Nicholas J Woodhead is a cartoonist from Birmingham, UK, who lives in London. His website is called Lethargic Margin Comics, and he is the creator of the “one-person anthology comic” WetNurse. “One-person anthology comic” seems to mean that it’s got a number of short comic-stories in it, not necessarily related to each other, although a lot of Woodhead’s work is clearly autobiographical or semi-autobiographical in nature. There’s a central figure who looks a bit like Tintin, with a sticking-up quiff of hair in the middle of his high forehead. He has a cat called Kirby, a black-haired female partner, and he draws comics.
This isn’t to say that the stories are anything like realistic. Instead they tend to start from a realistic incident or situation, then rapidly unfold into surrealist flights of fancy. In one of them a friend tells Nicholas that he’s taken up golf as a result of his mid-life crisis (below). This fragment of conversation keeps repeating over and over again Nicholas’s mind, until eventually the only way for him to stop it is to pay his friend a dramatic visit in the middle of the night…
There’s a story about what Nicholas would like done with his own ashes, after he’s died and been cremated. There’s another about his relationship with his own small intestine since he was diagnosed with coeliac disease. There’s yet another one about playing violent video games, and there’s one about his smoke alarm, which keeps beeping at him in the middle of the night.
The sequences about Kirby the cat mine a similar vein of surrealism based on true-life observations. Kirby is a self-centred manipulative megalomaniac. In one story she has already wiped out all the mice on earth, and intends to wipe out all the birds next. My personal favourite is ‘Pope Hat’ (below), available on the website (from WetNurse #0) rather than in WetNurse #1 – Kirby overhears the Pope complaining on television that some people are choosing to have pets rather than children. She quickly works out that the reason everyone pays attention to the Pope is because of his hat; so she insists on Nicholas making her a Pope-hat of her own, then goes out and gets herself interviewed on TV (“I can see the Pope sitting on a wall down the street”, remarks a hapless BBC reporter), using the interview as an opportunity to put across her uncompromising and distinctly un-Pope-like message, “Kill everyone now!’ ‘She does look pretty good in that hat, though”, remarks Nicholas when he sees her on the telly.
Interspersed with these domestic tales, WetNurse #1 also contains some more disparate material. There are three comic strips about Mary Magdalene – in one of them she attacks Jesus and John the Baptist for perving on her; in another she explains to Jesus (while he’s being crucified) that the time has come for them to go their separate ways; and in a third a hip publisher is on the phone to one of the Gospel authors, explaining that he loves the Jesus idea, but there are too many characters called Mary in the plot, and some of them might need to be culled.
There is also a strip about how the author Patricia Highsmith came to invent the Tom Ripley character; and a short biography of Andrea ‘Whips’ Feldman, one of Andy Warhol’s ‘superstars’, who killed herself by jumping off her apartment building, leaving behind a suicide note that said “I hit the jackpot”.
This last item, entitled ‘Whips’ Big Finish’, is quite different in tone from everything else in the collection. In many ways it’s full of flaws: the panels are over-crammed with text, the designs looks cluttered and jumbled as a result, and the drawings of Whips herself are somewhat clumsy. Nevertheless, there is some real psychological insight – “Everybody loved her but she was deeply unhappy. Many of the superstars acted crazy but Andrea’s mental health was truly delicate.” The surreal black humour which dominates most of the other stories in WetNurse is put on one side, and in the space of just eleven panels, we are given what seems like a real glimpse into a troubled and self-destructive life story.
The drawing style is black-and-white, sharp-edged and unfussy. The stories are absorbing, quirky, witty and well-paced. Definitely worth checking out.
Nicholas J Woodhead (W/A) • Self-published, £3.50
Review by Edward Picot
