Looks perfect, Cumberbatch is just perfect casting
Comics
Here we have a large portion of my 2000AD collection, a comic I’ve read since I was 8 years old, fast approaching issue 2000 itself. It’s time for these issues to go to another place, to people who will read them rather than being tucked away in my studio as some of them have for decades now. I’ve kept the first 600 issues (another 3 boxes) for purely nostalgic reasons plus the last 18 months worth but these approx 1200 issues will be going to Orbital Comics next week to do with what they will. Just in time for Free Comic Book Day and only a few months short of the comic’s 2000th issue in September.
The excellent documentary about the comic’s history – ‘Future Shock’ – was just shown on TV and is currently available to view online for the next month in the UK via Channel 4. I also found about 25 doubles of very early issues including no.20, issue 100 and more, they’ll be going with these too.
Here’s a few scans of images that caught my eye as I went through them: Brendan McCarthy masquerading at ‘Loaf’, a couple of Dredds by the incomparible John Hicklenton (RIP) and some pages from a beautiful Ace Trucking Co. story. No one draws the cosmos quite like Massimo Belardinelli.
Whilst recently going through many boxes of old 2000AD comics, before I send them off to a better home, I ran across this little Future Shock story in Prog 672 – Mar 31, 1990 – which did something a little different with the comic medium. Written by Paul Carstairs (not a name I’m familiar with) and drawn by old hand Massimo Belardinelli, it starts out as you would expect but quickly takes a new turn. All copyright is 2000AD/Rebellion
I’m very chuffed to have an interview with Savage Pencil aka Edwin Pouncey in the new Rough Trade book celebrating 40 years of the shop and associated labels. Just published by Thurston Moore‘s Ecstatic Peace imprint it’s packed with scrapbook-like anecdotes, photos, poems, drawings and interviews by a who’s who of the independent scene.
My piece runs to five pages and covers SavX‘s career from aspiring cartoonist and early employee of the Portobello shop to Blast First cover artist and abstract painter with Battle Of The Eyes. The interview was so long that I had to cut it down by more than half so I’ll publish the full thing here with many illustrations once the book has been out a while.
*Also – there’s a free John Grant one-sided 45 with etched B side if you buy the book from Rough Trade shops
The end is nigh, Hellboy’s story is done (for the moment) as far as Mike Mignola is concerned. Read more here
Hands up who remembers ROM: The Space Knight? The character has been tied up with rights-holders Hasbro for years to my knowledge but it looks like that’s been sorted now. He’s coming back via IDW for Free Comic Book Day this year:
“Rom the Space Knight #0 will feature an introductory 10-page story of Rom’s arrival on Earth, an incident that sets up an ongoing Rom series launching in July 2016.” Great cover by Zach Howard and Nelson Daniel
I found this by the door of a record shop along with all the other piles of free magazines the other day. It’s nice to see something like this in amongst the slickly designed, oh-so-cool others that vie for your attention. Crammed full of alt. / weirdo / mondo / trash / whatever you want to call it culture and proud of it. Goblinko is a store in the States that sells all sorts from badges to posters to T-shirts, records and fanzines. There’s not many left like this
Ted McKeever fans – he’s been back making comics on his own terms for a while now but Pencil Head might just be the best yet. A thinly disguised McKeever is a main character in a career-referencing look at life as a comic creator working in the industry. He’s pursued by his own personal demon and there’s all sorts of other weirdness going on in a strip peppered with the kind of oddball characters he does best.
Past works get referenced (Transit, Metropol, Eddy Current and more) which make it a joy for the fans to spot the little cameos. It’s only 2 issues in but it’s a lot more fun than his recent angst-ridden output. A one of a kind comic creator making a book about being just this in an industry that wants everyone to fit the same mold.
I really like what this guy does. Comics and collage, two of my favourite things combined, especially when it’s this out there. He’s doing a similar thing to what Cyriak does with film in some instances but the subject matter that’s being used also makes some of his work reminiscent of Robert Williams‘ paintings too. There is a ton of this and much more to view on the Samplerman tumblr
They say that creativity flourishes under oppression and bleak times and it’s been a great year for music so there must be a grain of truth there. In an effort to glean something positive to remember 2015 by in light of all the injustice and hate out there in the world, here are some of my favourite things, in no order whatsoever.
There were several amazing music releases that went far beyond the normal album format – the main one being Aphex Twin‘s incredible Soundcloud dump of archive tracks which continue to drip out and now number over 200 tracks even if he has taken a lot of them down now. If there’s a ‘release’ of the year then that wins hands down although I’m still trying to process it all and tried to compile a selection of the cream in this mix for Solid Steel but bear in mind that that was when he’d only released half of it so by it’s no means definitive.
The other mega-release that deserves special mention is Rammellzee‘s ‘Cosmic Flush’ magnum opus that’s still in the process of materializing in a physical format. Released across seven 12″s with one track + remix + instrumentals + art print each, to be collected in a limited box with booklet around Spring 2016, it’s taken a huge effort by the Gamma Proforma label to bring to fruition seven years after the record’s completion and five years after Rammellzee’s death. It’s been a vintage year for independent Hip Hop too with great albums by Divine Styler, Ollie Teeba, Memory Man and The Fabreeze Brothers.
It’s nice to see the Leaf label celebrating 20 years of existence and still as vital as ever with Melt Yourself Down, Polar Bear, Radioland and new signing The Comet Is Coming all releasing excellent records this year. One last mention must go to the album at the top of the list below that crept out under everyone’s noses on Record Store Day and has slowly been gathering attention through word of mouth in the last eight months. So much so that it won the Dead Albatross Music Prize – an alternative to the Mercury award set up by independent Norman Records to nominate records that would otherwise be passed over at such things. If you only listen to one album from the list below, make it the Annabel (lee) one.
Albums:
Annabel (lee) – By The Sea & Other Solitary Places (If Music/Ninja Tune)
Rammellzee – Cosmic Flush (Gamma Proforma)
Divine Styler – Def Mask (Gamma Proforma) (technically 2014)
Memory Man – Broadcast One (Chopped Herring)
Eagles of Death Metal – Zipper Down
Jane Weaver – The Amber Light (Bird)
Cavern Of Anti-Matter – Blood Music (Grautag Records) (technically 2013)
The The – Hyena (Death Waltz)
The Fabreeze Brothers – S/T (AE Productions)
Markey Funk – Instinct (Audio Montage) (released fully in Jan 2016)
Aphex Twin – Soundcloud Archive dump
Amon Tobin – Dark Jovian EP (Ninja Tune)
Radioland – Radio-Activity Revisited (Leaf)
Ollie Teeba – Short Order (World Expo)
Kurt Stenzel – Jodorowsky’s Dune (Light In The Attic)
Various Artists – The Delaware Road (Buried Treasure)
Floating Points – Elaenia (Pluto)
Morgan Delt – S/T (Trouble In Mind) (technically 2014)
Gaz Coombes – Matador (Universal)
Black Devil – Disco Club (Lo Recordings)
Bruce Ditmas – Yellow Dust (Finders Keepers)
Rodinia – Drumside / Dreamside (Now Again)
Various Artists – In A Moment (Ghost Box)
Jaga Jazzist – Starfire (Ninja Tune)
Tracks:
a few of these are from a few years ago but new to me…
Noel Gallagher – The Right Stuff (Sour Mash)
Graeme Miller & Steve Shill – Moomins Theme (Finders Keepers)
The The – Everybody Wants To Go To Heaven But Nobody Wants To Die) (Cineola)
The Comet Is Coming – Neon Baby (Leaf)
Reso – Richochet (Hospital)
Black Channels – Oracles (Death Waltz Originals)
Paul Rutherford – Get Real (Hardcore) (1989)
Beck – Dreams (Capitol)
Band of Skulls – Hootchie Cootchie (Ignition Records) (2014)
Pond – Zond (EMI)
Ash Grunwald – Walking (2011 but via the Amorphous Androgynous ‘Wizards of Oz’ 2015 RSD comp)
Olivier Libaux – No One Knows (feat. Inara George) (2013)
Alan Copeland – Mission Impossible/Norwegian Wood (ABC) (1968!)
Design / packaging / covers:
so many incredibly high quality creations, a oglden age for record sleeve packaging and design…
Science Fiction Dancehall Classics compilation (Trevor Jackson) (On-U Sound)
The The – Hyena (Cineola / Death Waltz/Mondo)
Kurt Stenzel – Jodorowsky’s Dune (Signal Starr) (Light In The Attic)
Jaga Jazzist – Starfire (Ninja Tune)
Tame Impala – Currents (Robert Beatty)
The ‘Beat Bop’ record case (Jean-Michel Basquiat)
Grasscut – Everyone Was A Bird (Lo Recordings)
Artists:
Dan Lish
Kim Jung Gi
Signal Starr
Oddly Head
Ameet Hindocha
Reuben Sutherland
Stan & Vince
Jonathan Edwards
Laurie Lipton
Larry Carlson
Books / Comics:
Augustine Kofie – Keep Drafting (ZERO+ Publishing)
Stephen Coates – X-Ray Audio (Strange Attractor Press)
Roger Perry – The Writing On The Wall (Plain Crisp Books Ltd)
Hanson, Godtland & Krassner – Psychedelic Sex (Taschen)
Island – Various (Image)
Sandman: Overture – Gaiman/Williams (Vertigo)
Ody-C – Fraction/Ward (Image)
8-House – Various (Image)
B.P.R.D: Hell On Earth – Various (Dark Horse)
Punks: The Comic – Fialkov/Chamberlain (Image)
Judge Dredd: Enceladus – New Life – Williams / Flint (2000AD)
Exhibitions:
Peter Kennard at the Imperial War Museum
Charles & Ray Eames at the Barbican
Cosmonauts at the Science Museum
X-Ray Audio at the Horse Hospital
Trevor Jackson / Format at the Vinyl Factory space
Zulu Nation 42nd Anniversary at House of Vans
Film / TV: (I really didn’t watch much this year)
Mad Max: Fury Road
Star Wars : The Force Awakens
Love & Mercy
Dune The Complete Saga (Fan edit)
‘Colossus: The Forbin Project’
Rick & Morty
Moments:
The X-Wing Fighter flying overhead during Star Wars Secret Cinema
The Frankie Goes To Hollywood box set getting nominated for an AIM award for best box set design
Interviewing Edwin Pouncey aka Savage Pencil for a forthcoming book
Getting to wear a full Stormtrooper suit whilst DJing during Star Wars Secret Cinema
DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist – Renegades of Rhythm show at Koko
Writing a piece and creating a mix about Rammellzee for the Quietus
The moving sale finds at Lambiek in Amsterdam
Crazy scenes at the Southbank for the Big Fish Little Fish free Sunday session
Heroes:
Ben Coghill (again) for being the best agent in the business
The NHS – for saving my mum’s life and generally being incredible
Joshu Docherty – for recommending me for Star Wars Secret Cinema
Jeremy Corbyn – for giving hope that there can be an alternative
Sarah Coleman & Leigh Adams – for releasing their first film, making unique and
interesting things and generally being great people
Pete Williams – for getting the keys to the basement
Shindig! magazine – for overcoming the odds and turning a bad situation to their advantage
Pete Isaac & Scott Boca 45 for getting the whole 45 Live crew together and building an international collective
Everyone who gave their time and dug through their collections to contribute to the weekly Flexibition posts on the site: Jonny Trunk, Pete Isaac, Jon Brooks, Markey Funk & Ofer Tal, Stephen Coates, Jon More, John Stapleton, Steve Cook, Anton Armtone, Sarah & Leigh, Spencer Hickman.
RIP:
Mike Allen (Legendary Hip Hop DJ), Lemmy, Demis Roussos, The Pizz, Don Joyce (Negativland), Shusei Nagaoka, Kája Saudek, Errol Brown (Hot Chocolate), Daevid Allen (Gong), Leonard Nimoy, Brett Ewins, Noriyoshi Ohrai, Rod McKuen, Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream), Mark B.
Looking forward to:
Transmission shop opening in Margate
David Bowie – Black Star LP
Mute 40 book
The Black Channels LP
The Allergies – Rock Rock feat. Andy Cat (Ugly Duckling)
Prophet: Earth War
I finally got round to checking out the Jamie Hewlett exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery just before Xmas. Split into three sections – colour renditions of the Tarot, Russ Meyer-esque posters of his wife as ‘Honey X‘, and B&W tree studies – it was good to see him pushing out of his comfort zone. The huge tarot images are in the style we know and love him for but all the pieces looked like prints rather than original art which was disappointing.
The Honey X fake film posters were enclosed in a black draped section that added to the seedy B-Movie vibe, their luminous glow alluding to the kind of dimly lit emporiums that would show such films. It’s hard to equate Hewlett with them as there’s so little of his established style visible. They weren’t bad per se, but I found it hard to care too much about them aside from the odd nicely observed graphic design placement here and there.
Much has been made of the tree studies and they are a revelation in that you can see his hand in the execution but they couldn’t be further from his usual source material. In recent years there’s been a stripping down of Hewlett’s style, a minimizing in detail and the stark contrasts of the tree images and some of the tarot remind me a lot of Mike Mignola’s work about 20 years ago when he first started drawing Hellboy. Since then Mike’s stripped his own style back even further and it will be interesting to see where Hewlett is in two decades time.
Is this the point where comic artists in the UK finally start to be accepted into the fine art world? What with this and the Comics Unmasked exhibition at the British Library last year could this be the tipping point that sees the UK catch up with our friends on the continent? Could we one day see major retrospective shows of the likes that Crumb, Hergé and Moebius have been afforded overseas in some of our major galleries? It’s been happening for years in comic shops and minor spaces but the Saatchi is a big player and tastemaker. The exhibition has been extended until January 3rd so there’s still time to catch it and it’s free.
Finally got round to colouring my Mike McMahon commission from a few years back and mocking it up to look like my first ever 2000AD Prog. Bit elongated but Mike doesn’t leave room for much else in his compositions.
I ran across this recently, a Pink Floyd tour program in the form of a comic. It was sold on their 1975 Dark Side Of The Moon tour and consists of 16 pages with colour cover and back where each band member gets their own story in a classic 70s boys comic kind of way. Roger Waters is a football hero, Nick Mason, the captain of a ship, Rick Wright, a rich playboy and Dave Gilmore, a daredevil biker.
There’s also the famous Ralph Steadman centre spread of the band (was this the first time it was used?), a personality file (where Wright and Waters quickly get bored and start giving joke answers), a quiz and song lyrics. It’s very much in the spirit of the 60s and 70s undergrounds and the alt. press of Oz, Ink or International Times including some un-PC depictions of women. It was put together by Hipgnosis and Nick Mason and featured cartoonists Paul Stubbs, Joe Patagno, Colin Elgie, Richard Evans and Dave Gale – none of which I think I’m familiar with. You can download a full set of scanned pages from here.
Readers might remember me featuring the first Metal Made Flesh kickstarter a couple of years back. Now the team is back for book 2, expanded with a second artist and bigger goals, two of which they’ve smashed, and they’re approaching the third with 12 days left. Taking liberally from all manner of sci-fi from the last three decades and managing to find new angles on it the book tells three different tales of a trio of characters and their place in the future cityscape of Tuaoni. You can get both books, T-shirts, original artwork or even appear as a character in the book in the new Kickstarter.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Amsterdam, taking part in discussions about ‘The Art of Curation’ with Mixcloud co-founder Nikhil Shah. The chat was hosted by the electronics company Sonos as part of the annual ADE music conference that takes place there, the biggest in Europe. I chose five tracks that linked with the subjects of Music, Art, Sci-Fi, Comics & Design which largely tie into the things I collect and post about on this site. This is the part where the blog eats itself as I blog about myself talking about blogging and readers will hear some familiar names and sounds during the interview.
The trip was a fruitful one in terms of digging for new things in my time off and I went with a mission for 45s, underground comics and sci-fi paperbacks. Things got off to a poor start with my first stop at Record Palace (Op Art -themed wall display at the top) which is on the outer rim of the centre of the city. I’ve shopped there a few times and it’s always yielded treasures but this time it wasn’t to be. Of the two 7″s I bought (a substandard late 80s Dickie Goodman break-in record and Raze‘s ‘Break 4 Love’) when I returned home to play them I discovered that the disc inside the Raze cover was in fact a Thompson Twins single. My fault for not checking the disc but they were only 50c and there was a strict ‘no playing’ rule on records from the cheap bins. The only good thing about it was the Trevor Jackson-designed cover which, when you look at the ‘dancing’ figures, is actually quite dirty.
From here I visited Lambiek a few roads away, the oldest comic shop in the world if their website is to be believed and, on the strength of their stock, I can believe it. The shop is about to move to a new premises and their usual gallery space was now a large dumping ground for what looks like all manner of random stock. Very little of it was priced apart from the odd penciled number on an inside cover and many of the piles can contain anything, very little order exists as you can see below.
But there was some gold there and I soon had a little pile building, the owner unable to direct me to the undergrounds as everything was mixed up due to the impending move. They closed at 5pm and at approximately 4.45 I glanced under a shelf and saw a box that looked like it was exactly what I was looking for. Going through it my suspicions were confirmed and I started pulling out handfuls of British and American underground and independent press comix as fast as I could, some in not-so-good condition but still a lot that you only find on eBay these days.
This copy of Oz magazine was nestling in the box, looking like a Robert Crumb comic, copies usually go for £10-20 and up.
These three Subvert comics by Spain were a bit water-damaged but I’d never seen copies before aside from being reprinted in other mags.
No.s 1 and 3 of Mother Oats Comix by the late, great Dave Sheridan.
They had five copies of this Radical Rock comic, all badly water-damaged but readable. You can easily find these for about $5 on eBay, but the postage triples the price as they’re always from the States.
I wasn’t going to leave a comic behind with a cover like the Bizarre Sex one, the issue of Tasty has some really nice abstract acid trip visuals inside although the cover isn’t up to much.
That Dutch NIMFKE comic on the right is probably one of the filthiest things I’ve ever seen in comic form.
There was more but here’s a lot of it. I’d been tempering my choices, thinking that this was adding up to quite a bundle but some of this stuff just doesn’t come around in Europe that often, even in this condition. Upon taking them to the counter I couldn’t quite believe my luck when the assistant proceeded to charge me one Euro for each comic with only two for some slightly over-sized books like Imagine and Heavy Metal. Digs like that don’t happen every day.
On then, with a spring in my step, to a couple more comic shops further north near Centraal station. On my way I passed a shop with a big sign outside, ‘Used Books, English Language’, and took a quick peek to see what it was like. Once inside I inquired if they had any vintage sci-fi paperbacks and the guy at the counter pointed to eight large apple boxes stacked in the aisle. “Four for ten Euros“, he quipped, “How long until you close?”, “20 minutes!”. I probably got through about two thirds of them, given that they were two rows deep inside but it was worth it.
Laugh-In magazine was one of a host of humour publications that sprang up in the wake of Mad magazine’s success. It was a spin-off from Rowan & Martin’s TV show of the same name, cheaply produced and only lasted a year before folding. Going by the copy that I picked up in a basement over the summer, it’s not hard to see why, it wasn’t very funny at all, stuffed with filler to pad out the little of quality. I was drawn to some of the letter and graphic designs more than the humour content, for example the hand drawn headers and patterns you see here.
There was however one other redeeming feature worth keeping, a Moonlightling Monsters series of pin ups by John Strejan (who I’m presuming is the paper engineer of the same name), complete with period psychedelic lettering, that I’ve scanned and posted for Halloween.
Back at some point in the early 90s I found an odd comic called Hep in the old Gosh! comic shop when it was across the road from the British Museum. I had no idea what it was about and had never heard of the artist but the artwork was cool and it was a bizarre mix of weird and crazed nonsense so I bought it. It’s an oddity alright, full of strange turns of phrase and stream of conscious madness and I always looked for a second issue but never found one.
Now that we have the power of the internet at our fingertips I found myself googling it the other week and finding out more about the artist and author, Marc Bell, and seeing if a #2 did ever materialise. Seems it didn’t as Hep was the second of two different titles he made for Calibre Press that flopped before he moved on to doing weekly strips for Canadian free mag Exclaim. I used to pick up copies of this on tours of Canada in the mid 90s and I’m pretty sure I have some of his strips somewhere, extracted from various issues because I liked the look of them. While reading this Comics Journal interview with Bell I chanced upon this flyer for an exhibition opening featuring my good friend DJ Wig (now Ghostbeard – head of Ninja Tune North America) on the bill.
Anyway, all this to say that, during a weekend trip to Amsterdam where I had the good fortune to strike it lucky at Lambiek (post forthcoming), I happened upon a comic called Boof which looked interesting. It wasn’t until I got it home that I realised it was by the same artist and a quick internet search revealed that these two were his first ‘proper’ comics and hard to find now. No Hep #2 but something as good as.
A full page ad found in the back of Cozmic Comix #6, 1974 and the record it advertised by Robert Crumb.
By complete coincidence The Observer just published an extensive Crumb interview today too.
