Nobody laughs at Mister Fish

Countdown to something inane

2008-07-05T17:03:00.008+01:00

Countdown to Final Crisis

Put it this way: is it possible for a continuity-wise writer to deliver a story which makes sense to the interested, but uninformed reader?DC comics, with their mammoth-but-not-necessarily wise maxi-series, have put this to the test.

First off, a series of such a length is a statement of intent. If want people to spend $200 or $300 on a story, you'd better make sure it's a good one. Scratch that. Make sure it's a fantastic one. Fail and you're telling your readers in the starkest terms that you're taking them for a ride.

Countdown, sadly and predictably, is bloatware. Nothing much happens for the first twenty issues or so. That's four hundred pages, people. Even Dostoyevsky gets his arse in gear faster than that. We have a number of different plot strands which do, somewhere far down the line, come together. To get there, though, we have a long and uninteresting road to travel.

Here's how it goes: Donna Troy and co turn up in one of DC's new spangly universes. 'I'm detecting Ray Palmer,' says one of them. They get attacked by some local baddies. They despatch them using fists and blinding flashes from Donna's galactic pants. 'Ray was here, but now he's gone,' says one of the bruised locals. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. 52 universes and yet all so samey.

Incidentally, didn't Ray Palmer sing the theme to 'Ghostbusters'? Perhaps that's one of the new universes.

Let's remove these pointless Ray-searches - to add insult to tedium, there were special 'Search for Ray Palmer' one-offs with exactly the same guff - and see what's left.

Mary Marvel. Mary Marvel. Doubtless her behaviour was utterly out of character for the entire series, but I'd never heard of her before, so I'm fine with that. This was a good strand, I thought. Good girl succumbs to temptation, does some naughty things, sees the error of her ways, redeems herself. Sometimes the old 'uns are good 'uns.

Except - and I don't have a clue how a sane editor could allow this to happen - right at the end, after she's redeemed herself and been forgiven and this strand is put to bed, Darkseid turns up, offers our Mary some more evil powers. This is a last temptation, right? She'll turn him down. We've spent the last few months learning about Mary's character. She's seen where succumbing takes her. Only that's not what happens. Clean out of the blue, she turns evil once again. No foreshadowing, no reason to think it might happen. It doesn't make the blindest amount of sense.

DC staff, this is narration 101: don't have your characters make decisions the plot doesn't support. You're in charge of this. You're supposed to know what you're doing. Pathetic.

As I understand it, Darkseid turns out to have been offing various old Jack Kirby characters. Why he's chosen now is never explained, but explaining isn't DC's strong point. He has to store their powers somewhere. Wouldn't in Darkseid be a good idea, maybe? Or just down the corridor from Darkseid's bedroom? No, he stores them in Jimmy Olsen, Superman's friend-sidekick-irritant. Would it be possible to find any place more ridiculous than there? You can never underestimate the stupidity of the powers of evil, I guess.

By the time the series is drawing to a close, we've got multiple factions slugging it out. I never quite figured out who Monarch is, or where he went in the end. I understood the Monitors well enough. OMAC turns up at the party, for some reason. One woman, Una, turned into one and then turned back again. Did I miss something there? One universe gets 'destroyed' twice.

Could someone tell these scientific illiterates that introducing a virus onto one planet is not the same as annihilating the entire universe? Memo to DC: universes are really, really, fucking huge. Just because a virus is one thousand years more advanced than us - no, I don't understand that either, but bear with me - somewhere in a universe of a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billions stars each there might be a planet with technology more than one thousand years ahead of us. They might find the anti-life virus as deadly as a snuffly nose.

And then the finale: Monarch and the Monitors have fallen by the wayside. Ray Palmer squashes a podule inside Jimmy Olsen (I suspect Olsen is composed of a multitude of podules, but there you go) and a new character pops out. Orion.

This brings me back to my continuity question. You're probably thinking Orion is an old character, right? Not to me. I'd never seen him before. But he turns up in the second-to-last week and kills the bad guy. Not Ray Palmer, not Donna Troy, not - heaven forfend - Jimmy Olsen, but some guy I'd never heard of. Surprised? You bet. Foreshadowed? Not in the slightest. For the uninitiated, this last plot turn made as much sense as the cast of Pride and Prejudice turning up and beating Darkseid to death with parasols. If you're planning to have Orion take care of Darkseid in the end, have the cast search for ways to spring him. Make that their goal. My enthusiasm for the DC universe seeped out of my head like air from a fart cushion.

Lord, I wish I could say something good about this series. Donna's galactic pants are fetching, I have to admit. The annihilation of one of the Earths was well-done. But the rest? Well, I would say bilge but.... No, I will say bilge.

Erase the mistake

2008-06-20T09:44:00.003+01:00

Way back when, Plok wrote a post about the achievement of Roy Thomas in codifying the Marvel Universe. While Stan Lee made up stuff up without consider its consistence with his other work, Roy went around the MU with a tidy brush, building a set of links between characters which made it possible to conceive of the Marvel Universe as one entity. From that time on, it became important to link each new innovation into that central whole.

I don't know if that's the whole story. The horror comics made no attempt to integrate, except maybe with themselves. Dracula could do a turn in Werewolf-by-Night, but his appearance in Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men was just fundamentally wrong. Chris Claremont, of course, loved any amount of magickal weirdness, and his talent for assimilation carried on way after Thomas' time.

This codification, by the way, is nothing new. Homer - the Greek version 1.0, I mean, not the portly suburban version 1.1 - took a load of characters - mystical Mycenean heroes, local deities, maybe even one or two genuine historical figures - and created a mythology. Athena and Area fight wars through proxies on the Hellespont because he thought it made a great, coherent story. He was codifying, in other words, and they built a religion out of it.

No, let's not call it a religion, as that just get people's back up. Call it a mythology. Marvel, and DC for that matter, have created a mythology. And the problem is that, where the Greeks had old stories to be embellished and changed as required, at the heart of our mythology is a company which has to make a profit, and therefore has to issue new updates of these figures on a monthly basis. As it does, the characters and plots grow convoluted, bad decisions get made, and these mistakes get amplified over time.

I'm tempted to use the Spider-wedding as an example, but I've done that already. Let's take another: the proliferation in the number of mutants. In the beginning, of course, mutants were few in number. There was only one comic, for a start, so that placed a practical limit on the number which could be around at any one time. The X-Men were shunned outsiders, which made sense and made for good stories. Then came New Mutants and X-Factor and X-Men and all those other spin-offs. Mutants went mainstream. By the mid 1990s, Marvel superheroes, which in 1980 had meant Marvel, were a side-event. Marvel threw money and talent and more money at the X-Men and everything else started to wither. Then Grant Morrison went into overdrive. There were thousands, then tens of thousands, then million of mutants. Take that to its logical conclusion and the whole of the Marvel Universe, Spider-Man and Rocket Racer and Man-Thing and all must eventually become embroiled in the X-men's race war.

That multiplication of numbers made for good X-Men stories, but at the expense of the Marvel Universe.

Which is where 198 comes in. Erase the mistake. Ditto the Spider-marriage. Erase the mistake. Whether you agree with those decisions is one matter. but there's a clear logic here. Erase the mistake.

But what does this do to the mythology?. After so much continuity-mining and reverse-gearing and retconning, is there a clear understanding of what's mythology and what's not. Quesada, of course, would claim the right to change it as and when, and given he's Editor-in-Chief, you have to concede that's some authority. But people believe in this stuff. Not believe in an I'm-a-stupid-fanboy-with-no-life-and-this-really-happened way, but believe in the sense of having an involvement in a story. A belief no different to people watching soap operas. Or reading The Great Gatsby. It's called suspension of disbelief, and that's why we have stories at all. If people are reading this because of their fascination with the entire Universe, then tinkering with it risks undermining the suspension of disbelief in the reader. And once that goes, the story is gone.

So am I arguing against myself here? If we concede the importance of mythology, then Peter Parker did marry Mary Jane Watson, right? Quesada can issue retcons to his heart's content, but if that mythology is living in the minds of his readership, they can just refuse to accept it. Are the MJ lobby right after all? I'll concede the point. Retconning the marriage damages the mythology. But married Spider-Man = bad stories. Twenty years have proved that. You pays your money and....

After the love has gone (3)

2008-03-28T08:57:00.003+00:00

Amazing Spider-Man: Brand New Day

It's not true that I haven't been reading any comics. I read DC's 52 all the way up to the top. Then the numbers started going down again - I haven't figured out why yet. I read Gerber's last comics. I'm up-to-date on, if uninspired by, the X-Men.

And then there's Spider-Man. His was the first comic I bought, and doubtless it'll be the last.

Brand New Day, Brand New Day. Where do you start with that one?

Well, first I'd like to thank the Mary Jane Lobby for their forebearance and understanding in these difficult times. It must be tough, knowing they have to go through life without receiving regular publications portraying the non-existent marriage of a non-existent man and a non-existent woman. I can see how your life must feel devoid of meaning and character now. Well done, Mary Jane Lobby! You've done yourselves proud. Thank goodness you haven't done anything undignified like, say, whining like a fucking jet engine.

Spider-Man is nothing if not a Moebius strip, and we've been here before. The Byrne-Mackie relaunch. Dispose of the marriage, push MJ from a DC-10, give Peter a new job, make things bright and fun, just like in Stan's time. It fell apart within ten issues. The MJL screamed and screamed. Everyone got horribly upset, and it all went back to status quo - Peter Parker, the Friendly-Neighbourhood thirtysomething science teacher. JMS was workaday and competent, if nothing else, but his series was as broken as it had ever been.

Now Joe Quesada's the one to flick the switch on MJ in an eyebrow-raising deal with Mephisto. Of course it was ridiculous, but marriage is like virginity. Once you do it, you don't get to go back to before. Get out of a marriage and you're either divorced or widowed, and neither label looks good for Spider-Man's market positioning. One More Day was preposterous, sure, but what else can an Editor-in-Chief do? This bed was made long ago.

The problem with Spider-Man is this: the character's been allowed to age too much; a majority of readers like it that way; young readers are turned off by it all. Bob Harras or John Byrne or Joe Quesada looks at his aging readers and thinks, Christ, we're doomed. They're not looking at their current customers, they're worrying about who's going to replace them when the reaper comes wagging his bony finger. They do what's necessary, and the rebellion kicks off again.

The only way this situation gets resolved is if the writing is so good on the relaunch that the protests die down. If sales don't slump they'll be able to build. A big if.

A few years ago, Rupert Murdoch wanted to take over English Rugby League. A complete revamp to fit Sky's schedules: a new league, Sunday games, played in the summer. And he wanted mergers: new clubs with silly names. Naturally, there were protests. 'Fev is Fev, Cas is Cas, stick your merger up your ass.' After a suitable period, he relented. No mergers. Everything else stuck. The game's played in summer now. But he never gave a stuff whether Featherstone Rovers merged with Castleford. Increased revenue for the big clubs will dispose of the little ones anyway. The mergers were a straw man. He got every single thing he wanted.

In Spider-Man, I think, I hope, the straw man is Peter's relationship with MJ. Once the MJL has squealed for a few months, Peter and MJ will go on a date. The MJL will be mollified, probably. Quesada wanted the marriage gone. It was nothing personal against MJ. If MJ gets cloying, a future writer can split them up. That's the fall-back position. At least, that should be the fall-back position.

And is Brand New Day any good? For me, no. It has a forced jollity, like being made to wear a stupid crepe hat at the Office Christmas Dinner. The tone is Stan Lee, hesitatingly updated for a new generation. It doesn't do anything for me, but you know what? My time is up. I've read all this a million times.

But if I was twelve and picking up a comic for the first time, I'd be impressed that Spider-Man's web shooters can run dry, and he can be falling out of a blue sky to his doom and get rescued by a beautiful woman.

It's time to move on.

After the love has gone (2)

2008-03-28T06:17:00.006+00:00

'The wisdom of John Byrne.' It's a hell of an oxymoron. It's become a duty to hate the man. He's a four-colour Heather McCartney, a moustache-twirling burlesque villain, ever ready with a half-witted quip or poorly-phrased boast. Living proof of why comic creators should be allowed nowhere near the internet.

I know, it's a new era now. Everything's interaction. Creator intersects with fan and this intercourse will result in.... In what? Better comics? Are comics written better now than twenty, thirty years ago?

Anyway, to quote Byrne:

"Who wants to read the same stories over and over. Characters need to change."

This is, of course, much like saying "Who wants to eat the same pablum all their lives? The flavors and textures should change!"

Those who take the stance that the characters need to "change" are missing the most important point -- it is they, the readers, who are changing, and if they cannot continue to read these stories for nostalgia value, they should move on, and find something which better suits their altered tastes.

This nails the problem. My tastes have changed.

When I was seventeen, I read Tolkien. No, I adored Tolkien. I read and re-read those damn books so often I'd memorised family trees of non-existent people. Names Tolkien had just thrown together in an Oxford quad some evening. Aragorn son of Arador son of Arathrump son of Aratickle. Why did he create this stuff? He was one anal-retentive author, that's for sure.

When I read Tolkien these days, I just laugh. Maybe not the Fellowship, which retains a little charm and mystery. But the third one, Lord oh Lord. 'Gondor! My King, thou art wounded! The Riders come at dawn, we must rebuild the wall!' Such unwitting hilarity. Those Elves: did anyone tell Tolkien what humourless boring stuck-up High Tory bastards those fuckers actually are? Given a choice, I'd much rather go down the pub with some Orcs.

You get the idea, I'm past Tolkien. Like I'm past comics, right?

Only that's not so clear, because Tolkien is one author. Comics are a whole genre. Dozens, hundreds of writers and artists. How can I be over every one of them, even though there's doubtless some I haven't even read.

Here, I'm going to let the late Steve Gerber do the talking.

We're working with a limited amount of space. You don't get the depth of characterization that you can find in a 1200-page Russian novel. It cannot be done.

There's a shallowness to comics, to the vast majority of comics. Its creators may be bursting with creativity and new ideas, but there's a hard limit in the medium to the amount of exposition. Given comics' self-imposed ban on the comment caption, all superhero comics have been reduced to dialogue. I think I've had my lifetime limit of dialogue-only literature.

I think the time is coming when the kids are not going to be willing to settle for about six pages of Peter Parker's neverending, never-changing problems with Aunt May sandwiched between two fight scenes with the Vulture. That era is rapidly drawing to a close. It's a style that became a formula accidentally.

What has happened, though, is that over the years that simple dramatic structure has ossified into a page-by-page formula that has become so predictable and so mind-numbing to the readers that it's hard to tell, except by the colors of the costumes — and they've all begun to look alike, too — whether you're reading Ms. Marvel or Spider-Man.

Gerber was talking back in 1978, and things have moved on a little. His ossification was that of Stan Lee: that writers were all having to write in his style. It's different now. Everybody writes like Chris Claremont.

And that's my second problem. Once you've read enough, superhero comics are completely predictable.

What keeps readers (including me, for many years) coming back, is fascination with the world and the continuity and its characters. I've lost that interest. Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are just constructs. They're not real people, they were never really married. What if (no spoilers here, just picking a name at random) Mr Fantastic turns out to have been a Skrull for the last twenty years? It doesn't matter, because it's just a story.

Obviously comic books readers see it differently. Comics are alive for them, a weird and entrancing world full of the strangest things. I wish I still had that fascination. But I don't.

After the love has gone (1)

2008-03-27T19:56:00.004+00:00

There are four hundred unread comic books sitting in my spare room. I like to take my time reading them, but let's imagine I rush things. I'll read six an hour, four hours an evening. I won't take breaks or have baths or engage in rumpy-jumpy, I'll just geek out. It'll only take, what, seventeen days. Obviously I won't enjoy the process much and they'll all merge into one, but I'd get there. I might even get them all read before next month's batch arrives....

When I stopped reading comics, it seemed like a good idea to just let them keep coming in. My comic shop is happy to send them, I don't mind paying the money, and sooner or late, I'd thought, I'll get back into comics and start reading them again.

Well, yes, but what if I don't?

I used to be a big football fan. I even went to away games, which in the nineteen eighties was a recognised psychiatric disorder. What a place, that away end at Millwall. Ten-year-olds giving you the finger and challenging you to fights. Then last year, after some particularly unpleasant display of arrogance by a footballer, I got sick of it. I stopped watching it. Stopped following it. Now I can't bear it. There is a rhythm, a flow, to a game of football, but I've lost it. It all just seems coarse now. And dull. I can't bear it.

Funny that you can love something your entire life and then just switch off from it. No, I don't believe it's like that. What happens is that the real love trickled away long ago, and all that's left is a habit. I don't miss football in the slightest. It's a relief not to have to spend two hours watching it.

Which brings me, obviously, to comics. I don't love them any more, I don't like them enough to actually read them. All that's left is my approval. I like the fact that they're still published. I like getting a parcel every month, but that's not enough to justify doing it. I'm still in the routine of comics, and I need to break away from it.

But - there's always that back-of-the-mind voice - I've quit comics before, and come back. Why won't it happen again? That's what's kept them coming through my door this last year....

Anyway, I know there's nobody here but us chickens, but I like to write about things. I'm going to formalise my divorce from comics. I'm going to attempt one last reconciliation, set a date for the proceedings (a few months time seems about right), worry about the split (what am I going to do with thousands of comics?) and then, if I we haven't had a surprise reconciliation, it's die ende, finito, khattam shud.

And in the meantime, my (probably non-existent, but I like to think someone's out there) reader, I shall tell you all about the end of the affair. I might even review a comic or two along the way...

On Steve Gerber

2008-02-12T10:30:00.000+00:00

You've gone, as they say, to some world or other...

Steve Gerber died working on a script for a character called Doctor Fate. His very last blog post was called Even Quicker Update. Like a doomed character in Man-Thing, I imagine him typing as fast as his dying fingers will let him, a clock thumping on the wall, conscious of how few seconds remained, and how much was still to do.

He'll never do it now.

I should enumerate his achievements: Man-Thing, Defenders, Omega the Unknown. A string of others, stretching from those early seventies - the most inventive, exciting period comic books ever produced. He was the outstanding writer of a great generation. And Gerber's finest work was Howard the Duck.

By turns outraged and affectionate, daring and inventive, and always hilarious, Howard the Duck was the greatest comic book series ever written. It had no rivals and produced no successors. Sure, it had its wrong turns and off-issues, but it never dropped below brilliant. And this in an industry which rarely rises above plodding competence.

I'm not going to be sentimental. Let's be clear about what happened to this man: he created something superb and developed it for a few short years. Then legalised robbery took his masterpiece, and they set about bastardising it. They gave lesser, unmotivated writers free-range to carry on Gerber's work. Their magazines and mini-series were feeble and embarrassing. If you want to understand why Gerber fans are still so angry about his treatment, it's right there. Marvel could have just let Howard the Duck slide into anonymity. But that wasn't enough. They wanted to prove the writer was dispensable. They were wrong.

You can say it if you want: that Marvel, in denying Gerber the rights to Howard, was just protecting its corporate asset, that Ditko and Kirby and who knows else would have wanted their share. That the economics of comics would have collapsed. That Gerber, damn it, should have made an effort to ingratiate himself with the powers-that-be.

You know what? I don't care. Writers aren't cuddly teddy bears. Some are prickly and anti-social, and some are downright nasty. A glance at Howard the Duck shows that Gerber might have had a negative side. Jim Shooter, apparently, didn't get on with him. So what? The job of managers and editors is to get the best, the very best, out of what is available. Even up to last week, the very best that Marvel could have produced was Howard the Duck. Thirty years passed between Gerber leaving Howard the Duck and his death, and Marvel produced six Gerber-written issues. Pathetic. Right now, there's nothing on Marvel's website about Gerber's death. Why aren't I surprised?

Somewhere out in the ether, there are a hundred or two hundred unwritten Howard the Ducks. The ones they gave Gerber no opportunity to write. Where would the industry be now with a regular infusion of literate, funny, satirical comics? I can't help feel it might be in a better position.

Anyway, those non-comics were stolen from Gerber and us by nobodies, bean-counters and mini-Napoleons. I don't know the behind-the-scenes details, so I won't accuse individuals. But I'll say this to the front men: doubtless you had your reasons, Shooter-DeFalco-Harras-Quesada, but does it feel uncomfortable to have torn the head off that golden-egg laying goose?

So now Marvel has its corporate asset, and no Gerber to launch irritating lawsuits. What future is there for Howard? Absolutely none. There's not a writer on the planet who could compose a new Howard the Duck.

The duck died with the man.

All-new comic coding special

2007-07-18T08:52:00.000+01:00

In an attempt to introduce breathtakingly novel blogging ideas into tired old reviewing, today I present the world's first compilable review. To take full advantage of this exciting feature, you will need a C++ compiler and a rudimentary knowledge of programming. You'll find my opinion buried deep in the code...

Today's topic: should Spider-Man's costume be red-and-blue, or black?


#define  SHITTING_LARGE_NUMBER  137;

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
  for ( int i=0; i<SHITTING_LARGE_NUMBER; i++ )
  {
    printf( "I couldn't give a " );
    for ( int j=0; j<i; j++ )
    {
      printf( "fucking " );
    }
    printf( "flying fuck\n" );
  }

  return 0;
}

Oh, I know you're all long gone

2007-07-17T10:13:00.000+01:00

I mean, I haven't posted here for months. But still...

I haven't read many comics. You should try it for a few months. It's good therapy.

But, like a Austin Metros pouring off a 1970's British Leyland conveyor belt, comics have continued to arrive every month, and are now sitting in a huge pile in my spare room.

You know what? They're stunning. The modern American comic is gorgeous. Thick and glossy and lustrous. I'd willingly stick my right hand in a mincer if my left could draw with a tenth of the mastery of Finch or Mack. These artists are geniuses. If reputation had any relationship to talent, their statues would tower over major thoroughfares. We should talk about them in daunted, reverential tones, and when they died, massed ranks of soldiery would fire volleys as horsedrawn carriages took them past distraught crowds to their cathedral resting places.

Instead they're the obscure talents of a geek pastime regularly traduced by ignoramus herds. Not fair. Not fair at all.

I can't make an economic case for the continued existence of comics. They shouldn't even be viable any more and, chances are, soon enough they won't be. But what a magnificent folly they are.

Just one last little post

2007-02-15T11:43:00.000+00:00

I have a new blog and a new moniker.

You can find me at Just a Hand, Not a Mystery.

--------------------------------

The Clone has left the building.

Some final words. Part One: How Joe Quesada killed my blog

2007-02-01T10:09:00.000+00:00

I short-changed you all yesterday. You shouldn't write a blog for a year and a half and then splurge out a mumbly "I quit".

So, breaking my golden rule,

Never write about why you write

I shall give it a pop.

First off: comics.

If I hadn't read Joe Fridays at Newsarama, this blog would still exist. I direct you down to the paragraph with SPOILER HEAVY MODE. Obviously, I'm going to be talking spoilers here.

This blog was always a comics blog. Even when I stopped blogging solely about comics, I still wanted to post about them. But I discovered half-way through a post about Peter Milligan's X-Men that I had no interest in the story. It wasn't bad, wasn't good. Just a mundane arc spread over five months. A reviewer should write as well about the average as the great or the horrible. I'm not a natural reviewer.

So just write about the good things then, I thought. Two years ago, Marvel was at the tail-end of a great half-decade. Even if some had recently been cancelled, I could still enthuse about Priest's Black Panther, or David's Captain Marvel, or Bendis' Daredevil. I'll get on to Thunderbolts shortly.

These were great comics and I'll look back in fifteen years and think, "Marvel had something going in those days".

Then, as a steamroller might career through a model village, the big crossovers returned. All the gems got crushed.

Thunderbolts was important to me because it was the last comic which made me want to rip open my monthly parcel. It was a special, acquired-taste book, but it was beautiful. They fired Nicieza and gave it to Warren Ellis. How could they?

Then there's the turgid Civil War, of course: a reasonable idea made horrible by disastrous characterisation. When I blogged about this, the always-pertinent Tim O'Neill pointed out I shouldn't buy it.

He's right, of course. I shouldn't. But these crossovers loom over every title. Nothing makes sense without their context.

Then yesterday I read that they've bringing back Captain Marvel. The one who died in Jim Starlin's epic. Mar-Vell wasn't Starlin's best-realised character: that was Adam Warlock. Mar-Vell died because he was a superfluous character. His death was important because of its ordinariness. He didn't commit cosmic suicide or get splattered across twelve dimensions. He got cancer. He died a death like we all will. Bringing him back should be unthinkable.

Jean Grey. Colossus. Aunt May. Bucky. Foggy Nelson. Joe thinks this is "giving fans the unexpected". If only.

So don't read it, right? Joe's got a business to run, and it's his decision. This is mine. Marvel's quality has plummeted, and these comics are not worth buying. I'm butchering my pull-list.

And you can't blog about comics you're not reading.

Anyway, here are the subjects I should have blogged more about:

Howard the Duck.
Howard the Duck.
Howard the Duck.
I should have done more Gerber. Sorry, Plok.

I should have told you all about the time I was reading Swamp-Thing and my daughter stopped breathing. That would have been a good post, but by the time my hands had stopped trembling, the moment for it had passed.

And finally, the phrase I'm most proud of is calling Warren Ellis a shy little coquette. You shouldn't laugh at your own jokes, but that one still has me sniggering.

I suppose that's it

2007-01-31T15:45:00.000+00:00

It's time to put this blog to bed.

I've revised this post fifty times and it still doesn't say what I want it to.

Oh well.

Once I've written a decent novel draft, I'll come back to blogging.

Until then, thanks everyone. It's been a laugh.

Cake as political metaphor

2007-01-29T10:15:00.000+00:00

BBC news, bless their little hearts, love using gimmicks. It's no longer enough to discuss, say, possible new Education Ministers by lining up grey baldy pontificators. These days they'd have a mortarboard graphic hovering around the 3D heads of up-and-coming politicians.

Anyway, this morning on the Today Programme, they had a long section about NHS funding. Sounds dull, I know, but I'm curious why NHS workers universally slag off a Government which has funnelled a fortune their way. Something funny's going on.

The BBC decided to show this using a cake. A real cake. Which they cut up with a surgical scalpel.

- This chunk here has gone on improved pay and conditions for medical staff.
- Gosh, that really is a pretty big chunk, isn't it?
- Yes, pretty big.

Slicing up a cake to analyse NHS spending is silly but not unforgiveable, you might think. But this was on the radio.

They're cutting up invisible props on the Today Programme. I weep as Alexander did when he saw there were no more worlds left to conquer.

American streams

2007-01-15T11:00:00.000+00:00

The wonders of the Internet mean I can now watch American television on my laptop, and I'm teleported directly inside the American soul. It's all there in the adverts.

Endless fast-food passes before my eyes. Why do none of these processed-fat-guzzlers look overweight? But I spot some salad, and start feeling peckish. If the nearest Wendy's Steakhouse is in Portland, Maine, could I get there and back before the start of the Second Quarter?

A smug businessy wanker drives his nasty machine on the edge of a skyscraper while a woman faux-orgasms next to him. I find myself rooting for gravity.

Hummer adverts. Contempt fails me.

Four more smug businessy wankers get email on their mobiles and gibber at the commands passed down to them from the Board. You know what? With each day that passes our bodies malfunction, the global climate breaks down, the sun burns on towards extinction and the universe - our gorgeous, swaggering universe - puffs itself outwards. Eventually there will be nothing left except wisps of inert matter, expanding towards nothingness for ever and ever and ever. But even then, should I by some outrageous miracle survive, there will not have been even one second where I have given the vaguest flying fuck about the desires of the Board. Grow some spine, you odious corporate lickspittles.

A slouchy fatso drops into a subterranean bunker where other slovenly nonentities drink themselves polatic in front of a plasma screen. Its target demographic is the suburban, sports-watching male. We're expected to empathise with the ordinariness of this supine and apathetic figure. He's us. The not-so-hidden message is you are a useless, failing toe-rag who doesn't even need windows, so shut up and consume our product. If I bludgeoned an adman to death with a copy of The Da Vinci Code, could I plead provocation?

The sports commentators start joining in the adverts. "I'm really looking forward to that new series of 24, where Jack Bauer's corpse is going to reanimate itself in order to save America by torturing dusky foreigners and slaughtering inmates in Federal custody."

Dozens of Peyton Manning slots. He lacks the comic genius of, say, Charlie Chaplin, but he's amiable enough. America, you'll soon be bombarded by David Beckham, who will make Manning look like Demosthenes.

Thirty magic seconds where rednecks talk about which devices to put on the back of their pick-up trucks. Are they serious, or is this ironic? I honestly can't tell.

But by the end of the game, Baltimore Ravens fans are blubbing on the telly. I know schadenfreude is an ugly beast, but I can't help feeling it's all been worthwhile.

At last some good news

2007-01-12T09:47:00.000+00:00

Victoria Beckham is leaving the European landmass.

A quarter of a billion dollars for an aging, non-dribbling winger to sign for a team who get lower gates than Stoke City.

Reluctantly, I'm forced to concede that this is probably a plot by space alien-vampires. Soon the population of Greater Los Angeles will be reborn as blank-eyed, slavering night-dwellers who live only for the sweet taste of narcissism and human blood.

Well, those that aren't like that already.

Is it winter where you are?

2007-01-05T11:49:00.001+00:00

We don't have them any more. Just extended drizzly autumns with an above-average chance of our villages being devoured by tidal surges.

I miss frost and snow and breath you can see.

And wearing coats.

Nanowrimo 2006 report

2006-12-20T11:01:00.000+00:00

In the end I did finish Nanowrimo. Knocking off thirty-one thousand words in the first ten days and then giving up would have just been feeble.

So I've won Nanowrimo twice in a row, and I'm now confident that I can knock off a novel's first draft any time I want to. If you're a fast typist and get off to a good start, you can be almost there before the first week is out.

Spewing out 50k words for the sake of it is fine the first time you do it, but after that you have to be show more ambition. Which is why this year I decided I wouldn't consider Nanowrimo a success until I had finished the second draft.

Writing a novel turns out to be like blindfold-wrestling with an alien monster. You start off with an idea of what it is, but you can't get a grip on it and it keeps mutating. Having now completed (more or less) three different first drafts, it's clear I regularly hit a wall at about forty thousand words. Incremental fiddling with the original plan renders the story incoherent at around this point. I just lose heart.

This year, an unimportant character turned up at thirty thousand words with an unexpectedly flamboyant personality. He immediately blew away every other character, gleefully exposing their mechanistic personalities and feeble romantic subplots. Novel characters are in a Darwinian struggle: the best ones elbow their way to the fore, demanding page space just by being so enjoyable to write about.

Which is fine if the good characters are the major ones, but with me it's always the minor ones. And then you have a major structural problem.

So I can finish the half-assed first draft or start a major rewrite. Or just quietly abandon it. I don't quite know which way it's going to go.

Segovia playing guitar against an Eiffel Tower backdrop

2006-12-13T12:00:00.000+00:00

Oh, it's just impossibly cool.

It's easy to see without looking too far...

2006-12-12T11:47:00.000+00:00

...that not much is really sacred.

I've just been looking at a Norwich City message board where they're making jokes about the Ipswich murders. Three bodies found this month and two more women missing. I won't bother providing a link.

The women were prostitutes who lived in our rivals' town, so it's OK to have a laugh, right? Even while the corpses are being fished out of streams.

Sometimes, you just have to despair.

Falling out of love with football

2006-12-11T09:43:00.000+00:00

In the days to call, which we have left behind,
Our boyhood’s glorious game,
And our youthful vigour has declined
With its mirth and its lonesome end;
You will think of the time, the happy time,
Its memories fond recall
When in the bloom of our youthful prime
We’ve kept upon the ball

(from On the ball, City)

An affair isn't finished until the moment the thought of your partner evokes nothing but blank indifference. So at six o'clock on Saturday, realising I had forgotten even to look for the Norwich result (as it turns out, they lost two-one at home to Sheffield Wednesday), it was time to admit the weary truth: that I don't love football any more.

Actually, I don't even like it.

It all started aged four with the strange colours of the 1970 World Cup. Maybe it was just our early television set, but there was a surreal, unearthly brightness to that Mexican sunlight. It was the last time that England's team could be said to be the best in the world. We had Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton and Geoff Hurst and, most of all, we had Bobby Moore, who sounds like a comic book hero and who, all granite jaw and flaming blond hair, looked the part. In the words of Serious Drinking's seminal Bobby Moore was innocent,

Lost three-two we know for sure
You can't blame it on Bobby Moore

So I was hooked, and stayed hooked through the seventies (straggly hair, brutal defenders), eighties (perms, tight trousers, extreme hooliganism) and nineties (pathetic sentimental revival led by unfunny comedians). I confess as a child I supported my father's team, Newcastle United, but at the age where friends become more important than parents, I started going to Carrow Road to watch Norwich City.

We had a few great years around then. Impossibly great years, it seems now. But it is not Norwich's decline, though disheartening, which has split me from football.

Even before this year's World Cup, England's current national football team were an unlovable bunch, consisting in the main of drugs cheats, sexual bullies and terminally-greedy loudmouths. And their attitude was foul: anointing themselves the Golden Generation and playing with Sunday-League-clogger dexterity, they relied on a pathetically easy draw to get through to the quarter finals where they succumbed to an equally-vile Portuguese team.

Normally, I would have been upset. This time I was relieved.

OK, so it was a bad World Cup. Football doesn't sleep for long and soon England were playing again, and I realised, to my shock, that I was still disgusted with them. I didn't want to watch, and didn't care whether they won. I had stopped being a supporter.

And it was so easy to stop watching, because moving advertising hoardings have ruined the game anyway. A football is an object thirty centimetres across. It is entirely lost in front of a backdrop of metre high luminous boards aglow with every flashing gimmick the advertising industry can concoct. And although I tried to concentrate on the play, it's just not possible to shut out the intrusion. Modern football is the sporting equivalent of huge animated gifs on a website. They've made the game literally unwatchable.

But, much worse, they've stopped it being a competition. I used to think that the biggest clubs (Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool) would eventually leave the English domestic competition to set up a European League with their Spanish and Italian pals, but I was wrong. The English Premiership and the European Champions League are two equally lucrative honeypots. They'll never leave the Premiership. But getting into the Champions League is contingent on doing well in the Premiership. They, along with Chelsea (a smaller club with an obscenely wealthy oligarch owner), have to finish in the top four every single year. Without a salary cap, their European and domestic television money, merchandising and gate receipts mean they can build squads vastly superior to the remainder of the English game. Chelsea spent - I don't know exactly - 150 or 200 million on players. Norwich's squad cost 7 or 8. Chelsea fans like to boast how much better they are than the rest of us. That's right, you are. We haven't got a hope in hell against you. Happy now?

So you have this situation where the top four have to be the top four every year, but you can't have a League with just four teams, so there have to be others. They can't allow us to compete but they still have to play us. We are patsies. Fall guys. Someone to turn up and get hammered by our superiors. Remember Orwell's vision of the future being a boot permanently stamping on someone's face? That's what football is now.

Norwich spent one season in the Premiership a couple of years ago, and it was simply embarrassing. Even the worst Premiership teams are light-years ahead of newly promoted ones. We almost survived, thanks to a stupendously under-performing Southampton team, but we would have almost certainly gone down the next season. The promoted teams which do survive are invariably those with cash-stuffed chairmen. Obscure teams like Wigan, Reading and Fulham whose success is a function of finance, not a reflection of their support.

Now there's the American expression "on any given Sunday", meaning that an unfancied team can sometimes beat a better one. On balance, this is just an illusion which spices up an individual game but conceals the wider truth. On nineteen out of twenty given Saturdays, the likes of Norwich will get slaughtered by the likes of Chelsea.

The days when middle-ranking clubs like Derby, Nottingham Forest or (though I hesitate to admit it) Ipswich could build a great team and win the title are gone forever. Under current financial conditions, I doubt that an outsider could do it even once in two hundred years.

And it's this absence of hope which kills you. It's not that my team will win the title, but simply that they might. I follow the perenially-wretched Cleveland Browns, but given a couple of favourable drafts and decent coaching, they could be play-off contenders in a couple of years. Norwich never will be. The only chance you have is if an idiotic billionaire takes a shine to your club (why do they do it, these rich fools? they don't even support the clubs who benefit from their largesse). But that's not sport. It's just greed.

All of which only leaves going to live football for the entertainment. But Norwich are ahead of me here. Twenty-five pounds to watch Norwich scrape a one-all draw with Colchester? That's fifty US dollars to watch two Second Division, third-rate teams. The last time I tried to get tickets, as I was held in a queue, a recorded message told me that I would need my Customer Number ready and that only customers in the Norwich City Database would be served. What Customer Number? What Database? Do I need to buy some shitty club merchandise before you'll even allow me to go to a game? What self-respecting retailer treats its customers like this? If I'm now a customer, and not a supporter, then a customer I shall be: this product is over-priced and mediocre, and your customer service is abysmal.

So, since I don't watch it on television and I don't go to live games, I suppose that's the end for me and football. Maybe if Norwich have a good season my interest will pick up again, but something inside me has changed. And poor, doomed Bobby is just a memory of some other time long over.

The Kingsholme

2006-11-30T14:50:00.000+00:00

Dunwich may have fallen off the edge of a cliff, but that wasn't why the town died. Buildings can be rebuilt, but economics is fatal.

The Kingsholme was a shingle spur a mile offshore, and the waters behind it formed the harbour which made Dunwich. Over the centuries, the sea ate the land underneath Dunwich and simultaneously pushed the Kingsholme onshore. Eventually, the river Blyth broke through the Kingsholme three kilometres north of Dunwich, Dunwich's harbour was blocked and its river reversed its flow, emptying northwards into the Blyth at Westleton.

There was no reason for Dunwich to be there any more, so it died.

The Kingsholme, though, survived as a shingle barrier keeping the sea from the silted-up harbour, which became a freshwater marsh.

Picture a three kilometre line of pebble and sand, three metres high by fifteen wide, cutting between marsh and sea. Beautiful in summer, and absolutely desolate in winter.

I've always had in mind that this would be a good setting for a novel, not least because it's one of England's most sad and haunting places. And it's transitory: not a generation has passed without Dunwich changing its form. How can you not make something of a setting where the landscape can change faster than the characters?

I imagined the Kingsholme as a processional way by which the main character would symbolically return back to the village of his birth. But in one of those rather unsettling coincidences, the same night I started writing about it, the sea annihilated the Kingsholme. A swell simply pushed much of the shingle ridge away, leaving a very low beach between sea and the now-tidal marsh. At low tide, you can now stand to the rear of the beach and see the waves at head height. It is disconcerting to see a familiar landscape so utterly changed.

An old tree, polished with age, now lies on the sand. I can only guess that it must have been buried in the shingle and liberated during the storm. It must have originally grown on one of the eroding cliffs, perhaps at Pakefield or Dunwich itself. I like to think that it might have been part of the East Wood, the oak forest which once stood between Dunwich and the sea, but was lost at a time when the land was eroding at ten metres a year.

The shingle had been artificially maintained for decades, and apparently they're going to rebuild the shingle one last time, but the next time the sea comes in, that'll be it. Which just about sums up the last thousand years at Dunwich.

Puff the Blubbing Dragon

2006-11-30T13:42:00.000+00:00

A comment from Marionnette strikes a chord: isn't Puff the Magic Dragon the saddest song you ever heard? Even if did reach the age of twenty-five thinking the little boy was called "Baccy Paper".

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar

It's strange that you don't notice when childhood leaves you. It just gets up and tramps away and doesn't even say goodbye.

Steely Dan's A Little With Sugar is another one:

All the years that she was with us
You could count them on one hand
I was taken with her showboat style
But too young to understand

But if you want an unsettling poem, Our Mothers Depart by Yevgeny Yevtushenko is top of the list.

Our mothers depart from us,
gently depart
On tiptoe,
but we sleep soundly,
stuffed with food,
and fail to notice this dread hour.
Our mothers do not leave us suddenly,
no —
it only seems so 'sudden.'

Slowly they depart, and strangely,
with short steps down the stairs of years.
One year, remembering nervously,
we make a fuss to mark their birthday,
but this belated zeal
will save neither their souls
nor ours.

They withdraw ever further,
withdraw even further.
Roused from sleep,
we stretch toward them,
but our hands suddenly beat the air —
a wall of glass has grown up there!
We were too late.
The dread hour had struck,
Suppressing tears, we watch our mothers,
in columns quiet and austere,
departing from us.

And don't get me started on Coz I Love You by Slade.

National Novel Writing Month

2006-11-28T15:41:00.000+00:00

Nanowrimo: It's November 28, 42500 words written. So I have 7500 left to write in two and a half days, but somehow I can't quite motivate myself to finish it.

Still, disappointing yourself is character-building.

Julie Andrews knew what she was doing

2006-11-21T12:21:00.000+00:00

One of my many "should get around to doing" tasks is to acquire perfect pitch, and in a fit of optimism, I find Good-ear.

A couple of hours of listening to pinging piano noises later, I'm getting quite good at it. So I go to the toilet, and when a drip of water hits the sink, I hear a distinct A sound. When I rap with my knuckle, the door makes an F.

It's all extremely weird. Like one of those Star Trek episodes where they discover that strange out-of-phase beings have been walking around on the bridge without anyone noticing. Perhaps I should give up this analogy before I sound too much like a geek.

Just a thought

2006-11-20T13:42:00.000+00:00

Which is worse:

Having your team play horrifically badly against their bitter enemies before creeping off the turf humiliated?

or

Having your team play well against their bitter enemies before collapsing ignominiously and slinking off the field humiliated?

Is this a funny way of putting it?

2006-11-20T11:39:00.000+00:00

"Roger Lancelyn Green

author spotlight

Roger Lancelyn Green (1918-1987) was a biographer of children’s writers and a reteller of myths, legends and fairy tales. He was a member of the Oxford literary group the Inklings, along with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

Random House will alert you to new works by author Roger Lancelyn Green! Enter your email address below to enroll."

Surely new works by a nineteen-year dead author are unlikely?

Though, come to think of it, passing over hasn't even slowed Tupac Shakur's productivity.