There is always a story to be told about the things you love, and the British comics industry has always been eccentrically lovable. Between the square-jawed respectability of Dan Dare and the satirical brutality of Judge Dredd there came a period of real strangeness – in comics like Valiant and Smash!, we got to read about morally ambiguous bizarre characters like escapologist Janus Stark and crime-fighting puppeteer Dolmann. There was a real originality there which was lost when the comics shut down, no matter how wonderful what has followed…
‘Albion’ is Alan Moore and Shane Oakley’s homage to the comics tradition that immediately preceded their early work, and is an attractive blend of old and new. The premise – Moore devised the scenario, then line-edited his daughter and son-in-law’s scripts – is that the comics told the truth: that the Britain of the 1970s harboured this bizarre collection of heroes, villains and those whose affiliation was more complex. Amnesiac comics collector Dan is recruited by Penny, daughter of Dolmann, to help her find what happened at the end of their childhoods – the British establishment betrayed and destroyed even those useful to it in the interests of the normal and safe, and ever since has locked all these freaks and their gadgets up in a gothic Scottish castle…
When you are writing about the return of the repressed, and setting much of your story in a standard Haunted
Palace of the Mind, there is no particular need to be subtle. ‘Albion’ is bright and snarky and garish, full of wisecracks and obscure references, and it makes no apologies for what it is: a manifesto for glorious, amoral strangeness.
