Apparently I wasn’t quite finished writing about DC Thomson comics. As a special request for John I present from Warlord #24 “The Monsters of No-Man’s-Land”.

And I realize I just spent my last two columns talking about how much I didn’t like the output of DC Thomson as previously established I am not made of stone people. On just a purely technical level you have to admire the skillful cartooning on features like Korky the Cat and Desperate Dan.

And there’s just something compellingly weird about Tomtin and Buster Brass. For one thing, it’s incredibly old fashioned looking for something that was published in the 70′s (unless these are reprints from earlier issues) — note that Freddy is wearing short pants. Not shorts, short pants; I realize it’s a little hard to accept but once upon a time one of the signs that a boy was becoming a man was when he received his first pair of ‘long trousers’. In America the practice pretty much stopped by the beginning of the second World War — I couldn’t tell you when it happened in Britain.

The art style also seems to be something from a couple decades previous and manages somehow to be simultaneously attractive and disturbing (it kind of reminds me of the style used to approximate old fashioned comics in The National Lampoon). There’s definitely a nightmarish quality to the world that Freddy inhabits, like the way the innocent fun of Freddy and Tomtim seems to act as a trigger for the obviously psychotic Horace. And there’s something about the way that Buster Brass is drawn (especially his head) that makes my stomach hurt.

And Jack Silver…what else can I say about Jack Silver besides the obvious…it’s just so weird.

From The Beezer there’s Mr. Flippy. He’s yet another one of those wacky space aliens that have traveled through the vast distances of space to visit not just Earth but Great Britain for the express purpose of palling around with a schoolboy, getting him in and out of scrapes with his space alien powers and wacky gadgets.