REVIEWS


Escape Magazine (1983-1989):
A review by Roger Sabin


Roger Sabin is an arts journalist and lecturer at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London. The following extract is taken from his book Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels published in 1996 by Phaidon.

In Britain, the most important Raw-imitator was Escape, which was also part of a larger publishing house (Escape Books and Graphics) which published one-shot comics. Escape was started by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury in 1983, and although certain aspects were very similar to Raw, there were important differences. The designer aesthetic was still a feature, though Escape was far less gimmicky (for one thing, it did not have Raw‘s budget); it too mixed old underground creators with new home-grown talent, and with European work - though with more emphasis on the latter than Raw was prepared to give. Finally, there was a ‘fanzine’ aspect to Escape that was absent in Raw. reviews and interviews were a feature from the start.

Thus, the self-styled ‘Comics Magazine of Style and Vision’ made no apologies for publishing many of the same names as Raw (Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Ben Katchor, Javier Mariscal, Jacques Tardi and Joost Swarte), but the real interest was in the material that was unique. The main star from the former underground was Hunt Emerson, whose ‘Calculus Cat’ strips were as wild as anything he had produced before; Brian Bolland was another creator who had started his career in that period, and here returned to his roots with the Crumbesque ‘Mr Mamoulian’, about an ageing introvert and his troubles with women (about as different from ‘Judge Dredd’, with whom Bolland was then associated, as could be imagined).

The new British names kept pace quite admirably, and included: Ed Pinsent, responsible for the mesmerizing ‘Primitif, about a tribal warrior and his battles with nature and the gods, drawn in an ‘avant-primitive’ style with narrative captions; Tim Budden, who produced claustrophobic tales about a group of weary badgers, and their problems with humankind (including, ultimately, their fate during a nuclear war); Carol Swain, whose charcoal-rendered slice-of-life stories were as vivid as they were affecting; and Savage Pencil, whose jagged, spontaneous style perfectly captured the punk spirit. Other names included the Pleece Brothers, Phil Elliott, Chris Reynolds, John Bagnall, Bob Lynch and Julie Hollings.

Finally, the foreign strips included less familiar names, and drew especially from avant-garde work in France. Creators included: Serge Clerc, a humorist in the ‘clear-line’ tradition of Hergé; Jean-Claude Götting, master of atmospheric romantic psychodramas; Alex Varenne, who used delicately-rendered cityscapes as a background to rather obvious gags; and the pairing of Edmond Baudoin and Claude Gendrot, responsible for a strip about the dark side to sexual obsession.

The Escape one-shots were every bit as interesting as their Raw counterparts, although were rarely as expensively produced. The early ones especially were rough-and-ready, but made up for it with charm and energy. They included Phil Laskey’s Night of the Busted Nose (1984), about love and punch-ups in a northern town, and Alec (1984), a brilliant semi-autobiographical account of bedsit life by Eddie Campbell. Later, Gravett and Stanbury followed Spiegelman and Mouly’s example by courting more mainstream publishers, and subsequent one-shots were published by Titan Books. These were much more professional-looking productions, and included Violent Cases (1988) by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, who were soon to make big names for themselves in mainstream American comics; Joe’s Bar (1988) by the South American pairing of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo and London’s Dark (1989) by James Robinson.

During the course of its existence, Escape went from a small A5 size to a larger square-bound magazine format, and eventually obtained a measure of news-stand distribution. It would be as influential in Britain as Raw was in the US, though sales were never impressive: it was eventually cancelled in 1990. Nevertheless it succeeded in being the most progressive British comic to be seen since the underground.