And it’s great! Really childish, really fun, scattershot crazyness. He’s obviously a bit of a goth*, but there are a lot worse problems of some other creators i admire.
I buy so few comics any more, but with a little time to kill the other day i forced myself into amateur porn shop Comics Showcase on Charing Cross road. I found part 18 of Seth’s Palookaville (well done Seth for getting 18 whole issues out in a DECADE), a 2000AD fanzine with a story written by FT’s own VIC FLUORO, and a b/w title “Bear” that I just liked the look of.
Well this turns out to be the last issue of Bear – so I’ve totally missed this bandwagon, but I very much hope to get hold of the paperback collections. And though Bear is an SLG comic the guy is a brit (now living in North FInchley it seems) which is really obvious from the language, specifically the brand of sweariness, used. There are so many points of contact to make in this comic, not just the language used, but the mania of the characters, the stuff between the panels.
There’s a cuteness shared by Carney&Phoenix’s Sugar Buzz (also SLG) and the PPGs, there’s Sam and Max, even 90s brit-indie-comic-marvel “Tales of Sleaze Castle” (Dave McKinnon, Terry Wiley), going too far back there’s possible something of Frank McDiarmid’s Cheeky strips, and there’s a huge dollop of on-line, even (say it!) LIVEJOURNAL-centric humour. Here’s Jamie’s LJ.
Happily Jamie seems to have got himself a regular gig with the Dandy – which looked a bit “thin” when i bought an issue of it last year (AS A JOKE).
Anyway that is all. Enthusiasm for a new (if late) comic discovery. Something that seems to happen to me at about the rate of 2 a decade. I just don’t go to Gosh any more, for whatever reason, and all other comic shops EVER that i’ve ever found creep me out. Apparently there’s some nice ones in Nottingham.
* and a bit of a rockist (natch) if the comments on his LJ are anythign to go by (see “I hate Sean Paul”)