You may or may not have noticed that I’m actually supposed to be posting here. I’m
kinda the Halley’s Comet of the CSBG crew. I turn up very rarely, there’s a brief
flurry of excitement and then I vanish for an interminable period of time.
Anyway, one of the reasons for this is that, well, most comics these days just don’t light
a fire under me. The blog is called ‘Comics Should Be Good’ after all, and, well,
I’m finding that most of what flits under my nose these days is kind of mediocre.
Not bad, per se, just not ‘good’.
Which leads us to Jamie Smart and ‘Space Raoul’.
Jamie Smart is a plucky British cartoonist most known for ‘Bear’ a neat little comic
which came out in the wake of Jhonen Vasquez’ ‘Johnny the Homicidal Maniac’
when publishers were scrambling for the next thing which they could trademark and then proceed to
smear all over clothing, stickers and lunchboxes and flog off to pimply, middle class goth kids
at Hot Topic for a vastly inflated price.
Amongst the wave of forgettable detritus, there was something about ‘Bear’ which made
me think it wasn’t the usual load of cobbled-together crap trying in vain to replicate the
‘kowaii’ (cute but scary) work of Japanese artists like Junko Mizuno.
For one thing, it was actually funny, while pretty much everything else could, at best, manage a
sort of tired, self referential wink (”Oh, look, it’s a cute teddy bear… but
it’s evil… how potently ironic… oh, I may swoon…”), and on the
other hand, it was competently executed.
Which brings us back to ‘Space Raoul’.
Space Raoul is a plucky, bold and ever-so-British space hero who travels the galaxy with his
trusty pal, Quibble, battling Space Ne’er-do-wells, encountering strange space races and
weird space phenomena, and eating cake (possibly some sort of Space cake, but more likely some
good, stout-hearted British cake he’s packed especially for the journey). He’s a
short, pinkish-red doggy-looking thing with a bubble helmet, a star on his chest and a pipe.
And he’s utterly delightful.
In fact, so euphorically delightful that it took all my efforts to write this review and not just
write SPACE RAOUL over and over again in big letters, enthusiastically pounding and flailing my
hands, arms, elbows and face into the keyboard.
So yes, the upshot is that, after doing a bunch of ‘Space Raoul’ pieces for a bunch
of people, the kindly folks at Slave Labour Graphics have compiled them into a handy-dandy
single-volume thing. At first, it seems rather slight, but one thing with Smart is that he crams
the story into every spare corner of his page, and there’s quite a bit to read here.
There’s some neat subtexts about imperialism, Britishness, the hubris of the middle-class
and so forth, but mostly it’s jolly all-ages space fun which entertains and amuses without
talking down to its audience.
If I had one quibble (besides our hero’s trusty co-pilot), it’s that, in replicating
stuff that originally appeared in British Tabloid-sized comics into a digest-sized tpb, some of
the script does tend towards the teeny. But aside from that, it’s all jolly and pip-pip and
what ho.
Do feel free to ‘get amongst it’.
It’s the civilised thing to do.
nmmoody
Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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