Birth Rite

(Congress, 1990)
©1990 Scott Blatchley and Patrick Farncombe

The street war began as a lark, really. A couple of skinhead punks saw a homeless bum in an alley and decided to have some fun before they went ’round and got themselves a beer. So the big one, a sadistic fellow named Brick, decided to kill the bum. No big deal. After all, life was cheap in Any City, year 2038.

Only the bum wasn’t really a bum. He was an undercover cop. His murder set off a chain of events that had a police department in the hands of the mob thinking that their competition was doing battle. So they decided to launch a few strikes of their own…

Birth Rite is a striking, if somewhat abstract piece of work by Patrick Farncombe and Scott Blatchley of London’s Congress Press. Farncombe’s work in black-and-white mixed media is here reminiscent of Bill Sienkiewicz (Stray Toasters), giving this series a tense, off-kilter feel.

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