The biggest surprise about Bruce Dickinson’s debut comic The Mandrake Project isn’t the sex ritual that appear in its first issue. No, it‘s the fact that the man whose CV includes two novels, an autobiography and the screenplay for a madder-than-a-walrus-on-a-unicycle movie (2007’s low budget/high insanity The Chemical Wedding) has taken so long to get round to it.
But here it is at last. The Mandrake Project is possibly the maddest idea in a career full of mad ideas: an epic, 12-issue comic book series centring on a mad metaphysical story about crazed magicians, a dead twin, trans-dimensional travel, corporate occultism and life after death. The small stuff, then.
