I’ve just finished reading this – King City by Brandon Graham – and it’s the best £15 I’ve spent on a book in a while. Graham’s style is a mix of Manga, sci-fi and playful punning gone mad. There are more ideas nestling in one page of Graham’s work than in some whole comic strips, he seems to shed them ten to the dozen, not only in the story narrative but also in the background details, graffiti and incidental characters who just so happen to be sharing a panel at any given moment.

King City is about a cat master called Joe, a cat master being someone trained to use their personal cat in any number of incredible ways in any number of different situations. He’s an expert lock-picker who gets coerced into secret missions by Beebay, the mysterious leader of the street gang, the Owls. He’s also pining for his ex-girlfriend, Anna, who has her own story going on across town involving a new boyfriend who’s addiction to chalk is slowly destroying him. Joe also hangs out with his best friend, Pete, who goes on similar covert missions in a range of masks and has his own problems. The stories intertwine but also meander along, taking breaks to flashback to events past or just take time out for incidental scenes that flesh out the characters or the city.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg though, what you get is a sense of a fully formed world that will be rewarded by repeated reads and could be infinitely expanded outside of these characters. As well as the wealth of detail in the city streets it occasionally throws up a crossword, a join the dots panel or a full double page game spread complete with cut out characters. Graham’s style is unique to me although I’m guessing that if I was well read in the Manga department then I would be able to draw some frames of reference. The overall tone feels like a perfect composite of American, Asian and Alien (is that a triple A rating?) and it’s truly a breath of fresh air, much the same as his ongoing sci-fi series, Prophet, which similarly blew my mind last year.

King City is a lighter affair though, similar to his recent Multiple Warheads 4-issue run for Image, largely due to being shot through with punning wordplay in almost every panel (seriously, if you find puns the lowest form of wit then stay away). Once you get used to the way he structures things though it’s a definite page turner and, weighing in at over 400 pages, you definitely get your money’s worth with all the original single issue covers, back up stories and such to add to the mix.

For me the weirdest thing about King City is that I hadn’t ever seen or heard of it on my regular trips to comic shops before. This is so up my street but until last year when the collection was released it had completely gone under my radar, Had I seen a copy on a shelf it would have immediately been the sort of thing I’d have picked up. Considering the first issue debuted in 2009 and the last in 2010, with this collection arriving nearly a year ago I really need to be a bit more alert.

Hunt Emerson was probably the first ‘underground’ cartoonist I discovered. I was kind of aware of Robert Crumb from the Keep On Truckin’ images that did the rounds in the 70’s, Gilbert Shelton‘s Furry Freak Bros. comics were around and I’d been reading Mad magazine for a few years (not really the same league though). In my early teens my family would go shopping in Crawley, a large-ish town South of Gatwick airport, much bigger than the one I grew up in and with a better class of book shops. One such shop had early ‘graphic novels’ – more collections of comic strips back then – and one day in ’84 I found ‘The Big Book of Everything’, an early collection of Hunt’s work.

It was weird, surreal and the style was cartoon-y, like the Whizzer & Chips, Buster and Cheeky comics I’d read years back. But the humour was adult in places, definitely not for kids. The backgrounds changed in each scene and some strips broke the fourth wall and drifted off altogether. I’d never seen anything like it before and I loved it, my nearest frame of reference being Leo Baxendale‘s ‘Willy The Kid’ books which are the missing link between the aforementioned kids comics and Hunt’s work.

It was also the first use of the phrase, ‘comix’ I’d ever seen, thereby alerting me to the fact that there was a difference. I’d go on to find the whole Knockabout line of books from here which then led me to the US equivalent of Zap Comix with Crumb, Shelton, Griffin, Moscoso, Williams and many more. But this was British, pure luck that I found that first, and there was Hunt on the back cover, staring down at me with a cocked eyebrow. Looking back at it now I see Alan Moore wrote the introduction, no big deal at the time as he was still a rising writer, a few years away from making his mark but his northern humour perfectly suited Hunt’s style.

Now there’s a new collection of Emerson’s work, 30 years after the ‘Big Book of Everything’ (96 pages for £3.95), and this one’s available for the iPad via Panel Nine at £2.99 for 200 pages (some mistake there, surely?). ‘The Certified Hunt Emerson’ contains 27 strips, covers, notes and an audio commentary from Hunt plus a panel mode that means you can zoom into each individual panel and read it like that if you wish. If you want an intro to his work, an overview of one of the UK’s premiere underground comic artists with material that would cost you hundreds of pounds to track down then this is a steal. If you like humorous strips that deal with jazz, sex, TV, rabbits, unexplained phenomena, sin, cities, cats and some of the world’s great classics reinterpreted then this is for you.

P.S. Hunt also did the ‘Beat Girl’ logo for The Beat back in the late 70’s as well as their Go Feet label identity, first LP cover and this little Beat-mobile.