Savoy Comics: Reverbstorm 5

Lord Horror #12

Reverbstorm 5—
The Running Dogs
of Anthony Powell

Script—David Britton

Art—John Coulthart

Cover—Coulthart (after Picasso and Seurat)

1996

A Savoy Thanatopsis Production

48pp

ISBN 0 86130 096 3

'I love to sail forbidden seas...for I am quick to perceive a Horror.'

Herman Melville

A Modernist detour as the narrative becomes infected with Cubist and Expressionist allusion. Picasso replaces Seurat, T S Eliot and James Joyce provide the dialogue and Blue Blaze Laudanum visits the heart of the Big Death. High art and pop culture collide as The Waste Land is flooded with Alligator Wine. Faut que jeunesse se passe.

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As was stated in the notes for Reverbstorm #1, we believe this issue to be unprecedented in its application of Modernist aesthetics within the comics medium, despite numerous attempts in the pages of RAW. In Reverbstorm the pulp elements and the more refined intellectual elements carry equal weight for the good reason that all this material is the stuff of the characters' lives—James Joyce and T S Eliot were contemporary with HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, Braque and Picasso with Burne Hogarth and Buster Crabbe. This is the first comic series to present this kind of material in this manner without being patronising to either parties. If we could have a soundtrack, the same would apply to Béla Bartók and Screamin' Jay Hawkins. This issue juxtaposes Horror's Fascist rhetoric with its consequences in Guernica and doesn't forget that, while being the greatest poet of the century, T S Eliot (like many of his colleagues) was a notable anti-Semite.

If all this sounds way too eclectic for you (or that standard retort of the braindead, 'pretentious'), consider the words of William Blake: "This book is a mirror: when a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out."

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)