Savoy Comics: Reverbstorm 3

Lord Horror #10

Reverbstorm 3—
The Big Beat of Apes
(Bo Diddley Meets
William Hope Hodgson)

Script—David Britton

Art—John Coulthart

Cover—Coulthart (after Arcimboldo)

1994

A Savoy Neotenous Apes Production

44pp

ISBN 0 86130 092 4

'The big simians are amongst us.'

Huxley, Ape and Essence

The Big Apes issue! Not since King Kong has so much Ape Power shaken a city's streets! Lord Horror harangues his radio audience and argues aesthetics with his brother. As the apes dance the Urban Dum-Dum more unfortunates receive the attention of the Razor King's blades.

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Thundering simian madness. The ubiquitous stock-brutes of a thousand Thirties melodramas take to the pavements and alleyways once more, the bastard offspring of Mighty Joe Young and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. This issue looks to reify the formula proposed by Philip José Farmer in The Jungle-Rot Kid On The Nod, namely the exquisite corpse created by cutting together William and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burne Hogarth's noble beasts are revealed as razor-wielding companions of the English Lord in his affenstunde, as splashes of deep red obscure Seurat's careful designs.

The Reverbstorm Appendix—A detailed guide to references within the series

"Mr Britton asks us to stare into the sun with him. Some of us do and, after winding our way through the tortuous labyrinth of western philosophy, rhetoric, political, artistic and scientific theory expounded in the text, we finally confront the minotaur at the centre, crouched atop a pile of human skulls and recognise ourselves with a sudden jarring shock."

D M MITCHELL, Rapid Eye 2 (1995 edition)

"Savoy flay and mock the cherished values of the Disestablishment...If it be admitted that this is a genuinely vicious body of work, it is at least one which attempts real violations or real contemporary norms, and not just the usual tepid pantomimes of rebellion...Coulthart's dark, clogged artwork is superb...The sheer darkness of Savoy's anti-heroes is true to humanity and to history in a way which other recent work fails to be."

ANDY ROBERTSON, Interzone

"A rollercoaster ride to the end of our collective night, a delirious, erotic and unbridled display of literary savagery and artistic terrorism."

D M MITCHELL, Rapid Eye 2 (1995 edition)

I have not seen in many a long series of months—or years—the kind of continued dedication to the punctilious and meticulous pen and ink work put on board by your artist. It's a striking example of the need to create and the desire to shock the sensibilities of an audience with a phantasmic subject linked to a febrile and phantasmagorical talent.

BURNE HOGARTH

"There is no clear-cut political code or ethical interpretation, because Savoy is leading us, as usual, into frighteningly unfamiliar territory...yet (in Reverbstorm) there is a strong misleading and dangerous element now present in the seductive form of rock'n'roll."

D M MITCHELL, Rapid Eye 2 (1995 edition)