Solid Gold Oat Serial #2

Solid Gold Oat is short, sweet and very strange. A hybrid of mad scientist movies and Bridgit Jones. The story centres around flatmates Bettina, Pete and Anne living together in the big city. Except Bettina is a evil mad practioner of Voodoo and Pete and Anne are zombies reanimated by Bettina to be her friends. Bettina's personality swings between being a ditzy young urbanite and a power-crazed practitioner of the dark arts, committed, as she puts it to, "Crimes against nature".

In this issue Anne and Pete, who are coming to hate Bettina and her refusal to acknowledge that the zombies their own personality have used her reanimation formula to create "children" in the form of dogs that have been run over. Their roadkill creations are discovered and the pair demand that Bettina now recognise them as people in their own right, only to have Bettina deny that anything has happened. The zombies end up under a sheet as Bettina carries on with her fantasy life.

Solid Gold Oat is a strange blend of several different sources but a surreal and enjoyable seam of humour runs through the comic and binds the whole together. While only 6 A5 sides long the artwork is good and the panels packed with detail and character. The use of speech bubbles to tie together the narrative across the panels is particularly good.
Robert Rees