Albion

Alan Moore, Leah Moore, John Reppion & Shane Oakley
Albion (2006)
Knowing very little about this one, I'll take a wild stab in the dark and guess that Alan Moore pushed Albion in the general direction of his daughter and her husband in hope that association with the author of Watchmen would grease the wheels and get bums on seats, so to speak; roughly like when Master P started releasing CDs of his own kids rapping about life in the school playground. Albion is plotted by Alan Moore it says here, although the plot is such that it probably could have been scribbled down on the back of a beer mat.

Anyway, for what it may be worth, Albion digs up a host of forgotten cartoon characters from the pages of English comics published during the decades before POW! the comic grew up. I was a devoted Topper reader when most of these characters were in print, and only achieved a dim awareness of the Steel Claw and some of the others when a kid at school gave me a stack of back issues of Victor, Valiant, Hotspur, and the like. Even at the age of seven I found it a bit weird how so many comics remained grimly obsessed with the second world war, so I never strayed far from the pages of Topper, with the occasional Beano or Beezer or Whizzer & Chips thrown in for the sake of variety. Therefore I've never even heard of most of the characters recycled here, which somewhat deflates at least some of the point which I take to be the spotting of references, as it was with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Leah's dad. More suspiciously, both being born in 1978, I'm not convinced either Leah Moore or John Reppion could have much investment in the likes of Robot Archie, Faceache, and Captain Hurricane, and consequently the whole endeavour feels like a bit of an exercise; and not a particularly successful one being as aside from a few chuckles, it's difficult to work out who is who and what the hell is supposed to be happening. Possibly ironically, Grant Morrison did a much better job when populating his Zenith strip in 2000AD with old D.C. Thompson characters. Here, the overly stylised art and the apparent reluctance to commit to any text which might actually explain what the fuck is going on results in something which reads like it doesn't quite know what it's doing and is thus trying far too hard in the hope that no-one will notice.

'Dad! Dad?'

'What is it, pet?'

'Tell us how yuz draws them canny good comic strips, like. I'm de'en one wi' our kid y'knaa.'

'It's a piece of piss, luv. Just don't tell no fucka what's gannin' on and it'll aal look reet classy, like one of them furrun philums.'

At worst, it steers perilously close to being a dark reinvention of the kind everyone and his milkman was churning out back in the nineties.

Why the fucking fuck would you try pass off half crack and half rat poison to a crazy-ass motherfucker like Franklin? You're such a blockhead, Charlie Brown!

Okay, maybe it's not that bad. It's actually fairly readable all things considered, but it could have been a lot better - or at least up to the standard of the original Janus Stark and House of Dolmann strips reproduced in the appendix of this collected edition, both hokey as hell, but at least confident and executed with an understanding of their readership; and Faceache most definitely deserved better.

The Case of the Invisible College

Andrew May The Case of the Invisible College (2010)
Andrew May wrote some fairly interesting online material on the subject of A.E. van Vogt's fix-up novels, and following a link on the site in question, I arrived at a page dedicated to the man's own self-published fiction. The Case of the Invisible College with its faux Edward Young Penguin cover and the promise of tales about chimps writing Shakespeare, books bound in human skin and so on, proved difficult to resist.

Being self-published through Lulu, some would perceive a certain stigma here, an unfortunate association derived from a reasonable percentage of self-published novels being a steaming pile of shite spewn forth without recourse to grammar, editing or peer review - not even some kindly friend pulling Dave aside to point out that actually, a cross between Star Trek and Babylon 5 really isn't going to set anyone's world ablaze, or that people who don't actually read books probably have no business writing them. Whilst sadly legitimate as criticism in certain cases, it might also be pointed out that mainstream publishing has similarly produced its fair share of poop over the years, so self-publishing of itself need not necessarily be equated with low quality. Furthermore, I myself grew up with fanzines and all manner of enthusiastically photocopied horrors bound with uneven staples, all self-published, and it never occurred to me that anyone might consider such publications inferior by virtue of having been produced solely by some bloke with green hair. Sometimes it requires genuine inspiration to print up something that will be of interest to almost no-one, at least not until two decades have passed and surviving copies are turning up on eBay at fifty quid a throw. My point, I suppose, is that for all its faults, print-on-demand remains a field with great potential, and if you're expecting genuine surprises, it's a good place to look.

The Case of the Invisible College didn't quite set my world ablaze, but it's brief and a lot of fun. The customary criticisms made of the self-published are rendered irrelevant by the clear and lively prose of someone who has evidently spent time learning how to write and how to put a story together. These are, I suppose, what you might call Fortean detective tales - more Conan Doyle than Grant Morrison - weirdly ripping yarns perhaps. My only real criticism would be that most of them are pretty short, and might have benefited from expansion rather than having all that exposition crammed into such a reduced word count; and that this reduced word count also results in a slightly modular feel with information revealed in natty little blocks very much in the vein of those robot tales by Isaac Asimov that I could never quite get along with; and this is compounded by the somewhat repetitive style of denouement whereby our narrator tidily announces that the case of the such and such - invariably also the title of the story - is SOLVED in upper case, this doubling up as acronym for the Secret Oxford League of Volunteer Extracurricular Detectives of which he is a member.

That said, I gather these stories are reprinted from some periodical and such criticisms may be at least as pointless as bemoaning how those Peanuts cartoons always seem to run to just three or four panels. The seven tales collected here as The Case of the Invisible College are probably a little more hard-boiled than my standard fare, but they're well written with good humour and the odd flash of genuine inspiration.

Our Friends from Frolix-8

Philip K. Dick Our Friends from Frolix-8 (1969)
To briefly forestall commentary in order to make an entirely unoriginal observation, memory is a funny thing. I discovered Philip K. Dick - I'm a little embarrassed to admit - thanks to Throbbing Gristle. As an early eighties teenager following noisy atonal music with all the fervour of the newly converted, there was at least one year during which I took all my cultural cues from Genesis P. Orridge and his chums. With hindsight, I'm actually sort of surprised I don't have a huge collection of Abba records purchased on the grounds of Chris Carter being a fan, but to get to the point, Re/Search magazine interviewed the madcap industrial funsters, and that interview was embellished with a quote from A Scanner Darkly presumably on the grounds that it mentioned heroin and was therefore edgy and dangerous. I hadn't before heard of Philip K. Dick, but if it was good enough for Genesis P. Orridge, then it was good enough for me, and so that Christmas Santa came down our chimney with The Golden Man, The Simulacra, and The Man Who Japed.

Soon after, I noticed assorted Philip K. Dick novels on sale in WH Smiths, mostly the Granada editions with those lovely Jim Burns covers and titles in Roslyn font; and I bought every last one - although due to immense flakiness it actually took decades for me to get around to reading all of them. Still I can vividly remember the excitement of bringing a new one back from the shops in Leamington Spa when I went to stay with my grandparents in Kenilworth; except my grandfather died in 1979, and my grandmother moved into a tiny flat soon after, and my edition of Our Friends from Frolix-8 - definitely one of those purchased in Leamington Spa and drooled over in Kenilworth - wasn't published until 1984, so it's an impossible memory, something that could not have happened; which as you will probably appreciate is all very Dickian, or Dickesque, or whatever peculiar custom adjective you prefer.

Sadly, this anecdote is probably more interesting than Our Friends from Frolix-8 which does all the right things in the right order, but somehow fails to add up to much. The details are fine - notably the theme of aid coming to a divided Earth from the depths of space, a variation on The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and precursor to VALIS - but all I can now remember are endless droning conversations with little of consequence by way of punctuation, and what may as well have been a very short story dragged out to novel length. It feels oddly like Dr. Futurity or one of those other early Philip K. Dick novels that didn't quite survive the process of being written. That said, given that this author was pretty much incapable of dull prose, it's readable, and certainly not without value, but somehow just doesn't do what it should.

Finally and briefly going back to that other matter, I recall buying the Coronet Books edition of Dick's The Turning Wheel and Other Stories which stood out for its bizarre use of Comic Sans or some similar font on the cover, the Happy Shopper of the typeface world; and I definitely recall buying shitloads of those Coronet Charlie Brown paperbacks - titled in the same font - when I went to stay with my grandparents back in the late seventies, so clearly I've somehow conflated the two. The lesson of which is, I suppose, never to underestimate the power of Comic Sans.