Obscure Comic of the Month - The Pennyfarthing Project

Obscure Comic of the Month takes a detailed look at a little known entry from my personal comic book collection. Some will be from major publishers, others self published projects, Original Graphic Novels, issues and Manga. What they'll all have in common though, is that I've rarely, if ever, seen anybody talk about them.

                                                    

The Pennyfarthing Project by Philippe Cottarel and Jean-michel Philibert – Six of One 1997

The Pennyfarthing Project is a special publication of Le rOdeur, the french language Prisoner magazine. It is published for the French and overseas members of Six of One, the official Prisoner Appreciation Society.

Mild Spoilers

We'd already taken a look at the official Prisoner comic, Shattered Visage, last year, and as such it'd be tempting to take this opportunity to compare. The Pennyfarthing Project, however, defies such comparisons. While Shattered Visage was an attempt to expand the scope of The Prisoner, The Pennyfarthing Project is instead a faithful tribute, an attempt to ape the tone and mood of the TV series without trying to do something inherently different.

The Pennyfarthing Project is one of the main reasons I wanted to start Obscure Comic of the Month. It's probably the weirdest part of my collection. A self published, personally bound, French fan-comic of The Prisoner that I picked up at Portmeirion . The fact that it even exists just makes me smile.

As mentioned, The Pennyfarthing Project is simply Cottarel and Philiber's tribute to the TV series, nothing more complex than that. What they set out to do is produce a story that could be seen as a 'lost episode' of the TV series, just unburdened by budget or imagination, and for the most part they succeed.

The Pennyfarthing Project plays closely to a lot of the TV series best episodes. Number 6 is brainwashed and convinced that The Village is a recovery resort for amnesia cases. Number 2 plants the charismatic Number 7 to coax information out of Number 6, who slowly figures out their plot with the suggestion that he and Number 7 have met somewhere before.

All in all, it's a pretty good Prisoner story, with the expected twists and turns. Cottarel and Philibert also make great use of The Pennyfarthing Project's own format, with psychedelic visuals very in keeping with the TV series but in ways the budget would never allow. Spiralling panel layouts reinforce the feeling of distortion and unease. Antagonists morph into hallucinated figures.

Philippe Cottarel's art deserves high praise, really capturing the atmosphere of the village, though it is clear that at times he's copying from stills of the TV show, making the characters feel somewhat stiff. But the black and white is crisp, and the story has a momentum to it that gives a life to the artwork.

On the other hand, some of the translation feels a little clunky and the lettering choice is really weird. Still, the visual storytelling is really creative and the bonus artwork at the back is capital B beautiful. There's lots of visual nods to the classic series, with references to the opening, the finale and an appearance near the end of Leo McKern's Number 2 that really taps into the chemistry they had on screen.

If The Pennyfarthing Project has one main problem though, it's in the character of Number 7. Based in appearance on Sam Fox, she visually sticks out from the rest of the comic in a way that feels jarring. She looks smoother than the other characters visually, far more 1980's in both fashion and beauty standards, but more than anything, she's just too sexy.

The Prisoner always had a sterile, sexless quality to it, not least because it's star Patrick McGoohan, was allegedly uncomfortable playing sexually liberal characters. That always worked in the shows favour though, adding an extra layer of 'wrongness' to the village.

So hot pants wearing, midriff baring Number 7 is a weird anachronism. That's not to say there isn't something interesting you could do with that, especially in a Prisoner comic, but that doesn't seem to be what The Pennyfarthing Project is going for here. It seems more likely that Cottarel and Philiber simply wanted to draw Sam Fox in a bikini.

Which is a shame because sexless McGoohan vs sensual Fox could have been a fascinating concept and an interesting statement, but the writers just try to slot her into a standard Prisoner story without minding the seams. It damages the overall experience too, which would otherwise be a tightly paced, lovingly rendered homage to a classic series.

Philippe Cottarel and Jean-michel Philibert still seem to be cracking out new stuff for the comics scene over of the continent, and they still seem to have a love for The Prisoner too. It's that love that shines through for The Pennyfarthing Project the most, despite it's flaws.

Ultimately The Pennyfarthing Project is a fun ride of the merry-go-round one last time. A reminder of what made The Prisoner great and, more chillingly, why it's still as relevant now as it was when it was first broadcast.

The night is long for he who watches.

                                           

Jack Harvey 2016. The Pennyfarthing Project (c) 1997 Six of One, Philippe Cottarel and Jean-michel Philibert. The Prisoner was created by Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein and produced by ITC Entertainment. Images used under Fair Use.

Announcing The Reminiscence of Good King Carnack AKA BUY MY EBOOK

 If you've been paying attention to my stuff over the last year I'll have talked about Less Than Three picking up one of my stories as an Ebook. Finally the day of release has arrived.

Carnack rules a vast kingdom, with millions of people looking to him for leadership and protection.

But he wasn't born royalty, and never had any interest in taking care of anyone but himself. So what changes a cold and ruthless mercenary into a trusted and caring king?

That story begins with a belt buckle, and the unexpectedly complicated adventure required to obtain it...

I had a lot of fun writing the story, so if you like your fantasy hard-ish and your characters unconventional then I recommend checking it out.

The cover is by the fabulous Meg Daunting .

It's my first real published work, so if you're interested, of you know anyone who would be, I'd really appreciate you spreading the word.

And it'sonly $1.99. You can find all the details for purchasing the Ebook here. 

And while you're there, feel free to take a look at the great work other authors have got going on. You can't go wrong really.

Thanks for reading!

Why The Eighth Doctor Comic Strips are Some of the Best Comics Ever Written

This column has been taking a look at obscure comics for twelve months. For every every sixth month, instead of taking a look at a comic that nobody talks about, this special edition will take a look at a comic I feel not enough people talk about.

                                            

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Comic Strips by Scott Gray and various artists – Doctor Who Magazine 1996 to 2005

Contains Spoilers

It was a strange time to be a Doctor Who fan in the mid nineties. The series had been off the air long enough that people had basically assumed it was never coming back. Few official stories had been released within the decade by the BBC, but the desire from both fans and writers for a return was only getting stronger.

Then everything changed, and at the same time, nothing changed. The 1995 Paul McGann movie proved there was fertile ground for the character to move on to, but it was an abject failure at courting new audiences.

As a young kid who didn't really understand the peaks and troughs of film and TV politics, I was waiting, with bated breath, for the TV series to return. It was bound to happen right? Only a matter of time?

In a post Doctor Who The Movie world there was a great feeling of betrayal. We had something so close and had been denied. And so we sought solace in the only place we could, The Doctor Who Magazine's monthly strip. It was the closest thing we'd get to seeing Paul McGann back on the screen.

It'd be easy to look back on DWM's Eighth Doctor strips with nostalgic fondness when that's practically the only Doctor Who you were getting at the time. And that's true, I lapped up what I could as a kid. With no TV series in sight, to me the DWM strip was Doctor Who.

I slipped in and out of reading it over the years, and I mostly read the colour strips when my brother was buying it regularly. But my interest fluctuated, and I had an egregious, homophobic reaction to the later stories which we'll get in to later.

I was in university by the time Doctor Who was back on the screen. I'd started buying the comic's reprints but I never went back and reappraised the Eighth Doctor stories until 2013, when I decided to finally complete the collection and read them as a single body of work.

It wasn't nostalgia. I enjoyed The Eight Doctor Strips so much more the second time round. They are some of the best Doctor Who stories ever written, maybe even some of the best comics I've ever read.

The whole four volume arc is itself relatively self contained, so I'd be interested to see what a reader with no foreknowledge of the TV show would think of the stories (I think they'd come across quite well.)

But what is it about these strips, written predominantly by Scott Gray, that makes them all time greats? Well, there’s a sense that Gray is really trying to break new ground with these stories. Long before we saw Doctor Who return to TV under Russell T Davis, Grey brought us a breezy, hip, forward thinking Doctor Who that could drop pop culture references at any moment, but still keep one foot rooted in classic Sci-fi, maybe even more so than the TV series, before or since.

In the beginning we're introduced to the Doctor's newest companion, Izzy Sinclare, a tomboyish science-fiction fan who is practically thrilled at the prospect of space-faring adventures. She's a great match for McGann's Doctor, who is at once level headed and serious, but also so full of hope and curiosity. Izzy can irritate him at times, but he just can't help but admire her enthusiasm.

The early stories are rather throwaway in tone, but they build an important foundation for what was to come later. Endgame sees the return of the Celestial Toymaker, and does what comics do best by creating fantastical and wonderful scenes that a TV budget would never get you.

The Daleks return, in Fire and Brimstone, a story that really does it's best to try and make them ultimately terrifying again, albeit in a very 90's Rob Liefield kind of way. The story has cracking action, and the art is a perfect fit for high concept sci-fi. Even so, it's the character driven stuff that really draws the appeal here. 

Alongside Izzy we're also introduced to androgynous super-spy Fey Truscott-Sade, who, though easy to miss at first, Izzy seems to be rather smitten with. It's the story The Final Chapter though, where the strip starts gaining steam. Not the story itself though, which is a fairly by-the-numbers look back at Time Lord mythology, but it's the ending that worth talking about. An ending which would go on to be one of the greatest pieces of trolling in comic book history.

A little context. With no sign of Doctor Who returning to the airwaves many fans had taken it upon themselves to produce their own future Who stories. One such example were the Audio Visual fan dramas, where Nicolas Briggs (who would go on to voice the Daleks in the TV series proper) was becoming quite popular playing a future incarnation. He'd actually appeared a few times as “the Nth Doctor” in some of the earlier comics.

At the end of The Final Chapter, Paul McGanns's Doctor seemingly sacrifices his life, triggering a regeneration and announcing Briggs as the new, official Ninth Doctor.

Readers fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Angry letters were sent in condemning DWM for writing off McGann's Doctor so early, while others said they had no right outside the TV series to make that call.

It was all a ruse of course. The Doctor was revealed to have faked his regeneration in the cracking space western, Wormwood. Teaming up with Time Lord bioweapon Shayde, the gang battle an 19^th Century industrialist and even more deadly bioweapon, The Pariah. The gang succeed, but not without Shayde being mortally wounded, forcing him to merge with Fay and essentially turning her into the Doctor Who equivalent of the Silver Surfer.

Wormwood creates the template that Gray would improve on over the subsequent years. It combined character drama with converging plot-lines and high concept stories with great action and visuals. It was all polished to a mirror shine, and the climax is great.

The next story arc, is, in my opinion, the best of the bunch. The Glorious Dead saw the return of Kroton, a Cyberman with a soul reinvented as a sort of Luke Cage character (who he even drops a reference to), he's also joined by Katsura, a samurai robbed of a noble death by The Doctor, and The Master, back as a schemer more vicious than he ever had been before (or since).

The Glorious Dead really embraces it's wide spectrum of comic book influences. Katsura's origin story sees references to classic and contemporary manga, and the main plot involves the two Time Lords battling it out for the throne of the multiverse. There's literal homages to Peanuts, Doctor Strange, X-Force and Dick Tracy. It's a comic aficionado's dream.

Right here, DWM was really leaving it's TV roots behind and embracing it's legacy as a comic first and foremost. With no TV series in sight, Doctor Who was dead, long live Doctor Who.

Soon later the comic would hit full colour for the very first time, and the quality and intensity of the stories would only increase from there. Ophidious would see Izzy swap brains with the amoral fish alien Destrii, only for Destrii to end up getting vaporised, leaving Izzy struggling to cope living in an unfamiliar body. 

The Way of All Flesh would see The Doctor and Izzy, no joke, team up with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to fight an alien art diva during Dia de los Muertos and it's a real doozey of a story. Then there's Children of the Revolution, voted one of the greatest DWM comics ever, that follows the legacy of a group of moralistic Daleks as they struggle to find a place in a universe that hates and fears them.

Things finally come to ahead in Oblivion as threads going all the way back to Endgame converge. Izzy, mistaken for Destrii, is summoned to her homeworld to take on the mantle of Primatrix. Meanwhile, The Doctor discovers that Destrii, in Izzy's body, isn't dead after all, and seeks to set right what once went wrong.

The story has action, adventure and political rivalries, but it is primarily concerned with Izzy coming to terms with who she is, as an outsider, an orphan and a lesbian.

In Scott Grey's commentary, at the back of Volume 3, he notes “I think we only got one angry letter (from an American reader) about Izzy and Fey's kiss. He cancelled his subscription in protest. I would have been deeply disappointed if we hadn't outraged somebody, so thank you, Mr Republican, wherever you are!” I think about that reader a lot, and the person I might have grown up to be.

For the young homophobic man that I was, the finale made me angry and confused. Going back in 2013, the story nearly moved me to tears. I didn't know it at the time, but Oblivion had played an important role in making me the person I am today.

The story ends with a big damn kiss with Fey, and a return to the day that Izzy first left in the Tardis. It's a neat and tidy ending, and would be the perfect place to finish, but Doctor Who wouldn't return to television for another three years, and there were still more stories to be told. It would have been easy, after Oblivion, for the strip to slip into a funk. It didn't, instead what they gave us was more of a victory lap.

The next run of stories are self contained but are some of the best homages in the entire run. The Nightmare Game is a cheeky, Roy of the Rovers inspired football adventure, The Curious Tail of Spring-heeled Jack is pretty self explanatory, and The Land of Happy Endings is told in the style of the old TV Comic Doctor Who stories from back in the 60's and re-contextualises them as The Doctor fantasising about a simpler, more childish world. 

We return to the long form epic arcs eventually with Bad Blood. Sitting Bull vs General Custer, the return of Destrii and Space Windigo. Jeeze oh man, is this story ever fucking awesome. Doctor Who, even now, has never had the budget to tackle western revisionism. But with comics? No problem. The TV stories have dealt with metaphorical stories of colonialism before, but here, it's front and centre.

As the kind of story Doctor Who was created to tell, it's probably be my favourite story of the whole bunch, even compared to The Glorious Dead.

Destrii joins the crew of the Tardis, finally, and so we reach the strip's grand finale, The Flood. The Flood isn't a particular complicated concept, reinvent a Cyberman story more suited for the modern age. It's interesting to compare The Flood with the TV's modern reinvention of the Cybermen, because they're like night and day in approach. 

When the TV series brought them back, the Cybermen were envisioned as hulking, boot stomping war machines. In The Flood the Cybermen look more fluid, more fragile. They don't stride towards their victims with menace, instead they glide and float. These Cybermen are eerie, truly alien.

The Flood finishes on another homage, one to Doctor Who itself. The last televised story before it's proper revival, Survival, ended with The Doctor and his companion Ace walking off into the distance, reminiscing of adventures gone by, and speculating on the ones to come.

The Flood's ending hits all those same beats. With Doctor Who returning to television this really was the Eighth Doctor's swan song and it decides to end in the same humble way the show did, reminiscing on the past, and looking forwards to the future.

I've never really felt the same way about a Doctor Who comic since the end of the Eighth Doctor's era. While there has been some exceptionally good work done by IDW and Titan and DWM itself, it's not quite got the same feeling now that the show is back on TV. The comics can't be quite as daring, or as experimental, as DWM was during it's wilderness years.

The Eighth Doctor Comics strips are some of my favourite comics. They're probably my favourite Doctor Who related stories period, and this is coming from a guy who's been a fan of the show since I was seven years old. They're ambitious and progressive, grand in scope yet warm and human. Paul McGann, despite only ever really having one proper TV appearance, is my Doctor, and that's in no small part due to what these comics mean to me.

Any Doctor Who fan, old and new, owes it to themselves to read the entire run, and even if you don't give a shit about Doctor Who the craft on display here is so finely tuned that there's a lot to love for a fan of comics in general. The Eighth Doctor strips show what Doctor Who as a concept is capable of when it's unburdened by budget and franchise limitations.

I grew up watching Doctor Who, but I never really loved Doctor Who until 1995. I'm still a fan, but I've never really loved it the way I did when Scott Gray was writing for DWM. You can probably figure out why.

                                              

Jack Harvey 2016. Doctor Who (c) BBC, published by Panini Comics for Doctor Who Magazine. Images used under free use.

Tales of the Modern Realms FAQ AKA BUY MY BOOK!

Hey people, I now have a book for sale! It's Tales of the Modern Realms, an illustrated anthology of six stories set in a pulp-inspired world of mystery and adventure.

The stories were originally published here on my blog and have since been remastered and expanded. There's also bonus material included on the history and background of the world itself.

If you're curious, want to support my work or just want something a little different to try, you can buy a copy here.

Amazon

Amazon UK

Createspace (Note: I'd prefer it if you ordered from here, but It's entirely up to you what method you choose)

If you want to know more, read the FAQ below.

What's the hook?

The Modern Realms are a fantasy world of dragons, wizards and elves. However, unlike most fantasy stories, it doesn’t take place in a psudo-medieval time period. Instead it takes place in a 40's – 60's inspired cold war landscape, with jet planes, microfilm and silenced pistols.

Here's the blurb:

Once the realms were home to great kings and noble knights, evil wizards and beautiful princesses. But those days are long gone. Lost in a war of bullets and smoke. Now the realms are home to billionaire playboys and femme fatales, cool spies and private eyes.

From the towering forests of Wendiga to the rainy skies of Hightower, from the cold mountains of Romahold to the neon lit streets of Gulf City, deals are made, money changes hands and nobody can be trusted.

This omnibus contains seven illustrated stories of mystery and suspense, as well as a detailed guide to the world of the Modern Realms.

Wait, all of this can be read for free?

Yes and no. All of the short stories were originally published on my blog, and can still be read here (and I encourage you to do so.) However, the versions contained in this book are extended and remastered.

Most of the stories have additional and altered scenes, some of which change the course of events a little. Likewise, I've also remastered and redone some of the artwork. The versions included are what I consider the definitive story.

Also it includes extra content on the background of the Modern Realms setting, details on the history, races and nations that you won't find anywhere else.

Is there an ebook version available?

Coming soon I hope. You'll know as soon as I have a concrete idea on that.

Is this the novel you've spoken about in the past?

No, there's still plenty of work that I've done that I want to publish through traditional means. Also there's a bunch of other Modern Realms stories that I haven't yet published, and would like to do as a collaborative job with other artists.

Is this related to that short story you were talking about getting published?

No, the story from Less Than Three Press is unconnected in both story and setting. That's its own thing.

It's not connected to the upcoming webcomic either.

Where can I buy it?

I already put the links above, but just because you asked, here it is again:

Amazon

Amazon UK

Createspace

Obscure Comic of the Month - The Gatecrashers: A Night of Gatecrashing

Obscure Comic of the Month takes a detailed look at a little known entry from my personal comic book collection. Some will be from major publishers, others self published projects, Original Graphic Novels, issues and Manga. What they'll all have in common though, is that I've rarely, if ever, seen anybody talk about them.

                                                  

The Gatecrashers: A Night of Gatecrashing by Zachary Mortensen and Sutu – Ghost Robot 2014

When a bomb explodes in the center of a densely packed protest rally, Gatecrasher Hex Spencer is the first on the scene and what begins as a routine call shifts into a life-threatening chase through choked streets of Palomar City. Hex's only concern is saving her patient and collecting her fee but with each turn she is drawn further into a complex web of power that will destroy anything – or anyone – that gets in their way.

Welcome to Palomar City, a tightly packed, overpopulated American mega-city. Over the last sixty years, a series of traffic control devices known as Gates have transformed this thriving metropolis into a pressure cooker of political and socio-ethnic tension that is on the verge of exploding. One of the only groups with unrestricted passage through the gates are the emergency medical teams, nicknamed “The Gatecrashers,” who find themselves in the middle of a building conflict that threatens to tear Palomar City apart once and for all.

Spoiler Free

I picked up Book One of The Gatecrashers while I was at New York Comic Con in 2014. I was on the lookout for independent comics that seemed interesting. I had walked past Zachary Mortensen plugging his work a couple of times over the weekend, and his comic kept catching my eye. I'm glad I checked it out, because The Gatecrashers has a lot going for it in it's own unique way.

It's not uncommon to see fiction celebrate the actions of law enforcers and soldiers but we don't often see many of the real everyday heroes get the focus in our space operas or dystopian cyberpunk worlds quite as much. The Gatecrashers is different because it focuses on characters who are basically Ambulance Drivers. Hex Spencer isn't a gun slinging maverick in a dirty world, she's just an employee trying to do a respectable job in the face of bureaucracy and bullshit.

The Gatecrashers feels very timely. While it doesn't target any specific political issues it does focus on a lot of areas that affect the working class in the current western world. Healthcare, civic unrest, questions of police jurisdiction and corporate corruption are all touched upon in the world of The Gatecrashers.

In a week where the UK saw a Junior Doctors strike, reading The Gatecrashers feels that little bit more personal.

Sutu's artwork really brings the world of Palomar city to life too. The use of colour really helps to set the scene of a dirty and run down city, with warm oranges and neon blues used to particular effect. His style takes a little getting used to and has a certain warped quality to it, but it really suits the setting of a corrupt and tired world. It reminded me a lot of Peter Chung's work on Aeon Flux.

The book's plot gets going thick and fast, essentially serving as a day in the life of a Gatecrasher, with reporter Archie McAlester serving as the audience surrogate. It's a great framing device, and sets up the conflict to be genuinely intriguing. The characters are all warm and relatable, if being a little one-note this early in the plot. Hex is an engaging protagonist and is given enough time to suggest there may be a few different sides to her personality.

Where the comic does stumble is in its sense of world building. There's a lot going on in the first volume of The Gatecrashers and what back-story we're given is told in passing just a little bit too casually. There's a big conspiracy surrounding one district in the city being annexed by another but a lot of the fine details are easy to miss, and you might find yourself struggling to understand character motivations when the action gets going.

Not helping is a lot of world building being left to bonus portions at the back of the book. It's obvious that Zachary Mortensen has taken a lot of time and put a great deal of thought into the fictional world of Palomar City, but far too much time is spent telling it in the margins, rather than showing it during the story. 

The whole thing could have done with just a little bit more time spent introducing us to the fictional world. Just a short sequence or a page or two would have done.

It's also worth mentioning that The Gatecrashers release schedule has been slow going, only issue five has been released since Book One in 2014, but issue six is due to be out this month. Here's hoping the series continues from it's strong opening.

Beyond that though, A Night of Gatecrashing is otherwise a great introduction to the series. It's hook is different, it's art is striking and the story ends with a lot of interesting places to go. If you like your cyberpunk, but would like to see the genre from a different perspective, then I highly recommend you check the series out.

                                        

Jack Harvey 2016. The Gatecrashers (c) 2014 Zachary Mortensen and Sutu. Images used under Fair Use.

Tales of the Modern Realms is Coming to Print

I've been meaning to get this to print for a while now and it's finally coming around. The complete collection of my Tales of the Modern Realms short stories, remastered, expanded and extended with bonus material. I'm currently going over the proof as we speak. It still needs a few tweaks (formatting is a pain in the backside) but hopefully those should be ironed out soon, and you'll see the book available to buy very shortly.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Obscure Comic of the Month - Necessary Monsters

Obscure Comic of the Month takes a detailed look at a little known entry from my personal comic book collection. Some will be from major publishers, others self published projects, Original Graphic Novels, issues and Manga. What they'll all have in common though, is that I've rarely, if ever, seen anybody talk about them.

                                          

Necessary Monsters by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Sean Azzopardi – First Comics 2011

There exists a world of horrors beneath the one we know. Where creatures of our nightmares stalk amongst humanity and play their games of vengeance, murder and intrigue. To police this world there is The Chain; a covert agency of monsters and killers, charged with keeping the human herd from ever growing too thin.

Contains Mild Spoilers

I picked up the first book of Necessary Monsters when I was at Leeds Thought Bubble a couple of years ago. The creators were promoting their second run of the series (sadly still uncollected) and It was pitched to me as 'Oceans Eleven with movie monsters,”. Suffice it to say, the pitch was unique enough that I couldn't possibly refuse.

It's important to note that I'm not a fan of horror films, at least not the slasher genre anyway, and that colours my experience with Necessary Monsters to a large degree. The cast is heavily populated with ersatz versions of horror icons. Cowboy 13 is a reference to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Charlotte Hatred a reference to The Ring and Creeping Tuesday to Nightmare on Elm treet. If you're a fan of those films, you'll probably love the comic unconditionally on those grounds alone.

But I'm not a fan of those films, and so I'm left to look at Necessary Monsters on its own merits. Fortunately for me, despite all of it's horror references, the comic is very much a hard boiled spy story, with much more in common with a Bond tale than Friday the 13^th. 

The story follows Tuesday Jones, daughter of a killer who could walk into dreams. She's inducted into The Chain, a secret organisation of monsters and killers who police the other monsters and killers. The Chain are not good guys, but they are less bad than the bad guys, or so we are led to believe. As the story goes on it starts to show that the villain, Harps Bane, may have more noble intentions than it initially appears.

Azzopardi's art is just perfect for the story, the stark black and white keeps the story grounded even as body parts begin to fly, and it walks just the right line between serious and ridiculous. His art does become a little ropey at times, with quite a few character looking a little off model, and his guns look really... odd. Most of the visuals are great though, and a battle between two elderich abominations at the climax is particularly inspired.

As for the plot itself, it doesn't waste any time in getting to the good stuff. The use of pop cultural touchstones allows for the reader to fill in the blanks of the world building all on their own. The cast are all thoroughly likeable, no mean feat considering they are mostly indiscriminate murderers. They're all appropriately grotesque too, setting the tone for the plot and leaving you wondering how it's going to end.

The comic throughout makes the most of the visual medium to create what is essentially a form of American folklore. Both Lady Liberty and the Hollywood sign play an important role in the plot and combined with the horror symbolism it takes a wry look at the concept of American personal identity.

As the plot unfolds, Tuesday is presented with a choice, embrace what she is as a monster, or turn away and return to the mundane world. It's good allegorical storytelling, essentially using movie monster tropes to tell a modern fable about being true to your identity. It's no accident Goodbrey cast Tuesday as a young black American in a story about personal identity, and her story arc is particularly touching.

Now the comic is not without it's problems. As mentioned earlier, the cast are likeable for a bunch of murderers, but that doesn't change the fact that they are, ultimately, murderers. It makes it hard to keep the reader sympathetic to The Chain's cause, but it also causes a massive headache in the dissonance between characters. Tuesday and, to a degree, Hatred are more like vigilantes in the use of their powers, taking down killers and gangsters in a form of warped justice.

Cowboy 13 on the other hand is an actual serial killer, who we see murdering teenagers at both the beginning and the end of the book. If Tuesday is, at least to some degree, empathic towards the plight of victims then it seems odd that we're supposed to just accepter her working alongside 13. Perhaps this is something that gets addressed in a later story, but for now just leaves things feeling a little off kilter.

Maybe it's just because I'm not a horror movie fan though. Most slasher villains become figures of fun eventually and the audience cheers along as they murder people in progressively more ridiculous ways. Maybe we're supposed to cheers along with Cowboy 13 retuning to his murderous roots, but for me, somebody reading this as more of a pulp spy story with a twist, It doesn't ring true.

I suppose that is emblematic of Necessary Monsters problems as a whole. The comic has one foot in one genre and one foot in another and never fully reconciles the two. It's a fun book, and a unique premise, and finishes at an excellent point that leaves you wanting more. It's best enjoyed quickly, and not thought about too much. For horror movie fans, It's probably perfect, but for everyone else, it might leave you feeling as though something is missing.

                                                 

Jack Harvey 2016. Necessary Monsters (c) 2011 Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Sean Azzopardi. Images used under Fair Use.