Notorious comic book brainiacs Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury have scoured the world to bring together a non-PC carnival of comic-book curiosities. American Presidents become muscle-bound superheroes, a massive Japanese monster plays basketball, cavemen fight giant tabby cats and a peasant girl fervently worships the swastika. Are you ready for Russia's busty bombshell Octobriana? What about getting your groove on with Mod Love? Can you take the flesh-eating farm animals in The Barn of Fear? If you can stomach these, you might want to try Fatman the Human Flying Saucer, Chaplains at War, Amputee Love or Fast Willie Jackson.

Gravett & Stanbury present the ultimate parade of rare and crazy comics, each featured in a colourful double-page spread with the eye-popping cover shown on a full page.

The Leather Nun will make the perfect quirky gift for comics fans, aficionados of pop culture – and anyone with a taste for offbeat humour.

"The perfect gift for any comic book lover or pervert in your life."
Jonathan Ross

Interview: Forbidden Planet Blog
Paul Gravett discusses graphic criminality and leather nuns with Joe Gordon at the Forbidden Planet Blog. More...

2008 Comics In The Rear View:
Holy Sh*t!: The World's Weirdest Comic Books by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury. What it sounds like: Dozens of examples from all over the globe of the most bizarre, hilarious, disturbing curiosities ever to appear in sequential-graphic form. Sadly such a work can never be a definitive edition because Rob Liefeld and Frank Miller continue to publish new material. Worth having anyway.

One of those laurels I continue to rest my weary head on is Longshot Comics, which is discussed in a new book by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury. There are two editions of it, with two different titles for two different markets. The Leather Nun and Other Incredibly Strange Comics is one name for the book, Holy Sh*t! The World's Weirdest Comic Books is the other. The difference in titles illustrates, quite vividly I'd say, the chasm of between United States and United Kingdom sensibilities. You can guess which title goes with which territory. Hint: Brits have a soft spot for the kinky, Yanks like naughty words.

Paul Gravett is back, this time with Peter Stanbury, casting his deep-thinking, analytical mind over some of comics' biggest questions. However, despite the fact that scholarly Gravett is usually found pondering the cultural impact of manga or the link between superheroes and war-time propaganda, this book reveals his other side: a lover of comic books' ability to shock and surprise.

Holy Sh*t isn't (perhaps unfortunately) an anthology of comics like Gravett's cracking Mammoth Book of Crime Comics, but instead offers covers, descriptions and sneak peaks at some of comics' more depraved moments. Amputee Love, Tales from the Leather Nun and Trucker Fags in Denial grace its pages, leaving you (depending on your outlook on life) either thirsty for more comic madness, or quietly quite pleased that most of the comics discussed never made it to the big time.

One of the things I have managed to do is lay my hands on a copy of Paul Gravett & Peter Stanbury's The Leather Nun and Other Incredibly Strange Comics. This book has been passed round my house, from hand to hand, over the last few days, accompanied by gasps, groans and giggles. Though some of the entries are strange and unsettling at best, utterly offensive at worst, even the most PC, delicately tempered person will find themselves being intrigued and fascinated by what this gloriously odd little book contains.

It almost works as a catalogue of the macabre, almost certainly boosting the sales of some of the more recent, still in print, dodgy works. Perhaps these would have sank thankfully under the waves of graphic literacy effluence, but it's too late to complain. They are released on the world now, and apparently mild mannered Paul Gravett is their chief champion.

Opening it at random, you are greeting again and again by inexplicible images, of erotic disfunction, socio-political oddities and incongruous, unthinking juxtaposition. I almost fell off my chair when I opened the book at "Teen-Age Romances" and my eye fell upon one female character saying of another "That little cheat will do anything to hold Dick." (Incidentally, there is an addictive collection of romance comics and other oddities to be found at Last of the Spinner Rack Junkies).

In itself the book is a handy little size, and gives us little glimpses into these strange comics. It treads a very narrow path, managing to provide enough details and images to assert the strangeness of the works in question, but not enough to assuage our curiosity. It is a skilful tease.

The blurb on the front, from the foolhardy Jonathan Ross says "The perfect gift for any comic-book lover or pervert in your life." This could be indicative of something, since my house mate just picked it up and remarked it on being a suitable present for her brother. As far as I know, he doesn't like comics.

I've had this sitting beside me for a couple of days and it's incredibly distracting. It's a dip-into book that you'll have trouble putting down because, frankly, you'll have some trouble believing that some of these comics ever came out. From the cover of a 1950 issue of Teen-Age Romances - where a girl sees her boyfriend flirting with a blonde while her friend tells her "You'll never get him back, Ann. That little cheat will do anything to hold Dick!" - to the action tales of Reagan's Raiders - wherein the pumped-up, 75-year-old US president Ronald Reagan and his senior cabinet save the world from nuclear disaster - Paul Gravett and Paul Stanbury have gathered together 50 examples from some of the weirdest comics ever that will leave you wondering why trees were cut down to make this!

Anti-Krushchev (Two Faces of Communism) and Christian tracts (The Gospel Blimp), promotional comics (Driving Like A Pro, published by the Greyhound bus company) and psychedelic hippie comics (Mod Love and Brother Power the Geek), bondage/S&M comics (The Leather Nun that gives the book its title), comics from another age (All-Negro Comics) and the indefinable (Amputee Love, Chaplains at War, Godzilla vs. Barkley [Charles Barkley, the basketball player], Genus issue 20, the "Special extra large lesbian unicorn issue", Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary, etc., etc.) - they're all here, and more!

To paraphrase something the editors say in their introduction, there should be something to amuse, amaze or offend just about everyone.

When you brazenly put a superlative in the title of your book — whether 'best', 'worst' or whatever — you'd damn well better be ready to back that shit up. Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury knew this, obviously, when compiling Holy Sh*t: The World's Weirdest Comic Books. About the only sin of omission in this hilarious hardback is the cake-taking crossover The Punisher Meets Archie.

From all stretches of the globe and stretching back about eight decades, our duo has unearthed some unique issues that will give you a serious case of the WTFs. Just flip open to a random page. There's You Nazi Man, a 1930s parody in which Hitler is served a severed penis on a plate... and he asks for ketchup! See what I mean?

With each of the dozens of examples, the cover and a sample panel are reprinted on a full-color spread, and supplemented with a half-page explanation for background purposes... because, believe me, you'll want to know how a Malaysian comic book graphically depicting the tortures of Hell ever came into being. Gravett and Stanbury have clearly done their homework... assuming you can call research on comics of amputees enjoying carnal relations homework.

A smattering of the books spotlighted are from major publishers — DC is represented by the hippie-dippy Brother Power: The Geek; Dark Horse gets singled out for Godzilla vs Barkley (as in Charles) — but most are from unknown and underground outfits, plus hired-hand gigs for Christian publishers and various safety boards. There are a few “names” involved, including Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel (here with 'superlover' Jon Juan), Steve Ditko (Mr. A), Otto Binder (Tod Holton, Super Green Beret) and, for those auto maintenance mags he did for the military, Will Eisner.

On one end of the spectrum, you have something as happily innocent as Teen-age Romances (with now-amusing lines like “That little cheat will do anything to hold Dick!”). On the other end — far, far on the other end — there's something like Sh-t Comics, which is a glorified Tijuana bible update. For every The Gospel Blimp, there's a Tales From The Leather Nun.

Other oddballs include Cold War scare stories, a Mexican Batman parody, an anti-smoking creed, 1947's All-Negro Comics, a topless Spider-Woman from Italy, a career primer starring Popeye, a Jeffrey Dahmer biography, Ronald Reagan as a superhero and a sex-fantasy thing with an ultra-niche "special extra large lesbian unicorn issue." (In case you were wondering, it's the issue that's extra-large, the authors note.)

For the antiestablishment names on your holiday shopping list, this would make a perfect gift. Name one other title that will school them on Elsie the Cow and gay truckers within a single flip of the page.

Quirky is an underdescription for The Leather Nun and Other Incredibly Strange Comics, Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury's gorgeously produced collection of the some of the wackiest, beyond-the-pale comics ever written. I worry about the crowd Gravett and Stanbury hang out with or the duo's choice of reading matter: where on earth did they excavate deranged gems such as the pornographic Amputee Love, or La Donna Ragna, the Italian porno-horror version of Spider-Man, or Trucker Fags in Denial - believe me, I'm not making all this up - or Genus: Special Extra Large Lesbian Unicorn Issue, or Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika? A wildly uproarious, perverted must-have.

An irresistible glimpse at the weirdest comics ever made.

Golden-haired innocents falling in love with bloodthirsty Nazis. Redneck truckers fighting to suppress their homosexual urges. Amputee sex parties where everyone licks each other's stumps. Popsicle superheroes, lesbian superheroes, killer pussycats. Perverts, monsters, death, gore, hippies, monkeys... and a muscle-bound, Spandex-clad president Ronald Reagan busting Bolivian drug lords with wily wisecracks and a roaring machine gun. Welcome to the weird world of underground comics, a dark and strange place often unseen by Joe Public, but a delight for fans of the strange, forbidden and gratuitously odd.

When casting light on these rare gems, authors Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury let the pictures do the talking, by reproducing a selection of the most outrageous comic covers published since the 1940s, along with a smattering of text to put each page into context. It's hard to choose a favourite among the dozens of forgotten strips they've dug up, but child-friendly guides on how to shoot a rifle, the adventures of military chaplains on the frontline of World War II and sports start Charles Barkley fighting Godzilla with little more than a basketball are just a few of the comics that have made Bizarre laugh, gasp and wonder how these crazy cartoons ever got published in the first place.

The sort of book Christmas stockings were made for, you'll read The Leather Nun again and again, and it'll doubtless inspire the creative among you to dream up your own twisted 'toons.

This compact hardback provides a peek at the eye-popping covers of 60 of the world's weirdest comics.

Some of them, like Reagan's Raiders (in which the 75-year old president becomes a super-soldier) or the self-explanatory Trucker Fags In Denial are intentionally odd.

Others, particularly educational comics such as civil defense title Fire & Blast! or the disturbingly chipper Saving Can Be Fun!, are unintentionally amusing.

But our faves are the dirty ones, like the jaw-dropping Amputee Love, and La Donna Ragna, a copyright-flouting Italian porno-horror spin on Spider-Man.

Is it too early to say that this'd make a great stocking-filler? Probably. Sorry.

It's not just leather nuns that provide the strange fare that makes up this fun title from Paul Gravett & Peter Stanbury (released as Holy Sh*t! by St. Martins Press in the US): for just under ten quid you can also find out about comics featuring lesbian unicorns, cavemen fighting giant tabby cats, a peasant girl fervently worships the swastika and killer roosters.

When the publishers say Gravett and Stanbury have scoured the world to bring together a non-PC carnival of comic-book curiosities, they're not kidding. Who else would reveal the origins of Russia's busty bombshell Octobriana, a comics myth later given greater life by the likes of Bryan Talbot and others? What other book for the Christmas market is going to offer you flesh-eating farm animals in The Barn of Fear, Fatman the Human Flying Saucer, Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Chaplains at War or Amputee Love?

Then there's other delights such as Nembo Kid, a re-working of Superman for the Italian market, his name changed in 1954, perhaps to avoid criticism that the publishers were advocating the failed philosophy of the ubermensch so close to the end of World War Two. It's nuggets like this that make Leather Nun such a fun read.

While not presenting the full comics - that would probably be too much for some sensibilities and anyway, many of them are probably not as good as the titles or synopses, presented as 61 glorious double page spreads of covers and background articles - this is a smashing title for both comics connisseur and casual comics fan alike, the text both intelligent and irreverent.

Of course, there is the danger that a book such as this will merely confirm many prejudices non-comics fans have about those who do enjoy the medium, but I'd say it's well worth the risk. Gravett and Stanbury have again come up with the goods without being in any way po-faced about the comics they regularly champion.

The Leather Nun And Other Incredibly Strange Comics (£9-99) by Paul Gravett and Peter Stansbury. Did Paul show you his preview copy? The cover alone is a story in itself (clue: look at what each character is reading). Peter and Paul have trawled the outer reaches of comicbook insanity to bring you the strangest comics in the world, and then treat you with their masterfully mischievous commentary. Paul asked me for ideas last year and I offered up what I thought were sterling examples of marble-free miscreants imposing their mentalism upon us, but every one was rejected as being "not strange enough "! Well, he was right. See for yourself what it takes to be stranger than the fiction I could come up with. Case in point, HOW TO SHOOT, a comic published by the Remington Arms Company, proudly boasting on the cover: "Remington rifles helped blaze the trail to America's glory." They probably played a role in the murder rate over the last few decades as well. Unsurprisingly it's one long overt weapons pitch aimed at readers old and young, and would therefore only just have got past ex-cabinet minister Robin Cooke and his ethical arms policy. As our editors here also point out, "To many, the glazed smiles of those armed youngsters on the cover seem less reassuring 50 years on, in this post-Columbine era." And to others like Sarah Palin they probably just look perky and purty as heck. A lot of the culprits here owe their inclusion to politics - racial, sexual and otherwise - having moved on some since their original publications, but still you'll be wondering, "Whatever were they thinking?!". My favourite here, however, remains the one we used to sell when available, LONGSHOT COMICS, an epic 90-year family saga told in 160 panels per page, and starring a cast of dots. Well, the cast are represented as dots, and it's a testament to Shane Simmons' craft that you are not once confused as to who is saying what to whom. It is hilarious, and the page reprinted here - about a woman bred to death leaving the household at the mercy of their oblivious father - is a perfect example of Shane's comedic timing. Pick up a copy when you're next browsing and treat yourself to that page at least.

5 Stars:
This offbeat compendium from the dark side of comics will delight and surprise even hardened fans. Be warned: Dennis the Menace this is not.

There's something for everyone this week; we've got superheroes, rude words from Garth Ennis, sarcastic teenage girls from Dan Clowes, booze-drenched writers - and everything else you'd never think of (what about Amputee Love?) is covered in Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury's brand-spanking new book The Leather Nun And Other Incredibly Strange Comics! Peter and Paul have diligently scoured the darkest recesses of forgotten collections to gather the most weird and wonderful comics ever published. There's purple people-eaters, surreal Japanese baseball dramas, gigantic alien monsters in swimming trunks (that's not just holiday snaps from Blackpool Beach on an August afternoon), hip-hop superheroes fighting crime, and peasant-girl Hansi fervently worshipping the swastika. The Leather Nun herself really is something to behold. What would her mum say?

These 61 rare and bizarre comics are each featured in a colourful double-page spread with an eye-popping cover shown in full. Perhaps I'm being a bit previous, but at £9.99 this definitely looks like the best Christmas presents around for comic fans and perverts alike. Just ask Jonathan Ross - he says so on the cover, which features art by Black Hole's Charles Burns!

Okay, to get it out of the way, this is obviously, blatantly, blindingly obviously a novelty book from Gravett & Stanbury. You want serious discourse over comics? Go elsewhere, try some of Paul's other books for a start. This is all about  the weird and wonderful comics that have existed at various points in our medium's history. It's no coincidence that Jonathan Ross gets the cover quote as it's exactly the sort of thing he'd have made a Channel 4 series out of a few years ago.

And that cover quote pretty much covers exactly what this book is for. It's a stocking filler, the unusual gift for strange Uncle George. Of course, this is not to say that it isn't a very enjoyable stocking filler indeed. Part of the fun is going through it and seeing all the weird comics and imagining what sort of a wonderfully weird world the creators lived in. Another fun thing is seeing how many of them you've either seen or read. Try it, it's fun.

For example I'd completely forgotten Longshot Comics by Shane Simmons. An incredibly fun comic with 160 panels per page, 3,840 panels in total from 1995 which features nothing more than dots to represent the characters. As I recall it took ages to read and was genuinely quite funny and certainly excellent value for the price of a regular comic. And marvellously, in the course of writing this I've discovered that Shane Simmons is still around and still doing comics. For an example of what Longshot Comics was all about here's a recent entry in his website's “Films in longshot” series:

Now imagine that for another 3,836 panels with a huge cast of characters and I think you can see just why Longshot Comics warrants entry in this book.

The Leather Nun And Other Incredibly Strange Stories is 128 pages of the strange, weird and downright bizzare comics that have been published in the last 50 or so years. Each double page spread covers a single comic, write up on one page, cover on the other. All firmly tongue in cheek and continually asking the question; What in god's name were they thinking?

The great thing about it is that Gravett and Stanbury have cast the net far and wide to find not just the obvious titles from the Underground comics movement (Leather Nun, Amputee Love, Binky Brown meets the Holy Virgin Mary etc) but have looked at some more wholesome comics that, with the benefit of hindsight, are perhaps the strangest of the lot. Take for example Hansi; The Girl Who Loved The Swastika. Not, as you may expect, some nasty propaganda book on behalf of Hitler's Germany, but a well meaning look at how a good bible and a healthy dose of Christianity can save anyone. Or maybe it was a nasty propaganda book after all? Published by Spire Christian Comics in 1976. Archie meets Nazis.

Or what about PM; The Preventive Maintenance comic book published by the US Army and drawn for many years by the late, great Will Eisner. The blonde heroine would regularly purr seductively to her GI readers about the benefits of keeping their equipment in good condition and no doubt made a far greater impression than any dry technical manual ever could.

And it goes on in this vein, page after page of wonderful entertainment, the trippy, alternative undergrounds, the incredibly innocent and sweet romance comics of another time (Just Married - Should a Jewish boy and an Irish girl fall in love?), the bizarre instructional manual type comics (Saving Can Be Fun, Driving Like A Pro), the  social comics to tempt wayward teens from lives or crime, drugs, illicit sex and worse (that would be Communism). From Purple People Eaters, through the Gospel Blimp and right on through to Steve Ditko's exercise in Ayn Randian Objectivism of Mr A.  It's all here, in all its glorious strangeness.

The Leather Nun [is] a great little hardback package, slightly smaller than comic sized, and perfect to fit into anyone's stocking this Christmas time. The Leather Nun is published 25th September 2008 and should be available from all good comic shops and bookshops and is, of course, available here at the FPI webstore. Weird Uncle George will thank you for it. But do yourself a favour - have a good look through yourself first, it's well worth it.

Funny peculiar: One of comics' greatest strengths is that no subject is off limits. Anything can be explored: superheroes, the Holocaust, philosophy, opera, relationships and - as Paul Gravett's novelty tome The Leather Nun... helpfully teaches us - lesbian unicorns (yes, really)! In this highly enjoyable and often eye-opening jaunt through the outer reaches of comics' weirder moments, mythical gay horses are just the tip of the iceberg. With more than sixty equally mad examples, highlights include the ultra-patriotism of Reagan's Raiders (led by Ronnie himself), a sweet, blonde girl fanatically devoted to Nazism, Trucker Fags in Denial (which speaks for itself) and an exploration of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's (exceedingly) troubled youth. Non-PC heaven.

Holy Sh*t is a novelty book more than it is any sort of serious, sustained creative effort: the kind of thing that might be more easy to find resting on the porcelain toilet-back in someone's bathroom as opposed to filling the go-to slot in the average comics scholar's bookshelf. However, the Gravett/Stanbury effort, the Jesse Garon to the same team's Graphic Novels: Everything You Need To Know's Elvis Aaron, is a fine creature of its kind. The book is smaller than the average comic book, but the covers are printed in extreme, edges-obliterating close-ups that flatters the format and each, individual piece. Those comics are well-selected, from several different corners of comics expression: corny cultural unearthings, unintentionally humorous mainstream books, underground goofs, corporate oddities, the rare religious comic, and even two or three formally out-there works like the all-dot-and-dialogue Longshot Comics by Shane Simmons. While I'm not enough of a comics braniac to know if individual entries are fair and to the point, the segments as a whole are fun, and seem appropriate to the subject matter. These things are important because with things like Comics.org and Coverbrowser.com, we're all in effect our own joke comics editors, rifling through any number of virtual covers in search of a chuckle. All in all, if you're reading this blog, you don't [need] this book. However, it is a nice stocking stuffer and the kind of thing you never mind receiving from someone else.