Hawk The Slayer 1-5 (JD Meg edition)

 

Hawk The Slayer

By

Garth Ennis & Henry Flint

 

Review By Luke Williams

In the realm of geekdom I think I may be in the minority,  I have never watched the “Hawk the Slayer”.

I remember loving the less fondly remembered “Krull” when I was 10 (not seen it since), another 80s fantasy film but released a few years later and also starring “we need to cast a giant”; “Ladyhawke” (1985) all the others completely passed me by. This kind of admission attracts sideways glances from friends, tuts and the risk of being shunned.

Garth Ennis, who seemingly has returned to the 2000AD stable with glee and given almost free reign to do whatever the hell he wants, is clearly a big fan of cheesy 80s fantasy films with weird soundtracks (or at last I’m told it has a weird soundtrack) and alongside the distillation of a 2000AD artdroid Henry Flint, in resurrecting Ennis’ childhood favourite “Hawk The Slayer”.

Handily Ennis and Flint provide a brief recap of the events of the previous film before getting into this, a direct sequel to the film. Hawk is out for vengeance against his brother the evil Voltan – who sought the Mindsword, a superpowerful weapon held by Hawk and inherited from their father, and killed his girlfriend.

Accompanied by a motley band, Hawk seemingly commits fratricide at the end of the film. He settles down – threat removed, a companion or two fewer.

Of course, you can’t keep a good baddie down and Ennis & Flint pick up the story : Voltan is back, belligerent and stubborn tyke that he is, and after the Mindsword. 

Hawk picks up what remains of his old gang plus some substitutes, including a Cacofonix like bard to provide light relief, he’s off again to settle Voltan’s hash.

The five issue series adopted a weird publishing model. Released as in the floppies of “Judge Dredd Megazine”, a welcome relief from some of the material that has been bundled with the Meg’. It’s a remarkable way to release the work of two incredibly popular creators, on an admittedly obscure cult  “intellectual property” ( sadly, everything is reduced to IP now isn’t it?), I don’t suppose there was a lot of competition for Rebellion’s bid to buy the rights?

If you haven’t picked it up with the Meg (which has consistently been at least a good read for a few years) then you could buy it in the comic shop as an “American market” title with beautiful covers by Greg Staples, though wildly different in style to Flint’s interiors.

 So, as it’s Ennis you can expect lots of manly posturing and bonding, occasional splashes of toilet humour and extreme violence. But this time, instead of guns and bombs – it’s swords and sorcery – not a genre he is usually associated with.  Henry Flint – GOD of art pulls out the stops with work that is slightly surreal, dynamic, occasionally grotesque, scratchy and beautifully rendered art.

What’s not to like? I still haven’t seen the film, I may find the time to do it, but you don’t need to watch it to enjoy this. Essential? Hell no. Fun? Crumbs, yes. If you can wait, there will be a trade paperback out in March.  More from Ennis and Flint please: War, fantasy, science fiction : whatever genre, I’m not fussy.

WE GOT REVIEWED!

Check it out!
https://gazzareadscomics.blogspot.com/2022/06/

COMING SOON!

Gorgeous Cover Teaser art by Alex Ronald

Flint has decided to take the plunge into the world of crowdfunding comics. Rossy writes, Flint draws and Mr. Burdis ‘edits’. More information will be revealed the closer we get to the launch date. Take a quick looksee…

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/928224654/white-heat-comics-digest-no1

Mek Memoirs (Facsimilie Edition) : By Jack Adrian & Kevin O’Neill

Mek Memoirs

By Jack Adrian & Kevin O’Neill

Published by Dark & Golden Books

Review by Luke Williams

 

Kevin O’Neill is a legend of British comics, his idiosyncratic, anarchic art style harking back to classic British humour comic artists like Ken Reid and MAD magazine contributors  like Jack Davis and Bill Elder but with a hard sci fi edge. He is legendary for being “banned” by the Comics Code Authority (ask your parents) for his contribution to a “Green Lantern” strip written by Alan Moore, possibly even more noteworthy for being a controversy not instigated by Moore.

At the start of his career, O’Neill took various jobs, including design work for film magazines and comics, and to help raise his profile, worked on fanzines and self published comics.

Mek Memoirs  is a reproduction of one of King Kevin’s earliest comic projects. Stuck in the dead end of IPC humour department, Kevin needed to find an outlet for his passions, the work that he really wanted to create.

Writer Chris Lowder, aka Jack Adrian famed of early 2000AD and Starlord amongst other work,  and Kevin put together this first episode of what was going to be a reportage style future robot war story. It has a surprising amount of salty language, pitching this towards the more “adult” market and perhaps where both creators saw the future of comics, or at least what that future should involve.

 Stylistically, it is unmistakeably Kevin O’Neill, the textures of his early work have a touch of Ron Turner about them, but you can’t hide that imagination. The robots featured are grand and bizarre designs, and the human characters belie that humour comics influence. This is the seed that would grow into classics such as Ro Busters, ABC Warriors, , Nemesis the Warlock his design of Walter The Wobot and this writer’s personal favourite, Metalzoic .

Thankfully, reports of his retirement following the end of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen were exaggerated and he’s working on a strip for this year’s Battle Action special, written by Garth Ennis.

Mek Memoirs is a “slight” volume. It’s unbound , has 8 pages of strip with another 4 pages of editorial and commentary from O’Neill and a new cover on top. For £8 plus postage that’s a little pricey. But it is a reproduction of O’Neill’s earliest work; a historical document for us Kevin O’Neill stalkers and a nice companion to the Cosmic Comics volume  published by Hibernia and Gosh, reissued last year with added content.

It’s worth hunting out to see the earliest work of a true original.

https://goshlondon.com/mek-memoirs-pre-order/

Further reading

Nemesis The Warlock : A Potted History

ABC Warriors : A Potted History

Metalzoic Review

Metalzoic Mega City Book Club Podcast

Starlord

 

Skreemer

By Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins, Steve Dillon and Tom Ziuko

Skreemer is an oft overlooked collaboration between old mates, Peter Milligan, Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon. An odd fit for DC and a series you couldn’t imagine them taking a punt on now, it was Vertigo before there was Vertigo, later reprinted in TPB form under that sadly now defunct imprint. It’s an unusual strip which could easily fit in 2000AD now and is here by dint that 3 parts of its creative were working on lots for “The Galaxy’s Greatest” at roughly the same time as it was published.

Skreemer is an unusual mix of near future dystopia and gangsters, or perhaps to paraphrase Ewins’ from his introduction a sci fi “Long Good Friday”. Veto Skreemer is an orphan who is brought up in an America where gangs now run the country following some unexplained cataclysm.  Skreemer rises to head one of these gangs, but throughout his life has had visions of his own doomed future, a future he tries to escape via a long term grand plan. The story is told by a mysterious narrator, jumping back and fore in Veto’s life and how it parallels and intersects with the narrator’s own family history.

In the introduction to the collection Ewins’ cites James Joyce as an influence on both himself and Peter Milligan , the latter revisiting Joyce in later works such as “Shade, The Changing Man”.  In places Skreemer is horrifying and often brutal, this is a very grim book. Reader sympathies lie with the narrator and his family, but weirdly and despite being a psychopath, Veto himself is also a strangely sympathetic character; possibly because he sees himself as being so helpless and beholden to a future only he can see.

The Ewins / Dillon art team is an odd mix, they had previously worked together on a one off Bad Company called “Simply”. There are pages which look like Ewins has been inked or even finished by Dillon, whereas other pages were all Dillon and then vice versa.  Ewins’ pop art sensibilities soon blend seamlessly with Dillon’s square jawed realism. Tom Ziuko’s colours are suitably sombre if a little on the muddy side.

A quick search on the internet reveals It can be picked up quite cheaply as a trade. A forgotten gem of a book.

V2A The Wasteland Chronicles: Doomsday

Firmly in the “Not 2000AD, but by dint of theme and creators could definitely fit in”, Luke checks out the first volume of post apocalyptic actioner V2A : The Wasteland Chronicles