The comic strips of Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death deliver an irreverent, heartfelt, and devastatingly funny history of rock and roll. Like Monty Python at its best, their version is surreal and ridiculous - yet somehow everything in it rings true. According to Morton and Death, the bass player in Led Zeppelin was Jean-Paul Sartre. And despite having been able to think up brilliant titles for their first three albums, Led Zeppelin were stuck for what to call the fourth one - so they put a load of prunes on the front. In strip after strip, Morton & Death pinpoint the absurdities and oddities of rock history. In the process, they often come closer to its truth than conventional accounts do, as well as being far more entertaining. As for the drawings, their caricatures of rock stars from Mick Jagger to Frank Zappa, Johnny Rotten to Courtney Love, are in themselves worth the price of admission.
One of the best ways to take the piss out of pop orthodoxy is to screw with its history, and no revisionists did it funnier or more incisively than the duo behind Great Pop Things. A strip that ran in Record Mirror and NME throughout the ’80s and ’90s, it skewered the overinflated self-importance of rock’n’roll mythology with a sensibility that fell somewhere between Harvey Kurtzman and Monty Python.
Artist Chuck Death—the Mekons’ Jon Langford under a pseudonym—had a knack for making rock stars look as grotesque as possible while still making them recognizable; his Mick Jagger might be the most comically cruel depiction of a rock celebrity ever drawn. Meanwhile, Morton’s jokes were both archly smart-assed and spectacularly absurd—the three-part “Space-Morrisseys” (“we relish the chance to be more pathetic than earthlings”) is among the most priceless—hiding in-jokes inside puns inside callbacks, and fitting as many intertwining laughs as possible in every panel. The end result is a body of work so anarchic and baffling in its comedy that it’s hard to tell just how much of it actually reflects any real-world opinion of the creators, much less anyone else. With practically every artist the strip covers being credited with trying to change the world (The Police: “...by dressing up as punks a bit but not really”; Henry Rollins: “...with sensitive shouting”), they turn critical boilerplate into goofy running gags. –Nate Patrin
