When it comes to the House of Harley’s comics anthology Ugly Mug the tagline “comics to amuse and confuse” perfectly encapsulates the breadth of material between its covers. An underground-style, bumper collection of strips and illustration, its contents range from everything from parodic Viz-like humour through to oblique and sometimes even impenetrable experimental comics. Since Ugly Mug returned a couple of years back, after a 30-year absence, it’s settled on an annual publishing schedule and brought the work of multiple veteran UK small pressers back to the attention of a new generation of UK indie fans.
Cover by iestyn pettigrew
This seventh edition, for example, showcases such luminaries as indie legend Ed Pinsent. In ‘The Imbalance of Nature’ Pinsent provides us with a series of unlikely biological entities – elephants that can draw freehand in the vein of Mondrian or tigers who have evolved an immunity to Dutch Elm Disease. There’s no narrative, no structure, no point to be made here. It’s just a succession of random thoughts designed to amuse and distract. And it does.
Art by John Bagnall
Fans of the great John Bagnall will be delighted at his multiple entries in Ugly Mug 7. There are a number of short strips that are replete with those Bagnall-isms we’ve come to know and love. One detailing past mourning customs like covering mirrors to avoid trapping the souls of the recently deceased being a good example. But it’s his ‘How a Comic is Made’, emphasising the wonderfully blocky idiosyncrasies of Bagnall’s art, that is one of this issue’s absolute highlights.
Art by Denny Derbyshire
More poignantly a one-page photo-strip ‘Batlight’ by the late Chris Reynolds reminds us of his genius in a contribution that blends claustrophobia with psychogeography. Jason Atomic provides an unrepentantly irreverent but unashamedly fond tribute to King Kong and his lifelong love of the character. And Denny Derbyshire contributes ‘Otherweirdly’ wherein a miserable individual retreats into a metaphysical, surrealist otherworld with one-page panels emphasising the cosmically hallucinogenic make-up of this strange realm.
Art by Jason Atomic
The House of Harley, as ever, have numerous offerings for us. The most memorable, arguably, being ‘Take the Children Out of Town’, a Suess-ian plea to save our kids from ourselves, and the punchline-led ‘Mr. Jimmy Joist Biology Teacher’ which plays with an infamous school classroom excuse to great comedic effect. And therein lies the essential appeal of Ugly Mug – its propensity for serving up such diverse takes on the form every issue. If we do accept the hoary old reviewer cliché that anthologies are “hit and miss” by nature at least we know that with Ugly Mug what you may consider a miss will be another reader’s hit, and vice versa.
Ugly Mug continues to provide a valuable and important space where genuinely alt and DIY-style work with a retro flourish can find a contemporary home and readership.
The House of Harley, Denny Derbyshire, Ed Pinsent, John Bagnall, Savage Pencil, iestyn pettigrew, Tom Baxter Tiffin, Hal Weaver, Jason Atomic, Patricia Gaignat, Chris Reynolds, Alberto Monteiro, Masaman, Jim Barker, Oxideguy (W/A) • House of Harley, £19.99
Review by Andy Oliver
[…] “…the tagline ‘comics to amuse and confuse’ perfectly encapsulates the breadth of material between its covers… its contents range from everything from parodic Viz-like humour through to oblique and sometimes even impenetrable experimental comics.” – Broken Frontier […]