Savage Messiah reviewed in Herald Scotland: "There are no superheroes in Oldfield Ford's London"
A review of Laura Oldfield Ford's acclaimed Savage Messiah appears in the article 'Graphic novels shake off the superheroes' in the Herald Scotland. In the piece, the reviewer emphasises the unique style of Ford's artwork:
Savage Messiah is a gather-up of Oldfield Ford's psychogeographical fanzines that collage black-and-white photocopied photographs of decaying bits of London with her own pencilled drawings of people she meets.
The main characters of Savage Messiah are social outcasts who are kept at the margins of the flashy, gentrified, greed-driven twenty-first century London:
punks and skins, squatters and shell-suited working class who live in the bits of the capital city that have yet to be reclaimed by the moneyed middle classes.
The diet of these anti-heroes consists of "bad food, bad pills, bad sex, punk gigs, raves and rucks"; their lives are "overlooked by money and power."
And yet Savage Messiah is not a nihilist book, but a deeply political one, the reviewer notes:
It's a book pulsing with anger and class politics, disgusted with the "millennial mediocrity" of modern London, its flashy empty promises, its bare minimum-wage opportunities. ... There are no superheroes in Oldfield Ford's London. But there is something heroic about it too. Fight the power!
Visit the Herald Scotland to read the review in full (free registration required).