BEDLAM and USHER are, as the SKYWALD publications before them, magazine-format comics with painted covers. John Gallagher has designed the content of the magazines so that each edition incorporates four or five stories with a supporting feature such as a text story and/or articles on various subjects connected to the history of horror and the macabre from literature through cinema. Issue 3 of BEDLAM for example includes an article by Martin Jones on the HAMMER FILMS actor Ralph Bates, and an explanation of the origins of Lady Satan by Steven Sennitt. Previous editions have included learned articles by Edward St.Boniface on the GORMENGHAST trilogy by Mervyn Peake and Howard Phillip Lovecraft's 'AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS'. There have also been brief reviews of the history of SKYWALD COMICS .

With edition 1 of BEDLAM appearing in the summer of 1999, this comic and its new companion USHER have been released at approximately annual intervals, and with small print runs of 50 or so copies with some extras being printed as required. Largely this is a matter of cost, since John Gallagher edits, assembles, organises and publishes the comics entirely on his own and at his own expense. The publishing schedule is one of necessity, when the printers can be paid for the next run of issues. John has a strict quality control policy as well and will only print the next issue when he is satisfied with the material he has gathered from the various contributors. Once the next edition is out however, John has ensured that it is worth waiting for.

Most important of all in John's view is the reader and their responses to what they see in the comic. Instead of rushing out what might seem momentarily convenient to meet a publishing or distribution contract deadline, John carefully reviews each story and article as commissioned and delivered, finally publishing only when he is certain of the synchronicity of the total issue. Working outside the mainstream press does give John unprecedented editorial and creative freedom to select only that art and those stories which he regards as having a genuinely imaginative and/or frightening insight into the darker phases of the human psyche. With a few PVC clad vampire-assassin big-boobed babes thrown in of course...

In a milieu of formulaic and genrefied horror and comedy-horror, it is the intention of BEDLAM and USHER to offer alternatives to what might seem an inescapable 'norm' personified by recent popular television series and films. The literary, psychological and subconscious aspects of terror are important subjects for John Gallagher. What motivates evil and why we have these images of vampires, zombies, demons and revenants so strongly fixed in our culture are a significant part of why John has gone to the trouble and expense of publishing his own comics. The stories are meant to reflect a wider and more thoughtful exploration of horror and fear and the psychic undercurrents of them that run through us as individuals and collectively. And have a few good (occasionally uneasy) laughs along the way!

And most of all, BEDLAM and USHER are meant to be FUN!!! There is horror and there is humour. There is gore and there is giggling - often simultaneously. In the supernatural imbroglio of excessive bloodsucking, grisly mutation and zombified danse macabre there is a celebration of what the inspired imagination of artists and writers can achieve when they are given the freedom to work outside arbitrary formula, overzealous editorial control and publish work they believe in. The stories in the comics jangle uneasily upon the frayed nerves of their readers. They are meant to be sheer provocation - a catharsis of the weird, the startling, the uncanny, the fiendish and sometimes the thoroughly ludicrous. This is meant, descending in part from SKYWALD, to be a continuation and vindication in its original form of the genuine horror comic and the 'Penny Dreadful' and their many associates in the history of independent publishing. There is a long line of dedicated publishers who have not accepted the commerical 'wisdom' of their times and refused to compromise what they publish in order to create something memorably original. It is this tradition, personified in SKYWALD COMICS, its contemporary relatives and predecessors that John Gallagher carries on with BEDLAM and USHER. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did in making them - once it's safe to come out from under the bed...