Maybe Others

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Occupy Comics Issue 1

Occupy Comics 1 was created as a fundraiser for the movement. The big coup - reuniting Moore and Lloyd, the V mask having scaled up from Warrior to Hollywood to Anonymous to all purpose global symbol of protest. 

In the end Lloyd contributed V playing matador to the Charging Bull and Moore provided an essay tracing comics from Gillray to bootleggers and pulps. 

It’s unclear who Occupy Comics is for. It isn’t, as declared, a document of the movement. It doesn’t platform, or even engage with, the voices of the protesters. It’s fundamentally on the outside and struggling with the surface. Your cool comics uncle has shown up to lecture you on how you’re protesting wrong with gramps along for the ride.  

The worst offender is JM De Matteis cautioning against the danger of demonising the 1% and breaking out the big guns of Buddha and Vonnegut to centre the need for love and respect. That it is fine to demonise the bastards price gouging insulin and foreclosing your house, that it is acceptable not to love ICE and rubber bullets isn’t considered. In LA today violence remains the preserve of the people with the bandanas and rocks not the people with the armour and guns, or the money, or the laws.  

It’s not just LA on fire. In Northern Ireland reacting to the terrible assault of a young girl, vigils have become riots. The Ballymena Reaction Group ‘is at war with Roma gangs’. Filipino families are just unfortunate collateral damage. Their Facebook shares addresses of those ‘born and bred’ so they can be passed over. “Can the whole of Hope street just be left alone please , everyone on this street are genuine people we don’t need or deserve this”. 

The BRG’s symbol is the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes Mask. 

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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS

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5 COMEDOWNS
Comedown 2: Polly

(random techno club, Oxford, 1995)

I met Polly in the corridors of Club UK and we became fast friends, in the way that only drugs can facilitate. An immediate closeness fuelled by amphetamines, dancing and frenzied, intimate conversation soundtracked by pulsing basslines.

Pre-mobile phones we saw each other through our routine attendance at Final Frontier, the Friday techno night. I realised that I was anticipating her being there and was always crushed if she wasn’t.

Speed is a weirdly chaste drug. Horniness alchemises into passion for earnest connection through movement. But still, I wanted to see Polly outside the sweaty communion of the club.

I arranged to visit her in Oxford one weekend. Summer. A time in life for missions and adventures. I was nervous of course – would we still connect in the same way? It was certainly different, but exciting too. There was a cautious warmth as we circled each other. Of course, she’d sorted some speed and we still went out on the Saturday night to some anonymous club-night in Oxford. This was when techno nights were still commonplace. Every town had one.

We danced as always – blissfully together and alone. The club was pretty sparse, but we still made new dancefloor friends. The night wound down and we taxied back to hers, stifling laughs at the prurient driver. Sneaking round her parents’ house, we took a blanket, water, fruit and snuck off to the fields outside.

The sun came up as we lay in a cornfield, in our own crop-circle. Talking, laughing, spacing gently out. We kissed. Even then I knew it was a charged, special moment.

Later, exhausted, on the way home, I tried to work out if we were going out. Unsure if it even mattered.

I saw Polly years later at a party randomly. But our time had passed.  

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MINDLESS COMMUNICATION - Craig Collins

Writer/artist/certified hunk. Collaborator with Iain Laurie on small press comics with unpleasant titles (Crawl Hole, Roachwell, acht, Metrodome’s not too grotty). Purveyor of occult wisdom (Billy Quest, The Ultimate Ross Geller Fanzine). Script droid on Ales of the Unexpected.

How did you and Mark Brady come to do a monthly strip for Ferment magazine?

Mark and I had finished our first bit of collaboration - tactile medieval battlefield workplace silliness in Medieval Times - and were considering a few things for our next project. I'd been getting Beer52 boxes for a few months and noticed the comic they had going in Ferment had dropped out the magazine. I thought we could have a lot of fun with it and I do like the challenge of a short gag strip, so we worked up some strips for a speculative pop at it. Unexpectedly enough, we were successful!

Do you guys get much feedback on the strip from readers?

Not a thing! It's kind of crazy to think that given the membership of Beer52 and the number of people receiving Ferment magazine we must have somewhere between one and two hundred thousand people at least giving the strip a cursory glance once a month. Far, far more than has read any of our other small press work. But no, not a word either way. It's cool though, we are stoic in the face of ambivalence.

Finally, if you had to be any X-Men character, who would it be and why is it Gambit?

Covid brought about significant changes to th' way we live, and some of them have been difficult for ol' Remy LeBeau. Jus' one example is the ubiquity of de contactless payment…

CLICK HERE FOR MORE ON ALES OF THE UNEXPECTED AND GAMBIT’S LIFE IN DE PLAGUE ZONE! 

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That Nerd Shit: Story Games

The inimitable Quinns of People Make Games and Quinns Quest once said that tabletop roleplaying games aren’t good at making stories. He didn’t mean that ttrpgs can’t create great narrative experiences. He also didn’t mean that what’s created in the gamified conversation (that all ttrpgs boil down to) can’t be narratively compelling in the moment. His point was that, at the end of a ttrpg session or even campaign, you’re seldom left with a story that you’d want to tell your friends let alone seriously think about. 

Art from the game Public Access, by Jason Cordova. Published by The Gauntlet.

In certain ttrpg circles, you hear the word “story” a lot. “Gives good story [cringe]”. “We’re making stories! [bad ones]”. The “story games” these folks enjoy feature more vigorous creative engines than trad “challenge” based games like Dungeons and Dragons (which have their own virtues). The creation of fiction in story games comes much easier than in, say, writing because they invite everyone at the table to actively contribute. It’s a shared responsibility, assisted by heavy duty guard rails

Where things get messy, from the point of view of crafting a story you’d tell your mates, is in the clash of ideas and randomness of the dice. Elements that are also what makes these games great experiences because they bring surprise. Players imagine themselves/their character [insert side note about Bleed] within a fiction that they can only influence so much, with all the tension, excitement, belly laughs and heartache that can bring. This socialised synthesis of creation and action involves everything enjoyable about hanging with friends, frequently amplified, with the added bonus of producing an aestheticised space and food for thought that can haunt players long after the fact. You know, like art. 

So maybe these games don't make good stories but perhaps it doesn’t matter.    

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All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook (Granta, 2002)

Another great Fucked England booksworth of curses injected into the young millennium. The on-shelf evidence is in those 2010s Alan Moore books: John Buchan, Richard Gadd, William Joyce, all that carry on. Seabrook walks that nasty little spur in the top right edge, as seen with the vantage of the red sun. From the high west, the Kent coast is not the point of closest concourse with the outside we mistake it for. Instead it’s distant and exposed, the backwater’s end point. The conqueror understood there’s only one way to beat them, you have to go around the back. The English haven’t stopped glancing over their shoulder ever since.

All The Devils are Here chats up all latest winners.  The trawling of popular scandal is scurrilous and prurient, irresistible and fun, and supposedly justified under unforgetting, to have reminders to do better. Apotropaic wanderings, keeping them in sight, the better to ward them off. But we don't need more memory right now. Because hopefully it’s too early to call but on the current balance at best this method is a drawing salve, pulling the poison to the surface. Now with poison all over our surface, we might find the best way to get rid of it is bury it again, swear to each other - remember to forget it forever this time.

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IF YOU DONT LIKE IT YOU CAN FUCK OFF

Hello there, I didn’t see you come in - I was just thinking how too many stalks in the tree is the dirtbag’s too much foam on the head. 

Anyway, away to write a review of a tender biographical comic by our friend Briggs (The Return) which has as usual slipped into my flow so perfectly I am going to have to start writing about synchronicities and not serendipity just for variety’s sake - Briggs doesn’t really make comics like anyone else I know, I think there’s probably a “high Vertigo” ‘95ish influence but it’s not… they are never really narrative driven, I think they are ponderous if you can imagine that not being used pejoratively; a synonym of meditative but that has implications that I find sort of annoying, there’s a strong fine art sensibility that I only know enough about to vaguely recognise and can’t perform any disquisition on really, but I always find the work moving and connecting in ways that are… essentially I think what is done here with colour and collage drawing the eye across simple, diaristic blank verse - everything is everything remember & this is closer to ee cummings than it is to 95%(?) of comics - is what we have always been trying to write about, the art of life, these intercuts and disjunctions are essentially omnipresent in my own experience but to read a story - per my earlier post-Gaiman misgivings about “story” - or even biographical account, it’s incredibly rare to find something that matches the abstruse mind(/less) in action; M John Harrison’s writing about writing anti-biography Wish I Was Here is probably the closest to authentically being inside someone’s head I have chosen to be…

The comic in part is about having things in your head that other people have put there, I awoke with the dreamlike phrase “You have disconnected yourself from your real self” the other day - about my latest sexual frustration probably - it is a feeling or sensation I know and see mirrored here… all the stupid presets folk wanted to put on you, well they were wrong because how the fuck would they know better; the process of building the right life is long, hard, onerous and you will have to be so strong, and the haters and losers can waylay you… here is a pathfinder, though x

This week’s music is: I got into Pop Smoke only to find out he was dead, the same thing happened with Nipsey Hussle five years ago, bloody hell he is good though; the booming, textural voice like Travis Scott, a bit of 50 that actually makes me reconsider if I do think 50 Cent is a genuine rap icon… that and Lil Tecca which seems a bit more gadgety and bedroom based, in the manner of Darci and Lil Cobaine (yes someone is called that, yes you are old, yes sorry it is quite good)