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.

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.

Serpent in Hell, originally published in 1992 as a 36pp A5 comic, is now available as a digital download. A miserable and embittered fable of alienation and despair. Contains many obsessive images of a wretched, suffering snake and some disconcerting drawings of The Devil. The drawings are aspiring towards the condition of old engravings, and the book attempts to emulate the look of an 18th-century chapbook or pamphlet.

“Cover me up with squares of turf / And I will consort with my brother worm…”

Download Serpent In Hell as a PDF (14.96MB)
Contains some adult content and will probably not be suitable for young readers.

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’.

“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!”

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.

Here’s a brand new Astorial story from July 2009. It features Arthur Fremantle in his younger days. To see him as an older man, read Fremantle and The Faceless One. The pages you see here were shot with a camera from the original art, which is why some straight lines look a bit wobbly.

Fremantle and The Astorial Apes page 01

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