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“EVER-SO-VERY LOONEY TUNES”  

Anyway, the pages within the black-humoured Bile Storys’ cover; how to sum them up? To (mis)quote the great Rod Serling; “Imagine, if you will”…..um, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart have gone on tour  with the frozen remnants of Walt Disney, and Zappa has been taking loadsa photos of stuff, which Beefheart has scribbled all over, while Uncle Walt drools half-remembered body parts of his cartoon creations over bits of Beefheart’s scribbles.Get the idea? Um, probably not, but don’t worry, you’re in  a majority.

Dans’ work is not so much a  collage of kitschy 70’s product ads, pornography and high school yearbook photos, combined with quirky doodles that warp their not-too-obvious reference points: rather it’s more an appalling pile-up of twisted metal and furry cartoon carcasses you feel oddly compelled to rubberneck on a visually demented highway in the Twilight Zone of borrowed consumer culture.

Phew ! More purile-ism than Surrealism perhaps.This certainly isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, but personally, I think the guy’s a genuine original when it comes to a certain halluncinatory vision. If I have a criticism, it’s that I’d much rather he concentrated on pure drawing, his real skill, rather than the juxtaposition of the drawing to the appropriated photo-imagery.Also, I think there’s mileage in considering taking some of the visual characters and working a narrative around them. Still, that aside, have fun attempting to work out exactly what his original drawing reference was, before it metamorphed into a Mudwig character. As already mentioned, there’s Dr Seuss to be found, as well as some odd buildings, an over-emphasis on strange meat products that might be the decapitated body parts of Bugs Bunny, not to mention of course, the battleship hulls of the Grossadmiral’s own fleet, floating above the cityscape.In all, it’s a visual delight of 21st century Heironymous Bosch proportions, filtered through a retarded You-Tube running on LSD Batteries.

 There, at least is my attempt at a review pushes all the pretentious noncery buttons that Mudwig intends to avoid. A final note must be made of the very good quality production job on this,deserving the fiver tag for what many would still consider a “zine”.

Well done Le Dilly. And thankfully Uncle Tel, I’m still able to avoid reviewing the stuff that sits on the shelves of the local Forbidden Planet, hooray !