Review: Thorgal – Child of the Stars Vol. One / Written by: Jean Van Hamme / Illustrated by: Grzegorz Rosinski / Published by: Cinebook Ltd / Release Date: 16^th March

Thorgal is the critically acclaimed comic book series by Belgian writer Jean Van Hamme and the polish artist Grzegorz Rosiński. Originally seen in the pages of Tintin magazine it has since been collected into several volumes and exists in multiple languages being particularly popular in France.

Child of the Stars opens with the Drakkar – at least what’s left of them – lost out to sea in the grip of a powerful storm. These men are Viking raiders fallen on hard times, and it doesn’t take long for their leader, Leif Haraldson, to be challenged by the usurper, Gandalf the mad.

Gandalf believes sacrificing Leif to the gods will somehow appease them, and the storm which is a sign of the gods’ displeasure will simply go away. Just before Gandalf makes the kill, however, an eerie light flashes upon the horizon. Big on portents and omens, never ones to pass up on a chicken’s giblets, the Vikings are quick to deduce that this is also a sign from the gods. Leif should live – despite being contradictory to their earlier sign – and they should head towards the light. They row through the night and when the sun first puts in an appearance make landfall only to discover a mysterious object washed up on the beach. From within they find a child, and Leif lifts him into the air to pronounce: ‘If you’re a son of Aegir or a gift from Thor, you’ll be named after those who put you in our path to save us. Welcome amongst us, Thorgal Aegirsson!’

And so the legend is born.

So far, so boring.

Moving beyond the reason why any man would adopt a son and call him Thorgal, Child of the Stars launches into some entertaining – if a little silly – storytelling. It combines Norse mythology and Alantean fable with hokum sci-fi but mostly through the gorgeous art of Van Hamme manages to keep its head above water.

This is the first translation of the Belgium Thorgal by Cinebooks but actually the seventh in the series, and while dealing with the origins of Thorgal one has to wonder whether it’s in keeping with the creator’s original vision.

Child of the Stars is populated with Gaimanesque monsters, but to draw a comparison would probably be unfair as Thorgal outdates Gaiman’s Sandman by five years. There’s a certain rustic charm to the stories that despite being set around the 1^st century have an 80’s kind of feel to them. A little splash of Highlander, add Conan and Star Trek, then shake. That’s not a bad thing, by the way, but times have moved on.

The stories remain interesting enough despite the characters being two dimensional and a little predictable. There’s a sense of set up here for the future volumes, but as this was originally intended as a prequel of sorts, one wonders if the reader will ultimately see the payoff, and will they care when it comes?

If you like a good romp through Asgardian legends and would love to see your Nordic gods without the Marvel makeover, then this is the one for you. There’s enough magic to awaken the child within and enough cheese to make six month old stilton taste mild by comparison.

Review: London Horror Comic #4 / Written by: John-Paul Kamath / Illustrated by: Lee Ferguson, Dean Kotz / Published by: Self Published / Release Date: Out Now

A high-quality, plush-looking horror anthology from an independent team is a rare thing. With gloss cover, full colour and 40 pages, London Horror Comic is one of those titles that will either get snapped up by a publisher or serve as a springboard for its creators.

The fourth issue, which came out in February, has five short stories, each a love letter to a different form of genre.

The Passenger is a true British story about a trip on the Tube where the ill-fated passengers’ steps to avoid danger put him directly into the path of something else. V is the exception here, a very funny take on the eternal battle between a superhero archetype and his overly clever nemesis, set in a coffee shop. Tough All Over is another British tale with no supernatural or violent horror element, just a simple but honest vision of life in the high street in post-credit crunch cities. Drive Thru’ is an EC Comics homage where a waitress has to defend herself against the occupant of a blacked-out limo who isn’t here for the fries and shake. Finally, Skyscrapped is a silent horror set in a skyscraper and a commentary on the blinkered nature of society today.

The writing is superb, changing style to suit the story. Some have narrator’s captions, others are in the modern style of just relying on dialogue and art. It is genuinely funny where it needs to be, ironic for those tales with a twist, and non-judgemental in those that require a ponder afterwards. That is the readers’ job, after all.

The art is spot on. Suitably cartoony so it can pull in and keep readers of more commercial comics who are less patient with the rough-hewn character of independent comics yet subtle enough in change for each story. The EC Comics-flavoured Drive Thru’ has that larger-than-life pop art caricature feel while the more social commentary Tough All Over has grimness all over it. In contrast, the superhero tale V is fluffy and light with bulging torsos or stereotype knock-out ladies.

London Horror Comic seems so polished and refined that it would be all too easy to ignore that it is cranked out by a very small team who sweat over making sure there is not a single bad line of dialogue or art just for their love of comics. Visit their website for back issues and more.

Review: Hermit / Written by: Andy Waugh / Illustrated by:Andy Waugh / Published by: Self Published / Release Date: Out Now

When the ceaseless, inane banter of modern life becomes more than one man can cope with then the only solution available is to become a Hermit.

Andy Waugh is a man that knows how to make the most out of the limited time available to him. By focussing on short strips and illustrations Andy has built up a portfolio that includes HIVE, Paper Science, Solipsistic Pop, Mustard, Narc, The Bleed and Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic. That sickening range of clients proves that Waugh has the talent to make great comics, but the big question is how he’ll fare on more sustained projects.

The answer, in Hermit, is a story that’s insightful, witty and accomplished but follows the typical model of writer/artists by taking a measured pace to the storytelling, so that it flows wonderfully on the page but amounts to a lightness of content. I associate this trait with writer/artists because where the writer and artist are separate one would always have to justify to the other why two pages would be used rather than one to illustrate a point, whereas an individual creating a comic can follow their own muse with regards to how much space to allocate to each section of a story. Adam Cadwell’s Blood Blokes #1 was a good example, featuring an elaborate travel sequence where the main character rides a bus that looks very attractive but doesn’t further the story in any way. It isn’t my intention to criticise anybody’s working methods, but during the course of reading an insane amount of self-published comics I’ve developed the belief that economy is a virtue for comic-creators trying to sell their own work. You can give your characters room to breathe when you find time to work on that long-delayed graphic novel, but with only 22 pages to impress I want to see as much content and value for my money as possible.

Back to the comic in question, Hermit, which is relatable, funny and warm-hearted, even managing to include a conversation about The Apprentice between a rock and a deer, culminating in the line “F*** off Trevor – no-one asked you”. I sincerely recommend Hermit, which acts as a great introduction to Waugh’s work, but hope that with his next sustained comic Andy Waugh will either more aggressively pursue adult work or commit to an all-ages approach, because Hermit currently exists as a warm and gentle approach to a uniquely adult problem. The next step for Waugh, if not a graphic novel to put me in my place, should at the very least be a Chalk Marks collection from Blank Slate Books or a 17×23 collection from Nobrow, because he very clearly has the talent to hold his own against anybody creating comics in the UK.

Review: Dinopopolous / Written by: Nick Edwards / Illustrated by: Nick Edwards / Published by: Blank Slate Books / Release Date: Out Now

Nick Edwards is a London based illustrator with a love of science fiction, dinosaurs, robots and cats. His first comic book sees him teaming up with the guys from Blank Slate Books to bring us Dinopopolous.

Nigel is a 13 year old school boy from Chipton and is in love with his classmate Martha. Sounds normal enough you might think, apart from his mystery solving partner in crime and best friend, Brian the dinosaur.

When Nigel receives an urgent email from Lancaster Perrifold, desperately requesting his help to hunt down The Miracle Bird of Ndundoo, how could he refuse? But what makes The Miracle Bird on Ndundoo so special, well it excretes jewels, that’s what! The only clue he has to go in is a Ndundoo artifact, encased in sand and covered in weird symbols. This doesn’t hold him back and Nigel and Brian are off on their adventure with their nemesis Justin and the Evil League of Lizards hot on their heels.

This brilliant comic book is like something from a Nickelodeon cartoon crossed with a Day of the Tentacle, Lucas Arts style computer games. Back in 2009, Nick Edwards won The Cartoon Museum’s Under 30’s Young Cartoonist of the Year and this comic is a great testament as to why. Some of the pages have so many little details in them, you could see something new every time you look at it. With dinosaurs wielding laser cannons, underground monsters, treasure pooping birds and the overall psychedelic, fun packed style of it all, there’s nothing I didn’t like about this comic.

Nick Edwards appears to be an indie comic gem to keep an eye on and I really hope there’s more coming from him soon.

Review: Afterlife Inc – Dying to Tell / Written by: Jon Lock / Illustrated by: Various Artists / Published by: Jon Lock Comics / Release Date: 25th Feb

Imaginative, colourful and eclectic, Afterlife Inc: Dying To Tell reprints the dazzling webcomic created by Jon Lock and an assortment of polished artists.  When corporate con-artist Jack Fortune’s life is cut short he finds something of a power-vacuum in the afterlife, spelling opportunity for an entrepreneurial soul.  In a world where anything goes the time is ripe for modernisation, and Jack Fortune is just the man to lead the charge.

I met Jon Lock at Thought Bubble last year and frankly when he showed me samples of material from Afterlife Inc. I was surprised that there wasn’t already a publisher attached. Every aspect of this title shows a deftness of hand, from the patient and measured plotting and the thoughtful but varied cast to the rotating artists producing work that is never less than at a professional level. Despite being completely independent the closest parallels that I could draw for Afterlife Inc. are not with the usual British small press strips or even with some of the more polished web-comics being created by the Sweatdrop crowd; more than anything else Afterlife Inc. feels like something that Image or Wildstorm would traditionally have published. There’s a gleeful invention to the character designs based on Lock’s idea that this is an afterlife for creatures of all manner of species and religious designations. By allowing the protagonists from each issue to shape the creation of their own unique afterlife Lock turns the high number of artists into an asset for the series, capturing completely different vibes with each story and letting each artist play to their own strengths.

With an accessible plot, a largely upbeat tone and a surfeit of creativity at play Afterlife Inc. is a world that really deserves a visit. The artists vary from issue to issue but all largely project that Joe Madureira style, bringing manga sensibilities to the kind of layouts normally reserved for the boldest of superheroes. It isn’t often clear to me how comic creators make the leap from self-published to working for the big Western publishers, but Afterlife Inc. shows all the traits that Marvel and DC should be looking for in their fresh blood.

Review: Rose Black and Rose Black – Demon Seed / Written by: Ed Murphy & Tom Campbell / Illustrated by: Various Artists / Published by: Rough Cut Comics / Format: Paperback / Release Date: Out Now

When a 600 year-old vampire comes out of retirement for the British Secret Services to war against a criminal branch that has infiltrated the Vatican, the results are suitably bloodthirsty. Rose Black channels the late 1990s boom for Bad Girl comics through the kind of cut-throat sensibility that you’d associate with 2000 AD.

Glasgow-based Rough Cut Comics launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999 with an eye to producing comics both based-upon and that could inspire feature films and video games. That’s no longer a fashionable thing to admit to in this age when the Cowboys & Aliens graphic was finally released as a flimsy sales pitch for an equally-flimsy film, but Rough Cut’s early comics based on Brian Yuzna’s Society prove that they have a sensibility that’s far from such lightweight, mainstream material.

Rose Black is an interesting graphic novel, because all of the ingredients that come together to make the plot are indicative of something titillating and exploitative, of a smoking-hot vampire that gets the job done in-between showers and tearing people’s throats out, but that just isn’t how Rose Black plays out. Those elements are very much present, but there’s a depth to the plot, sincerity to the dialogue and a level of attention to detail in the artwork that you’d never find in the cheap Bad Girl comics that I’m comparing it to. The black-and-white art by Jaeson Finn and Colin Barr is simply fantastic and could stand up alongside the best that EC Comics or 2000 AD have ever had to offer. Rose Black harks back to a less self-conscious era, when nobody cared if their comic was a play on familiar themes, they just wanted to tell the best possible story that they could. I enjoyed Rose Black in spite of my preconceptions and it’s genuinely a much better book than I hoped it would be.

I wish that I could be as positive about the sequel, Rose Black: Demon Seed, written by the same team of Ed Murphy and Tom Campbell, but this book serves more as a lesson in what different results can be interpreted from the same material by different artists. Demon Seed is in full colour, which should allow it to better compete in the current market, but sadly the page layouts are less ambitious, the facial expressions of the characters less convincing and it’s buried under colouring that seriously disagreed with me. The intent is very clearly for the colouring to add depth and realism to the character’s faces but instead the colourist achieves the opposite, making the characters less convincing and more artificial.

Ed Murphy impressed me at Thought Bubble last year with his approach to comics and won me over with Rose Black, which was at the very least an Eight Star book. For horror fans, particularly readers that feel nostalgic about comics before the 1990s boom and subsequent descent into style-over-content and then decompressed writing-for-trades, you’re going to love Rose Black. That the colouring hindered my enjoyment of the sequel is unfortunate, but certainly something that needn’t be a factor for Rough Cut’s future releases.

Written by: John Smith / Illustrated by: Edmund Bagley / Published by: 2000 AD/Rebellion / Format: Paperback / Release Date: Out Now

Downbeat, nihilistic urban horror that perverts our worst fears of the UK’s underbelly characterises this bleak and nasty collection from the pages of 2000 AD.

Far from the exaggerated sci-fi most commonly associated with 2000 AD, Cradlegrave follows the life of young offender on parole Shane Holt as he returns to the claustrophobic estate referenced in the title, populated by pillheads and joyriders that chase every high available to make their hopeless lives more bearable. This dystopia is made all the more nightmarish for its utter believability, from the dysfunctional families welcoming each other home from prison with a couple of cans to Shane’s inability to escape the same fate as his peers.

Thanks to this grounding in the harsh realities of what we now dismiss as Britain’s feral underclass, when the Cronenbergian horror elements creep into the mix they seem right at home, dragging Ravenglade Estate into the bowels of hell. Bagwell’s art cements the authenticity of urban life and excels in the grotesque, bringing out the best in Smith’s measured pacing. The introduction by Ramsey Campbell should hint that Cradlegrave offers something out-of-the-ordinary and he’s right. Cradlegrave is a sickening affirmation of everything you ever feared about society and it exposes the worst of our traits without ever resorting to exaggeration or stereotyping.

Written By: Jason Becker / Illustrated by: Jon Rea / Published by: Archaia / Format: Paperback / Release date: Out Now

When Detective Zhu apprehends notorious child-killer Richard Pickman he enters a deranged world of supernatural noir, littered with dead bodies and populated by testosterone-fuelled cops with foul mouths and pump-action shotguns.

The story riffs on common tropes like the supercop on the verge of retirement and the struggle to balance the needs of a new family with the needs of the police force, but this is a world where demons are very real and hungry for blood. With a visual style heavily-influenced by revolutionary artists like Bill Sienkiewicz this is a dense, luscious book, with more happening in the margins than most Marvel creators can currently fit into single issues. I gather that Killing Pickman was influenced by an H P Lovecraft story but I’m not a big fan of the man, and luckily this didn’t at all detract from my reading of the book.

The art and story gel brilliantly to create a world where Pickman’s evil influence permeates the page-layouts, where characters say one thing and think another. Killing Pickman is not the most original story that you’ll read this year but it has a savage edge that reminded me of Welcome To Hoxford, heralding an aggressive new creative force. The density of imagery in Killing Pickman also offers serious re-readability, making it a story that you’ll be happy to return to.

Created by: Christ Doherty / Published by: Self Published / Format: Paperback / Release date: Out Now

Absolutely the best horror graphic novel released in 2011, Video Nasties reads like Twin Peaks meets Grange Hill by way of your barbaric local video store.

Released independently in seven issues between 2007 and 2011, VN is unquestionably the most accomplished and compelling original British horror comic that I’ve ever read. Based around the disappearance of three students from Redbrook Secondary School ten years ago, Video Nasties combines teen angst, mystery and a disturbing ring of snuff films into a timeless tale that brings to mind the notion of childhood trauma that Stephen King mines so effectively in his novels. There’s no overt gore or gratuitous violence that would compare to Video Nasties’ namesakes, visually this is a comic with its roots firmly in the British small press scene and it could easily be mistaken for a Top Shelf graphic novel. Don’t be fooled by aesthetics, despite the lack of visual savagery this is a narrative more mature than anything that most sadistic gore-hounds ever achieve. Protagonist Evan Reilly and his circle of friends are completely believable and every sadistic plot twist is grounded by their realistic relationships, whether it be unrequited crushes or the savage vehemence that comes so naturally to adolescents.

The most common complaints that have been levelled against Video Nasties are about a tonal shift midway through the story when high school drama becomes something more sinister, but accusations such as these must surely say more about the expectations of reviewers than the author. How could readers expect any less from a story about disappearing children called Video Nasties?!? I urge anybody that values content over spectacle to give Video Nasties a read, either online for free (here) or by buying a copy through the online store. This is exactly the kind of home-grown content that British comic-buyers should be supporting, by an artist at the beginning of what will doubtless be an illustrious career.

Created by: Philip Gelatt, Aaron Warner / Published by: Sea Lion Books / Format: Paperback / Release date: Out now

It is the year 2025, and techniques used to cure inherited illnesses have lead to a small percentage of the population being born as Vitros, human beings with abnormally high intelligence.  This is the premise of  Aaron Warner’s Pariah,  a twelve part graphic novel written by Philip Gelatt and produced by Aaron Warner, the man who gave us Shrek.

This post-human fable avoids many of the obvious clichés and concentrates on a character driven story. Tales of humanities struggle with super human beings are nothing new to comic book readers, but Pariah is more of a science fiction story than another retread of The Watchmen. It explores how mankind copes when there are those amongst them who happen to be superhumanly smart, and examines how these geniuses respond when mankind does the inevitable and decides to deal with its hyper-evolved progeny.

It avoids going in the traditional directions, and dives headlong into drama. The story uses multiple character perspectives to explore the world, and takes its time with setting up the main characters, which are sympathetic and interesting, though not exactly likeable. Each Vitro sees themselves as an outsider, which immediately makes for drama and conflict. People who can design and build miracles of science are portrayed as being as potentially foolish and naive as anyone, and this seems to be one of the series ongoing themes.

Artist Brett Weldele brings a gritty and messy art style to this tale, which suits the grubby feel to the story. This is a world where mankind is deeply flawed, and in a story where super humans are just utterly un-heroic, Weldele’s wild style fits perfectly. The rough style also makes the book feel slightly like the story board for a motion picture, and the fact that many of the backgrounds are in either teal or orange doesn’t help either, as both colours are all too commonplace in Hollywood motion pictures.

Pariah is currently ongoing and takes till issue 4 to get into its stride. It is certainly a slow burning story, but an engaging one none the less.