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)

2008-03-28T08:57:00.003Z

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)

2008-03-28T06:17:00.006Z

'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)

2008-03-27T19:56:00.004Z

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

2008-02-12T10:30:00.000Z

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

2007-02-15T11:43:00.000Z

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

2007-02-01T10:09:00.000Z

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

2007-01-31T15:45:00.000Z

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

2007-01-29T10:15:00.000Z

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

2007-01-15T11:00:00.000Z

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

2007-01-12T09:47:00.000Z

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?

2007-01-05T11:49:00.001Z

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

2006-12-20T11:01:00.000Z

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

2006-12-13T12:00:00.000Z

Oh, it's just impossibly cool.

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

2006-12-12T11:47:00.000Z

...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

2006-12-11T09:43:00.000Z

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

2006-11-30T14:50:00.000Z

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

2006-11-30T13:42:00.000Z

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

2006-11-28T15:41:00.000Z

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

2006-11-21T12:21:00.000Z

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

2006-11-20T13:42:00.000Z

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?

2006-11-20T11:39:00.000Z

"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.

This house believes in Dylan over the Beatles

2006-11-17T09:53:00.000Z

Over a A Trout in the Milk, Plok is eulogising the Beatles, bringing back one of the great schisms to hit our Sixth Form.

Now when I was twelve, you weren't allowed to like any record issued before the Buzzcocks' Orgasm Addict, and the charts were full of croonily-challenged nylon-fizzing boybands like Sailor and Slik (no, Midge Ure, that hasn't been forgotten).

Especially detested was older-brother music like Queen and David Bowie or even-older-sister music like Barclay James Harvest. To this day, I can't listen to Seven Seas of Rhye without being gripped by the unquenchable fear that my mates might be watching.

Anyway, Year Zero lasted about three years, brutally put down when hard-core indie favourite Adam Ant (heard about only in rumours, because Radio One didn't play it and I wasn't about to spunk out three quid at Robin's Records on Richard Mayes' say-so) turned out to be a media floozy and vacuous, lipsticky fop. Disillusionment hit and we were forced to delve back into pre-history to find something listenable.

Obviously, sibling tunes were still out, though Led Zeppelin were OK because they never released singles and could there never become associated with plesiosaur DJ's like Dave Lee Travis. But it was the wretched Sixties that we started to discover.

A quick shuffle through, say, the 1965 charts will show that the Sixties produced as much unlistenable ear-belch as anything concocted since, and any decade which spawned Freddie and the Dreamers without throat-punching them out of the studio must have been, to some extent, lacking critical judgement.

But after some initial crude fumblings (the Strawbs: why, Lord, why?), our peer group split into three hostile factions. The Rolling Stones fans all eventually moved on to umlauted horrorshows like Motorhead and Motley Crue and are now living on crystal meths in squats in Tower Hamlets. Heavily outnumbered, we Bob Dylan fans specialised in alienation, profundity-mining, and heavy sarcasm. You'd never guess to listen to me now, though, would you?

And those who listened to the Beatles? They never gave their parents a moment's worry and are now running the country.

No, I just never got the Beatles. I'm not going to diss them because, well, what's the point? They've sold about eighty-five billion records, so I'm obviously in the rejected minority. But I've never, ever been moved by a Beatles song. Well, maybe Norwegian Wood if you substitute the words for a football chant.

And just hearing the first half bar of Imagine makes me want to slap John Lennon across the face with an outsized chequebook.

We're all friends, here, right, so no-one's going to laugh if I say my favourite Paul McCartney song is crashingly-twee Wings' ballad London Town.

London Town, for god's sake. The horrible Dick Van Dyke-ness of it all. But stick it on the stereo and I'll be blubbing like a D-lister facing a plate of Witchetty-grubs.

Dylan may have had a voice which emitted from a hole in his abdomen, and he may have been (I admit this reluctantly) a strum-along-and-blow merchant, but his work was untouchable. The week I bought Blood on the Tracks, I listened to it for ninety-eight hours non-stop until a timely intervention by Social Services.

This house still believes in Dylan. It's inescapable.

2006-11-15T13:55:00.000Z

Hallelulah! It's a truce

2006-11-14T09:29:00.000Z

For the second month running, no Civil War plops onto my doormat. Now I'm no expert on the comic book industry, but I reckon if your entire year's comics are based around one storyline in a seven-part mini-series, you're probably going to make a considerable effort to put them out on time.

Obviously, out come all the usual excuses about artists being overstretched ("Shit, Joe, I'm sorry, I'd clean forgotten the eight week hols in Torremelinos I'd booked for the wife"). Now Joe, being Joe, commendably comes up with the old "The Watchmen was thirty-nine months late and nobody complains about it now" line, conveniently overlooking that The Watchmen was fantastic, while Civil War is feebly flipping over and over like an oxygen-starved haddock.

Now, this being the internet, we have a duty to introduce as many evidence-starved conspiracy theories as we can dream up, so can I point out that Marvel's behaviour is exactly what you'd expect if they'd suddenly realised their flagship story was a steaming mound of excrescence that made half their products (does that sound too commercial? How about "intellectual property"?) behave like lunatic right-wing kidnapper-torturers and that if they didn't sort it out their company would be up Scheissestrasse?

What do you do in these circumstances? You suspend printing, get all the relevant editors and writers together, draw down the blinds and throw a panicky "what the fuck do we do now?" all-nighter while resisting the temptation to chuck your possessions into the back of a truck and hightail off to Montana. Consequently, the schedule ends up slipping a little.

In support of my theory (not that I need evidence, obviously, this being a conspiracy theory and all), at the time of the Clone Saga, Marvel seemed to throw these meetings approximately twice a week for two whole years, and the result was the single worst comic book series ever written. Sorry about that, Ben Reilly fans, but it's true.

(Strangely, Marvel were advertising the Ultimate Clone Saga the other month, and now Peter David's threatening to bring Ben Reilly back. Is this comic books' version of the fashion industry, where some nightmarish trend, like 747-wing shirt collars or thick jumpers with leggings are yanked from the grave purely to inflict trauma on the minds of those who were scarred first time round? Has it come to this? as Mike Skinner would whinge.)

And yet I find myself drawn to Civil War. Not because it's good, but because of the sheer scale of the impending disaster. It's a grand folly, a Millennium Dome in four colours, a pen and ink England rugby team. Whether you like it or not, you have to concede that it is, as promised on every single damn cover, a comic book event.

I haven't been tagged...

2006-11-10T14:02:00.000Z

...but then I never am. Not that that's going to stop me from pretending Dave tagged me for 'Five Things About Me'.

PLEASE LEAVE THE FOLLOWING IN ALL POSTS
'Remember that it isn't always the sensational stuff that writers are looking for, it can just as easily be something that you take for granted like having raised twins or knowing how to grow beetroot. Mind you, if you know how to fly a helicopter or have worked as a film extra, do feel free to let the rest of us know about it.'

1) I've been rejected a few times, but I've never been dumped.

2) I sometimes get out of bed at three in the morning, put my contact lenses in, and then stare at the stars until my extremities freeze.

3) I adore being alive. It's just fantastic.

4) I have a terrible habit of yod dropping. Stoodent. Toolip. Hooman. Noo.

That make me sound loik a yookel, doon't ut?

5) I once got threatened with arrest in the away end at Newcastle United for making an offensive "wanker" hand signal

at Peter Beardsley

I know I shouldn't whinge about "Civil War", it'll only damage my digestive system...

2006-11-08T12:42:00.000Z

...but I'm going to anyway.

Civil War has no quest. We've had the trigger - reality TV show goes horribly wrong (something of an oxymoron because all reality TV is horribly wrong) - Nitro explodes some suburbanites and then the US government passes Stalinist legislation in a hundredth of the time it would normally take to get a Municipal Dog-Crapping Ordinance passed.

So we're triggered. Typically, after that comes the quest, that infinitely stretchable section of narrative which takes us from the beginnings all the way to the climax itself.

"Frodo has to get to Mordor to chuck the ring down the Cracks of Doom" was a quest.

"We have to get the secret plans to the rebel base and then blow up the Death star" was another.

"Let's stop Jean Grey from going bonkers and blowing up star systems" was a good one.

So what is Civil War's version of the quest? Captain America and his pals sitting around in moody disused factories dabbing antiseptic on each other's lacerations before bouncing off to free another batch of spandexes from Tony Stark Chokey so that they, too, can flounce onto cardboard boxes in semi-darkness?

It's just stasis. A quest needs a goal, a hint of how things might be resolved. If Cap and co had a big meeting and concluded that they themselves didn't have a clue what to do, but they charged dynamic teenage hero Wesley Smuggins with finding a way, that would be a quest. We could follow Wesley for an issue or two as he finds out the President has been replaced by a loathsome, slime-pulsating alien (this may actually have happened in real life).

If they decided to replace the US Congress with a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, that'd be another. It'd be worth reading, as well.

But there is no hint of a way forward, and so it's horribly bogged down - which is, as it happens, the way most Civil Wars turn out.

Now you're all ahead of me in your reading, and maybe by now Civil War has taken off and is fabulous, but at the moment, my problem with it is that, after thirty issues or so, this narrative hasn't got round the first lap.

I started reading "Lolita" last night

2006-11-08T12:25:00.000Z

OK, granted Nabokov writes like honey gushes from his fingertips, but is it all going to be such rank, odious garbage? Is there a valedictory, life-affirming ending where Humbert Humbert accidentally slices his own face off?

I'm tempted to quit now, but I'm worried I might miss something.

Am I the wrong person to be running my own business?

2006-11-06T10:51:00.000Z

You Are 12% Capitalist, 88% Socialist

You see a lot of injustice in the world, and you'd like to see it fixed.
As far as you're concerned, all the wrong people have the power.
You're strongly in favor of the redistribution of wealth - and more protection for the average person.

Are You a Socialist or Capitalist?

Civil disturbance

2006-10-29T10:11:00.000Z

I was lost to Civil War from the moment Captain America, the Mary Sues' Mary Sue, made his escape Han Solo-style from the SHIELD helicarrier in the teeth of hundreds of soldiers specially trained and armed to catch him, before hitching a lift on an Air Force jet and correcting the surprised pilot's mild cursing. If only, while Captain America was busy preening himself at this daring escapade, Batroc had bounced on his head, knocked him cold, and dragged him off to a Government torture chamber where Sayid from Lost could have made himself useful with a staple gun, a pair of pliers and a packet of caustic pencils.

What is Civil War? Is it allegory? Are Stark and SHIELD supposed to be Bush's America, trampling civil liberties with the willful glee of a herd of wildebeest cantering over the Serengeti? What does that make the other side, then? Al Qaida? But, utterly obviously, they're supposed to be the good guys, right? As the advertising says, which side are you on? Let me just think for a minute... should it be the cool ones in leather jackets who have secret hideouts and make tediously self-righteous speeches about liberty? Or should I root for the stormtroopers who laboratory-grow murderous Thor-clones and swoop in on innocents at four in the morning, beat them senseless and then cuff them and stuff them and push them without benefit of lawyers into a hellish extra-dimensional prison-fortress?

I don't know about you, but I'm with the fascists on this one. You can't mollycoddle these lawbreakers.

Obviously, even in the best of comic stories, you have to suspend a mound of disbelief to cope with the spandex and unfeasible powers, but the character changes in Civil War are so extreme it's as if Mark Millar is personally jabbing you up the nose with a drumstick yelling, "it's only a story, you fool, I just couldn't get it to fly without jimmying everything around".

Witness Reed Richards, who only a few months ago was knocking over a foreign country on moral grounds in the teeth of US government opposition, but is now happy to use the Negative Zone as an extrajudicial robot-manned dungeon. The Negative Zone, for God's sake, backyard of Annihilus - didn't you used to die if you hung out there too long? What if there's a power outage? What if Blastaar takes out the security bots and recruits half the world's superpowered individuals as his personal minions?

Yes I know it's a cypher for Guantanamo, but it's a ludicrous one. Richards has mutated into Josef Mengele, feverishly inventing ways to subvert human-rights while muttering non sequiturs. I should get your head seen to, mate. It's no wonder your wife left you.

Meanwhile Peter Parker is obviously wondering if becoming Tony Stark's mini-me was a wise career move as all the other superheroes are starting to bully him in the playground. When Civil War ends (if it ever does - perhaps these production delays are out of pure embarrassment?), if the resolution involves Parker having a fit of conscience and at the last moment betraying Stark then I shall gibber uncontrollably for a fortnight while watching 100 Funniest Comedy Double Entendres on looped feedback in a darkened room.

And there's so many of the damn books. Ninety-six. Dark Phoenix lasted nine. If you added up every single Howard the Duck Steve Gerber ever wrote you probably wouldn't get past forty, but any given page would have more thought and insight than the entire monstrous Civil War collection.

Some of the ninety-six are nonsensically flabby. Civil War Files is just typed reports about Marvel characters. Like I give a shiny shite who (to open a page a random) Falcon and Sally Floyd are supporting.

Front Line is probably the best of a bad job, since much of it is written by Paul Jenkins, a good writer who has somehow managed to avoid becoming a great one. But it is here that we find the most dreggy and absurd story. Put artists impressions of the Vietnam war on one side of the panels and superheroes on the other and then include excerpts from Goodnight Saigon, a Billy Joel song about Vietnam.

A bit of advice for you, Paul: superheroes aren't real. They're made up. Put them anywhere near real events and the result is not only in bad taste but glib and superficial. And horribly, squirmingly, buttock-clenchingly embarrassing. I went and hid under my duvet until the nasty comic went away.

Civil War is pompous and portentous and utterly without humour. It's this decade's Onslaught.

Cor strewf stone the crows

2006-10-26T10:49:00.000+01:00

Madonna is starting to sound like Dick Van Dyke. Why don't Americans who pick up an English accent sound like the English when they pick up Americanisms?

Boltcutters

2006-10-16T10:17:00.000+01:00

You wonder if Marvel has any idea why people read Thunderbolts.

I know there is only me and about fifteen others and it was probably heading for cancellation, but it was a last lonely little outpost of creativity in Joe Quesada's increasingly alarming flood of commerciality. Here's Mark Millar:

My idea for Thunderbolts, very simply, was that it should employ the same strategy as New Avengers and JLA in that if we have a team, why not make it the A-Team in the sense that they're all recognizable names?

Well, it's a fair question. Why would want a title of stiffs, nobodies and half-forgotten incompetents when we can have Norman Osborn, Venom and Thanos on the team? (I made one of them up, but I'm past caring which one.) We can have big personalities. Big fights, Big muscles. If this was 1995 we'd get big breasts as well, but I suppose, given it's Warren Ellis, it'll be raincoat-shrouded anti-heroes, malevolent aliens and gratuitous torture.

I had an idea for The Champions, I had an idea for a new Defenders book.

Oh, Mark, why couldn't you have done just that? The Champions were a joke even back when. The Defenders non-team concept ran out of steam long ago. Couldn't you have put Ellis to work on them? I wouldn't have minded. Admittedly, I wouldn't have bought them either, but you can't have everything.

We Thunderbolts readers, though few in number, are possessive and possibly a smidgen touchy about our book. We dislike, no hate, the way Marvel (led even then by Joe Quesada) ditched the entire cast and replaced it with a plodding Fight Club with sub-pornographic covers which was an exact copy of a simultaneously running Spider-Man plot. We dropped it, Marvel cancelled it and then (to my astonishment, frankly) revived it. Fabian Nicieza takes a few months to get all the multi-threads up and running, but with that achieved, we're back to having one of the top three Marvel books of the past decade.

But we don't love it because it has big well-known characters. We love it because it doesn't. Thunderbolts is Nicieza exploring redemption: those who desire it, achieve it, fall from it. Thunderbolts uses minor characters because they're sufficiently ill-defined not only that Nicieza can breathe life into them, but that we readers can't guess whether they will come or go or die or reform. Does anyone actually see that in Norman Osborn, written by Warren Ellis?

NEWSARAMA: Back to production Ellis on villains. One of the simpler decisions made at Marvel recently?

JOE QUESADA: Seemed like a no brainer to me. Let's face it Warren is a very evil, evil man, I’ve always suspected that he's behind all the evil acts in the world so who better to write this book?

Thunderbolts was never about the portrayal of evil. No wonder you keep shitting on our book, Joe. You don't have the slighest idea what it's about.

The bones of Jacob Forster

2006-10-06T09:41:00.000+01:00

With every autumn storm, the clifftop nibbles closer to the bones of Jacob Forster.

He lies in the churchyard of All Saints in Dunwich, where he died in 1796.

(from Suffolkcam)

The church went a hundred years ago, and the only intact gravestone I could find was Jacob's. He's ten metres from the edge in a rabbity hawthorn thicket. Just along the cliff is a clearing where some thoughtful soul has left a plastic bottle and an aluminium tray of used charcoal briquettes. The cliff (30 metres high maybe?) isn't even stone. Just pure compressed sand.

(from Suffolk churches)

Jacob, rabbits, hawthorns and clearing should be tumbling over the edge in a decade or two. Does the council have someone to come and clear up mortal remains after a storm? Or do they just wait for the high tide to suck everything away?

I suppose they could give him another couple of centuries by digging old Jacob up and re-interring him in the new church in the grounds of the old leper colony. But, frankly, who wants to be digging six feet down on the edge of a crumbling cliff? Safer just to let him drop.

Anyway, that's where Jacob's family and friends must have ended up. If skeletons had thoughts, perhaps one thundery night, as his plot starts to slip, he'll be thinking, "about bloody time too".

There's a man down the corridor...

2006-10-03T11:06:00.000+01:00

...who bellows into his mobile phone. Not shouts. Not screams. Bellows.

Shut up, you fool. Shut up.

Happy birthday to me

2006-09-27T12:00:00.000+01:00

Yes, I was born on 27 September 1965, which by a happy quirk of Einsteinian physics makes me 28 today.

27 September is the 270th day of the year.

The average pregnancy lasts 266 days.

So I was conceived on 4 January 1965.

Which just happens to be the day TS Eliot died.

If I was Shirley Maclaine I'd probably now proclaim myself to be Stearnsy's reincarnation, but there are a few irritating obstacles like not being sure I was conceived on the 4th: if it was the 3rd I'd be a bit stuffed.

There were also a few tens of thousands of other people born on that day, like comedian Rhona Cameron (who incidentally, used to live in Musselburgh, as I did) and no less than two Canadian politicians, Peter MacKay and Bernard Lord.

And, without wishing to come over all Richard Dawkins, there isn't the slightest shred of evidence that reincarnation occurs.

Oh, and TS Eliot was one of the giants of literature and I'm just a blogger with an irrational hatred of Mary Jane Watson.

Apart from those, I reckon I'm a shoe-in.

Can someone just reassure me

2006-09-26T16:14:00.000+01:00

That there is a redemptive quality to watching useless, failing, pathetic, awful, self-destructive, pathetic, pathetic sports teams for year upon year?

It's not just decades of losing until you start hitting yourself with a stick, is it?

Sound the bells, school's in, sucker

2006-09-19T13:42:00.000+01:00

"It's usually the parents who get upset, not the children," said the teacher, as I reluctantly handed over my four year-old for her first day at school.

Do the first few years actually fly over in no time? They've seemed more to me like a trudge through the High Altai in carpet slippers. By the time September 2006 came around, I thought I'd be getting demob happy and making up some celebratory mix tapes.

Not at all, as it turned out, because I hit a philosophical problem. Which is "how do you send your children off to school when you hated the experience so?"

My school years were pretty bad. My first school had psychotic nuns still chafing at having been denied the right to assault their charges. The second one wouldn't teach me the same alphabet as everybody else. The third put me in a class of thirty-nine in a bombed-out urban wasteland. The fourth broke the streak by being caring and nurturing.

But the fifth - how I hated the fifth - was an old-fashioned pull-your-socks-up-boy-we-demand-diligence-hurrah-the-first-XV tyrannical rusting rat-corpse-infested Gehenna in a sugar beet field. I loathed it from the moment I set my thirteen year old eyes on it to my contemptuous parting flob as the final bus pulled away.

School taught me was that you could hand any old shit in and, as long as it reached a bare minimum standard, it wouldn't matter because they couldn't touch you. School taught me that learning was a chore and that I was a lazy failure.

So you leave school and hopefully recover from it and time rolls around and suddenly you're dropping off your daughter in the care of a complete stranger and trying to get with the school ethos while secretly thinking, "if she's going to go through anything like I did I'd rather keep her at home and educate her myself."

Oh, it's not that I think there's something wrong with schooling, and not that my daughter's teacher or school are bad: they're much more caring and homely for a four-year old than my first school was. But for me school was like an abusive relationship and once I left, I tried never to think about it again. I appear to still have a fuming teenager bubbling up through my psyche.

On a side point, do many people who had rotten schooldays go on to become teachers themselves? Somehow, I imagine not...

As bad as they wanna be

2006-09-18T09:49:00.000+01:00

The Balkans 1804 - 1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers - Misha Glenny

In 1990 I hitched down the fabulously named Brotherhood and Unity Highway, which stretched the length of Yugoslavia from Austria to Greece. Everyone I got a life with agreed the country was in trouble; "War in two years" said a Serb doctor, shaping an imaginary pistol with his fingers.

All history books are products of their own time period, and you feel that Misha Glenny's book was written to answer the questions most interested Britons were asking at the time: who are these people and why are we bombing them?

Glenny's history starts in 1804 with a rebellion of (Orthodox Christian) Serb pig farmers against the (Muslim) Ottoman Turks who had ruled the Balkans since kicking over the late Mediaeval Christian kingdoms. The next century saw the declining Ottomans unable to keep order in the provinces while their subjects lacked the power to kick them out. The sponsorship of a great power - such a British admiral acting without sanction from London to save the Greek fleet - could save independence, but the other powers generally counter-balanced this. Without exception the Great Powers acted in their own interests, rather than those of the inhabitants.

Russia's long term strategy was to expand down the Black Sea coast to that ancient and warm-watered centre of Orthodoxy, Constantinople. Austria desired a Balkan empire to replace the primacy in Germany it had lost to Prussia. Britain sought to prop up the Ottomans to thwart the Russians. So, for instance, when the Russians looked to have the game won with the creation of a huge Bulgaria, the other moved in unison to stop them.

By the end of the First Balkan War, the Ottomans had been removed from almost all of Europe, and their successors - Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania - were learning to live with each other. This they did by bushwhacking Bulgaria and then launching into the First World War.

If the 1800s were grim, the 1900s were worse. The slaughter of the First World War led to some ugly, tyrannical monarchies. Mussolini's insane and incompetent invasion of Greece led to the darkest period of all, Hitler's German conquest of the entire peninsula. The Red Army marches in in 1945 and a surprising variety of Communist regimes come to power - populist but brutal in Yugoslavia, brutal and insane in Rumania, xenophobic and insane in Albania. Then the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989 and a brief burst of happiness and optimism (see 1912) is quickly quelled as Yugoslavia descends into bloodshed and partition, which is where we came in.

Glenny concentrates on the Balkans' two most impenetrable problems - the Bosnian question and the Macedonian question. Macedonian Slavs could be Bulgarians, or Macedonians, or Serbs or even - in the 1800s at least - Greeks. Bosnia's mainly South Slav was divided by religion (Muslim Bosniak, Catholic Croat, Orthodox Serb) and, much more in the eye of the beholder, ethnicity. So for a Croat nationalist, the Bosniaks might be Muslim Croat or they might be Muslim Serb unless the Croats were going through a phase of pan-Slav union, in which case all might be considered to be one people. And one of Glenny's most important points is that these nationality issues were far from unchanging: the modern antipathy between Croat and Serb, for instance, goes back no further than World War Two, a far cry from the mediaeval hatred theory of Balkan conflict.

He goes a little way to dispelling the notion of the Balkans as especially violent: the actions of the distinctly Western European Nazi Germany beats anything the Balkans (even the squalid Croatian regime of Ante Pavelic) could match: the Nazis' most horrific action probably being the deportation and murder of the entire Jewish population of that old Sephardic city, Salonika.

Even without the Nazis, there's enough horror to be going round. The brutality, rapine and massacres take us from Napoleon to Bill Clinton. We witness military actions which appear to have been dreamed up after sinking twelve pints: Serbia's pointless 1885 attack on Bulgaria, Rumania's disastrous entry again the Central Powers in the First World War and, saddest of all, the catastrophic 1919 attack by Greece on Turkey. The forced population exchange in 1923 meant the expulsion of Greeks who had lived in Asia Minor since the time of Pericles and the death of the Megali Idea, the reunification of all the Greeks under the rule of their greatest city, Constantinople, henceforth Istanbul.

But however idiotic this invasion was, even it couldn't match Austria's catastrophic 1908 annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina which, by only making sense as the first stage of an imperialist frogmarch down to Salonika, turned Serbia into Austria's sworn enemy and led to Gavrilo Princip assassinating Franz Ferdinand (not the band, sadly) on the streets of Sarajevo, pitching Europe into the First World War.

And one of this books many sad images is that of the remorseful Princip dying fettered in Theresienstadt, trying to convince himself that the war would have come even without his actions.

Even the moments of light relief are dark: the widow of a murdered Bulgarian politician silencing barrackers at his funeral by waving the pickled remains of his severed hands.

As Glenny's book comes to an end, NATO has just bombed the crap out of Serbia to stop Slobodan Milosevic expelling the entire population of Kosovo. Glenny, obviously without the benefit of seven extra years, doubts the wisdom of this, though, given Milosevic was a serial invader, the only mistake was not doing it years earlier when Milosevic, having already started one war with Croatia, turned his attention to Bosnia.

The attack on Serbia perhaps had one further unintended consequence - the over-confidence of Tony Blair. Never known for his lack of self-belief, his correct decision to go ahead against substantial opposition, stripped away his caution when other more consequential but far less justified wars came his way.

The surfeit of violence and warfare is this book's main problem. The portrayal of the Balkans is as an endless Molvania of the soul: violent, treacherous and meritless. Unlike, say, Neal Ascherson's atmospheric and beautiful Black Sea, Glenny doesn't spend time looking at art, literature or popular culture, except in as far as their creators conflict with political leaders. Without giving space to the better side of human nature, Glenny's Balkans end up looking like an irredeemable hellhole.

Timberlake, you snide, self-satisfied, stinkarsed, jigging little stoat

2006-09-15T12:03:00.000+01:00

Charlie Brooker gives Justin Timberlake an utterly merited smacking.

The hypochondriac

2006-08-25T09:37:00.000+01:00

So it's 1977 and I'm screaming while a doctor with a big pair of pliers proves that a local anaesthetic and a tourniquet don't make an iota of difference when you're having a poisoned nail and pieces of bone pulled out from your finger. When the bandages come off I have a three-quarter length claw with two malformed pieces of nail growing vertically away from the bone. I even laugh when they tell me that it's a good job I'm not a girl since looks don't matter to boys. But I don't think it's remotely funny because they hadn't been in that operating theatre and, anyway, appearance is important to me too. I'm only twelve but I'm shocked and furious.

Nobody could understand when I hadn't said anything earlier. Hadn't it been painful, what with my flesh festering and everything? Although (technically speaking) I had told someone. Which is why I went around for two days wearing my father's crazed sugar-and-soap poultice concoction which might have done some good if the soap had been of the type used in the the 1940s, but which just provided a cosy breeding ground for bacteria to gnaw away at my bone. You might have thought going to Hethersett Surgery would have been a better idea but that was all of four hundred metres walk and, frankly, my father just couldn't be bothered.

But I'd put up with the burst of pain with every heartbeat partly because I'd thought it would get better soon but mainly because I was desperate not to be known as the kid who keeps pretending he's ill.

Rewind to 1976 and I've just told Miss Girvin that I feel sick and she tells me that I'm a hypochondriac. I'm only ten but I know exactly what that word means. And I'm devastated because the only plus side of moving schools every year or so is that you can shake whatever reputation you might have had before.

Mr McEwan at my previous school was the first person to call me it, in 1974, when I told him for the umpteenth time that my stomach was hurting and I had a headache. He was totally unmoved, even though I was worrying I was going to spew up on his desk.

Thanks to the likes of Miss Girvin and Mr McEwan, I learned that real illnesses had spots and temperatures and anything else - even if I had just sicked up my lunch in the school toilets - was just pretend. So I learned to shut up and ignore the nausea and cramps and flatulence and eczema and knitting-needle-in-the-eye migraines. Only the healthy are popular.

At fourteen I realised my mother's chips made me ill and started cooking for myself, but it was much later before I stopped eating even tiny quantities of potato. In 1998, wondering why only one of two nearly identical packets of Lebkuchen gave me heartburn, I started looking at ingredients and saw that one had potato granules in it. Post-beer stomach ache went away once - most sadly of all - I said goodbye to crisps, alarmed at the way eating even a few left a tingling on my lips, now that I had learned about anaphylactic shock.

I have a potato allergy, and I was fed them every single day of my childhood. If you're being poisoned for a decade, you'll have endless stomach aches, an intimate knowledge of the inside of toilet bowls and sometimes - just sometimes - you'll probably want to tell someone else about it.

So can I suggest, Miss Girvin and Mr McEwan and anyone else who's contemplating it, that the next time a nine-year old says they feel sick, you don't call them a hypochondriac? Just don't do that.

It seems to me

2006-08-21T09:45:00.000+01:00

That there is no sentence which can't be made to sound less pompous and much cooler by adding "and shit" on the end.

I rather hope I've caught the eye of Mr Swanage: the devilish cut of his dinner jacket and his cultured - though never humourless - airs have quite left me a quiver; however his family are mere tobacco merchants, and I fear my father would never permit me to marry a person of such reduced expectations: - unless it might be - how I wish it could be - that I can convince my mother that Mr Swanage is my one true, divinely inspired, love and shit.

I have read all the intelligence reports, and there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussain has the ability to launch weapons of mass destruction in forty-five minutes and shit.

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before and shit.

Self-employment

2006-08-20T10:33:00.000+01:00

Means sometimes you have to sit at work at 10:30 on a Sunday morning. Insane.

On the plus side, the bells at Loddon Church are ringing rather beautifully.

Thank you for your cooperation

2006-08-18T10:25:00.000+01:00

We don't have much in our village. There's a school (mainly portacabins). A pub (being refurbished). A church (mainly pensioners). And a bus shelter (mainly people without driving licenses).

It's not a bad little bus shelter, actually, set back slightly from the main road so we don't have to hear the anguished shouts of car drivers forced - forced, I tell you - to brake to a snail-like 40 mph just because a few smelly, probably in-bred miserables might want to do ridiculous things like cross the road. Our bus shelter's not even particularly vandalised - probably because we don't particularly have any teenagers. It keeps us warm and dry and it's one of those little things that make you think, "Hey, maybe some people do give a toss about public transport".

And then the other day, a woman in a big fat people carrier parked up at our bus stop, got out her two-year old, went into our bus shelter, pulled down his trousers, and encouraged him to deposit a big pool of urine on our floor. She had unwittingly misinterpreted our enclosed, safe, warm, usually unsmelly, shelter as a public convenience for weak-bladdered car users.

So you're driving along the A146 and little Jeremy or Georgie or whatever the hell rich women in fat people carriers call their offspring is yelling that he needs a wee. Where do you have him do it? In a field maybe? Whatever about behind an oak tree or a hedgerow? Maybe you could turn down a side road or nip into a wood or even (this being harvest time) in a field?

But, no, that wouldn't be a sufficiently contemptuous gesture towards users of public transport, would it? Why not piss in their bus shelter? It's not like Georgie and Mummy are ever going to spend lengthy periods of time in it, is it?

Now you may have guessed that I'm a bit of a dove on law and order issues, but would it be so much to ask that a leather-clad policeman on a fusion powered hoverbike might zoom down from the sky, administer a crisp Zidane to her face, declare "Urinating in a bus shelter in the United Kingdom is a crime punishable by annihilation, Ma'am" and then flick the switch on his Punishment Rod to reduce her to a blackened, twitching, smoking corpse?

It's true

2006-08-14T13:38:00.000+01:00

If you live to a hundred and twenty, you will never ever encounter a comic book character worse than The Highwayman.

He was a biker with a monacle. A monacle that fired stun blasts.

He was the worst. The very worst.

Dear Dr Gibson,

2006-08-11T10:32:00.000+01:00

Where do I begin, after your charming comments about people in Norfolk being "quite in-bred with many not leaving the county". Apparently "if you look at the names in Norfolk, there's a lot that are the same. There is an inbreeding complex in villages - people inter-marry. That might mean more of them have got the same gene which predisposes them to it". Where "it", from the context of the article, means obesity.

So we're in-bred fatties, are we, Dr Gibson? Are we congenitally stupid too? Maybe we have more than the average number of toes, as well.

There is a regular stream of insults aimed at our county - all the normal patronising city-dwelling crap: in-bred, country cousins, fucking our sisters, you know the stuff. Well, you should, given you're the Member of Parliament for Norwich North. This is coming from our elected representative. You should be glad we don't riot the way we used to.

You have a degree in genetics, haven't you? So have you ever wondered why geneticists go off to the Faeroes or Gozo in search of genetically distinct groups, rather than just pop up to Norfolk? Do you have any peer-reviewed papers showing that we are an isolated population?

Perhaps history isn't your speciality. Forty per cent of Norwich used to be foreigners (or "strangers", as we like to call them). Nine different languages were spoken here. We have Dutch and Danish words in our dialect - there's even a theory that the extreme regularity of our verb conjugation (I go, you go, he go) goes back to our immigrant populations settling on a simple, mutually comprehensible form. Great Yarmouth and Norwich were important trading ports, and there has been a centuries old flow of immigrants into our county - including your family and mine. Norwich was the second city in England, built on its wool trade. Kings Lynn was a Kontore of the Hanseatic League. We weren't always a backwater, and we were never isolated.

I see you were born in Dumfries. By a happy coincidence, some of my ancestors came from Dumfriesshire, and I've wandered around a good number of Dumfriesshire graveyards, staring at the endless lines of Johnstones and Irvines and Murdochs and Bells. In my experience, Norfolk graveyards have a larger range of surnames than your own backyard. Perhaps you should look in the mirror if you want to see inbreeding.

But it's not about science, is it? It's just narrow bigotry of the type which, if you tried shouting it in the away end at Carrow Road, would get you ejected from the ground. You hate the same people who have elected you to Parliament at the last three elections.

I think you've outstayed your welcome.

The Man or the Spider?

2006-08-06T08:40:00.000+01:00

Spider-Man is a coming-of-age story. Peter Parker, the teenage geek, is given wonderful powers, but has to master them while dealing with all the standard adolescent problems - bullies, relationships, over-protective relatives, bad skin. The specialness of Spider-Man is that it's set in a transitory phase of life: Peter's low ranking in the Daily Bugle food chain, say, or his inability to pay the rent, are excused by his youth. If Peter were thirty-five and yet still allowed J Jonah Jameson to push him around, if our credibility let us to believe that Spider-Man would allow anyone to treat him that way, we would conclude that Peter was a weak fool.

Peter has to grow up. But when he does, the adolescence elements that make his story compelling evaporate. Granted, most of our early-twenties peers haven't been dropped off bridges by the Green Goblin, but the incremental loss of Stan Lee's great cast does reflect what happens in real life. Friendships may endure, but people disperse and get married and change, and once you're married that becomes the primary relationship (or should be, anyway). And people do take jobs that don't fulfill their erstwhile promise as bright spark of the 7b Physics class.

But if Peter Parker has grown up, the classic early-adult elements of Spider-Man remain the same. The inability to square this circle means that Spider-Man has been in a low-level crisis for a couple of decades now.

It's not that Marvel is unaware of any of this. The Clone saga and the Byrne-Mackie relaunch - two storylines which between them almost killed off the series - were both ham-fisted attempts to haul Spider-Man back to earlier times. The Clone saga's plan was to reveal Peter as a clone before replacing him with Ben Reilly, the true Spider-Man who would be younger, poorer and have lots of woman problems. Byrne-Mackie simply threw Mary Jane Watson out of a plane, moved Peter in with Randy Robertson and had him start acting like a seventeen year old. Or maybe seven year old.

It's to J Michael Straczynski's credit that he's stabilised the ship, though his big idea (that Spider-Man is some or other mythical insect totem) hasn't ever looked like filling the void in this series.

And now comes Civil War, and Peter's secret identity - the last standing cornerstone of Stan Lee's series - is gone. Peter is now a grown-up hero who lives in a mansion with his supermodel wife and surprisingly healthy aunt, who hangs out comparing biceps with his Avengers pals and trolling after a right-wing billionaire.

Now I have to acknowledge that this may not be a status quo, and would hope Civil War might shake things up. But there are some big problems here.

Abandoning a secret identity is a short-term device. You'll get stories featuring the reactions of pretty much everyone who knows Peter Parker. On Newsarama recently, Joe Quesada was saying that they thought they could get a couple of years of stories out of this. We can compare this with the editorial team that allowed Peter to get married. Often derided for their naivete in thinking like fans, not writers, I think they've been misjudged. They saw a huge potential for Peter-and-Mary Jane stories: he'd never been married before, after all. For a while, they were right. The fifty or so episodes after the marriage were as good as they get.

But once the novelty's worn off, the marriage was the new status quo, and it quickly became a bicker-fest. The quarrelling has now stopped, but only at the expense of a near-total neutering of Mary Jane Watson's once rebellious, fiery and utterly irritating personality. Mary Jane is the new Gwen Stacy.

So what happens once the novelty wears off? I expect the next year or so will have some good storylines, but, once Flash Thompson and JJJ and Betty Leeds and Curt Connors and Jill Stacy have had their moments in the sun, what then? You've resolved a pile of conflicts which have accumulated over the years, but at the cost of eliminating any more secret identity problems.

Then there's this armour business. I'm not one to worry much about powers, since they're just plot devices. But a few months ago, we have this whole The Other business, where Peter turned into a big insect and got a power upgrade, which mainly consisted of having webs shoot out of his wrists, rather than shooters. If Spider-Man needed anything extra in order to survive with the Avengers, this was the time to do it. But, no, a few months later and Peter is presented with an altered form of Iron Man's armour. Two power changes in a year is a sign of an uncertain editorial team.

Without a secret identity, will the dual-personality of Peter (neurotic, insecure, bit of a loser) and Spider-Man (confident and funny) tend to erode now there's no difference between them? There is effectively no difference between Logan and Wolverine, or Reed Richards and Mr Fantastic. The secret identity is a powerful device to perpetuate these differences. We may be losing something important here.

And then there's other things that disappear - the shabby flat, the day job, the relationship with JJJ, the worries about money. A great clump of Spider-Man stand-by's are being cast away here.

Meanwhile, the other two Spider-Man titles are cut adrift while the big boys get on with their revamp. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is bumping along retrying the whole mystic-Spider scene, while the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man of Peter David (the man who once wrote the superb "Death of Jean DeWolffe") reads like a cry for help, bringing back Flash Thompson's long-gone and unmourned jock personality and beaming in Uncle Ben from some alternative universe in a rehash of an old Spider-Man 2099 plot.

Losing the secret identity is a big step. If it goes wrong and Spider-Man slides down the pan again, Quesada will probably lose his job, and Marvel will have to patch it with idiotic retcons. I want it to succeed, but right now, whatever the new Spider-Man is, I just can't make it seem like Spider-Man.

Remember that feeling?

2006-08-02T11:57:00.000+01:00

Did you get that feeling at school when your last exam was over and you thought, "no matter what's happens in future, I'll never feel as pressurised as that ever again in my whole life"?

If you did, you were probably mistaken.

1274 meteorite strike?

2006-07-25T19:45:00.000+01:00

Frank Meeres' History of Norwich quotes the seventeenth century Norfolk antiquary, John Kirkpatrick, as saying that in 1274

on St Nicholas' Eve were great earthquakes, lightning and thunder, with a huge dragon and a blazing star.

I've been having a wee scan around the net and found this reference:

1274 AD: Earthquake again felt throughout England; Glastonbury destroyed.

This reference seems to be from a local inscription that saying Glastonbury church was destroyed in an earthquake, and some sources give 1275 as the year, so I don't know if they're referring to the same event.

But what if they are? Glastonbury is at least 150 miles from Norwich. It's not exactly Chicxulub, but pretty scary nonetheless.

Some really old poems

2006-07-25T11:01:00.000+01:00

For metals is Exeter famous
And York for her broad wooded plains
While Chester is proud of her Frenchmen
Norwich boasts of her Irish and Danes

Caistor was a city when Norwich was none
Norwich was built with Caistor's stone

Musselburgh was a town when Edinburgh was none
And Musselburgh will be one when Edinburgh is gone

The times I nearly died (part 2)

2006-07-19T14:33:00.000+01:00

Time: Today
Place: The A47 Norwich Southern Bypass
How did it happen? A Peugeot on the other side of the dual carriageway careered into the central reservation, heading straight for me, before splatting into the safety barrier and spreading a cloud of debris over my side of the road. Quite a driving lesson.
How was it? Pretty grim, especially for the Peugeot driver, I reckon.
Valuable life lesson learned? Never promise to join the forces of evil. God reads blogs.

On balance, I've decided to become evil

2006-07-18T15:13:00.000+01:00

Oh it's not that being good doesn't have its attractions - the satisfaction of benevolence, the pat-on-the-head-you've-become-a-good-man-son, the shiny teeth, the halo. But good characters have whiny self-obsessed partners (witness: Spider-Man), hellish day jobs (witness: Spider-Man - working as a science teacher at the High School where you were mercilessly bullied is surely a Stygian punishment) and a succession of family members and friends either pointlessly butchered or replaced by robots (witness: Spider-Man).

Doppelganger suggests I should use the old Nietzsche beyond-good-and-evil trick, but I reckon that's just an excuse for behaving unpleasantly and listening to lots of Wagner. Besides which, the mention of Nietzsche brings flashbacks of Billy Idol riding on the back of a US Army World War Two Jeep through the ruins of my old school. I'm pretty sure this in fact didn't happen, but I treasure the memory nonetheless.

Anyway, evil characters get to live in lairs, hire flunkies and flaunt the rules of petty bourgeois morality, and you just can't vote against luxury. The only downside is that I might become a one-shot Cable and Deadpool villain who gets humiliatingly beaten up and then slammed up in Ryker's Island (Stryker's Island? am I the only one confused by these names?) before getting disembowelled by Matt Murdock with a spoon for comic relief.

The best way forward, I think, is to obtain the Power Cosmic and build myself a reputation by crushing an entire galaxy. Sorted.

Oo-er

2006-07-07T13:47:00.000+01:00

My computers are all looking at me. I don't feel safe.

In Chess the pawns go first

2006-07-04T09:11:00.000+01:00

X-Men: Last Stand

This film has a bad case of Infinite Crisis syndrome. Take a few good ideas (or in the case of Infinite Crisis, about thirty) which don't belong anywhere near each other, shuffle scenes together more-or-less randomly, add lots of explosions - you can't go wrong with explosions - and stand back to admire your brain-aching mishmash.

My fourteen year old niece politely told me afterwards that it was all too confusing, though doubtless her teenage mind was running through the full gamut of insults you might want to inflict on a doddery old uncle.

The two themes of the film were otherness and love for someone who is losing their mind. They're good themes, these two, and might well have made two good films. Obviously there was nothing new for those of us who have garages bulging with old copies of Uncanny X-Men, but why should there be? The mutant cure main plot was obviously a stand-in for asking how society might react if someone invented a "cure" for race. Ian McKellan was back as Magneto, and looking more like a parody with each scene. He had a villainous posse whose women didn't object to being part of a "Brotherhood" and who had clearly mistaken bad facial tattoos for scariness (sooooo 1990s). Everybody bashed each other.

But there was also Jean Grey, the benchmark for classic X-Men storytelling, having a breakdown caused by...well, that wasn't made clear. It may have been an adverse reaction to having a lake drop on her at the end of the previous film. Uncanny X-Men: Dark Phoenix, the comic, is as much Scott Summers' story as Jean. The reader sees Jean's disintegration through her lover's eyes, and it is his sadness at the loss of his childhood love which makes the story so unsettling.

In the film, sadly, Scott gets butchered by Jean early on, with Hugh Jackman's Wolverine stepping into the bereaved's shoes. This doesn't work at all as Jean and Logan hardly know each other, and anyway, it's the animalistic part of Jean which is attracted to Logan. Marionnette rightly points out that Logan is a Mary Sue - wish fulfillment characters once typified by teenage geek Wesley Crusher steering the Enterprise - but also one who couldn't have been more irritating if he had been dipped in itching powder. What makes this character work is his barely-suppressed savagery. Make him the X-Men's de facto leader, or have him fall in lurve, and he loses what makes him good. "They've tamed you", say Jean. Too right.

Now I'm pre-disposed to be attracted to Jean Grey (obviously this is a saddo teenage fantasy, but let's run with it) but poor Famke Janssen, faced with having to act the unactable as Dark Phoenix, resorted to the most intense, leather-trousered glowering since Tom Welling got at the Red Kryptonite in Smallville. By the time Jean started her rampage on Alcatraz, the film was descending into farce. Although only one line was laugh-out-loud funny: Magneto's motivational "in Chess the pawns go first". You can't learn stuff like that out of leadership books.

And the editing was off. The sequences which would have made sense of the Bobby-Kitty-Rogue love triangle seemed to have been mislaid on the cutting room floor, and Colossus almost entirely disappeared, which may have been a mercy.

And the moral is: don't butcher Patrick Stewart half-way through a movie - the whole film visibly deflated once Jean exploded him. On the plus side, at least there's not going to be a follow up. Is there?

What I love about my country...

2006-07-03T11:18:00.000+01:00

...is that we can have a footballer who kicks an opponent in the nadgers, and when he gets sent off we all complain about how perfidious these foreigners are.

It's the kind of spirit which conquered a quarter of the world's surface, you know. And then lost it all.

Oh it hurts, how it hurts

2006-06-27T09:19:00.000+01:00

It's not the presence of my Australian niece, visiting for the first time in seven years, that's stopping me blogging. It's not the product I have to deliver by the end of August. It's not even my moving my business from our spare room to its new ...ahem... corporate headquarters.

It's the World Cup. I just can't take my eyes off it. I even watched Switzerland - Ukraine. It was actually even more tedious than you're probably imagining.

Make it stop. And while you're at it, make England stop. They play worse hoofball than Nigel Worthington has instilled in our Norwich team. Led, incidentally, by our inspirational captain, Andy Hooves, who is completely fearless apart from the nagging worry that one day he will be devoured by a lion set loose by an enraged bulletin board poster.

Work, damn you, work

2006-06-26T10:04:00.000+01:00

Mustn't blog.
Mustn't blog.
Mustn't blog.

Should I use my powers for good or evil?

2006-06-21T11:30:00.000+01:00

Ooh, I just can't decide...

So what do you do with Iron Man?

2006-06-12T10:07:00.000+01:00

Iron Man was the character most affected by Stan Lee's early flirtation with right wing politics. Lee gave Tony Stark a set of personality attributes so dislikeable that I can't understand how they could have been thought of as heroic. Consider:

He was an arms manufacturer. Given he had to make a suit of electronic armour, it did make sense to have Tony Stark work in one of the most morally-dubious professions, but it was the Cold War and early Vietnam which made this choice possible. Arms manufacturers were patriotic heroes fully signed up to the fight against godless Communism and not, say, professional murderers.

He was an industrialist. Subtly different, he was running a company which, when environmentalism gained ground as a political force, would clearly have some questions to answer about pollution and its contribution to global warming.

He was stinking rich. Never the most lovable attribute, and not one to make you feel especially sympathetic when he was having emotional difficulties bedding his secretary.

He was a womaniser. I suppose Stan Lee must have had the now ultra-sleazy playboy caricature in mind when he gave Stark his reputation for seduction. Apparently this was admired in the early sixties, but it's now more likely to be regarded as a sign of a pathological hatred of women.

These negative attributes are perhaps the reason why Iron Man has flip-flopped so much over the years. Numerous writers have struggled with this character who
Doppelgaenger cruelly but accurately describes as "the lame drunk Marvel one". While Iron Man could be heroic, writers adopted strange contortions in order to redeem Tony Stark.

First to go was the arms manufacturing. Stark had a fit of conscience, and got out of the killing business. At one point, he became a leader of the opposition in his own company, trying to stop nasty board members from pitching Stark International back into its old ways. Believable? Hardly.

Once pollution became an issue in the early seventies, we had a very strange story where Stark had a meeting with fellow industrialists where he tried to persuade them to adopt environmentalism after Namor had caused a major incident by smashing a polluting oceanic outlet pipe. I was left wondering why Stark didn't put his own house in order rather than talking to other companies. Not to mention his habit of jetting off for a party in Monte Carlo every time a writer was looking for a story introduction.

Therapy culture became big in the 1970s and, in one of the most convincing plotlines Marvel ever came up with, Stark became an alcoholic, simultaneous resisting both S.H.I.E.L.D. plans to take over Stark International (back into the arms' business, obviously) and the allure of a bottle of 18 year old McTickle's Glenseizure Scotch Malt. He also met Bethany Cabe, the only woman Stark ever looked vaguely like settling down with. Womanising just never became unacceptable enough to change that part of Stark's behaviour.

In the eighties, after an endless second battle with the bottle, Stark (having unconvincingly and carelessly managed to lose all of his old multi-billion dollar corporation) headed off to California to start a new, exciting, dynamic company up. This was a quite successful attempt to make Stark's business activities look exciting, dot.com a decade early, but was somewhat marred by the worst mullet ever to appear in four-colour format.

In the nineties, well, Marvel had a corporate nervous breakdown and nothing made sense any more. Two words: Teen Tony.

After an amazing escape from cancellation, Iron Man settled down into a pleasant mediocrity, but nothing amounted to much until after 9/11. In a brave-but-foolish plotline, Stark became Defence Secretary (Americans, please forgive me if I can't remember his exact title) in Bush's administration, making the startling and unlikely promise that his technology could stop anyone ever dying in war. Disingenuously brushing aside the question of how he could hold such a position without being an ideologically committed neocon, we, and the writers, were left to puzzle out how Stark could be a full-time politician and Iron Man simultaneously.

All this fascinating silliness ended with the Disassembled storyline, when Iron Man was handed over to Warren Ellis and Adi Granov on the understanding that they would produce an issue without fail every single blue moon. By the time an uninspired relaunch had petered out, Marvel, in its Civil War storyline, is again starting to make good use of Stark, as they show him for what he is: a ruthless businessman who, if his interests are threatened, will suck up to the powers-that-be until he runs out of slurp. Despite the alarming sight of Peter Parker becoming Tony Stark's mini-me, it's the best portrayal of Stark in years. Pity it's taking place in the Avengers, and not Iron Man.

He's a scummy man

2006-06-12T08:56:00.000+01:00

Every time I see his preening, self-loving face on television I feel like tipping off the tabloids.

He's a celebrity chef now, though when I knew of him, way back when, he was just a chef. A scummy chef. The type of chef who would betray his wife by having an affair and then pressurise his mistress into having an abortion. The mistress, clearly not an innocent party herself, was a purely-platonic friend of mine. It was a nasty business.

I wouldn't tell the tabloids, obviously. She would suffer far more than him, and, if spun correctly, he could even come out of it looking like a smouldering sex god, so to speak. Which he's not. He's a scummy man, and I object to his irritating face popping up unexpectedly in my living room and fawning interviews with him dropping on my doormat. I just object to it.

She's not my friend any more, by the way. My purely-platonic friend froze me out once I fell in love with another woman. There's a Julia Roberts plot in all of this somewhere...

Three posts about Gumilyov part three

2006-06-05T09:39:00.000+01:00

Agamemnon's Warrior

It was several years before I had the slightest idea what Gumilyov might have been thinking about when he wrote this one.

A strange and fearful question
Oppresses my uncertain soul:
How can you live when the son of Atreus has died,
Has died on a bed of roses?

Why, I wondered, would Agamemnon's warrior have even the slightest difficulty outliving his king? Granted, Gumilyov was a monarchist (not exactly my favourite political philosophy), but surely the whole point of monarchy is that "the king is dead, long live the king"?

It was only once I needed to think about such matters that I noticed the similarity between kingship and fatherhood, and wondered if the grief that the warrior feels is for the loss of his father. Kings get replaced. Fathers don't.

My father had all the medical knowledge you might expect from a working class Gateshead lad, and an implacable (and possibly inheritable) stubbornness. As he developed prostate problems, his reaction was not to think about his problems, not to seek a doctor, and to refuse any offer of help.

What was needed was someone to tell him, probably using medium levels of swearing, that he was a stupid bastard who was going to die and leave my mother widowed. An appeal to chivalry would probably have shocked him to the doctor's and this whole sad business could have been avoided.

This conversation, which we never had, ranks #1 on my all-time list of things I wished I'd said (anyone who doesn't have regrets about anything hasn't, in my opinion, made enough mistakes yet - just wait), and the reason we never had it comes back to fatherhood and kingship.

All that we dreamed of always and everywhere
Our longing and fears
All was reflected, like in clear water
In his calm eyes

Children look up to their fathers, and I had never shaken the habit of trusting more in my father's judgment than my own. He had in the previous ten years been right many more times than I had. At thirty, I deferred to his opinion, even when I knew he was wrong, and said nothing.

Ineffable power lived in his muscles
A saga - in the curve of his knees
He was beautiful, like a cloud
The golden lord of Mycenae.

By the time he took himself to hospital he was almost dead and, though he survived, his kidneys were damaged and his bladder ruined. He lived his last few years in misery.

And by inviting my mother - against her instincts and my father's wishes - to visit me in Scotland, I ensured that he was utterly alone when he had his stroke. He smashed up some rooms, defecated on the floor and collapsed on his bedroom carpet, to be found a day later when my mother got the Fire Brigade to break into our house.

As drove up from Luton Airport through a weird electric storm with Britney Spears' wretched One More Time on continual loop in my brain, it struck me that there was no longer any need to rush. That my father had died. Without wanting to sound like a senseless filly again, I was right. He had died in hospital a few minutes earlier.

Later, at four in the morning and completely unable to sleep, it seemed strange that, of all the nights in my life, I should be living this one. The one where I was without my father for the first time.

Who am I? A fragment of ancient wrongs
A javelin, fallen in the grass
The leader of nations, the Atreid, is dead
While I, a nobody, am alive.

You survive these things: grief has a long half-life, but it isn't forever. After seven years, I try not to concentrate on his last day, though I fear the unresolvable horror, of never knowing how much he experienced, the absolute absence of consolation, has sunk into the bloodstream of my family. I do not feel primarily responsible for his death - any dispassionate analysis shows that my father had many chances to let the Health Service help him, including at the very end, when he could have dialled 999. But to do so would have been again the grain of a lifetime spent avoiding doctors. My father was a fool.

Even so, there's plenty of secondary responsibility to go round, and I now see how Agamemnon's warrior could have felt this way:

The clear waters of deep lakes beckon me
The dawn looks on with reproach
It's hard, hard to bear the shame
Of living, after losing your king

Manchester: the paradise that was punk

2006-05-30T08:48:00.000+01:00

Don't believe the contrarians, johnny-come-latelies and non-believers. Punk wasn't invented in Brooklyn by the New York Dolls. Bloodsucking fashion parasite Malcolm McLaren's tacky Kings Road shop had no part to play. Johnny Rotten was still an alterboy at Saint Patrick's Church in Leatherhead on the day it all began.

How do I know? Because I, Paul Morley, chronicler and fan, journalist and journal-ist, so to speak, was there that night, the third of October 1973, in the Dog's Trotter in Rawtenstall when deviant glamsters The Spleen Explodes crashed over, phlegming and swearing, into fully fledged punkdom. In the first eight bars of "I'll kick your fucking teeth in (and you'll thank me for it)" a terrible beauty, a terrible wonderful beauty, a terrible wonderful portentious beauty, a terrible wonderful portentious beautiful beauty, had been born. Manchester, a poor bombed out hulking industrial shell of a city, was remade as a zealously reshaped cultural cradle. Buzzcocks, The Smiths, Joy Division, The Stone Roses, Oasis, all would suck at the teat of mother-Manchester, their creations were born in the fiery furnace, the fur 'n' ace as it were, of the Western World's cultural capital.

- - -

And though there were only nine in the audience that night, what luminaries they were destined to become, as they stumbled out to the kebab shop in their tartan troos and bondage bowlers (McLaren and Vivienne Westwood sucked the marrow from the skeleton of fashion, but it was Manchester's bones they slurped). Like disciples from the foot of Jesus, they rushed off to form the bands which rebuilt civilisation. Howard Devoto. Morrissey. Siouxsie Sue. Ian Brown. Ian Curtis. Zenab Badawi. Harry Hill. Cardinal Josef Ratzinger. And, humbled and awed, me.

- - -

The Beatles have an undeserved reputation as a Liverpool band. But Liverpool, shallow and floppy and Mecca for silly band names, could never have brought forth such genius. No, the Beatles were Manchester through-and-through. John Lennon's cynicism vomited out the humiliations of his days as a bootblack on Bacup High Street. The real life Eleanor Rigby was a washer-woman at Paul McCartney's prep school in Chorlton-cum-Hardy. And what, other than his ancestral streets of Droylsden, could have inspired George Harrison to write the masterpiece that is Here comes the sun?

Ringo was a scouser, though.

- - -

Ian Curtis - sad, lost, Ian - was clinical mastermind, howling vacuum, bawling fool, all of them, none of them, no I think I've lost my grasp of this sentence.

The last time I saw Ian was outside the toilets of a Joy Division gig in the Brickmaker's Guild Memorial Hall in Pendlebury. Three weeks before his suicide, he was already tiptoeing down death row.

'Ian,' I said, 'some see you as tortured genius and revolutionary thinker, some as tuneless, Nazi-fixated mumbler, but I think you're more than that. Aren't you both messiah and traitor, a Jesus Iscariot if you like, who'll both show us the promised land but betray us on the road? Aren't you saver and enslaver?' I grasped him by the lapels. 'Aren't you a God walking the Earth as a mortal? Aren't you? Aren't you?'

'Out of the way, mate,' he said, 'I need a slash.'

Stan Lee's politics: dodgy or what?

2006-05-22T09:26:00.000+01:00

Stan Lee's propagandist past is not something we Marvel readers like to dwell on. It's easy to find overt political references in Lee's early superhero comics, with The Hulk and Iron Man being the worst offenders.

Here in Fantastic Four #1, for instance, we find Sue Storm nailing her colours firmly to the McCarthyite right's mast as she unwittingly sums up John F Kennedy's entire space policy.

And here, in Hulk #1, we find a disgruntled Soviet scientist berating Nikita Khrushchev, the notorious shoe-wielding Communist Party leader, for his sanctioning of weapons tests which had temporarily increased his head (the scientist, I mean, not Khrushchev) to eight times its normal girth.

I'd like to think that Lee is slyly criticising the US government here, since the main plot revolves around Bruce Banner being turned into the Hulk after a weapons test disaster. But there isn't much evidence of subtle thinking in the rest of this book, so we're probably safe to savour the irony.

These books, plot, characters and politics, are archaic to the point of kitsch. Communism is gone, but if it wasn't, it's not likely many heads would now be turned by this propagandising, so does it matter?

I think it does. Lee is one of the most loved people in comicdom. For all the complaints about self-promotion, how (allegedly) many of his ideas were those of his collaborators, and his often-cloying writing style, you can't get away from the Man's achievements. If he had written nothing else, the first hundred issues of Amazing Spider-Man would still make Lee one of the most important figures in twentieth century popular culture. Add in the Fantastic Four, Hulk, Avengers, X-Men, Dr Strange, Silver Surfer and Iron Man, and you have a measure of just how much he achieved in the Sixties.

But alongside it, he's producing aggressive political material aimed at demonising a political enemy. In publications aimed primarily at children. Isn't that something to worry about?

There are a few ways we can excuse or condone this politicking.

This stuff is so heavy-handed you can't take it seriously. Irrelevant, really. It's the intent, the reason Lee wrote those stories, that matters. Whether it had any effect on the minds of his readers is a secondary consideration.

It was all a long time ago, America was different then, the country grew up, etc. Regularly used to explain aberrant past behaviour, this explanation often pops up when we see footage of Joe McCarthy and his Senate henchmen destroying the careers of anyone vaguely left-wingish. This was a Pleasantville America, naive and young and given to foolish ways before the sixties revolution woke it up. Personally, I don't buy it. The Second World War generation had lived through the Great Depression, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Korea. That generation were not, couldn't have been, such political naifs.

Communism was nasty. Even if it was propaganda, the cause merited it. I have some sympathy with this view, as I don't think propaganda in a good cause is automatically bad. But it's difficult to stretch this view to accommodate, say, the Iron Man origin issue, where Tony Stark becomes Iron Man in order to trash an oppressive Vietnamese despot. It's all in the same vein as The Green Berets, John Wayne's laughable 1968 movie where Big Leggy himself saves Vietnam from the evil commy invaders, a plot so far divorced from reality that it appears to have been beamed in from Neptune.

To make Lee's position even worse, a few years later he was producing the Silver Surfer, where an Earth-condemned shiny-headed alien surfed around babbling like a peacenik on the lines of why can't these humans know love? before, this being comics, ramming five hundred thousand volts of Power Cosmic into the solar plexus of the villain-of-the-month. Lee, by then in his late thirties, had apparently experienced a Damascene conversion and morphed into a Haight-Ashbury hippy. Rather coincidentally, so had his readers.

And that seems to be the common thread in Lee's politics. In the censorious early sixties, Lee was happy to write like a right-wing demagogue. The public mood was hostile to comics, and toeing the party line made life easier. As comics readers grew in age and maturity, Lee adjusted his stories accordingly. But what sort of writer propagandises for both sides?

For me, I doubt if Stan Lee was ever the Cold Warrior these early comics might suggest. Without any evidence of Lee's true political views, I guess that he is probably quite apolitical, and it was this lack of belief which led to the opportunism which Lee showed in these storylines and the blatant disregard for the effects they may have had.

Whichever way you slice it, Stan Lee doesn't come out of this very well, and perhaps that's why we don't talk about them much. Because this is Stan Lee, and most of us don't want to say bad things about him.

Moving stuff

2006-05-20T17:47:00.000+01:00

Too busy to post. Unpacking boxes. Pulling back muscles. Watching semi-finals of Eurovision Song Contest. Reading old copies of Dracula Lives. Back on Monday.

It's all gone quiet

2006-05-08T14:51:00.000+01:00

Moved house, broadband connection died. It's like the Middle Ages over here.

Back in a few days.

Will the real Alexandra Frean please stand up?

2006-04-29T11:02:00.000+01:00

Alexandra Frean sang breathy French vocals on the Blue Aeroplanes' Honey I, and, with only her sensuous voice to go by, I built up an impression of a sexy, stately, if slightly haughty, woman, all Paris fashions and full lips and dark eyes and Gallic shrugs.

Obviously, this is based on no evidence whatsoever, as the Blue Aeroplanes don't exactly hang out with Parisienne aristos, so it's at least as likely that Frean was a Bristol University Sociology student who'd learnt a passable accent during a gap year stint at the Montmartre branch of McDonalds, but my mind wanders where my mind likes to wander. Frean must surely be svelte and urbane and touched with a certain froideur.

So I'm reading Private Eye, a satirical magazine which likes to publish scurrilous rumours, and guess who pops up?

'Bizarre scenes on a recent press trip to South Africa arranged by Freeplay, the wind-up radio firm. Among the Fleet Street hacks in attendance was Ms Alexandra Frean, social affairs correspondent of the Times, who startled her hosts by continually taking photos of "Mrs Teddy-Weddy", her beloved cuddly toy, in various locations - on the hotel tortoise, next to some penguins, perching on the edge of Table Mountain, etc.

Most toe-curling of all was a visit to Robben Island, with a tour of the old jail led by a former prisoner. A solemn and serious occasion? Not, apparently, for Frean, who sat Mrs Teddy-Weddy in various poses (behind cell doors, behind bars, in the middle of the exercise-year et) - to the squirming embarrassment of fellow-hacks and horrified amazement of the tour guide.'

All right, this could be a made up story (Private Eye regularly gets sued), and it could be there is more than one Alexandra Frean - though Frean isn't what I'd call a common surname. But they might be the same person. Could my cool, elegant chanteuse actually be someone who takes photos of Mrs Teddy-Weddy in Nelson Mandela's old prison? Oh, the disillusionment.

Though there is just the possibility that Frean, despite her teddy-bear habit, is nevertheless cultured and chic, and that inside every stylish bohemian there is a woman with a burning desire to snap her cuddly toys in famous places. I find it all strangely reassuring.

Thailand

2006-04-29T09:43:00.000+01:00

Is travelling dangerous? I may have slightly unnerved a reader who noticed that two of my near-death experiences were in Thailand. Not that the near-drowning was specifically Thailand related - I could have had the same result if I went paddling off Great Yarmouth during a North Sea storm. With added hypothermia. That typhoon, though, was a moment of genuine weirdness. Once the ferries were cancelled, the island got cut off and it became clear that every other westerner on the island was a total druggie. It like the cast of Lost had headed en masse down to the heroin plane for a mass indulgence.

And even the atypical pheumonia wasn't Thailand's fault, as I caught the damn thing in Hong Kong, and just happened to be in Bangkok by the time hospitalisation became desirable. For which I'm truly thankful, as the Vichaiyut Hospital was a fabulous place to be horribly ill, with much better treatment than would have been available in, say, the back-end of Sichuan province, China.

OK, my travelling days were a wee bit pocked by unfortunate incidents like car-crashes, incapacitating back conditions, sleeping under alpine hedges during thunderstorms and seeing people (well, one person) die. But it's always been like that. I'm a person who could declare, seeing the snow falling, that I wasn't playing football as "you could break your leg out there", get talked into it and then snap my ankle. I drank nail varnish remover as a baby. I'm on at least nodding acquaintance with most of the mistakes in the book. And probably not, therefore, a good person to be handing out advice.

Another reason to be a bit wary of giving travel advice is that I haven't backpacked in over a decade, everything will have changed and I'll sound like one of those old hippies who used to say that the Pudding Shop in Istanbul was the place to head to, man, when by the time I got there it had as much ambience as the BHS canteen in St Stephen's Street, Norwich. Though it's probably back to being a trendy hang-out again. See? I'm a dinosaur.

Notwithstanding my exposure to tropical diseases, I loved Thailand, and I'd head back there in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't spend much time in Bangkok, and I'd definitely stay the hell away from the travellers' ghetto, Khao San Road, if only because horrible, nightmarish things happen to me every time I go near the place. Concretey Pattaya didn't impress me either. I'd stay away from the sex trade, not only because it's morally indefensible but because HIV is rife. I've never taken drugs, but I wouldn't do it in Thailand anyway. You'll find plenty of travellers who'll insist there's no chance of trouble, but they're a biassed sample. You won't find the ones who got caught because they've been locked up in some unappealing prisons.

Other than that, the whole country - jungles, ruins, beaches - was gorgeous. My favourite places were Chiang Mai, Sukhothai, the Khymer ruins near Khon Kaen (whose name I've sadly forgotten, Ayutthaya and Koh Samui. The people are friendly, the language is sonorous, there's endless piles of tropical fruit (including the noxious Durian fruit, which isn't so much grown as plucked from Satan's backside), the ruins are sad and stately and the beaches really are white. You'll love it, Paul.

The times I nearly died

2006-04-25T08:44:00.000+01:00

Location: A boating holiday in Brittany, France
Nemesis: Decapitation
Blow-by-blow: After some less-than-impressive navigation by my father, we were stuck on a sandbank. Another boat was towing us off, only the metal fixture gave way, whiplashing between my ear and shoulder
How was it? Exciting. It introduced an enticing danger into my up-till-then mundane life
Valuable life lesson learned: Stay away from ropes under tension

Location: The A1M near Scotch Corner, North Yorkshire
Nemesis: Car crash
Blow-by-blow: Our hired Ford Orion, for no obvious reason, went out of control at 70 mph. We arced our way back and forward across the motorway before hurtling into the grassy central reservation and pitching into a ditch. We ended up in Catterick Garrison Hospital with nothing worse than medium whiplash and a certain amount of shock.
How was it? Time did genuinely seem to slow down, meaning it felt like we were doing 20 mph.
Valuable life lesson learned: Plenty. Don't get in a Ford Orion. Don't take your shoes off while you're in the car. And if my life is going to end suddenly, my last words will probably be "fucking Nora".

Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Nemesis: Atypical pneumonia
Blow-by-blow: I had something like bird flu years before it became trendy. Hallucinations! Panic attacks! An armful of antibiotics! Lung damage! And all on Christmas Day.
How was it? Shitter than a shit date in Shitsville with Jimmy the Shit.
Valuable life lesson learned: It's easier to get into a foreign hospital by waving your credit card than by waving travel insurance. That'll do nicely.

Location: Koh Phangan, Thailand
Nemesis: Drowning
Blow-by-blow: I was so enjoying the head-height waves that I didn't notice I was being pulled out to sea. I just about made it back.
How was it? A fantastic, adrenaline-pumping adventure. It was only once I was lying on the beach being sick than I considered it all could have ended unhappily.
Valuable life lesson learned: Don't go swimming in a typhoon.

Location: An office in Edinburgh, Scotland
Nemesis: A cheese and lettuce sandwich
Blow-by-blow: One second I was munching my lunch, the next, a carbohydrate-fat mixture was firmly lodged in my throat and I was making a noise like a sea-lion being castrated, wondering if any of my colleagues might know the Heimlich manoeuvre.
How was it? Much, much less funny than when I heard about how Mama Cass was supposed to have died.
Valuable life lesson learned: Chew your food properly, silly.

Brooklyn Bridge

2006-04-16T07:19:00.000+01:00

Soviet writers loved technology. No third-rate Communist writer of the thirties or forties would have felt complete without praising output levels in tractor factories or paeons to pig iron production in the five-year plan, works interesting now only for their humour value.

Although its subject is a bridge, Mayakovsky's poem "Brooklyn Bridge", while bubbling with enthusiasm, never looks ridiculous. Mayakovsky, who wrote the poem during a six month visit to the USA in 1925, writes as a tourist lost in wonder viewing the marvel of his age.

There is a certain irony in a staunch Communist acclaiming the technology of the ultra-capitalist United States, and Mayakovsky, never one to shirk a problem, approaches it in his first lines -

Give, Coolidge,
a shout of joy!
I too will spare no words
Blush at my praise
Go red as our flag

He then launches into a full-on acolade, using, as he too often does, a military metaphor.

As a crazed believer enters a church,
retreats into a monastery cell, austere and plain
so I, in graying evening haze
humbly set foot on Brooklyn Bridge.
As a conqueror presses into a city all shattered,
on cannon with muzzles craning high as a giraffe
so drunk with glory, eager to live
I clamber, in pride, upon Brooklyn Bridge

If I worked for the New York Tourist Board, I'd consider making the next lines into a slogan -

As a foolish painter plunges his eye,
sharp and loving, into a museum madonna
so I, from the near skies bestrewn with stars,
gaze at New York through the Brooklyn Bridge

I've never been to New York, but I imagine his description of the quietness, even ghostliness, of the city no longer applies

New York, heavy and stifling till night,
has forgotten its hardships and height;
and only the household ghosts
ascend in the lucid glow of its windows
Here the elevateds drone softly.
And only their gentle droning
tells us: here trains are crawling and rattling
like dishes being cleared into a cupboard

Mayakovsky now drops in one of his other preoccupations, how he and his era will look to succeeding generations. This angle gives Mayakovsky's work a sharp immediacy as, from the grave, he directly addresses the reader. He invokes the dinosaurs as a metaphor for mortality, another recurrent theme.

If the end of the world comes
and chaos smash our planet to bits,
and what remains will be this
bridge, rearing above the dust of destruction;
then, as huge ancient lizards are rebuilt
from bones finer then needles, to tower in museums,
so, from this bridge, a geologist of the centuries
will succeed in recreating our contemporary world.
He will say - that paw of steel
once joined the seas and the prairies;
from this spot, Europe rushed to the West,
scattering to the wind Indian feathers

Mayakovsky now moves on to describing his own, ultra-modern world

By the cables of electric strands,
I recognize the era succeeding the steam age -
here men had ranted on radio
Here men had ascended in planes.
For some, life here had no worries;
for others, it was a prolonged and hungry howl.
From this spot, jobless men
leapt headling into the Hudson

A bit of a research error here, as the jobless men would have needed exceptionally strong leg muscles to plunge into the Hudson from the East River-spanning Brooklyn Bridge.

And he brings things to an end by namechecking himself, standing on the Bridge composing a poem.

I see: here stood Mayakovsky,
stood, composing verse, syllable by syllable.
I stare as an Eskimo gapes at a train,
I seize on it as a tick fastens to an ear.
Brooklyn Bridge -
yes...it's quite a thing.

Now I no longer writer poetry, but if I ever make it to New York, I might just heading up to the bridge to compose a line or two, because I don't have too many heroes whose footsteps I'd like to follow, and it would indeed be quite a thing.

The Bedbug and Selected Poetry

Flight cancellation

2006-04-10T09:11:00.000+01:00

The Blue Aeroplanes are beginning to annoy me. Granted, I'm irked after only finding out they cancelled their Norwich Waterfront gig after I had shipped grandma halfway across the county for an evening's babysitting / deep sleeping, but you could argue the cancellation was because of poor advanced ticket sales, something which might have been avoided if we'd bought advanced tickets.

But I also failed to see them last month in a concert in that London because they'd sold out. What sort of band sells out some gigs and cancels others in the same tour? It makes no sense.

But that's not what really irks me about the Blue Aeroplanes. It all goes back to a calamitous gig in Scotland in the nineties. The exact venue has been lost in the mists of time - my wife thinks it was in Glasgow, but I remember it being Edinburgh's unpleasantly smelling Venue.

Anyway, on this particular night, the Aeroplanes' guitarist, substitute vocalist and Tim Henman-lookalike, Rodney Allen, decided to come out on stage as a blustering, monomanic football fan, telling us between every song about the love of his life, international business conglomerate Manchester United.

Now there is a time and place for hearing complete strangers witter on inanely about football, and that's why I go to Carrow Road. I go to Blue Aeroplanes gigs to hear Anti-pretty and Spitting Out Miracles and Broken and Mended. I want swooping guitars and caustic, sarcastic lyrics spat out from Gerard Langley's withering, pitying face. I don't want to be lectured about the world's premier glory-seeker magnet by some twat from Bradford-on-Avon. And he went on and on and on, all evening.

Rodney's display of overt English-wankerness was putting him in some danger of a kicking - and I think here lies the proof that this gig was in Edinburgh, not Glasgow, as behaviour like this in the West of Scotland is generally rewarded with multiple lacerations and an overnight stay in Stobhill Hospital - and to top it all, he came back on-stage after the gig and announced, utterly rat-arsed, he was going to entertain us with his stand-up comedy routine. He was then led off-stage by a sympathetic band member with the immortal line, "come on, Rodney, you plonker".

What was needed here was a spot of Mark E Smith style "don't let the doorknob ram you up the jacksy on the way out, Rodney" sacking from the Aeroplanes' poet-in-chief, Gerard Langley. Sadly it didn't happen and anyway the Blue Aeroplanes, who had been up there as my favourite band of all, were already well into a precipitous decline. Each album was substantially worse than its predecessor, until by Rough Music Langley was writing songs about going down the pub. But Sham 69 justifiably have that micro-market to themselves. And while CD Universe puts Rough Music as the Blue Aeroplanes' last album, it sadly wasn't. In 2000 there was Cavaliers and Roundheads, which was one-paced lo-fi muttering bulked out with witless maundering fretwank, useful only for clearing blockages in the middle ear.

And that seemed to be that for the Blue Aeroplanes, until this year's didn't-see-that-coming decision of EMI to sign them, release a new album and re-release Swagger, the album which first persuaded me I was in the presence of genius. It also, by appearing in the record collection of my new girlfriend, propelled me down the road to true love. In a world then stalked by hordes of Madonna, Sinitta and Wet Wet Wet fans, I took her good taste as a sign of cosmic compatibility.

At the time, it was commonly accepted that the pallid skin and lack of musculature found in most indie kids indicated underlying hormonal imbalances which surely made child-creation unlikely, but it turned out not to be the case. So we now have two children, one of whom at four years old listens obsessively to Elliott Smith and knows more Long Winters lyrics than I do, so we have to consider the possibility that indieness is an inherited trait. A few more generations and we could be a new species.

I could review the new album, Altitude, of course, but - guess what? - I was going to buy it at the gig they never turned up to. Since I can't review gig or album, I'm going to let you, the public, decide.

The Blue Aeroplanes gig was

a) like witnessing the birth of a strange, beautiful new species on an alien planet in a pulsating nebula
b) a humdrum stew of guitary sludge which was marginally better than the alternative, Coronation Street
c) Buttock-clenchingly embarrassing

The highlight of the evening was

a) Glittering arrangements of classic songs punctuated by intriguing glimpses of new ones
b) Nicking a plectrum when nobody was looking
c) Hurling up six pints of Broadside and a Chilli Doner Kebab in the Wensum

Wojtek Dmochowski danced like

a) Nureyev performing Swan Lake
b) Your Uncle Jimmy at a wedding reception in Chester-le-Street Working Men's Club
c) Bez

Whoever is responsible for booking Blue Aeroplanes venues doesn't know their arse from their

a) shoulder
b) wrist
c) elbow

Rodney Allen acted like

a) a twat
b) a twat
c) a twat

Young Huns go for it

2006-03-27T08:53:00.000+01:00

The Fall of the Roman Empire - Peter Heather

The great thing about explaining the fall of the Roman Empire is that it inspires almost everyone to have a crack. Peter Heather doesn't actually mention the theory that it was all down to the Romans becoming mentally infirm after drinking from lead water pipes, but it's safe to say that doesn't pass the two questions any theory needs to explain. Why did the Empire fall in fifth century, rather than earlier or later? And why was it only the Western Empire which fell? (The Eastern half continued on, eventually becoming the Byzantine Empire, which Heather feels to be a successor state, and who am I to argue?)

These two questions knock out many favourite theories. Roman licentiousness can't be to blame, as the first century emperors excelled at this - performing a selection of their favourite violin solos while the capital got torched, promoting horses to consul and poisoning each other's figs. The later emperors, by contrast, were a much less lively bunch.

The second knocks out the I blame the Christians argument of Edward Gibbon. Which is sad, because pointing out that the advent of Christianity as a state religion coincided with the Empire's decline had good irritation value. Saint Augustine wrote City of God while the Vandal army was camped out in the suburbs of Hippo. This book started a backslide of Christian thought: having been more than happy to embrace the Empire, they were now starting to put some theological distance between Church and State. But the Eastern Empire was more religious and Christian than the West, and it survived.

Peter Heather refreshingly takes the direct approach, which is that the Western Empire fell because it was overcome by a seemingly endless stream of mainly Germanic invaders. As provinces fell, the Imperial treasury became empty, its ability to pay its armies diminished, and the crisis intensified.

Heather identifies the Huns, steppe-dwelling horsemen, as the catalyst behind all the main crises in the century long fall. A build up in the population of German tribes had increased their danger to the empire. The arrival of the Huns on the Volga led to the collapse of various (German) Gothic kingdoms in the Ukraine. Survivors fled south over the Danube. Conflict with the Empire forced amalgamation of these tribes, and the defeat by these Visigoths of the Romans at Adrianople was a turning point. With Valens, the Emperor, dead, it's difficult not to see Adrianople as the beginning of the end.

But the end would be a long time coming. The Visigothic War was ended, only for a worse Germanic crisis to erupt in the decade after 400. Another Visigothic war in 401-402 was worsened after group of Vandals, Huns and Alans walked over the frozen Rhine on the portentious 31 December 406. In 410 the Visigoths, led by Alaric, sacked Rome, though it was apparently a comparatively civilised affair. Peter Heather sees the arrival of the Huns in Hungary as having sparked off this crisis, but he doesn't appear to have any evidence that they were there before 425.

We then move on to Aetius, the "last of the Romans". He is traditionally seen as an untouchable hero after his defeat of Attila's Huns in 451, but as someone (can't remember who, sorry) once said, he was only the last of the Romans because he didn't leave any Romans to come after him. In particular, Heather lets Aetius off lightly for signing a ridiculous peace treaty which let Geiseric's Vandals stay in Morocco. They were then able to wait till Aetius went off cruising for Germans in Gaul and then marched into Carthage, taking the Romans' most financially important provinces. For all Aetius' heroism against Attila and his fruitless plans to retake North Africa, it was this decision which did for the Empire. Without the excess finances to buy large armies, the Western Empire was pretty much sunk.

The disappearance of the Huns after Attila's Huns as marking another stage in Rome's decline. Aetius had used the Huns to keep the Germanic tribes in check. With the formidable Roman army much diminished, modern Britain, France, Spain and north Africa had been lost. This left only the Eastern Empire which could recover the situation in the West, but once Anthemius' fleet had been lost off Carthage, the East was bankrupt and the West was finished. A few years later in 476, the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was pushed into retirement and the Western Empire was over.

Another factor in the fall was the amalgamation of the Germany tribes into ever-larger groups. Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and Franks were recent inventions, as groups of invaders realised they would rather hang together than hang separately.

Peter Heather has a fun and informal (well, for a historian) style. Traditional historians probably wouldn't have approved of Heather's amusement at the Roman habit of inviting barbarians to banquets and then sticking the fadge on them, but you've got to admire someone who can come up with a heading like "Thrace: the final frontier". Definitely worth reading.

To the Editor of the Pebble Lake Review

2006-03-20T10:43:00.000Z

Dear Ms Auchter

My knowledge is uncertaine in these times, and I truly know not whether thine appelatione is Mrs or Miss; and thus have I settled on Ms, though in truth I find it unseemlye and strange, as it seemeth to lack a vowel for proper pronunciatione.

I pray thou would consider my poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for publicatione in thine esteemed journal, the Pebble Lake Review. My poem is a strange, forsaken tale, whereby a mariner slays with an arrow an albatross, a veritable pious bird of good omen. The mariner thereby is doomed by a curse to walk the Earthe as a phantasm, encountering such ungodly beings as a Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate before his final redemptione. He learns finally to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth.

Yours hopefullye

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Dear Samuel

Sounds like some shit about vampires to me. Bet it rhymes as well. Fuck off.

A Auchter, Editor

(Carter's Little Pill)

Hundredth post paralysis crisis

2006-03-20T10:27:00.000Z

Can't think of anything suitably momentous for my hundredth blog post.

Instead, here's an idiot with a Norfolk accent.

Psychbloke disappears

2006-03-16T14:04:00.000Z

Nothing to see there any more. And I can't even say nice things about it without looking like a bit of a hypocrite. He was threatening to kill off a blog as part of his multi-crossover "Crisis on Infinite Blogs", as well.

Come back, you bugger.

Between the dead and the unborn

2006-03-13T08:53:00.000Z

My eldest daughter finally asked me the question I've been quietly dreading since her birth, four and a half years ago. Have you got a Daddy? Having time to prepare an answer isn't the same as having a good one, and the best I could manage was a feeble euphemism: he isn't with us any longer. She just brushed this aside - where does he live then? - and I was stuck with the old, awful question. What do you tell them about death?

Three and a half decades ago, faced with a similar problem, my mother had an easier task. When we die, she said, we go to a place called heaven, where Jesus lives with all our loved ones. You won't die until you're old - and that won't be for a very long time - and when you do, you'll be happy. This original message was reinforced with a few years at Catholic school, which taught me about heaven and hell and purgatory and the importance of doing what your priest says.

It took me until I was eleven or twelve to see through these sugary lies, and many years to stop feeling angry about it. Those teachers had taught me that my soul was like a piece of blotting paper, black and vile until it was turned white by confession. They asserted the existence of these elements of their theology with the same sureness that they used to told me that the Romans once conquered Britain, or that two plus two equals four. Unable to understand that personal belief is not the same as verifiable fact, that belief without evidence is just hope, these charlatans, blotting paper and all, had used the classroom as a forum for my indoctrination.

And now, perhaps for the first time, I was seeing how easy a religious white lie could be how bleak atheism can seem. My father is gone forever, and I will never see him again. That's hard to accept as an adult, but to a child?

I could hardly speak anyway. My father's death was a harsh one, and all it takes is a trigger for grief to come stampeding back. When I won't sit in the chair where he used to sit. When I see the rug that covers the stains on the carpet where he lay dying. When I tend his grave.

I used to have a Daddy, I told her, but I don't any more. He isn't alive now. He died.

And my daughter just nodded her head, and started jumping on and off the settee. She doesn't mourn her grandfather, and she never will. Was it Thomas Paine who said that the greatest chasm of all is that between the dead and the unborn? Grandad will always be an abstraction, nothing more than a missing piece in the puzzle that is our parents.

My daughters will never know him. And he never knew of them. That's the worst of all.

Ian - it's pure dross

2006-03-07T14:24:00.000Z

Which of these is the most believable historical figure?

1) Ian the Magnificent, who conquered Wallachia and Rumelia with an army of fifteen thousand janissaries before returning back to Istanbul and his harem of three hundred sumptious, if neglected, beauties.

2) Ian Earp, impeccably dressed rootin'-tootin' hard-drinkin' womanisin' sharpshooter who ended the Clantons' reign of terror at the OK Corral and then rode off into the sunset with Jane Russell.

3) Sir Ian de Cherbourg, Norman Knight who sacked Tyre in the Second Crusade and later became King of Jerusalem and Bishop of Bath and Wells.

4) Ian VIII McSwegan, known as the Unpalatable, who ruled Falkirk and East Renfrewshire with a rod of iron before being accidentally disembowelled on the eve of a climactic showdown battle with his hated foe, Archie Throatslash McClintock, Tyrant-Laird of Kippielaw and Dalhousie.

My dislike of Ian

2006-03-06T09:00:00.000Z

My first name is 'Ian'. Just let that roll around your mind for a moment. What does it summon up? How about superannuated demagogue 'The Reverend' Ian Paisley? Or nasty former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith. Then there is Iain Duncan Smith, a Tory leader so unsuccessful even the Conservatives were forced to junk him before he'd even fought an election. And much, much worse is child-murderer Ian Huntley.

And while Ian gets some redemption in cricketer Ian Botham and actor Ian 'Gandalf' and 'Magneto' McKellen, there's not much doubt that Ian is a name with much to be modest about.

It's also generational. It had its moment in the sun in the sixties, when it emerged from its Scottish heartlands and enjoyed nationwide popularity, but it is now heading towards senescence. Nobody calls their son 'Ian' any more. Ian is the 'Percy' of the 2040's.

If it hadn't been for that brief period of popularity, I might have had an unusual, Celtic name, like 'Eoin' or 'Callum' is now. While most Ians got their name because their parents like it, mine is a family name, going back, as far as I can tell, to 'Ian Grant', an Invernessshire crofter in the 1800s.

It's unlovely, Ian. Any name worth only three points on a scrabble board can't avoid being plain. With two vowels and a terminator, it's little more than a grunt. I just can't think of myself as 'Ian'.

So why not use your middle name, you're probably thinking. Only - and here I think there is justification for registrars taking new parents into a sideroom and slapping them over the head with a naming dictionary - my mother wanted my second name to be that of her father.

Which was John. As in, the name of which Ian is the Scottish version. I have two identical names. I am a built-in, two-for-the-price-of-one, there's-no-escaping-me-sucker repetition.

'Ian John.' Without wishing to get into any I-blame-the-parents fingerpointing, you'd have thought my mother and father would have done a little elementary fact checking before saddling me with a redundancy for the rest of my natural. People were weird in the sixties.

I'm not sure whether familiarity breeds contempt, but my love of this name has not grown over the years. I should take up another name, but I just can't think of one that fits. I suppose I'd have to if I ever got published - the thought of seeing those three droney letters attached to my work sends a zing of alarm down my spine.

My surname, on the other hand, I love. That's because it's... oh, but that would be giving away too much in one post. It'll keep.

Scarily accurate

2006-03-01T12:19:00.000Z

Which country should you REALLY be living in?
Russia
A vast terrain filled with beautiful scenery and interesting characters. You don't trust the world. You feel they are always up to no good. Which is why you'd make a great Russian. You want life to be simple and have no desire for riches, fame or wealth - and thats the only way your government would have it.

Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Factor the drawing board

2006-02-28T09:03:00.000Z

X-Factor 1 - 3

To my surprise, I find I've been reading X-Factor.

Those who bought comics in the 1990s remember them as a long, shrill, anguished wail punctuated with staccato bursts of hysterical sobbing. At the beginning of the decade there was a huge boom in interest and comics prices, and there was an accompanying change in how Marvel viewed its product. Noticing that most comics readers were also comics collectors, it started putting out product solely with collection in mind. Crossovers! Events! Limited Edition Balsa Wood and Salami covers! You couldn't dam up the flood of this stuff.

Back then, as now, Marvel's premier product was the X-Men. It started as one comic, then New Mutants joined it. Then there was Wolverine. Excalibur. X-Force. X-Men. Generation X. X-Files (or was that something else? I think I need a fact checker). Marvel took the corporate decision to push out as much product as it could, without regard either to quality or its own long-term prospects.

Now we could argue about what the nadir of all this was - was it the splitting of the X-Men into their wretched gold and blue teams? The turgid Excalibur? The irritating, slurring, vapid Gambit? Or how about big-gunned, lumpen-headed Cable with his rough, tough, gruff, bluff attitude? Oh, it would be tempting to put Cable at the bottom of the bonfire.

Except that, for me, nothing summed up the futility of the times more than X-Factor. An initially poor concept (the original X-Men brought back together as pretend mutant hunters who are secretly helping their victims) degenerated into no concept at all. Staffed wholly by Z-List mutants desired by none of the main X-Men writers, it could have filled a niche, but no-one invented one. It just carried on, purposeless and flaccid, scripted (in the main) by people who would rather be elsewhere.

So why did I buy the damn thing? Because it took me a few years to realise I was being had. Because I was a collector as well as a reader. Because I loved all things mutant. Because I was an idiot.

Slowly but collectively, though, we did realise how bad comics had become, and we stopped buying. Comic sales collapsed, a lot of sharp marketing professionals lost their jobs, and Marvel eventually came round to realising that you can only piss in the well so many times before it becomes undrinkable. We like to whinge, but the quality of comics is now higher than it's ever been.

Now there are certain nineties revivals that you figure are never going to happen, like a Shed Seven comeback tour or putting John Major back in Downing Street, not because it's impossible to achieve, but because you can't see why anyone would want to bother. X-Factor is surely one of those. Normally, I would expect to skip past Marvel's new X-Factor without the vaguest desire even to browse it.

Except, and it's a big except, the new X-Factor is written by Peter David. David is in the position of being one of comics' best writers, but being perenially ignored by those in the editors chairs. His Captain Marvel was a work of pure genius, funny and sad and tragic and challenging and all those things you want from a comic book but rarely get. Obviously, it sold like a dog, but quality often doesn't sell. As far as I know, Peter David doesn't get work off DC at all. Last year Joe Quesada pointedly missed David off his list of Marvel's top writers. I don't understand why. Perhaps David has tourettes or bad breath or keeps called Quesada "fat boy"?

Anyway, I'll follow Peter David anywhere, even back to his revived X-Factor (he was one of the writers on the orignal series, though, typically, I managed to miss this, instead hunkering down for the Mackie years).

It's even got a concept this time - X-Factor is an investigations agency. If I find myself cringing at the absurd Strong Guy or that ridiculous Werewolf with the Brigadoon accent, there is still the magnificently stroppy Monet and the schizophrenic Jamie Maddox to enjoy. And behind it all, Peter David carries off his story with a firm touch, and drops in just enough foreshadowing to make me want to come back for more. It's too early to say if it's good, but it's definitely not bad.

I like X-Factor. Now there are words I thought I'd never write.

No Monday post this week

2006-02-27T12:00:00.000Z

I'm currently having a close encounter with something an awful lot like the winter vomiting virus. Could someone send me a shiny plastic bowl, a half-gallon of kaolin and morphine and a new stomach?

And now back to bed.

Good job my great-great-great grandfather was illegitimate

2006-02-22T11:40:00.000Z

Now I can commit serious crimes, leave my DNA splashed all over the shop, and the fuzz'll be looking for someone with a totally different surname.

You'll never catch me, coppers.

Three posts about Gumilyov part two

2006-02-20T09:04:00.000Z

The tram that lost its way - Nikolay Gumilyov

There was a good post over at Dick Jones' Patteran Pages about two different types of poets: those who sing songs and those who like to experiment with language. It was great to hear someone say what I've been feeling for years: that he (and I may be paraphrasing slightly here) doesn't have a clue what the fuck the language experimenters are going on about. And they comprise the majority of modern poems.

In one of the comments, a reader (who I won't link to as it looks like I'm specifically getting at them, when I think this is actually a general problem) stresses the importance of metaphor while downplaying narrative: the poet deploys his equations, namely metaphors, to delineate a limited fictive apprehension of a metaphysical reality. Condensing, in my extremely humble opinion, why so many poems make no sense. Poets have gone off to a peculiar universe with a specialist vocabulary which does far more to alienate than enlighten the reader. It's not necessarily that they're wrong, just incomprehensible.

But to reject narrative? We've been telling stories since the days of eating stewed squirrel around campfires while picking lice out of each other's fur. I cannot accept it as old fashioned. You just have to use it in the right way.

The tram that lost its way is Gumilyov's best poem, one packed with metaphors and any amount of weirdness, yet bound within a narrative. Gumilyov is telling a story, and, no matter how strange things get, the reader knows where the narrator is in this strange road trip.

I was walking down an unfamiliar street
When suddenly I heard crows croaking
The sound of a lute, and distant thunder
In front of me a tram was flying

How I managed to jump on its footboard
Was a mystery to me
Even in broad daylight it left behind
A trail of fire in the air

It rushed on like a dark, winged storm
It lost its way in time's abyss
Stop, driver
Stop this tram right now

So Gumilyov has set up his premise: that he's flying off, Hogwarts style, in an enchanted tram. Those last two lines, by the way, sound much better in Russian, where they beg to be shouted.

Too late. We had already skirted a wall
We dashed through a palm-grove
Across the Neva, Nile and Seine
We clattered across three bridges

So far it's all been an enjoyable romp, but Gumilyov brings in some foreboding with his use of a living, yet dead man.

And, flashing past the window
An old beggar threw us a searching glance
It was, of course, the same one
Who died in Beirut last year

Since Gumilyov often travelled to Africa, was this beggar a real one? He now steps up the tension.

Where am I? Languid and troubled
My heart beats the reply:
Can you see that station where you can buy
A ticket to India of the Spirit?

And now we come to familiar territory: Gumilyov foreseeing his own death.

A sign...blood filled letters
Spelling "Greengrocer": here, I know
Instead of cabbages and swedes*
They sell corpses' heads

In a red shirt, with a face like an udder
The executioner chopped off my head too
It lay together with the others
Here in this slippery box, right at the bottom

Granted, he's not predicting death by bullet this time, but the red shirt and French Revolution-style mass beheading are clearly anticipating a death at the hands of revolutionaries.

And then we're back on the tram.

And in a side street, there's a wooden fence
A house with three windows and a grey lawn
Stop, driver
Stop this tram right now

We've now passed through nine of the fifteen verses, but it's only in the next verse that we get to understand what the poem is about.

Mashenka, it was here you lived and sang
And wove a carpet for me, your fiance
Where are your voice and your body now?
Could it be that you are dead?

That's the power of the narrative form. His lost love's appearance is a shock because we're not expecting it, and a vital part of storytelling is the element of surprise. The narrator now moves on to explain his loss, though we're left to ponder if Mashenka is actually dead.

How you moaned in your room
While I, my hair powdered
When to present myself to the Empress
And never saw you again

At this point, the narrator's world, with its empresses, powdered wigs and carpet-stitching fiancees, seems a long way from ours, and even a little comical. But Gumilyov was writing for his day, when these references would have seemed less strange.

Now the narrator steps out of the story to show what he has learned of the world.

Now I understand - our freedom
Is just a light that breaks through from another world
People and shadows stand by the entrance
To the planetary zoo

Gumilyov now takes the narrative back to its starting point in St Petersburg, with a horseman who could have come out of Lord of the Rings.

And suddenly a sweet, familiar wind blows
And beyond the bridge, flying towards me
Are a rider's hand in an iron glove
And two hooves of his horse

A faithful stronghold of Orthodoxy,
St Isaac's Dome is etched in the sky,
There I will hold a service for Mashenka's health
And a requiem for myself.

To finish it off, Gumilyov has four infinitely sad lines.

But still my heart is filled with gloom
It's difficult to breathe, and painful to live.
Mashenka, I never knew it was possible
To love and grieve so much

The last two lines show how deft Gumilyov could be. If the narrator was just telling us of his grief, it would fall into cliche. But he introduces a level of indirection, and instead talks of how he has learned about the terror of grief. It is a superb finish to a superb poem.

*Americans might want to read this as "rutabagas"

Existentialist, apparently

2006-02-18T14:59:00.000Z

You scored as Existentialist.

Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.

Existentialist

69%

Modernist

63%

Cultural Creative

56%

Materialist

44%

Postmodernist

44%

Fundamentalist

19%

Romanticist

13%

Idealist

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

And I'd always thought of myself as a romantic idealist. Bugger.

Three posts about Gumilyov part one

2006-02-17T09:12:00.000Z

The workman - Nikolay Gumilyov

Now if you want to make it big in the precognition game, the most impressive trick you can carry out is to correctly predict the manner of your own death. Even if you get it wrong, you have the consolation that no-one's going to be able to point it out to you, but get it right and you'll have created something a work which will have unease tap-tap-tapping down the spine of anyone who reads it.

Nikolay Gumilyov was part of the same generation of Russian poets as Esenin and Mayakovsky. A traveller and adventurer, his idiosyncratic and imaginative poetry, as it veers between the classical and the surreal, has one of the strengths I most admire in writers - the ability to switch moods. Nabokov, though, once said that Gumilyov was a poet for adolescents - and, let's face it, Nabokov was an expert on that subject.

The workman is a six verse poem which, though atmospheric and haunting, is mainly remarkable for its prescience.

He stands before the red-hot furnace
A small old man
The blinking of his reddish eyelids
Gives a submissive air to his calm eyes

Having briefly set the mood, Gumilyov snaps into first-person and gets straight to the point

All his comrades have gone to sleep
He alone is not sleeping
He is busy casting the bullet
Which will part me from the earth

While we're reeling from that, Gumilyov follows the workman a little longer.

He's finished, his eyes have brightened.
He's going home. The moon is shining.
At home, waiting in a large bed
Is his warm and sleepy wife

And for the rest of the poem, Gumilyov describes the consequences of the workman's actions

The bullet he has cast will whistle
Above the foamy white Dvina
The bullet he has cast will seek out my breast
It has come for me

I will fall in mortal agony
I shall see the past as it really was
And my blood will gush like a fountain
Onto the dry, dusty and trampled grass

And the Lord will requite me in full measure
For my brief and bitter life
This is what the small old man in the light grey shirt
Has done for me

In August 1921, the Petrograd Cheka (secret police) ordered the execution of 61 alleged monarchists, including Gumilyov, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Tsar and was a fervent anti-communist. The exact dates, means and locations of the executions are unknown, but I suppose it's a good guess that it would have been done by firing squad. I wonder if, in calling the workman's associates "comrades" (товарищи - tovarishchi), Gumilyov is also making a stab at the identity of his communist executors.

I'm a senseless filly

2006-02-16T09:02:00.000Z

"That'll be Joyce," said my father, "to say that Albert's died." He was correct - it was his sister on the phone, and her husband had just died. That was the first time I ever paid much attention to my father's family's weird acquaintance with death. The earliest episode I know of was in the First World War, when my great uncle, back on leave from France, told my great-grandmother that she wouldn't see him again. And she didn't.

In 1998, my future wife and I drove around Greece looking at ancient sites, and we went up to Levadia to look at the springs of Trophonios, which I'd read about in Pausanius' Guide to Greece, an ancient travel guide. At Trophonios, visitors used to drink from the two springs Lethe and Mnemosyne (forgetfulness and memory), then get lowered into a hole where they would hallucinate furiously before being dragged out and made to write about their experiences on a wooden tablet.

The site, though set beautifully between mountains, is a concrete shambles, so you don't exactly get a feeling of reverence. Two thousand years of earthquakes have changed the landscape somewhat, but there are still springs there.

Now I'm a scientific rationalist, and while I'm fascinated by ancient Greece, I'm not about to start confusing their religious superstitions with fact, and what better way to prove this than to drink some of the spring water? I stuck my hand in, had a slurp, and thought nothing more about it. You can see where this is headed, right?

We were staying in a room right next to the Herkyna, the river which flows from the springs, and that night, freezing and deafened by the noise of the river, I experienced something somewhere between a dream and a hallucination. It was very clearly a premonition of the death of my father. I woke up devastated, and stayed upset for weeks.

Less than six months after we visited Trophonios my father was dead.

Now for me the only connection we can possibly make here is that I was worried about my father and had been reading too much Pausanius. They combined in an unpleasant dream and my father's death was just a coincidence. If those waters had anything in them then presumably the whole of Levadia would be having regular hallucinations and druggies would be heading there en masse in an attempt to get permanently tripping. The odd series of family events is just a statistical quirk. If you live long enough, you'll see some weirdness you don't understand just because so many things happen to us. Like I said, I'm a scientific rationalist.

And then recently I had a similarly nasty dream about the death of another family member, and I'm getting damned sick of my subconscious playing these tricks on me. So all in all, when dealing with people like me who think we're having premonitions, I think it's best to use Kevin O'Brien's unique combination of hostility and condescension:

Marianne Rodgers: fellow senseless filly

I'm a senseless filly, and that's the end of it.

Why I've never been cool

2006-02-15T15:10:00.000Z

I genuinely liked all these songs. And probably still would I heard them again.

Hello this is Joanie (The Telephone Answering Machine Song) - Paul Evans

Difficult to believe nowadays, what with our sat-nav trainers, microweave i-pods and web-enabled ironing boards, but back in 1979 answering machines had a glamorous, hi-tech, American sheen about them. Only Jim Rockford had one. And then Paul Evans released this touching, tragic story with an answering machine message in every chorus. The narrator has an argument with his girlfriend, she stomps off and gets wiped out in a traffic accident. The only way to hear her voice one more time is...I can't bring myself to say it.

I never should have let her drive alone angry from my place
I'd never hold her again and kiss that funny face

Car 67 - Driver 67

Curiously, this was in the charts the same week as Hello this is Joanie. I suppose it was the detritus of earnest mid-seventies singer-songwriters being washed up on the shores of the music industry. This song featured a conversation between a taxi driver and his controller, a man who had the strongest Birmingham accent ever featured in a music recording (if we agree to forget the Electric Light Orchestra, which we probably should).

Anyway, Control wants the driver to pick up a young lady at 83 Royal Gardens, but the driver doesn't want to do it:

Control have mercy on me
I don't wanna do the pick-up, isn't anybody else free?
Stuck in a jam in a one-way street
Why don't you tell her she'd be quicker if she used her feet, yeah

Over several agonising verses, the truth is teased out.

The girl of my dreams left me all alone
And at number 83 is where she made her home

There's a solitary tear trickling down my nose as I write this.

You've got to be a hustler if you want to get on - Sue Wilkinson

This caused a minor public outcry - pretty much anything could cause a public outcry in 1980, mind - by informing young girls that they should have sex with all and sundry in an attempt to better themselves. Wiser heads might have counselled that Sue's simpering voice implied she wasn't being entirely serious, but no, the tabloids clambered on board.

Yes, you've got to be a hustler if you want to get on
Principles can only hold you back
The only women makin' it are women who are shakin' it
They're faking all their morals on the mat

These days, of course, we can see how dated this approach is. Now all you need to get your three and a half seconds of fame is behave like a likeable cretin on reality television for a few days and then sell your story to OK! magazine.

Blogshyness? Blogitation?

2006-02-15T09:09:00.000Z

Is there a word to describe the phenomenon of repeatedly failing to post to your blog when you realise your entry was rubbish?

My problem is I'm just a shrinking bloglet.

Masterpieces with Crap Endings

2006-02-08T09:54:00.001Z

If it's to be considered a classic, you might have thought that a book would need to have a quality ending. But it's not true. As long as you've still got the reader hooked two thirds of the way through, it doesn't matter if you haven't actually worked out how to tie the whole thing together.

Here are a few unquestioned masterpieces where the muse scarpered just as the author was starting to wrap things up.

William Shakespeare - Hamlet

I've never understood why there aren't fits of laughter during Act 5 Scene 2 of Hamlet. Shakespeare warms us up with what is surely drugs humour:

'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do.
Woot weep, woot fight, woot fast, woot tear thyself,
Woot drink up eisel, eat a crocodile?

Anyway, having brooded intensely for months, Hamlet is about to kick it off with evil King Claudius and his posse. The result is the expiration of most of the cast in a comedy Deathathon. Not only is there a poison dagger but also a poisoned cup being passed around between unwitting drinkers; a device rather cruelly lampooned by Danny Kaye as

The vessel with the pestle is the brew that is true
But the flagon with the dragon is the mug with the drug

Or something like that.

Inexplicably, King Claudius allows the wife that he loves to drink the poison.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: He's fat and scan of breath. Here, Hamlet, take my napkin. Rub thy brows. The Queen carouses to thy fortune.
HAMLET: Good madam.
KING CLAUDIUS: Gertrude, do not drink.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me
KING CLAUDIUS (aside): It is the poisoned cup; it is too late.

Now this sequence is obviously unlikely, so I propose a rewrite:

KING CLAUDIUS: Gertrude, do not drink.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I will, my lord, I pray you...
KING CLAUDIUS: For fuck's sake, don't drink it. It's fucking poisoned.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Oh, all right then.

Homer - The Odyssey

After having wandered around the Mediterranean for ten years and inspiring every road movie ever made, Odysseus finds his palace overrun by suitors. They are then contemptuously dispatched by Odysseus and his son, Telemachus. You might have thought that was enough, and Homer could top it all off with a Tom Cruise style father-and-son bonding moment.

But no, the suitors had girlfriends who worked in the palace. Given Odysseus had been gone twenty years, most of these women would have been too young to even remember their old king, and so could be forgiven for consorting with his enemies. Perhaps a little lenience is in order?

Hell, no, let's massacre them. First, they are made to clear away their lovers' corpses - "groaning bitterly, weeping plentously". Then Telemachus suspends
a rope high enough so that no woman's feet could touch the ground. "So with their heads in a single line the women's necks were all caught and noosed, to make them die the most piteous death. For a little while their feet kept writhing, but not for long." Bloody charming, as my Dad used to say.

So it's "never let it be said that sluts like these had a clean death from me", is it, Homer? Shit-head.

TS Eliot - The Waste Land

Now regular readers will know that I adore this poem, but there's not much doubt that Stearnsy has run out of ideas by the time he gets to the end of the fifth section, when he starts breaking out into multiple languages, doubtlessly inspired by his pal Ezra Pound, the asking-for-a-smack proto-Fascist given to littering his poems with classical quotations rather as my dog Shep used to pepper Hethersett Recreation Ground.

By the final lines, Eliot is sounding like a gone-to-seed, Merlot-addled Cultural Studies lecturer recalling her days in Kathmandu with the Maharishi.

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

If we're honest, this is just gibberish.

Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War

It may be a little cruel to blame Thucydides for the end of this book, as he appears to have keeled over while writing it.

Thucydides, an Athenian general, was blamed for letting Amphipolis fall to the Spartans, and spent the rest of his days in a villa in Thrace writing the first proper history book, and one which is still one of the greatest. His forensic account of the disastrous Sicilian campaign should be required reading for any democratic politician thinking of embarking on a morally-dubious foreign adventure.

By the time we get to the end of the History, a combination of Spartan arms, Persian gold and suicidal Athenian politics are bringing the war to its climax, but Thucydides is sadly not going to take us there. The final line is

He went first to Ephesus where he made a sacrifice to Artemis...

It seems that Thucydides died with pen in hand .

The good news is that there was a historian to follow Thucydides. The bad news is that it was Xenophon, a jumped-up Boys' Own Adventure writer who should have been slipped an injunction for writing the ridiculously biased and sloppy A History of my Times.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

I'm not quite sure who to blame for the ending to this traumatic book. The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov wallops an asking-for-it pawnbroker and then spends hundreds of pages regretting it in the most unnerving fashion. It's enough to put you off over-running a parking meter, let alone murdering someone.

And right at the end, having been sent off to Siberian chokey, Raskolnikov gets unexpectedly redeemed by the love of a good woman. Aaaaaaaaarrrgggghh.

I wonder if maybe Dostoyevsky had to put in a happy ending in order to get such a blatantly unhappy book through the censor. If I'd have been the censor, though, I would have given him a slap and told him to come back with something suitably miserable.

Biting the hand

2006-02-06T09:01:00.000Z

I want to bite the hand that feeds me
I want to bite that hand so badly

Elvis Costello - Radio Radio

In 1978, aged 12, I left my modern, enlightened Middle School and started at Secondary School, an austere 1930's throwback erected on the remains of a World War 2 USAF base. It emphasised traditional values, obedience and regimentation as vital milestones in the development of the child into a balanced, educated individual. For the independent-minded, this approach was as likely to nourish a love of learning as a half-ton of rock salt might enhance your Lobelia bed.

Stunned by this new regime, I plunged into misery and was soon playing traunt. At least I thought I was pretending to be sick, but in truth I was hovering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and those days off were just about the only thing keeping me sane.

So there I was, physically healthy but stuck in bed and listening to Radio One all day. Radio One was and probably still is the home of the smuggest, thickest, most self-satisfied DJs in broadcasting, but they mercifully had little say in what records they played. And in the late seventies whoever planned the Radio One playlist had great taste.

Punk had just about breathed its last, but that was OK, because most of punk music was second-rate. Bands like Generation X or the Plasmatics or the Lurkers were migraine-inducing, chord-deficient mediocrities. But many of the bands which had sprung out of punk, like Blondie, the Police or the Jam, while universally acclaimed at the time as sell-outs, were vastly superior and entering their most productive phases.

Playing truant and spellbound by the hourly rotation of Elvis Costello's fantastic "Radio Radio", I was starting to notice things. I was fascinated by the line "I want to bite the hand that feeds me".

Obviously I was drawn to its surly rebellion, but I'd been hearing surly rebellion for the last two years without being particularly impressed. I'm not sure I understood why, but it was the clever construction that impressed me. My English teacher, who was one of the most humane teachers in my school (she's been to college with Jean Jacques Burnell of the Stranglers - how cool is that?), could have told me why it was clever. If I hadn't been actively avoid her lessons, that is.

What Costello was doing was inverting a cliche to make something new. When "bite the hand that feeds you" was coined it must have seemed new and exciting, but it had become hackneyed through overuse. By sticking that "I want to" on the front, Costello had made a phrase which I'd simply never heard before, turning a standard slur into a statement of discontent. And Costello's deliberate repetition of "I want to" in the next line emphasised the point, while the "so badly" widened it.

And then there was

Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed

"Overwhelmed by indifference". How could that even be possible? And yet it worked, and condensed into three words a whole world of emotional conflict.

This was all novel and intelligent and entirely intoxicating. I wanted more, and I wanted to learn how it was done.

So in attempting to avoid an English lesson I had gingerly tiptoed through a backdoor into the delicious garden of poetry. Without wishing to denigrate Government attempts to eliminate childhood truancy, this was the most educational skive of my life.

Did this make me an lifelong Elvis Costello fan? Not really. He showed flashes of greatness but even then I realised Radio Radio had been written with airplay in mind. Obsessed with lyrics, I moved on to other bands before, almost inevitably, falling into the orbit of Bob Dylan.

I have a confession to make

2006-02-03T12:11:00.000Z

I don't know how to drive.

There, I've said it. I can't drive.

What's worse, I can no longer rely on at-least-I'm-not-destroying-the-planet smugness to get me through any those tricky "what are you, some sort of freak?" social situations, as I've started taking lessons. Not only am I a bad driver, but now I'm a failed ecologist as well.

For the record, here is a complete list of the other things I probably should have tried but haven't.

1) Ice skating
2) Going to the opera
3) Smoking a cigarette
4) Taking illegal narcotics
5) Calling Tony Blair a lying arsewipe while fingering the "wanker" sign in his face

Don't be evil

2006-02-01T12:26:00.000Z

Just in case you thought Google's arselicking of the butchers of Tiananmen was as low as they could go, try googling "shoah film"*. The first of 654,000 results is a bilious piece of shit by a Holocaust denier (which I have no intention of linking to).

$1.26 billion = Google's revenue last year.
$50000 = Approximate cost of employing someone to check their search results aren't disgusting and offensive

*"Shoah", by the way, is a long and extremely distressing documentary about the Holocaust, directed by Claude Lanzmann.

We've made a horrible miscalculation. It's time to intervene.

2006-01-30T09:01:00.000Z

Infinite Crisis #1 - 3

I'm guessing that not many readers of this blog are members of the Illuminati, the ultra-secret global conspiracy hellbent on directing the history of the world for its own diabolic purposes. However I am, which is why I spend most of my evenings ensconced in the library of an exclusive London gentlemen's club with Kofi Annan, Peter Mandelson and Boxcar Willie, plotting the downfall of the Lukashenko regime in Belarus.

Now the one thing which really irks us Illuminatis (or "Loomies", as we call ourselves), is novice members like spotty newcomer David Cameron who haven't committed to memory all 86 Books of our Secret Gospels. Anyone who hasn't attained at least the 55th degree of the Inner Circle is, frankly, a ignoramus thicko who should be serving cappuchinos in the canteen.

Which segues me nicely into Infinite Crisis, the greatest comic book event of the next millennium, a series so wilfully, gloriously obscure that a reader unversed in DC lore experiences a sensation similar to being headbutted across the nose by an "H-E-A-R-T-S" singing hooligan from Wester Hailes. Painful, and yet somehow leaving you with the feeling that you deserve it.

The first issue should be preserved in aspic as a study of how to make a reader feel unwelcome. Shovel dozens of characters in there, don't introduce them, don't even name them, up the portentousness quotient to "flatulent", mix in some dubious astronomical observations ("this storm just swallowed the neighboring galaxy", "For the first time in history, Oa is no longer at the center of the universe") and you're happily cruising down the Incomprehensibility Highway.

My particular favourite in this blizzard of weirdness is the character of Uncle Sam. No, not a national symbol or a metaphor for American power, but an actual living, walking Uncle Sam. "He claims to have bested Paul Bunyan in Armwrestling and outplanted Johnny Appleseed in the orchards of Washington". But that's nothing: I personally seduced King Arthur's wife and beat Robin Hood at darts in the snug lounge of the Swan and Smallpox in Alfreton.

Anyway, Sam and his unnamed band of heroes get butchered by an unnamed band of villains for unknown reasons, providing Infinite Crisis with its own Women In Refrigerators moment, touched with just a wee smidgen of disturbing sexual imagery.

Sigmund Freud himself would find nothing remotely
sexual about the death of this young lady

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam ends up bleeding in a puddle, political in the sense that superpowers tend to need to see themselves as victims, though not exactly the Putney Debates in terms of subtlety of thought.

Middle eastern ruler bops one on American national
symbol while unnecessarily disrespecting democratic
values

By the end of it, we have no less than five people running round in Superman outfits, something calculated to give us Clone Saga veterans post-traumatic flashbacks. And "The world needs a Superboy" may well be the most contestable statement in the history of literature.

So by the end of Infinite Crisis #1 I was just utterly baffled. Which is why I got down on my knees and wept real tears in #2 when the writers took the time to explain something about what was going on. A four and a half page summary provided more useful information than the other twenty or thirty Infinite Crisis tie-ins had managed. Though the fact that I was still reading by this point, rather than having given up bewildered, probably owes more to blog writing than any intrinsic value to the story.

Anyway, there's an Earth-1 and an Earth-2, and Earth-1 is ruined because Wonder Woman snapped someone's neck like a twiglet and one of the Supermen wants to swap Earth-1 for Earth-2 and Batman's going to stop him. Why Superman thinks getting rid of Earth-1 isn't exactly the same as planet-level genocide, and where Earth-2 has been hiding in the meantime are questions I haven't exactly figured out. Now Wonder Woman killing someone who was evidently asking for it isn't such a great crime in my books, but we're assured that Earth-2 is a much more pleasant place than Earth-1. Does that mean they missed out on some of the world's other less heart-warming moments, like the Holocaust and Black Death? Or is Earth-1 just being given a bad press so they can justify utterly jumbling up the DC Universe again?

And by issue #3 everyone is running around like Corporal Jones shouting "Don't panic". There is a portrayal of a genuine atmosphere of malice here, but the shouty, overwrought over-reactions left me thinking the entire cast needed hosing down.

So this is a cosmology story, and obviously this cosmology is a bit ridiculous, but so is Marvel's, but that doesn't mean the story can't be fun. And maybe it is enjoyable for the initiated, but with my limited knowledge of the DC Universe, I simply can't judge. It's an inward-looking, dedicated hard-core-fans-only story. It leaves the casual reader feeling ignorant and foolish, which are not typically the reactions you would want to inspire.

"They're a bit beyond my likes or dislikes, Mister Frodo", as Samwise the Gardener might say on being faced by some mendacious Elven trickery.

Potato = vegetable of satan

2006-01-29T18:02:00.000Z

If any waiter in the Norfolk area is reading this, the correct answer to

Could I have rice or pasta with my salmon, as potatoes make me projectile vomit?

is not

So would that be roast or boiled?

Thank you.

Chris Claremont is leaving Uncanny X-Men

2006-01-23T16:32:00.000Z

As the years pass, you wear out the machine of the soul
People say: "He must be put on the shelf,
He's written himself out, it's high time"
There's less and less love, less and less daring
And time is crashing into my forehead
Then time comes for the most terrible of amortizations -
That of the heart and of the soul

Mayakovsky

It's National Gordon Day

2006-01-18T09:09:00.000Z

Gordon Brown, Tony Blair's brooding sidekick and Prime Minister-in-waiting wants us to have a special "British Day" to celebrate "British history, achievements and culture".

Now I'm not one to whinge about how terrible our history was, despite our monumental achievements in building the trans-Atlantic slave trade and fighting wars with almost everybody, but there are a couple of problems with British Day. One is our innate distrust of shows of patriotism. Hanging flags in your garden, singing national anthems and having communal neighbourhood hug-ins all sounds suspiciously foreign to me.

And the other problem is that we have so many days to choose from.

13 March - Hooliganism Day

With their plastic pitch, ban on away supporters, all-seater stadium and rent-a-gobshite-quote Tory Chairman, Luton Town in the eighties came to epitomise the ruling order in a way unmatched by any other reactionary, right wing figure except Thatch herself. So it was with genuinely mixed feelings that we watched the match against Millwall in 1985 when their ground was demolished by a riotous mob of psychopathic South Londoners.

How do we celebrate it?

Villagers assemble on the green, half dressed like Harry Enfield's character Loadamoney and half as baton-wielding Bedfordshire rozzers. They chase each other around a bit in a flurry of flying plastic seats.

21 May - World Unity Day

In 2003 Britain's position in the world sank to a justified new low as tuneless Scouse duo Jemini were given a total of zero points in the Eurovision Song Contest. Jemini's song Cry baby was flat enough to damage ceiling fixtures and performed with the seductiveness and sensuality of a prisoner being strapped into an electric chair.

How do we celebrate it?

With a singing contest in the local Miners' Welfare Club. Local schoolchildren compete to gain nul points in front of a group of handpicked Latvians making Simon Cowellesque judgements. The winner is the youth who can produce the worst rendition of Cry Baby and get through

Cry, cry, baby
You lied to me, baby
I'll survive without you, baby
Baby, bye, baby, bye-bye

without suffering an existential crisis brought on by a surfeit of banality.

31 August - Mawkish Sentimentality Day

To commemorate the sloaney life and works of injudicious speedster and seatbelt-refusenik Diana Spencer, who departed this world in a storm of whirling cameras, hysterical tributes and nonsensical hyperbole such as "Diana's death has upset me more than my own father's did".

How do we celebrate it?

By covering town squares in expensive bouquets nicked from the local branch of Interflora, pointlessly signing books of condolence, publicly cursing Charles Windsor in Westminster Abbey and spouting nonsensical hyperbole such as "even though we never met, I felt like she was my friend".

22 September - Furore Day

This could actually be any day of the year, as we celebrate our sporadic ability to whip up a mob mentality on almost any subject. This juggernaut of self-righteousness can bring down a lynch mob on the guilty or innocent alike, leaving a dazed trail of coke-snorting supermodels, braindead footballers, Education Ministers, whoring television presenters and the Beastie Boys.

How do we celebrate it?

By eliminating entire species of dangerous dogs and whistling up a mob in Newport to attack a paediatrician on the grounds that it sounds a bit like "paedophile". And by organising puppet shows featuring our Shit-Stirrer-in-Chief, spouse-battering Sun editor Rebekah Wade who symbolically truncheons her husband, TV hard man Ross "Cut it aht, you slag" Kemp, into unconsciousness.

1 December - Sneering Day

We may not make movies or cars anymore, but Britain still leads the world in our ability to sneer. That one-two combination of twitching upper lip and pitiless gaze can only be mastered after years of study in the British state school system. On this day, we remember in 1976 when the Sex Pistols were suckered into saying "fuck" on daytime television by a sleazy looking interviewer called Bill Grundy.

How do we celebrate it?

In silent contemplation, as we wonder whether calling someone a fucking rotter is cool or a bit rubbish.

Reality Blogging Result

2006-01-13T10:26:00.000Z

The entrants have been running neck and neck all week*, but the phonelines for our one-time only Celebrity Big Blogger challenge are now closed.

Happily, one voter fell for our sucker bait. The non-existent entry was, of course, The potato that snarled. I mean, they can't snarl, can they? Not having appropriate muscles or vocal chords or anything.

That left us with a two way tie between Take Out Baldy, He's Messing Up My Plot and The Greatest Eight-Point Arc Ever Told. I'm going to have to do some background reading before I can do the latter, so our judges awarded the tie-break to...

Take Out Baldy, He's Messing Up My Plot

Stan Lee was good at building balanced teams. The Fantastic Four, for instance, had clear, well defined powers which contrasted and complemented each other. Even if a woman having the power to turn invisible is ever-so-slightly sexist.

But he made a horrible error with the X-Men. The main team were well-chosen. Angel could fly around, which is visually impressive. Beast could bounce around. Marvel girl could lift small objects. Iceman could make snowballs. Cyclops had a powerbeam, making him the most powerful student, but not outrageously. But none of them were in their headmaster's league, the self-proclaimed "Most Powerful Telepath In The Whole World", chuckling Charlie Xavier. He could switch off the head of almost anyone. In a straight fight, he was almost invincible, disabled or not.

And that was then writers on the X-Men started hitting The problem. Why would an uberpowerful grade A telepath send a load of weedy hormonal teenagers to face Magneto and his ilk? Obviously, from a plot point of view, they had to be out there. They had all the action poses and could smash thing up, while Xavier's non-visual meant the only sign of him being in a fight would be a look of concentration on his face. Which, incidentally, is why he and the Shadow King always used to fight on something called the Astral Plane.

So, anyway, how were the writers going to keep Xavier out of the fight? Well, you could make it a test, like GCSEs but with flying cars. Xavier would send his students off to face notorious crypto-fascist buckethead Magneto, they would nearly get murdered, and then he would say, "You fought well, my students, I'm awarding you all B+. Except Bobby who gets a D-."

Obviously, this had the effect of making Xavier look like a callous, pompous fool and ridiculously casual with the lives of his charges. Adding his then-propensity for mindswiping passers-by "to protect our secret", a small amount of thought would quickly reveal that Xavier was a nasty piece of work.

Which makes it quixotic that later writers decided make Xavier's "dream" an important, if ill-defined, cornerstone of the series. This was Xavier the Philosopher, dreaming of a world where mutants and human would live together and cuddle each other. A dream rather like that of Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, in fact, though neither of those elected to start a school which functioned as a military training academy.

But The Problem remained, and remains still. And through the years, writers have adopted various strategies to solve it

1) Kill him

It's the obvious thing to do, and was done way back. Comic books being comics books, he was brought back (something to do with a doppelganger and an alien invasion - incredulity has mercifully dimmed my memory of the exact details). Usually, resurrections are a bad idea, but there was some point to this, as the series just didn't sparkle without Xavier. He always added something extra.

Currently, he's dead again, but I'm a couple of months behind the rest of the world. He's probably back already.

2) Nobble his telepathy

This has been done a couple of times, and there is some merit to it. Weaken his telepathy, or remove it entirely, and The Problem goes away. But the problem with all power loss stories is that they beg to be resolved by having the powers return, and the writers soon cave in.

3) Hospitalise him

This'll take care of him for a few issues. He once had seven shades of shit kicked out of him by some aggrieved college students. Another time, his body got hijacked by the brood and the Starjammers had to generate a new one. Which led to him being able to walk again, until they wheelchaired him again, but let's not get into that.

4) Fire him into outer space

An intergalactic love affair with a dictatorial space alien kept him out of Claremont's hair for a couple of years. He even started an offworldTraining Academy for Mutant Skrulls. Wonder if it's still going?

5) Put him in chokey

After the Onslaught debacle, the feds imprisoned him. Again, not a bad solution, but the X-Men always scheme and scheme until he gets sprung.

6) Turn him into a bad guy

But that would be Onslaught. Which was simply farcical.

7) Send him on holiday

He spent a while cruising around the Caribbean, if I remember correctly. His recent sojourn in Genosha comes under this category, although Genosha is no longer a top tourist destination.

8) Have him start acting weirdly

At one point, Xavier expelled all the X-Men and retired to his study for several months with only Jean Grey for company. Which was not a bad choice, when you think of the alternatives.

The upshot of all of this is that the Xavier problem is never going to get solved. Even with the upper power levels of the modern X-Men, Xavier is just too powerful to fit in, but his whole Obiwan Kenobi balding mentor routine is just too important to the chemistry of the team for him to be permanently axed. He'll be yoyoing in and out of our lives for years to come.

*in the sense that one vote each is neck and neck

Interactive Special!

2006-01-09T10:40:00.000Z

Mister Fish Productions, in association with Endemol Television, is proud to present the very latest in interactive blogging technology. Now you, the reader, have the chance to affect the posting on this, your blog.

Yes, for one week only, you can choose the topic of the next entry on this blog. To vote, simply use the mouse on your computer to click on the "comments" link at the end of this entry, and post the letter for the topic YOU want to read on Friday morning.

The topics are:

A - Masterpieces with Crap Endings
B - Take Out Baldy, He's Messing Up My Plot
C - Three Posts About Gumilyov. Part One - The Workman
D - The Potato That Snarled
E - The Greatest Eight-Point Arc Ever Told
F - The Times I Nearly Died

Now some say that the Reality Blog genre is dying on its arse, which is why this contest has a special twist. One of these is just a title I made up. Vote for it, and there'll be no post at all on Friday!

The closing date for votes is midnight on Thursday night, when our host Davina McFloozie will reveal which entry has won, and which others are going to have to leave the Mister Fish Household.

Vote carefully.

2006: The year ahead

2006-01-06T10:33:00.000Z

January

Spider-Man: The Other, a storyline with the premise that Peter Parker is dying, finishes in the most dramatic way: Spider-Man dies.

Marvel immediately cancels Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Knights Spider-Man, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, thirty-six mini-series, the movie Spider-Man 3 and its complete range of Spider-Man merchandising, up to and including children's bedspreads, egg-timers and its exclusive Come Hither, Mary Jane range of men's lingerie.

"Hey, dead means dead at Marvel," says an unrepentant Joe Quesada. "And Spider-Man's old hat now we've got the Sentry."

February

"Sick puppies" is how Frank Miller describe those critics who see something disturbing in his portrayal of Bruce Wayne in All-Star Robin and Batman the Scary Old Bloke Who Likes To Keep an Eye on Twelve Year Old Boys. Artist Jim Lee is unable to comment as his tongue now permanently hangs out of his mouth, having drawn one too many women in their underwear.

March

Infinite Crisis reaches its climax amid allegations that it's just a bloated, incomprehensible, cosmologically ridiculous rehash of an old Marv Wolfman plot. DC strikes back by insisting that potential buyers pass a DC continuity entrance exam before being allowed to have a copy. "They should have been paying attention, but they weren't, and now they're going to suffer," says Geoff Johns before a massed army of dedicated, Aquaman T-Shirt-clad fans chanting, "Fuck the mainstream."

April

The number of mutants in the Marvel Universe, stuck at 198 after the really long House of M crossover, rises to 212 after Joss Whedon resurrects several popular mutants from the early 1980's. Yes, Jean Grey is one of them.

May

Writer Brian Michael Bendis is rushed to hospital having been completely motionless for fifty-six hours. He is later released after they discover he was just in an extended dramatic pause.

June

England fans, upset at their side's unexpected 6-1 defeat in the World Cup, respond in traditional fashion by chasing the Trinidad and Tobago around Nuremberg. Writer Gail Simone is unimpressed: "If you want gratuitous violence, you should read Birds of Prey. You'll see more faces smashed up in twelve panels than those jessies managed in a whole evening."

July

Following extensive internet lobbying campaigns by X-Men fans disappointed at their favourite heroes losing their powers, Marvel relents and allows a number of mutants to return. Within three months there are 1397 mutants, including Illyana Rasputin, Ugly John and Maggott.

August

Marvel denies it is desperately pillaging its 1970's back catalogue as it announces new series of The Champions: Ice and Feathers, Living Mummy: Bandages of Death, Black Goliath: Glocks in da Hood and Human Fly: Back and Buzzin'.

"We're not scraping the bottom of the barrel yet," says Joe Quesada. "That won't happen till next year's Brother Voodoo meets Werewolf By Night maxi-series.

September

Michael J Straczyski takes over the writing duties at Daredevil, and starts his traditional reinterpretation of his hero's origin, examining why the radioactive flask chose to crash into Matt Murdock's face and revealing the billy club to be an ancient, profoundly powerful weapon from the Flarg galaxy. Galactus stars.

October

The latest issue of Spider-Man/Black Cat fails to appear after writer Kevin Smith sleeps in. For the 1286th day running.

November

Writer Grant Morrison takes over the duties at Cable and Deadpool. The number of mutants rises to 356 million.

December

Ebenezer Byrne, the grumpiest grump in all London town, experiences an epiphany when he is visited on Christmas Eve by his old partner, Jacob Claremont, and three time-travelling, heavily sarcastic phantasms. Overnight, he learns how to keep Christmas in his heart, not only in December but throughout the year, and becomes the kindliest, gentlest soul in the whole kindly, gentle country. God bless us, everyone.

Sadly, his writing gets even worse.