Requiem Vampire Knight volume 1: collected gothic perversity from Pat Mills and Olivier Ledroit

Requiem, the most luridly over-the-top, utterly deranged comic book ever published, has finally been collected into a graphic novel for the UK market, having been published in the Francophone world for years.

I’ve written about my love of Requiem before and spent years seeking out old copies of Heavy Metal magazine, the only place you could find the translated version (they always run a new instalment annually around May).

The lack of UK edition until now is shameful, considering Requiem is written by English comics godfather Pat Mills. Mills was the creator of 2000AD and wrote bizarre, visionary and violent comic strips that warped my childhood, like ABC Warriors, Nemesis the Warlock, Slaine and Ro-Busters.

It’s obvious that Requiem allows Mills to explore his rabid obsessions for an adult audience, so all the familiar tropes he explores in 2000AD – magick, reincarnation, religious fanaticism, hypocrisy, imperialism – are turned up to 11 and served with lashings of sex, sado-masochism, ultra-violence and gore.

So what is Requiem about? Put simply, Hell. The primary character is the eponymous Requiem, the reincarnation of Heinrich Augsburg, a Nazi soldier shot on the Eastern Front. Upon his death, he finds himself reborn as a vampire in the infernal world Resurrection.

Everything in Resurrection is perversely reversed, so evil is virtuous and characters grow younger as they age, eventually dwindling to foetuses. The vampires are the elite of the Resurrection social order, reincarnated from particularly monstrous humans. The Emperor Nero, Aleister Crowley, Atilla the Hun and Count Dracula himself are at the pinnacle of society. Their realm is surrounded on all sides by other fiendish nations, so war is never-ending. Which is exactly how the vampires like it, of course.

Tomas de Torquemada is a werewolf; rapists come back as centaurs; weapons scientists are high priests dedicated to burying knowledge; genocidal feminists from the future return as ghoul pirates. In the midst of it all, Requiem grapples with his nature as he attempts to save Rebecca, his Jewish lover who died in the death camps.

Yes, the good return to Resurrection too, born into the bottom end of society as lamiae. Death – as well as life – just isn’t fair.

This premise gives Mills all sorts of ways to amuse himself, as well as giving Ledroit opportunities to create astonishing gothic landscapes and epic battle scenes.

Ultra-dense Mills dialogue, ridiculously delirious art, convoluted plotting and the sheer insanity of the story make Requiem hard to follow at times. I thought I’d understand what the hell was going on better once I found that long-sought-after first episode in Heavy Metal. I was wrong. It was still gloriously bewildering.

Requiem is the ultimate bad trip, the grandest of Grand Guignol. Seek it out and read it, give yourself some gorgeous nightmares.

Daily Dredd

Anyone who works with me will know that I draw at least one Judge Dredd a day, usually doodled in a meeting or conference call. So I thought it would be cool to stick my drawings on the web to create a mega-scrapbook of Mega-City's legendary lawman. Go on, take a look citizen!

Another Lady Judge

I think they're getting better - she's a little statuesque maybe - I was channelling Helmut Newton at the time...

Heavy Metal Memories and Pat Mills' Requiem

One of the illicit pleasures of my childhood was buying (or indeed shoplifting) Heavy Metal comic from unwitting newsagents in Leamington Spa. Heavy Metal is the US version of the French comic anthology Metal Hurlant, full of translated European fantasy comic strips, which was cool in itself, but the best thing was that it was also littered with beautifully drawn nude women and sex. Horny 12 year old sci-fi nut nirvana! As it was a comic, the newsagents would stick it next to the Beano and I could legitimately buy it. Hurrah!

As an adult, I haven’t often shelled out for Heavy Metal as it’s generally full of nonsensical beautifully drawn rubbish – and the allure of nude cartoon women isn’t quite as powerful. However, recently I have started reading it again for one comic strip – the utterly deranged ‘Requiem Vampire Knight’.

Requiem is a Franco-Belgian comic written by the British visionary Pat Mills (the bloke who started 2000ad) and drawn by French artist Olivier Ledroit. It’s best summarised a mental vampire goth headfuck set in a bloodsoaked Hell.

Its protagonist is a Nazi soldier reincarnated as a Vampire in a nightmare world where time runs backwards. I can’t really make head nor tail of the plot, but it seems to involve Requiem searching hell for his lost love who was a Jewish woman sent to the camps. Loads of over-the-top bonkers stuff is thrown into the mix – Dracula rules a kingdom in this hellworld, Tomas de Torquemada has been reincarnated as a werewolf and there’s an extreme politically correct feminist tyrant from Venus who’s been brought back as a pirate. There’s also plenty of sado-masochistic sex and gory ultra-violence.

There’s no doubt that Mills has several screws loose and writing for an adult European comics publisher allows him to let those screws scatter all over the shop in a very disturbing fashion. The madness is brought to life by Ledroit’s feverishly detailed psychopathically exuberant art.

Mind you, if Mills is mentally ill, I must have a morbid side to seek this stuff out. It’s funny – I used to look down my nose at Goths as a teenager and now I’m turning into one…

The Walking Dead Comic by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard: Emotionally Believable Zombie World

It’s rare that a mainstream comic book comes along that features ordinary people with human weaknesses trying to cope with the emotional fallout from a disaster. It’s even rarer to find emotional empathy in comics, where the need to big, violent things to happen and for even bigger things to explode (like the occasional planet) appears to dominate.

Having devoured 5 books of The Walking Dead in one week, I’m happy to have found a comic that has a cast of believable ordinary people and applies emotional realism to its storytelling. Admittedly these believable ordinary people spent their surrounded by (as well as fighting and being eaten by) zombies, but their reactions to this extraordinary situation are refreshingly realistic.

The scenario is the same as most zombie flicks: we follow a group of survivors as they try to stay alive in a nightmarish, shattered United States ruled by the shambling brainless dead with a penchant for dining on living flesh. We start out encountering a small-town cop Rick Grimes as he wakes up in hospital after being put in a coma by a gunshot wound (echoes of Danny Boyles' 28 Days Later). After quickly getting acquainted with the flesh-eating zombie situation, he tries to track down his wife and child in Atlanta (which is chock full of carnivorous corpses).

I don’t want to talk you too much about what follows, as I’d love you to read it and become as gripped by the twists and turns of the plot as I was. Suffice it to say that the writer, Robert Kirkman, deals with well-worn Romaro-style tropes and explores them in his own way. The characters develop, experiencing survivor’s guilt, fear, depression, boredom and loss. They harden up as the old social norms and certainties slip away. They grow and change. This is unusual for the horror genre in any medium, let alone comics.

In the main, the art is handled by the UK artist Charlie Adlard (who I know from his virtuoso black and white drawing for ‘Savage’ in 2000ad) whose dark, rough and expressive style adds to the realistic atmosphere.

Having never been a big zombie fanatic, I’ve had 7 days of living with the dead and I love it. Just have to wait for volume 6 to come out now…