The first thing that strikes you about this comic is the front cover. It feels nice and heavy. It's a nice size and it's very, very shiny. It even has some shiny gold bits! Must of cost a bit to produce. So why, why has it got one of the worst drawings in comic book history scrawled upon it? Why go to all that expense and then ruin it with a picture that is worse than anything else the comic itself contains? As soon as I saw it I thought "Christ, this is gonna be poo". If I saw it on a shelf in a shop, I wouldn't even pick it up. I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but... well, that saying was written before marketing men existed.
The second thing wrong with this comic is the drawing and design of the main character, Hardly the Hog himself. Out of all the characters and people in the comic he is the most badly drawn of all. In each frame he stands out like a sore trotter. In fact, to be honest, Hardly is a bit of a pig's ear. This is strange as the rest of the characters show some potential artwise. There is a style hidden here that, with some work, could shine but it all needs cleaning up.
There is also a third crime: a dream sequence, a dream sequence containing Dali style lines depicting hearts and hands. How many more of these will I have to suffer in my lifetime? I hereby promise to shoot the next similarly crafted dream sequence creator.
Individual sections of text can be well written but the story as a whole seems jumbled. I have nothing against Mystic Pig antihero demigods, semi pagan settings etc. In fact I'm a great fan of fantasy but this comic needs a serious clean up on every level before it will go anywhere. I just couldn't warm to any character, story or art in this comic. It did show enthusiasm though and it may be worth picking up the next issue to see how things have improved.

You don't have to be a frothing-at-the-mouth Tory journalist to feel that you can demolish all adversaries with a swift flourish of innate verbal acuity. But if by some unimaginable circumstance you are, wipe the sputum from your lips, brush the saliva from your chin, press a tissue on ZUM!'s pages for a moment and read on. Even you will find something reassuring in the figure of an anthropomorphic porcine lead character who can complain:
"I find your pattern of speech vulgar and your manners non-existent. I take it you are Americans?"
Now if only Osama Bin Laden had been able to say that to George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld instead of aiming passenger jets at the World Trade Centre or hinting ominously about the Cave of Death. Would the world be a different place?
Hardly The Hog is an insufferable boar. And therefore he is a figure of English fun. Every scrap of brayed diction, every carping nuance of spoilt middle-class English utterance is here. If the Amis family had been born with snouts, trotters and pointed ears instead of what they seem to have, this is how they'd be.
US readers gulled by its comic book guise into buying a sample copy of HTH may find Hardly typically annoying. Some yanks may bang on about the French now but there is little more likely to get up the colonial snout than a patronising, indolent Brit. The English, it seems, are too damned busy sitting around being civilised to actually do anything. Every moment of Englishness is a conversational gem, glittering with allusion and erudition amid the festering stink of its historical inertia. Irony has provided limeys the delusion with which to trounce a world of triteness, overbaked ideas and obvious notions without having to work up the slightest sweat.
Luckily, beyond the smoothness - or suaveness, or both - some real sweat has been worked up here by Alex Coward: refining dialogue, discarding ideas that either didn't work or were too witless. Likewise Jamie Coward's careful page and panel compositions wring an awful lot of narrative out of his choice of pictorial devices - simple, uncluttered lines and shaped areas of solid black - striking a balance between the need to define character and the need to lay out clear sequences of story.
My only quibble is whether the comic really should just be for adults, as are so many independently produced comics submitted to ZUM!. English kids should at least get the chance to pollute their minds with something like this rather than with Temazepam or Atomic Kitten.
Ah yes, details, details...in this issue Hardly is attacked by a mammoth shark, which reluctantly he despatches only after resorting to use of a firearm, and is rescued by an odd trio of American seagoers, one of whom, Merton Broody, takes Hardly to Enmity, the town Broody is sworn to protect. There.
Steve Edgell