Ed Pinsent - Henrietta (1995)

 

Subtitled The Pirate of Love, I'll admit I picked this up because of the adults only warning on the cover supplemented by a list of transgressive acts depicted within. Whatever I imagined didn't seem like the sort of thing Ed Pinsent would have drawn and so I was naturally curious. Thankfully Henrietta isn't like anything I imagined and the adults only tag seems mainly precautionary, given our living in an age of persons deeply traumatised by exposure to anything they didn't want to see. Rather than following in the lineage of Oh Wicked Wanda!, the book's more potentially contentious elements are probably closer to the spirit of Rabelais and are, in any case, details rather than the driving force of the enterprise.

Just as aspects of quantum mechanics appear to crumble under the weight of their own description, I feel Ed Pinsent's strips work best as read because attempts to describe what he does will usually unwittingly hammer the narrative into a shape which is mostly in the eye of the beholder, so I'll keep this minimal: Henrietta is a tempestuously libidinous redheaded woman who visits a certain bull in his dreams and who additionally spends time as the captain of a pirate ship. At one point she has sex with an octopus, which is conducted with more charm than anything else you're likely to find at the end of such an ill-advised Google search.

Pinsent's art inhabits what may as well be its own cosmology, with tales told therein relating to mainstream equivalents at much the same kind of tangent as did the Residents to the rest of the music industry in the seventies. It isn't weird as such, or at least no more weird than the art of Edwards Ardizzone, Gorey, or Campbell with whom it shares a similarly whispy quality, as though its reality could be carried away on a sharp gust of wind. It could probably be dismissed as streaky marks on paper but for this ephemeral or hallucinatory quality pinned down with surprising gravity by the strength of its own conviction, by its consistency of vision and belief in whatever it happens to be saying; and the effect is even more powerful in full colour, as is Henrietta.

So we have a sort of myth, or something mythic which follows its own logic with an almost classical sensibility informing its prevalently nautical atmosphere. It's funny and often moving without anything reading too much like a performance, and startles with occasional asides which seem like they should break the spell but never do. I felt as though I could hear waves and the sound of someone honking away on an accordion as I read, and was left with a sensation of having learned something touching and profound which probably wouldn't translate into words, hence the pictures; and crucially, I would suggest that this tale couldn't be told in any other way than what you have here, for adaptation would only result in a different animal altogether, which - if you ask me - is the measure of true art.

Thar she blows!

Ed Pinsent & Mark Robinson - Silver Age Superman (1993)

 

Should the name be unfamiliar, Ed Pinsent is probably as close to a living legend as you'll find in the world of small press comics, having done much of it first, better, and for longer than most whilst remaining absolutely faithful to a vision entirely his own, stylistically some way outside the mainstream yet neither esoteric nor indulgent and near impossible to mistake for the work of any other artist. His strips tend to combine art and writing in a single visual train of thought, but Silver Age Superman seemed to demand a different approach, not so much an homage or impersonation of Superman as a form more suited to what Ed had written. Enter Mark Robinson who matched Ed's enthusiasm for the undertaking.

As is probably obvious, Silver Age Superman wasn't published by DC but has succeeded - or at least eluded legal scrutiny - by virtue of a format bearing no similarity to anything official, and through terming itself fan art, almost a love letter - certainly unlike the more acerbic reading one might expect from the small press taking on an icon of the mainstream. It's faithful to Superman with none of the gritty revisionism which has become such a cliché, but does more, straying into the introspective realms of the small press; and the magic is that even in doing something different, it remains true to Superman, albeit a Superman of whom we've had only glimpses.

This Clark Kent is an amiable reporter but never quite one of the gang in terms of humanity despite his best intentions. The recurrence of a puzzling memory sends him back through time to the Great Library of Alexandria, the dissolution of the monasteries, and other lost repositories of knowledge in hope of answering an existential question - whether knowledge can be reconciled with understanding or experience. At least that's how it reads to me. It's a weighty subject, but doesn't feel unduly ponderous due to the telling which cannily retains the charm and wonder of the finest Superman strips. I also enjoyed the church and its predecessors acknowledged as central to the development of civilisation, and sponsors of art and science as was historically the case whether we like it or not. Tales of this stripe so often invoke religious institutions mainly for the sake of ill omen, softening us up for the inevitable appearance of Aleister bleeding Crowley; and as if to underscore the refreshing spirit of the enterprise, Pinsent and Robinson have Superman meet John Dee without any of the traditional beastliness.

This one really is a breath of fresh air, a reminder of what we may have lost and of how exciting it once seemed - a breezy philosophical rumination without posturing which, if instilled with a certain melancholy, nevertheless warms the heart and leaves us with smiles on our faces.

Genuinely amazing.

...and you can find it here!

Knitting with Coalsmoke

John Bagnall Knitting with Coalsmoke (2013)
I wouldn't ordinarily make the effort of setting virtual pen to imaginary paper for something so slim as a single forty-page small press comic book, but this one seems to have enough going on to justify an exception to the rule. I've been vaguely aware of the existence of John Bagnall for at least a couple of decades, and I'm fairly sure we've both contributed to the same periodicals at one point or another. I tend to think of him as a small press cartoonist due to former association with a loose group of individuals including Ed Pinsent, Carol Swain and others with whom his work exists at a similar tangent to the mainstream. I suppose, to commit an extraordinarily crass analogy, you might take it that I'm referring in this instance to the cartooning equivalent of obscure European cinema, tons of subtitles with nothing happening slowly in black and white, and before we get too carried away, I'm not saying this is a bad thing.

I'm out of my depth here in the sense of having drifted away from the small press many years ago, somewhat repelled by a glut of gratuitously self-referential autobiographical material, low content queerzines published by pierced middle-class teenagers now in their leathery fifties and still dressing like members of Haysi bloody Fantayzee, and general wank apparently justified by the idea that hey, at least I'm expressing myself. It still pains me to consider the ocean of horrible drivel in which the good stuff, such as what we have here, is but a drop; but anyway...

Bagnall doesn't really do strip cartoons so much as invoke details of times past, specifically of an England which will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the sixties or seventies. However, this is some way removed from Stewart Maconie chuckling over Spangles and the Bay City Rollers, or any Harry Enfield pastiche of a public information film. The nostalgia industry tends to focus on that which most people remember without prompts, and so our punk documentary - for arbitrary example - will be about the Sex Pistols rather than Eater, the Prats, and the Bears, despite that anything looming so large as to remain in the memory has usually become its own discreet phenomenon and as such can no longer quite be considered part of the general texture. John Bagnall's excavations, on the other hand, are all about the texture, the background noise we barely even noticed at the time, let alone ever had a chance to properly forget. His style is particularly well suited to the task, stark and simple lines tracing solid forms without strongly resembling anything which has gone before, thus allowing for these historical examinations to unfold without unnecessary caricature or kitschy nostalgia clogging up the signal.

There's something very haunting in these tales, or at least these anecdotes of subjects so small and lacking in quantifiable moment that I'm not sure they could be told by any better means than they are here. The silent panels showing the new town centre, or the trades which might be pursued by dexterous young men seem particularly affecting, unburdened by any editorial implication of a better, simpler world gone by, serving simply as an affectionate record of that which should be preserved if only for poetic reasons. This really is a beautiful piece of work.

Purchase your pleasantly musty copy here.