Gregory is a strange little man/child who wears a straightjacket and lives in a padded cell. He doesn't say much, but usually manages to get his point across. His friend Herman Vermin, the rat who lives in his pants, does say a quite a lot, but is rather accident prone and gets killed off on a regular basis (am convinced that South Park stole the idea of Kenny from here). Other friends include Wendel the mouse, who has a serious cheese obsession, and various insects.Creator, Marc Hempel is best known for his art on "The Kindly Ones" arc in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Highly recommend exploring Gregory's strange little world. Some more info Here
Any one else have some favorite comics?
Banana Splits (The Tra La La Song) - The Dickies
Dyon Anaswa - Lee "Scratch" Perry
Particle Man - They Might Be Giants
Blossom (Got To Get It Out) - Komeda
The Yo Yo Man - Echo & the Bunnymen
Poppies - The Teardrop Explodes
In My Area - The Fall
I'm a Supergirl - Shonen Knife
O Superman (X-Booty) - Laurie Anderson
Superman's Big Sister - Ian Dury & the Blockheads
Comedy Of Errors - Keith LeBlanc
Parker, Well Done! -The Barry Gray Orchestra
17 comments:
Shoey, in chronological order, I loved: Beano, Shiver n' shake (was that its name?), Misty magazine which was very strange and rather unwholesome as I remember and then... VIZ!!!
I used to love 2000ad the most, then followed grant morrison around til he went mainstream.
Ah, Misty, the scary version of Bunty! All gypsies and ghosts, no?
Yes!!! Did you read it TK? I went through a ghost story phase and devoured EA Poe, Roald Dahl and that kind of thing. I must have been about 11 at the time. Some of the stories in Misty, with hindsight, were very weird indeed. I distinctly remember one about a girl eating prawns in a restaurant and then being picked up by huge alien prawns who ate HER live with a bowl of mayonnaise. An early plaidoyer for vegetarianism there. "Very strange" as someone once said... I don't think the magazine lasted that long.
i've never heard that echo and the bunnyspeng track before! most peculiar it is too!
I had the classic Whizzer & Chips set-up with my brother: I was a Whizz-kid and he was a Chipper, although I do remember noting that the snake thing (Sid?), who was the focal point of Whizzer, wasn't as appealing as Shiner, the main Chips character who kept getting black eyes. But I also remember not really finding any of it that funny. But then we both dabbled with Cor! which (if I've got my comic etymology correct - please correct if not) spawned Corky comic which in turn begat Krazy, each one funnier and less reverential than the last in a kind of TISWAS way.
But you can't shake the sense of grown-ups trying to chase what kids think is funny with this stuff (today's kidult culture at least steers round that by pandering to grown-up humour half the time anyway - anyone caught I'm Sorry I've Lost My Head on CBBC?) so I've got to credit my elder brother, who was a gifted cartoonist, for taking the attitude that the ideal comic was the one you drew yourself. So he did - he called it Zoom: it had a school-based strip called Schoolditz and another detailing the running Tom&Jerry-style battles between "Harold and Teddy Too!" - Wilson and Heath, who'd always be united when Maggie came on the scene. The comic even got featured on the holy of holies, Why Don't You...? I, of course, did the kid brother thing and tried to make my own comic, Zip!, which was badly drawn and the stories all had woeful narrative arcs.
very eclectic mix of tunes there, shoey, any chance of the artist names?
Wow, what a precocious brother you had there, drawing political skits! I read Misty sometimes is Bunty or whatever had already been sold at our local newsagents, but you are correct, it was a bit too strange to last. I used to get the anthologies of ghost stories from the school library, like A Touch of Chill. There's one particular story that scared the crap out of me, and I can't remember who wrote it, but it's set in an old recorty at Christmas and there's something in the attic. It concludes with the kids watching as the trapdoor to the attic starts to open from the inside....Fantastic stuff! I know you are a fan of Saki FP, did you see the televised Who Killed Mrs De Ropp? Three fantastic short stories told in a fantastic way, very playful and each story colour coded. You can watch the whole thing here on iplayer, well worth an hour of your time!
http://watchification.com/2008/09/17/saki-who-killed-mrs-de-ropp/
Yeah, I don't know that there was a whole load of political analysis in the cartoons - Harold smoked a pipe, Teddy laughed with his shoulders, had big teeth and like boats: it was very Mike Yarwood. Think it was more of a comment on the absence of an exclusively youth-orientated frame of cultural reference back in the '70s - I guess this is why stuff like the Sex Pistols, Smash Hits, Tiswas, The Tube, skateboarding, the Big Breakfast and Viz, each in its own way according to your own tastes and experience, hold such affection; and why I never tire of reminding my kids when trying to peel them away from the Disney Channel or Nicktoons to get ready for school that I was 15 before we had more than three channels or something to watch in the morning and when these things came along, all it gave us was Frank Bough in the morning and Richard Whiteley before the folks got back from work. And we had to make our school uniforms out of the ends of woodbines stubbed out in our eyes by our antidiluvian fathers.
I was a Whizzer & Chips kid too....but am struggling to recall the characters....of course Shiner, and...Milly O'Naire and Penny Less?? Mustapha Million? Tiny Tycoon? were they all money-motivated capitalist conspiracies???!
My dad liked reading Rainbow and Chicks' Own when he was wee...
Cheers TracyK - I will DEFINITELY check out who killed Mrs de Ropp. Always thought it was the ferret myself...
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I also got the ghost story compilations out of the library and scared the sh_t out of myself with them. There was one where the main character is a printer by trade and has a bet with a friend that he can't kill someone having warned them that he's going to do so. On the last page of the book he says "and so I'm a printer and have just added this last page in this one book. Just for you. Now keep looking over your shoulder. AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!! Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrgh!!
Three weeks of nightmares there! Kids' literature no less.....
This weekend has brought to mind a book I was certain I had NOT got rid of in one of my space-making purges, but I can't find it (or even remember the title) for love nor money.
It was a spooky novel about a team of academic ghost-hunters who invented a minor dead character (American Civil War I think) as a control item in an investigation. Then the trouble starts: said never-existent person weirdly begins turning up in historical references, at the same time as the team members start to fall out and apart at the seams. One by one they withdraw from the team, then from life, at the same time as the ghost seems to home in on them through the intervening decades.
From memory, I nearly put the book down early on as it sounded complete tosh, but the twists and references kept me reading.
Suffice to say, the story did not end well for any of the team, but history appeared completely rewritten to accommodate the ghost, who by the story's climax, not only existED, but existS in the flesh as a major historical figure. Conversely, the entire life of the deceased team members is wiped FROM history - e.g. at one point the police refuse to help locate one of them, as there is no record of anyone by that name at the University, so there IS NO missing person.
Given fp's printer story, it is a little disturbing that I can't find the book, but what's worse is that, for instance, tarxien and jasonaparkes haven't been heard of for weeks over on RR.
If I find out that novel had anything to do with one Brian Speng, I'm bolting the doors, loading the revolver with silver bullets, and never going to sleep again!!!!!
Hello? . . . Is there anyone there?!
Ohshitohshitohshit ... that was comment number thirteen too!!
If my last.fm playlist throws up Soulsavers' Ghosts Of You And Me, I'm gonna freakAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH IT'S "Spiritual" !!! "Jesus oh Jesus, I don't wanna die alone" WTF? FFS! SOS!! *whimper*
[Ignore him, everyone, he's been at the Jack Daniels. - Ed.]
Sorry all - got distracted this weekend, but thanks for keeping things ticking along nicely with comic nostalgia & spooky stories.
I can put the names up, but don't worry Blimpy, no Moby or Snow Patrol this week. You may have been grooving out to the Power Puff girls though (B.L.O.S.S.O.M). Keith LeBlanc's Lenny Bruce tribute is especially fine (2nd from end). The last Thunderbirds track is wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to start.
japanther - I remember a class struggle stand-off strip that ripped off the battles between Lord Snooty and his chums and their povvo counterparts: the Toffs and the Tuffs, I believe. It'd be the Hoorays and the Hoodies now. Or, the Chaps and the Chavs. And wasn't Fuss Pot, a proto-Thatcher harridan, another regular? I definitely remember Mustapha Million, who's now the owner of Manchester City, and wasn't there a Beverly Hillbillies direct rip-off, the Bumpkin Billionaires?
May1366 - Fuss Pot! Yes, a definite Tory-girl, and the Bumpkin Billionaires were a favoutite of mine...a blatant rip-off for sure, and there was a family on our estate that everyone called the Clampetts because they were even more chavvy than the rest of us (assorted abandoned fridges in the front garden, 11 kids (true!) and around 8 Cortinas between them), but the twist was, they were really rich! I always thought they were like the opposite of the Bumpkin Billionaires...
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