British comics of decades past are unique, serialized adventures with a sometimes painterly look, outrageous scenarios and colorful characters. ALBION – plotted by modern comics legend Alan Moore, and written by his daughter Leah Moore and her husband John Reppion – pays tribute to those graphic works gone by.
Suffice to say, if you are a fan of old IPC mags like WHAM! and TERRIFIC!, you’re going to be giddy with pleasure over this six-issue graphic novel. And if, like me, you’ve never even heard of them, you’ll probably have a little fun, yet also be way lost.
ALBION’s conceit is that the heroes and villains who populated the pages were and are very much real people. This is a fact unknown to the general public because the characters are either dead, in hiding or holed up as prisoners in a giant castle. The daughter of one of them recruits a skeptic comics fan to help her find her dad.
The big villain is The Spider – not the same as the pulp hero, mind you – with his enemies including beefy, thick-necked war hero Captain Hurricane and a battling tin-can man named Robot Archie. (It’s not Riverdale High’s Archie as a robot, but boy, what if?!) Other bizarro characters include a giant gorilla robot, a rubber man, a master thief and loads of others, some of whom merely make cameos in the backgrounds of panels.
Along with artists Shane Oakley and George Freeman, Moore and Reppion have a ton of fun playing in this sandbox of established properties on which they presumably grew up. Oakley in particular gets to flex his creative muscles to recreate the style of an original strip – escape artist Janus Stark – when one person reads an old comic, or also render the same person’s childhood flashback in an overly cartoony manner befitting kid-centric “funny books.”
For the uninitiated, it’s always enjoyable to look at, even if each successive issue reads more like an inside joke, the gag to which you’re not privy. WildStorm supplements the story with bonus pages that reprint actual stories of these characters from the 1960s and 1970s; although they’re at the end, I think they would’ve heightened my reading experience had I read them directly following Neil Gaiman’s introduction. –Rod Lott
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