Full-Page Bleed

Henry and Stanley Miller

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 13:41:00 +0000

“I Was Scared Out of My Wits. But I Gradually Became Obsessed” – Henry and Stan Miller Talk About The Fall, Plasticine and Their New Comics

(An pre-ELCAF feature/interview on Broken Fronter with Henry Miller and his son Stanley - ace cartoonists and the geniuses behind the Catford Comic and Zine Fair, which is far and away the most convivial event on the London small press calendar. This year's is taking place on Sunday December 9th at the legendary Blythe Hill Tavern in Catford.)

Shit is Real (Drawn & Quarterly)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 18:28:00 +0000

Shit is Real – Aisha Franz Looks Through the Cracks at the Strains of Modern Life

(Review on Broken Frontier)

The Great North Wood (Avery Hill Publishing)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 18:21:00 +0000

The Great North Wood – Tim Bird Brings a Little Magic Back to the Hills of South London

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Generous Bosom 3 (Breakdown Press)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 23:04:00 +0000

Generous Bosom #3 – Conor Stechschulte Takes Us Further Down the Rabbit Hole in His Deepening Mystery

(Review at Broken Frontier)

The New World: Comics from Mauretania (New York Review Comics)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 22:55:00 +0000

The New World: Comics from Mauretania – A Welcome Return to the Compelling and Mysterious World of Chris Reynolds

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Anti-Gone (Koyama Press)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 22:50:00 +0000

Anti-Gone – A Voyage to the Numb Limits of Sex, Drugs and Shopping by Connor Willumsen

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Get Naked (Image Comics)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 09:26:00 +0000

A review at Broken Frontier:

Get Naked – Steven T. Seagle and His Collaborators Get to the Bare Essentials of Body Culture

Ghosts, Etc (Avery Hill Publishing)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 09:23:00 +0000

A review at Broken Frontier:

Ghosts, Etc. – Three Very Different Stories by George Wylesol Highlight an Emerging Voice in Comics

Crushing (Sophie Burrows)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 09:19:00 +0000

Over at Broken Frontier, I reviewed a rare comic that brightened up my day:

Crushing – Sophie Burrows Shows Chops and Charm in Her Tale of a Lovelorn Londoner

Twisted Romance #1 (Image Comics)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 09:52:00 +0000

As promised, here we are again. I've written a review of Twisted Romance #1, by Alex de Campi et al, featuring some very enjoyable work from Katie Skelly.

Twisted Romance #1 – Alex de Campi and Her Gang Go Deep into the Foul Rag-and-Bone Shop of the Heart

My Favorite Thing is Monsters (Fantagraphics)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 17:34:00 +0000

Well, here we are again.

After a while out (helping my wife to care for her dad, and then everything that came after that), I'm trying to regain a bit of traction on the world of comics.

My old mucker Andy Oliver kindly left the door open for me to return to Broken Frontier, so that's what I'm doing (albeit in the tentative manner of a footballer coming back after a career-threatening two-footed horror lunge).

Anyway, my first piece back was an appreciation of Emil Ferris's all-conquering graphic novel, My Favorite Thing is Monsters. Maybe an incredibly dense 400-pager wasn't the easiest thing I could have chosen for my rehabilitation, but arragh sure musha ná bac leis.

More to come, hopefully....

Horrible Folk/Got Your Nose (Strip for Me)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 17:52:00 +0000

If you're not already familiar with his work, Douglas Noble is one of the most enduring and prolific talents on the UK comics scene.

His highly distinctive comics are generally published under the umbrella of his 'Strip for Me' series: An occasional anthology of geographic terror and unfriendly romance.

The second half of last year saw the publication in rapid succession of numbers 48 and 49 in the series, entitled Horrible Folk and Got Your Nose respectively. And while the two comics are very different in their approach, they both highlight his singular creative voice.

Rather than laying out an A-to-B narrative, Noble often works like a musician playing variations on a theme to build up a cumulative effect.

Like the layered 'hauntological' music put out perhaps most notably by Ghost Box, he brings together diverse elements to create an atmosphere of unease, using a repeated layout or pattern as the basis for varied riffs.

Horrible Folk demonstrates his 'sampling' technique. Each page has the 'backing track' of an identical panel layout. Over that, he layers drawings based on locations from a 1970s collection of British folklore and background characters from a collection of classic British horror films, from Witchfinder General to Death Line, before adding his own poetic fragments of supernatural speculation or recollection.

Over the 28 pages he captures the feverish, hallucinatory feel of folk horror - the strangeness that hums in even the most familiar of landscapes.

A sense of the secrets of antiquity leaking into the present carries over into Got Your Nose, the playful title of which belies an altogether more somber thesis.

Formally this is a more simple work than Horrible Folk, as the damaged heads of decapitated statues relate the story behind their disfigurement. The book starts off with a light-hearted, almost comical air: one statue was toppled by an amorous drunk trying to give her a kiss and cuddle, while another was dropped by burglars, whose meticulous planning failed to make allowance for the attentions of an over-affectionate cat.

However, a darker and more uncomfortable pattern soon starts to emerge, with the damage inflicted on the statues increasingly revealed as another strand of bleak male rage and violence against women. And the book ends with the chilling suggestion that murderous misogyny will continue to be handed down the generations.

With a confident sense of design and a density that repays a number of readings, Douglas Noble's body of work is an ongoing treat that often disturbs but rarely - if ever - disappoints.

The print versions of Horrible Folk and Got Your Nose are available here for £3 each (+P&P), while the digital versions are available via either Gumroad (PDFs, US$2) or ComiXology. Check out some of Douglas's other work while you're at it.

Fourteen euros in Primark (Lidless Comics)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 20:45:00 +0000

Dear old things!

Family stuff means I can't put my shoulder fully back to the wheel, but I keep coming across bits of work that are far too good not to give at least a bit of a signal boost.

One of those is Fourteen euros in Primark, published last year by Dublin-based artist Sarah Bowie under her own Lidless Comics imprint.

Across 40 pages, it lays out an impressionistic slideshow of a claustrophobic relationship, related in an intimate style by a young Dublin woman.

Bowie uses the comic form skilfully to take us into the narrator's subjective experience, blending the conversational narration with tightly cropped and focused vignettes. With jumps in time and layout on each page-turn, every spread acts as a kind of stanza, highlighting an episode or an aspect of the relationship.

Although we never get a clear look at either of the principals, the telling details we're presented with bring them vividly to life, along with their working-class environment and the nature of their relationship. Our attention is drawn to the woman's cheap engagement ring, indicating her lack of investment in the relationship; the matching tracksuits they wear as they eat their tea in front of the telly; the oppressive uniformity of the wall of soup cans in the supermarket; and the parka coat that gives the book its title, highlighting the unacknowledged depth of the fault line between the couple.

Bowie's creative choices are on the money throughout, from her keenly observed imagery and body language to the glacial monochrome palette. This is a comic of considerable insight and artistry.

(Sadly the print edition has sold out - although I picked one up in Orbital Comics in London last week - but you can still get a PDF for €3 via Gumroad.)

Red Red Rock and Other Stories (Breakdown Press)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 11:03:00 +0000

I've just noticed that I forgot to post a link to my final review for Broken Frontier, published in June:

Red Red Rock and Other Stories, a new collection of Hayashi Seiichi’s alternative manga from Breakdown Press, is a demanding but rewarding read.

Family commitments mean that I've had to step down from BF, but I'm hoping to return to writing-about-comics some time in the future. In the meantime, I'll continue to chunter sporadically about comics and ting on the Twitter.

Pip pip!

Carpet Sweeper Tales (Drawn & Quarterly)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 19 May 2016 11:34:00 +0000

Mashing up 'fumetti' photo-novels with text from vintage magazines, Julie Doucet has performed an act of artistic alchemy on unpromising source material to produce a highly enjoyable and thought-provoking volume.

(Review at Broken Frontier)

Scab County (Floating World Comics)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 19 May 2016 11:31:00 +0000

Scab County, a grim little vignette of a short cut gone wrong, is an accessible introduction to the work of DIY culture hero Carlos Gonzalez.

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Megg & Mogg in Amsterdam (Fantagraphics Books)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 19 May 2016 11:28:00 +0000

The second volume of Megg, Mogg and Owl strips by Simon Hanselmann (Megahex) is a strangely affecting flat-share sitcom that has a sharp edge of melancholy never far beneath the surface.

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Sun Bakery (Press Gang)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 19 May 2016 11:26:00 +0000

The three stories in Sun Bakery, Corey Lewis’s anthology, sacrifice plot-heavy narrative for sparkling graphic energy.

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Dept H #1 (Dark Horse Comics)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 19 May 2016 11:23:00 +0000

In Dept H, his eagerly awaited follow-up to Mind MGMT, Matt Kindt leads the reader into what promises to be a meticulously designed mystery, with the addition of lush watercolours by his artist wife Sharlene Kindt giving the work another dimension.

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Modigliani (Salammbo Press_

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 19 May 2016 11:20:00 +0000

Modigliani (Salammbo Press): Laurent Seksik and Fabrice Le Hénanff Create Bleak Beauty from the Painter’s Final Years

(Review at Broken Frontier)

5,000 km Per Second (Fantagraphics Books)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 11:35:00 +0000

5,000 km Per Second, Manuele Fior’s delicate Angoulême-winning graphic novel, is a beautifully executed look at what time does to our hopes and our relationships.

(Review on Broken Frontier)

Irmina (SelfMadeHero)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 14:07:00 +0000

Irmina, Barbara Yelin’s award-winning graphic novel, is a paradoxically beautiful and unsettling piece of work that avoids all the obvious choices to ponder how an independently minded young woman can become complicit with a murderous regime.

(Review at Broken Frontier)

The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Pantheon Books)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 17:14:00 +0000

Sonny Liew’s presentation of the life and work of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, an overlooked (fictional) Singaporean cartoonist, is a stunning amalgamation of history, politics, character and art.

(Review at Broken Frontier)

Goldtiger (Rebellion/2000AD)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 10:58:00 +0000

A chance encounter at the Malta Comic Con led artist Jimmy Broxton to the lost newspaper adventure strip Goldtiger – a classic document of 1960s comics. But that was only the start of the story…

(Review at Broken Frontier)

Patience (Fantagraphics Books)

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Murphy) — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 14:54:00 +0000

One of the most eagerly awaited books of 2016, Daniel Clowes’ Patience is a velvet glove of a time-travel thriller cast in the iron of exquisitely depicted human turmoil.