PERVERT COMIX #'s 7, 8 & 9 Girls on Gavin McInnes. Ariel Bordeaux:"I think you are seriously disturbed... you are in dire need of professional help." Julie Doucet:"No,no,no!!... Don't change Gavin!... The world needs people like him because he is very entertaining." And what sort of entertainer is he? ...A fucking comedian. Making a prat of yourself in public is a mainstay of stand-up comedy — maybe the mainstay. Gavin McInnes' confessional comic zine is a low-tech, armchair version of a comic's mic, PA, and return ticket to a gig in the sticks. Pervert dishes up the dirt audiences crave in the twenty pages of comics and letters section which transposes to printed form the heckle and jibe of the live crowd. We also get the mandatory obsequiously glowing tributes from his comic peers: in this case Jim Woodring, James Kochalka, Chantale Doyle and a crate of other top bananas. Whackey fun from issue 9 includes this interchange on Pervert #7: Kochalka: The clit licking panel is really good. God I love sucking pussy! McInnes: James, I like to eat pussy too! Check out this picture of me going at it. I sure fixed this saucy young trollop's wagon!! A tiny polaroid of frozen cunnilingual action follows. Then, on to the next line: McInnes: How do I look with a moustache? Gavin McInnes is funny. He'll take you along with him and his nerdy sex relations with a secession of women through a trip via plane and train across Europe, checking out punky crash pads, demos and anarchist squats, fucking up every encounter by his inability to have a straight shag more than a couple of times without whipping out red thigh socks, his favourite sex aid. No, he doesn't wear them. The girlfriend has to put them on. Each scene of pathetic lust, guilt and recrimination is boldly rendered in strong and animated cartoon lines to register maximum embarrassment. This single achievement is backed up by short and worthy strips from Marc Bell and John Porcellino but, of course, the show is Gavin's. Steve Edgell PERVERT COMIX [#8 32 22x18cm PAGES, 2 COLOUR + HAND TIPPED CARD COVER, #9 32(?) 22x18cm PAGES, COLOUR COPY ON CARD COVER] $3 EACH (+P+P?). GAVIN MCINNES, P.O. BOX 42023, MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA, H2W 2T3. POST MORTIMER #1 "Like the shadowy forms observed through membraneous half-sleep, or the vague phantasms glimpsed through a bubble of blood, as the final breath gurgles in a hollow chest, Post Mortimer is a subterranean glimpse of one man's mind and its darkest stirrings." Yes. Quite. With that on the back, and a tombstone of purple praise inside the cover, you can't miss that this is a nasty story. It's the internal monologue and dreary reality of a depressed pathologist with a morbid sex/death obsession as he does autopsies on reeking bodies, while being haunted by visons of Death as a wobbly heap of putrefying organs. Uh-huh. Even though David Gough's artwork is superb, very much like what you'd get on the walls of Ditko's padded cell if he went psychotic, the script is a full-on fire-hose of emetic twaddle. Every single panel is overstuffed with grim prose — I lost count of all the suppurating/bloated/putrefying/rancid variations. I'm afraid Gough has gone to such lengths to make this tale as gross as possible, that the end result is just OTT. "David Gough Disturbs Me" says Noel K Hannan — well he bores the hell out of me. This title is ideal for the sort of person who videos BSE documentaries in order to slow-motion the scenes of rendering cow brains into sausages... Terry Wiley POST MORTIMER [28 30x19cm PAGES] £2 (P+P?). DAVID GOUGH, 119 HOMEFARM RD, WOODCHURCH, WIRRAL, L49 7LG. PRINCESSE MAJORETTE Behind the cover pic of a uniformed, knicker-flashing gal in flames, Princesse Majorette is a collection of screenprinted monstrosities compiled in the form of a role-playing game book. The scenario is pretty simple. I can even translate some of it very roughly from the overlapping Japanese, French and spanish instructions plonked across the inside front cover spread: "Bad luck! You've died and you're going to howl in the agonies of Hell. Yet the Devil wants to have still more fun with you. You can save your soul from damnation with the role of a dice. Take two dice, throw, then go forward until you have become a minor saint. Beware — you must keep going right to the end. If you don't you'll have to come back by as many places you have remaining. Stick to these rules as He will be watching. Be trickier than the Arch-trickster himself." You get the picture; or, more accurately, you get the pictures. The RPG McGuffin is merely the pretext for another descent into graphiste inferno with a typical gang of Le Dernier Cri contributors as your guides. Princesse Caramel, Prince Bolino, Prince Kerozene and Prince Bongo lead you through spread after spread of cheery dismemberment, corporal violation and diabolic torment, each excruciating image lovingly screenprinted in lush, poisonously fetid inks on white and pastel coloured boards. You can, of course, use it as a game instead of merely drooling over all the metonymic abomination — but be ready to tackle the alternative French, Spanish or Japanese rules if you really feel the compulsion to get verbal; though why you might is totally beyond me. Steve Edgell PRINCESSE MAJORETTE [24 240x320 PAGE ALBUM, 3 COLOUR TO 7 COLOUR SPREADS, HEAVY CARD STOCK] 150_ LE DERNIER CRI, 38 RUE FLEGIER, 13001, FRANCE. PUB FICTION You know that really annoying bloke down the pub? Y'know, the one that always says, "Cheer up, it might never happen" and then expects you to be concerned when he's unhappy. And you know his mate, the one that's too damn nice and puts up with all his bull, usually defending him, saying, "He's alright really, it's just his way". Well this comic is about them. You'll recognise almost everything Alan and Jim get up to, from sitting in trees pining for a just-too-distant youth, to sitting in the road waiting to be hit by a car 'cos the girlfriend's gorn and left — again! And that's the problem with this mag really — it's too familiar. So much so that you end up with so little sympathy for the protagonists that you begin to wish that car would hurry up and put us out of their misery. Like all pub philosophers, they're nice enough geezers, but you wouldn't want to be stuck with them down the bar all night — and that's not a good move when you're trying to create characters for your readers to identify with. I spose they're alright really, I guess it's just their way. Roy Delaney PUB FICTION [20 A5 PAGES, CARD STOCK COVER] £1·50. MAT BUNCE, 3 WREN CLOSE, YATELEY, CAMBERLEY, SURREY, GU17 7NZ. REVERBSTORM #5 See that up in the sky? ...Is it a bird? ...Is it a plane? ...Nope, it's Reverbstorm flying completely over the top of this reviewers head. I've done quite a few reviews lately and my major complaint has been that so many comics are either too derivative, unimaginative or both. Yet here we have a comic that's neither of those things, but sadly I have to report that I simply don't understand it. Thick as 2 short planks or what? Anyway, this obviously puts me at a disadvantage when it comes to recommending it or not, but to give you a brief taster I'll just say that James Joyce is one of the characters as is Picasso (err, actually it's Guernica rather than Picasso himself. You work it out). The intellectuals amongst us might well be in hog heaven with this, but it might prove a little too avant-guard for those ordinary mortals like me. If you hadn't already guessed, this is not at all like any previous Lord Horror comic; it's an altogether more serious, surreal and sombre work. Britton's comics are never an easy read, but they do usually repay the effort you have to put in. However, I would suggest that this comic is so locked into its own obscurity that without buying the previous 4 issues your chances of taking much from this are minimal. Andy Brewer REVERBSTORM #5 ISBN 0 86130 096 3 [52 GLOSSY A4 PAGES, FULL COLOUR COVER] £3·50 SAVOY BOOKS, 279 DEANSGATE MANCHESTER, M3 4EW. RHONDA ROCKET #3 I'm in a quandary over this, It's well written, and has an enjoyable plot concerning Nick Taylor's bizarre adventures of the titular Ms Rocket... I mean, giant sea monkeys and a man wearing the Starship Enterprise in his bonce are gonna get your attention, aren't they? But the art really does get in the way of it all. The basic layouts are okay but the finishes look incredibly rushed and make it seem like the artist could not be bothered. There are flashes of finer work but the majority of it is extremely splodgy, which is made more obvious when Rhonda appears in segments from an old Spider Man strip. This sequence is actually very cleverly done, and you can't expect Nick to ape another artist's style, but the two styles do clash quite conspicuously. I could stand to read someone else's copy but I'd never fork out for one, which is a shame as it's obviously a labour of love for it's creator. Just work on your inks, man! Nigel Lowrey RHONDA ROCKET [32 A4 PAGES, COLOURCOPY COVER] £2. NICK TAYLOR, 53 ST DAVIDS ROAD NORTH, ST ANNES-ON-SEA, LANCS, FY8 2BS. ROUND MIDNIGHT COLLECTED EDITION #1 Apparently this is named after the gorgeous Thelonious Monk tune as played by Dexter Gordon (but check out the unbelievably spooky solo piano version recorded by Monk in Paris in 1954, or its reworking for cosmonauts by Miles Davis on 'live at the Plugged Nickel'). What? Oh yeah, this is a comics review magazine, isn't it? Subtitled A Romance, it tells the tale of Jack, the Harlequin, who dreams of another life in which he loved and lost, gaining a child and much bitterness. Convinced that reality lies behind the dream, he goes in search of it. By now you may be thinking of The Sandman and Peter Bangs admits to being influenced by Neil Gaiman. He also claims that there's a good deal more to it than that, and he's right. There's a delicacy to his work, not just in the light, poised art but in the balanced opposition between a dream which is like reality and a reality which is, er, dreamlike, that I can't feel in Gaiman's knowing, inviting scripts. It's as though Bangs has grasped the warmth as well as the wildness of romance and is content to let its mysteriousness carry it without throwing in anything sensational. To repeat, it's delicate — which doesn't mean it's weak. Bang's isn't likely to win any prizes for anatomical drawing — faces and, particularly, hands often look strange — but he has a tremendous grasp of body language and uses open space, lots of it, very atmospherically. He uses lettering styles nicely too. All in all he's grasped the spirit of Monk's tune perfectly. I'm damned if I can think of higher praise than that. Mike Kidson ROUND MIDNIGHT [COLLECTED EDITION: 56 A5 PAGES, CARD STOCK COVER, #5 16 A5 PAGES, #6 20 A5 PAGES] COLLECTED EDITION £1·20, SINGLE ISSUES 30p EACH, 16 ISSUE SUBSCRIPTION (INCLUDING COLLECTED EDITION) £4·80. PETER A. BANGS, 51 WOOLSTON RD, BUTLOCKS HEATH, SOUTHAMPTON, SO31 5FR.