Motherfuckers:
The Auschwitz of Oz David Britton
Savoy hardback, £14.95
Review by David Clark (1996)
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Motherfuckers:
The Auschwitz of Oz
David Britton
Savoy
hardback, £14.95
Review by David Clark (1996)
A nightmarish fairy tale, a deep-black comedy and, of course, the long-awaited follow-up to Lord Horror.
Welcome to the insane world of Meng and Ecker, mutant twins rescued from Auschwitz after being used for research purposes by Dr Mengele. We’ve reached the end of the line, where the next cattle train is about to unload its living cargo of Jews, Gypsies, giants and dwarves. The twins are vile, enslaved by their appetites. They haunt Manchester, New Orleans and Auschwitz, time-travelling back and forth in a terrain of unfettered imagination. This is the Land Of Do-As-You-Please, the place where the macabrely detailed dreamscapes of Lautreamont and Sade meet the popular, commonsense fantasy of the likes of Roald Dahl, adapted in part from Savoy’s world famous, universally acclaimed – ok, it, isn’t. but it ought to be – Meng & Ecker comic, with a host of mesmerising supporting characters. Some early issues of the comic are actually still banned – only the Lord Horror novel was legitimised after the appeal, supported by Geoffrey Robertson – making them the only banned comics in England. The comics are hilarious. This reads as darker, however.
Hard to credit though it is, Meng and Ecker are descended from Fudge and Speck, the elven heroes from Fudge the Elf, the much-loved Manchester Evening News comic strip by Ken Reid, creator of Roger the Dodger, Faceache, etc. What was possibly the worst horror of modern history gets absorbed into the framework of surrealism, literary fantasy and the darkest children’s fiction. By viewing the Holocaust as a tragicomic carnival of the grotesque, Britton offers his readers a vivid, dream-level identification with efficient barbarism, just as Hansel and Gretel introduced children to the reality of infanticide. Meng and Ecker are no longer represented uncritically, as in the comic (where they are heroic figures of a kind), but as living, sickening symptoms of a distorted, perverted world. Motherfuckers makes scary reading at times but is, despite being reference-laden and serious, perfectly readable. A book of monsters. Real modern horror. And there’s a surprise under that jacket picture of William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea.