31 Days of Comics #13

Food for Thought #1
By Moore, Morrison, Campbell, O’Neill, Mills, Lloyd, Gibson, Gibbons, Emerson, Davis, Baikie, Smith and Talbot

It’s always a pleasure to stumble across another old comic done created to raise money for charity, because you get some incredible talent doing some incredibly idiosyncratic things. And I’m all about incredible talent doing incredibly idiosyncratic things

They’re always worth a look. Something like the Comic Relief Comic saw creators like Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman and Garth Ennis and Mark Millar and Pete Milligan team up to write a story drawn by artists like Simon Bisley and Philip Bond.

That particular British comic was one of the more successful and popular efforts, largely due to mainstream media support, but there were plenty of others. There was Heroes for Hunger and that X-Men thing where they got everyone from Alan Moore to Stephen King involved

I always think I’m on top of these charity comics, but then another one shows up, like Food For Thought, a 1985 comic edited by Gary Millidge, Matt Ginn, Dave Whitwell and – blimey - Warren Ellis, with all the proceeds going to Ethiopian famine relief.

I’d never even heard of the thing before I found it recently in a back issue box, but I had to have it - This comic has a page of ABC Warriors and Nemesis the Warlock done by Mills and O’Neill that I’ve never seen before (and a Slaine from Mills and Pugh), four pages of Eddie Campbell, Morrison writing and drawing one of his last Stargrave stories, an Alan Moore/Bryan Talbot comic about dinosaurs, a Ron Smith Judge Dredd and things from Alan Davis and Ian Gibson and Dave Gibbons and David Lloyd and Hunt Emerson.

Like anything, there are stories and art in this comic that are stupid, pointless and hamfisted, even if their heart is always in the right place. But there are loads of delights to be found in this 52-page comic.

It’s a pity that charity comics usually end up forgotten. This kind of stuff never gets reprinted, usually due to complicated rights issues – with everybody doing it for free, that’s always going to happen.

The causes also fade away into history, as new concerns and new charities battle for attention. At least there are things like Food For Thought out there – earnest comics that exist in a specific mind and place. The world moves on, leaving behind these tiny documents filled with big ideas.