Another comic I picked up at Bristol was Dream Lover, written by my friend Sissy Pantelis. As this Geek Syndicate review notes, it is pretty firmly aimed at the Twilight audience, but Valia Kapadi’s art is good, and considering that Sissy’s first language is Greek, and her second is French, I am in awe of her ability to produce a perfectly good English language script. Get it for your teenage daughter.

Something I was very much hoping to find at Bristol but did not was a new issue of Jenika Ioffreda’s awesome Vampire Free Style. Thankfully there is a new issue. Richard Bruton has a review at the FPI blog.

The other comic book I was keen to pick up at Bristol was #1 of the debut series written by Jonathan Ross. Non UK readers may be scratching their heads and asking, “who?” Well, Mr. Ross is well known here a movie critic, but to you he is probably better known as the husband of Jane Goldman, the Hugo-winning scriptwriter for Stardust, and for the recent blockbuster, Kick-Ass.

Ross’s interest in comics has been well known for years. He once co-owned a London comics shop, and his collection is legendary, but as far as I know this is his first serious foray into fiction. Despite his love of superheroes, Turf is not a caped crimefighter story. It is set in New York in 1929 during the Prohibition era. The city is run by criminal gangs who pay off the corrupt mayor and police chief. Society columnist Susie dreams of being able to write hard-hitting articles that will expose the corruption, but has little hope of any success. Even her loyal photographer, Dale, appears to only tag along for the free “lemonade” he gets at high society parties.

As the story opens, a new family has just come onto the scene. They are rich nobility, recently emigrated from Romania. They don’t appear to be terribly interested in the alcohol racket, but they do have a serious interest in smuggling their favorite drink: blood.

That by itself would make a fine comic. Gangsters v Vampires in Prohibition era New York is a lovely idea. But Ross is not the sort of man to go for a simple, safe idea. He has big ideas and plenty of ambition. And that is probably why there is a single page devoted to a dog fight taking place 12 miles above the surface of the Earth, leading to a large object crashing into the city.

Can he make it work? On the basis of issue #1 I think he can. As Ross confessed in an interview on Geek Syndicate, the script for Turf #1 is a bit wordy (though nowhere near Don McGregor class), but there is a fair amount of infodumping to be done so that’s not surprising. Aside from that it works very well. I’m particularly pleased to see that Ross appears to have good guys and bad guys in both the gangster and vampire communities. That promises interesting developments in issues to come.

The art is by Tommy Lee Edwards who has an impressive track record in comics and doing style guides for high profile movies. His work reminded me a lot of Howard Chaykin and it did not surprise me to find interviews online in which Edwards cites Chaykin as a major influence. The panels are all very dark and heavy on the brown, almost as if Edwards has deliberately gone for a sepia tone look. It seems to suit the subject matter rather well.

Given his high public profile, I don’t think Ross need worry about the book being a flop. Based on #1, however, he may well have to worry about it being a success.

Somehow I have managed to forget to enthuse about Roger Gibson and Vince Danks’ excellent comic, Harker, before now. I need to remedy that forthwith.

Not all comics contain super heroes. Indeed, not all of them have any speculative elements at all. Harker is a straight-up police procedural. It features the rumpled, chain-smoking investigative genius, Detective Inspector Harker, and his younger, fitter, hipper and more computer-savvy assistant, Detective Sergeant Critchley. As with many such stories (think of Morse and Lewis, for example), much of the entertainment comes from the interaction of the lead characters.

Volume 1, which I should have reviewed last year but obviously never got around to, was called The Book of Solomon and featured the murder of a well-known London occultist. Book two — The Woman in Black — takes us to Whitby. Harker is on vacation (amongst other things he is visiting the grave of his great grandmother). Much to his annoyance, his hotel is hosting a “murder mystery weekend” run by the famous crime writer, Agatha Fletcher. When the obnoxious Ms. Fletcher ends up as the victim of her own crime party the vacation is put on hold.

Comic-based crime stories share an advantage with television – it is possible to give visual clues. You can do visual jokes too. There is one lovely section in which Harker and Critchley are sat on the pier complaining about how dull Whitby is as a corpse floats in on the tide below them, making a liar of the Inspector.

There are other good comedy sections too. Whitby is the subject of an annual Goth pilgrimage. Part of the festivities involves a soccer match between a town team and the Goths. Having discovered this, Gibson & Danks had to include it, though I doubt that the actual Goths are quite as depressed as they are portrayed.

Of course the story is about a murder — several of them actually — so the story can’t be all comedy. The eventual explanation for the crimes is a serious business, as it should be. Harker is generic police procedural fiction, but it is well done and the central characters are good fun. I’m looking forward to the next one.

Bryan Talbot does Tarantino with Furries. Oh yeah.

I’m hoping to get my copy at BICS on Saturday. In the meantime you can enjoy a huge interview with Bryan by the inimitable Pádraig Ó Méalóid over at Forbidden Planet. And you can learn more about the book from Bryan’s own web site.

Goodness knows how they managed it, but the guys from The Geek Syndicate persuaded Jonathan Ross to spend an hour or so on the phone with them while he was on vacation in Florida. It must have been something to do with the fact that he got to chat comics with them. And you know, there are few people in the world who can talk comics as intelligently as Wossy. It really is good stuff (especially if you happen to be a hard core Steve Ditko fan – there’s someone I’d love to see as a Worldcon GoH, though I gather he’s something of a recluse).

They do talk about a few other things as well. The boys ask Wossy what it is like to be a World of Warcraft Widower, and Wossy explains what it is like to have Neil Gaiman as your henchman. They fail to ask Wossy what it is like to live with someone who has a Hugo Award when you don’t (and your henchman has four). However, they do spend quite a bit of time talking about Wossy’s own comic, which it turns out is going to be drawn by the amazing Tommy Lee Edwards, so maybe he’ll at least get a nominee pin one of these days.