Tom Lennon

By Order of the Sleazy Geezers: British Fascist Gangs of the 1930s

Tom Lennon — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:26:45 +0000

Background Image: © The Everett Collection via Canva.com

British fascist gangs of the 1930s are largely forgotten, but what can we learn from Sleazy Geezers, Tecky Brothers, and Freaky Preachers?

Introduction

Sir Archibald Flagstaff was a fascist politician who rose to prominence in 1930s Britain and was known for his unwavering commitment to bigotry, brutality, and low-impact sports. This was the era of gangs like hit TV sensation the Peaky Blinders, and Flagstaff – like so many ambitious politicians of the era – kept similar groups of sociopaths on retainer in case he ever got the chance to overthrow democracy.

Here are a few examples:

Tecky Brothers

Image: The Everett Collection via Canva.com

The Technocracy Brotherhood was a gang of successful multi-thousandaire futurists with delusions of genius. They were closely associated with the era’s emerging technologies, such as telegrams, transistor radios, and wireless barbed wire, and supported fascism as a transitional form of tyranny, but believed things would go much more smoothly once they had full control and stopped paying taxes.

Gang members shared a passion for science fiction novels, especially the upbeat dystopian ones. Some even tried to turn science fiction into reality, often with disastrous results. In 1931, the inventor of the mobile telephone box, Cornelius Filibuster, was inspired by H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to build a giant, fully operational Martian Tripod Machine, which tragically incinerated him.

Worse was to come. Taking their cue from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, six brave technocrat gang members set out to explore the English Channel for mining opportunities in their custom-built submersible, Nautilus 2. Their vessel – a modified Model T Ford – sank immediately, as did the gang. A year later, another group of Tecky Brothers embarked on a mission to find their fallen comrades, but they drowned, too.

As a nation mourned the loss of these titans of industry, radical leftist artists and writers mocked the Brotherhood in the letters page of the Manchester Guardian, often in the form of tasteless single-sentence “jokes”. This infuriated the gang, who claimed that Britain’s creative industries had been held back for too long by empathy, introspection, and media literacy.

In 1932, the gang filed a patent for a hydraulic “Self-Learning Originality Piston” that would not only produce art and literature to order but also put artists and writers out of work. Flagstaff provided investment capital after struggling to find creative types willing to produce antisemitic cartoons. SLOP’s launch event was a disaster, however, as Flagstaff and other investors discovered it was just a fancy tracing-and-plagiarism engine. The machine was dismantled, and its parts were later used to construct the world’s first Speak & Spell.

Freaky Preachers

Image: The Everett Collection via Canva.com

The Freaky Preachers were an evangelical Anglican cult who believed themselves to be God’s chosen gang. They were passionately committed to converting the British Empire to their fundamentalist vision of Christianity “by any means necessary,” which included forced conversions and backstreet baptisms.

Their leader was defrocked radiovangelist, Revd. Godfrey “Mad God” Godard, who was known for his zero-tolerance policy towards non-gang members, especially Catholics. Godard warned them that they would go to Hell, although that could be avoided by making regular payments into his divine protection racket.

The Freaky Preachers were staunch supporters of fascist leader Sir Archibald Flagstaff, whom Godard described as “more Christlike than Christ himself.” During Godard’s Church of England exit interview, an angry Archbishop of Canterbury listed Flagstaff’s extensive collection of seven deadly sins. Godard defended Flagstaff, saying, “You see a cruel, degenerate, unrepentant monster, but God sees a roguish, man-of-the-people emissary. God told me that Himself last night, just after the 6 O’clock news.”

In truth, Godard supported Flagstaff because he believed the fascist leader was so narcissistic and mad that he’d lead the country into war alongside Nazi Germany. Godard was an early advocate of World War 2, believing it would lead to Armageddon and the gang’s swift ascension into heaven, where they’d be able to grab all the best seats.

Godard confidently predicted that the world would end during the 1936 Croquet Cup Final between the Oxford Commas and the Henley Dons. According to his prophecy, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would appear during halftime, and Christ’s Second Coming would take place just after the final whistle, assuming the game didn’t go into extra time. Godard and his gang were eager to finally meet Jesus and highlight some of the flaws in his teachings.

The Freaky Preachers included both men and women members, partly to set itself apart from the all-male Catholic gangs. Many women in the gang were former Gretty Garbers (see below) and could be easily identified by their cheerful, aggressive cruelty, fake performative piety, surgically altered faces, and chain-mounted crucifix weapons.

Gretty Garbers

Image: Getty Images via Canva.com

The Gretty Garbers were an all-women street gang often overlooked by modern feminist historians because of their anti-woke, politically incorrect hostility to other women’s rights.

Also known as the Black Blouses, gang members were fiercely loyal to Flagstaff, often throwing their ample inter-war undergarments at him during croquet tournaments. This greatly amused Flagstaff’s second wife, fascist fangirl Peggy Sledge, who was a bit weird like that.

The gang took their name from Hollywood actress Greta Garbo, whom Flagstaff was infatuated with. When Garbo rejected his numerous advances, the gang retaliated by writing scathing reviews of her 1932 box office hit, Perplexed Trombone. Though she tried to ignore this harassment, Garbo eventually broke her silence and demanded to be left alone. For a silent movie starlet of the era, breaking a silence was virtually unheard of.

Garbo not only inspired the gang’s name. Its members went to extreme lengths to look like her and hopefully catch the eye of their favorite philandering fascist. Plastic surgery had, of course, made significant advancements since the First World War, although cosmetic surgeons still relied heavily on plasterboard and glue. As a result, many of the gang’s “Greta Garbo Faces” resembled a shell-shocked gunnery sergeant from Wigan.

Sleazy Geezers

Image: The Everett Collection via Canva.com

The Sleazy Geezers were a controversial gang who believed that the British Empire was in the grip of “an epidemic of lonely gentlemen” caused by beta cuck soy boy political elites pandering to Suffragettes. They blamed overconfident women for a wide variety of social issues, including mass unemployment, industrial unrest and male pattern baldness.

The gang’s leader was Monty “The Misogynist” Montgomery, a former pro-wrestler who retired from the sport after a misjudged Half Nelson smackdown cost him his chin. Montgomery developed a woman-hating methodology he called “radical obnoxiousness,” which combined traditional sexism with modern bodybuilding techniques and tight clothes. He and fellow gang members delivered expensive weekend seminars at local community halls, with discounts available for early bookings.

Montgomery and his gang were popular amongst vulnerable young men still traumatized by the 1926 silent musical “Dance Lady Dance”. The film sparked riots upon its release for its graphic depiction of the Roaring Twenties, including a controversial dance number in which Clara Bow performed the Charleston with her elbows on display. Thanks to the gang, these young men no longer felt obliged to sit with their uncomfortable feelings, take responsibility for their emotional well-being, or develop a personality. Instead, they were encouraged to work on their muscles, wallow in their victimhood, and blame everything on Mary Wollstonecraft.

The gang was also known for their dubious get-rich-quick schemes involving pheromone scones and spring-loaded chest expanders. They supported Archibald Flagstaff’s fascist party after he promised to end women’s voting and restore medieval gender roles.

They all died alone.

Shrieky Grifters

Image: Brett Sayles from Pexels via Canva.com

The 1930s saw a rise in the popularity of amateur radio. While the BBC monopolized short-, medium-, and long-wave transmissions, ham radio enthusiasts operated on obsolete tall-wave frequencies. These could only be accessed by ladders or by mounting transmitting equipment on elaborate tripods. As a result, these amateur radio enthusiasts became known as tripodcasters.

Most of these shows were fairly harmless, often featuring young women excitedly reviewing free gifts they received from British manufacturers, such as clothing, cosmetics, or steam engines. Others showcased young men known as “fan-chaps” arguing over who would win a fight between Tarzan and Zorro.

Flagstaff’s propaganda consultant, Iago Gammon, was quick to see the potential in this new media. He formed the Shrieky Grifters, a gang of pro-fascist propagandists who could bypass the BBC’s strict broadcasting rules, which still followed the traditional Reithian principle of not giving airtime to hate-mongering spivs. The gang was known for its fierce loyalty to Flagstaff, its divisive rhetoric, and its sale of official Flagstaff-branded merchandise at massively inflated prices.

The Shrieky Grifters were behind some of the era’s most infamous conspiracy theories, like claiming Louis Pasteur’s rabies vaccine caused people to grow tails and woof. These fake stories were often used to vilify political opponents. For example, they alleged that Victorian street urchins disappeared off the streets during Edwardian times because Conservative and Labour politicians were trafficking them through a Lyons Tea Shop in Croydon. Today’s readers might find it hard to believe that so many people were gullible enough to fall for such ridiculous nonsense, but it’s important to remember this all occurred before the rise of modern fact-checking tools.

The Shrieky Grifters were soon joined by the Tecky Brothers, Gretty Garbers, Freaky Preachers, and Sleazy Grifters, who all launched their own tripodcasts. They’d make regular guest appearances on each other’s shows to boost their listening figures, sell their merchandise, and make themselves feel more important.

The biggest tripodcast star of the era – former music hall comedian Monty Barbarella – was a free speech dimwit who regularly invited Flagstaff onto his show to discuss his fascist beliefs. This went unchallenged by Barbarella, who replied with his trademark catchphrase, “Well, that’s certainly given me something to think about, vicar.”

Afterword

Flagstaff’s fascist street gangs came to an abrupt end during the Battle of Cable Street (1936), where they were beaten senseless by a coalition of Jewish groups, anti-fascists, and proto-feminist gangs like the Feisty Sisters.

The post By Order of the Sleazy Geezers: British Fascist Gangs of the 1930s appeared first on Tom Lennon.

Five Great Comic Book Parodies of Daredevil

Tom Lennon — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:40:59 +0000

Image: Marvel/IDW

Daredevil: Born Again returns to Disney+ this week, so let’s have a timely look at some of the comics that have poked fun at everyone’s favourite visually-impaired vigilante:

Scaredevil

Blind attorney and amateur chef Mutt Murdoctor (AKA Splat Murdock) secretly – and somewhat incompetently – fought crime as Scaredevil (AKA Duhdevil) in Marvel’s parody comics Not Brand Echh (1967-69) and What The–?! (1988-1993).

Marvel/Art: Fred Hembeck

Marshal Law Takes Manhattan

Veteran British comics writer and Judge Dredd co-creator Pat Mills never cared too much for superheroes, so when he and fellow 2000ad alum Kev O’Neil created a comic for Marvel’s ‘mature readers’ Epic imprint in the mid-1980s they decided to really put the boot in. Set in a dystopian future where capes and superpowers are commonplace, the eponymous Marshal Law was a government-sanctioned “hero hunter” tasked with eliminating rogue superheroes. In Marshal Law Takes Manhattan, he encounters grotesque parodies of major Marvel superheroes, including Spider-Man, Captain America and – of course – Daredevil.

He’s not identified by name, but you can tell it’s Daredevil because he keeps running in the wrong direction and he wears a costume with horribly mismatching colours.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The TMNT comic series made its debut in 1983 and was originally a parody mash-up of the hottest comics of the time, including X-Men spin-off The New Mutants (which contained numerous teenage mutants) and Frank Miller’s seminal run on Daredevil (which featured lots of ninjas). Long before it influenced the original Netflix show, Miller’s Daredevil was a big inspiration behind Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael – possibly more so than even the Italian Renaissance. For one thing, they shared an uncannily similar backstory to Ol’ Hornhead – in one version of the TMNT origin story, it was strongly hinted that the radioactive sludge that mutated our Heroes in a Half Shell came from the same truck that blinded young Matt Murdock. Both Daredevil and The Turtles were trained by wood-themed mentors (a man called ‘Stick’ and a rat called ‘Splinter’), and would often get into conflict with menacing appendage-themed ninja gangs (‘The Hand’ and ‘The Foot Clan’).

Maybe they’ll show up in season three.

Alan Moore’s Grit

Alan Moore is one of the world’s most respected and influential comics writers. He deconstructed the superhero genre with Watchmen, autopsied the Victorian era with From Hell, and inspired the wardrobe of a global protest movement with V for Vendetta. Before any of that, however, he mercilessly ripped the piss out of Frank Miller-era Daredevil for shits and giggles.

Illustrated by Mike Collins, who seamlessly blends a faux Miller-esque art style with a Mad magazine-style superabundance of background gags, the strip originally appeared in Marvel UK’s 80s anthology monthly, The Daredevils. It’s a good example of Moore’s critically underappreciated early, funny period.

Marvel/Art: Mile Collins

You can find the whole goddamn thing here.

What If?

Many of these parodies focus on Frank Miller’s early-80s Daredevil work, which made his name in the industry and transformed Daredevil from a swashbuckling sub-par Spider-Man to the comics noir crimefighter that Disney+ subscribers know and love. Miller was not averse to a Daredevil parody himself, though, as this one-page strip from Marvel’s classic alternative universe comic What If? proves:

Marvel/Art: Frank Miller

Granted, it’s not the best thing Miller’s ever done, but some would say it’s an improvement on his more recent work.

Five great Daredevil collections at Amazon

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Tom Waits, Grand Rex Paris, 29th May 2000

Tom Lennon — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 04:04:24 +0000

He’d given two encores – and the house lights had long since come up – but the audience were still on their feet and making an awful lot of noise thirty minutes after Tom Waits had left the stage of Le Grand Rex in Paris. After forty-five minutes, and much to the relief of the bewildered theatre staff, the numbers had dwindled. Most had accepted that he wasn’t coming back and had reluctantly made their way to the exits. There was a stubborn, hardcore element, though, who carried on whooping, stamping, and roaring.

I know this because I was one of them.

It was the evening of 29^th May 2000, which was either the first year of the twenty-first century or the last year of the twentieth, depending on your personal levels of pedantry. The venue, Le Grand Rex, was a lavish Art Deco cinema-slash-concert hall marinated in history, a marinade that presumably contained plenty of absinthe.

In other words, it was the perfect place to see a Tom Waits concert.

In 2025, Time Out ranked Le Grand Rex as the most beautiful cinema in the world, and who am I to argue with people who used to publish my listicles? As it happens, the place caught my eye years before I saw Tom Waits there, during my first visit to Paris. I’m no architecture nerd, but I know a good-looking building when I see it. This chic, sexy cinema looked so effortlessly cool, so defiantly Parisian, that I half expected it to light up a Gitanes and go for a wander around the Champs-Élysées with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.

Inside Le Grand Rex on the night of the concert there was no sign of Belmondo or Deneuve, but there was a tangible buzz in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere I’d read about in vintage rock magazines with cover-mounted CDs about gigs that usually happened before I was born. Maybe someone reading this now can relate to the phenomenon. People had waited a long time for this night, and many had journeyed a fair distance. In my case, it had been a thirteen-year slog with a Channel crossing on top. The reason I’d travelled all the way to Paris to see Tom Waits was that I couldn’t get tickets for his London gig, and the reason I couldn’t get tickets for the London gig was that there wasn’t one.

Judging from the accents I heard in the lobby, I wasn’t the only one to make this pilgrimage. Waits would eventually perform for one night only at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2004, but the tickets were impossible to get hold of for anyone but Hollywood A-listers and their entourages. Many of us in Le Grand Rex that night in 2000 would return to the venue in 2008 when the European leg of the Glitter and Doom Tour once again bypassed the Big Smoke. The French Tom Waits fans who couldn’t get tickets for his Paris gigs must have hated us.

We took our seats. The lights dimmed, the drum roll started, and the crowd erupted. The drum kept rolling, he was taking his time, making us Wait. The crowd went quiet, staring at the stage. “What’s he building in there? What the Hell is he building in there?”

People were still being ushered to their seats when Tom Waits entered through a side door in the stalls. There was a very, very loud roar. The spotlight followed him up to the stage as he threw fistfuls of glitter at the frenzied audience while growling The Black Rider’s “Lucky Day (Overture)” into his bullhorn:

Ladies and gentlemen, Harry’s Harbour Bizarre is proud to present,

Under the Big Top tonight, Human Oddities.

That’s right, you’ll see the Three-Headed Baby

You’ll see Hitler’s brain

Lea Graff, the German midget who sat in J.P. Morgan’s lap

Like his then-recent album Mule Variations (1999), Waits’s set list touched on most of the bases of his long and varied career. He played plenty of material from his Island-era of radical reinvention and sonic experimentation, from 1983’s Swordfishtrombones through to 1993’s The Black Rider. Rain Dogs (1985), my Tom Waits gateway album and personal favorite, was surprisingly well-represented on the setlist. The only early, Asylum-era song in attendance was a faultless rendition of “Invitation To The Blues” from Small Change (1976).

Many concerts have their moments, but this one had an abundance of them. There was the sight of Waits sporting a mirrorball hat during Mule Variation’s “Eyeball Kid,” which seemed to fill the venue with a weirdly mesmerizing constellation of reflected light. Then there was his comically absurd interaction with a roadie fixing a snapped piano string, leading Waits to improvise a new song, which he assured us was “fresh out of the oven”. But the moment that turned me into a blubbering mess was when the audience (me included) sang along to “Innocent When You Dream” from Franks Wild Years (1987), prompting Waits to look up from his piano and purr, “Beautiful.”

His legendary skills as a between-song raconteur were on full display that night, offering top-quality surrealist anecdotes and asides at regular intervals. Explaining the ban on flash photography at the gig, Waits told us about his early career in the Bolshoi Ballet. He was at the top of a human pyramid when someone in the audience took a photo. “My career,” he explained, “was over in a flash.”

Later, an English guy in the audience heckled Waits about the lack of UK dates. “Y’know,” growled Waits, “I have these embarrassing family members who keep following me around.” Cue the band, who launched into Cemetery Polka, a song about embarrassing family members.

Forty-five minutes after Tom Waits had finished his second encore, a plump, harried-looking theatre manager in a dinner suit and bow tie combo took to the stage and cried, “Monsieur Waits is no longer here. He has gone to his hotel and is probably in bed now. Please, please go home!”

Le Grand Rex took one last drag from its Gitanes. It seemed like a good time to leave.

This is an updated and expanded version of an article that appeared in Gig of My Life, a zine produced to benefit the victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Here’s the original piece.

Tom Waits – Le Grand Rex, Paris, 29th May 2000 – Setlist

Lucky Day (Overture)

The Black Rider

Jockey Full of Bourbon

Jesus Gonna Be Here

In the Colosseum

Strange Weather

Get Behind the Mule

Chocolate Jesus

Hold On

Eyeball Kid

Tango Till They’re Sore

Cemetery Polka

A Little Rain

Picture in a Frame

Invitation to the Blues

Innocent When You Dream

Gun Street Girl

Who Are You

Shore Leave

Rain Dogs

I’ll Shoot the Moon

Encore 1: Come On Up to the House

Encore 2: House Where Nobody Lives

Soundtrack to this article

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Marvel vs DC: a Secret War in Crisis

Tom Lennon — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 20:14:26 +0000

Background Image: © Stanislav Kondratiev via Canva.com

These days, there are so many superhero movies and TV shows that Hollywood’s starting to resemble a big comic shop that’s obscenely rich and massively out of touch with the rest of the world. While spandex-clad franchises might seem harmless enough to anyone but Martin Scorsese, their popularity has drawn attention to a conflict that’s anything but heroic. This is the dark, weird, and often embarrassingly dressed world of superhero sectarianism.

Scorsese provoked a global geek-rage following revelations that he once told an interviewer that superhero movies “are not cinema”. The legendary film director vehemently denied this, claiming what he actually said was: “People who get into fights during DC or Marvel films are not moviegoers I’d care to share my popcorn with”. Scorsese, of course, famously invented the popcorn protest.

The mad-browed auteur had been discussing the recent case of Dicksplash P. Bubblecroft, the unhinged Zack Snyder fan who sustained life-changing injuries while clumsily review-bombing the new Superman movie. Scorsese described it as “a worrying escalation of nerd-on-nerd violence”, but to jaded comic fans, this was nothing new.

The Golden Age of Toxic Nerds

Sequential arts historian Professor Zeppo Connery claims that the first conflict between comics fans took place outside a Brooklyn drugstore in 1939, when proto-DC street gang the Defective Convicts snatched a pristine copy of Marvel Comics #1 from a 10-year-old boy. The comic featured the first appearance of Marvel’s Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner, which prompted the mean-spirited thugs to set fire to the book and then drown it. The victim subsequently developed a phobia of both fire and water and was later unable to sell his comic at auction.

Scheduled fights between comics fans were suspended following Pearl Harbor (the Japanese military attack, not the Ben Affleck movie). President Roosevelt urged squabbling fanboy factions to put aside their differences and swap their autographed sketches for war bonds. Many wartime comics fans began collecting war bonds, which became highly collectible, especially the autographed ones. This armistice continued into the post-war years, as fans focused more on economic prosperity, rock and roll music, and the professional comic artist bare-knuckle boxing scene.

The Silver Age

Hostilities resumed in the 1960s, a decade synonymous with peace, love, and comics fans tear-gassing each other on American campuses. The arrival of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the Avengers marked the start of the Marvel Age of Comics and a new generation of radicalized comic readers.

These college-educated “Trotskyite Marvelites” would taunt and bully DC fans who tended to be younger and therefore shorter. They wrote angry letters to Playboy magazine, condemning Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman as “out of touch, bourgeois, and hyphen-less”.

This noisy subculture of “Four-Color Freaks” and “Spinner Rack Johnnies” had a disproportionately strong influence on the Sixties, like an uncool Velvet Underground. The popular counterculture phrase “Stick it to the man”, for instance, was inspired by the Merry Marvel Marching Militia’s anthem “Stick it to the Superman”. This was a period of turbulent intergenerational conflict that spawned many modern anti-elder insults, although back then, “OK boomer” was still just a friendly greeting between post-war adolescents.

The 1970s comic convention boom gave comic fans a safe space where they could beat each other up in costume. This “Bullpen Bullying” later formed the backdrop to the failed sitcom spinoff That Seventies Seinfeld. Its unaired pilot featured high school friends Jerry (Freddie Prinze Jr), George (Elijah Wood), Elaine (Zooey Deschanel), and Kramer (Henry Kissinger) attacked by a mob of angry Marvel fans who caught them buying a Superman fridge magnet, played by Dean Cain.

1980s: Dark Knights of the Watchmen

Once an unfashionable underdog, DC upped their game in the 80s by attracting top comics talent who produced books that appealed to an older, taller readership. DC soon had extremist fan gangs to rival Marvel’s notorious MCUVF, like the Provisional JLA and the Real JSA. DC hardliners like the notorious husband-and-wife team Max E. and Minnie Sears would taunt recently bereaved Marvelites during candle-lit vigils for the X-Men’s Jean Grey, Elektra, and the original Captain Marvel, who had all recently died for the first time.

Frank Miller’s classic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) was hailed for its uncompromising critique of notoriously ageist Marvel gangs. The story featured a middle-aged Caped Crusader subjected to elder abuse by a gang of adolescent sociopaths called “The Mutants”, a term as synonymous with Marvel as “Stan Lee” and “unethical work-for-hire contracts”. Later that year, Watchmen (1986½) took this critique even further. Its mature deconstruction of superhero comics exposed some of the genre’s more problematic tropes and made people think twice about getting into scraps while dressed as Doctor Octopus.

Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns topped The New York Times Bestseller list, so journalists at The New York Times were forced to read them. For many, it was their first exposure to “The Fandom Problem” and led to a six-month Times investigation into the American comics industry entitled “Biff! Pow! Comics are just for thugs these days”.

This sent shockwaves through Marvel and DC offices, with senior management afraid of being hit with congressional hearings and big cover-mounted warning stickers. The subsequent 1988 Marvel/DC Crossover Treaty was a watershed moment for the industry, and the sight of former enemies putting aside their differences and reading each other’s comics inspired the world. In the years that followed, the Berlin Wall came down, South Africa’s apartheid system was abolished, and the members of Fleetwood Mac finally attended counselling.

The 1990s: The Age of Nerdecadence

The 90s were a period of excess for Marvel and DC. With a speculator boom driving up revenues and sectarian tensions no longer in the air, comic conventions became champagne-guzzling feasts of unbridled hedonism, where an autographed Rob Liefeld anatomy book could get you anything you desired. Traditional boundaries between Marvel and DC were breaking down, and there was a permissive, anything-goes approach to intercompany crossovers.

While the liberal comic elites partied, disgruntled veterans of the Marvel/DC wars like Mylar Bagge and Baxter Paper could be found lurking in the dark corners of what was still called “The Inter-Net” before it was asked to remove the hyphen. They felt increasingly betrayed by the publishing houses they’d devoted the best years of their lives to. During this period, recognizable traits of online toxicity began to emerge, secretly beta tested by petty, squabbling dorks. The term “flame war” was coined by angry fans of The Human Torch, while the first recorded act of trolling occurred in an AbUsenet group dedicated to Pip the Troll.

21st Century Fanboys

Dissident factions from both sides longed for a return to the glory days of superhero sectarianism, when they’d happily whack each other across the face with rolled-up Previews catalogues. As superheroes began to dominate the 21st-century movie landscape, they eagerly anticipated a resumption of hostilities, welcoming the likes of Spider-Man, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight as Hollywood-subsidized recruitment videos.

Things didn’t go quite according to plan, however. While these hit movies created a new generation of comics fans, most weren’t interested in traditional Marvel vs DC tribal conflicts. Their focus was on challenging problematic tropes from the past through fan-based activist groups like the Social Justice League, the Upper West Side Avengers, and the Easily-Offended Guardian Readers of the Galaxy. Unfortunately, due to their ideological inflexibility, self-righteous neo-puritanism, and single-issue monomania, they spent most of their time fighting amongst themselves.

Despite this, they did manage to secure some concessions from Marvel and DC, who took steps to make their superhero universes more progressive, diverse, and inclusive. As a result, the formerly male-dominated comic convention scene saw an influx of smart, progressive young women who brought new voices and a hitherto unseen level of sophistication to graphic storytelling and cosplay.

The male-dominated veterans of the Marvel vs DC wars were horrified by these developments, which made them easy prey for unscrupulous right-wing podcasters. Some joined ultra-conservative “TradFan” communities, turning their back on modern superhero universes for the back-issued embrace of a predominantly male, predominantly white bygone era. They missed the old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” approach to gay superheroes and were particularly hostile to trans characters, despite struggling to name any. This was ironic given how many of them would later transition from superhero fans to supervillain supporters.

Others went even further and joined far-right “Guns, Jesus, and Graphic Novel” militias like The Deep State Avengers, The Anti-Vaccine Titans, The X-Bros, The Birds of Prayer, The Fantastic 4Chan, The Challengers of the Indisputable, and Womb Patrol. The most extreme sanctuary for embittered comic war veterans was the Snyderverse Revivalists, a superhero movie-inspired doomsday cult that emerged during the 2010s. Fanatics like Dicksplash P. Bubblecroft violently rejected all forms of superhero storytelling except for a few DC movies directed by Zack Snyder. Followers believed that these films contained mystical teachings and esoteric knowledge that could only be understood by a select group of “High-IQ Disnydles”, a term that was later rejected for looking too much like “Disney”.

They believed that Snyder was inspired by a series of mystical transmissions he received from an extradimensional entity known only as “Clive from the Planet Zanussi.” Snyder himself has strongly denied these claims, and when recently asked to comment on the subject, said: “Will you please tell these assholes to leave me alone.”

The movement imploded in 2021 when the release of Snyder’s original cut of Justice League did not lead to a prophesied Apocalyptic Rapture or result in any of the members getting a girlfriend. In the years that followed, a variety of quasi-religious splinter groups have emerged, including The Caped Edge-Lord Baptists, The Slo-Mo Episcopalians, The Evangelical No-Star Review Presbyterians, The Pentecostal Cavillistas, and the Church of the Latter-Day Marthas. These groups remain committed to sabotaging “heretical” superhero movies while swooning over pictures of Henry Cavill.

The radical movements attracted veterans from both ends of the comics publishing spectrum. As former DC gang member turned Snyderverse Revivalist Lon Bochs puts it, “Fighting fellow DC fans was better than fighting no one at all.” The era of traditional superhero sectarianism was over, replaced by a chaotic, endless conflict fueled by rage, gullibility, and low self-esteem. “What we have now is a civil war”, notes Professor Connery. “Just like that movie where Iron Man fights Captain America, or the other one with Mary Jane from Spider-Man.”

Martin Scorsese might not like it, but that’s going to take more than just a popcorn protest to fix.

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Morrison, Grant
Quitely, Frank

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Loeb, Jeph
Sale, Tim

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The post Marvel vs DC: a Secret War in Crisis appeared first on Tom Lennon.

Alejandro Jodorowsky: A ‘Jodoverse’ Comics Reading Guide

Tom Lennon — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 23:17:22 +0000

Not many people get an entire universe named after themselves, but that’s exactly what Alejandro Jodorowsky has managed to do. Sure, it’s only a fictional comics universe, but they’re all the rage right now and tend to be the sole preserve of huge American publishing entities with vast IP portfolios and a track record of shafting their creators. They’re not usually associated with cult filmmakers with mystic tendencies who are now in their nineties.

This place is called The Jodoverse – AKA The Metabarons Universe – and there’s nowhere quite like it in comics or, indeed, anywhere else. It’s big, it’s weird, and can sometimes be so ferociously violent that it makes Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy look like Zooey Deschanel’s New Girl.

Here’s a list of the comic titles that make up the Jodoverse, all of which are English translations published by Humanoids (the US-based offshoot of legendary French comics publisher, Les Humanoïdes Associés). As an Amazon affiliate, I may earn a small commission for any purchases made via this article, but it won’t affect the price you pay, and it’ll earn you my eternal gratitude.

The Incal (1980-1988)

Writer: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Artist: Jean (‘Moebius’) Giraud

The one that started it all – the Jodoverse’s Big Bang, so to speak. Originally serialised in French comics anthology Metal Hurlant (and later its US counterpart, Heavy Metal), The Incal is a gorgeously illustrated and staggeringly original cosmic saga in which Jodorowsky reclaimed and repurposed many of the certifiably insane concepts from his famously unproduced and probably unfilmable 70s adaptation of the sci-fi novel, Dune. Together with the late Franco-Belgian comics legend Moebius, Jodo’s storyboard artist on Dune, they chronicled the reluctant spiritual quest of protagonist John DiFool from selfish dystopian-dwelling private (in every sense of the word) dick to enlightened cosmic entity and back again. The Incal introduced many of the concepts and characters that Jodorowsky would revisit in the decades to follow (including many, many things with a ‘Techno-‘ and ‘Paleo-‘ prefix), and remains an undisputed comic art masterpiece.

The Incal

The Incal
Humanoids, Inc.
ABIS_BOOK

$34.20

Buy on Amazon

The Metabarons (1992-2003)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artist: Juan Giménez

Tonally, The Incal’s most famous spin-off title is a very different beast to its illustrious predecessor. A classic in its own right, The Metabarons (also known as ‘The Saga of The Metabarons’) is a multi-generational epic that explores the family tree of The Incal’s bald master assassin, tracing their origins back to their humble beginnings as stonecutters on a planet made of marble. To put it another way, it’s like an unbelievably violent and outrageously explicit version of the popular TV show Who Do You Think You Are?

With beautiful, painted visuals by the late Argentinian comics artist Juan Giménez, this is a wonderfully operatic space opera full of blood, honour, patricide, and ritualised initiations that involve mutilation (families, huh?). It also manages to be even more outrageously bonkers than The Incal: when comic writer Warren Ellis says “There is literally a new and mad idea on every page,” he’s not exaggerating.

The Metabarons

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Gimenez, Juan

$31.06

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Before the Incal (1988-1995)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artist: Zoran Janjetov

Yes, it’s a prequel, but don’t let that put you off. Published not long after the original Incal finished, the story was illustrated by the Serbian comic artist and Moebius protégé Zoran Janjetov. Telling a more grounded, noir-ish tale (no cameos from God this time around), Before the Incal delves into the traumatic backstory of Incal protagonist John DiFool and his seedy dystopian city-shaft home with a compelling tale of corruption and conspiracy.

Before The Incal

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Janjetov, Zoran

$35.07

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The TechnoPriests (1998-2006)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artist: Zoran Janjetov

Another Incal spin-off, this time featuring a protagonist called Albino (and yes, he is). Told mainly in flashback, it charts Albino’s rise from unwanted offspring of an intergalactic cheese magnate to the Moses-like leader of Cosmic Exodus, because that’s how character arcs play out in the Jodoverse. Beautifully illustrated by Before the Incal’s Zoran Janjetov, who had moved on from his early Moebius-influenced linework to something more distinct and personal.

Technopriests (New Edition)

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Janjetov, Zoran

$40.45

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After the Incal/Final Incal (2000/2008-14)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artists: José Ladrönn (Final Incal); Moebius (After the Incal)

When a deadly metallic virus threatens to eradicate all organic life in the universe, our only hope is John DiFool and the power of L-U-R-V-E – providing John’s various selves don’t kill each other first! When Jodorowsky and Moebius released the first volume of their long-awaited Incal sequel in 2000, it was quite the bande dessinée du jour, as they say in fancy Parisian comic shops. Unfortunately, Moebius was unable to complete After the Incal, so, with his blessing, Jodorowsky teamed up with the immensely talented Mexican artist, Ladrönn. Rather than continue from where Moebius left off, they restarted the entire series from scratch under a new title, Final Incal. A satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, Ladrönn’s artwork is stunning and even manages to surpass Moebius’s After the Incal work.

Final Incal

$27.35

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After the Incal Vol. 1: The New Dream

$5.95

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Megalex (1999-2007)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artist: Fred Beltran

Some would argue that Megalex shouldn’t be classified as a Jodoverse title as it doesn’t seem to be set in the same Incal/Metabarons universe as everything else on this list. Others (this author included), have a looser definition of ‘Jodoverse’, possibly encouraged by its publisher who lists it in the Jodoverse section of their website. As for the book itself? Jodorowsky explores his familiar theme of nature vs tech, although not as successfully as he’d later do with Final Incal. It features the distinctive CG stylings of Fred Beltran, which jarringly switches to traditional hand-drawn art for the final volume.

Verdict: it’s alright, mostly.

Megalex: The Complete Story

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Fred Beltran

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Weapons of the Metabaron (2008)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artists: Travis Charest and Zoran Janjetov

An odd one, this. Travis Charest – the Canadian artist best known for his work on the American superhero comic WildC.A.T.S. and his lush, highly detailed cover illustrations – moved to Paris in the early 2000s to work on a Metabarons story called Dreamshifters. This would look at how the greatest warrior in the galaxy acquired his formidable arsenal (his weapons, not the English soccer team). Unfortunately, Charest was a far from prolific perfectionist, and by 2007, only 29 pages of the story were complete. These were published as Weapons of the Metabaron with a framing sequence by Zoran (Before the Incal, Technopriests) Janjetov, who probably knocked out his 26 pages in the same amount of time as Charest spent prepping a panel.

Having said that, those 29 pages by Charest sure are purty.

Weapons of the Metabaron

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Charest, Travis
Janjetov, Zoran

$29.99

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Metabarons Genesis: Castaka (2007-2013)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artist: Das Pastoras

A beautifully illustrated prequel to the Metabarons saga, which possibly makes it a pre-prequel. The original series explored the colourful genealogy of the galaxy’s premier hardman, but Metabarons: Castaka goes further back and tells the story of the ancestors of his ancestors. Turns out that before they were humble stone-cutters on a planet made of marble, the Meta-Fam lived a semi-feudal, samurai-like existence on an isolated world. This was before mom, dad and the kids turned to space piracy to make ends meet. Meta-Ancestors, huh?

Metabarons Genesis: Castaka

Jodorowsky, Alexandro
Pastoras, Das
Jason Aaron

$1,087.51

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The Metabarons: Second Cycle (2015-2018)

Writers: Jerry Frissen and Jodorowsky
Artists: Valentin Sécher, Niko Henrichon

While the Jodoverse titles have featured work by some of the comic industry’s finest artists, up until 2015 they were all written solely by Jodorowsky himself. That changed with The Metabarons: Second Cycle, which was originally published under the rather confusing, singular-not-plural title The Metabaron. As the original title suggests, albeit obliquely, this series focuses on the most recent Metabaron, the bald badass from The Incal. While Jodorowsky received a ‘Story by’ credit, the series is written by Humanoids veteran Jerry Frissen, with an English-language adaptation by the cult South African filmmaker Richard Stanley.

Incidentally, the documentary film Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is well worth your time and serves as an ideal double-bill companion to the excellent Jodorowsky’s Dune .

The Metabarons: The Complete Second Cycle

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Frissen, Jerry
Sécher, Valentin

$21.87

Buy on Amazon

Simak (2019)

Writer: Jerry Frissen
Artist: Jean-Michael Ponzio

The latest Jodoverse series, with Frissen flying solo and not a Jodorowsky in sight. Future noir yarn in which an amnesiac cop investigating the murder of his colleague gets mixed up with the Simak, the loathsome transhuman critters last seen in Metabarons: Second Cycle.

Simak: Manhunt on Solar Corona

Frissen, Jerry
Ponzio, Jean-Michel

$21.45

Buy on Amazon

The Incal: Psychoverse (2022)

Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Yanick Paquette

Now in his 90s, Jodorowsky increasingly delegates the task of universe-building to younger creators, and who can blame him? In Psychoverse, Russell and Paquette tell the story of a group of renegade nuns from an extradimensional afterlife who embark on an interplanetary killing spree in search of the elusive Incal. This prequel to The Incal features John DiFool, The Metabaron, and Kill Wolfhead from the main series, and Russell and Paquette skillfully choreograph these characters around the galaxy, ensuring they don’t encounter each other before they’re supposed to

The Incal: Psychoverse

Russell, Mark
Paquette, Yanick
McCaig, Dave

$20.05

Buy on Amazon

The Incal: Dying Star (2023)

Writer: Dan Watters
Artist: Jon Davis-Hunt

A mad cosmic tragedy featuring Commander Kaimann, the aristocrat-turned-semi-reptillian pirate we first met in Before the Incal.

The Incal: Dying Star

Watters, Dan
Davis-Hunt, Jon

$24.99

Buy on Amazon

The Incal: Kill Wolfhead (2023)

Writer: Brandon Thomas
Artist: Pete Woods

Incal spin-off featuring the European comics’ most libidinous lycanthrope, Kill Wolfhead.

The Incal: Kill Wolfhead

Thomas, Brandon
Woods, Pete

$18.70

Buy on Amazon

The Jodorowsky Library (6 volumes)

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artists: Various

Featuring deluxe collected editions of Jodorowsky comics from the Jodoverse and beyond. Each volume features at least two main stories and a veritable plethora of bonus material (including rare pages from Jodorowsky’s never-reprinted comics debut in 1966!)

Book One: featuring bawdy secret agent tale Anibal 5 (art: Georges Bess) and the aforementioned Megalex (art: Fred Beltran), along with a selection of stories from his anthology work Screaming Planet.

Book Two: featuring modern-day, El Topo-esque spiritual western Son of the Gun (art: Georges Bess) and the harrowing tale of a mime in Nazi-occupied France, Pietrolino (art: Olivier Boiscommun).

Book Three: an all-Jodoverse volume featuring the aforementioned Metabarons Genesis: Castaka (art: Das Pastoras), Weapons of the Metabaron (art: Travis Charest and Zoran Janjetov), After the Incal (art: Moebius) and Final Incal (art José Ladrönn).

Book Four: featuring the English-language debut of 80s psychedelic Saga of Alandor (art: Silvio Cadelo) and the unfinished erotic tale Diosamante (art: Jean-Claude Gal), more tales from his Screaming Planet, and articles about Metal Hurlant and Jodorowsky’s legendary Dune movie project.

Book Five: featuring the Tibetan-set mystical adventure The White Lama and Jodorowsky’s first YA story, The Magical Twins.

Book Six: Satirical sauciness with Madwoman of the Sacred Heart (art: Moebius) and Twisted Tales (art: François Boucq)

The Jodorowsky Library: Book Three: Final Incal • After the Incal…

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Pastoras, Das
Charest, Travis

$37.93

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Humanoids Presents: The Jodoverse

Writer: Jodorowsky
Artists: Various

If you’re new to the Jodoverse and you’re not too sure where the best place is to start frying your synapses, you could do a lot worse than this reasonably-priced tasty hors d’oeuvre of brainwrong, which features excerpts from The Incal, The Metabarons, The Technopriests and Megalex.

Humanoids Presents – The Jodoverse

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Giraud, Jean
Gimenez, Juan

$3.49

Buy on Amazon

If you want to find out more about The Jodoverse, it’s worth checking out Christophe Quillien’s books Deconstructing The Incal and Deconstructing The Metabarons (both published by Humanoids). I’ll regularly update this post as new titles become available, but in the meantime, please let me know if there’s anything I’ve overlooked via Facebook or Threads.

The Comics Universe of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Métal Hurlant: the French comic that changed the world

Metal Hurlant Comic Strips in English

The post Alejandro Jodorowsky: A ‘Jodoverse’ Comics Reading Guide appeared first on Tom Lennon.

Philippe Druillet Comics in English

Tom Lennon — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:08:17 +0000

English language graphic novels by Metal Hurlant co-founder and baroque universe builder Phillipe Druillet have been out of print for years. Thankfully, veteran British graphic novel publishers Titan Books have come to the rescue. Their Druillet Library reissues look great: large format hardback volumes printed on good quality paper just like proper bandes dessineés albums ought to, but without the need for a Duolingo French binge. If only the Moebius estate would let them do something similar with The Airtight Garage.

Many of the titles feature Druillet’s enduring antihero, Lone Sloane, who I’ve described elsewhere as a ‘sort of a demented mashup of Han Solo and a sweary Silver Surfer’. I stand by that description.

Any prices displayed are in US dollars, although the links will take you to your local Amazon store where they’ll be priced in your local currency. As an Amazon affiliate, I may earn a small commission for any purchases made via this article, but it won’t affect the price you pay and it’ll earn you my gratitude and a healthy karma offset.

The 6 Voyages of Lone Sloane

This collection of early Lone Sloane adventures was first published in 1972 and featured stories that originally appeared in the French weekly anthology comic, Pilote (home of Asterix, Valerian and Blueberry). As the title suggests, it contains six loosely-connected, self-contained yarns – Les Future Shocks, if you will. Despite being early work that first appeared in a comic targeted at an adolescent audience, the art is pure Druillet and the stories are delightfully bonkers.

A great introduction.

Lone Sloane: The 6 Voyages of Lone Sloane

Druillet, Philippe
Druillet, Philippe

$36.45

Buy on Amazon

Lone Sloan: Delirius Vol. 1

Written by Snowpiercer co-creator Jacques Lob and originally serialised in Pilote, this was the first album-sized Lone Sloan epic. Our red-eyed antihero finds himself on the mad planet Delirius (“The debauched Planet of a Hundred Thousand Pleasures”), caught between the ruthless ambitions of the evil Imperator Shaan and a rebellious order of gangster monks called the Red Redemption. Presumably their ancestors were heavily involved in Western-themed videogame franchises.

Dark, epic and mind-bogglingly imaginative. A classic.

Lone Sloane: Delirius Vol. 1

Lob, Jacques
Druillet, Phillippe
Druillet, Phillippe

$23.30

Buy on Amazon

Lone Sloan: Gail

A broken Sloane finds himself trapped on a prison planet at the mercy of evil aliens ‘made of metal and hate.’ Their ruler, Merennen, wants to usurp power from Sloane’s archenemy, the Imperator Shaan, while dark, otherworldly forces manipulate both sides.

This was the first Metal Hurlant-era Lone Sloane adventure, and Druillet embraces his increased artistic freedom with gusto. The story deals with big ideas and the artwork delivers them in breathtaking style, yet it still feels deeply personal. While the opening pages were produced in 1974 and serialised in early issues of Metal Hurlant, the story was completed in 1978 after the death of his wife, Nicole, and photographs of her are incorporated into the artwork. The grief-induced rage that fuelled The Night (1976) now contains a glimmer of hope. As he writes in his 1981 introduction “Let the darkness be nothing but the chiaroscuro which highlights the beauty of things.”

Lone Sloane: Gail (The Philippe Druillet Library)

Druillet, Phillipe
Druillet, Phillipe

$19.99

Buy on Amazon

Lone Sloane: Salammbo

In 1862, Gustave Flaubert followed up Madam Bovary – his classic study of literary infidelity – with a big, blood-splattered historical epic in which a violent mercenary becomes obsessed with a beautiful priestess and lots of people die. In 1980, Druillet relocated the story from ancient Carthage to his own psychedelic sci-fi playground, ditched the book’s male lead and replaced him with Lone Sloane. Just as well literary Twitter wasn’t a thing back in 1980 (or, for that matter, 1862).

Side note: Druillet’s adaption of Salammbô was, in turn, adapted into a 2004 point-and-click PC adventure game. Druillet was heavily involved in the game’s creation, but it hasn’t aged brilliantly. This was no Resident Evil 4 and his comic is much better.

Lone Sloane: Salammbô Vol. 1 (The Philippe Druillet Library)

Flaubert, Gustave
Druillet, Phillipe
Druillet, Phillipe

$20.07

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The Night

Written just a year after the death of his wife, Nicole, The Night (La Nuit) is one of the most personal, harrowing comics ever created. It tells the tale of a drug-addicted, post-apocalyptic biker gang on a doomed quest for the ultimate high. A sense of suffocating nihilism and frustrated rage permeate the story, with dialogue so terse it makes Frank Miller comics sound positively verbose. Visually stunning, its depiction of murderous sci-fi bikers was a huge influence on the Mad Max series of films, especially the most recent Fury Road. It also features a bizarre Rolling Stones musical interlude, which is something you don’t get enough of in comics these days.

A raw, powerful, unforgettable comic where an emotionally vulnerable creator uses art to process his grief. Essential reading.

The Night (Graphic Novel)

Druillet, Philippe

$39.42

Buy on Amazon

Lone Sloan: Chaos

Lone Sloane is dead and his corpse is being transported by train to his old enemy, the tyrannical Imperator Shaan. Like most train journeys, though, don’t go quite as scheduled – and, yes, we’re talking about something a bit more cosmic than a rail replacement bus service to Delirius. The red-eyed inter-dimensional wanderer returns for a final (possibly, we’ll see) head-to-head showdown with his arch-nemesis in a meditation on God, sex, life, death, art and good versus evil that’s cleverly disguised as an epic space opera.

Lone Sloane: Chaos (Graphic Novel)

Druillet, Phillippe

$23.41

Buy on Amazon

Yragael and Urm the Mad

Written by Michel Demuth and inspired by British author Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga (more on that later), Yragaël and Urm the Mad features two separate but interconnected stories. The first opens with the birth of the universe (well, it worked for the Bible), before introducing us to Yragaël – prophet, prince, and the last hope of a doomed world, until he’s seduced by the queen of an evil city, or possibly by an enticing embodiment of the place. To be honest, it’s hard to tell. In the second tale, we meet their offspring, the grotesque fool Urm, who probably got off to a bad start by having an evil city as a parent. It’s all very confusing, but the art sure does look purty.

Yragaël and Urm the Mad

Druillet, Philippe
Demuth, Michel

$34.99

Buy on Amazon

Lone Sloan: Delirius Vol. 2

When his best friend’s daughter is kidnapped, Lone Sloane is forced to make a return trip to ‘The Planet of a Hundred Thousand Pleasures’, Delirius. The 2012 sequel to his 1972 classic took a long time getting to the printers. The original Delirius creative team of Jacques Lob and Druillet started work on a sequel as far back as 1987, but, sadly, Lob passed away in 1990, and the project was mothballed. Druillet returned to the project in 2011, collaborating with writer Benjamin Legrand (who, as it happens, previously continued the Snowpiercer series after Lob’s death). Possibly due to its staggered production, the artwork seems a tad uneven by Druillet’s standards, although the story itself is a lot more straightforward and linear than some of his more esoteric works.

Lone Sloane: Delirius Vol. 2 (Graphic Novel)

Lob, Jacques
Druillet, Philippe
Legrand, Benjamin

$24.99

Buy on Amazon

Elric : The Return to Melnibone

Michael Moorcock’s albino warrior Elric returns to Melnibone only to discover that his evil cousin had been scheming against him. This edition contains two black-and-white Elric strips: a 20-page story by Moorcock and Druillet and another illustrated by long-term Moorcock collaborator Jim Cawthorn. The Druillet story originally appeared in 1973 and had been in and out of print over the years due to copyright issues that were outlined (in amusing detail) by Moorcock on his forum. You’ll need to scroll down a bit, but it’s well worth a read.

The Michael Moorcock Library: Elric The Eternal Champion Collecti…

Moorcock, Michael
Cawthorne, James
Druillet, Phillippe

$19.99

Buy on Amazon

Vuzz

Black and white fantasy strip in two parts, originally published in the French magazines Phénix (1973) and Metal Hurlant (1982). A change in tone for Druillet, this tale of a grotesque thief trying to get by in a world of giant rabbits, inept warriors, and pervy wizards swaps out his usual penchant for cosmic nihilism for something more akin to black humour. This is reflected in the art, which seems looser and more spontaneous.

One from Druillet’s short-lived early, funny period.

Vuzz (Graphic Novel)

Druillet, Philippe

$26.94

Buy on Amazon

Lone Sloane Box Set

Collecting the first three volumes from Titan’s Druillet Library (6 Voyages of Lone Sloane, Delirius, and Gail) in a rather fetching slipcase.

Lone Sloane Slipcase Set (Graphic Novel)

Druillet, Philippe

$60.24

Buy on Amazon

I’ll regularly update this post as new titles become available, but in the meantime, please let me know if there’s anything I’ve overlooked via Facebook or Threads.

Related Stuff:

Alejandro Jodorowsky: A ‘Jodoverse’ Comics Reading Guide

The Comics Universe of Alejandro Jodorowsky

Métal Hurlant: the French comic that changed the world

Metal Hurlant Comic Strips in English

The post Philippe Druillet Comics in English appeared first on Tom Lennon.

Metal Hurlant Comic Strips in English

Tom Lennon — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:13:28 +0000

The classic French comics magazine Métal Hurlant was originally published between 1975 and 1987 and not only spawned an enduring American counterpart (Heavy Metal) but influenced a multitude of classic sci-fi films including Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars and Mad Max (I wrote more about it’s lasting impact here). Unfortunately, for English-speaking fans with tight budgets and terrible foreign language skills, translations of some of Métal Hurlant’s comic strips have become very hard to find.

Here, you’ll find a list of classic Métal Hurlant strips that are currently available in English. My articles are supported by readers, and as an Amazon affiliate, I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through this page, at no additional cost to you. I appreciate your support!

Metal Hurlant (2025)

Backed by a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $750,000, Humanoids has relaunched Metal Hurlant as a new quarterly anthology series featuring a nice mix of all-new material and vintage stories from their archives, including a couple of classic Moebius yarns (“Is Man Good?” and “The Detour”) that haven’t appeared in English since Marvel’s Epic releases of the late 1980s. In addition to Moebius, it features classic works by Metal Hurlant legends such as Philippe Druillet, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, and Jean-Claude Gal, as well as new material from contemporary creators like Matt Fraction. Oh, and the first volume includes an in-depth history of the magazine written by me.

This lavishly produced, square-bound publication is one of the best-looking comics you’ll read this year. Highly recommended!

Metal Hurlant: Old Dreams, Young Visions

Bendis, Brian Michael
Fraction, Matt
Claveloux, Nicole

$29.99

Buy on Amazon

The Incal – by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius”

Before the arrival of the newly relaunched Métal Hurlant, English translations of most of Moebius’ comics were trapped in some nebulous out-of-print limbo. Sure, Dark Horse Comics had released a series of gorgeous Moebius books in recent years, but those consisted of his mid- to late-period, post-Metal Hurlant works, such as The Edena Saga and Inside Moebius. There was, however, a rather nifty (ahem) Moebius loophole. Humanoids, the US-based offshoot of Métal Hurlant publisher Les Humanoïdes Associés, held the English-language rights to all of Moebius’s collaborations with surrealist filmmaker-turned-comics-writer Alejandro Jodorowsky. Chief amongst these is The Incal, which was first serialized in Métal Hurlant in 1980. It tells the story of John DiFool, a dystopia-dwelling “Class R” private eye who gets embroiled in a mind-bending science-fiction saga of breathtaking proportions. The source text for Jodorowsky’s vast, interconnected comics universe (also known as ‘The Jodoverse’), it’s a bona fide Métal Hurlant classic and a must-read for anyone interested in comics.

The Incal

The Incal
Humanoids, Inc.
ABIS_BOOK

$34.20

Buy on Amazon

Den Volume 1: Neverwhere – by Richard Corben

The out-of-print-for-decades fantasy comics masterpiece gets a long-overdue English-language re-release. A dorky young man is transported to a fantasy world where he finds himself transformed into a fierce warrior with a bald head, a ripped physique, and (in the words of “Young Frankenstein”) an enormous schwanzstucker. Let the neo-puritans dismiss this as a testosterone-charged mashup of pulp hero John Carter and porn star John Holmes; Corben’s luscious, idiosyncratic artwork and unforgettable feats of world-building make this an unforgettable read. As Patton Oswalt describes it in his introduction to this edition, Corben’s Den is “the progrock strip club at the far end of your mind.”

Much like their rather gorgeous Moebius Library collections, Dark Horse Comics have pulled out all the stops with this, sourcing original artwork and re-lettering the strip to ensure that Corben’s masterpiece has never looked better.

DEN Volume 1: Neverwhere

Corben, Richard
Corben, Richard
Oswalt, Patton

$21.35

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Social Fiction by Chantal Montellier

This new collection by comic artist Chantal Montellier features three long-out-of-print Métal Hurlant strips (“1996”, “Wonder City” and “Shelter”), all of which appear together in English for the first time. A pioneering female cartoonist in a field traditionally dominated by men, Montellier’s work had previously appeared in English in Heavy Metal magazine in the 1970s and 80s, although the translators often took liberties with the source material. For instance, when her “1996” strip first appeared in Métal Hurlant, it was a stark, dystopic sequence of vignettes that effortlessly channeled the nightmare visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley through a post-1968 feminist perspective. When translated for Heavy Metal, however, it could sometimes read more like a sleazy ’70s sex comedy with incomprehensible word salad dialog.

This new, elegantly packaged collection from the New York Review of Books remedies that, with a new English translation that captures the author’s original intent. Highly recommended.

Social Fiction (New York Review Comics)

Montellier, Chantal
Brock, Geoffrey

$21.47

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Metal Hurlant – Selected Works

The original Metal Hurlant was published between 1975 and 1987, but the title was briefly revived in 2002 as a US comic-size Franco-American anthology comic. It serialized “Megalex” (a characteristically saucy dystopian saga by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fred Beltran) and “The Zombies That Ate the World” (the popular comedy-horror strip by Jerry Frissen and Guy Davis) and featured entertaining text pieces by Metal Hurlant co-founder Jean-Pierre Dionnet, as well as numerous short stories. These were often twist-in-the-tail pulpy sci-fi yarns not unlike British comic 2000ad’s Future Shocks (mind you, 2000ad itself was influenced by the original Metal Hurlant), but other genres were represented, too, including Horror, Fantasy, Westerns, Boxing Noir and that perennial Eurocomix staple, Weird French Stuff.

Metal Hurlant: Selected Works collects 22 of these short stories, featuring work by Anglo-American comic talents such as Geoff Johns, Kurt Busiek, David Lloyd, and Ryan Sook. It also features an additional ‘bonus track’ from the French comics artist Caza, the first English translation of Peace, a short story that first appeared in the original Metal Hurlant magazine in 1981.

Please choose display type!

Metal Hurlant – Selected Works

Johns, Geoff
Busiek, Kurt
Sook, Ryan

$39.95

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Lone Sloan: Gail – by Phillipe Druillet

English language comic strips by Moebius’s Les Humanoïdes Associés co-founder and baroque nightmare universe builder Phillipe Druillet have been out of print for years. Thankfully, veteran British graphic novel publishers Titan Books (who made their name releasing 2000ad comic collections back when that was still a far-flung date in the future) have recently come to the rescue with their Eurocomix-leaning Statix Press imprint.

Druillet’s Gail (not to be confused with Coronation Street’s Gail – ask a Brit) was first serialized in early issues of Métal Hurlant and featured Lone Sloane, Druillet’s dimension-hopping antihero. Sloane – a sort of a demented mashup of Han Solo and a sweary Silver Surfer – regularly found himself at odds with cosmic Lovecraftian critters and evil intergalactic empires with a penchant for unfeasibly large and impractical forms of weaponized transport. So, yes, George Lucas was a fan.

In Gail, Sloane finds himself trapped on a prison planet at the mercy of evil aliens ‘made of metal and hate.’ Like much of Druillet’s work, it’s visually audacious, utterly bonkers, and – in an ideal world – deserves to be read on a format as big as a king-size mattress.

Please choose display type!

Lone Sloane: Gail

Druillet, Philippe

$23.44

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Conquering Armies/Arn’s Revenge – by Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Jean-Claude Gal

Conquering Armies was a series of brutal, self-contained, anti-war stories set amongst the lower ranks of a vast, prehistoric army. Written by Métal Hurlant’s Editor in Chief, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, and illustrated by Jean-Claude Gal, whose gorgeous, painstakingly detailed black-and-white artwork anticipated the imaginary environments of HBO’s Game of Thrones. The two men would subsequently collaborate on Arn’s Revenge, a more generic heroic fiction yarn, and both stories have been translated into English in three tastefully colorized volumes by Humanoids, although you can find the first installment in its original black-and-white format in the new Metal Hurlant anthology.

Armies Vol. 1: Conquering Armies

Dionnet, Jean-Pierre
Picaret
Gal, Jean-Claude

$5.49

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Exterminator 17 – by Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Enki Bilal

More musings about war and warriors by Jean-Pierre Dionnet, this time swapping out fantasy prehistory for a science-fiction future. This tale of cybernetic warrior angst featured characteristically moody, atmospheric art by another Eurocomics legend, Enki Bilal, who, along with Moebius, would later go on to influence the film Blade Runner.

Exterminator 17

Dionnet, Jean-Pierre
Bilal, Enki

$28.50

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The Eyes of the Cat by Jodorowsky and Moebius

While technically not a Métal Hurlant strip per se, this was originally a Les Humanoïdes Associés giveaway used to promote the magazine so it makes the list. More of an illustrated storybook than a comic – albeit a dark, twisted yet hauntingly beautiful one – it was the first published collaboration between Moebius and Jodorowsky, who’d previously worked together on a famously ill-fated movie adaptation of the sci-fi novel, Dune (the documentary film Jodorowsky’s Dune tells the fascinating story of that, and is highly recommended).

It comes in a couple of versions, but I suggest going for The Yellow Edition as that matches the format of the original 70s Ashcan release (which had yellowy pages, natch), and it just looks better. Like the aforementioned Incal, it’s published by Humanoids.

The Eyes of the Cat

Jodorowsky, Alejandro
Moebius

$5.95

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Salammbô – by Phillipe Druillet

In 1862, Gustave Flaubert followed up Madam Bovary – his classic study of low-key literary infidelity – with a big, blood-splattered historical epic in which a violent mercenary becomes obsessed with a beautiful priestess and lots of people die. In 1980, Druillet went one step better – transporting the story from ancient Carthage to his own psychedelic sci-fi playground and swapping out the book’s male lead for the aforementioned Lone Sloane. This was long before some tone-deaf Hollywood type coined the horrible term ‘re-imagining’ and is every bit as mad as it sounds.

Lone Sloane: Salammbô Vol. 1 (The Philippe Druillet Library)

Flaubert, Gustave
Druillet, Phillipe
Druillet, Phillipe

$20.07

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Freddy Lombard – by Yves Chaland

Yves Chaland was a pioneer of the retro-modern Atom style of illustration who tragically died in a car accident at the age of 33. His Freddy Lombard was a bequiffed, Hergé-inspired hustling adventurer – think TinTin with cashflow issues. Humanoids published a five-volume Complete Freddy Lombard, with volumes 2 and 3 containing stories that originally appeared in Métal Hurlant, but more recently have released a rather nice hardback volume that collects the set. They’re great fun and all worth a read.

Chaland Anthology #1: Freddy Lombard

Chaland, Yves
Chaland, Yves

$67.99

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Young Albert – Yves Chaland

Chaland was a prolific contributor to Métal Hurlant. Young Albert (serialized between 1981 and 1987) was a bittersweet, semi-autobiographical series of gag strips about a flawed and sometimes unpleasant young man; however, the art was so lovely that readers were prepared to cut the kid some slack. Humanoids have released an English language translation of Young Albert in both a super-oversized coffee table book and a more modestly priced regular edition.

Young Albert

Chaland, Yves
Chaland, Yves

$5.49

Buy on Amazon

Arzach – by Moebius (French edition)

Okay, I’m cheating a bit here. While Moebius’ hugely influential, visually sumptuous yarns about a grumpy pterodactyl-riding warrior remain criminally out of print in the English-speaking world, there’s a no-frills lifehack anyone can try: just get yourself one of the many foreign-language versions instead. The strips are dialogue-free, and it’s not as though you’d insist on an English-language dub of a French silent movie. You’ll only need Google Translate if you’re one of those people who insist on reading copyright notices and disclaimers (spoiler – similarities to pterodactyl-riding warriors, living or dead, are purely coincidental).

Arzach – Edition 50 ans

Moebius

$55.75

Buy on Amazon

That’s it for now. I’ll regularly update this post as new titles become available. In the meantime, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked (or if you just want to say Hi), please message me here, on Threads, or on Facebook.

The post Metal Hurlant Comic Strips in English appeared first on Tom Lennon.

Hotel Pennsylvania and Other New York Stories

Tom Lennon — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 01:52:07 +0000

Photo: Massimo Salesi/Shutterstock

Caught between the twisted stars, the plotted lines, the faulty map
That brought Columbus to New York

Romeo Had Juliette – Lou Reed

In March 2005, I took my dear old ma to New York City and we stayed at the now-demolished Hotel Pennsylvania on 7^th Avenue. It was the 10^th anniversary of my dad’s death, and as ma’s oldest and least favorite son I felt a moral duty to do something ridiculously grandiose to take her mind off it. Mine, too, for that matter. Dad had passed away suddenly while making me a cup of tea and his anniversary had been playing on my mind like unresolved trauma tends to do. On top of that, I’d also been going through some major Category A life changes. In recent times I’d been divorced, made redundant, and had a significant health scare. You could say I was experiencing a midwife crisis.

It was my first trip to New York, something I’d wanted to do ever since I was a Marvel superhero comic-devouring kid. In my defense, that was long before my childhood fixations took over Hollywood. As I got older, my I Heart NY tendencies expanded to include Scorsese movies, the city’s rich comedy heritage, and just about any band that ever played at the Bowery’s legendary music venue, CBGBs. Maybe one day they’ll all get to take over Hollywood, too.

Our plane landed in Newark and we took a train to Manhattan’s Penn Street Station. Right across the street was the Hotel Pennsylvania. “Is the hotel far from here, Thomas?” asked ma.

“It’s right over there,” I said, pointing at the hotel.

She squinted at me, giving me a look of bemused bafflement that I’ve become accustomed to over the years. “You’re a case!” she said with a chuckle. “Never mind, I’ll ask that young couple over there.” She gestured towards a young Japanese man and woman exiting the station who looked just as touristy as we did. “You should always ask people for directions when you’re in a new place, Thomas.”

Ma marched up to the couple and asked, “Do you know where the Hotel Pennsylvania is?” They looked at each other and shrugged apologetically. She asked them again, “Do you know where the Hotel Pennsylvania is?” but this time in a louder, much slower voice.

An NYPD cop approached. “What seems to be the trouble, ma’am?”

“Do you know where the Hotel Pennsylvania is?” asked ma.

“It’s just across the street, ma’am,” said the policeman, gesturing towards me. “Right where that guy’s pointing.”

These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you

Empire State Of Mind – Jay-Z

Even then, the Hotel Pennsylvania looked like a faded relic of a bygone era and everything I wanted New York to be. The lobby was huge – I mean, really huge – with a long wall of old-school payphones making a brave last stand against obsolescence. I felt like Cary Grant during the opening scenes of North by Northwest, which is a hell of a feeling. You should try it sometime. Like me, Grant’s hero in the movie arrived with a mother in tow, although the actress playing her was only eight years older than him. Different times, I suppose.

I lugged our suitcases across the lobby and checked us in with a front desk guy who looked disturbingly like Harvey Keitel. Of course, this being New York, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that this was actually, really Harvey Keitel and I’d stumbled into some deep cover Lee Strasberg Method Acting op. Who knows? Maybe they had Robert De Niro on staff as a chambermaid.

As I showed Front Desk Keitel our passports and filled in the paperwork, ma said “Thomas, tell the man to put me in a nice room.”

“You can tell him yourself, ma,” I said. “He’s right there.”

“I’ll make sure you get a nice room, ma’am,” he grunted. “That’s five nights, including breakfast.”

Ma nudged me sharply. “Thomas, ask the man if we’ll be getting breakfast.” Front Desk Keitel scowled intensely. Of course, the real Harvey Keitel would have done that, too.

I didn’t realize it then, but the Hotel Pennsylvania was positively steeped in history. In its heyday, guests included Fidel Castro and Harry Houdini, although not on the same night and presumably not with their mothers. It was also a popular venue during the big band era, with the Glenn Miller Band’s hit Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand being one of those rare songs about a man’s love for a hotel’s telephone number.

The Hotel Pennsylvania was once known as the Stadler and – together with the city’s Waldorf hotel – inspired the Muppet Show’s misanthropic double-act, Stadler and Waldorf. That duo famously delivered snarky criticism of Muppet performers from the safety of their private box, which was quite a novelty in the days before Twitter and Rotten Tomatoes. It also hosted the world’s first Star Trek convention in 1972, although that was later retconned to 1997 by JJ Abrams.

Did you see what she did to him, did you hear what they said?
Just a New York conversation rattling in my head

New York Telephone Conversation – Lou Reed

After checking in, we made our way to the elevator. As the lift ascended, some smartly dressed people were having smartly dressed conversations on their cell phones. I just stared at the elevator doors. As we reached the seventh or maybe eighth floor, there was a break from the chatter. A slender silent interlude, a moment of quiet. Ma turned to me and asked, “How are your bowels, Thomas?”

“They’re, um, OK I suppose,” I answered awkwardly.

The next morning, I was awakened by a commotion outside my hotel room. Dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, I opened the door only to find a film crew in the corridor. They were shooting an episode of Law and Order, and apparently, one of the neighboring hotel rooms was the scene of a fictional murder. As a Richard Belzer fan, I asked one of the crew if John Munch was investigating. “Sorry, sir,” she said. “He’s in the other show.”

That was my first morning in New York.

This ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGB
I ain’t got time for that now

Life During Wartime – Talking Heads

I tried to take my ma to all the places you should take your ma to in New York. With hindsight, I probably should have written a book about it, maybe called it something like Places You Should Take Your Ma to in New York, but this was 2005 and the world wasn’t ready for the grown-up-with-parent travelogue genre. That would have to wait until after the global banking crisis, the subsequent redistribution of global wealth to billionaire charlatans, and the rise of the political idiot class.

We visited the Empire State Building and I took her to the observation deck, but it was a foggy day and you couldn’t see much besides the occasional skyscraper tip breaking through the mist. It was like concrete and steel whack-a-mole. We took the Staten Island Ferry and got a good view of the Statue of Liberty, then later that evening caught a Broadway show. It was Spamalot with the original cast, including Tim Curry as King Arthur and Niles from Frasier as Cowardly Sir Robin. It remains my favorite live musical theatre experience from a list that isn’t particularly long. I took her to Central Park, and we wandered around Times Square where she accidentally collided with Sylvester Stallone as he climbed out of a limo by Planet Hollywood.

Ma’s always been fiercely independent, so one evening she decided to go off alone in search of a bingo hall. “It’s all I have to look forward to,” she said sadly. “It’s all I have to look forward to” is a stock phrase of my ma’s used to describe a wide variety of things, all of which she looks forward to. I decided there was no point in telling her that I’d already checked my Lonely Planet guide and was pretty confident there were no Gala, Mecca, or Top Rank bingo halls in New York, not even in Brooklyn. I figured it was best if she found out for herself. Maybe she could ask that young Japanese couple.

While she was searching for a bingo hall, I caught a gig at CBGB’s back when it was still a venue and not just a t-shirt brand. The next morning, we had breakfast at Tom’s Restaurant as part of a deeply personal Susanne Vega/Seinfeld pilgrimage combo. This was, after all, the Tom’s Diner Vega originally sang about in 1987, and its exterior was used for Seinfeld’s fictional Monk’s Diner. Later that day, I visited the site of what used to be Ali Yeganeh’s original Soup Kitchen, the inspiration for Seinfeld’s famous Soup Nazi episode.

See, I told you.

The downtown trains are full
With all them Brooklyn girls
They try so hard to break out of their little worlds

Downtown Train – Tom Waits

Ma was keen to go on a guided bus tour, which wasn’t a bad idea. I tried to book one with Kenny Kramer (the real-life inspiration for Seinfeld’s hipster doofus next door, Kramer), but it was fully booked or too expensive or both. I can’t remember. I found another tour bus company, and our tour guide was a wisecracking guy from the Bronx who resembled a middle-aged Beastie Boy. As the open-top double-decker bus passed Columbia University, the tour guide endeared himself to me forever by saying – with a perfectly straight face – how the campus had recently been in the news after an accident involving a high school student and a radioactive spider. This was like a nerdy verbal masonic handshake, so I reciprocated and asked him if he could tell me the whereabouts of the Baxter Building. “It’s two blocks east of Avengers’ Mansion,” he said with a wink.

I took my ma to several Irish bars, or – more accurately, I suppose – bars that identified as Irish. I was always quite progressive like that. On our final evening, we visited one on West 33^rd Street, where I ordered us a pint and a half of Guinness. She was in her late 60s by then, and even though she’d spent most of her adult life in England, she never lost her strong Derry accent. This was catnip to the predominantly Irish-American bar staff and clientele who treated her like a rock star. “The young people, they all love me, Thomas!” she said gleefully.

I let her bask in the attention, slipped out front, and lit a cigarette. I was soon joined by a nicotine-craving motley crew consisting of an off-duty cop, a Wall Street banker, and a construction worker. It was the closest I ever got to joining the Village People.

And I thank you for those items that you sent me
The monkey and the plywood violin

First We Take Manhattan – Leonard Cohen

On the morning we were due to leave I found an envelope that had been pushed under the door to my room. I opened it up and saw a handwritten note. The penwork was neat and pretty and definitely not the work of a Y chromosome. If any of my fellow men are offended by this, then please let me know in writing, although I probably won’t be able to read it.

I soon realized it was a love letter meant for someone else and suspected the mystery author was French, Russian, or possibly Frussian. This might be due to its liberal use of the term “manly borsht baguette”, although I might be misremembering that. In any case, I quickly stuffed it back in its envelope, but not before other key phrases burnt their way into my retinas, including “Forgive me for not saying goodbye”, “By the time you read this I’ll be flying home”, and “I’ll never forget our night of wild lovemaking”. It can’t have been that great, I thought, or she would have remembered his room number.

I didn’t feel right about throwing the letter away, so I hopped into an elevator, headed down to the lobby, made my way to the front desk, and handed it over to Front Desk Keitel. Was he ever not on duty? I thought. If this really was Harvey Keitel you had to admire his commitment to researching a role. I explained the situation and what I saw as the futility of my gesture. I didn’t think a guy would report a missing letter he wasn’t expecting to get from a one-night stand to lost property.

“You’d be surprised,” snarled FDK, squinting and grimacing like a man who’d just received a lemon juice enema. In other words, just like Harvey Keitel.

I returned to the hotel room to grab my passport, suitcase, and mother. I took one final look out the window at Penn Street Station, Madison Square Garden, the hot dog stands, the yellow cabs, and the crowds of people urgently heading to wherever they were going. Some flakes of snow were drifting downwards. We headed to the lobby, checked out at the front desk, and stepped onto a 7th Avenue which was now waist-deep in snow. I didn’t think this much snow could fall so quickly, but I guess in New York even blizzards don’t have time for small talk. The Big Apple looked like it was covered in a generous layer of marzipan, and I half expected to see 1980s Kurt Russell on 7^th Avenue pass me by, riding an AT-AT. I’m talking, of course, about bearded, parka-wearing Kurt Russell from The Thing, not eyepatch-wearing Kurt Russell from Escape from New York. That would be ridiculous.

A small kid stands by the Lincoln Tunnel,
He’s selling plastic roses for a buck

Dirty Blvd – Lou Reed

We crossed a gridlocked street to Penn Street Station only to find that all train services had been canceled, including the one to Newark Airport. I hailed a yellow cab that wasn’t going anywhere. Against the stark white backdrop, it looked like an ice sculpture made of frozen piss. “Newark Airport, please,” I said, panicking. “We’ve got a 5 pm flight to England.”

The cabbie was an elderly Bangladeshi man with the sort of crumpled face that could run a lucrative side hustle as Rocky Balboa’s coach. “Good luck with that, buddy!” he laughed as the car lurched forward several millimeters.

Ma was starting to panic. “Thomas, tell the man we’ve got to get to the airport!”

“I just did, ma,” I said, losing the will to live.

Eventually, the traffic started to move. We crawled in a north-by-north-westerly direction, much like Cary Grant did in the 50s, but much slower. We approached the Lincoln Tunnel only to find it was closed due to what our cabbie described as “Goddamn bastard snowflakes.” It was the first time I heard that term used as an insult.

He told us the Holland Tunnel would be closed as well. “We gotta take the George Washington Bridge,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind getting to the airport next Tuesday.” He was laughing again, and so was my ma. He jerked his steering wheel to the right, invading the personal space of fellow road users, who honked their horns and shouted abuse.

No sooner had we started heading north along the Hudson River-hugging 12^th Avenue when our cabbie noticed something in his rear-view mirror. “The Lincoln Tunnel’s open again!” he shouted. I looked back and saw nothing but cars and snow. He found a gap in the central reservation barrier and pulled off an elaborate, hair-raising U-turn maneuver that would make the average Fast and the Furious set piece look like the work of a Sunday driver. Ma cheered.

He was right: the Lincoln Tunnel had reopened. We crossed it and headed south along the New Jersey Turnpike. Well, south-ish. Due to the snow, we took what felt like an erratic route – intermittently leaving and re-joining the Turnpike – but I was in no position to question his judgment. I caught glimpses of the Manhattan skyline, passed many industrial buildings, and began to feel a nagging sensation of déjà vu. I’d seen some of this scenery before. A Turnpike tollbooth, eerily familiar overhead signs, a distinctive-looking bridge, an abandoned Hydro-Pruf factory. Then it hit me: our cabbie had taken us on a meandering detour through the opening credits of The Sopranos.

“And that,” as I later said to the lady at the check-in desk, “is why we’ve missed our flight.”

Soundtrack to this article

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19 of the West Midlands’ sauciest streets

Tom Lennon — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 22:34:57 +0000

Birmingham and the West Midlands contain such a rich variety of lewd-sounding street names that people often assume that our local councils were once infiltrated by members of the ‘Carry On’ team. Here are just a few of our favourites:

Allcock Street, Digbeth, B9

Not a sly reference to Digbeth’s burgeoning hipster scene. Not at all.

Balls Street, Walsall, WS1

It should have been a cul-de-sac.

Beaver Close, Wolverhampton, WV11

Surely this must be Wolverhampton’s tribute to Leslie Nielsen?

It’s not, and don’t call me Shirley (because that’s in Solihull)

Bell End, Rowley Regis, B65

Well played, Rowley Regis. Well played.

The Butts, Walsall, WS4

A 10 minute walk from Balls Street. You’re good at this, Walsall…

Bush Grove, Walsall, WS3

…almost too good.

Cock Hill Lane, Rednal, B45

Not far from the equally dodgy-sounding ‘Lickey Hills’. More on that later.

Emmanuel Road, Wylde Green, B73

If 1974 French movie ‘Emmanuelle’ became a by-word for (ahem) certain types of films, then 1978’s ‘Carry On Emmanuelle’ must have seemed like the ‘Batman v Superman’ of smut.

(Aficionados of the genre should note that nearby Walmley has a Vixen Close…)

Hardon Road, Wolverhampton, WV4

Oh, Wolverhampton – you just had to go there, didn’t you?

Hole Lane, Bournville, B31

Idyllic Bournville, that Shangri-La of suburban sobriety, with its ornate cricket pavilions and big chocolate factory. But wait – what’s this hidden in the shrubbery?

Horne Way, Shard End, B34

And here comes Shard End with some stiff competition.

Ladycroft, Edgbaston, B16

Oh Edgbaston – you and your fancy euphemisms.

Long Wood, Bournville, B30

Not you again, Bournville? Guess it’s true what they say about those Oompa Loompas…

Lovelace Avenue, Solihull, B91

Linda Lovelace was the star of notorious X-rated ’70s flick ‘Deep Throat’. Don’t Google it at work.

Lye Close Lane, Quinton, B32

No, Quinton – if you don’t mind I’d rather take the sofa.

(See also Loyns Close, Chelmsley Wood)

Mount Pleasant, Kings Heath, B14

Kings Heath, you’re one smooth-talking suburb.

Stud Lane, Stechford, B33

Look at you Stechford, with your big gold medallion and Burt Reynolds’ moustache…

Tracey’s Meadow, Rednal, B45

Your attempt at twee Edgbaston-esque subtlety isn’t fooling anyone, Rednal.

Twatling Road, Lickey, B45

And last but not least there’s Twatling Road, which can be found just south Lickey Hills and thereby offering two innuendos for the price of one. Proof, if proof were needed, that the A-Z of the region contains a lot of XXXs. Perhaps the town planners of yesteryear all need a cold shower and some therapy.

All photos by yours truly. This originally appeared on Time Out.

Cool Brummie Stuff from Amazon

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Benched – extract from a one-act play

Tom Lennon — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 11:19:36 +0000

I recently submitted a script to the SKY Comedy REP scheme, where nine writers with little or no playwriting experience got the chance to develop one act comedy plays with pros like Meera Syal (Goodness Gracious Me, The Kumars), Simon Blackwell (The Thick of It, Veep) and Guz Khan (Man Like Mobeen). The nine plays are to be performed at a three-day SKY Comedy REP Festival at the Birmingham REP next year and the writers will get paid for it, which is always nice. As someone with no playwriting experience whatsoever I thought I’d have a crack at it. Sadly, I didn’t get through to the final nine, but did have a lot of fun writing for a different medium.

The brief was to write a three page sample script that involves a meeting on a park bench. Rather than send my (unsuccessful) effort off to some cloud-based knacker’s yard, I thought it might be fun to post it here.

So that’s what I’ve done:

BENCHED
By
Tom Lennon

CHARACTERS

DANNY: 30, male. Bookshop Assistant Manager
SARAH: 28, female. Regional Head of Marketing of a major blue chip company and Danny’s soon-to-be former fiancée
BERT THE BENCH: A park bench possessed by the ghost of a 1930s Aston Villa footballer.

SCENE 1

Cannon Hill Park in present day Birmingham, England. DANNY paces back and forth near a park bench, having a heated conversation on his mobile phone with SARAH.

DANNY:
I don’t understand, Sarah, I thought you were happy. I thought we were happy. We were supposed to be getting married next year.
(Pause)
I’m in the park. Liz let me finish early. There was a bomb scare in the bookshop, a suspicious package in the Self-Help section.
(Pause)
I don’t know why they’d plant it there, I’m not some terrorist prankster. Maybe they don’t like Louise L Hay.
(Pause)
It’s a joke, Sarah, I know she’s your hero. (Pause) Why are you talking about her in the past tense?
(Long pause, he squirms)
Oh God, I’d forgotten she’d died. I’m so sorry. (Low battery beep from his phone, he ignores it) That was a very confusing time for me, I was still getting over Bowie and Prince-
(Pause)
Why am I in the park? Because I’d finished work early and the weather was nice. Thought I’d get off the bus on the way home and go for a walk.
(Pause)
It’s not weird! I didn’t know you were planning on dumping me. If I knew that I’d have come straight home.
(Pause)
I’m not being facetious. Well, maybe a bit facetious.
(Long pause as he becomes more agitated. He’s clearly getting grilled)
You think I’m disorganised? You used to say I was spontaneous! I know what this is: you’re rebranding me! I’m not disorganised, I’m- (Another low battery beep, but this time he checks) Oh, no – my phone’s at 2%!
(Pause)
I can’t charge it, I’m in the middle of a park!
(Pause)
What, the portable charger you got me as a Valentine’s gift? I don’t have it on me. I think it’s in my desk at work. It could probably do with a charge.
(Pause)
I’m sorry, Sarah, I didn’t mean what I said about Louise Hay. Are you still there, Sarah? Sarah?! (Stares at phone, slumps onto bench, sobs)

BENCH: Ahem

DANNY looks up, his eyes dart from left to right

BENCH: Would you mind – you’re sitting on my larynx.

DANNY: Who said that?

BENCH: Me. I did. Now budge over to the left a bit.

DANNY:
Budge over to the…? (He gets up, examines the bench). Is this a wind-up? Is there a spotty YouTuber hiding in the bushes? (Raises his voice) Stranger shaming is not cool, kids! (He crouches behind the bench, looks underneath) I bet there’s a Bluetooth speaker under here.

BENCH: Oi, stop looking up at my private parts!

DANNY: (Jumps back, horrified) Who said that? Where are you?

BENCH: I said it and I’m right here. I’m the park bench.

DANNY: Don’t be ridiculous, benches can’t talk!

BENCH: Who told you that? Bet it wasn’t a bench.

DANNY: Of course it wasn’t a bench!

BENCH: Let me guess: because benches can’t talk? So you keep saying.

DANNY: Because it’s true!

BENCH:
No it’s not. Benches can talk, it’s just that we don’t like to talk about it. But you lot just see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. Bet that’s why your bit of stuff showed you the door.

DANNY: (Aghast) ‘My bit of…’ what? You can’t say that about Sarah!

BENCH: Why, cos I’m a bench?

DANNY: No, because it’s massively sexist!

BENCH: You said that benches can’t talk, yet here you are policing my language.

DANNY: I’m not policing anyone’s – argh – this is infuriating!

BENCH: It’s not a walk in the park for me, either, Danny. Mind you, being a park bench I don’t really get to walk in the park.

DANNY: (Sits on bench, hesitates, then budges over to the left a bit) I must be going mad. Wait, how do you know my name?

BENCH:
I’ve had people scratch their names into me for years, so I’ve developed quite a feel for the topic. You’re not losing your marbles, Danny. You can’t normally hear us because we’re on a different vibrational frequency. In certain circumstances, though, regular folk can hear us talk. Like when they’re drunk, or when they’ve just been dumped.

DANNY: Oh thanks.

BENCH:
Don’t mention it. Cats can hear us, too, but cats can hear everything. They don’t miss a trick, those blighters. Don’t know what we’re saying, of course, because they’re cats.

DANNY:
You said I was sitting on your larynx, but you’re made of wood and metal and bits of old chewing gum. Why would you even need a larynx?

BENCH: Same reason as you do, sunshine. So I can talk.

DANNY: It’s weird. I can feel your voice vibrating through the wood.

BENCH: (Snorts) I bet you can, you dirty bleeder!

DANNY: (Groans) So how long have you been doing this?

BENCH:
Long enough to remember when all this was fields, but that was before I was a bench. Technically speaking it’s all fields now, of course, but with a duck pond and an award-winning arts centre. I suppose a park’s just a well-groomed field with accessories.

DANNY: So, you weren’t always a bench?

BENCH:
No, I used to be one of you lot, a person. Born and raised around here. Wasn’t the assistant manager at some fancy bookshop, though.

DANNY: What were you, then?

BENCH: I was a professional footballer.

DANNY: A footballer?

BENCH:
That’s right, and quite the star attraction around these parts. Bert Butcher, centre-forward with 43 international caps to my name and my face on many a cigarette card. But I bet you don’t like football.

DANNY: What makes you think that?

BENCH: I can tell. You’ve got that look about you.

DANNY: Oh, right, so you can see as well as talk? Wooden eyes to go with your wooden larynx?

BENCH:
Don’t be ridiculous. I’m a park bench. I’m made of wood and metal and bits of old chewing gum. I’m as blind as a cricket bat.

And that’s where I reached the end of my third page and had to leave it. There’s quite a few scribbled notes about Bert’s backstory and my rather elaborate bench-based afterlife system which may be recycled in modified form elsewhere. I wanted to get Sarah to the park so she could confront Danny (with Bert acting as a no-nonsense relationship counsellor), but hadn’t quite worked out the logistics.

Oh well.

The post Benched – extract from a one-act play appeared first on Tom Lennon.

Tom Lennon

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