Megg and Werewolf Jones are - Horse Mania! The worst band in the world! Follow their incompetent shows that test the audience’s patience as they perform in back gardens and dive bars and take on the local music scene, heckling other bands’ performances and sabotaging their merch tables! Will they ever make it - find fame and fortune through their art? Of course not. They’re garbage. Horse Mania! Aoow!
Simon Hanselmann’s back with another great comic, Below Ambition. I was gonna say “another great Megg and Mogg comic” but Mogg’s outta town in this one and only appears briefly in a flashback story near the end, so this is the first Megg and Mogg book sans Mogg, but it’s fine - the star of the show, as ever, is the delightful derelict Werewolf “I’m not raping her. We’re a band” Jones.
Hanselmann’s made funnier comics but this book still has some laffs. I loved Mike the Wizard’s enthusiasm - he’s the band’s biggest/only fan - and the stuff Jones writes on the co-headlining band Urban Plannerz’s records is so silly but undeniably funny. I enjoyed how shitty they are to other bands trying to make it. Rather than form a community, they do their best to ruin it for them, which is definitely the more entertaining route.
I also like how Hanselmann sometimes doesn’t bother writing real dialogue and just has them saying “Blah blah blah” as they move from one scene to the next (or maybe they really are saying that?), and the slurs are represented as images to get around the “hate speech” it’d be perceived as if they were articulated through letters. It’s very creative and clever.
If there’s one criticism it’s that the stories are pretty much (appropriately?) one note - Horse Mania go to a gig, get wasted, play their horrible music, get booed off the stage, repeat. There’s more to the stories to add variety to them but that’s broadly the predictable trajectory of the book.
There are a couple short stories included at the end not set in the present. One is a flashback from 12 years ago called Homo Train, and 7”, which is a flashforward story, that I won’t spoil here with details - both stories are a hoot.
I’ve always said one of the limitations of comics is that they don’t really convey music well. I should caveat that by saying comics don’t convey good music well - because I didn’t need to hear Horse Mania to know how bad they must stink live. And also this book comes with a flexidisc single featuring a song by Horse Mania called Stick It In For the Ambient, so you can actually listen to their sound if you have a record player (I don’t so I didn’t). It’s Hanselmann and an old (now deceased - heroin’s a helluva drug) friend playing their music back in the day.
If you’ve never read Simon Hanselmann’s comics before, I can’t recommend them enough but go back to the beginning and start with Megahex rather than jump in here - they’re all (more or less) standalone reads but the first book is also one of the best. For everyone else, if you’ve read one of these before, you know where you stand by now - you either love these comics (smart… smart) or you don’t (boo) as, while the quality varies from decent to amazing from book to book, the humour or tone doesn’t change and that might bother some people who aren’t into it for whatever reason. Below Ambition is one of the better books in the series and I really enjoyed it.
Simon Hanselmann! Aoow!
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