Hard Core Horror 2—
Churchill's Tick-Tock Men

Script—David Britton

Art—Kris Guidio / Harry Douthwaite / John Coulthart

Cover: The Divine Miss Matthews

1990

A Savoy Gustave Flaubert Production

60pp

ISBN 0 86130 078 5

1934: James Joyce, T S Eliot, Unity Mitford and Ezra Pound discuss events in Europe and Winston Churchill's jealousy of Lord Horror. Fascist leader Oswald Mosley tours the industrial North on a rabble-rousing mission with Horror, and Churchill sends his steam-powered Tick-Tock Men in pursuit. Jessie Matthews hits the bottle, flaming planets circle ominously and Unity Mitford shows she can deal out the violence with the best of them.

A particularly rich issue, nearly twice as many pages as #1 and some tremendous work from Guidio, assisted once again by Harry Douthwaite's sure sense of texture. Also in this issue, John Coulthart's debut in Savoy comics, providing background assistance and with two pages of flash-forwards to the Holocaust horrors in #5.

Also includes text story by David Britton: The Lung Of England

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"The imaginative black and white artwork is good. The dialogue matches the surreal and grotesque drawings to make a genuinely adult product."

FEAR

 

"The scope of Britton's achievement bears justifiable comparison with Hans Jürgen Syberberg's magnum film opus, Hitler: A Film from Germany. There, too, there is an exacting cultural reclamation of theme and material previously considered intractable to creative expression."

COLIN DE SUINN, Speakeasy

 

"A base, sordid, corrupting evil that perverts our nation... It is a so-called 'comic' book of filth and degradation in the name of art."

SUNDAY SPORT

 

"A considerable achievement in graphic art."

BYRON ROGERS, The Sunday Telegraph

 

"The Lord Horror comics certainly go beyond the bounds of public decency. They should be banned."

TEDDY TAYLOR, Tory MP

 

"A rapacious alternate history of Lord Haw-Haw filled with violence and vitriol."

DOUGLAS E WINTER

 

"The artwork is dizzyingly forceful, standing head and shoulders above almost all other comics."

RUSS KICK, Psychotropedia

 

"Executed (by Kris Guidio) in a Beardsleyesque 'yellow' manner—showers of blood and offal mingling deliriously with art nouveau backgrounds; eroticism and elegance merging seamlessly with ultraviolence and sadism."

D M MITCHELL, Rapid Eye 2 (1995 edition)