Lord Horror's Creep Boys
The Adventures of Meng & Ecker: Lord Horror's Creep Boys © Dave Britton (script) Kris Guido (art)
| The Adventures of Meng & Ecker: Lord Horror's Creep Boys Contributors: Dave Britton, Kris Guido, Paul Temple & John Wiliams. |
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This book, a perfect bound large format, paperback collects together a number of issues of Meng and Ecker, or more exactly David Britton's Meng and Ecker. The book was published in 1997 and contains material from 1987 onwards. It reprints some material which has been published in comic format before but includes Meng and Ecker issues #10 and #11, not available elsewhere. According to the text items, mainly reprinted articles, and the press release, this is the only comic to be banned in England. In some ways it's not surprising. The artwork is explicit and the text is likely in parts to offend jews, black people, the royal family, and almost anybody really. It obviously offended the Manchester police who seem to have raided the publishers regularly.
The impression is that the creators, artist Kris Guido and writer David Britton, have gone out of their way to be politically incorrect and to shock. Unfortunately it is all at one pitch, so Hillsborough and Auschwitz get the same treatment as Oscar Wilde and the Booker prize. But this is not really social satire. In its original form it was a comic so there are plenty of references to comic characters, to Judge Dredd, Tank Girl, Korky the Kat, Biffo the Bear and assorted pre-war comic cuts, and to comic shops and conventions. Music hall heroes, like Frank Randle, Arthur Askey and George Formby roam the pages. Quite why, I'm not sure; it probably means something but maybe not. The characters talk to each other, their creators and the audience, just so's we know that that they know we know how knowing it all is. The narratives, such as they are, show their literary depth by being fragmented, though at one point I wondered whether the pages had just been printed in the wrong order.
This volume prompts the question of how differently one looks at a book rather than a comic. What one reads occasionally might be entertaining, thought provoking or amusing. When it's presented in a large chunk of 250+ pages, in this case it becomes oppressive. The more so because, if they have done nothing else, the creators of Meng and Ecker have invented their own universe, and a fairly unpleasant one at that. Though perhaps Manchester really is like this.
Maurice Wakeman
| The Adventures of Meng & Ecker: Lord Horror's
Creep Boys: 256 A4 30x21 pages, full colour glossy card cover, squarebound. |
£9.99 from: Savoy Books, 446 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester, M20 3BW |
Received at ZUM! HQ: no details Review Posted: 2000 |
