Unedited reviews: Verbal issue 21

Pentti & Deathgirl

Emma Rendel

Jonathan Cape

On July 22^nd 1990 I was involved in an incident at a dog show in a field in County Donegal... On that day I was 12 years old, and I was attacked by a rather large Pit-bull Terrier and sustained a wound on my leg that required 12 stitches to close. As I lay in that field , bleeding, surrounded by a bunch of complete strangers who were gawping at me as I cried in my clown boxer shorts, I thought: “ this is the worst thing that will ever happen to me!” . This remained true until last night when I read Pennti & Death Girl.

The book is split into two parts. ‘Pentti’ is the story of two Finnish brothers and their reactions to a homosexual couple that moves in next door to them violence, anger and repression). Deathgirls Diary is the story of a lonely and friendless girl and her obsessions with stabbing beheading strangling and poisoning. So, it’s a barrel of fun all around then. The stories are threadbare and hateful and I found the artwork at times to be nauseating. This book made my head hurt.

NOW I realise that there may be some cultural differences between here and Sweden, the home of writer artist Emma Rendel and It is possible that I am two shallow to appreciate the deeper meanings of these tales or the artwork . It is also possible that you will love this. However it will cost you £12.99 to find out and I don’t think you’re willing to take that risk. I found the artwork at times to be nauseating

This book is so bad that it actually hurts the reader’s feelings.

Aya of Yop City (Hardcover)

By Marguerite Abouet (Author), Clement Oubrerie (Illustrator)

---

Jonathan Cape Ltd (15 Jan 2009)

I received the first volume of Aya about a year ago. I read it, put it to one side, and paid it no heed. Or so I thought. Upon receiving volume 2, I realized that I remembered every plotline character and situation. I enjoyed reading this so much I immediately went back and read the first.

The Aya Series tells the story of the titular teenage girl and her friends, family and life in the Ivory Coast during the earl part of the 1970’s. It’s very much a soap opera style affair, with romance, business and family problems. I am very surprised by how much I like these books. This is exactly the sort of thing that I should hate and yet I found myself reading two volumes cover to cover in one sitting . Why?

The key to its success is twofold: Firstly is the beautiful art. In sharp contrast to the books mentioned above this is a real pleasure to look at , being at the same time cartoonish and realistic. The characters and in particular the cities and villages are drawn in such a striking fashion that its very easy to loose yourself in some of the more detailed pictures .





French artist Oubrerie has done a fine job in making the city one of the characters in the book, as much as any of the human protagonists.

Secondly is the laid back tone of the writing. Like the dialogue from an episode of Desmonds the words and accent are both strange and at the same time reassuringly familiar and comforting. The major events are simple( a new baby, a beuty contest, a mysterious stranger in town) yet gripping , my only gripe is that it ends on a cliffhanger.

I cant wait for volume 3

Dawn Of The Dumb

Charlie Brooker

As a 30 year old Curmudugeon with a chip on my shoulder and a hatred for mainstream television, I don’t often get the opportunity to have my prejudices reinforced. Three cheers then for Charlie Brooker,Host of ScreenWipe and the Guardian TV reviwer whose Screen Burn columns have been neatly collected in two volumes. The latest of these Dawn Of The Dumb is so funny that if you don’t laugh out loud at least three times when reading it , I will personally give you ten British Pounds. For real. Ciaran.flanagan@verbalartscentre.co.uk.

Im serious.

Three thumbs up.

Reviews from Verbal Issue 20 ( uncensored)

A bit fucked off that all the jokes in this review were edited out This CENSORSHIP~! maskes it sound as if i am fair and unbiased and that is not a notion i wish to cultivate. I have reinserted said jibes in itallics.

Kelly’s Heroes


Kelly: A Memoir
by Gerry Kelly with Don Anderson
(Gill and Macmillan)


A book that’s better on the show, than on the man himself. An opportunity missed,says Ciaran Flanagan.




Here’s a secret that UTV and BBC Northern
Ireland don’t want you to know, but that I
feel is my duty to get out there. Every single
television programme ever produced in the
province of Ulster has been produced by
using an ancient magical Celtic formula that
Verbal Magazine can now reveal to you - the
reading public.
What you do is take the phrase “Northern
Irish Version of….”, and then just add the
name of an existing television programme
at the end. (The only exception to this is
Give My Head Peace - a programme so
baffling that it defies analysis of any kind).
Go on, try it. Talkback (Question Time).
Town Challenge (It’s a Knockout). Suss
(Crackerjack). Dry Your Eyes (Little Britain)
and of, course Kelly. It would be very easy
of me to say that, clearly, some chancer at
UTV saw The Late Late Show in 1989 and
thought “I’m having me some of that.”, but
that would do the man (and the show) a
disservice. Over nearly 20 years the Friday
night chat show has become a staple for
many thousands of viewers. The Kelly Show
is an Institution. But, then again so is Long Kesh.
Anyone expecting an in depth look at the
man himself had better look elsewhere.
Kelly deals largely with the show’s more
than 15 year run on Friday nights, looking at
his life before that only very briefly. It talks
about early hardships (alcoholic father,
mother working all the hours God sent, etc.)
and gives some details of how the talk show
came to be; starting with his initial primary
school teaching career and his early
broadcasting work presenting Good Evening
Ulster alongside Gloria Hunniford – which,
curiously, came about as a result of a case
of mistaken identity. And that’s about it
After that its all about the show, and if you
like the show - great! If you don’t like the
show this will be a little more arduous. A
show like Kelly lives or dies based on the
quality of its guests, and unfortunately, for
every Shirley Bassey or Garth Brooks, there
are a dozen Big Brother contestants or soap
opera cast offs. I once saw an interview with Sid Little( of Little and Large fame), so boring and unfunny , that i went blind out of contempt.
Gerry does defend his position in the
book and to be fair his reasoning (cost,
and availability) does ring true. There is
some mild excitement in the form of bomb
scares and death threats but nothing world
shattering. In short: this is a book about
the Kelly Show, and if you are a fan of the
show, then you’ll be a fan of the man and
his book. If you have something better ( im sorry ,had) to do on a friday night. Look elsewhere.

A Thanksgiving Treat.

Having been involved in some poorly acted and blocked theatre pieces over the years , it gave me great pleasure to come accross this little gem from Macy's Thanksgiving parade 1988 . It has all the charm of of a school play, with features such as a token Black Man , Doctor Dooms langer, and a retarded Hulk, all to the theme music from Back To The Future. Tremendous





Also at the 1.34 mark ROBOCOP~! appears from nowhere , pulls a lever and then fucks off without saying a word.

Happy Native massacre and land steal day America

Charlie Brooker is my Hero.

Try as i might to not watch the X-Factor, it just seems that with EoghinMania(tm) running wild that i have to deal with ill informed 13 year olds explain to me why he is the best thing since sliced bread. Leave it to good old Brooker to sum him up in perfect fashion .


It's Eoghan Quigg. Eoghan Quigg. That's not a name, that's a Countdown Conundrum. It looks like what happens when you hastily type a URL with your fingers over the wrong keys. If they still allowed text voting, he'd have been out weeks ago.

Or maybe not. Because the moment Eoghan bounds on stage, he triggers a dormant maternal instinct in millions of grandmas up and down the nation, enough to overcome any spelling barrier. Last week an elderly neighbour aahhed herself to death halfway through his performance of Anytime You Need a Friend. Because Eoghan's got a baby face. And I mean that literally, as in someone's grafted a baby's face on to the front of his head. Tiny
little eyes and a ruby-red mouth. He's like a cross between the Test Card clown and a crayon portrait of Jamie Oliver. Weird. Eerie. Like the spectral figure of an infant chimney sweep that suddenly appears in an upstairs window, gazing sadly at your back as you walk the grounds of a remote country mansion on a silent Christmas afternoon; alerted by an indefinable chill, you turn and, for the briefest moment, his wet, sorry eyes meet yours... and then he's gone.

That's Eoghan, the ghost of X Factor present. Even if he gets voted out, I'm frightened I'll still spot him intermittently in the dead of night, popping up on screen during old black-and-white films, pleading through the glass like a kitten in a microwave. Swear to God, if he's not gone by New Year's Eve I'm having my television exorcised by a priest.

Perfect.

While were on the subject , why has no one pointed out how much he looks like wee Jimmy Krankie? A point that would be better illustrated if i could find a decent fucking picture of him.

Jonah Hex

Jonah Hex: Guns of Vengence

Jimmy Palmotti and Justin Gray

In 1954 a book was published called “ Seduction of the innocent.”, a controversial work that suggested that super hero and horror comic books were corrupting the minds of the young people of America , and turning them towards GASP communism. Of course it was complete bollocks, but unfortunately it meant that for over a decade the only stories that could be published without attracting unwanted attention were war stories, science fiction, romance, comedies and westerns. As a genre the western comic book reached its absolute peak during the mid 1950’s, started to taper off during the 60’s, began to plummet during the 70’s, and sank without a trace during the 1980's. By the 1990's the comic book cowboy was dead and buried in Boot Hill, never to return. Or so we thought.

Jonah Hex was a long time staple of such western books. A hideously scarred former confederate soldier turned bounty hunter who traveled across the Wild West dishing out justice to evil doers....for a price of course. Bounty hunter or not, Hex always did the right thing, fought for truth and justice, and was always polite to ladies. No wonder people stopped buying stories about him: the old Jonah Hex series portrayed him as a gimp!!!! The new Jonah Hex series portrays him as an anti hero loner, with a twisted sense of justice. A drunken, whoring, card cheating, scum bag, which sometimes does the right thing....provided the price is right.

DC has performed nothing short of a minor miracle with this relaunch of Jonah Hex taking a dead genre and a hokey character and turning it into an ideal hero for the 21^st Century: an amoral loner with serious personality issues motivated solely by money. Hex along with the successful revival of the Lone Rangers comic adventures seems to indicate that the western rides again .Read this right now!!!!!!

Hugo Duncan : a great man.

Northern Ireland is a truly retarded place when it comes to pop culture.

Try as he might, Ciaran Flanagan can’t help but be won over by ‘Uncle Hugo’.

Drunken Duncan

Uncle Hugo: The Story of the Wee Man From Strabane, Paul Evans (Blackstaff Press)

If there’s one thing that’s rubbish about living in Northern Ireland it’s that the quality of our celebrities leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. I’m not talking about people like Liam Neeson, or George Best, you know, people with talent, who go somewhere else and do something useful. No, I mean the type of ‘Personality’ who might have been a guest on The Kelly Show. The next time you’re bored type ‘Northern Ireland Celebrity’ into Google Images and have yourself a laugh at the feeble selection of men dressed up as women, presenters, disc jockeys, show band leaders and country music enthusiasts that comes up.

Hugo Duncan is one of the faces who will appear when you do this. Hugo Duncan. It is almost impossible to dislike Hugo Duncan. And believe me: I’ve tried. He’s representative of a type of music which, by his own admission has never been fashionable, but never goes out of fashion. He is a presenter of daytime country music radio and lame local It’s a Knockout rip-offs. But he’s so bloody likeable you can’t help but forgive all this.

The book is an awful lot like the man. While there is a lot of waffle, it is interspersed with a shocking frankness about his showband days, how it led to alcohol dependency and his subsequent attempts to quit drinking. There are also occasional surprises, for example the album of rebel songs that Hugo recorded in Monaghan in 1979 – which, on being reminded of it 25 years later caused him to throw up in his car. This was of course during his ‘Drunken Duncan’ period (the rebel songs I mean, the boking is an understandable reaction). Personally, I wanted a frank expose of the Town Challenge years and gossip about how much he and George Jones hated each other, but alas, this whole era is largely glossed over. Still maybe George will write a tell-all book. In the main it is a collection of fond recollections of great days growing up, and numerous music hall dances all over the country, that for people of a certain generation will go down a treat.

The scary thing about Uncle Hugo is that, in one way or another, he is exactly like all of my uncles. He’s probably exactly like your uncles too for that matter. I think that’s his secret.

Freddie and me : Mike Dawson

Reviews from verbal issue 19. This one was rejected months ago, but the tune was changed once i took out some....errr.....sailor talk.

Ciaran Flanagan assures us, this comic really will ‘rock you’.

Queen and I

Freddie & Me, Mike Dawson (Jonathan Cape)

Even at the best of times, autobiographical comics are a funny wee beastie. It might just be me, but there’s something quite disturbing about an anthropomorphic version of a real life person pouring their heart and soul onto the page for the benefit of the fan boys (who can then, presumably, enjoy the vicarious thrills of having a social life or perhaps even a girlfriend). But to tell ones life-story in comic form, using the career arc of prog-rock/opera, super group Queen, as inspiration and reference point; that takes a special kind of bravery or mania. Mike Dawson is one such courageous madman.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that there is anything wrong, per se, with slavish fan-boy devotion to either music or comics (given that I have a Rolling Stones tattoo and review graphic novels), but it seemed to me that it would be bit of a stretch to match up the events of one’s life with the career of a band like Queen - especially given that their front man snuffed it in 1991. Not so. From his humble beginnings as a child in Leighton Buzard all the way to his later life as a struggling artist in New York, Dawson is able to use Freddie Mercury and the boys (and also, curiously, George Michael’s Wham) as a point of reference, a point of discussion and, interestingly, a point of view (literally in some cases). Although there’s a little childhood trauma and teen angst, in the main its all either pleasant nonsense or George Michael based flights of fancy. The art is nice enough. Nothing flashy, just good solid work. What makes it stand out is his use of partial frames, extreme close ups and darkness; to create a sense of suspense around what is essentially mundane.

At times the ‘Queen Love’ becomes a little nauseating (especially when referring to the Ben Elton penned musical ‘sensation’ We Will Rock You) and ultimately you have to learn to live with it. But dear me, don’t say you love Queen as much as this man.

If you’re a fan of the hard rocking, apartheid cultural embargo breaking, Wayne’s World inspiring, hair/teeth pop combo - you will LOVE this. If you are indifferent to them (as I am) you will still really enjoy it. Go out of your way to find it.