Phenomenomix
Hunt Emerson
Knockabout Press 2022
Pb, 224pp, £22.99, ISBN 9780861662906
Even after working on FT for well over two decades, some things never, as they say, get old. One of those things is the arrival, every four weeks, of a new “Phenomenomix” strip from our resident cartoonist, Hunt Emerson. Sometimes, if we’ve discussed what’s coming up in the next issue, I’ll have an inkling of what might be in store; sometimes, as with Hunt’s recent strip on fishfalls (FT420:71), it’s a case of serendipitous synchronicity (or “the hive mind as work”, as Hunt suggests); most often, it’s a delightful surprise. After all, we could be dealing with cryptozoological classics, oddities of history, the miracles of lesser known saints, or, as brought together in a previous (highly recommended) collection of Hunt’s FT work, Lives of the Great Occultists.
Whatever the topic, though, the treatment is always pure Hunt: visually, a blend of classic Mad Magazine-style cartooning and the freewheeling, surrealism of underground comix, plus his unique ability to address the outer limits of human experience with a very down to earth sense of irony.
Hunt has been part of the FT team since Bob Rickard launched the mag (then known as ) way back in 1973; the story of how the two of them met is retold in a wonderful four-page special Hunt created for our 40thfor Bob’s columns in issue eight (“Strange Encounters”, “Lights and Fireballs”, “Embeddings” and so on); for issue 11 he contributed his first full strip, “Fortean Funnies” (“more or less incomprehensible – I had a lot to learn about drawing comics!”). “Phenomenomix” debuted in issue 30 (1979), and in issue 42 he gave us the first adventure of that dogged but hapless investigator of anomalies, Gully Bull. (My own favourite Gully strip is “A Dreadful Night”, in which our hero’s attempt to solve one mystery results in him creating a host of new ones, as he is mistaken for a lake monster and accidentally creates a simulacrum of Christ on a wall!)
