London is calling Fergie as he and Sid are on the run for a murder they didn’t commit. Searching for a father he’s never met, Fergie is on a dangerous and confusing path through the city as both the police and agents claiming to be MI5 are on his tail. Some Spoilers Ahead.
Written by David Barnett
Illustrated & Colored by Martin Simmonds
Color Flattening by Dee Cunniffe
Lettered by Aditya BidikarPicking up hot on the heels of the first story arc, ‘London Calling…to the Zombies of Death’ sees Fergie and Sid immediately getting pulled into the craziness that is London. Both are overwhelmed by its power for different reasons: Fergie is beyond stressed due to their predicament and Sid, having died in the 1970s is still blown away by the completely different city and world that is laid out in front of him.
With some newly learned information, Fergie believes his estranged father, a man he only knows as ‘Billy,’ could possibly help him deal with not only distance himself from a possible murder charge, but help him learn more about his past and these new found paranormal powers. As the boys embark on this adventure, we get a brief look at love interest Natalie’s home life, a murder of a priest, and a seemingly possessed aging punk singer looking to get the old band back together. This hurricane of characters and supernatural happenings are incredibly well balanced in this opening issue. With so many layers coming together to keep the story moving along, it could have easily floundered and spun into a total mess, but Barnett keeps it moving along smoothly.
David Barnett blends a modern London punk and alt-rock aesthetic with 70s punk rock and it comes together so well it truly feels timeless. Fans of punk will fall in love with this series. This issue moves at a pretty good clip and is impossible to put down. As we move between ghosts, possession, murder, Lovecraft-ian tentacle afflictions and secret government agencies fans of any one of those things will enjoy the hell out of this book. Since it is the beginning of the second arc, following the plot is much easier if you have read the first run, but Barnett does an incredible job of making you feel caught up with quick callbacks and brief reference points. We get a nicely detailed, yet concise re-cap at the beginning of the issue before jumping back into the plot. Most writers would force us to wade through a lot of dry and exposition, taking up story pages with a re-telling rather than using the space given to move the story forward as much as possible.
Just the idea of this book is totally bonkers. For most readers and punk fans the idea of Sid Vicious’s ghost helping a kid in an attempt to make amends for past sins sounds terrible, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t make the series that much better. If a core point of the first arc was to humanize Sid and move away from sensationalizing the era in which he lived, then this arc is here to throw him into an over-the-top paranormal adventure and keep him as the human center. Even though he’s the ghost of a dead celebrity who killed his girlfriend, he ends up being more relatable than the super-powered fifteen year old. It works so well!
Martin Simmonds’s beautifully bizarre art walks a tightrope of the surreal and the world as seen through the eyes of a terrified teen and a dead punk rocker fascinated with the modern world. It is all so gorgeous and does a damn good job of both building this world up to more than we could have ever expected and becoming enveloped in a bear hug with Barnett’s narrative. His line work varies in detail from panel to panel, purposefully used to varying degrees depending on what emotion or action the story is putting out. His colors work in a similar fashion changing based on emotion or if we are looking at something based in the natural or supernatural. Like the illustrations, color is used in a fully realized, highly detailed manner or moves to the extremely abstract, but for the most part dances delicately somewhere in between, like the writing itself. The dream-like color schemes are an absolute joy to look at. This is a wild book and Simmonds dives right into the craziness, having fun with it while taking the characters and story seriously. As the series moves into bigger territory we get a mash-up of ideas and sub-genres that is Men in Black, Ghostbusters, From Beyond, and Image Comics’s “Blackbird” seen through a Sex Pistols lens. This is the kind of comic I would have killed for in high school.
“Punk’s Not Dead” continues to be a surprisingly wonderful series taking a wacky concept and running with it. It is safe enough for a mainstream audience and punk enough to leave fans of the genre spanning the 1970s to today completely satisfied.
Final Verdict: 8.5, “Punk’s Not Dead: London Calling” #1 keeps the punk in all of us alive with this excellent genre-bending series.
