015: THE SACKMAN PROPHECIES

“THAT SAILOR THING”

Good morning from Yeovil, South Somerset where there has been another sighting of the eerie entity known locally as The Sackman.

So, I went for a drink with my pal, JM, and at one point in the conversation he broke off from telling me about his recent walk-on speaking part in an episode of Bargain Hunt and went a bit quiet. He glanced nervously around the tavern. A stern, unforgiving portrait of Elton John glowered down at us from a nearby wall. JM finished his cider and leaned in, conspiratorially, his voice a hoarse whisper: “Something uncanny happened to me recently. I… I think I saw The Sackman.”

His face was pale, but that might have been the drink. A strange, unearthly chill ran up my spine and the hairs stood up on the nape of my neck. I shuddered and reached for my own drink. The Sackman… oh, shit.

Ah, perhaps it’s best JM tells the story in his own words:

“Saturday 15th Febuary 2025. I'm driving home from an evening away with my girlfriend in Shaftesbury. It's early afternoon, cold but sunny on a typical late winter’s day. It's roughly an hours drive back to Yeovil and it’s a straightforward uneventful journey until we get close to home turf in the nearby village of Chilthorne Domer. On the busy road adjacent to the Halfway House pub, the road continues to a dual carriageway into Yeovil or turns right onto the lesser travelled and sometimes avoided... Vagg Hill Hollow. A semi-obsolete old road which is notorious for tree debris blockages and flooding. And now the mysterious Sackman!”

“There's oncoming traffic, so I stop in the road, indicating to turn into the Hollow. While I'm paused, waiting for oncoming cars to pass, I notice an unusual 'figure' stood a few feet into the road. It's stood still in the middle of the road. It was dark and solid, human-shaped with outstretched arms (like a scarecrow) wearing what looked like a Hobbit-esque hooded cloak. The cloak or shawl was hanging down from its arms, tattered and stringy like a weathered sack rocking in the wind. I thought it was a person. My immediate reaction was, "what the fuck is that!?" I’m expecting there now to be a delay or incident - maybe somebody in an emergency or a D&D cosplayer out wandering in a lane in the sticks looking for mead? A few cars pass, so for a good 30, 40 seconds I watched the thing and it was masted, completely motionless, in the centre of the road.

“I turn into the road around the slight bend, anticipating something that might hold up our journey and… there’s nothing there. It’s completely gone! I didn't even think it might be anything 'spooky' initially. I drove past slowly expecting to see an obvious explanation (a weirdly dressed cyclist or some old biddy in a a giant coat) but there is nobody around. On one side of the road there is a lane which leads to farmland and on the other side there's a house and some under-construction garages. I slowed down, nearly stopping, as I passed the area where it was stood to look up the farm lane, but there was nothing! It has completely vanished. We didn't pass another person or car at all on the small stretch of road. I sketched a very rough picture in biro when I got home.”

JM’s comment about cosplayers might sound bizarre, but we do have two D&D / Games shops in town and a fair-sized local RPG community. It’s not uncommon to see people in Yeovil town centre in costume or ‘in character’. Someone was dressed as Deadpool a few months ago, stood up on a bench in the Quedam, haranguing passing shoppers with his carbonadium (plastic) katanas and lame, squeaky-voiced insults. Also, this is a pretty rural area: you can get some real oddbods roaming the unlit country roads at night. I once had a guy pass me up Grove Avenue one night on a unicycle. Another time, I passed a completely naked man walking his dog down by Dodham Brook. Also, Vagg Hill is not far from the Reindeer Ranch, where, er, stuff like this can be regularly found:

When he got home, JM’s Jimmy Olsen-like reporting instincts took hold and he questioned his parents about any potential past weird goings-ons down in the Hollow and MM, his dad, recalled an incident known as “That Sailor Thing”. According to MM, some years ago, a matelot was killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking down that same stretch of unlit road after a night out in Yeovil. Presumably, he was yomping his way back to the naval base In Yeovilton, the other side of Ilchester. Brrr.

JM returned the next to take photos of the scene and ask in the Halfway House pub if they knew of any similar sightings or had had spooky experiences, but the pub was shut, its door barred with a milk-churn painted with the word CLOSED.

Keep it paranormal (in the West Country), pals!

All the best, Kek

I’m Kek-w… (call me Kek). I mostly write comic books, along with the odd book or film. I’ve been doing this for a loooong time - over 30 years professionally and, before that, a fair few years writing for the Small Press / Indie sector, music and comic zines, etc. In recent weeks I seem to be making a lot more art than I have for years. If I’m to be honest I think it’s probably a reaction to / defence mechanism against all the grim, terrible stuff that’s going on right now. A way of immunising myself, without turning my back on things or people. I also make a bunch of music in a wide variety of guises / genres. Again, I think it’s a way of staying sane in the face of adversity.

HUMANE DEBRIS is an attempt to create a safe space - a bubble or oasis of relative calm - for other weirdos like myself. A place away from the toxic ratatatat of social media. I’m gone from Facebook and Instagram (‘cos, you know, billionaires) and I pressed the Smart Bomb button on Twitter a looong time ago. We gotta try’n build new communities, new networks, webs and clusters, away from all that crap. Catch our breaths, rebuild, heal and grow. I hope you find some fun, respite and relative calm here with us.

A CHAT WITH PETER DOHERTY

Peter Doherty is one of the UK’s greatest and best-loved comic-book creators: a superb illustrator and the #1 go-to colour artist for many A-List creators, including Geof Darrow, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Mark Millar. He was certainly David Roach’s top choice of colourist when he and I collaborated on two series of SAPHIR for 2000AD in recent years. When the pages started to come in I was blown away, not just by David’s gorgeously detailed black and white line work, but by Peter’s incredibly subtle, sympathetic and synergistic colour choices. I could see why David was so keen to have him on the team.

Peter’s first professional work came in 1990 after a couple of 5-page try-out strips he’d illustrated were shown to the then-Tharg, Steve MacManus. According to UK comic-book lore, John Wagner was walking by at the time, nodded in approval and Peter became the artist for the Wagner-scripted series, Young Death. Peter’s work on Young Death (Boyhood of a Superfiend) was one of the primary touchstones of mine and Dave Kendall’s Fall of Deadworld. In creating Deadworld, I had to cherry-pick Judge Death canon and mould it into a coherent body of lore that we could use to go forward: Peter and John’s Young Death was an essential cornerstone of that.

I’d never met Peter before, but David Roach introduced me to him at the 2024 Lawless Con and I had a great natter with him about all sorts of comic-related stuff (most of which has since fallen through the cracks in me grey matter). Peter was great company ad great fun, full of anecdotes from 35 years in the biz. It took me a while to re-establish contact - (it was mostly kickstarted by the fact that Peter teamed up with David and I again to help finish Nightmare New York after John Burns retired, then sadly passed) - but I finally got round to mailing Peter and starting an off-on conversation with him. The ‘off’ part was mostly due to me getting distracted by work and life stuff - Peter was incredibly generous with his time and was open to chatting about all sorts of topics and I thank him for taking the time to cheerfully engage with me.

Back when I was on FB and Instagram I noticed Peter would regularly post sketches of people on public transport, waiting for the bus, etc. It seemed to me as if he’d had some sort of formal art training - or had done Life Drawing classes, at least - so I asked him about how he’d started. Was Art something he always wanted to do? 

PD: “I drew from an early age, even though you only realise in hindsight it sort of defines you. It took quite a few years to imagine it could be something one could as a job."

I'm guessing that maybe you went to Art School / Art College?

PD: “I did, following a couple of years trying to do physics / electronics at Durham Uni. Art school was pointless, though I had a good tutor on the foundation course, however, and he got me into sketching people and things out in the real world, a habit I haven’t really lost.”

I was interested that Peter had studied physics (my own science background was microbiology) and wondered if that was something that still interested him or intersected with his art in any way?

PD: “I still read a lot of science books - popular ones, but still I’m interested. Don’t know how much it feeds into what I do in comics.

“I have a similar background to what yours sounds like.  My parents were both from mining families and were crawling up the social ladder, so they wanted me to be a trophy son. I was clever enough to go to a local grammar school, but I threw that all away - hahahahaha!!! 

“In a way I wish I had stuck with the physics degree and got that, I’d have been in a better position to do more things, and more different things too. I think university was overwhelming to me, as I was very naive and so were my parents in dealing with me ‘cos they just had the snobby aspirations about uni (something to brag about), but no knowledge of how to deal with my problems going there. To them, I think it was just a continuation of school, but it happened somewhere else.”

Peter’s experience is something I can very much relate to on a personal level - also coming from a Working-Class home where, at the time, it was still relatively rare in the UK for people of my generation from that background to end up in Higher Education. I also felt very out of my depth in those surroundings and, like Peter, I always wanted to study Art or a more creative topic, but got nudged into the Sciences, so I can sympathise with all this.

At what point did illustrating / colouring comic-books become a thing? Did you bounce around doing lots of different art / design jobs before or in-parallel to working in comics?

PD: “Left Art College, did some samples, got my first job (Young Death). Simple as that - well, not quite!! Well… I just drew stuff, but didn’t have many comics and I showed them to Diana Schutz (Dark Horse editor who edited Sin City, 300, Grendel, Concrete, etc) one year at UKCAC. And she was pretty forthright, and correctly so, and suggested I go and learn a little craft and try again in a few years time. She was very nice about it, but she was right. I didn’t really have any comics work - I suspect you know the problem - I’ve seen the phenomena lots of times: folks don’t show comics, when that’s what they say they want to do. I did a graphics degree and in the interim met Duncan (Fegredo) and John (Smith) which gave me a bit of a way in…”

As I get older, I’m increasingly interested in how / why people who take a creative path through life continue do what they do, despite all the potential hardships and obstacles that reality throws up. I told Peter what John Burns used to tell me, that, “It's only a job, yet despite that, we somehow put more of ourselves into it / onto the page." And that maybe our love of all that stuff (comics, art, creative activities) is somehow greater than the self-doubt and the barriers that stand in our way. That something propels us over or around them…

PD: “What you say about JMB strikes me as correct. There’s something about making stories that’s really fulfilling. 

“It’s weird that there’s so much comics-based media these days that it’s easy to forget most people don’t look at comics themselves. As my mate, Jared, who owns OK Comics in Leeds, told me recently: someone came into the shop asking for recommendations - he said he was a big fan of the Marvel movies, turned out he never read a comic!!

“I think it’s really interesting the ways comics have sort of escaped their ghetto - superhero films, courses in comics, really naively crafted comics by all sorts of folk, etc, etc. I think it’s partly that more folks these days have grown up with comics as part of their wider cultural landscape, as opposed to our day where they were confined to a little cultural cul-de-sac.

“I vacillate between embracing this widening out of comics into the wider world or getting all bad-tempered at most people’s appalling taste in material. Hahaha!!!”

I have a terrible memory, but vaguely remembered Peter telling me at Lawless that he’d done 'everything' on the Millarworld work he did for Mark (Jupiter’s Legacy), not ‘just’ the colouring, but lettering and design. When did you start adding lettering to yr skill set, Peter? Was that round about the time you started doing computer colouring (for Geof Darrow on Shoalin Cowboy)? Did lettering come out of using computers to do colour work - or did you start off hand-lettering?

PD: “The design work just came from being familiar with bits of software over the years. Shaolin came about cos I could do the work, and I told Geof it was easy enough to do the whole job oneself rather than trust it to someone else. So I did it and it was overseen by Geof - I think he'd had publishers fuck things up too many times, and he’s a bit of a control freak, like I am too, I ought to add. So that’s what happened. And he was open to daft ideas too, like that Kevin Nowlan cover where the logo is almost completely covered by the mule in the foreground, but it was a variant so who cares. Mark wouldn’t have gone for that in a million years.”

PD: “The Jupiter’s stuff was initially done as Mark had always worked for companies that do the design stuff in-house, and Image don’t do that - it’s the creators job to sort out all that crap - so he was ignorant of what went on and me and Vin sort of took over!! I’d done it on Shaolin with Geof a few years before and that went fine and I knew what to do, so.... It was fine with Image too, the Art Director said one time what I was doing was great, ‘cos they didn’t have to fix anything before the stuff went to print. I ended up doing more of that stuff (and lettering) as I knew what I was doing and those jobs rather than "creative” ones, Mark didn’t have to have any arguments with me about bits of design he didn’t like (which I think, in reality, he’s not much interested in) - I often did things in the design he wasn’t keen on, not sort-of boring, conventional things which Mark liked.

“There’s a couple of covers in the document I’ve attached that he didn’t much like so I changed them a bit as per his wishes. I think he preferred to keep me on the most invisible jobs that needed doing, but didn’t interest him.”

PD: “All this stuff I did on the computer, I couldn’t have done lettering freehand, but digitally, it isn’t that hard. Same with the design stuff and putting together a print PDF. It’s not rocket science, as they say!!!! Even the colour is all digitally produced. Lee Carter was surprised that I did Shaolin digitally, but although it’s a bit of a more time-consuming process, I like this stuff looking “real”.

“All this stuff I just picked up as I’ve gone along, and it’s easier these days doing it digitally than it ever would be with all the old tools that you actually need skills for!!!

“The colouring I started in about 2001. First job was Grant and Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy for Vertigo. Digital stuff. It was when DC were beginning to let colourists provide their owns print files rather than do guides which were sent to a separation house to provide the print files. All the colour work I’ve done for other people is digital.”

I  loved Seaguy, btw!  

PD: “Taa, I had a laugh doing it!”

So, you coloured SAPHIR and NIGHTMARE NEW YORK digitally too?

PD: “Yeah it’s all digital. I think there’s some scanned watercolour patterns but they’re dropped into a digital file. 

“Like I say, I’m aiming to make the art feel like it’s all of a piece, where the colour and line work “fit” together. Of course you can’t ever make it look completely “natural”, but that would be pointless. 

“How did you think it had been done?”

Well, that's just blown my mind, Peter! I thought you'd done it by hand - it had a very subtle / delicate feel, like, I dunno, water colours / gouache or something...  well, holy cow! (laughs).

Thanks for all yr time and for engaging with this, Peter. Yr comic book work on Flex Mentallo, etc I love to bits - it's wonderful ! - but, weirdly, it's yr sketches that I think are really amazing / more personal... the day-to-day stuff, the things you made 'cos you wanted to - thanks for sharing those! Well, for all of it - and for chatting too!

PD: “Thanks for the kind words about the sketches. It’s not really work, so it’s free of all the expectations you have to consider when doing “proper” work

“No bother at all. Like I said, I’m a champion blatherer.”

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

Huge thanks to Paul at the wonderful Fort Evil Fruit label for sending me tapes of Glares by Minced Oath and Resultado da Guerra by Ferida Aberta.

I mentioned these releases a couple issue-episodes ago. The Minced Oath tape has an meditative Aphex Twin Selected Ambient meets electronic Gamelan percussion vibe. Dreamy, drifting Morton Subotnick sonorities underpinned by Minimalist buzz, crackle n hum. It was my go-to pre-bed chilltrack during a recent, much-needed break in Paignton, Devon. Ferida Aberta is ferocious, D-beat propelled Brazillian Crust Punk and my current bicycling-into-town listen as I zip in and out of the gnarly, road-rage choked, gridlocked local traffic, dodging psychotic Asda grocery delivery trucks, gig economy white van privateer ‘postmen’ and The Munsters Hot Rod Koach. Sheesh, it’s like The Cars That Ate Yeovil here!

Did you know the Musters Koach had its own theme tune? Well, it did.

A thousand hails to my pal Matt aka Wizards Tells Lies for hepping me to Spirit of Ecstasy by Imperial Triumphant.

New York Art Deco inspired / Jazz inflected, hyper-convoluted, occasionally dissonant / avant Technical Death Metal. It’s a relentlessly, breathlessly, urban music that ducks and dives, constantly veering off down unlit blind alleys, through tangled rat run mazes of fire escapes, pools of piss, buzzing air-con units and steaming vents before throwing itself, with a gasp of relief, into the back of a waiting yellow cab - escape at last! - only to find, as the vehicle pulls away, that it’s now sealed in the back seat with a grinning corpse. Imperial Triumph summon up, for me - a simple small town boy - the nameless horror of The City: that sense of choking, exhaust fume overwhelm, the swarming, worker-drone side-walk rush of Too Many People, of Too Much Noise, Too Much Motion, that smothers and exhausts you even as you’re beguiled by the beauty of its buildings, by the endless variety, wealth and novelty on display. They channel that claustrophobic, unbearable sense of urban density, of vastness and infinite variety constantly closing in on you, bearing down on you - each labyrinthine, baroque twist in the music, like the convoluted turns of city streets, ultimately leading to a Dead End. To some awful, unwanted fate.

Metrovertigo, indeed! As Matt (a talented bass-player and drummer himself) said to me: “It’s madness! I am baffled by how you'd even sit down and write this stuff, do you know what I mean? Takes some brain power just to listen to it, never mind write/ perform it!” Like Matt, I’m equally in awe of how something like this is conceived and put together. It’s ultra-Proggy next level shit that revels in its opulent decadence, but which never loses its gnarl and snarl.

And speaking of Death Metal, I very much enjoyed the Exeter band, Recreance, when they recently played a pub in Yeovil (!) with Somerset Grind superstars, Eproctophilic Necrophile. Again, they had a slightly Proggy vibe, but I wasn’t expecting them to incorporate electronic drones and textures into their breakdowns. Scored a copy of their album Parallels from the band after the show and it’s been on repeat play here - it has more electronic textures, filtering, etc on it than their live show suggested, but it’s dark, super-gnarly, throat-rasping fun. Recreance don’t seem to have a Bandcamp, unfortunately. If you want a physical (mine was a well-spent £7, direct from the group), it looks like you’ll have to hit them up on (sorry) Facebook or Youtube or - much better! - catch ‘em live. Great to be able to support a Devon-based band. (What is it about Devon and Metal? Didja know a top Metal logo designer worked at the Co-op in Seaton?)

And, finally, a quick shout-out to, er… me. A few weeks back I played live at Cafe Kino in Stokes Croft, Bristol, with Red Brut and Pixaban - my first full live show since covid - and I had a great time! I don’t think I’ve ever had a live show go so smoothly - no kit died or blew up on me mid-show, everything not only worked, but sounded great - and that’s mostly down to Jess, who did the live sound. I don’t think I’ve worked with a better Sound Person / Technician. They were super helpful, patient and unflappable, really knew what they were doing and were extremely nice. I’d work with them again in a heartbeat. Thank you, Jess! Also, a huge thanks to Owen and Charlie for their kind invitation to play. They are currently doing a pre-order for Dread Country, a lathe-cut Carnivorous Plants Trio album. Check it out here.

Also: Cafe Kino have an ongoing crowd-funder to save them from closure. If you want to help save a wonderful community space and venue, please donate here:

Fingers crossed, I’m hoping to play some more noise / drone / weirdo shows later this year. Pls contact me if you fancy having me come and play. Thx.

CHILL WITH KIKI

Spring is slowly coming to life - and so, I hope are you! - but take it easy. Look after yerselves, okay?