Customer Reviews

It's Dark in London (A Mask Noir Title)

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I'm a pretty big fan of both graphic storytelling, stories set in London, and Serpent's Tail line of crime books, so I expected this to be a perfect brew for me. But I have to say I was a little let down by this collection of twelve graphic shorts, there were only a few I found worth the time it took to read. Oddly enough, Woodrow Phoenix's wordless series of unpeopled black and white cityscapes, "You Are Here", is one of them -- and it nicely establishes a sense of place for all that follows. As might be expected, Neil Gaiman scripted "The Court" is another of the best entries. Brought to life in the realistic, no nonsense work of Warren Pleece, the story of a powerful man's desire and a legendary tribe of women is, despite all odds, the most straightforward story in the book. Gaiman later rewrote it into a prose short story called "Keepsakes and Treasures", which appeared in the anthology "999". Yana Stajno and Chris Hogg's "A Flash in the Park" takes a very simple idea of a flasher and does a nice twist on it, with much more open art than any of the other stories. Stewart Home's contribution keeps to his standard mix of class war, skinheads, and philosophy, and is well supported by Jonathan Edwards' confident art.

Graeme Gordon and Dix's "Dancing with Death" is too impressionistic in both story and art for my taste. Chris Webster and Carl Flint's "Frozen" is too self-referential as a story (about a conceptual artist and her model) and too inconsistent artistically for me. Stella Duffy writes an interesting story which gets confusing at the end for "Luck Dip", but I couldn't stand Melinda Gebble's art for it. Iain Sinclair is a writer I've tried to get into and just can't connect with, and his script for "The Griffin's Egg" is typically enigmatic, while the collage art by Dave McKean is painfully dated looked. I liked Carol Swain's "Come Down Town" for a while, before it too, become too much about art. This is now the third version of Chris Petit's "The Hard Shoulder" I've read (first it was short story, later a novel), and I can't say that Garry Marshall's art adds much to the proceedings. Ilya's "The Body" begins with a hermaphrodite corpse fished from a canal, and had something resembling a story idea, but the distorted graphics distract and detract to the extent of spoiling it all. And it doesn't get any bigger in comics than Alan Moore, but his story "I Keep Coming Back" feels like a dashed off riff, set against the making of the film From Hell, more than an organic story, and the supporting art by editor Zarate doesn't do much for me. For Moore completists, it also appears in his collection "Yuggoth Cultures."

While attractively packaged and produced, and full of "name" writers and artists, the bottom line is that this is not a very strong graphic anthology. It's too bad, a collection arranged around ideas of London is good one, it's just not well executed here. As with all such collections, there are a few bright spots, but not enough to recommend it.

London is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, home to great wealth and deep economic depression. People from all areas of the former British Empire live in London and contribute elements of their culture to the whole. The streets contain a great deal of despair, depravity and people living out their lives of little hope. This collection of comics by British artists captures all of these characteristics of that city.
These are not comics that you want to read while in a dark mood, unless of course your goal is to make it even darker. The brutality of life in the underworld is depicted in stark black and white detail; among other things there is suicide, the purchase of human beings for sex, murder, necrophilia of a hermaphroditic corpse, sculpture of frozen urine, oxygen deprivation sex and the plight of a male flasher. Hard stories designed to uppercase the graphic in the phrase "graphic comics." If these are the kind of stories that you enjoy, then this is a book that will interest you. Conversely, if they disquiet you, then your best action would be to avoid them.