For all the incredible power over fiction that the editor possesses, there's very little fiction in turn actually concerning them. The mind of the comic editor must be an interesting thing, the filter through which all those stories, both brilliant and inane, must travel through before they reach the eager readers in corner shops all over. It's their job to transform work from mere transcripts and proposals into works of literary art, to take out the bad and retool with the good.
But what if an editor, tired of the drudge, of the endless drivel being produced by his company, went bad? What if he went beyond the editors usual pranks of letting slip in a cuss word or a bare nipple, and began to slip in the details for a pipe bomb?
Such is the story of Serial Killer, by Pat Mills and & Kevin O'Neill. Dave Maudling works the long shift on a series of classic British Comics. Dave is a broken man, working a job driving him mad one panel at a time. A man of complex desires, most notably for the endless pursuit of beautiful furs, a lithe Scottish co-worker, and listening to the demands of his dead mother.
But his editing work is poorly supervised, and Dave begins to find opportunities to insert his own viscous element into the pages of the hapless comics he edits. Just how long could it be before he manages to find a way to get readers to off themselves or others? Only one way to find out.
What makes this weird and wild novel all the funnier, is that it is the work of two of England's most respected comic creators.
No stranger to the toils of editing, creator of legendary British comic 2000AD, Pat Mills has a comic career spanning decades. Creating classic characters like the Nemesis the Warlock and Slaine, and to this day penning new work like sexy cult hit Requiem: Vampire Knight.
Kevin O'Neill is perhaps one of the most notorious names in comics art. His instantly recognizable art appeared in many classic 2000AD strips, and his work would also prove to be too graphic for the comic code to handle in an infamous DC comics controversy. O'Neill also brought to life modern seminal classic League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
People like me grew up in the Golden age of British comics, with Judge Dredd and the rest of 2000AD bringing respect to the field. Pat and Kevin grew up in the hard years, when the only choices you'd find were the endless likes of Buster, Topper, and The Dandy. When they've worked together, Mills and O'Neill have created some of the most memorable works in British comics. A left and a right of one great beast.
Serial Killer is a unique novel, weird and stylish, lit with the blackest of comedy. English readers in particular will love the echoes of the Beano and a dozen other old Brit rags found throughout the story, and the entire novel is peppered with excerpts from the latest stories Dave and his fellow editors are currently working on. These snippets of quirky characters and deliberately terrible period pieces are some of the novels best moments, painfully accurate facsimiles of the kind of crap we all used to read for 10p a week back in the day.
Mills and O'Neill make memorable work in novel form, and it'll be a lot of fun to see what they come up with next.
Serial Killer is available here
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