Crawl into The Dome: Review Roundup!

It's been a busy few months, having had both a great time and a great success of the Stripped Fest Comic Fair and the MCM Scotland Comic Con, and in doing so meeting a load of very cool and talented people around these exhibitions...

Meanwhile, behind the facade of this innocent-looking blogpost, comic reviews have been creeping about the place unchecked and it's time to round them up in one place and exterminate them! Here we go...!

Both Metrodome and Crawl Hole, by me and the excellent Iain Laurie, have both received a powerfully good review in the latest issue of Starburst Magazine. Our "work together is instantly recognisable and like nothing else you've ever read... often hilarious, occasionally incomprehensible and always, always disturbing". Yeah!

On Metrodome, "...this ultraviolent, sickeningly offensive midnspew is utterly brilliant", while on Crawl Hole reviewer Phillip Buchan is impressed with our breadth of stories "all filtered through a very Death Metal sensibility". Iain's work is complimented as "grotesque as ever, improving in consistency and confidence with every comic that he releases" and for my part my "warped sensibilites really do hold nothing sacred". Hey man, click to embiggen and read it for yourself!

 

Thanks to Phillip Buchan for the review. Starburst #393 available from all good newsagents and Good Guys doll factories now!

Over on the Forbidden Planet Blog, Metrodome takes a bit of a battering from the ever-astute Richard Bruton. Unsurprising for an unconventional comic, but he does find some qualities therein, saying "It’s well written and Laurie is obviously having a great, great time doing his vilest, most grotesque characters...".  Read it over here...!

In the following weeks, Richard takes a look at Crawl Hole and finds it very good indeed. Yeah! He states Iain's work "has his very best Kev O’Neill on in a couple of the final stories. And it suits him, the angular, scratchy style, the explosion of bodily fluids, guts, and gore picked out in every detail" and describes the writing as having "...something more about them, a heft not in keeping with their short length". He concludes "All in all, this one is slight, but manages to do the important thing; it’s satisfying, with ideas that make the sum of the experience far greater than the page-count." Man, Craig, shut up. It's over here!

And following that I was delighted to see the complimentary covers for Roachwell and Crawl Hole featured on the Forbidden Plant blog! A little trick that I was pretty pleased with myself on and Iain and Derek Dow executed perfectly, so it was excellent to see it appreciated in this way.

And finally Andy Oliver of Broken Fronteir looks at Metrodome over here, with plenty good to say! On Metrodome "the characters emerge fully formed from the deepest, darkest depths of the magnificently poisonous headspaces of Collins and Laurie...".

He concludes " If you like your comics unsettling, in-yer-face and gratuitously grotesque then you can’t go wrong with the wicked and wily wit of these guys".

So here ends the gratuitous splurge of frothing reviewage! All in all I'm really pleased to see our weirdo experimental comics being received so well in some very esteemed quarters. Thanks to the reviewers above for their time and efforts in writing these, and their continued support of the UK small press.