3 out of 5

A mixed batch of average mish-mash, linked either by shared creators or a vague theme of the supernatural.

Nothing in this floppy particularly stands out (hence all my wishy-washy descriptors above), but I still love these bonus mags for giving other-ran’s the opportunity to be collected.  For example, the five-parter that gives this collection its title, by Si Spurrier: there’s likely no profitable method for collecting these short tales, so if you were a Spurrier fan, you’d either be tracking down back issues or be out of luck.  And logistics aside: it’s always fun to read serialzed stories in a sitting.

Not that London Calling is all that great – like a lot of Spurrier it’s a lot of idea, executed quickly, and thus there’s not a lot of room for character or sub-plotting, but the compression in and of itself is amusing (the speed is throttling) and I love how Si went for don’t-give-a-fuck full cockney writing.  LF is a spin on the  “monsters are real” type tale, in which they’ve been living among us as humans for however long, waiting, apparently, for their leader, Shuck, to return and lead a human conquering rebellion.  But maybe one of Shuck’s crew likes his human life.  A fun twist here is that the monsters extend far beyond normal vampire / werewolf mix. Lee Garbett does a weird Chris Bachalo impression.

Afterward we get the final few chapters of Civil Warlord, which are on par with what came before (I.e. pretty dumb), but again, I’m glad to get the chance to read it and that the Meg overlords saw fit to finish up the republication.

Warlord artist Lee Carter makes a better showing in color in a short and moodily effective terror Terror Tale (as there’re no large scale action sequences) by Arthur Wyatt; Spurrier and Jon Davis-Hunt offer an amusingly meta-meta-meta Future Shock, and T.C. Eglington and, again, Mr. Carter, give us a Time Twister that’s rather underwhelming in its few pages, but would be an effective story at length.

Bits and bobs – more like an issue of the Meg itself than the usual floppy collections, but a fair pass of time.