4 out of 5

Rough around the edges, but a hoot.

After much pleading, Tharg relented and has given us our first archival reprinting (from the recently acquired IPC libraries) in the Meg floppies.  While being a recent 2000 AD convert, I haven’t minded the odds and sods collections of older prog material, it is definitely cool to be reading stuff that definitely hasn’t been available in a good long while, and equally cool to see that there have always been badass comics poking about.

Taken from the short-lived Tornado (’79 through ’81, I think?), there’s the definite sisterhood with the 2000 AD vibe, including shared creators and strip-length and whatnot, though that could be said to just be the historically British magazine-comic style.  Lawless Touch is a rogue-turned-hero story, pulpy and cheeky as can be, with plenty of sentences ending in exclamation points!  Because everything sounds more exciting that way!  Johnny Lawless (uh huh) is an ace thief whose ace thieverings bring him to the attention of a secretive, European police corp (yup) who require an operator who’s willing to bend the rules to accomplish the most daring of tasks (of course)…  Waving the options of jail or servitude over his head, ‘Mother’ (the corp’s Q proxy) Johnny agrees to give the agency his Lawless Touch.  Oh man.  But writers Kelvin Gosnell and R. Tufnell execute all of this in tongue-in-cheek stride, with slick and detailed art from a slew of artists; it’s an undeniable glee-worthy rush when Johnny lays out the current no-escape scenario and then we slam into our well-designed The Lawless Touch title box.

And he’s an amiable anti-hero, imperfect and willing to admit it, and always sneaking away with a dollar or two from the moneys he’s just rescued from other thieves.  The capers are whimsical Bond-y world-trotting jaunts, featuring gadgets and fast cars and fisticuffs.  The water attack dogs (in Steve MacManus’ The Dogs of Death) start crossing the line into plain silly, and there are a slew of lettering issues – bubbles out of order, missing punctuation – but again, the fleet-footedness of the whole affair is a blast.