ARC FESTIVAL 2026! For the uninitiated, UK cartoonist Ed Pinsent has been creating and self-publishing comics since the early 1980s. His characters psychic detective Drake Ullingsworth and companion Dog, the subject of today’s review, date back to near the very beginning of that creative journey. Pinsent is one of the longstanding pillars of the scene. Indeed, BF’s Tom Murphy described him as “the small press Godfather” here on the site a few years back. (Hardly surprising then that Pinsent has gone on to contribute to the Colossive Press Colossive Cartographies series, edited by Tom and Jane Gibbens Murphy, multiple times in recent years.)
Let’s get this out of the way from the beginning. You do not need to have any prior knowledge of the characters to enjoy the stories collected in Drake & Dog Armed. Each of these ‘Tales from the City of Cruelty’ bounces off a fun meta premise – Drake and Dog’s crime-solving services are no longer required by the city so they decide to make up their own mysteries to solve. This leads to them coming up against a colourful assortment of arch-criminals and fiends – travelling back in time to the Roman Empire to face the Second Caligula; taking on The Toolbox, a villain determined to dismantle the city bolt by bolt; or foiling the schemes of Edgar Allan Poe-inspired baddie The Balloon Hoax.
As those descriptions imply the work in Drake & Dog Armed is absurd in its humour, taking the grotesques of the rogues galleries of classic super-hero fiction and dialling up their bizarreness with a considerable relish. Narrative rules are ploughed through simply because by the very nature of these stories they absolutely can be – the protagonists are making them up after all and can change events to suit themselves. It’s ridiculous, it’s self-indulgent, and yet it’s utterly splendid as a result. Silly escapist fare that nevertheless can sometimes have darker underlying themes if the reader cares to look hard enough.
The nature of the shifting subject matter/genre approaches means that Pinsent also gets to adapt his angular, detailed cartooning to enhance the mood of different stories – an eerier, haunting style for ‘The Revenge Phantoms’ for example, or the muted colouring of ‘The Empty Cathedral of Drake’ to accentuate its gothic qualities. Interspersed throughout are one-page cartoons detailing how the city itself has become almost sentiently cruel. While there’s limited art available online to illustrate this review you can watch a short video flip-through of the comic on Pinsent’s online store here which gives you all the reason you need to pick up this wonderful anthology at ARC this week.
Ed Pinsent (W/A) • Self-published, £10.00
Review by Andy Oliver
Ed Pinsent will be tabling at ARC Festival comics fair on July 11th-12th. For the full details on everything ARC has to offer check out their website here.
Poster by Lando
