My Demons (Signed & Sketched In) back

"I'm on sick leave, look, here's my doctor's note."

She or he may be on sick leave, but they're dangling the note over an office draw, for the company cannily provides employees' accommodation on-site.

In filing cabinets.

Welcome back to The Andi Watson Collection, now complete: a dozen wit-ridden mini-comics, each containing a dozen story pages inside an exquisitely designed cardstock cover with chic, matching trade dress. The first was THE CITY NEVER SLEEPS which we made Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month. That'd be a very good place to start.

A lot of lateral thinking goes into these satirical swipes at modern-day life or whimsical musings on how it always has been, and they can be dense with double meaning and visually playful as well.

Take 'Love Removal Men' from LOVE REMOVAL MEN; it can be a very heavy load they bare.

"The Love Removal Men came today.
"I saw their van from my window.
"I told them I'd had a change of heart."

Oooof! If you don't demand to know what happened next, then you have none of your own. I promise you Watson follows every idea assiduously. The ramifications can be wrenching.

'Join The Team At MCW' - the one where everyone's working from filing cabinets - is the last of three short stories in MY DEMONS.

Imagine that your next job will be to evaluate the efficiency with which the potential for company expansion was explored and then detailed for a team of profit monitors to employ as part of their ongoing study into assessing the - AAAAAARRRRGGGHHHHH! Now imagine that job will be yours for life - guaranteed! - and will therefore constitute your profession, your career in its entirety.

It's precisely the sort of absurdity that Evelyn Waugh would be lampooning were he still in the business of books: self-generating, self-sustaining, the expenditure of infinite effort to produce nothing of either physical substance or practical benefit.

I got whiffs of Winsor McCay, Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. It's positively Kafka-esque.

I love that those open drawers which the employees are nesting in are high up in the sky almost as unapproachable, as unreachable, as a golden eagle's aerie. The workers look pallid and wan. I don't think they get down a lot. One drawer door says "Flush after use".