Obscure Comic of the Month
takes a detailed look at a little known entry from my personal comic
book collection. Some will be from major publishers, others self
published projects, Original Graphic Novels, issues and Manga. What
they'll all have in common though, is that I've rarely, if ever, seen
anybody talk about them.
The Collected Evil Wee
Comics by John Gordon Miller, Rob Miller and Adam J Smith – A Braw
Book 2015
We proudly present the
collected 'Evil Wee Comics' brand from Scots underground veteran John
Miller. Features 'Secret Agent', 'Super Tales' & 'The Atomic
Society' issues #1 & 2!
How exactly is one to
describe Evil Wee Comics? My first attempt would be to say that
they're a somewhat surreal homage to classic golden age superhero and
spy comics, but that wouldn't be quite correct. My second attempt
would be to say that they're a stream of consciousness
reinterpretation of classic comics through a very Scottish lens, but
that wouldn't quite cover it either.
The fact that the Evil Wee
Comics are so hard to describe is in many respects part of their
appeal. Explaining the plot behind the intricate, decade spanning
world of the OSS and the Atomic Society is unnecessary and ultimately
pointless. Plot isn't really the purpose of Evil Wee Comics, instead
the whole experience is more about in the moment nuttiness and taking
a journey to find out where the bizarre tangents end.
The average story in Evil
Wee Comics usually starts with something resembling a plot. A secret
agent must track down an escaped villain, a superhero team must fight
one of their possessed members, but the stories quickly branch off
into bizarre non-sequiturs about departmental budget constraints or
Paul Jones – lead singer of Manfred Mann being an all round boring
K**t.
Art duties bounce around a
lot, with some great work by Rob Miller on the superhero fight
sequences, but it's John Miller's own artwork that is the most
notable. It's sharp and blocky, and often takes up only a fraction of
the page, with some pages almost filled with nothing but text. It's
another layer of bizarre to add onto a primarily graphic medium, with
the humour of some of the strips being the slow inevitable crawl of
the dialogue edging out the art.
And the humour is indeed the
comic's greatest quality. Evil Wee Comics probably has more in common
with newspaper strips than full length issues. It is at it's best
when experienced just a coupled of pages at a time and revelling in
the straight faced absurdity of it all.
Miller and Co are no
slouches on depth either. It's clear that the team has a lot of love
for the old Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D comics, and there are
numerous nods and references if you know where to look. Likewise, the
Atomic Society comics draw back to a lot of WW2 era superhero teams
like The Invaders, and there's a po-faced nostalgia that's oddly not
part of the many jokes on offer.
To go into more detail would
probably defeat the point. Evil Wee Comics is Underground through and
through, so it's not going to necessarily hold an appeal to more
mainstream readers, but if you can handle the sort of punk rock
weirdness of stuff like early Tank Girl then you'll probably find a
lot here to be tickled by.
There's nothing else out
there quite like Evil Wee Comics, and some of it just has to be seen
to be believed.
Jack Harvey 2017. Evil Wee
Comics is (c) John Gordon Miller, Rob Miller and Adam J Smith.
Images used under fair use.
