Since 2013, Richard Littler has been publishing Scarfolk, a darkly comic series of brilliantly photoshopped artifacts from a dark and brutal English town trapped in a loop between 1969 and 1979; Littler published his first Scarfolk book in 2014, a pretty straight-ahead best-of anthology that was a sheer delight, and since then, he's taken a brilliant detour into animation, while still keeping up on Scarfolk, which has now spawned its second -- and even better -- book: The Scarfolk Annual.

[[You may know Richard Littler from the astounding dystopian alternate fiction/bleak humour series Scarfolk (previously). He's been working on an on-again/off-again animated series that is, at long last, on. I was honoured to be offered the opportunity to launch the series here today!]]

Dick and Stewart is a series of short animations set in either Britain’s dismal past or the Britain that’s soon to come. It's hard to tell nowadays, isn't it? Either way, just imagine what it would be like if children's TV programmes were written by George Orwell or Franz Kafka. Or the government itself. Read the rest

The latest edition of the Civil Service Quarterly from Her Majesty's Government accidentally included a satirical poster from Scarfolk, the nightmarish alternate reality of a perpetually renewed decade of Thatcher/Cthulhu crossovers. Read the rest

The artifacts that tumble out of Scarfolk (previously), the English horror-town stuck in a ten-year loop from 1970-1980, continue their amazing run of being so very much on-point with the issues facing the UK today, case in point: The Campaign for Real British Crime. Read the rest

From Scarfolk, the English horror-town stuck in a ten-year loop in the 1970s, comes this Action Man waterboarding playset, marketed after overwhelming popular demand: "A survey conducted in 1978 found that the jobs boys most wanted when they were older included astronaut, engine driver and chief torturer for a totalitarian regime which uses its cover as a civilised democracy to commit national and international atrocities with impunity." Read the rest

The dystopian satire site Scarfolk (previously) has scored another direct hit, this time on the human-rights-hating new, post-Brexit Prime Minister and the savage faction she's stacked her cabinet with. Read the rest

Since April of 2013, Cory has posted frequently about Scarfolk for Boing Boing. Now, Hunter Oatman-Stanford has interviewed Richard Littler, the creator of this fictional 1970s dystopia. Even in the three years since Cory's first post, the line between Littler's fiction and our contemporary reality has gotten disturbingly blurry.

Here's a snip from Littler:

"Scarfolk is paranoid and cynical, and often touches on themes such as surveillance and the diminishment of civil rights. To a certain extent, Scarfolk is speculative because it plays with the recent political developments and either subverts them or exaggerates them to the point of absurdity, though that’s becoming difficult with people like Donald Trump and the incumbent British government. Increasingly, there are official actions and statements that come across like they’ve already been created by satirists. It’s becoming hard for us to outdo our sources!"

Read the rest

Scarfolk is a fictional English horror-town stuck in a perpetual loop, from 1970-1980, from which beautifully weathered artifacts escape onto our modern Web. Read the rest