new comics — ConSequential — Haunted Phonograph

Thought Bubble! It's Brit-nerd new year! Or something! Look, it's a big old mess of just all the comics and the comics people, and the fun and the dancing, and probably too much beer, and the podcasting, and the new things, and the cosplay and the shiny, and yeah. It's pretty great.

It's also a cracking time to stumble on new stuff. But we try to go prepared. We're like the boy scouts of spending far too much money on comics, with a throbbing hangover.

Last year, we had a few bits of advice on how to get the best out of comics shows, and this year we've picked out some things we might just consider buying.

So here's a few titles and publishers you should check out at T'Bubz

Improper books are back

Of course they are. We love those folks. Porcelain is the proverbial's peripherals - a crisp, slightly gothic tale of an orphan girl taken in by the Porcelain Maker, a crafter of pristine, eerie automata. Naturally, there are twists and intrigues, as the nature of the porcelain becomes more clear.

They also now publish Mulp, a noir-inflected archaeological rodent mystery.

Together, Mulp and Porcelain were some of our favourite books at the festival last year, and this year Improper are back with the second volume of each. No more intro - just go and buy them, ok?

Shiny new things

We also had a quick flip through the frankly mammoth list of books making their debut at TBF15, and picked ten or so titles that look just totes wizard.

Kingpin Books Portuguese publisher Kingpin was one of our interviews last year, and we loved their anthology Crumbs - their first book in English. This year they've got 4 new English translations, and they look super promising. These include: The Fossils of Beautiful Souls: a twisted 15th century historical; The Waltz: a coastal village folk horror; and Solomon, a splash of urban mysticism with a wonderful sense of light and dark.
I Love This Part The childhood friendship of two young girls, told across imagined landscapes and snaps of pop culture. It has this amazing economy of line, and restrained expressions of painted colour. Wow.
Diner Devotional A twelve page fold-out of linocut sketches of American diners. No, really. What? We like design, and chiaroscuro fifties consumer kitsch is fucking catnip.
Drugs and Wires Cyberpunk, but not shit. Drugs and Wires is all misery and things and people that don't quite work. Now you can pick it up on a special legacy-tech portable data store: gunked-up tree bits.
Frogman Trilogy He's a frog. He's a superhero. He's an absolute idiot. It's three stories about a foul-mouthed frog, making just the worst job of being a hero.
Golden Cannibal Girl Douglas noble does these itchy, allusive webcomics, intense vignettes, and Strip For Me, a series of shorts. This is the latest.
How We Grow Old It's hard to tell if Richard Amos' set of short stories on ageing will be sweet or crushingly sad, but the style is quiet and gorgeous. We'll be surprised if he has to carry many of these home.
Bao and Pom There's a girl and a maybe-anthropomorphic red panda? It's possibly cute? Look, we're new to charming, but this might be it.
Klaxon A trio of deadbeats face off against their evil landlord, and it looks great. Not strictly new, but recent and interesting. Nice use of colour, too.
Shadow Constabulary A nutter with a cricket bat tries to fix Britain by beating the crap out of suburbia. This could be horribly on the nose, or feel like Chubz via Marshal Law, or be just the best loud daft thing. Maybe all three.
The Adventures of Dragon Mouse Something sweet to finish - a mouse who dreams of being a dragon, and tries to solve this problem using ingenuity and household craft materials. It looks just a bit lovely.

Now, the Thought Bubble website isn't exactly the most usable information experience you can have on that thar interwub, so we've like as not missed some fine publications.

But what? What have we missed? WHAT EXCITES YOU?

It's not often we get to showcase something brand new here, so we were delighted when Kristian sent us The Ditch. It's a prison zombie horror vignette, wonderfully dynamic, quite gory, and his first comic.

This 12-page short opens with Sal - not a particularly nice man - stuck in solitary confinement, having just smoked his last cigarette, noise all around, something ominous clamouring to get in.

That's a classic pressure/isolation horror opener, and from here we pull back to find out quite how Sal got there. Spoilers: it's a blend of a) zombies, and b) being just a total dick.

Kristian's a professional animator, so it's not surprising that the comic has a wonderful sense of flow an motion. Which is what you want for a story about the hungry dead biting chunks outta folk.

You can read the whole thing here:

The Ditch - Kristian Carsetnsen, PDF

Or check out more artwork and sketches on his site.

We know Kristian from a combination of early Consequential pub meets, and the Cambridge tech sector being something of a richly linked network. So when he sent the PDF over, Roger asked him a few questions:

The Ditch is an extremely polished first work, and I was quite curious about whether this was something he'd always had as an ambition and been working towards.

It seems comics have indeed always been a passion, and from early on:

I grew up with access to tons of comics. My dad had a near complete collection of Asterix & Obelix and Lucky Luke and as soon as I could get a library card I'd be carrying mountains of random comics home from the local library. Getting my hands on a lot of age inappropriate stuff in the process, (hello Morbus Gravis) It did expose me to a lot of different styles and stories though.

From lugging home his childhood bodyweight in occasionally-racy bande dessinée, it seems comics were nearly a career:

I pretty much wanted to be doing it as a career ever since I can remember, and I even visited an artist collective back in Denmark when I was like 13 or so to find out more about it. Unfortunately what I found out was that, at that point, there were like 3 or 4 people in the entire country that were able to actually live of it. Probably fewer now. So I put that idea aside and focused on animation instead which was another passion of mine.

More specific visual influences for The Ditch are drawn from prison movies - Kristian mentioned The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, as well as a general fascination with work from Mike Mignola, Guy Davis, Max Fiumara and James Harren.

There's a playful note to The Ditch, too, in amidst the gore. A prison work gang beat a guard to death with a shovel, in what's already a slightly coy reversal of zombie tropes, and when the iconic hand pops up from its shallow grave, Sal just stamps it back down:

Later, that same hand rises again, shown against forking lightning, and we just know this doesn't end well. Similarly, the rise of the undead is intercut with little panels of characters chewing chicken legs, and some no less bloody prison violence.

It's a well constructed thing that I reckon richly deserves more eyes on it.

So, you can read the whole story here: The Ditch, PDF