MAGAZINE REVIEW –DODGEM LOGIC #4 June/July 2010  

Took a look at a magazine a friend gave me a copy of, Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic. Hard to picture anything this bad actually surviving to its fourth issue. As a big fan of Moore’s graphic book’s like V For Vendetta & Watchmen, I looked forward to reading this, but found it to be a badly bodged rather self-indulgent fanzine publication, set out with some nice artwork, but carrying a very 1960’s psychedelic feel, and words in fancy fonts on multi-coloured pages that hurt and strain the eyes as you try to read it all.

There are cartoon strips that simply make no sense, and have the look / feel of student rag mag submissions. There are contributions by Robin Ince, and Steve Aylett, and other well-known authors.

The publication seems unsure of its direction or target audience, trying to be adult oriented with beautifully drawn images of two men kissing on the cover to scream subversive, liberal minded and politically dangerous at you before showing some quite pedestrian material within. It’s like someone took Private Eye or Oz and turned it into the Beano. Warhol-ian swirling magic mushroom taker’s art, short stories that are often in serialized form, but hardly likely to engage you enough to need the next issue in two months time.

Alex Novak’s review of the life and work of music-comedy genius Spike Jones (of the City Slickers group) is the only feature to really hold my attention here, as I loved Spike Jones’s work. I was amazed that he was one of the musicians on Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, a fact I never knew until I read this article. Great as that is, it seems out of place in a magazine dominated by Science Fiction & Fantasy writers / artists. When you hit a page of recipes for salsa snacks a little later you realize how eclectic and downright random this publication actually is. You may well will find something of interest here, but hardly all of it.

The retro sixties feel is very odd, and spelt out in the opening page feature on the coolest ‘hipsters of the period’ namely One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest author, Ken Kesey, alongside Andy Warhol and Timothy Leary, all champions of LSD culture. It’s like Moore is trying to turn the clock back to give their era the freedoms of the Internet age. It’s not a very successful experiment.

The magazine carries poster art and a supplementary magazine called Notes From No-Ho that initially appears to be loose pages from the main magazine itself, and pretty indistinguishable from the main publication.

This is work for Moore completionists only, who think Moore can do no wrong and isn’t prepared to just release any old self-indulgent tosh on the unsuspecting world.

Arthur Chappell