BRICKMAN REVIEW!

Brickman Begins!/Brickman Returns! Review by John A. Short At last! No longer will we have to hunt through mouldy back-issue boxes at marts and waste paper bins… Between them, these two publications collect every appearance of the Dark Brick together in one place (well, two places… well, you know what I mean!) Child genius, Lew Stringer, created the cretin crusader in 1979 in the pages of comic fanzine* 'After Image' (*the internet, before the invention of electricity.) Since then he has rampaged through his own photocopied publications through to full colour American adventures in Image Comics 'Elephantmen' (Brickman, not Lew Stringer… Well, both of them I guess.) When zillionaire Loose Brayne is hit on the head by a brick while reclining in his mansion in Guffon City, he intones the classic phrase… “It's an omen! I shall become a brick!” and a legend is born. He goes on to face the vile villainy of the Poker, Gnatwoman, the Diddler, the Ostrich, Mr. Cheese, Man-Brick and more. Lew is a bit of a legend himself, having written and drawn strips for everything from Oink!, Toxic, Beano, Viz to Doctor Who Magazine (where he currently gives us 'The Daft Dimension' Doctor Who spoofs.) The great thing about Lew's work is the way that he crams jokes into his work, often throwing away jokes every panel that the rest of us would save for the big joke at the end of the strip. If these two publications don't have you laughing out loud multiple times you must be a DC lawyer or something. Not only that but they contain art and strips drawn by Alan Davis, Dave Gibbons, Hunt Emerson, Tim Sale, Charlie Adlard, Mike Collins and more. (A personal favourite is the two page strip 'Brickman Goes to Hell' drawn by Kevin (code-killer) O'Neil. Do yourself a favour and buy these comics and treat yourself to over 170 pages of pure stupidity. Find it at: http://www.lewstringer.com/page7.htm