Small press anthologies just don’t seem to have the prevalence they had several years ago when they seemed to almost swamp the self-published shelves in UK comics stores. That Comic Smell is a collection of diverse comic strip shorts from the eponymous podcast team that has a pleasantly nostalgic, old school, DIY feel to it. Indeed the hand of David Robertson, one of the team and a prolific champion of self-publishing, is very much in evidence in its design.
This second issue of the project (cover above by Mike Sedakat) is a compilation of work and styles that range from enigmatic trips into bleak urban living (Alan Henderson’s ‘City’) to playful and endearing silliness like Hicks! and David Robertson’s account of musician Jeff Lynne explaining the plot of movie bomb Xanadu {below).
The standouts for me here were firstly Alan Henderson’s seemingly ephemeral but actually rather clever piece of experimental comics ‘One Liners’ which tells a four-panel story with one continuous line (extract below). Robertson’s Taken parody ‘Takin’ the Bus’ transports the action hero film to the mundaner world of public transport, with stolen shopping bags on a bus replacing kidnapped daughter as revenge motivation. And Tom Stewart’s ‘Perception’ neatly morphs from a meditation on the nature of colour to something far more punchline-driven.
The eclecticism of the anthology and its rejection of themed content means that it can play host to strips as different as Nando’s very personal reaction to the death of Kobe Bryant and Mike Sedakat and David Robertson’s relocation of Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat to the world of space opera.
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that technical proficiency in That Comic Smell #2 can vary significantly from strip to strip but the enthusiasm for the medium of comics in these pages is infectious throughout. This is exactly the kind of grassroots project we don’t see nearly enough of anymore and one that underlines the wise words of graphic novelist Karrie Fransman when she described comics as a “medium which is open for any of us to define”.
David Robertson, Mike Sedakat, Fernando Pons, Tom Stewart, Alan Henderson and Hicks! • Self-published, £4.00
Review by Andy Oliver
