Coffee-Table Notes

4 stars Gary McNair is probably best known for his ever-expanding canon of self performed solo stage works. These have largely been personal passion projects, from homages to Morrissey and Billy Connolly, to McNair’s granddad in the recently revived A Gambler’s Guide to Dying. McNair has also applied his masterly storytelling to new stage versions of classics including Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist and a version of Charles Dickens’ rites of passage novel, Great Expectations, reimagined as Nae Expectations.   Rites of passage are here too in McNair’s urgent version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ultimate boy’s own adventure yarn, stripped down to an hour without losing any of the original’s narrative largesse. McNair sounds both chatty and conspiratorial as cabin boy Jim Hawkins, on the run from his dead dad’s pub and on a mission that sees McNair embody the voices of Billy Bones, Long John Silver and all the rest with an intense sense of unfinished business. Pulsed by Michael John McCar...

The golden ages of British comics are brought to life in this glorious rustle through their back pages by the matey double act of Mark Hibbett and John Dredge, who each week review a specific issue of a classic 1970s title. This moves from old school D.C. Thomson stalwarts such as Dandy, Beano and Topper, to the more anarchic IPC new wave embodied by Whoopee! and Krazy. The riot of wild artwork and puntastic characters including Frankie Stein and Leo Baxendale’s magnificent Sweeney Toddler that followed was akin to moving from music hall to punk, with lashings of junior school surrealism thrown in.   The twelve editions so far take us from Jackpot to Cheeky Weekly, as we discover the class-based roots of many strips, with one in which a posh private school and a scruffy comprehensive are merged even being called Class Wars. Umberto Eco gets a mention, as does Trevor Metcalfe’s superhero homage The Amazing Three’s second life by way of Grant Morrison’s Zenith in 2000AD. The first Da...