Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan page for February 28, 2025, plus more on our old death metal friends
They met working at the vegan soup kitchen, of course
Today
In Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, we take a quick look at what Krakatoa has been up to since she left brother Bartholomew and the monastery.
Read the whole page on the website!
Earlier
I mentioned in the previous newsletter that the legendary Slam Death Metal band Festering Suppuration would make its return to the comic. That's these guys:
Gosh, that's not how I've been drawing them lately! Characters evolve under an artist's hands and in this case, I started with the portrait before I knew what the band members were going to be like. Since then, each member has acquired a back story as well, but the back story I want to tell is how I got to be intensely interested in brutal death metal for a few months in 2019. It's because brutal death metal was the only thing that could keep me sane! Just before the pandemic, I was working for a translation agency, in an office that the owners wanted to convert to student housing. Our company didn't want to leave yet, and to put pressure on us, the owner started to remodel the entire space around us. Translation and editing work requires intense focus and attention to detail, so this was a bit of a problem, especially when the workers started drilling and kept on drilling for what seemed like weeks on end. I rushed out during a lunch break early on to buy a pair of the best noise-canceling headphones I could afford. And they didn't work. I mean, they were and are great and could cancel noise. Just not this noise. It was too much even for Sony's finest anti-soundwave technology.
I still used Spotify at the time, so I went to look for louder and louder music until I settled on a sound that was very close to the sound of drilling in my ears, but musical. I found a Dutch band from the 1990s called Anthropomorfia that was perfect for drowning out the power tools, and while trying to find out more about them, I came across the term ‘slam death metal’.
Now, I may have got this wrong at the time. Maybe Antropomorfia themselves weren't in the slam death metal genre. Honestly, microgenres in metal wax and wane and there's no point in trying to keep track of all of them unless you're a died-in-the-wool fan.
But what caught my attention was that the imagery that slam death metal bands tended to have on their record sleeves was in spectacularly bad taste. You may think of metal bands as having mainly satanic imagery in their artwork, and some do. You may guess that in the broader death metal genre, there'd be a lot of dead bodies and graves on the sleeves, and you'd be right. But with the bands that I was looking for at the time, while they did have death-related imagery, the common denominator was that the art was repulsive. It had absolutely livid-looking colors, textures of rot and disease, and the bands themselves had names like Feculent Putrefaction or Oozing Carrion. And maybe it was my mood at the time, but I found it hilarious. Many of these bands had been around for a while and I started imagining these groups of mostly grown men spending their working lives engaged in a long, slow gross-out contest with one another.
And thus, Festering Suppuration was born. With its core trio of performatively disgusting fifty-somethings Oozer MacRancid (grunts, rhythm guitar), Pustule (lead guitar, main songwriter) and Filth (drums), plus new hires Tag on bass (Tag came up from the punk scene and is actually the best mucisian in the band - his groove is unmatched) and Gail, who updates the band's sound with some keyboards and clean vocals, they have been recording in a studio on the island and filling in at the Dunestock festival organised by the naturist campsite. They banter endlessly among themselves, but are much more gentle than they appear to be. In fact, I hope to show more of the hearts of gold under their repulsive façade. Because metal guys are absolute…
…sweethearts.
Bonus comic for paid subscribers
An older version of this page can be read for free at Is that supposed to scare me?, and you can read on from there if you choose to go there, or binge-read from the very beginning.
And the full page:
Originally published on April 3, 2008 with art by Aggie Janicot of American Gothic Daily. The new version is still based on Aggie's layouts and has new coloring by her.
See you on Monday!