REVIEW of 'MY BIG BOOK' 1 - 5

 

TITLE: My Big Book RAP 1 - 5

WRITER/ARTIST: Richard Anthony Pester

FORMAT: 24 page each A4 Colour & B/W

PUBLISHER: Chang3lings Comics

AVAILABLE FROM: https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11910794-first-big-book-of-utter-c-rap

REVIEW:

Richard A. Pester continues his wonderful collection of stray strips and wayward art in new issues every few months. I've been a fan of his slick art for the past thirty years and I've been lucky to work with him a number of times (including on our on-going near-future robot rebellion strip RESISTORS in SHOKWAVE.)

He's a versatile and professional artist who is able to turn his hand to a number of different styles from cartoony to photo-realistic. But he is probably best known for his fetishistic futuristic good girl art (which got him a spot at Fantagraphics' Eros Comix back in the day.) He makes a splash with plenty of his PVC maidens here – including the covers...

But the main back-bone of these books are the pages of his serialised 'Dave -Trails Of The Cosmic Oddity' strip (seen in colour here for the first time.) This autobiographical strip is very different from his exploitation cheesecake art. 'Dave' is very much a heart-felt (some might say 'Heartbreaking') slice-of-life, true-confessions style strip about Richard's early life as he grew up as an abandoned, unwanted child. He mixes his cartoony and photo-realism to tell this story of his troubling and angry home life back in the pre-teens and teens.

Comics seem to be a medium that lends itself to the autobiographical tale, but it's something I could never see myself doing. Some creators seem to be able to turn the most mundane events into compelling stories and I have to admit, I'm not sure how they do it. But this is anything but mundane. I see why Richard wanted to get this off of his chest and I hope telling this helped him. If nothing else, seek out these issues for this story. I hope he will consider collecting the colour version as it's own dedicated book once he completes this serialisation as I have a feeling that many of the people who would be impressed by this tale are missing it while it's tucked away in a collection with latex ladies on the cover. This should be award-winning.

But there is plenty more in these pages too, from copyright baiting tales of sci-fi film and TV and comic characters that he has produced as samples and try-outs down the years. In the latest issues you can see a certain future cop taking on a time travelling terminating robot.

Not to mention his illustrated text stories about 'Derna' with plenty of rubber-ware, violence and swearing. (Much more what you would expect to find in this title judging by the cover images.)

And if you like his stuff on his own title, do come and see what we're doing together on 'Shokwave'.

John A. Short 2024