Plenty of sites review books and graphic novels. When I created Carabas I wanted to do something wider, using a few decades of industry experience to intuit upcoming best reads and preview them as recommends. I was waiting for something a little special before writing my first personal review.
	On just seeing the title ‘Scotland Yardie’ coming from veteran indie graphic novel publisher Knockabout I was grinning my backside off, then again perusing the summary. Carabas is much inspired by Deadline, a 90s counterculture music and comics magazine: discovering Scotland Yardie debuted in Bobby Samuel’s contemporaneous Skank magazine, I was sure, for numerous reasons, I’d found that particular title I was after.
	Now just published, here are some preview pages courtesy of Knockabout and the creators, preceded by my first personal review as to why you should be parting with your retail or personal budget and grabbing yourself a stash of Scotland Yardie… As ever, enjoy!

*****

So Bobby Joseph with artist Joseph Samuels brings back Jamaica’s most feared bad bwoy cop, fetched over to police the streets of Brixton as part of the Met’s yearly plan to increase ethnic quotas. But what’s all this about blue chicken? What sinister agenda links corruption in the Met to street level badness? (And which out of the Tie-Fighter and the Starship Enterprise will emerge victorious in the dog fight in the London skyline?!!!)

Like Tank Girl (hosted by Deadline) there certainly is a beginning, a middle and an end (or two) in this volume of Scotland Yardie and even a plot running through. But is that the appeal of either TG or SY? Hell no!	(Full width version in summary below)
It’s that every page if not every panel brings another unexpected reason to grin while inwardly exclaiming WTF?! It’s for the refreshing tonic – in these superhero-heavy days – of violence being entertainingly meaningless while still loosely being in the public good, and where a protagonist can think, say and do what they feel like even if, especially when, it goes against protocol and conventional good taste and gives the reader what they didn’t realise they wanted.
Then there are all the cameos you can point a… an extended roll-up at: from Jay and Silent Bob to Michael Knight and Boris Johnson (naturally) to Henry the Hoover (also naturally!(?)), and it’s fully up to Pokemon Go and post-Brexit date in referential and satirical terms. And once you realize what blue chicken actually is… Well the title Breakin’ Bad Menz resolves in meaning rather.

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Yep Bobby Joseph’s scheme and script please throughout as do the vibrant cartooning of Samuels which likewise bare comparison in quality and anarchic style to Mr Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl with Alan Martin, Gorillaz with Damon Albarn). Aside from the story itself, whether you know London intimately or otherwise, it’s like being a tourist on a non-stop tour of the capital as projected from the mind of your tour guide Eddie Izzard; very far from being in any respect a bad thing but credit still needs to go to Messrs Joseph and Samuels. Plus in this era of bonus features there’s more than a few of those, Mssr Michael Robinson contributing here aside from elsewhere.

So having been grinning at every stage before and while reading Scotland Yardie, I was still doing so for some time after, it’s impact still lingering as politically incorrect Jamaican expletives were conjured for days to come back in the mundane world: that’s entertainment easily worth just £10.99.

Respeck to all concerned!

 

Preview Pages

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See below for full publisher description, or click through to our January 2017 New Title Highlights to see this and other great graphic novels and books!

 

SCOTLAND YARDIE * Bobby Joseph & Joseph Samuels * 9780861662517 * PB * £10.99 * Knockabout With institutionalised racism at an all-time high, the Metropolitan Police embark on their yearly drive to recruit more ethnic people in the police force. With little or no success they bring over Jamaica’s most feared policeman – Scotland Yardie, a ganja smoking, no-nonsense bad bwoy cop who breaks all the rules to enforce his own harsh sense of justice. But what happens when cultures clash? Can the average criminal handle the street -wise Jamaican Lethal Weapon rolling through downtown Brixton? Will south London ever be the same again? With his reluctant partner P.C. Ackee -Saltfish, Scotland Yardie embarks on an adventure that deals with the disappearing drug trade in Brixton, corruption, the death of innocent people at the hands of racist cops, assassinated cats, immigration fears and the emergence of the addictive blue chicken!