By Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo

Visprint

Foul play. Magic spells. Supernatural criminals. When crime takes a turn for the weird, the police call Alexandra Trese.

We covered Volumes 1-3 of Trese back in January 2011. And what I said there goes just as well for Volume 4:

“Trese is a supernatural series starring a female investigator who steps in to protect the streets of Manilla when the police can’t deal with the supernatural weirdness that appears. Produced by Budjette Tan andKajo Baldisimo, this Filipino book does so much right it’s practically scandalous we haven’t heard more about it here in the UK.

Whenever she’s needed, Trese arrives, often called in by Captain Guerrero, the Comissioner Gordon to Trese’s unconventional Batman, a man who seems singularly predisposed to lean on her knowledge and specific skills. Supported by two mysterious and obviously magical creatures of uncertain powers – the always stylish Kambal twins, she’s always there to protect Manilla from supernatural threat.”

(Meet Alexandra Trese, supernatural protector of Manilla, from Cadena De Amor in Trese Volume 4 by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo)

Here in Volume 4, we’re on familiar ground, taking four short stories from the casebook of Alexandra Trese, each one delivering some interesting aspect of Trese’s world, providing a sharp jolt of the supernaturtural adventures that I’d enjoyed so much in the first three volumes. Again it’s something very familiar to anyone who’s grown up with the Ellis’ and Delanos of US comic books, and Trese and her world have that very familiar Vertigo feel. Seriously, any fans of Hellblazer should absolutely pick this one up.

(Spinning a very eastern twist on the familiar supernatural horror – Trese introduces us to some very Singapore specific monsters. From Wanted: Bedspacer in Trese Volume 4 by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo)

But just as before, the unique setting, and the inclusion of so much native Singapore and Eastern folklore puts it into new, interesting, and unfamiliar territory. It has an exotic and original atmosphere about it, that gives it that extra edge.

Perhaps the only thing missing this time around in this volume was uncovering some more of Trese’s history, her family lineage that was slowly revealed previously. Here we’re back to a simple case file structure, a mystery to solve and move on to the next. But there’s still a lot of great storytelling packed into the four stories here, backed up with Kajo’s stark and frankly rather beautiful artwork.

Standout story is Fight Of The Year, which closes the volume in some style, telling a tale of the country’s greatest boxer taking part in the annual fight for his soul. But we soon discover this interesting spin on the sell your soul tale has a far more significant part to play in the supernatural life of Manilla

(The final tale in Trese Volume 4, Fight Of The Year is the best, really showing off Trese’s position of responsibility, as she acts as a guide to the supernatural realms of Manilla)

And it was with this story that it clicked for me. It was mentioned in the introduction, but I never read those until finishing the books, for fear of spoilers. All the comparisons to Hellblazer and Vertigo were supplanted in this story with a familiar feel – this has the glorious scale and import of Ellis and Cassaday’s Planetary, with Trese functioning as the spiritual and supernatural protector of Manilla, delivering her world safe and sound, no matter what it takes, whilst we get to investigate alongside, all the weird and wonderful her mystical existence has to offer.

Trese Volumes 1-4 really should be on your reading list. Budjette and Kajo are taking very familiar genre stories and spinning them off in interesting and original ways, creating something with a unique sense of place, and doing so with great style. Very highly recommended.

By Karrie Fransman

Square Peg

The House That Groaned is the debut graphic novel from Karrie Fransman, and she’s certainly not frightened of really going for it. No thin little volume is this, no lightweight simplistic story. No, this is heavyweight, thick, literary stuff. Deliberately so perhaps, and definitely appealing to that literary set.

Before we start, a reminder that we’ve already had the pleasure of listening to Fransman have a schizophrenic conversation with herself in a director’s commentary article on the blog. And I’d certainly recommend reading that, marvelling at some of the behind the scenes stuff, and then visiting the frankly brilliantly done website for the book.

Now, on the book itself……

The beautifully designed double cover – a cut out house with its windows full of the characters you’ll find inside, reminiscent of a doll’s house of old, really catches the eye, a better piece of book design I don’t think you’ll see all year.

So welcome to 141 Rottin Park Road, an old, decrepit house, full of fairly rotton and decrepit people. The residents are all damaged in so many ways, ways we explore throughout the book, journeying through the house’s rooms, throught the inhabitants lives, their foibles and obsessions, their pasts and what little futures they all have.

(Barbara meets Janet, holding herself together, just barely, but aren’t they all? Aren’t we all? From Karrie Fransman’s The House That Groaned)

It’s Barbara that ties the book and the residents together, a make-up artist (only temporarily of course – she’s got plans) just moved into the building, our eyes on the various goings-on around her.

She’ll meet and greet everyone in the house in turn; Janet, the dietician whose weight loss only came about through need and remains through obsession and despair. Matt who works with the beautiful people, but only through the photographs he obsessively retouches for others, and he just can’t bring himself to take off his gloves. Brian is the immediately disgusting one, a “diseaseophile” whose desires bring a procession of ill, broken, disfigured women into the house and maybe, one day, into his bed. And then there’s old Mrs Durbach, a nonentity who genuinely blends into the background of her flat, and is glad to do so.

And opposite her is Marion, the opposite of so many of the residents in the house; decadant, hedonistic, fetishistic, the extravagant to Mrs Durbach’s invisible, the gluttonous to Janet’s calorie counting obsessive, the dedicated pleasure seeker to Matt’s touch averse nature.

(Brian retreats to his work, safe, alone, sealed off from the world)

And all of the strange, isolated characters will come together in one way or another, brought together quite slowly at first by a house that is crumbling, leaking, dripping, breaking, hissing, creaking and groaning towards entropy seemingly in sympathy with those inside.

Along the way we’ll look back, observing those moments that set each one on their path, ending up lost, isolated, alone, damaged in a rotten house on Rottin Road.

(You could almost imagine it’s the house talking about itself in that sequence above, and if that’s the case, it’s speaking for itself and everyone inside.)

The House That Groaned is all about looking at how past events, often disturbing and long buried in our psyches, can twist characters, setting them on paths to a disturbed, dark future, full of contemporary lifestyle commentary, where everyone seems to be dealing (badly) with isolation, body image and obsessions, that affect everything they do, define who they are, and ultimately will lead somewhere dark and disastrous.

(PoorBrian, trapped in his desires, incapable of escaping a house of damaged people)

You want a strange image that came to mind during this? Imagine Rising Damp done now, with a Lynchian sense of body shock. That pretty much covers just how dark and disturbed the territory The House That Groaned covers in its pages.

Fransman’s style is nicely (not perhaps the right word, given the people she’s dealing with) cartoonish, simplistic yet expressive. And the book reads exceptionally well, Fransman’s storytelling is really solid and good. Her characters are exaggerated stereotypes, her situation veers towards the surreal.

My big problem comes not from the execution but the characters surrounding the concept. The assortment of freaks are simply too stereotyped, which wouldn’t be a problem as a starting point, but none of them really move that far away from the starting point to make them truly interesting and engaging. The one original character is Brian, with his diseasophile’s sexual attraction to the ill and diseased, but even he really doesn’t develop past something reminiscent of Fight Club’s obsession with the emotional crutch of various dependency groups.

So that lack of originality, the inability for the characters to really develop much beyond the starting stereotypes and the lack of engagement with the characters because of it puts me distinctly at odds with many far more famous names. Nicholas Roeg is a vocal fan of the book – and although I freely admit it’s hugely impressive for a debut graphic novel, I’m certainly not convinced, as Roeg is, that it “breaks all the rules of storytelling accumulated over the past thousands of years”. It’s good yes, but it’s not that good Nic.

So all in all it’s a damn fine book; hugely, spectacularly impressive for a debut. But the flaws in it make it more a technical and storytelling success than a really great, engaging, intriguing, fascinating thng. The real disappointment in many ways is that everything is in place to make this truly, utterly wonderful. It fails and it falters slightly, but still rather great.

By Sam Vanallemeersch

Nobrow Press

I’m just not the right person to appreciate this.

I’m a comics guy, and my art tastes veer strongly to the sort of art that looks great but does so in service to a story.

So basically Big Mother, as an A3 collection of artwork by Belgian artist Vanallemeersch just leaves me cold. Attractive in its way, but in no way worthy of this treatment.

Vanallemeersch operates under his own name and two aliases; the visually tight and controlled Kolchoz and the mania of Solchoz – and here in Big Mother it’s all definitely Solchoz – panaramas, pencil works, lots of colours – flat and washes.

So yes, it’s huge, yes it’s colourful, and yes the artwork is a littlemore comics-ish – but effectively it’s just the same thing as those Drawn & Quarterly petit livres I slated a while back for being a waste of time (see this one - Nogoodniks).

I didn’t like those much at all. This I like a little more, but honestly? Give me comics.

And that’s my problem with it – as illustration, it’s alright, but nothing I can’t see all the time at numerous websites (including our own) every week. As a package it’s impressive through its size – but is that merely painting it with the brush of artistic pretension? Or to justify the price of £18 for 23 pages of content + cover?

So if you do have £18 burning a hole in your pocket – try The Wrong Place – beautiful, colourful art and a great comic story. Or the new Joost Swarte book – beautiful illustration, AND a master of comic art.

By Bram Stoker, adapted by Jason Cobley and Staz Johnson

Classical Comics

It’s been a while since I looked at Classical Comics, way back in 2009 with the adaptations of Romeo & Juliet and The Tempest. Of which I ended with:

“They may come across as worthy reads to this reviewer but to children in their teens, turned off by the complex, exaggerated, theatrical language of Shakespeare I can see these full colour, well illustrated graphic novels being a very attractive alternative and a wonderfully exciting breath of fresh air.”

And that’s been proven to me several times this past year, as the Shakespeare graphic novels found their way into the school library to be eagerly read and enjoyed by several of the great readers in Year 6. Noticeably though, the children gravitate towards the Quick Text versions – sufficiently fast paced and succinct to give them a good read without bogging them down.

But what I have here is the original version of Stoker’s classic. A classic I first read as a young teen, and loved for the originality of his idea, and the creeping, oncoming horror that works its way into your head far slower and effectively than any of the Dracula movies I’d seen by that stage. Reading it here sent me back to that first experience, of a novel that chilled, that thrilled, that genuinely scared me so much I couldn’t tear myself away.

And reading it all over again, in this abridged form that utilises Stoker’s original words, I had a real sense of all the excitement of that first reading.

Or at least it did after a little perseverance. Because that first section of the book, maybe 30 odd pages, is really heavy going – as though Stoker’s words were doing battle with the adaptation itself and I found myself reading the words with scant attention to the artwork at times. There’s simply too much here, too much on the page, too much to properly construct a symbiosis of words and pictures.

BUT BUT BUT - crucially, it’s only the first section. Once that’s over and done with it’s as if a lightness descends on this darkest of tales, with Cobley relaxing and settling into a far more confident flow.

And once that happens Johnson’s artwork becomes far more integral to the adaptation, and everything settles down to a much more enjoyable read. There’s a far better sense of flow, of integration of words and pictures and we’re presented with many pages of lovely layouts, although there is a feeling that Johnson’s art, with a strong US comics style, is eminently more suited to the action sequences than the slow, creeping horror of what is actually a rather slow moving tale.

Here are just a couple of highlights, where Johnson really makes those ages work – such as this montage where writer and artist combine beautifully to summarise Dracula’s journey to Whitby, as the doomed ship he sailed on comes to port:

Or this piece, with Renfield detailing his meeting with his master:

So yes, once over that initial trouble, this had most of what I was after with an adaptation of Dracula. It certainly manages to get across everything I remember so vividly from the novel, and that is always a sure sign of the success of an adaptation of a work I’d previously read and enjoyed.

Overall, without having seen the Quick Text version, I do have a sneaking suspicion that I’d have had far fewer problems with this in that format, and sense the words and pictures would fit far more comfortably throughout. As it is, this original version is a flawed yet fulfilling adaptation of a book you really should read at some point in your lives.

By Graham Pearce

Pier-C Comics

I’ve looked at Pearce’s Mike Battle before (here and here) and although I had reservations, I’d enjoyed it, especially the later issues where he’s beginning to find an artistic style. But with Last Admin Hero he’s reprinting issues 8-10 of Sgt. Mike Battle, and some of the problems are back, along with a new problem of trying to switch his storytelling to a multi-issue storyline. More on that in a moment.

It’s certainly a change of pace for his action series starring the very all-American, all-over-the -top, all-action hero Mike Battle, here relegated to a supporting role, with the male lead going to the weedy bloke working as a temp in the admin department of some secret US military organisation. Or as Pearce puts it:

“The ridiculous scenario that entered my head was what if terrorists took-over the building, I was the only person to stop them and all I had was the contents of the stationary cupboard”

And that’s it really. Die Hard with the office admin temp in the Bruce Willis role, set against the backdrop of the Sgt. Mike Battle universe in the S.H.I.E.L.D. era of Jimmy Bond-esque superspies. Here’s his first scene:

John Trojan is just a lowly office temp, thrust into the limelight here when he just happens to be on a toilet break as the agents of A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. storm the building he works in, the brilliantly designed Section D – a straight up yours to the UN building opposite. They’re intending to sell out the good ol’ U. S. of A. and flog its secret-est secrets to the highest bidder.

Panic ensues, or rather it would, if the folks in charge weren’t trying to figure out something much more important:

In some ways that A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. gag is the very essence of this comic. Enjoy that and you’ll find a lot to enjoy.

The simple concept works really well at the start, with the turn it all on its head idea of the last guy in the building being genuinely a bit useless. There’s clever gag after clever gag, all playing on our familiarity with the stuff Pearce is pastiching. Again, another war-room funny:

I have to admit though, I think Pearce’s work is more suited to shorter tales, where he gets to keep things fresh and light and clever and succinct, within the confines of a single issue. Stretched out over the three issues here, the simple concept feels just that – stretched, and just that little bit thin. By the end, it’s a little overdone, a little tired. I was lagging by the end, I really was, and the joy of the original gags had gone.

Art wise, quite naturally, it’s between the really rough first issues and the more nuanced, stylish stuff that came after it. There are faults, of course there are, but you can easily overlook them, enjoy the nice art when it pops up and generally get swept up in the adventure. Flawed but fun.

And Pearce certainly knows how to fill the book with some genuinely interesting and worthwhile extras – an alternate ending courtesy of Pearce’s wife, a brilliantly done tongue firmly in cheek trailer, loads of concept art and behind the scenes stuff (did you all catch the Akira reference in the cover by the way?).

Last Admin Hero is available from Graham Pearce at the Sgt Mike Battle website. And if John Trojan’s adventures have set your heart racing, Pearce promises Last Admin Hero II is coming soon(ish).

Chloe Noonan Monster Hunter Colour Special

By Marc Ellerby

“…simply one of  the best comics I’ve read in the last few years, and you need to be reading it.”

All the fun, and the laughs, but this time round, there’s an added little bit of introspection, a hint of things to come, and a clue that Ellerby has big plans for his whinging ginger ninja.

Arthur and Posy Issue 1

By Ella Risbridger and Graham Johnson

“There’s a sweetness here, a delightful innocence about the pair. It’s got the feel of a somewhat off-kilter children’s book. Albeit a children’s book that looks like it’s going to be meessing around with all sorts of gender roles and religious prejudices. And I’m intrigued and involved with the characters after just this short first issue to want to know much more.”

Solipsistic Pop Volume 4: Maps

Edited by Tom Humberstone

“Solipsistic Pop has become, after four volumes, a shorthand for artistic delight, and a triumph of style AND substance. Consistently the benchmark to which other anthologies have to strive.”

By Paul Stapleton

November: A new strain of flu hits Britain.

March: Spring wakes up to an empty world.

But a single life abides.

Even nothing needs its king

That is a cracking four line back-cover blurb right there. Cracking. Made me really keen to see just what Stapleton had for us, whether he was going to head for downbeat thought piece, a variation on the post-apocalyptic zombie thing, or something else.

However…. in all honesty, that was the high point of the comic. Which sounds a horrible thing to say, but putting it into context will help. There’s a fair bit about The Undisputed King Of Nothing (title, concept, setting, tone) that works really well and I’ll be interested to see where Stapleton takes it. The thing is, that back-cover blurb had me thinking it was going to be really, really good. And it’s not. It’s good enough, but there’s too many faults to live up to the hype.

It starts beautifully, and from just these panels I thought I was in for a real treat. Maybe I just like moody shots of landscape too much, I don’t know:

The whole issue is one man, post apocalypse, the “single life” of the blurb, who spends all day, every day, walking the desolate, broken streets, looking for any tiny sign of anyone else. And he hasn’t seen anyone for weeks. Food, power, his teeth – all worrysome. The answer he finds is to immerse himself into a daily routine, cycling, foraging, stealing, searching. Day after day, cycling through the car-strewn streets.

To keep himself from going mad, he narrates, he thinks, then he writes it all down. Or perhaps, just perhaps, he’s already gone mad, and these meandering thoughts are the perfect example of it. Mad or not, he’s the last one alive as far as he knows, and he’s barely surviving.

There’s one point where Stapleton has his protagonist say this:

“It’s amazing really. I have so many things to get done yet I still find the time to write this horseshit every day.”

Please, don’t get the idea I’m accusing Stapleton of writing horseshit, I’m really not. But he has overwritten it, and that almost seems like, right at the end of this first chapter, to be his way of explaining it. It’s written this way becuase that’s what he wanted to get over in the issue, the isolation, the loneliness, the desperate desire to hear something, even if it’s only the sound of your voice inside your head as it goes down on the page I suppose.

But to me all that thinking just overwhelms the story, and certainly overwhelms the artwork:

Thing is, you might not think the same. Maybe it is just me. I know I bloody hate the sort of people who seem determined in this life to take my precious moment of quiet and fill it with their incessant blabber. And that’s what this feels like. I wouldn’t like this bloke in real life, and he annoys me in comic form.

Yeah, I know he’s thinking it all, and that’s just what I’d do as well, but on a comic page, thoughts have substance and a volume, and sadly these are overwhelming and deafening.

But right at the end. With just that moment, with the character actually interjecting over his own thoughts, with a “hang on” – then it gets interesting again. Enough to rescue it, enough to make me want to read a second issue? Yeah, I reckon so.

Sure, his art is much, much better when he’s focusing on the landscape rather than the man, as his figure work’s not up to much. But I can cope with that. I don’t know if I can hack another issue of deafening thinking all over the pages, but I’ll be around to see what happens.

You can buy The Undisputed King Of Nothing at Stapleton’s website.

By Rob Jackson

This is exactly what I love about the UK comic scene – you wouldn’t really expect one issue of a self-publishers expansion into the home-made ice-cream business, and now we get the second issue of Rob Jackson’s comic about his adventures at various markets around his home town of Bolton.

I looked at part 1 back in 2011 and had this to say:

“It’s fascinating, it really is…. just like any well written, well observed autobiog comic can be. Regardless of the subject, if it’s well done, you’ll be drawn into it. And so it is with “It’s A Man’s Life In The Ice Cream Business“.

You’ll read all about the pros and cons of ice-cream manufacture, the variety of markets around Bolton, the sheer hard work involved in the business for Jackson and his family. There’s none of the comedy or farce that Jackson’s utilised so well in the past, but it doesn’t matter. Just having the details presented straight in front of us is enough.”

And underneath a really impressive looking cover, part two gives me more of the same. Just like this:

Yes, Jackson’s tale of his adventures in ice-cream carries on. Although his product range gets more diverse here. Ice-creams, cheese, black peas. This time there’s even soup!

It’s the ongoing minutiae of the situation I fond rather enthralling, this is almost catalogue comic-ing; the endless procession of markets, the setting up, the listing of the products taken, what sells, what doesn’t, and why, the weather and its effect on trade, the gazebos, the people, the competition. It’s all here, and it’s all very enjoyable.

As usual, Jackson’s art is rough, but it’s a roughness that appeals, and his tight, dense panels (10-14 per page usually) suit the style of his story here so well. The routine of dense panel pages is occasionally, and refreshingly broken every so often by a larger panel or two, and suddenly the freedom produces some really lovely moments such as this; with the backdrop to the sign, the washed-out stand and the cut to a glum Rob working so nicely:

Or this, with Rob’s mom setting up the hot black peas:

All in all, it’s a surprisingly satisfying comic, on a completely unexpected topic. But Jackson’s autobiog storytelling is such a relaxed, easygoing thing that I’d imagine pretty much anyything he turned his hand to would work just as well.

The advantage with this ice-cream comic is the absolutely unexpected nature of the subject. We’ve all read autobiog from comic artists talking about how miserable their comic making lives are, how that girl in the coffee house will have nothing to do with them, how life just isn’t the way they hoped and all that. But autobiog about trying to make your way in the cut and thrust world of homemade food markets? Now that is interesting and unusual.

And yes, cut and thrust world – right at the end of this one we get the added threat of competition – someone trying to break into Rob’s patch with ice-cream and cheese as well. What next for Rob and his fledgling business? Putting up with it, changing products, or possibly a Bolton ice-cream war to match the one in Glasgow in the 80s?

We’ll have to wait for the next issue to find out. And it may be a little longer to wait this time (Jackson notes he’s rather sick of drawing gazebos), which is a genuine disappointment.

By Howard Hardiman

On one hand, it simply confuses, this prose with illustrations little non-comic with the name of an old, old friend written on the front. This is Badger’s Dairy. It says so on the front cover.

And there he is again on the back cover…. that’s the little critter I remember falling for so long ago now….

And in truth, all the way through Badger’s Diary, Hardiman gives me pictures of Badger, lovely little black and white things, just like these:

But this is something very different. And at first I couldn’t really make out the connection. What had Howard Hardiman writing about his own experiences of loss, isolation, and a series of small flats, mostly too expensive to afford, certainly too expensive to enjoy, have to do with poor little lonely, lost, isolated Badger……

Oh.

Yes. I see.

It never really occurred to me before this that Hardiman, a lovely man who I look forward to saying hello to each time we meet at various conventions was actually writing himself as a small, terribly sad, awfully fragile little Badger.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, maybe the connection’s merely one of my own invention, but like all fiction, no matter how grounded in fact, it ceases to be what the author meant the minute the reader attributes a meaning to it. So in that sense, my reading, whatever Hardiman’s original intent, is true, at least for me.

These short prose pieces are lovingly written, hazy nostalgia butting up against harsh reality of modern life, of struggling withrents, of moving in, moving out, sharing experiences with friends, of the guilt of having so much compared to others not so fortunate, even as the ongoing near poverty existence of an artist living in London means chatting to the local homeless guy whilst worrying about getting back the grand in deposit on the last flat. Every piece in here is thoughtful, lovingly written, harsh reality mixing nicely with poetic allusion.

It’s not comics, not this time. And as much as I’d love to see another Badger comic I feel happy and content knowing that Hardiman has moved on, leaving behind the sad, lonely little Badger, and off to bigger and potentially bettter things.

Badger’s Diary, along with his current, far more hard-hitting current comic series; The Lengths, is available from Hardiman’s webstore.

Regular as clockwork, Phoenix issue 4 drops through the letterbox, and regular as clockwork, Molly grabs it and refuses to give it up until she’s read it cover to cover. She promises to write something about it soon, but basically she’s enjoying most of it, especially Long Gone Don by the Etherington Brothers, and Jamie Smart’s Bunny Vs Monkey. She particularly enjoys the extras – Neill Cameron’s How To Make Awesome Comics prompts her to get her sketchpad out, whilst she’s having great fun each week solving the Von Doogan puzzles, and this week she had great fun looking at the last 4 issues worth of Patrice Aggs’ What Will Happen Next.

(What Will Happen Next – Patrice Aggs, a Where’s Wally style disaster in progress)

For my part, when I eventually get hold of the issue, it’s a lot of fun. Highlights pretty much as last issue – Pirates Of Pangaea continues to impress, managing that difficult trick of making a four-page weekly adventure strip fulfilling in each episode with Neill Cameron’s art this time round full of gorgeous sunset reds, Bunny Vs Monkey is daft nonsense with great art, Star Cat is very funny and has great comedy timing.

Long Gone Don by the Etheringtons and The Lost Boy by Kate Brown are two I’m increasingly convinced will read better in bigger chunks though, as the 3 and 2 pages respectively just don’t really work for me at the moment (In fact, I went back and read the first four parts of each tonight, and yes, I’m spot on – as one story there’s a much more satisfying read to both).

(Cogg and Sprokit by Jamie Littler)

New this issue is Cogg & Sprokit by Jamie Littler, another of the Phoenix feature specials that looks like it’s already lined up for a more regular appearance somewhere down the line. But based on the four pager intro here that’s not a bad thing at all.

It’s a manic fantasy tale of an adventuring emoboy and his hippo – this time round they’re having to deal with a rather nasty looking purple monster with far too many teeth for comfort. And all they’ve got in Sprokit’s backpack is a toy rocket, a remote control for something, and a box of doggie treats. Fun and frolics ensue, with some fresh looking artwork from Littler.

There’s also the welcome return of Gary Northfield’s Gary’s Garden. And from the “more next week” at the end, here’s hoping it gets a regular weekly slot.

(Gary Northfield’s Gary’s Garden – the domestic bliss of the orchard shattered!)

So, as a weekly comic, I’m coming down on the side of yes, albeit with a few reservations. Molly is an emphatic yes though – and that’s the thing that really matters, she’s the target range after all. If I can somehow drag her away from her ever-expanding social life, I’ll get her to tell you about just how much she’s enjoying it real soon.

The Phoenix Comic is available through subscription (details at the website), it’s on sale at Waitrose supermarkets and at selected independent stores.