Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Boys, Strangers, and Zombies with Accents.

By Regie Rigby

Hello again! I know I’m supposed to be getting away from the whole reviews thing, but there are a couple of books out there now that I want to talk about, and if I leave it any longer their moment may well have passed.

I’m already a little late to be celebrating the triumphant return of The Boys, for instance, cast out of the DC stable for being, well, let’s just say “a little bit too much for DC” and leave it at that. But our trench coated friends are back picking up exactly where they left off and I can honestly tell you that when I picked up #6 a few weeks ago I laughed like a hyena on nitrous. I know it’s puerile and in poor taste, but what can I say? It’s genius bad taste. It’s very good to see it back.

But, as one door opens another door closes, and so it’s also an appropriate moment for me to bid farewell to the masterpiece that was Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. The very final issue has been looming for a while, and I picked it up about a fortnight ago. It sat unread on my desk until yesterday because I couldn’t quite bring myself to say goodbye to Francine and Katchoo.

I was a reluctant convert to Strangers in Paradise, having been lent the first collected edition by my long suffering best mate I left it on a shelf for a year – only finally reading it on the train ride down to meet her at UKCAC ’97 where Terry Moore would be in attendance. (The full story of that is related here – and you’ll be pleased to know that the problems I had with issue #43, as discussed in that column have all been resolved in the last few issues.)

It’s been a ride and a half as the most frustrating love triangle* the world of comics has ever seen has played itself out. There has been laughter and heartbreak, smiles and tears, action and tranquillity. Some beautiful art, and some deep, realistic characters overlaying a complex thriller of a plot. SiP had it all – organised crime, political corruption, millionaire rock stars, plane crashes, prostitution, deception, and good old fashioned cluelessness. Some of it was difficult to read – some of it was even far fetched, but all of it was good reading.

And now it’s over. Moore handled the final moments of the story beautifully. I don’t know how he did it, but all the plot threads were neatly tied up, all the questions answered and the surviving characters (because we lost a few along the way) are free to get on with their lives – a fact underlined by the rather firm way Francine closed the door on the readers in the final panel. It’s time to let them live the lives we’ve been following since 1993 without the eyes of tens of thousands of readers prying through the fourth wall. I’m going to miss them, but full marks to Moore for ending the story when he felt it was over, rather than keeping it going when there was nothing left to say.

Books like Strangers in Paradise come around all too rarely. If you missed it, get yourself out and buy the collections. You won’t regret it. If like me you’ve been along for the ride for a long time, please drop by the message board and let me know – what the hell are we going to read now?!

Actually – I do have a few ideas, although not for ongoing series at the moment. I don’t think there’s been a new ongoing that’s caught my attention since Scalped hit the stands, and that was a while ago now. There are some interesting looking one off books out there though, including the latest offering from Accent UK.

This is another book I picked up at Bristol but have only just gotten around to reading properly. Accent has developed a tradition of theming its more or less annual anthologies, and following hard on the heels of books full of stories about Pirates, Phobias, the labours of Hercules and War comes a book absolutely bursting at the seams with Zombies. The books are already available in selected comics stores, and will be solicited in Previews in the not too distant future. (I’ll give you the nod when…)

Like all anthologies Zombies is a bit of a mixed bag – which sounds like faint praise, but it isn’t. The fact is that while some of the offerings behind the blood red Steve Bissett cover are better than others, all of them are good. Positively the best kind of mixed bag possible!

From my point of view this chunky square bound black and white tome carries the added bonus of some top notch David Hitchcock artwork – something that we’ve been deprived of since he completed his Eagle Award Winning Springheeled Jack. Here he provides the visual element of ”An Mothley A An Ny-Marow”, or “Curse of the Undead”. Words are provided by Leah Moore and John Reppion, and the story, concerning a cursed mine and an evil Lord of the Manor is a little bit disjointed. Hitchcock’s art more than compensates for this though, and it’s really good to see his intricate pencils on a comics page again – by far the visual highlight of the book.

The story telling highlight for me was One, a quietly understated tale written by Darren Ellis supported by some sensitive plain line work from artist Roland Bird. Like all the best shorts there’s a lot more going on in this touching vignette of family life than at first meets the eye, but the twist at the end (not the one I was expecting) tells the reader everything they need to know about the world the family lives in. No explosions, no big speeches, no grand statements, heck, not even any actual Zombies. Just some subtle storytelling that does a lot more than you’d think.

It’s also an interesting example of how a writer can make use of the context in which their story will be read. We know that this is a zombie story of some kind, so Ellis had no need to give us panels of exposition explaining how the undead have left their graves and begun to roam the streets. There are merely a couple of oblique references to “them”. That’s the beauty of this kind of anthology format, and it’s a trick that several of the other excellent stories in Zombies also use to good effect.

There are far too many individual tales in this book to go into them all in any detail – suffice to say that I enjoyed them all for different reasons. Highlights included Andrew Cheverton and Tim Keable’s The Scent of Coriander - at once a clever visualization of the lengths humans would go to just to continue with everyday life in a city infested by flesh eating undead, and a poignant love story. It was good to see Eagle Award winning writer Andy Winter teaming up with artist Natalie Sandells again on the satirical Pop Zombies. David Baillie’s six panel one page Zombie Interviews are also worthy of mention because every single one of them made me giggle.

There are nearly forty stories here, some fun, some scary, some moving, all good. It’s a fine addition to the Accent library of anthologies, and I commend it to you.

See you next time (notice how I’ve stopped promising exactly when that’ll be?) when hopefully I’ll be a little more punctual.






*which had actually become some kind of weird romantic hexagon by the time all the plot threads finally came together…