Samphire and Hardiman - The Game

Samphire and Hardiman are a pair of characters that turn up in an issue of Rapid Fire, where they get trapped in the comic at the end. For My friend Bob's very arty, double sided comic we did a cut-out-and-keep board game featuring their attempt to escape the comic - into the readers' themselves. It was designed as being unplayable - a bit of jokey meta-horror, but we did actually manage to play a game of it once. It's the only game I've ever designed, and it's also a bit of postmodern art as well as a commentary on genre narratives. I did the words and Bob did all the lovely pictures, and I'm very proud of it. Feel free to print it off and have a go at playing - click on the pictures to get the full size versions.

As a special bonus, here's my working copy of the game board, showing how good I am at computer art.

Marvel: Strange Tales vols. 1 & 2

Despite being supposedly something of a comic fan I've actually read very few actual Marvel comics, and I haven't ever consistently read a monthly title. I think that in reality this is because I'm not really a comic fan, I just happen to think that comics are as valid as any other narrative format so I don't instantly discount them. Second to this, I'm mainly involved in the small press side of things so a lot of what I read comes through that. Finally, when it comes to superheroes I tend to find the comics too soapy to bother with - I'm more interested in the films and cartoons and when I do read collections it's predominantly of DC characters.

Not being a fan, however, doesn't mean that I don't know how comics work, or the themes and characters and tropes that run through them. I have read enough comics to appreciate the heavy-duty deconstruction in works such as Grant Morrison's Animal Man and Doom Patrol runs, Paul Grist's Jack Staff or the monolithic Watchmen quite as well as the fact that they are good stories well told, which utilise the unique aspects of the form. And at this point I often find myself more interested in books which play around with the characters rather than ones which play them straight; I don't have a big enough emotional investment in the characters to make the time spent following yet another Spider-Man reboot a worthwhile endeavor.

What this ends up meaning is that when I do read superhero comics nowadays they tend to be of the indie variety; but the problem is that most indie superheroes are just re-skinned versions of already well-known characters, or fairly bad attempts at parody. There are occasional gems, but most of the most interesting work in indie comics is going on outside of superhero comics. But it doesn't mean that people don't still want to have a go at those characters - they're icons, and for so many people they were right there in the first comics that they read. (For a full disclosure, I ought to add that I, as part of Underfire Comics, co-wrote a giant, meta-textual 10-issue superhero graphic novel that was also about a comic company going into administration and the creators destroying their creations that in the end was never drawn, although an offshoot is in the works here.)

Which brings us to Marvel's Strange Tales, where, with remarkable nonchalance, the company most famous for stiffing character's creators for their IP, allows indie comics free reign. It is, as with most anthologies, a little hit and miss, but it is worth the misses for the hits. More than anything it highlights how much better, and more interesting, the art is in the indie scene. Other than that, there's not much clever I can say - there are too many people coming from too many angles for any sort of easy generalisations or pat thematic comments, it's just some good comics fun.

Belated Small Press Expo Round Up

Five months down the road and I've finally read all the small press books I picked up at Bristol Small Press Expo in May. I'm not going to be able to make it up to Thought Bubble this year, yet again, as I've got an exam two days after, but as a lead up to it I thought I'd go through the gems in my Bristol haul - if you are heading up there then here are some people to look out for. (I'm not sure how many of them will be exhibiting, but keep an eye out anyway.)


They all do properly small small press, or as close as - which means self-funded, self-published and as such direct from their brain to your eyes with only their own ideas of what's appropriate or what will sell having any say, not anyone else's. As much as I love what some of the indie publishers are doing out there, and think that it's absolutely essential that we have them, there was a while when it seemed like they were going to completely squeeze the self publishers out of the market. While that has still happened to a certain extent, as has a move towards doing webcomics instead of printing, I can't say how glad I am that the small press is still soldiering on.

Spandex

Spandex is one of the most brutal superhero comics I've ever read. Without the luxury, or some might say straighjacket, of a fortnightly or monthly release there's no gentle sense of things staying roughly the same from issue to issue. It's pretty bracing to read at first, as you have to come to terms with big changes very swiftly, but if you keep up then it ends up being very rewarding. It is, very clearly, someone who loves superhero comics making them live up to the rules and repercussions that they set - and really ought to follow - themselves.

Kate Brown

I got Fish and Chocolate from Kate Brown purely on the strength of the artwork and production values - both were at a really high standard- but I really enjoyed the stories too. It's kind of the opposite end of the spectrum to Spandex, because the stories are very loose and, while things happen in them, nothing is spelled out or necessarily resolved - leaving you to think about the implications that follow. Kate seems to be heading into proper indie publishing now which is really nice to see.

Ronin Dogs

Ronin Dogs is just absolutely great fun - violent space layabouts having adventures whilst on the run from shady government forces. Pure escapism, but really cleanly drawn and with a good sense of how to put together action pages - which is good because it's pretty much action non-stop. It manages to maintain an energy, dynamism and freshness all the way through. Also, one of the main characters is a skeleton. Just because.

7 String

7 String is a comic with a master plan and I really hope Nich manages to finish it, although last I heard he was getting paid work from Titan - clearly great but also clearly going to take priority. He deserves it though, with a lovely cartoony style with thick lines and a very clearly defined pallette of blues and purples he mixes a nostalgia for 80s Satuday mornings with an innovative approach to design and layout. If you can get hold of it do check out the stand-alone book Gossamer Blue.

Hitsville UK

This one's a bit of a cheat, as Dan and Jon are good friends of mine, but dammit they've made one of the best comics I've read all year - from any publisher. Dan has previous, with Frequent Flyers being one of my all-time favourite comics ever. Hitsville is in glorious full colour, and is about music and what it means to like music, and what sort of power music has to shape our lives and identities. Just read it.

And finally, although I won't be there some of my comics will be. Head to the Hitsville table to find the Best of Underfire Comics (click on the cover to read a preview), which I edited, and which I appear in as well. You may even find a copy of Endangered Weapon B (at the bottom of the picture above) which has a game I wrote in it, as well as some awesome stories about robots.

Orc Stain

Orcs, orcs, orcs. I write a lot about orcs - so much so that you might think I was obsessed. Well, I am I think. I just can't get over this strange, somewhat Utopian belief that if we (fantasy readers/writers/fans) as a community can just work this one out, can just rehabilitate our treatment of orcs, then maybe the world will be a better place. Sometimes I think it shouldn't matter, I shouldn't worry, and then I discover that people have been writing games where the Zulu people are all orcs and then acting surprised when people call them racist (protip: if you write a setting in which Europeans are presented as predominantly human and non-Europeans are presented as non-human, then no matter how bad-ass you make those non-humans you are still equating being European with being human-standard, i.e. normal, and being non-European as being abnormal, problematic and, well, not really human). That's when I realise that this particularly tedious and unhelpful, and metaphorically barren, fantasy trope of mapping fantasy races directly to real-world groups of people isn't going to go away.

But, I'm not here to talk about Victoriana and what might be right or wrong about it - I haven't read or played it and so I can't really say whether their handling is sound or leaves much to be desired (all I was really saying above is that they shouldn't have been surprised that people called them out on it). I'm here to talk about Orc Stain and why it is good and why you should read it.

One of the best things about Orc Stain, which isn't immediately apparent when you pick it up (there is talk of there being other fantasy races, all running scared of the orcs, but you never really meet them) is that the Orcs are basically the whole of the world. The story is set inside orc society, so immediately they get to be themselves, rather than some othered horde. And yes, it's true that life as an orc is nasty, brutish and often short, and all they like to do is fight, but that's ok; we see this from the point of view of an orc striving for meaning to his life, not as an outside observer judging the non-human scum.

Secondly, the orcs aren't an analogue of any one human culture. This is really important. They are also not a lazy, predefined sub-Tolkien/Games Workshop rip-off, so they don't just channel the failings of those particular tropes either. Instead, Stokoe has clearly taken bits of things that he likes, and bits of things that look good and mixed them all together with his own ideas to create an orc that is clearly still the fantasy race, but that also represents itself more than anything else (well, there is something else it represents, but I'll get onto that in a minute). So there's elements of Japanese gangster and samurai films, of Mitteleurope hero sagas, of Meso-America and Hollywood and 2000AD and it's all wrapped up in an absolutely beautiful visual style, a language all of the creator's own with the self assurance that comes from knowing that you get to control everything in the comic.

What all of this does is to allow the metaphorical power of the orcs to be used to explore something other than 'these violent foreigners aren't really people, you know - not like we are at least.' Orc Stain is, amongst other things, about gender. It is a very masculine study of what it is to be a man, or a certain kind of man at least, within a society that views being a man in a very narrow way. Orcs are all (as far as we can tell) male, and obsessed with genitalia. Women, for the most part and within orc society, are represented by passive Love Nymphs (yeah - it's not going to be passing the Bechdel test anytime soon). The only female character we meet who is actually a character (with agency!) is a sexy action chick and all the orcs are scared shitless of her, precisely because she has agency. Which... works, in the context. I'm not going to say it's perfect, but it is a critical study of masculinity, rather than a simple piece of gung-ho chauvinism and for that I loved reading it. Plus it has some beautiful violence in it.