This book, brought to you by Warren and Gary Pleece, two legends of the British comics scene, is completely demented. But I like it all the same. Its title, Montague Terrace, comes from the block of flats in which it's set, a decaying art deco ocean liner of a building that made me think of Marine Court in Hastings, where Iain Sinclair, psychogeographer extraordinaire, maintains a weekend home – rather fitting, given that most of its characters could have walked straight out of the pages of one of his more capacious books. A hopeless magician and his white rabbit; an ageing quiz show host who spends his time watching old videos of himself; a former special ops agent who has her own way of fighting interfering council officials; a wunderkind experimental novelist with writer's block and a coke habit; a brilliant but fallen scientist under surveillance 24 hours a day; a 60s crooner on the run from his shabby past… You'll find all of these at Montague Terrace, and many more.
I can't pretend that I understood what was going on all the time (or even half the time). Once you step inside Montague Terrace, there are no rules. The place functions both as a time machine, the stories flipping back and forth between past and present, and as a repository of dreams/nightmares; it's often hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins for these people. Mystical Marvin, for instance, is accompanied to the children's parties at which he performs by a talking rabbit, Marvo, who is on the run from an animal research laboratory. But can the bunny really chat? Or is Marvin's mental health even shakier than it seems? And what about the excellently named TCP deBoyne, the hip young novelist whose publisher is about to lose patience with him? When he ventures into the bowels of Montague Terrace and finds what looks like a load of freemasons indulging in orgies of drugs and sex, is he merely working up, somewhat desperately, the plot of his next novel? Or does this den of iniquity actually exist?
This is the kind of comic that demands the reader pay close attention; clues and satirical in-jokes lurk in the corner of every frame. It's also, given the interlinked nature of the individual stories it contains, a book you will want to start reading again almost as soon as you've finished, the better to try to get a handle on just who is manipulating whom (the architect of Montague Terrace, Edward Loonkins, is reputed to have based his design on a pentagram). The Pleece brothers' black and white drawings aren't especially beautiful but, brisk and economical, they have an energy that pulls you along. Their story gets under your skin. As it happens, I can see a block of flats from my desk: not art deco, this one, but vast and certainly slightly down on its luck. I'm looking at it now, and I'm thinking: who lives there, and why?
