The Megatherium Club by Owen D. Pomery

A RAPIER-SHARP wit, that is at once debonair, distinguished and drunk off its ass, The Megatherium Club by Owen D. Pomery, is a mini comic unlike any other and an essential addition to any civilised library.

Pomery's take on this late eighteenth century gentlemen's club, dedicated to the pursuits of 'gin, taxidermy and fucking about', is a heady cocktail of sequential debauchery, stylish prose and elegant artwork.
Volume 1, The Great Ape - which I liberated from Pomery at this year's Lakes' International Comic Art Festival from the veritable cornucopia of good-looking comic books that graced his table - tells the tale of a drunken bet that leads the club's members on a hunt for that most elusive of mythological beasts, the yeti.
The rambunctious joy of The Megatherium Club is perhaps most obvious in the quick-fire, often grotesque, irreverent, drunken, frat-boy humour of its members, which will inevitably raise a guilty laugh in even the most cynical reader.

But its the high farce of the plotting and the chaotic way characters roam the landscape of the story that really brings The Megatherium Club alive - whether it's the club contingent who set off to hunt down a bigfoot in the nearby woods to win the ill-conceived inebriated bet made with the landlord desperate to evict them from the Smithsonian Institute, or those left behind frantically trying to construct convincing yeti artefacts as a fall back should their co-conspirators prove unsuccessful. 
Pomery is relentless and pushes the boundaries of taste in decency with aplomb, a feat which deserves credit in itself, and is one that is rarely achieved this effectively. 
You shouldn't love Pomery's characters, but it's impossible not to root for them as the story reaches its wild intoxicated climax.

In theatre farce is a comic drama which utilises buffoonery, horseplay, crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations, and like the best works of that genre, the choreographed confusion of The Megatherium Club keeps the audience on its toes throughout.
The considered lines of Pomery's artwork add poise to his cast and a sort of sepia-tone to the pages which help place the story firmly in the past, albeit a gin-soaked past where men were real men ... as long as there was a well-stocked liquor cabinet somewhere nearby.
Best enjoyed with a glass of port, hell, a whole bottle, The Megatherium Club deserves its place in any small press library, not least because if it didn't get in, it would almost certainly set fire to the damn place for the snub. 

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