Picking up the pieces
Picking up the pieces |
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Page 22 of 38  Page from 'Tank Girl' (1989), featuring an appearance from Tank Girl's 'boyfriend', Booga the kangaroo. Art/script: Jamie Hewlett. Deadline's influence outside of these Tank Girl-related products is hard to quantify. Certainly there have been competitors and imitators. For example, Heartbreak Hotel (Willyprods, 1988) was also a 'style comic' and featured the strapline: 'Where Music and Comics Meet'. Again, it was aimed at an adult audience, and was mostly humorous - though with a more political, left-wing tone. Contributors were encouraged to interpret a song lyric or musical theme each issue, and included notable 2000AD names, such as Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Kevin O'Neill and Grant Morrison. Even these talents, however, could not keep it afloat for more than a year. More originally, Sphinx (Bold, 1990) styled itself 'The Magazine of Black Music, Culture and Comics', and featured articles on rap and hip hop, plus strips about black experience and history (including, notably, a biography of Malcolm X). It too was short-lived." The third and final of the British triumvirate of titles, and the one which most resoundingly confounded the falling trajectory of comics sales, was the remarkable Viz. This was an adult humour title like no other -violent, brutal, offensive, and a complete stranger to notions of taste and decency. There had never been anything like it, even in the days of the underground: in no other comic was the sensibility of punk so authentically replicated. Undoubtedly, it represents one of British comics' finest, and funniest, moments. |