That Was The Year That Was Part Four: Comics of the Year!

By Regie Rigby

Get your party poppers, fireworks and champagne corks ready my Foolish Friends – it’s New Year’s Eve and the party starts here! Last week I managed to get myself into “moan mode”, so in this final instalment of 2003 I promise it’ll be upbeat all the way. So, charge your glasses and let’s get on with it!

It has been a hell of a year in comics, with a whole lot of good stuff to get excited about. OK, so last week I pointed out that two of the year’s biggest “events”, Neil Gaiman’s 1602 and the Batman story Hush were very much Emperors in seriously inadequate new clothes, and so they were. But there were some things this year that really did live up to expectations.

For a start, Francine got married. I never thought she’d do it, and it’s painfully obvious that she still loves Katchoo, but she did it anyway. I tell you, I bloody hate Terry Moore sometimes. For the better part of a decade I’ve been drawn into the tangled love triangle that is Francine, Katchoo and David. I’ve come to care about them, I’ve gotten involved in their lives and the world of Strangers in Paradise that Moore has created for them and what does that get me?

I’ll tell you.

Every few issues that bastard rips my still beating heart out of my chest and kicks it around the room for a bit. Then he stamps on it, dips it in salt and feeds it to his cat.

The wedding thing, and the baby thing were almost the last straw – how much grief am I expected to stand? You’re either reading S.I.P., in which case as a fellow sufferer you know exactly what I mean, or you’re not, in which case you’re wondering what the hell I’m blathering about. If the former, are you enjoying the revelations about David’s past as much as I am? If the latter, why are you denying yourself the Strangers experience?

I’ll be sticking with Francine, and Katchoo and David in 2004. I know they’ll make me crazy, but what can you do? I just hope they all have a happier and more successful year than they did in 2003…

Having a rather happier time in 2003 was the small press. Some notable successes (Thrud the Barbarian, for example) have already been mentioned, but there was so much more good stuff this year I barely know where to start.

Actually I do, because there is a small press effort I’ve been meaning to tell you about for weeks but just haven’t gotten around to talking about. Starscape came to my attention because it was promising to reprint a classic British strip called The Leopard of Lime Street, which ran in the long defunct U.K. weekly Buster waaaaaay back in the early eighties.

When the strip launched I was nine years old, and I remember leaping around the branches of the trees in the playground of my primary school “being” Billy Farmer, the Leopard of Lime Street. I’d never actually read it of course, my mother’s prohibition of all flavours of comic in the house still stood then (although fro some reason I was allowed The Beano which somehow didn’t count…) but I saw odd episodes when my friends brought their comics to school. So, Starscape promised to resolve one of the long standing “issues” from my childhood. So, y’know, there was no pressure on the first issue to perform of anything…

Dated December 2003, but actually launched slightly early to coincide with the Comics Winterfest in London back in November, my copy arrived in the post and I confess that I was a little disappointed when it dropped out of the envelope and I saw the cover.

It really is dire. Because I knew publishers Superherostore Comics had paid out money for the reprint rights to Leopard I’d been expecting pretty high productions values, but this looked more like a cut rate fanzine than the slick publication I’d anticipated. Still we solider on and in fact the rest of the comic was pretty damn good. We have The Deterrent, a rather nice take on the superhero as defender of the people I thought. There were some shades of early Moore Marvelman going on I thought, which can only be a good thing, and some rather tasty art. Then a rather nice (and equally well drawn) actioner called Damage Dogs. I’m looking forward to the second installment of both of these, and my recommendations don’t come higher than that.

Then there was the main attraction - The Leopard of Lime Street, which was every bit as good as I’d hoped. Overall, I was hugely impressed with the content, just a little disappointed in the wrapping. You really don’t want to be judging this book by it’s cover - Starscape is well worth seeking out. Available from the Website in printed form for two quid, or in downloadable electronic format for a measly £1.25GB I suggest you make this your New Year treat.

Oddly, there was a rather feline flavour to my other UK Weekly highlight of 2003. Back when I was jumping around in trees at my primary school playing at being the Leopard of Lime street I would, occasionally switch to being Billy the Cat. Just as The Leopard had been a cat like schoolboy having adventures in the pages of the mostly humour oriented Buster, Billy the Cat was a cat like schoolboy who originally had adventures in the pages of the mostly humour oriented Beano.

In the very early eighties, Beano publishers D.C. Thompson launched an adventure title called Buddy, and of course, Billy the Cat was there. In fact, now I think about it I wonder if Leopard… was a sort of response…

Anyway, this year, Billy the Cat went home. Seeing print for the first time in two decades or more he was unleashed in a six part adventure in The Beano, the first time that publication has run a non humour strip in, well, in as long as I can remember. It was great! I bought the Beano for the first time in a quarter of a centuary. Fantastic stuff, and a real unexpected highlight. UK readers who missed it might want to pick up a copy of The Beano Annual probably available at a discount right about now, because Billy has a new adventure in there. Fingers are now crossed for further revivals, maybe even a full blown D.C. Thompson adventure title. You never know…

Hitting my nostalgia buttons just as hard in 2003 was The Rainbow Orchid. Not a revival this time, but a beautifully executed adventure strip set in the twenties, The Rainbow Orchid was a wonderful invocation of everything that was good about the Tin Tin books that were used to try to teach me French back in school. Better still, this was in English! It’s all here – big ugly bad guys, plucky young hero in the shape of Julius Chancer (not a reporter but an archaeologist in the Indiana Jones vein, but British and so tidier) beautiful villainess, rich tycoons and a search for something legendary.

Issue Two isn’t out yet, but I’m hoping 2004 will bring me (and you, go out and buy this from the website if you didn’t already) more in the adventures of Julius Chance.

Which brings me to that Comic of the Year business I promised you. There’s no trophy, and because I couldn’t actually pick one, there are three categories. The Rainbow Orchid is hereby named as the FoolBritannia Small Press / Self Published Comic of the Year 2003. There was stiff competition, but nothing moved me the way this did. Take a bow Garen Ewing, and everybody else at King Rat Press.

Moving on, the winner in the second category is likely to get me in trouble. The FoolBritannia Online Comic of the Year 2003 is Gun Street Girl.

This is going to get me in trouble because Gun Street Girl’s scribe, one Barb Lien-Cooper is not only a long standing SBC staffer, she is married to another long standing SBC staffer (our own Park Cooper) and they were responsible for getting me on board here at SBC. Add to that that the fact that Barb and Park have been friends of mine for over a decade (and yes, it really is that long guys…) and the charge of “favouritism” cannot be far away.

The thing is though, Gun Street Girl is, without question, the best online comic I’ve read this year. What was I supposed to do? Disqualify it just because it was written by a friend? If it’s any consolation to the doubters, Ryan Howe, the artist responsible for the gritty but vibrant look of this comic is utterly unknown to me.

Gun Street Girl is a gritty, action packed story about violence and the supernatural set against the backdrop of a very real urban world. I’ve been saying for ages that Barb should be writing Hellblazer, and Gun Street Girl goes a long way to proving that I think.

This isn’t Hellblazer, of course. There’s a similarity of attitude, but Gun Street Girl is in no way some kind of “Hellblazer for chicks”. While explaining it to somebody recently I described Gun Street Girl as being to Hellblazer what Laura Croft was to Indiana Jones. More than just a different take on the same idea, it’s a whole new idea with some familiar echoes.

And it’s fabulous. Don’t just read it because I say so, read it because it’s brilliant. I know these people are friends of mine, but I still wouldn’t say it was good if it wasn’t. If it sucked I just wouldn’t be mentioning it at all.

The final category is for “Best Comic by a Major Publisher”. There was tough competition here, although I had thought that it would be a two horse race between Catwoman from DC and Alias from Marvel. Indeed, until a couple of months ago that’s exactly what it was. But then the comic which is the undisputed champion dropped through my letterbox.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the FoolBritannia Major Publisher Comic of the Year 2003 is the unutterably beautiful NYX.

It was the cover to issue one that got me. There’s something in that art – some quality that just leaps out at me. Something about the quality of the colour and line that I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough artwise to explain, but I can certainly appreciate when I see it. There’s a delicacy there that takes what should be an uncomfortable image (stoned girls are not attractive, and the girl on the cover here is clearly seven shades of off her face) and makes it impossible to turn away.

Better still, since the interior art is by the same guy, you get that effect on every single page. As regular readers will know by now, I don’t buy comics for the art. But I have to say, even if the writing on this was shite I’d still be buying NYX. Hell, I’m toying with the idea of buying two copies so I can frame one and put it on my wall!

But the writing here is good too. I’ll be honest, I’ve not followed the scripting career of Joe Q. I have no idea what else he’s done, no idea whether it’s any good or not. The quality of this book makes it likely I’ll be making the effort to find out. Everything is spot on. The dialogue, the plot, the characterization, it’s all just right. In the pasty I’ve been critical of the way some comics have portrayed teenagers. They are, as a group, difficult to write convincingly – so many comics feature teenagers the way their parents wish they were. Not so here.

NYX opens with our fifteen year old heroine taking drugs in a nightclub toilet. Not a single punch is pulled. As a teacher I work with teenagers every day (and It’s not that long since I was one myself…) and I have to tell you, Joe Q has these teenagers spot on. I believe in them.

I’m not going to tell you the story, because I want you to read it. Wait for the trade if you must, but read it. Forty years ago Marvel revitalised superheroes by allowing Lee, Ditko and Kirby to go off in a new direction. The result was The Fantastic Four, The X-Men and Spider-Man. I have held the future of superheroes in my hands my friends, and it’s title is NYX.

Those results in digest form then…

The FoolBritannia Small Press / Self Published Comic of the Year 2003 goes to The Rainbow Orchid by Garen Ewing, published by King Rat Press.

The FoolBritannia Online Comic of the Year 2003 goes to Gun Street Girl by Barb Lien-Cooper and Ryan Howe, published by Graphic Smash.

The FoolBritannia Major Publisher Comic of the Year 2003 goes to NYX by Joe Quesada and Joshua Middleton, published by Marvel Comics.

I commend them to you all.

Now, before I go, some serious and depressing things which cannot go unremarked. As the old year dies, it always seems that people we don’t want to lose slip out with it. 2003 is no different.

Bob Monkhouse, R.I.P.

First we have lost one of Britain’s finest comedians – the king of all things game show Bob Monkhouse. I suspect non-Brits will wonder who I’m talking about, and most Brit readers will be surprised to see him mentioned here. Bob is a household name in the U.K. but not really for anything to do with comics. In fact, he has a lot to do with comics.

Long time readers will have heard his name here before. One of the surreal memories I have of my wedding day (February 2001) was hearing Monkhouse interviewed on the radio about the sale of his friend Dennis Gifford’s comics collection. Gifford, who passed away in the year 2000 had been a UK comics historian and theorist of some note and Monkhouse was lamenting the fact that his collection, possibly one of the largest and most diverse ever assembled by one person, would now be broken up.

I was frankly astonished to discover that he was so passionate about comics, but it turns out he had been a life long enthusiast - in fact, comics were where the young Bob Monkhouse started his career. He had his first comics work published in the UK comic Mickey Mouse Weekly back in 1940. He was just 12 years old, granted it was wartime and adult artists were busy on the front lines or drawing propaganda, but even so this is child prodigy territory. I only have one example of his comics work, sent to me by an internet aquaintence a few years ago, and reproduced below.



A keen sense of humour much in evidence I think you’ll agree. By 18 he was writing for radio and performing his own material. When television came he was right there and in addition to his comedy became the host of just about every game show the UK ever produced. For a while he fell from favour as fashions in comedy changed, but in recent years he regained much of his former “cool cred”, appearing on such British institutions as the comedy panel game “Have I got news for you?” and branching out into straight(ish) acting as a curmudgeonly old performer in the off beat crime drama “Jonathan Creek”. For the record, he was bloody brilliant.

Bob Monkhouse died last weekend at the age of seventy-five. We’ve lost one of the greatest all ‘round entertainers the UK has ever produced.

Hermes Tadeu R.I.P.

Hulk colourist Hermes Tadeu was murdered in Praia Grande, Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 21st. He was just completing his first issue of the series, #70. Tadeu was 25.

I have seen very little of this promising young artist’s work, but he was 25 – there must have been so much more to come and this is such a waste.

Don Lawrence R.I.P.

Don Lawrence was never as big a name as he should have been. Known for his work on Trigun Empire in the UK and Storm in Europe, he was however a massive influence on a whole generation of artists. He died last Monday of pneumonia. We have lost a giant, and we will not see his like again.


But now the New Year beckons, and 2004 is as I write mere hours away. Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, may your New Year be peaceful, prosperous and above all, happy. See you next year folks!