Copyright: Jo Billingsley 2009

Rosie Boscawen discovers the joys of the Mallard Small Press comics

Teeming with poetic, quirky and sometimes downright disturbing short stories and comic strips, the most recent publication from Mallard Small Press, Mallard 6, is a most welcome treat.

Joe Baddeley’s sketches never fail to amuse – the particularly immature but destined always to be funny, “Your mum’s a recession”, has shot to front page fame, and is an especial favourite. The sadistic (though characteristically plain-looking) man who celebrates the death of a delicate bird is also worth a guffaw or two, though given Tom England’s poetic and sensitive bird stories in earlier publications such as Fragments, this is an even crueller joke than at first it seems. Although his The Exhilarating Small Talk strips don’t quite match up to those from previous publications, the now familiar format of two stick men conversing in a less than exhilarating manner is like a mug of Varsity hot chocolate on a cold and wet morning: non-essential and slightly self-indulgent, it starts that warm happy feeling running, so that you smile at the recollection of it all day long.

Rob Curson’s graphic short stories are in a similar vein of very slightly wrong humour. 10,074 tells the sad tale of a loner who befriends a rabbit, and subsequently loses this friend. Drawn in a comforting style with pretty flowers and bunnies and no dark forests, the protagonist’s isolation is in stark ironic contrast with his home; really, it ought not to be real. Yet the second instalment asserts this reality, when we see him feebly fighting against the monotony of his days in a “sea of dead eyes”. Gloomy stuff, indeed.

fantastically – if terrifyingly – drawn

With an interlude of Exhilarating Small Talk, we pass on to a comic by Iain Laurie, She Sung the Vampire Song. I must confess it’s not really my thing, and is not all that easy to follow. Nonetheless, it’s fantastically – if terrifyingly – drawn, with clever continuations from one scene into the next, as grotesque humans transform into yet more grotesque not-quite-humans; a metaphor for what lies within the soul, perhaps.

Indeed the souls in Christopher Bernard Leahy’s sixth instalment of The Yearning and the Recoil are not untarnished. Though the narrator’s irony is confusing during the more morally warped moments of play, for the most part it sits in delightful incongruity with the strange tale of the microcosmic society of Brayling Hall. Bryan, the central character, is beset by a naïve and honest curiosity in the nature of the trial of his attacker, making Miss Brayling’s maxim, “Kill the human! And you will save the human,” all the more unnerving.

Paracetamol Man by Simon Eaves is likewise disturbing; Eaves’ no-frills, clinical language evincing the dry, characterless air of the night aisles in a drugstore – and it does seem to be a drugstore, rather than a more British chemist. The central character is pathetic in his frantic attempt to regurgitate the pills he was stealing, the whole bottle not-so-cunningly concealed in his stomach.

Beginning and ending with Jo Billingsley’s less provocative comic strips which ridicule the natural world in a brilliantly unfair fashion, this little collection is saved from being fixated with the black humour of man’s black soul. Still, even if it wasn’t, we all need a dose of it every now and then.

For something very different, look at Tom England and Chris Leahy’s contributions to Fragments. The characters in England’s cartoons take themselves seriously, and are so immersed in what they see below the surface that they miss the ironies of everyday life. Interspersed with Leahy’s thoughtful river narratives reminiscent of Alice Oswald’s Severn poems, the two meander along, each complimenting the other as if they were old friends.

Go to mallardsmallpress.blogspot.com to find out more and purchase your own copy of these, and other, comic book treasure troves.

Rosie Boscawen