Bart Dickon is a character created by artist and writer Borin Van Loon. Dickon, styled as 'The Ideologically-Sound Secret Agent', first appeared in comic strip form in the British publication 'Brain Damage' (later 'The Damage') in the late eighties. This surrealist collage comic strip was entitled 'A Severed Head' (named after an

Iris Murdoch Dame Jean Iris Murdoch ( ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her fi ...

novel). This continued briefly in 'Talking Turkey', then as a regular feature in the rock/culture fanzine Sun Zoom Spark (named incidentally after a

Captain Beefheart Don Van Vliet (; born 'Don Glen Vliet'; January 15, 1941 – December 17, 2010) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble known as the M ...

song on the 'Clear Spot' album; references to Captain Beefheart lyrics occasionally appear in Bart Dickon stories). Much of the material was reworked and extended for regular publication in

The Chap ''The Chap'' is a British humorous men's lifestyle magazine published quarterly. It was founded in 1999 by Gustav Temple and Vic Darkwood, and is still edited by Temple. The magazine proposes that men everywhere return to a more gentlemanly wa ...

magazine in the late nineties. November 2005 saw the publication of the book 'The Bart Dickon Omnibus' which built upon this body of work, completed the 'A Severed Head' graphic novella and added a short story featuring Dickon and other strips. The character (not to mention the physiognomy) of Bart Dickon is mercurial by dint of the creative approach applied to the stories. Imagery informs the twists and turns of each chapter as much as narrative. Inasmuch as Dickon spends the majority of the novella as a head separated from the rest of his body, much of the action is guided by his sidekick, Snowy. This nods in the direction of the original daily Dick Barton radio series on the

BBC Light Programme The BBC Light Programme was a national radio station which broadcast chiefly mainstream light entertainment and light music from 1945 until 1967, when it was replaced by BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2. It opened on 29 July 1945, taking over the ...

from 1946 to 1951 (later in novels and a trio of low budget feature films), although the spelling of the original character, Snowey, has been changed - as has his gender from time to time. The original theme tune: 'The Devil's Galop' by Charles Williams is also alluded to in 'The Bart Dickon Omnibus' and is hummed by the protagonist. Drawing on mythology, Dickon is seduced by a succubus, dismembered and the constituent parts scattered to the winds. Snowy and her doppelgänger carry Bart's head through multiple realities to save the day. The collage comic strip approach to story telling relies almost solely upon found images, serendipity in research and the use of a narrative to bind the images, speech and thought bubbles and text boxes together. The roots of collage comic-strip can be found in the sound-collage experiments of Ron Geesin, the animations of

Monty Python Monty Python, also known as the Pythons, were a British comedy troupe formed in 1969 consisting of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. The group came to prominence for the sketch comedy ser ...

era

Terry Gilliam Terrence Vance Gilliam ( ; born 22 November 1940) is an American-British filmmaker, comedian, collage film, collage animator, and actor. He gained stardom as a member of the Monty Python comedy troupe alongside John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Pa ...

, the surrealist novels of

Max Ernst Max Ernst (; 2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German-born painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic trai ...

('' Une Semaine de Bonté'' and 'La femme de 100 têtes), the agit-prop visuals of the

Situationists The Situationist International (SI) was an Proletarian internationalism, international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and Political philosophy, political theorists. It was prominent in Eu ...

and the satires of Biff. Text-only stories and blogs about Bart Dickon and his chums also appear regularly on the World Wide Web.

External links

Official Bart Dickon site
Comics characters {{UK-comics-stub