Catalyst was edited by Norman Herrington in Sussex. I’m not sure if it went beyond two issues. The magazine folded out into a large poster, with each panel of the folded page containing one short article; it covered small press and more mainstream comics in its reviews. In #2, I contributed short articles on Joost Swarte and Asterix.

Probably more titles to come; watch this space.

A few examples are linked below, but once you browse the photostream you’ll find more things, including examples of his Mexico paintings.

• Sid Watches Telly
• Beathag 1991
• Beathag 1992
• Giant Skull On Wheels
• Everyman (1990)
• Cartoons (337 images)

My collection starts in October 1982 with #7 of these sheets, which marks the date when I first went to the Westminster Mart. If anyone has copies of #1-6, please get in touch. I’ve scanned everything quite large to allow for maximum legibility, although the text isn’t OCRd (if you read them, you’ll understand why). Later years will be soon added to the resource, so watch this space.

Illustration on this page is © Eddie Campbell 1983/2011.

John Watson (2002)

John Watson was an exceptional artist, and one with a quirky side which he exhibited in an extraordinary series of small publications. Between about 1986 and 1988, John produced at least 25 titles of these small-run pubs, most of them under the general title SPY. Other titles included HUMP, CUCKOO, OVO, FLY, MONSTER, NOSE, MOUTH and HUM. I helped to sell these through the Fast Fiction distribution system which I was operating at the time. John’s little publications were sold as mini-comics, although they weren’t strictly comics at all. Usually xeroxed onto sheets of A4 cream or blue paper, they unfolded to reveal – not a strip cartoon, but a huge sprawling imaginary landscape, peopled with weird semi-human creatures parading around bizarre, twisted cities and crazy ramshackle buildings. Characters spoke in word balloons, but that’s about the only concession to conventional comic strips John made. He never told a story and never had a recurring character.

Everyone bought the SPY series and came back hungry for more. No wonder. These tiny slices of oddness were addictive – I think that nobody (myself included) could quite figure out what was happening in them, and we just kept reading to try and get onto John’s wavelength. Sure, they promised plenty laughs. The characters looked superficially like ‘bigfoot’ cartoons; but a closer look revealed them as ingeniously delineated grotesques, positively reeking of ugliness. His one-liners promised conventional gag-joke hilarity; read them carefully, though, and they turned out to be absurdist utterances, each one operating with a bizarre, self-cancelling logic.

I’m looking again at the SPY comics now after some 12-13 years, and find they are steeped in fairly dark, bleak observations on the human condition. At the time I used the phrase ‘life seen as an energetic pageant of lunacy’. John wasn’t a bitter man. The callous indifference and casual selfishness of his characters is observed, not with a Swiftian despair, but with a complaisant shrug. John was preoccupied with the way human relations didn’t really work. All his characters fail to communicate; instead, they speak in twisted versions of well-known phrases, mostly to themselves (I can’t recall a single dialogue taking place in any SPY). Suicide is the life-option of many of them; usually they do it by leaping from one of Watson’s many bleak tower blocks, to the general indifference of the remaining populace, who either don’t notice, or don’t understand.

John couldn’t escape the physicality, the dirt and filth of human relations; most of his characters stink, and cheerfully discuss their smelliness with each other. If there isn’t any stink, John will find some to dig up; even his buildings proudly displayed their huge sewage pumps, spewing effluent onto the streets. Perhaps he found human behaviour too clinical; we all like to hide our feelings, but John’s SPY would dig them up and make us wallow in them. Maybe he used stink as a metaphor for real emotion. I think this also informed his totally idiosyncratic take on sexual relations. I can’t figure out if John found sex completely absurd, or dangerous and frightening, or all three. He stopped short of drawing it in a vulgar way, but he found other ways to really let fly. Never afraid of huge phallic symbols (or breast substitutes), he allowed his characters to develop enormous growths and protuberances which were little short of nightmarish. The nose was his favourite penis-substitute, but long worm-like necks and tentacles also abounded. These growths acquired a life of their own, literally. Lust In Space depicts a half-human, half dustbin-robot with the ubiquitous Watson condom on his nose, while his sex organ has grown a pair of feet and walks ahead of its owner, boasting ‘My mental capacity is as big as my sexual capacity’. There aren’t many artists short of Hieronymous Bosch who could pull off an image like this.

I always wondered if John was troubled by what he saw as a basic lack of compassion in the world – certainly nobody in SPY world exhibits much in the way of love. Rather, everyone seems motivated by need. Basic human needs – they’ll use each other for sex, but in the end will settle for anything they can get their hands on. ‘Can I have your tin of beans?’ they ask one prospective suicide. The most touching statement he ever made was on a visiting card. ‘Your heart doesn’t work properly until it’s been broken’.

John Watson – the Spy in the House of Lust!

Firstly, it was wonderful to see so many friends and familiar faces from my small press days, artists and publishers who had regularly attended the Westminster comic marts and numerous social occasions of the food-drink variety. Darryl Cunningham, Stephen Poulacheris, Andy Williams, Woodrow Phoenix, Hunt Emerson and Tony Bennett, Ed Hillyer, Bob Lynch, Paul Grist, Martin Skidmore, Martin Hand…Woodrow gave me a welcoming bear hug that practically crushed my ribs. Ed Hillyer told me how the place reminded him of the San Diego comics con – everyone was balding and bearded. Bob Lynch asked me to send him scans of some items in my collection which he might be missing. Martin Skidmore is relaunching FA, a fanzine with a pedigree longer than your right arm. And Darryl is doing very well of course, since there’s currently a tremendous amount of interest in his fine hardback book. He told me the other side of the story to Psychiatric Tales; it seems to represent one of his aborted attempts at following a conventional career path.

Secondly, equally wonderful for me to see the vibrant and vital UK small press scene as it obtains in 2010. Perhaps I’ve been missing out. It’s impressive to me that there is now enough talent in the UK to occupy an entire roomful of tables piled high with smart-looking and colourful publications, many of them boasting high quality production values. Paul Gravett assures me that the content within the pages is equally exciting. I did briefly meet a few creators and publishers who are new to me, mainly thanks to the evening drinks at The Lamb and meal at the nearby pizza place. One comic I bought which impressed me was an astonishing full-colour affair by John Miers. These largely wordless, intricate, and multi-layered strips of his reminded me of Boris Artzybasheff and Virgil Partch, at least in the stylisation of the figures. Apparently large-scale colour prints of some pages were exhibited by Gravett at the Print Gallery event. Later, Miers was kind enough to greet me and I learned how his strong narrative leanings were not exactly encouraged by his tutors on the fine art painting course he had attended. That resonates with me; I did go to art college, and although I didn’t have the exact same experience, I often sensed that story-telling (along with lowbrow entertainments like TV, cinema and comics) was regarded with high-minded contempt and suspicion.

Also: I did an actual drawing for 25 minutes, depicting Windy Wilberforce meeting a large owl, taking my turn at the table in a line with many other talented ink-slingers in a live event which was broadcast to the room on a big screen, thanks to Stephen Poulacheris and his camcorder. Later he used the same device to interview me for five minutes in the slowly-emptying rooms just as the more conventional comic dealers were packing up their crates of Golden Age rarities. Steve’s best question was along the lines of “Primitif or Conan the Barbarian – who will win?” I think my answer was even-handed, and fair to both characters. I was mainly there trying to sell copies of my Magic Mirror book and other old comics, and even if I didn’t make much money, the social buzz is what I will remember from the day.

What a day to leave my camera at home! Lucky Garen Ewing took a couple of pictures…

Nick’s blog also covers many other aspects of books and comics, and is beautifully written and illustrated.

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.