The next publication from Peakrill Press (after this one) will be the comic Dregs of Rudetown by Chris Barker. We’re making copies of the comic ridiculously cheap on Kickstarter – £5 including postage for a 40-page comic.
The comic covers the everyday exploits of nineties folk – featuring everything from landlines to indie discos, fruit machines to smoking in pubs. More on that below, but first a little on the comic’s author and illustrator, Chris Barker.
You may not have heard of Chris, but there’s a good chance you’ve come across his work. He is probably best known for his annual Sergeant Pepper-style tributes to dead celebrities, which started in 2016:
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| sgtpepper2016. See also sgtpepper2017, sgtpepper2018, sgtpepper2019, sgtpepper2020, sgtpepper2021 and sgtpepper2022 |
He also knocks out satirical images with astounding frequency, honed by many years’ entries to the weekly b3ta photoshop challenge. The first of these to go viral was a fake Sky News graphic which generated so much outrage that Sky had to put out a press release denying it. Nowadays Chris seems to have a humorous response to every political scandal posted to his Twitter account within minutes of it happening.
In 2017, Chris’s response to the Grenfell Tower fire was picked up and used by the New European newspaper. They subsequently commissioned Chris to create many of their cover images, to the extent that his covers have almost come to define the magazine’s brand:
Most recently, Chris’s “Brush Strokes – the Fine Art of Light Entertainment” images were exhibited at London’s Museum of Comedy and published as a book.
Chris also has a day job as an art director on prestigious magazines including Campaign, and he was responsible for designing every one of 2012’s daily Olympics and Paralympics programmes.
Chris has also written a series of kids‘ novels proving that, infuriatingly, he can do words as well as pictures.
Over 20 years ago, I remember Chris hawking around some half-finished comic that he’d been working on. I didn’t hear any more about it, and assumed that Chris had got bored/busy and binned the idea. Turns out he’d just been gestating it. Now, more than 23 years after the end of the 90s, Dregs of Rudetown is finally ready for publication. Here’s a preview of a section which covers the defining moment of the 1990s (click panels to embiggen):
I’m really proud to be working with Chris on this, and can’t wait to see it in print. Reserve your copy here.
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