Professor Elemental - the comic

I love the cover!

Geoffrey the monkey butler.* Tea. Cake. Strange adventures abroad, and stranger adventures in science. All themes in the songs (is that the right word?) of chap-hop star Professor Elemental, and all present and correct in the first volume of the Professor Elemental comic.

I read comics when I was a little guttersnipe getting 2000AD every week in the late 1980s and all the way through my university days, but stopped buying them in the noughties and have only got back into them in recent years thanks to my friend Kai**. I wanted to buy this one because I really enjoyed Professor Elemental's performance at Waltz on the Wye. The comic feels beautiful: nice card cover, decent paper stock. When I unwrapped it my first reaction was that it felt like a high-quality item.

Did it read like one? Oh yes. There are three separate stories, all a few pages long, written by Chris Mole but with different artists. The third piece is directly inspired by the song 'The Quest for the Golden Frog'. There's also an interview with Geoffrey. You could safely give this comic to children – one for your junior steampunks, perhaps – but it's still fun to read as an adult, and it makes me smile just to pick it up and flick through it. I'll definitely be buying later issues, and if you want a copy, you can buy them direct from the Professor Elemental website.

Splendid! As the Professor himself might say.


*Okay, he's an orang-utan, and as anyone who reads Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels will tell you, orang-utans are apes, not monkeys. But 'ape butler' doesn't have as nice a rhythm.
**If you're reading this, Kai, I got you one too :)