A new Drake Ullingsworth comic “The Case of the Concrete Collapse”, just published and available for sale via Lulu.com. This is an extensive reworking of a 5-pager from 1984, with the story told from the viewpoint of different characters using full-page illustrations, prose text, comics, and a pseudo TV documentary. 40pp, bw interior, full colour glossy covers, £4.93.
Eibonvale Books are publishing Magic Mirror, a sumptuous collection of my comic strips as a 350pp paperback (with a hardback edition to follow). It’s all printed A4 size, with a new painted full-colour cover. I made the selection myself, drew a new frontispiece page, and added some extensive notes at the back of the book, about the first time I’ve written at any length about my past work.
Half of the book is devoted to Windy Wilberforce and includes The Saga Of The Scroll presented as I would wish, in its entirety and at a size that displays the drawings to their advantage. Plus there’s most of Windy’s early adventures, collected together for the first time. The other half of the book is divided into themed sections (humour, fables, poetry, Astorial stories, dark tales…) and collects some of my favourite stories, including a few written by Denny Derbyshire.
The cover is supposed to represent aspects of various characters’ faces, all refracted through the prism of art. Of course I suppose it would only make sense to a reader familiar with all my characters. Watch this space for further details as the book becomes available.
Just created a new shop page today. From here you can buy the Windy Wilberforce and Primitif paperbacks. I also have a few unsold Fast Fiction and Staring Eye items. All prices include postage to anywhere in the world.
Help! Shark was a small press comics imprint based in Chester in the North-West of England. I suppose the main man behind the operation was Chris Flewitt, a talented and self-effacing artist who approached me to submit a strip of his own to Fast Fiction magazine in early 1985. He was also the designer behind the Help!Shark comics catalogue, which featured stories, strips, graphics and poems by his friends Steven Martin and Gavin Butler. As I recall, they had access to cheap offset litho printing at a local community centre, and the economics of the situation allowed them to experiment with paper stocks and colours.
Chris’s cover designs were always striking, elegant and inventive. They are simply not like conventional comic book covers in any way. As can be seen Chris made good use of typography, bold geometric shapes, enlargements and unusual printing methods. Some of his covers involved elaborate die-cuts and folded elements, sadly not really visible in this gallery. Every book in the series had a serial number, and it’s clear Chris was more influenced by record cover design of the period (especially Peter Saville’s work for Factory Records) than by Marvel Comics or Fantagraphics.
Around 1986 Cally Stapleton joined the Help!Shark gang, making all her images out of potato prints, craft stickers, and hand-stencilled lettering. She turned out to be an alias for Chris Flewitt. Others spotted this far more quickly than I did, yet when challenged Chris was readily able to produce a photograph of the fictional Cally and provide further detail about her life story.
Our thanks go to David A. Simpson, a long standing reader and collector of UK small press comics, who kindly sent us scans of the covers of Fast Fiction #1 from his own copy. He also provided the catalogue description of the contents.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen this artwork, an early example of Phil Elliott‘s quirky humour and distinctive use of Letratone. David also sent us scans of the Fast Fiction Catlog 1989, which isn’t a comic but a listing of the Fast Fiction back-stock I produced in an attempt to sell various unsold items. This missing piece of the jigsaw now completes the Fast Fiction cover gallery. Well, almost. Neither of us can identify the artist who drew the back cover of FF #1.
Most of my A5 small press comics collection is now completed and covers are available to view in four galleries. A special gallery devoted to the works released under the Help!Shark imprint is in preparation.
Today, started the gallery of A4 size comics; titles starting A-B are now represented. For American readers, maybe I should explain that A4 size is slightly wider than 8″ and slightly less tall than 12″; it’s about the closest we got to a magazine size format in the UK. Small press publishers found they could feed A3 paper into a photocopier and produce backed copies, if they were lucky.
I will also mention here that I added some photographs to the website earlier this month. We think they were taken around 1987 or 1988 and show the Fast Fiction / Escape artists meeting up, going to the comic mart at Westminster City Hall, convening at a conference, or just hanging out.
We were absolutely delighted to hear from Russell Christian last month. “Check out my World In Disarray“, he suggests. “Mostly old comics, but stuff you’ve never seen. Putting them up on the blog might even encourage me to start drawing comics again (when I’m not spitting fire at the Big Bankers, or teaching little kids how to have fun with Art at the Bruxist Manifesto Institute. Ah yes! The ever elusive Art, who always evades. You get to the bedsit and he’s gone and the trail is cold.”
Russell’s oblique mind continues to find art hidden in the most unlikely places. “Your site wouldn’t let me comment,” he told me. “To the question: Are comics made of paper or glass? I answered: They are see-through and yet strangely opaque (when they are good that is). But my answer, apparently, was wrong.”
As I said in reply: that is because computers are not poets. Even though some say ‘code is poetry’.
To our great delight we were recently contacted by Tim Budden who got in touch by email from Taiwan. In the 1980s, this Welsh artist contributed his extraordinary badger stories to issues of The Wimp, which he co-published with Mike Hemsley and other art school friends, sometimes working under the alias of T.N. Neddub. He also contributed to Escape and Fast Fiction. Using the figure of Brock The Badger (which could be read as an alter-ego), Budden created strange rural visions of a life beneath the ground, where the activities of the badger community seemed to connect to long-forgotten and semi-magical burial rites. They often got the better of the human beings who wanted to kill them and stuff their bodies. The stories, and the unusual way they were told, have puzzled me to this day, but what’s also striking is Tim’s powerful black and white artwork, and the strong patterns he could make from arrangements of the badgers’ pelts. Since his distinctive work never appeared on the covers of The Wimp, I have reproduced (with his permission) some examples for Budden’s page on this website. Now let’s hear from the man himself and what he’s doing now:
“I spent many years being a teacher and a non-artist. I realised that that was due to some kind of cultural dislocation. I couldn’t find a connection between my art and Taiwanese culture, then I discovered paper cutting and since then have produced numerous cuts using a kind of silk paper. It has a graphic and sculptural quality I really like plus it is all about story telling. So for the last 4 years I’ve slowly rediscovered the artist in me and have a website, which is about to be updated big time and a blog.”
“The badgers are there still, but nobody is sure what a badger is here, which makes Brock’s role more difficult. Even North Americans are confused. The North American badger is a real mangy looking nasty beast – more like a rat weasel than the gentlemanly badger I grew up with in the UK. I have a new character called Daniel, a cherubic curious asexual child. In Taoist philosophy the innocent child is seen as embodying the best way to experience the world – curiosity unencumbered by indoctrination – a pure openness coupled with playfulness. Since following this path of working I’ve been working up to producing a longer cartoon strip called Lost in Forest Wild. It is a work in progress and bits of it can be seen on my blog.”
“As to the history of The Wimp, I remember the high point was when the National Library of Wales asked for copies and gave us an ISBN number. For me the whole Wimp FF Escape thing is still important. Last year I even got a fan letter from a guy in Kent who told me how moved he was by the badger tales, so much so that he became a wildlife officer in Kent. Every time he picks up dead badger roadkill he always pauses for a moment and thinks of Badger Tales and Brock!”
Added a second gallery of A5 comics, covering titles E-L. This includes six issues of Fred Herring by the very wonderful Russell Christian. Russell is more of a painter and a poet than he ever was a comics artist, and as I recall UK fandom generally found his stream-of-consciousness works hard to understand. Russell moved to New York at some stage in the 1980s; I think this is Russell Christian’s current blog.
Also in this gallery is an item by Merv Grist, an English artist who sent his eccentric comics and booklets from Trowbridge in Wiltshire. I wish I could reproduce the whole of The Melvin Moments Story here; it’s a fine pastiche, illustrating the life of an imaginary rock singer from the early 1960s. All the ‘clippings’ from old magazines are lovingly created and hand-drawn by Grist, and packed with spot-on parodies of adverts and movies from the era. More covers from Merv in future galleries. His recent paintings are for sale here.
I decided to include two issues of Bagnall’s Hairy Hi-Fi even though (technically) it’s a music zine and not a small press comic. In same vein, the Harlan Ellison interview by Reynolds and Harvey is all prose, but it’s a part of the Mauretania publishing output.
Many thanks to Russell Willis, the editor of a fanzine called Infinity in 1984-85, who sent us a link to his Facebook galleries of UK small press cover art from his personal collections. “Feel free to use whichever ones you feel fit,” he adds encouragingly. I’ve added a few of his images to the first gallery and I’m sure his collection will be extremely useful for filling gaps in future additions. I regret I’m currently unable to credit the artists, or ascertain dates, for some of these comics.
