003: THE GREEN SHOOTS OF RECOVERY

IT’S MONTY DON’S WORLD AND WE ALL LIVE IN IT

Good evening from Yeovil, Somerset, twinned with the dark topaz towers of Carcosa.

I’m sat, sipping a pint of Thatchers and writing this intro in a very convivial social club where Gardeners World is silently playing on an OLED screen the size of a hockey net. A gigantic Monty Don is slicing down into the earth, a gleaming metal trowel gripped tightly in his three-foot fist, a golden retriever snoozing by his side. Truly, Monty is a Barbour and welly-clad Parsifal! A knight of the Corduroy Table; a postmodern 21c digital fertility symbol - a hybrid-cross between the Green Man and Sir Gawain bringing life back to a barren, wind-blasted land. BBC2’s answer to Swamp Thing.

Maybe it’s the cider, but everything around Mony looks so gorgeous, rain-plumped and lush. A world erupting into bloom, fertile. Awash in purples, mauves and blues. The camera cuts away to a multicoloured insect chrysalis suspended from a dripping leaf like some fabulous Moorcockian jewel. It’s so enormous on the giant telly that when I look up from writing and see it, I momentarily recoil - gah! - from this crystalline, hyper-real 4k version of Nature. It’s a lurid, beguiling, mega-pixel representation of beauty - Widescreen Cottagecore - that makes me wonder what an IMAX version of Gardeners World might look like.

I come not to bury Monty (nor replant him, nor prune) but to praise him. I’m not a gardener myself, but GW not only brings comfort and joy to a great many people, it’s also inspired them to interact with Nature, to stay active, curious and engaged - and that’s a Good Thing. I’ve just never seen a Colossus of Rhodes sized Monty Don before. Maybe there’s some sort of cross-over potential here with the Legendary / Warner Bros Monsterverse.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the rest of us are still waiting for Spring to roll up, late for work, hungover and bedraggled with Bed Hair, recovering from its winter-long bender. In a gap between rain showers I watch a well-fed wood pigeon sat on our fence waiting for worms to pop their heads over the parapet. A pair of squirrels are going nuts, running up and down tree trunks and leaping between branches, not in time to the Mission Impossible theme, but to to some angular, stop-start late-70s Quirkpop track by Devo or Split Enz. Later, a beef breaks out between a magpie and a crow who buzz-bomb each other back n forth for a minute or so ‘til they get bored and disappear off to have a think about corvid philosophy or whatever it is they do between stealing jewels and trolling mammals. Later, I saw the biggest bee I’ve ever seen.

The thing about Nature, see, is it doesn’t need a High-Def camera - Life thrives in lo-fi. It’s a succession of beautiful, quietly unassuming moments. Blink and you miss ‘em.

Keep smilin’!

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w, a writer of comics, films, TV and Strange Fiction. I make music, art and a right ol’ mess of things. If you enjoy this newsletterzine and think a friend might like it too, then please consider pointing them at the Subscribe url: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe . Cheers!

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SLATE UPDATES

INDIGO PRIME: BLACK MONDAY. The last episode of the current series runs in this week’s (8th May) 2000AD. Can Mickey Challis, Jerry Foundation and the gang prevent multiple universes from bleeding into one another? Can cracked actor, Johnny Depth, salvage his movie career and make an against-all-odds come-back? No spoilers! You’ll have to read it to find out. The only thing I can reveal is that Tyranny Rex and Salome la Rue get to chat about hair:

(Apparently, Huge Page-Count, Narrow-Screen Banter Comics are big right now: phonebook-sized Post-Post Seinfeld Slice-of-Life comic-strips in which absolutely nothing whatsoever happens: endless pages - thousands of ‘em - all set in photo-realistic offices, food halls and retail clothes outlets. Maybe I should lean into that, this year. I did a fashion comic with my youngest daughter some years back, maybe reboot that… call it Apropos of Nothing, where the main character is called Apropos… )

Joking aside, a huge thanks to artist Lee Carter and letterer Jim Campbell for the phenomenal work they’ve done on this series of Indigo Prime. Total Dudes beyond the call of duty. Team Supreme! I’ll run a lil piece here at some point on some of the Easter Eggs Lee and I snuck into this series…

Also on my list-ta-do at some point are some Writing Process pieces like, I dunno, one breaking down my plot-to-script process or, maybe, a How To Break Into Comics piece? ‘Til I get there, here’s the Next best Thing: a humour piece of mine from 2018 originally published by AHOY Comics entitled HOW TO BEAT WRITERS BLOCK.

Meanwhile, you can’t really argue with reviews like this, can ya? Thx, man.

Intrigued? You can snag a copy of OTHER TIMES, my New-Old Skool Fantasy / Sword n Sorcery book here:

“THAT WHICH IS AN EAR I CALL TOBACCO.” - Benjamin Péret, Dadaist poet.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

Bit of a grab-bag this time round. I’m on a quasi-hiatus atm - recent months have been a mad work scrabble, so I’m clawing back some personal Thinking Time and indulging in a bit of what the Dutch call niksen - “nothing-ing” - in order to recharge me batteries, hence the pigeon-watching. Part of that included catching up with old friends on Friday and Saturday. The opening minutes of a Saturday pub chat with Chris G took in the Junior Boys Own label, Ashley Beedle’s early 90s Black Science Orchestra project, Farley and Heller’s Fire Island (and Brian Eno’s ‘Over Fire Island’ from 1975), all of which lead Chris to recommend me this excellent iPlayer documentary on the early days of Disco: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001tkyf You shld def. watch.

Meanwhile, Eleni Poulou mailed to alert me to this gorgeously spacious / meditative new May Day piece by Organza Ray - herself and trombonist, Hilary Jeffery - aided, in this instance, by Juan Felipe Waller.

Last time around our guest was Robert Ridley-Shackleton, the Cardboard Prince, whose Bristol-based Cardboard Club label has just released ‘Vicsaway’ by Sprat. Opening track ‘Botanicals’ exudes a sullen post-punk bedsit menace: mumbled skunknoia poetics that erupt into a frenzy of furry-sounding electronics and bass as if the vocalist is angrily ripping his mattress and pillow apart in slow-motion with a bread-knife until the air is full of feathers and fluff. Great stuff! ‘Lipstick’ is super-catchy Casiotone FuzzPop with a Punkabilly tinge, like a cross between Suicide and the Silicon Teens, or a revved-up lo-fi Subway Sect fronted by someone with a mouthful of cotton-wool. Love it. A hit!

Sprat is Rob’s brother, Edward Shackleton - which I didn’t realise when I wrote the previous paragraph! - and ‘Vicsaway’ is his first solo release. Ed also writes and draws his own spooky horror comics: there’s a couple here on his Tapas that he did during lockdown. I think they’re terrific: haunting and atmospheric, creepy, slow-burning tales of alienation and fatalistic inevitability. I like the idea of ‘substitution’ that pervades these - of an unavoidable horror that takes over an individual, possesses them like some awful existential infection, eventually ‘becoming’ them in some way. Dostoevsky, if he did modern kitchen-sink Horror. There’s a panel on Page 9 of ‘Cat Story’ where a horrific, large ovoid head comes out at the reader that reminds me of the freaky black and white work of Symbolist artist, Odilon Redon. There’s more of Ed’s artwork here on the Down in the Cellar website.

Finally - (cos’ I’m burning through the column inches here!) - is a new release from my old Weston-Super-Mare comrade, Dsic, with the latest instalment of his History of Microprocessing series (No. 33!). If you’re neuro-divergent / ADHD you might find this relaxing or mildly stimulating rather than abrasive (it’s not Power Electronics) as it sits somewhere on the Venn Diagram Border with Brown Noise, with just enough low-level micro-variety to keep ADbranes engaged without jarring.

CHILL WITH KIKI

Thanks for dropping by, pals. See you soon. In the meantime, get comfy and cosy like Kiki, aka The Pusser. Better days are on their way! x