John A. Short (W) David Hitchcock (A) Emily Allison (Ed)
Kult Creations
B&W
A4
8pp
£2.50
order via:
http://kultcreations.blogspot.com/
Having spent many, many years (too many to want to remember) trawling through Victorian/pre-Victorian newspapers and periodicals, I can tell you that nothing went on then that doesn’t go on now. A mother cutting the throats of her six children because “she could not afford to keep them”. And more than once your modern sensibilities baulk when you read that someone (child, man or woman) was hung on the flimsiest of evidence.
So, when I saw the mock-up back cover of an edition of The Illustrated Police News, I thought that it looked good. Doesn’t mean the actual comic is good though.
Let me say, firstly, that I LOVE the art style used here. Writing “black and white” seems a bit lame because there is some great use of grey tone. The art alone is worth the price of the comic.
Remember I wrote a few days back that I liked John A. Short’s writing on the humorous Spliffy strip? Well, this subject matter is far removed from that and I have to say it was great. When you start feeling sorry for a character in a comic strip then its good characterisation by the writer.
The dreadful thing is that this is not a fictional story. Set in the days before “hoodies” there were still lots of unemployed youths loitering around with nothing to do. Violence and death were quite common place. There were no police scientific investigation services (CSIs to you American comickers). Policing was very basic and so, in many cases, was the judicial system.
John McCrave, twenty years old at the time, was no innocent. However, based on the evidence it is fair to say that today he might have gotten probation or a suspended sentence. The Victorians had their on type of “suspended” sentence -hanging.
The creators wanted to use the McCrave case because it draws a parallel of “youths, knives and crime/gangs” in the Victorian and Moodern era.
This is a superb comic but is more than just a comic. Again, it shows that British creators can produce bloody great comics.
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