Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Children With Monster Heads

The Bulletproof Coffin #1 (of 6), by David Hine and Shaky Kane

I bought this before registering that it was partly by Shaky Kane. Older readers may remember him as that guy who did all the weird occult themed stuff in the British anthology title Deadline. I am actually surprised to see him draw something like this that is an actual narrative comic, as back then his technique was so stylised that I would not have thought him capable of it.

What lured me into buying this was skimming it and seeing that it had a comic-within-a-comic, done in the retro style of things from the 1950s and 1960s. I am a sucker for both meta-narrative and pastiche, if it is done well. This does not disappoint. The outer story is about these guys lifting stuff from a dead guy's house before it is turned into landfill. He turns out to have been a collector of outrĂ© pop culture material – bizarrely possessing what appear to be incredibly valuable comics thought never before to have been published. One of these is the inner comic - The Unforgiving Eye, about a dealer of unflinching justice with a giant eye for a face. "There is no escape from the all seeing EYE OF KA-BALA", he asserts to some luckless crim. But in the narrative, the inner comic was created by… Shaky Kane and Paul Hine.

Further odd things happen. I know I will want to read more of this, but as it is a limited series from Image, future issues will probably appear only intermittently and never make it to Irish shores.

image source

An inuit panda production

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