002: GOING POSTAL

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE: AN EDITORIAL

Hey! Good morning from Yeovil, Somerset.

We got magpies swaggerin’ round the garden today like they own it - which they probably do - cocky little bleeders! Meanwhile, scientists have decided that crows probably possess a form of consciousness - but us HUMANE DEBRIS diaspora already knew that, right?

The weather might not be agreeable atm, but the company sure is! Thanks to all you crazy peoples who’ve supported this madcap newsletterzine endeavour. It’s been amazing getting mails / call-backs from y’all this week. Receiving a mail that reminded me that “a better world is possible” - ‘cos it sure as Hell is - was exactly what I needed to hear right now. Thank you.

This badge my daughter gave me a little while back kinda sums things up:

It’s time to make our own maps, uncover new, uncharted territories - or maybe even just rediscover the ones we misplaced or forgot during the white-hot razzle-dazzle decade when soc.media colonised our synapses. Instead of chasing our tails for a dopamine re-up we could be watching each other’s backs, clumping together in new ways - recombining, accreting, building, creating. Like lichens and mosses, human beings have the capacity to cling to and persist on even the most spartan or inhospitable of surfaces. Don’t give up: believe me, it’s never too late (or early) to reinvent or reimagine ourselves. Pick a direction and set sail. There’s no wrong answer.

We’ll camp in the rubble of their abandoned platforms, forage for forbidden knowledge in the bitrot ruins of deserted GeoCities. Sing nonsense songs about dead billionaires as a pale fingernail moon rises over the pixilated remains of their kingdoms. We’ll resurrect obsolete browsers, re-wire AR-goggles so they run soundmovies fuelled by our imaginations, make cartoons and 8-bit boardgames, get drunk together on molecules that don’t exist yet.

Keep marching toward the sun, you wunderful weirdos! Fun is our currency, love and laughter our common language. Tomorrow is OURS!

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w, a writer of comics, films, TV and assorted weird shit. I make music, art and a pest of myself. If this newsletterzine hits a cool synaptic spot for you and you have a friend you think might also dig it, then please consider forwarding them the Subscribe url: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe Or give a wood pigeon some seeds and ask them to forward it for you. (Most wood pigeons have a specific Newsletter Notification Call they make this time of year: it goes G-C-D. It means something cool has arrived in your nest-box.)

But, hey, if you decide all this nonsense is not for you, then there’s an unsubscribe button lurking in the murky lower depths of this mail like Nyarlathotep. It’s all good.

SLATE UPDATES

INDIGO PRIME: BLACK MONDAY is currently running in 2000AD. Deranged, other-dimensional capers written by yrs truly, with insane art by Lee Carter and lettering by Jim Campbell. “LIMBSLIDE!”

NIGHTMARE NEW YORK: Well, as hoped, the outline for the final episode was signed off. The episode - an extended 7-pager - was scripted this week and is now sat with 2000AD editorial, waiting to be approved and sent to illustrator, David Roach. I first started work on this series in November, 2022, when the great John M Burns asked me to write something new for him. The result was an historical horror strip - a genre that I call Dickenspunk (that’s ‘punk’, not ‘spunk’, btw) - set in 1845. I always feel ambivalent about finishing up large / long-term projects: part of me feels, I dunno, ‘relief’ mixed with a sense of accomplishment when things are done and off my desk; another part feels oddly hollowed-out by the completion of something that’s taken up a sizeable chunk of brainspace and emotional real estate for several months. It’s as if you’ve suddenly stripped a room in your apartment of all its furniture, fittings and inhabitants. It’s an odd feeling, difficult to describe, so I won’t.

In between scripting NNY, I also wrote a short humour piece for an American comic book publisher, which I was delighted to find they bit on and bought on Friday. Things don’t always go that smoothly, in case you’re wondering; rejected pitches and submissions are a big part of the freelance writing landscape, but it’s always lovely when you make a fast unexpected sale.

EDWARD MONARCH POLICE MYSTERIES is a strip by myself, artist Mauro Longhini and lettering legend, Annie Parkhouse. Last time round, I mentioned there were now dialogue-free ash-can editions floating round of Anno Domini 1900, the comic that features it. I wasn’t fibbing. Here’s a tease of Edward Monarch Police Mysteries:

Conventional wisdom says that you should shorten titles, make ‘em more palatable to an attention-constrained marketplace - like, this strip should just be called MONARCH ‘cuz that sounds terser, snappier, more now - the sort of thing that commissioning editors and streaming-service execs are looking for. But, tell ya what, I like longer titles, in the same way I valorise longer, more evocative band names like The Teardrop Explodes, Dalek I love You, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, etc over truncated shorthand single-syllable monikers like Blur, Ride, Blah, Blah, Blah. More importantly, I really wanted to reference Edgar Wallace and have the word Police in the strip’s title - as in, The Police Gazette, etc. For me, the title evokes a period that stretches up from the Late Victorian Era through to the 1960s, scooping up a bunch of microgenres along the way, like Post-War Detective Mysteries, Kitchen-Sink BritNoir, WhoDunnIts, Krimi, etc. Sure, maybe that has a wider focus / bandwidth than it probably needs, but it also sets the scene / seeds the idea of futurity and temporal outreach, and hints that a lot more lurks beneath the surface than is seen. Pro-tip: always bring far too many knives to a knife fight, because, yes, writing is very much like a neural knife-fight with yourself. Well, it is for me. Finishing up the script for a second episode of EDWARD MONARCH POLICE MYSTERIES is pretty high on my writing to-do list in the coming week or two.

Thanks to my old pal, artist SHAKY KANE, for his kind wurds about my recent Sword n Sorcery book, OTHER TIMES. I did not pay him to say this. Well, not much. Cheers, dude. You’re too kind.

Well, Shaky, you’re my favourite Pop Artist bar none (well, apart from that guy with the wig and the cow, whutsisname, Damien Warhola). Shaky doesn’t have a digital store-front, but if you hit him up on FB (his handle, as above) he’s available for art commissions and has a bunch of back issues available for purchase, boxed up in what he endearingly calls a “recreation of the NY skyline” in his bedroom. Somewhere out there, hidden on Amazon Kindle or the Image Comics site, you can probably find a digital download copy of CAP’N DINOSAUR, the comic we did together a few years back.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

I first met Robert Ridley-Shackleton - RRS or The Cardboard Prince as he’s also known - at a gig in the legendary Surrey Vaults pub in Bristol. It might of been the Guttersnipe / Organchrist show, but my memory’s a bit fuzzy. We were both hiding from a crackhead who’d locked on to us separately and coincidentally ended up sharing the same table downstairs. We started chatting about music, then carried on chatting about music, underground or otherwise, and so a connection was forged. Somewhere, on my old phone, I have a pic of Rob doing a private pole-dance for me prior to going on stage at a gig at The Old England. Rob’s one of the nicest guys I know: warm, funny, perceptive, honest and open. His live shows exist at some unlikely improvisational intersection of performance art, stand-up comedy, avant-noise and lo-fi Prince Tribute - a collision of phunky, fun-filled frolics and hesitant human vulnerability that Rob calls Card. When I asked him a few years ago to describe what he did, he said “being human.” You can find snippets of his performances here.

Rob runs a great label called Cardboard Club, which he kindly gave up some time to talk about. (Bizarrely, I was playing a Prince’s Greatest Hits CD that I’d just bought for 50p when his mail arrived, which is kinda perfect): “I've been running this snack-a-delic label for a decade now, so there's a good load of stuff we've released over the years. Its mainly me, Robert Ridley-Shackleton, but in the later years I made it much more of a label which gathered some of the sounds I really dig in the DIY music scenes and also features some of my best friends in real life.

“The sound of Card is vast and corrugated , but there tends to be a lot of lo-fi recordings , tapey ferric hiss and clunk, but also grab the recorder “I need to make music nooow” rawness. There is of course a lot of noise music on the label, as this has been the scenes and styles I've been most familiar with over the years. Clutter and rummage, fall apart, dicta-phone in the room, in the bin and all around.

“I also am a big fan of Pop music, it’s not all abstract in this club, there's quite a few Pop stars over here, but we always keep that DIY touch that the noisy mangoes are always familiar with. Lovely pound shop superstars we be. I think that despite the two quite different approaches to DIY music, Pop and noise, all of the artists and mangoes have a real personal and soulful touch to the albums, often voice plays a big part in a majority of the releases, this along with the home recording clunk and clutter helps let shine these wonderful, beautiful humans within the club and beyond.”

Adds Rob in his Email Rap Voice, “Riggidy real, riggidy raw and don't be afraid 2 b human when u hit record.”

“Also, I have a show coming up in Brighton at the Bees Mouth 28th June. The new issue of my comic / zine is coming out (Card Mango) and it comes with a CD as well. This big bumper pack is launching at the show . Owen is coming down too and playing a solo set as Carnivorous Plants. Card Mango is coming out on the label Chocolate Monk.  

“In terms of my inspiration, Prince and Suicide (the band with Alan Vega in) are the big two that have shaped everything I do musically. But I'm always inspired by the tape labels that surround me. I used to obsessively buy noise tapes when I was younger, I was always so excited when they arrived and I could discover all the possibilities of home recording…”

Oooh, a comic / zine from the Cardboard Prince! Cool! I’m jazzed. “Lovely pound shop superstars we be.” - that’s beautiful, just beautiful. Thanks, Rob.

FYI, Owen is Owen Chambers, who chatted to us last time round and who has a noo release out on Cardboard Club: “Amulets Threshold” by The Vending Machines. Sez Owen: “It’s kind of a Hypnagogic Pop / direct to cassette Techno thing. Drum machine and a million loops. Collab between myself and Joe Kelly (Wendy Miasma / Viridian Ensemble / a million free improv projects).” To my elderly cloth-ears, it’s got a VERY cool, exotic kinda Skaters vibe to it.

SOME EXIT CHILL

Kiki, aka The Pusser, pictured here hanging out with her best pal, Patti. Heh, some side-eye action def. going on here; wonder what just transpired? Hm, maybe we should have a CAT CAPTION COMP. Whaddya reckon? The best / funniest caption wins… something. Send your answer in on a postcard. Meanwhile, find a favourite corner and snuggle down on a fluffy llama or alpaca fleece of yr own devising. Get comfy and hang loose, cool cats!

Or as RRS would say: “Stay Card!”