"Bagley presents a layered and captivating tale
here, brought to visual life with an exquisite eye for detail and a remarkably
assured and confident storytelling style. If you don’t instantly fall in love with Tick after a
first reading then, quite frankly, you have no soul…"
Small Pressganged soundbite
Rebecca Bagley’s steampunk fable Tick is a 36-page colour
small press comic. Its starting point centers on a new homeowner’s discovery of
a curious, kettle-headed, mechanical creature hidden away in the house she has
just purchased. Obviously sentient, but forlornly uncommunicative, it soon
becomes obvious that this hi-tech-yet-retro homunculus’ original function has been
lost to the mists of time.
TICK now is heralded as being one of 10 of the “best”
small press books of 2012, as proclaimed by Andy Oliver (contributor to Paul
Gravett’s "1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die") in his weekly
column SMALL PRESSGANGED.
As comic critic Andy Oliver said in his weekly column:
“The “Tick” of the book’s title refers to the fact that this little metal man’s
mechanism seems also to be faulty and, while he ticks, he does not tock. As the
story progresses, the readers observe the author’s ponderings on the origins of
the character and her various attempts to find him a new role within the
domestic arrangements of the house. Trapped out of time in a world he never
made can our tiny robot ever find contentedness again?”
And Andy Oliver speaks more: “Younger readers will love
it as an enchanting tale of a lost robot in a contemporary world. Adult readers
will find it speaking to them on much deeper levels because Tick is as much a
story about feelings of redundancy and isolation, of the importance of a sense
of purpose and of knowing our place in the world, as it is an urban fairy
tale.”
You can read more about TICK and other Small Press titles
here:
http://www.brokenfrontier.com/columns/p/detail/celebrating-2012-ten-uk-small-press-comics-you-need-to-own
Tick is available priced £6.00 plus postage. To obtain
this gem and to find out more about Rebecca’s work, please check out her
website here http://bagleybooks.com/.