THAT COMIC SMELL: Science Fiction

The latest episode is out now. 

The first of two featuring science fiction comics.

Have a listen here.

MEGA CITY BOOK CLUB: Captain Condor

Eamonn Clarke hosts Mega City Book Club podcast which regularly discusses 2000ad and other British comics.

On this episode, we discuss Captain Condor by Frank S.Pepper and Brian Lewis; a terrific science fiction story from Lion comic.

Have a listen here.

THAT COMIC SMELL #100: Issue 100s

The latest episode is out now. A discussion on issue 100s!

Have a listen here.

From the website:

"[Episode 100 of That Comic Smell is dedicated to Ian Kennedy and Steven Walsh. Thank you, for everything]

First of all we want to give a MASSIVE thank you to Richter FM (AKA, Paddy Johnston of Good Comics) for composing this amazing track/new theme music. Please follow the links above and give the Hibiscus EP and the rest of Richter FMs music a listen and follow. Also a HUGE thank you to Chartsmasher (AKA, Joan Edam) for allowing us to use their track for so long.We hope you enjoy the new intro and outro. It’s nice to change things up a little but we’re not changing too much around here. It’s comics, comics, comics, as usual. Seeing as it’s episode 100 as well then why not issue #100s to celebrate.

There is also a little focus on how some titles seem to get published/publishers, a particular comic that Mike managed to get his hands on (De Cape et de Crocs by Alain Ayroles & Jean-Luc Masbou) and a certain ‘Krazy’ collection of Sunday strips that could double as a paving slab.
This and all the usual comics chat on…
That Comic Smell!
To find out where to find, listen, contact us and buy our comics then please visit
thatcomicsmell.com
Don’t forget to Like, Share, Subscribe, Rate & Review.
Most importantly… Read/Make More Comics!
Thanks again for listening and supporting the podcast
Krazy Kat Sundays (George Herriman)
The Thing and Ben Grimm #100 (John Byrne, Ron Wilson)
2000AD and Starlord #100 (IPC)
Archie Madhouse #100 (Dexter Taylor, Stan Goldberg)
Star Wars Weekly #100 (Chris Claremont, Mike Vosburg, Steve Leialoha, John Costanza, Bob Sharen)
The Defenders #100 (J.M. DeMatteis, Don Perlin, Joe Sinnott, Sal Trapani, Jack Abel, Al Milgrom, Frank Giacoia)
Starblazer #100 (Various, Jesus Redondo)
Justice League of America #100 (Len Wien, Dick Dylan)
The Nutty #100 (DC Thomson)
Master of Kung Fu #100 (Doug Moench, Gene Day, Mike Zeck)
Dark Horse Presents #100 1&6 (Various Dark horse Contributors)
Iron Man #100 (Jim Starlin, George Tuska)
Showcase #100 (Joe Orlando, Joe Staton, Dick Giordano, Paul Levitz, Paul Kupperberg, Joe Staton)
The Incredible Hulk: Planet Hulk (Greg Pak, Carlo Pagulayan, Gary Frank, José Ladrönn)
The Comics Journal #100
X-Men #100 (Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum)
Doctor Who Magazine #100
Conan #100 (Roy Thomas, Jon Buscema, Ernie Chan)
Eagle is 100 (Alan Grant, Ian Kennedy, John Wagner, John Burns, Alan Hebden, Jose Ortiz, Vanyo, Rex Archer, Manuel Carmona, Scott Goodall, Heinzl, Dave Follows, John Cooper, Fred Baker)
Marvel Age Special 100th Issue (Fred Hembeck, Tom DeFalco & various Marvel alumni)
Amazing Spider-Man #100 (Stan Lee, Gill Kane)
Marvel Team Up #100: Fantastic Four & Spider-Man (Frank Miller, Chris Claremont)
Cerebus #100 (Dave Sim)
The Simpsons #100 (Bill Morrison, Jason Ho, Nathan Kane)
The Beano 100 (DC Thomson)
The Walking Dead #100 (Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard)
Penned Guin Strip 100 (Alan Henderson) tinyurl.com/5n9xrkj6
Awesome Comics Podcast: tinyurl.com/2p9hm8ad
iFanboy: ifanboy.com/
Comic Books Are Burning In Hell: comicsinhell.libsyn.com/
Word Balloon with John Siuntres: wordballoon.blogspot.com/
Cartoonist Kayfabe: tinyurl.com/h7a4b84j
Noah Van Sciver Youtube Channel: tinyurl.com/yc4z9m8c
11 O'Clock Comics: 11oclockcomics.com/
Never Iron Anything: neverironanything.com/
Fatman Beyond: tinyurl.com/2p8prkfx
The Lakes Podcast: tinyurl.com/mrxd6u4y
Inkstuds: www.inkstuds.org/
The Comics Alternative: tinyurl.com/wj3t99zm
The Earth-2 Podcast: tinyurl.com/ymtj77zy"

THAT COMIC SMELL 26: British Comics

The new episode of That Comic Smell is now online.

Have a listen at iTunes, Soundcloud and YouTube.

From the web:
"AY UP! It's only ruddy bloody British Comics... INIT?!
Hello folks and welcome to another episode of the only podcast to come to you through the far reaches of time and space. That Comic Smell!
This time the folks here are talking Britannia. We delve into the world of British comics and talk about some of our very own shining examples of what we have collected from this side of the pond over the years. You'll notice that one of us truly out shines the rest.
Then it's on to the usual recommendations, what we've been reading and so much more.
So get that kettle boiled, grab a fresh packet of hob nobs and join us at the table for some comics time!!
Here are some of the titles we discuss:
Beano
Dandy
Commando
Toxic
Shuggie & Duggie
Victor
Warlord
Battle
2000AD
Eagle
Whizzer & Chips
Roy of the Rovers
Oink!
Tiger & Scorcher
Nutty
Hotspur
Champ
Topper
Hoot
Valiant
Viz
Scream (All Various Artists, writers and publishers although surprisingly a lot of DC Thomson)
D.R. & Quinch (Alan Moore, Alan Davis)
Classwar (Rob Williams, Trevor Hairsine, Travel Foreman)
Batman & Judge Dredd (Various 2000AD but mainly, Alan Grant, John Wagner, Simona Bisley, Todd Klein)
Some Comics by Stephen Collins (Stephen Collins)
The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil (Stephen Collins)
Various Small Press Comics (Treehouse, Sol, The Works of Our Very own David Robertson, Video Games For Good, Left, Hot Schitt, Awesome Comics, Wired up Wrong, The Devil in Disguise, DTH RTL, FLD, Space Captain, The Never Ever After and much much more)
Jack Falls
Terror from the Other Side (Joan Edam {Jon Adam})
Saltire (John Ferguson)
Suffragette (Mary M Talbot, Kate Charlesworth, Bryan Talbot)
Shako (John Wagner, Pat Mills, Ramon Sola)
Young Death (John Wagner, Peter Doherty)
Sláine (Pat Mills, Angela Kincaid)
Robo-Hunter (John Wagner, Ian Gibson)
Grandville (Bryan Talbot)
Spleenal (Nigel Auchterlounie)
Little Star (Andi Watson)
Alec - How to be an Artist (Eddie Campbell)
Monster Fun"

THE PERILS OF MIXING COMICS AS A HOBBY, AND COMICS AS A BUSINESS

This is the second in a series of guest posts I'm going to run over the summer. I asked folk to write on any topic at any length - as long as it's comics related. Next up is David Wright...

Until about 5 years ago, comic books were a huge part of my "escapism" along with tabletop games.  I say until about 5 years ago as that's around the time that I stopped reading comics.  At least reading them for fun.
Some background to help shape this.
I was introduced to comic books around the age of 6 or 7 through a variety of sources.

My eldest brother Leslie had started getting 2000AD from its release.  My brother Allan was reading the Beano (which I would borrow) and shortly after that started to get my own comic - The Nutty, which was the home to Bananaman.

Alongside all of this though the 3 Wright Brothers had been introduced to American Comics thanks to a collection previously owned by my Uncle John.  Now these were reprints of Marvel titles under the banners of Fantastic and Terrific and so began my connection with Superhero comics specifically.

Throughout the 80s my relationship with comic books grew through picking up "holiday packs" of DC Comics from newstands when on family holidays.  These would be where I'd learn of such superhero teams as the Legion Of Superheroes and All Star Squadron and also get to know about titles like Camelot 3000.  The DC titles stretched my imagination yet further and this overlapped into my tabletop gaming hobby when Mayfair Games released their DC Heroes RPG in 1985.  I think I got the Marvel RPG around the same time but it's less clear.

Anyway it was in the late to mid 80s that my comic book reading really started to kick off and a lot of it was Marvel based.  I think some of that was due to the Secret Wars storyline that was being printed in magazine sized format comics in the UK.  I had all of them and from there I was able to determine the books that I wanted to read.

Amazing Spider-man was one such title and in particular the emergence of Todd McFarlane's re-imagined webhead in 1988 was for me so refreshing that for the first time I was bagging and boarding my books.  Up til then comics had been consumable, now they were to be treasured and to a certain extent to be collected.  I had been buying Amazing Spider-man prior to McFarlane's first appearance on the title but it was only once 298, 299 and then 300 hit the shelves that I really got into the title.

This development of my interest in comics continued to grow through those hey days of the Pre-Image crew working on flagship Marvel titles with Jim Lee slowly becoming my favourite artist of that time and indeed he remains one of my favourite artists to this day.

My comic book interest during the 90s peaked along with my spending on comics.  Lots of Image (Spawn, WildCATS and others) and Dark Horse (specifically Star Wars) titles with the ever present Peter David on Incredible Hulk and a variety of other titles.  Nothing really stands out from that time other than the Incredible Hulk run that Peter did.  The early 90s also saw the creation of the Glasgow Comic Art Convention (GlasCAC) which enabled my younger self to meet some seriously famous comic book creators including Peter David, Charles Vess, Bryan Talbot and Alan Grant.

It was also during the 90s though and into the early 2000s that my interest started to wane.  This was at the same time as my gaming hobby hitting a complete lull and "real life" really taking a grip on me.  Whilst this only lasted a couple of years (thankfully) I'd say that my comic book interest really only started to restart again through the discovery of 3 books -

Mage: The Hero Defined.  Matt Wagner is perhaps my favourite writer/artist and his creation of Kevin Matchstick is fabulous.  I've consistently recommended this title to people over the years and I will continue to do so.

Queen & Country - Greg Rucka's spy series of comics which blew my mind.  It was the first non-superhero comic that when I read it I knew I had to have all of it.

Atomic Robo - Easily my favourite comic for light hearted ACTION SCIENCE fun.

There have been other comics such as Pride Of Bagdhad and a number of the iconic Batman books but these 3 titles (none of which are DC / Marvel in case you hadn't noticed) are without question the comics that have helped define my interest.

So why then do I find myself uninterested in reading comic books?

As with my tabletop gaming hobby, my interest in comic books suffered when my games & comic shop "Kingdom Of Adventure" closed down just over 2 years ago.  It wasn't just as a result of the closing of the shop though, it was more (I think) in part down to my associating the comic books to sales and seeing them pretty much as products and commodities that if I didn't sell I didn't make money.

I'd extend that a little by saying that the ordering process and reliability of the deliveries was painful.  Diamond Comics have a monopoly over the distribution of comic books.  This has its benefits as it's just 1 distributor to deal with whereas in the tabletop gaming space I had 5 regular distributors and another 5 or so secondary ones.

It also however means that you end up not getting stuff if your order levels are low.  Essentially a pecking order exists.  With hindsight I should have looked at other options for distribution, e.g some of the bigger retailers offer a "sub" service where you buy through them which actually makes it more likely you get what you order but also takes a slice out of your margin.

The struggle I have now is finding something that actually interests me.  I'm expecting that through my purchase of the Atomic Robo RPG that I might be drawn back to reading the Atomic Robo comics and who knows maybe some other stuff too.  I've tried to read stuff over the past 2 years but they end up being half read or in some cases sit on the shelf untouched...

I'm sorry to say that right now I'm not interested in reading comics.  It's something that gnaws away at my core in many respects but that is offset by my recent recapture of my tabletop gaming hobby (chronicled on a2ndchapter.blogspot.co.uk if you're interested).  Who knows, maybe I just need to find the right book?

DUMP #2 GUEST ARTIST INTERVIEW: DAMON HERD

Another in a series of mini-interviews with the guest artists who are featured in Dump #2. Next up is Damon Herd…

DR: Have you always been interested in comics?

DH: Yes, I've always been interested in comics. i remember buying the NUTTY when I was a kid and had a drawing published in issue 26. 

I had a few Marvel UK Hulk comics as I loved the TV show (also Wonder Woman but never got any comics). I never really read much superhero stuff after that, I do remember spending days in the local library reading Asterix and Tintin books. My Dad had fabric pens for drawing on T-shirts and I made my own Asterix T-shirt!

I recently remembered reading TOPS magazine, which was a rival to Look-in and had TV and pop music strips. I was a big fan of Adam Ant and they ran a bio strip about him as well as fantasy adventures, that was probably my first experience of autobio type comics.
As a teenager I read 2000AD and then Deadline and started getting into American indie comics when I discovered Peter Bagge's Neat Stuff and Daniel Clowes Lloyd Llewellyn. Then Love & Rockets and Dennis Eichorn's Real Stuff. Autobio became my big thing especially Eddie Camppbell's Alec, David B's Epileptic, and Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte. Most recently I've been impressed by the work of Geneviève Castrée and Ulli Lust.

I did a short strip for Graphixia last year about my life in comics (

http://www.graphixia.cssgn.org/2013/01/22/100-standing-in-relation-to-comics-a-special-100th-post/ )

DR: What had been your experience in making comics yourself before your contribution to Dump?

DH: I drew the occasional comic as a kid. I remember making a Danger Mouse one as a kid with a pal and I used to copy the characters in Asterix. If I drew a superhero he would have the physique of a muscly legionnaire.

The Weetabix skinheads were an influence too. I didn't draw much in my teens which I regret but slowly picked it up again in my 20s with a very occasional one pager.

I didn't really get going again until my 30s when I went to art school. I studied Book Arts and they were very happy for me to make comics as my projects. I started to do my own minis, such as You're So Vain which looked at scalp replacement surgery. On my illustration MA I produced my autobio comic The Adventures of Ticking Boy.

 

Twitter and tumblr are both good ways to discover and connect with other cartoonists, and for the last 2 years I have taken part in 30 Days of Comics. Each day in November you have to create a short strip. I've produced a minicomic of my results each year.

The creating of strips has been sidelined slightly by my current PhD studies but I have produced some autobio strips as part of my research.

DR: What other artistic pursuits do you follow? I've seen you implement guitar playing into your comics talks.

DH: Ha, yeah, I did play an electric guitar soundtrack to a strip at a DeeCAP performance evening. DeeCAP stands for Dundee Comics/Art/Performance and we host comics readings which can be as straightforward or highly performed as the artists like. You've done a few great turns there yourself! Interestingly I started off by just reading prepublished strips but for the performance you mentioned I created the strip knowing I wanted some sort of musical accompaniment. The strip doesn't really work without the music. We are planning the next DeeCAP in April as part of Dundee Comics Expo. I am not an accomplished musician by any means but I like to have a go and I know a few chords.

I am also a practising fine artist and have been part of several exhibitions across Scotland. I work across several media including murals, video, installations and print making, I'm especially partial to screenprinting. Much of my work is influenced by comics though, either by including comics language such as panels and balloons, or by actually being comics such as my piece on Sandford Fleming, the inventor of standard time, which was a 4 panel comic strip in which each panel was 1m x 1m.

DR: How did you find the process of drawing "Why I Vote"?

DH: I enjoyed it. It was a pleasant change to work from someone else's script - difficult to do if most of your work is autobio! And it was an an insight into another person's way of working. If it's not cheating to do this, you can see my more detailed thoughts on collaborating with you in my post at Graphixia

http://www.graphixia.cssgn.org/2014/01/28/152-a-collaborative-dump/

One thing I didn't mention there though was the trying out of a new working method for me. Usually I pencil the page on Bristol board then ink it and then, once dry, I rub out the pencils. I recently got a lightbox and so this time I did the pencils on paper and used the lightbox to then trace the inks on board. No pencils to rub out on the finished art!

Can we expect to see more comics from you in the future?

Good question! I've put together my strips from 30 Days of Comics in November and should be printing that shortly. It will also be featured in Graphixia's 30 Days... epublication which should hopefully be available soon.

I've done a few strips for my studies which I will collect at some point but not until I have finished my PhD! It would be good to have another issue of Ticking Boy out by the end of the year but I might get lost in finishing my PhD, we'll see.


Have a look at www.damonherd.com for more information.

DUMP #2 GUEST ARTIST INTERVIEW: STEPHEN BOYD

Beginning today is a series of mini-interviews with the guest  artists who are featured in Dump #2. First up is Stephen Boyd…

DR: Have you always been interested in comics?

SB: Yes.....and no. I grew up with Oor Wullie, The Broons (in Scotland it's kind of mandatory to read these as a kid and it's ok not to grow out of them), The Beano all those DC Thomson staples. Then I discovered Starblazer comics and would pick them up if the cover grabbed me, which was often because I love sci-fi.

I used to occasionally pick up The Eagle and I bought 2000AD religiously. In my teens I really enjoyed stuff like Crisis, Strip and Toxic (while they lasted). I read The Sandman, Alan Moore and Akira as a student and then I got bored of comics. I'd look at what was made available to me in deepest darkest Dundee, but it all seemed a bit silly. Except for Maus, which blew me away, but as far as I was aware that was a one of a kind blip, so my interest in comics dried up for a few years. And then someone introduced me to Jaques Tardi's 'It was the war of the trenches' when it was released by Fantagraphics and that opened up a whole new world of comics that I'd been missing for all these years. I’ve been pretty much catching up since.

DR: You’re welcome. What had been your experience in making comics yourself before your contribution to Dump?

SB: It's actually been quite limited. I drew comics when I was a kid, silly little stick figures acting out jokes, but what 6-10 year old didn't? This carried on into my teens, mostly Viz knock offs and 2000AD inspired nonsense. I'd always liked drawing and did art at higher level but found the teachers at my school downright unhelpful, particularly if you wanted to follow a more graphic or comic bookish path. I left school with 2 highers, English and Art and always said I was only ever qualified to write and draw my own comics yet never got round to doing it. I still kept a hand in at the drawing, just as a hobby, while I pursued other interests, but the nearest I got to anything comics related was trying to learn to draw in the manga style. And that was it till my mid 30s. The relationship I was in at the time broke up and I found myself with a lot of spare time on my hands so I drew to stop my brain thinking. That drawing became the beginnings of a few comics that I never got round to finishing but had potential if I possessed anything amounting to an attention span. Of course, you and I worked together in the real world at this point and you saw much of the work I was doing, and did best at encouraging me to continue working on it. I intend to finish them off someday in the future or maybe start something else but I'm so busy just now with my nurse training. I still draw and my style has taken on a quicker, more sketch like immediacy, partly because I need to work in a hurry because life's so damned busy, partly so I can finish a piece before my attention span drifts off again and partly because I'm unashamedly trying to draw like Eddie Campbell.

DR: How’s the music going?

SB: Slowly, but well. I'm slowly putting another EP together but who knows when it'll be ready. Again its finding the time to record at the moment. I get a lot of false starts the way I make music. I write as I record so I never have that much of a notion of a finished piece at the beginning. I prefer it that way, much more exciting and organic. I like the chance to experiment while creating and it's hard to do that with too many pre-conceived ideas before starting. The more you prepare beforehand the less honest it gets I feel. You might have found that with your story 'Everything' I'm guessing. 

 

Anyhoo, I'm a big fan of the ethos of Sister Corita Kent, a nun who taught art and made posters in LA during the 1940s and all the way through to the 60s. She wrote these 10 rules for her schools art department to promote creativity  and includes gems such as 'Rule 4 - Consider everything as an experiment' and 'Rule 6 - Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make'. I like that idea. Sure it may result in creating something self-indulgent, but to a degree the very act of creating and putting it out there for others to see or hear is self-indulgent and I have no problem with that. My only problem just now is not following Rule 7 enough ‘The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things’.

DR: I suggest your next recording session should be done live with a bass player and drummer.

SB: I’m game for that. It’s one of the things you miss not being in an actual ‘band’, that spontaneity of jamming, the one time, never to be repeated performance. I listen to a band like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and think one person couldn’t possibly create that, music like that can only be made by a collective of musicians with a long enough runway but then you hear Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells knowing that it’s all the work of one bloke with a lot of time and dedication spent on his craft. There’s more than one way to do these things and I’d like to try them all out and see the end product of each of the different processes, for better or worse. As the good sister said, ‘Nothing is a mistake’.

DR: OK, let’s record our next jam then.

Unlike the other stories in Dump where I gave the artists a script, kind of, more exactly a page layout with dialogue, doodles and stage directions, I wrote Dream of Being You on top of your existing page of art. How was it seeing the finished page? Imagine I’m not me and answer truthfully.

SB: It would be an understatement to say that I was really pleased with it. It was the first time I'd ever seen anything of mine in print and I showed it to everyone I knew saying how I was technically a published comic book artist. Process wise, it was an odd way of doing the strip but I'd definitely do it again. I remember getting the e-mail to draw a page and thinking I'd love to but I just don't have the time. I had a collection of single page efforts and offered you your pick of those. Originally it was going to go in unchanged but then you asked if you could rewrite over it Marvel style (which I reckon you had planned to do all along) which I had no problem with. My story was OK but nothing special and certainly not something I was emotionally invested in. I much prefer what you did with it.

DR: I guess I have to answer your gentle accusation. When I took your page I was originally going to run it as it was. As I got closer to publication though, it did start to niggle at me that I had written everything in the comic except your page. It felt like your story was an oddity in there. It occurred to me that I could write on it, if you were OK with it. So no, I hadn’t planned it all along. 

Anyway, just to confirm: Can we expect to see more comics from you in the future?

SB: Sorry about the cheeky wee quip, I have absolutely no doubt in your intentions and to be fair I would have felt the same niggle for exactly the same reasons. I get very like that with music hence my short lifespan in most of the bands I've been a part of. And as I said, your story was far better.

Now, to answer your question. I'd like to think there would be more comics out there with my grubby paw prints on them in some way in the future but who knows. I did consider starting a blog that was just single strips or instalments of stories, like you did with Berserkotron, and perhaps that will still come to something, perhaps not. What I can say is that there will definitely be another E.P. release by The quietest page before any future comics related work.

You can have a listen to Stephen’s music at http://thequietestpage.bandcamp.com/ and https://soundcloud.com/itsred

THE GREATEST JUDGE DREDD COMIC OF ALL TIME

There’s a second Judge Dredd movie out just now, and this may have piqued the curiosity of some to read a Judge Dredd comic. In order to aid those wondering which one to read, I am here to write about the best Judge Dredd comic ever made.

Fungus written by Grant Grover – the pen name of the Alan Grant/John Wagner team - and drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, my favourite Dredd artist. First a group of “foraging tramps” is infected with an infectous airborne disease in the wastelands outside the city. One of the group, Grubby, makes it back to civilisation, where he is apprehended by Judge Dredd.

Single figure colouring by ten year old me. The second part of the story sees Med-Judge Kildare willingly act as a guinea pig, exposing himself to the spores voluntarily. Dredd does some detective work to find the source of the disease:

In the third part, the Judges scour the streets looking for infected individuals, and the chief judge puts out a message to the populace:

One of the infected is already known to Dredd and they have a showdown.

The ending to the story is low key, heartbreaking and funny. The entire prog is brilliant, and I don’t think it’s just through nostalgic rose-tinted glasses. What a line-up: Sam Slade: Robo Hunter by Alan Grant/Ian Gibson; Rogue Trooper by Gerry Finley-Day/Colin Wilson; Ace Trucking Co. by Grant Grover/Belardinelli and Mean Arena by A.Ridgway/M.White. Great days to be reading comics as a kid. I’m sure I read somewhere that these comics (#275-277) were the biggest selling 2000ads ever. Didn’t see any fungus guys in the Dredd 3D trailer. Disappointing.

HOW ABOUT THOSE COMICS STAMPS?

(AKA COMICS STAMPEDE 7)

The current set of commemorative stamps from Royal Mail have images from comics. The presentation pack has the ten stamps, a miniature edition of The Dandy, and a card with information on the ten comics featured.

The text is written by Graham Kibble-White and contains sentences such as the following: “The last significant comics launch came in 1977, with the sci-fi themed 2000ad.”

Ignoring many interesting comics that have launched in the past 35 years, I assume he is terming significance as financially successful.

But then what of Viz? You may recall that not only was it a big selling comic – it was actually at one point “Britain’s 5th best selling magazine - and you’ll never buy a bigger pile of shite" as the cover stated. Viz is not included because comics for Kibble-White are kids’ stuff that they used to make. Nostalgia rules here. There was a similar flavour to his book from a few years ago. Loads of good info, but from the limited point of view that comics are all but a dead issue. Something to look back on with fondness. He’s not a writer you look to find out what interesting comics are coming out now.

That's my wee niggle. It's still a very nice set.

COMICS STAMPEDE 6

Oh, look what's coming in March...


Details can be found here.