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Home ¦ Reviews ¦ Angel Fire

28th December 04

Cover by Steve Parkhouse and Chris Blythe

Buy Angelfire direct from Shettered Frames

What to Expect: John Dury gets involved with the drug known as Angel Fire and his life starts to come apart at the seams...

Review by Gavin Hanly

Editor's note - while not strictly a 2000AD review, we thought this book was generating enough interest in the 2000AD readership to warrant a review.

Angel Fire is the first production from Chris Blythe’s self publishing house “Shattered Frames”. Blythe himself is very well known to 2000AD readers as one of the chief colourists for the comic, lending considerable weight to the art of Henry Flint, Cam Kennedy and Simon Coleby, to name just a few. Here, he teams up with Steve Parkhouse with whom he previously joined forces on a couple of Future Shocks. These short Future Shocks (plus some more with Cam Kennedy) have been 2000AD readers’ only opportunity to see Blythe’s writing in action so far. The response was generally positive, but it’s always been difficult to accurately judge a writer from their early Future Shocks (indeed, some of Simon Spurrier’s early tales fall considerably short of what he’s capable of now). So this has really been our first chance to see Blythe as a writer.

Eschewing the publishing format of a monthly comic series, Angel Fire comes complete as a fully fledged graphic novel (although handily split into chapters if anyone needed to reprint it in parts in the future). While retaining certain horror/fantasy overtones, the main part of the strip is set in the present day and has a more mature tone than many 2000AD strips. It seems to have far more in common with DC’s Vertigo imprint which, with many of its writers coming from these shores, also prints comics with as British a feel to them as this one. Indeed, it’s a breath of fresh air to read a comic that seems so overwhelmingly British, with Parkhouse sticking in recognisable landmarks like the Pitcher and Piano, Natwest and more. Far too often, our homegrown comics take the approach of setting their tales in America – Judge Dredd is an obvious example of this – and it’s far more entertaining to read something that doesn’t pander to this notion.

Dury's bad trip...

Blythe successfully creates an intriguing mystery from the get-go, where the fantasy elements never drown out the human drama at the centre. John Dury, the central character could easily, as a drug addict, have been a very unsympathetic character, yet as he winds down the road to recovery Blythe manages to keep us on his side. Blythe’s writing steers well away from the pitfalls of many of his contemporaries, mainly the “why use one word when ten will do” problem that makes other many graphic novels interminable. He lets the images tell the story whenever possible, never feeling the need to over-explain a scene and trusting Parkhouse to get the point across. This makes for a much more enjoyable experience, where you feel the book is working in the comic medium, as opposed to just being a story with some pictures to go along with it.

And much of this can be down to the participation of Parkhouse. He has long been one of our highly underused and under-rated artists, capable of drawing scenes clearly rooted in reality. It can be a testament of an artist’s ability that they can create believable scenes of everyday life just as well as the more fantastical elements of science fiction or fantasy. Once an artist can believably draw a scene of two people talking in a pub, he should be ready to tackle anything. Parkhouse ably matches the more horrific elements of the tale with the mundane, creating a sense of a classic British Horror film of the sixties, where bad things would happen to the person who lived next door as opposed to the latest teen idol from Hollywood. It is precisely this everyday setting which makes Angel Fire work so well.

Dury heads out to the castle...

You may notice that I’ve mentioned very little about specific details in the book. This is mainly because the book is a far better experience if you come into it knowing as little about the plot as possible. Suffice it to say that it’s an extremely well put together thriller, with both Blythe and Parkhouse at the top of their game. Both writer and artist gel together perfectly to create the kind of graphic novel we haven’t seen for a while – intelligent, well paced and an immensely satisfying read. This comes as a very easy recommendation for anyone in love with British comics, and you should all get your hands on a copy as soon as you can.

Buy Angelfire direct from Shattered Frames