The complete set of Hard Core Horror is now a rarity. We do, however, have a few copies to sell at the original price per set of £30 post free (overseas prices available), as we do a number of other hard to find Savoy publications: Kris Guidio's Sinister Legends, James Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock's The Crystal & the Amulet, several very rare, early issues of Meng & Ecker. Savoy themselves haven't had copies of some of these to sell for a long time.
Email us for details and overseas prices.
Hard Core Horror
by David Britton, Kris Guidio & John Coulthart
Savoy 5 issue mini-series, comprising Lord Horror #s 3-7; £10/$25 (US) the set.
Review by Gerald Houghton
Heard the one about the pioneer Nazi propagandist and several million dead Jews, gypos and queers? David Britton has. So, during the last war, did the numerous Britons fortunate enough to stumble across the radio broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw. Freed from British government censorship, Haw-Haw (William Joyce) spewed forth all the facts kept from the mass of the population. 'He was something new in the history of the world', wrote Rebecca West of Joyce when he was unjustly tried as a radio traitor after the war.
Still with us? Take that as your starting point then. Lord Horror is Lord Haw-Haw, detached from strict historical accuracy to roam the war years through the five parts of the distorted history lesson that makes up Hard Core Horror. Horror, subject of an eponymous, scarcely seen novel, is an anti-hero, and Britton's chief weapon is irony. The controversy surrounding the various Lord Horror projects is at once understandable and farcical. Taken at face value, the outrage makes chilling sense if you are addressing a Sun-loving population to whom 'queers' and 'gypos' are everyday terms, and whose facts come in handy bite-sized chunks two inches tall, attached to lurid photographs. In Britain as it stands you are treading on very thin ice.
Horror - whose writer brother James Joyce is a knife-wielding psychopath and wife music hall darling Jessie Matthews - is a brutal, mo-hawked racist intellectual. He treks across the country, often accompanied by Oswald Mosley, inciting mass rallies and incurring the wrath of the laughable, ape-like Churchill (Britton and the truth clearly aren't always strangers) who despatches his Tick-Tock Men, homicidal, steam-powered robots, to dispose of him. Eventually the onset of war forces our anti-hero to flee into the arms of a degenerately camp Hitler, but even here Horror's irksome belligerence succeeds in usurping his privileged position and the walls of Auschwitz beckon.
Lacking a clearly signposted morality, Hard Core Horror supports an oblique sense of humour that demands of its audience the trust in its vision from beginning to end, wherever and whatever atrocities it decides to visit upon them, believing somewhat unfashionably in their intelligence and collective sense of satire and irony. This vision does incur a certain dilution in a lack of quality control with Kris Guidio's occasionally forceful but more usually merely functional illustrations (Horror as Jerry Lee Lewis in the fourth issue is particularly powerful), and through the somewhat wordy quality of Britton's scripts in the first half, which are weakened by contrast with the final two virtually textless instalments. Throughout the series, the horrors of the parables are underlined in the magazine's design, using photographs, montage, and selected quotes, as well as a supporting text to background and cement Britton's ideas. The final pages of photographs hammer the intent home with an undeniable force.
Despite its flaws, Hard Core Horror's sheer unsavoury imagination, utterly horrendous invention and plain audacity make it a genuine attempt to expand the limits of comicdom. Its scurrilous wit and closely observant eye to history make it an atrocity that taunts and incites its audience with the raw terrors it shoves in their faces. Lord Horror is about evil, and evil is not pretty.