013: UNLUCKY FOR SOME

“IT’S A GOOD JOB I’M NOT SUPERSTITIOUS!”

Good morning from Yeovil, South Somerset, where we are currently suffering, not from a Christmas Overindulgence Hangover / Dry January, but from an inexplicable outbreak of M/A/R/R/S graffiti:

M/A/R/R/S, huh? Part of me jokingly wondered if this is a reaction to A.R. Kane reforming or the universe responding to the piece on Shoegaze / Zoomergaze that I wrote in an earlier HUMANE DEBRIS, but this is Yeovil so the reality is almost certainly something far stranger! For those of you unaware, the other half of M/A/R/R/S - Colourbox - released a series of wonderfully idiosyncratic and gorgeously realised records on 4AD through the 80s. If you don’t believe me, go, find and have a listen.

On a bummer note, I was super sad to see my fave cafe, Veganuti, close at the end of the year. They served the best coffee in town and some lovely nosh, with a great soundtrack of Ukrainian Punk, Rap, Emo and Folk. The women who ran it tried their best to make the place friendly and welcoming, but I guess this part of the world just wasn’t quite ready for it. But I will treasure the time I spent in there as the joint’s (unofficial) Writer in Residence. Some pages of comic-book work you may have seen recently in 2000AD were written in there (along with some still yet to be published or illustrated).

To take a short philosophical detour, this all begs a broader question: just how long do you slug it out when something you love doing or have invested a big part of yrself in just isn’t working out? Obviously, it’s far messier / trickier when money and livelihood are involved - there comes a point where potential insolvency comes into the equation and makes the decision for you. Sure, following your dream(s) can often incur a personal cost, but trying - reaching for something, even if it never fully materialises or succeeds - is never a fail. It’s worth keeping that in mind, as it’s often something that many of us, especially creative bods, can lose sight of.

I was also saddened to see demolition work start in Glovers Walk, a legendary Yeovil Brutalist landmark. I grew up nearby in Wyndham Street, so remember the grim, long-gone tenement streetscape that preceded it and the Bus Station. Me and my friends used to play in and around Earle Street with its yards full of funeral hearses and lock-up garages, their walls displaying lurid posters for whatever X-rated Hammer Horror film was playing at the Odeon that week. Without running a search, I’m a bit sketchy about which year the Bus Station / Walk was built, but I remember buying the tail end of Gardner Fox’s run on The Justice League of America and then (later) Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics in the Station newspaper kiosk when it opened (they only sold DC comics, not Marvel), so I guess it must have been there by about ‘68-ish.

Later on, of course, Acorn Records moved to Glovers Walk from its original - (and tiny, but stuffed full of Krautrock and Prog!) - Princes Street location and GW then became a regular hang-out haunt for us during the Punk Years and beyond. A social hub where bands were formed, alliances forged and gossip shared. I’m now also flashing back to the Army-Navy store a few doors down where we used to get cheapo clobber. Muuuch later on, in the early 2010s, the first (and best) incarnation of Atomic Comics opened next to Acorn. So GW features very highly in my own personal YeoMythology. Before it was sealed off prior to demolition, we Bin Juiced it and gave it a good send off. Yes, Bin Juice is now a verb.

Yeovil has always had the amazing capacity to reinvent and rebuild itself. It’s resilient and full of surprises.

Just like you.

Now hand me my jet-pack, 2025, we’ve got new worlds to create and explore!

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w… Kek. A freelance writer, mainly of comic books, but not entirely. I’ve also written books and worked on film and TV stuff. For fun, I like to make music and art and write humorous, satirical and just plain silly comics - it makes a nice change from the gnarly Dark Horror work like FALL OF DEADWORLD for which I’m probably better known.

I’m currently uncoupling from Facebook and Instagram, so thank you for following me on here. I promise to make this newsletter a safe, non-toxic zone. I’ve just replaced Instagram with an ‘art’ blog called EPHEMERAL DEBRIS - it covers the Street Art, Abstract Paintings and Noise Aktions that I make and the sort of Found Weirdness that I used to post on Instagram. It’s possible that I may wash up on Bluesky at some point now that I’ve found out that Jack Dorsey is no longer involved and the site is a decentralised public benefit corporation rather than straight replay of Twitter. But one step at a time, huh?

SLATE UPDATES

Been a while since I did one of these, so let’s go!

First up, a new series of this is still in production. In fact, this very script got signed off this morning (sorry, no spoilers!):

I’m writing a second series for 2000AD in parallel to this one (in fact, I’m gonna be doing a bit of work on that soon as I finish up typing this), but it’s a - ssssh! - secret.

Meanwhile, TOXIC AVENGER #4 from Ahoy Comics of Syracuse, New York, features (a reprint of) my short “POTATO RICK’S COMIC BOOK PICKS” which originally appeared in an issue of the wonderful CAPTAIN GINGER comic a few years back and sports an illo by the great Alberto Ponticelli. In shops on 22/01/25.

I’ve written a couple of POTATO CHIP RICK pieces - hmm, maybe I should write one or two more and collect ‘em one day in a little limited micro-book for conventions, book fairs and Bandcamp?

Then, by coincidence, just as I was writing this piece, the postie delivered this:

Thanks to Rebellion for sending me a copy. As much as I like to look forward rather than back, it is really nice having copies of yr own back catalogue. Editor Matt Smith’s intro makes for interesting reading and I thank him for his kind words. This hardback collects the two series of CANON FODDER from the mid 90s, the first written by Mark Millar and the second by myself in ‘96, both illustrated by Chris Weston. It also contains the ANGEL: ZERO series by myself and the much-missed John M Burns, reprinted from 2011, I think. It was the first work I did with John and it’s beautifully illustrated.

There’s a lengthy afterword piece assembled by Karl Stock documenting the history of Canon Fodder that includes some DVD style commentary by myself (as well as I can remember events from almost 30 years ago) and Mr. Weston. At the time I was asked to pitch a third series of CF, which I did, but it became collateral damage in the various background legal wrangling - which is presumably now sorted, given the series' reprintings in recent years. But it’s all ancient history / water under the bridge. Publishing, innit. Off the back of it I was asked to pitch to Shelly Roeberg (now Bond) at DC-Vertigo somewhen around ‘96 / ‘97, which I did, but - as I’ve mentioned elsewhere - my pitches were almost certainly crap and nothing came of it. I can only assume I wasn’t quite ready and thus blew my chances of an ‘in’. Coincidentally though, I ended up, decades later, doing a bunch of work for Ahoy Comics (see: above) whose crew includes Tom Peyer and Stuart Moore, both ex-Vertigo editors. So, I kinda got there in the end, by what we in the UK call a B-road route. Life takes us where Life takes us.

As an aside, I always fancied a crack at the classic Vertigo character, John Constantine / Hellblazer - reckon I’m probably one of the few pro Brit comic-book writers who have never had a swing at him at one point or another. I do have a really cool / fun Constantine pitch in my back pocket - these days, the character feels a little played out to me, a man out of time, but I have a unique, off-the-hook take - one that I’ll likely never get to do anything with, but it’s fun to play mental What-If games with these things sometimes. Grant Morrison famously had a series of black notepads with ideas / pitches for virtually every major character IP from Sherlock Holmes onwards, just in case someone, you know, asked. It’s a good habit / exercise / praxis to get into as a writer: well, what would you do if you got to write, for example, a Tarzan story? And even if you never get to play with that character / universe, it can spark ideas for yr own original creations. But in the unlikely situation that someone from DC is reading this: Well, hello, there!

Und, finally, the second (6 pages, this time) episode-adventure of BUNNI & BLOB is done: a fun, madcap, creator-owned series featuring a mecha rabbit-samaurai and her potty-mouthed pal, a bitter, crabby, old, Gloop-addicted blob of programmable matter, in a dingy, Manga / Anime-inspired cyber-metropolis. It’s written by me, illustrated and coloured by Jack Parsons (a local up-and-coming artistic talent from over the Dorset border) and lettered by my old pal, Polish superstar, Lukasz Kowalczuk. This time round, we tail (sic) the unlikely tall tail (sic) of Blob’s origin and start to expand their world a little, layering Yokai, Oni and Japanese mythological elements onto Cyberpunk and Tokusatsu imagery and tropes. It’s a LOT of fun!

Jack and Lukasz knocked it out of the bar… er, I mean, the park on this one.

We’re currently looking for a (paid) home for it, in the UK and beyond. Any interested editors / publishers reading this, please ping me and I’ll be happy to share / pitch it in all its lurid glory! I’m hoping Jack and I will get to do some more Bunniverse tails.

Not writing-orientated, but I’m playing a gig in February in Bristol at Cafe Kino - yet another local Brizzle venue under threat of closure as landlords and speculators do their best to trash the city’s indy / co-operative cultural bases. If I’m able, I pop in for lunch whenever I’m up in town, so I’m delighted to be able to finally perform there. It’s a great place. I’m on the same bill as the Dutch sound-art musician, Red. Brut, and Bristol synth-drone-ambient duo, Pixaban.

Me, I’m gonna be making a bit of a racket. We’ll be down in the basement if you need us.

All of which leads us nicely into the next section…

SOME MUSIC WOT I MADE

Just after New Year I released a super-limited physical edition of HAVNTED WAVEBANDS, an album by SILO TOWERS 13.2GHz - my Signalwave / Broken Transmission / Damaged Ambient project - on black unbranded CD-rs. These sold through in a day or two (it was VERY limited!), but the album is still available as a download version.

NOTHING LEFT BUT THIS is an album of Blackened DIY Dungeon Synth that I released back in the Late Autumn. It’s morbid, misery-inducing and Black Metal af. There are still a couple dual-coloured black n red, murky-sounding cassette tapes left. There is also a d/load version if yr, I dunno, worried that playing a copy of the tape will leave you cursed and with only a week to live like some wretched character from Hideo Nakata’s Ring.

I might do a very short CD-r run of this release for those of you who don’t have a tape-player - a couple people have asked if that was a possibility. Watch this space (or follow my Bandcamp, it’s probably easier!).

KEK’S WORD OF THE DAY

Unsub.

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

First up is the awesome 34,400 litres (live at the Cube) tape by Bristol Grind super-group, Piss Drinker - it’s a shrill, fizzy, frothy, frazzled ammoniacal concoction that sounds like a demented, drunken weasel tearing, biting and scratching at your shirt-tails as it chases you down an ill-lit, piddle-puddle flooded back-alley. This’ll get ya out of bed in the morning!

And speaking of West Country Grind - Goregrind, in this instance - I went to see Eproctophilic Necrophile at the King Arthur pub, Glastonbury, last night. The Proctos are Somerset boys - Taunton / Bridgwater based - I saw ‘em play in Yeovil last year and really enjoyed them. Despite a lack of rural Southwest venues for this sort of music, the lads have been gigging wherever / whenever they can and are turning in to a tight, well-oiled and extremely entertaining unit. The evening was a Punk / Metal showcase that found them sharing a bill with their pals, Twisted in a Layby (“No fuckin’ hyphen!”), a cranked-up (3 string?) cigar-box guitar, bass and drum-machine punk duo from Devon, I think. Both groups had a hatful of killer riffs and charisma to spare, honed by playing and playing and playing. A blistering, bloody good night out.

Fort Evil Fruit, the wonderfully eclectic Irish cassette label, have been a constant on the scene for many years now, consistently delivering quality music that deftly defies rigid genre borders. If you like electronic music that floats on ever-so-slightly ominous black lily-pads of sound, Gamelan-esque gongs and metallophones, then Glares by Minced Oath if for you. In places, it sounds like a slooowed-down Harry Partch, drugged and framed for murder, left for the cops to find at the crime scene of an early 1960s black and white thriller. Or some lost, colour-coded, super-rare 90’s CD-r by Conrad Schnitzler. It’s VERY much my bag. Minced Oath is one of many aliases used by electronic musician and composer, Dunk Murphy. It’s evocative and unhurried, a series of sound paintings. I like it a LOT.

And, just when you think Fort Evil’s tape droppage can’t get any more beautifully diverse, the Minced Oath album was released on the same day as Resultado da Guerra by Ferida Aberta, the São Paolo situated Crust Punk band. Fort Evil Paul told me: “I like being kind of passive aggressively eclectic, though I feel sorry for the completists!” Well, I dig this album too and very much - though for very different reasons to Minced Oath - 19 tracks of Discharge-inspired Metallised Thrashpunk / Brazilian d-beat: what’s not to love!

Got back into Morton Feldman again recently. You don’t need to know this, but I’m gonna tell ya anyway: I went down a Feldman rabbit hole 2, 3 years ago when I was recovering from Long Covid and needed to listen to something a bit more chill and meditative. I arrived at Feldman by revisiting / exploring some of John Cage’s piano pieces, prepared or otherwise. I was looking for pieces of music that had some sense of stillness at their centre, that were fairly long and which I could just leave running on my headphones and could drift in and out of, and some of the Late Era / 80s Feldman fitted the bill. I remember listening to Triadic Memories on YouTube a lot.

I won’t bore you with my musical flight-path / way-in this time round (it was pretty convoluted and took me to some interesting places along the way), but recently I’ve found myself fixating on some of the earlier piano pieces, particularly Piano (Three Hands) from 1957, listening to vibrations moving up and down the piano strings (it’s a beautifully mic’d / recorded version) as they diminish, hearing the notes slowly, calmly decay. This one isn’t the version I’ve mostly been drilling down into; instead, it’s a gorgeously softer (and faster?) version performed by Feldman himself and John Tilbury (of AMM).

I can’t 100% remember, without running a search, whether Feldman had switched back from graphical scores and returned to classical notation by this time (I think he had). Cage broke first from Classical Tradition by using chance / indeterminacy, creating a important cultural rupture-point, in much the same way as DuChamp arguably did with art. Feldman, with whom he was friends, later abandoned Cagean indeterminacy and instead, presumably inspired by some of the abstract artists he was hanging out with in New York, started composing / creating increasingly lengthy sonic ‘structures’ - audio-objects that the listener can temporally move through, hearing / experiencing aspects of the piece from different directions / angles. As the years passed, Feldman became increasingly concerned with creating sound continuums - simple-but-complex, quasi-repetitive clusters of notes - cutting them loose from traditional narrative structures and strictures, freeing them from representational ‘meaning’ - from being ‘about’ something - just exploring and enjoying sounds for their own sake - but without Cage’s tendency to defer to Chance. Instead, he composed as if he were an artist, presenting his works to the listener as if they were sculptural objects - vibrational shapes that hang in the air, shining like multifaceted jewels.

What I love about some of these more minimalistic Feldman pieces is that they continue to play on inside yr head after the physical performance has ended.

CHILL WITH KIKI

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid! Take care, y’all.