"...a rare gem..."

Back in... ooh... 1991 I think it was I picked up a magazine, and flicked through it. It was a mix of articles, and comic strips. I thought it must have been new, as I'd not remembered seeing it before, but no, it was issue #12. This zine was called "Deadline", and over time its most famous creation, Tank Girl, exploded over in to the mainstream even spawning a movie... but it was never Tank Girl that impressed me most with Deadline. There were a couple of strips that I always liked more, one was Wired World(1). The other... that was Hugo Tate.

The Hugo Tate story in issue 12 was a slice of brilliance. It was a slice of a seemingly ordinary person's life, and of love, and memories, and lost love... and it blew me away. And then there was the style of the art... intricate, and detailed, and beautiful... but hang on; Hugo himself. His head was drawn in a style with not much more detail than an acid house smiley face. But somehow it worked. It drew me in, and meant that I became a regular reader of Deadline. And, as each issue came out, the first thing I'd do would be to check that Hugo was in it. 

Eventually, Deadline ended. There was a collection of the latter, set in America, Hugo Tate stories, but not of the earlier ones. And I never saw a copy in the shops. (This was 1993. Years later when I tried getting a copy on the internet, it was surprising elusive.) There was talk of these being collected, but it never appeared. So, now it's nigh on 20 years later, and I never thought I'd get a copy...

....so, today I was in Waterstones in The Oracle, and was looking at the graphic novels. I had a quick check out of the second volume of Phonogram, and put it back on the shelves; I mean, sooner or later the stuff they missed out from the individual issues is bound to be re-released, either on its own or a new version of the second volume. I can wait. So, I walked around the other side of the stand, and a book with a bright blue spine caught my eye. There were four words on the side. 

"Nick Abadzis" and "Hugo Tate".

I picked it up immediately, and began to flick through it. As I did it sunk in exactly what it was... a new collection of Hugo Tate; not only was the American stuff in it, the earlier stuff was in there too...  I looked at the price... £14.99. My usual reaction in such times kicked in... "I wonder how much cheaper this is on Amazon...?" (2) But, then I thought... "No, sod it; I don't care how much cheaper it is on Amazon, I want this right now..." So I bought it, and I did something I haven't done in such a very long time. I went straight home, there and then, and read the whole thing from cover to cover. 

And the memories came flooding back. With anything like this there's always a fear that the memory of something is stronger, and better, than the reality. I'd not read a Hugo Tate strip in something like a decade. But I didn't need to worry. I enjoyed it as much now as I did when I first read it. The #12 story, "Waiting in Vain", was just as good today as it was that day in 1991. Oh, I'd love to tell you all about this story... but you need to read it with as little foreknowledge as possible. It's a thing of beauty. Just this strip is worth the cover price alone...

Being able to read almost every (I'll return to this soon...) Hugo Tate strip, in order, in one volume just shows how much it developed; the way how Hugo develops, not only as a character, but in terms of the style in which he is drawn, is quite something when you see it as a single work, rather than a chunks over the course of a few years. As the strip progresses the level of detail in his face increases, going from the smiley face style of the early strips, to near fully detailed in the latter ones. 

I recall being disappointed with the latter episodes set in America back when I first read it; the "road movie" elements of it never gelled with me, and I missed the more ordinary settings of the  earlier, London based, episodes. However, I found I enjoyed it much more this time around. Yes, it's certainly true the London stories are, at least to my mind, the better material; but I think looking back there was an element of me disliking the American stuff because I was judging it on what I wanted it to be, rather than what it was. And that was something I did a bit back then; I had a similar reaction to the Twin Peaks movie.

I mentioned earlier that the book contains "almost every" Hugo Tate strip; there's a small number of short strips missing according to a footnote at the back. Apparently Nick A didn't have either the original art, or a copy of the relevant issues of Deadline in which they appeared. The note states that these were "...irrelevant to the main narrative and took place outside its continuity." It's a bit of a shame that a bit of effort wasn't expended to track these down; it wouldn't have been tricky to source copies of Deadline to scan them in... I mean, I've got every issue somewhere, and I really can't be the only one! But, really, this is a minor quibble. 

Also, at the back, there's an appendix with various bits of art; covers, a t-shirt design, and so on. There's also a handful of rough sketches, including a very rough drawing of how Hugo would have progressed had there been further strips. 

Frankly; if you have any interest in the medium  of comics, you need this book in your collection. If it's not, you have a large gaping hole that can only be filled by the purchase of this book. Just go and buy it. Now.

Notes:

1 - If someone can please publish a book with the words "Phillip Bond" and "Wired World" on its spine, I'd be most grateful... I recall the final Wired World being almost as good as the Hugo strip in #12.
2 - Turns out I'd only have saved £2.25 buying from Amazon.