Froody
Just a change and to see if anyone other than spambots is taking notice.
You all know the stuff I like. Kinda. (Which could mean sorta or the rather lovely Peter Davison Doctor Who story, and hey there’s a band called Castrovalva in York.) I like British stuff and science fiction and crime and I like artsy stuff and well, I like a lot of stuff. And despite my occasional puritanical tirades, I’m partial to the old romance, I just don’t like the way it’s often presented, but give me a Princess Bride or a, I dunno, I kinda liked the romance of Tim and Dawn in the Office, and I’m as happy as Mr Stevens at the end of the day in his little room, not telling Miss Kenton that he loves her.
So, is there anything you folks would recommend to me for broadening my horizons?
Also, I am currently planning to submit to Crossed Genres, and they currently want stories involving artefacts or gadgets. I’ve done a coupla those kind of stories before, but if anyone has any ideas for what sort of artefact or gadget to base my stories around, I’m all ears. Except the bits that aren’t. But only suggestions, don’t give me plots for God’s sake because if you do, I’ll assume you’re giving me ownership of that plot and by posting you will be passing the copyright on to me. He said, crossing his fingers.
Who is Jack Collins?
And why has he added me as a friend on facebook?
Who is he? That’s all I want to know, who is he?
Mini Eggs
Just read in the Guardian that Matt Smith has a love of mini eggs that rivals my own. I think he’ll do just fine.
New mission statement
I’m fond of the unreal. In fact, some might say I’m infatuated with it. I think it’s because it’s a law unto itself. This website is a testimony to this and shall continue to be so.
What *do* you do with a drunken sailor?
Hmm, not an apposite post title that, but what the cowing hey, as the Brummies might say. Before they beat me up for glib regional stereotyping like I was a panellist on some lazy BBC current affairs quizshow. Or any BBC panel show. Or any BBC comedy. Or any Channel 4 etc. etc.
So, Spring is here and with it new horizons. No longer is life work and then darkness. The world lives again and with it groweth mine ambitions and joys. I find new things to excite me and entrance me. Not entrance as in a way in, but entrance as in put me in a trance. Or maybe I do meant the other thing. Ah language you multisided many-faced whore. How dost thou give such deep and ambiguous pleasures to your users? Soft, my darling, soft.
I’ve come across a few lovely things of late. A webzine called Crossed Genres, which I’m thinking of submitting to. I might well try for the upcoming issue on gadgets/artifacts because Philip K. Dick used to do that sort of thing very well with his various mood gadgets in his short stories.
Daniel O’Mahony’s enlightment-esque novel Newton’s Sleep is available free online from Random Static, which is wonderful as I’ve been trying to lay my hands on a copy for ages. Daniel is a Doctor Who fan writer who writes nicely intricate and intelligent novels that are worth your time. (Now if only Andrew Cartmel’s Prisoner novel Miss Freedom was so easy to lay one’s hands on!)
I’ve been watching black and white episodes of Callan, and falling in love with being British all over again. I don’t much care for a lot of the trash culture we’ve developed, but I like our folksy eccentricities, even if a lot of it is middle class indulgence. It’s unlikely, for example, to come across a working class Wiccan. But I digress. Callan is one of the best spy shows ever because it’s so very moral. Spying is highly immoral, but Callan is a man who cares about what he’s doing and seeing him tortured and twisted out of shape is a wonderful thing. (I’ve also bought myself the Fantomas serials, French silent era crime fiction featuring a dastardly criminal mastermind of what would become known as pulp traditions, but I’ve not watched any yet.)
I also watch Inglourious Basterds the other night and was pleasantly surprised. I’m not excessively fond of Tarantino, mostly the subject matter doesn’t appeal, but I enjoyed this because of the stylings which reminded me of seventies westerns and war films. And Brad Pitt doing some caricature work, like some cartoon of Charles Bronson (the actor, not the criminal). But I think it was probably the cartoon Nazi, Hans Lander, that was the most interesting performance as if he’d walked off some hard-edged version of ‘Allo ‘Allo. The ending was too over the top to be entirely satisfying but it reminded me to cast further afield for my inspirations and to write with more fun in mind because I once was very good at dialogue.
I just bought the penultimate volume of Urasawa’s Pluto, the mature readers version of an Astroboy tale. Very much looking forward to consuming that morsel.
And finally finally finally I’m going to get around to joining the British Science Fiction Association, which I should have done ten years ago, but twenty pounds sounded like a massive amount for a subscription. Oh how callow a youth was I then, that I thought twenty pounds a lot of money? Well, I kind of still do. Sigh.
Excalibur
Three ex-X-men and two characters from the sporadic adventures of Marvel’s one UK-based hero were teamed up in the mid 80s as a light-hearted spin-off of the mutant adventure. Nightcrawler, the Rachel Summers Phoenix and Kitty Pryde, Captain Britain and Meggan, along with Lockheed, Widget and Alistaire Stuart, were the greatest British heroes.
I came across them in the newsagents at Market Weighton, 16 or 17 issues into the series which featured a bizarre cross-time setting of a world that came across as a mixture of Star Wars and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ take on Mars. Phoenix had gone a little mad after an alternate universe version of her mother, Jean Grey, was killed before her eyes and was dressing up as a masked swashbuckler, there was a giant dragon-man version of Lockheed and everybody died but Meggan and Phoenix and then they were brought back and there was a scene in a spaceport and a cameo by Professor Xavier and the Starjammers. It was the piling on of ideas, alongside baroque overblown superheroics that worked for me. (Along with Alan Davis’ fluid lush pencils, enhanced by the exactness of Paul Neary’s inks.)
British superheroes don’t really work. We don’t have multiple metropolises with skyscrapers and dark alleys to create the landscape needed for a Spider-man or Batman to work. For this reason, British superheroes tend to be tied to those things we do have plenty of. Magic and legend.
Captain Britain was made over from being a run of the mill crimefighter to being connected to an otherworldy empire that was just a part of a vast omniversal structure. His enemies shifted from robbers and assassins to transdimensional bountyhunters, reality-warping government ministers and their Lewis Carroll inspired creations. Whimsy and science fiction and magic had been part of British superheroes in the past. Marvelman, arguably the best-known straight superhero, was a refit of Captain Marvel, the little kid who transforms into a superman when he says Shazam, and would routinely fight vikings and travel in time. The steel claw was a man who wore a metal glove that turned him invisible and the Spider was a supervillain.
Superheroes aplenty there were, but none of them worked properly because superheroes are an American thing, and they don’t fit into Britain that well. They don’t fit into our mindset very well.
Think of our icons. Sherlock Holmes is a drug addict and anti-social. The Doctor is an intellectual elitist who acts like a spoiled child or else uses people like chess pieces. James Bond is a misogynist killer snob. Dennis the Menace is a thug who beats up softies. Desperate Dan is an American in a very British version of the wild west. Judge Dredd is a fascist. Alice is a little girl on a trip. Peter Pan steals children and never grows up. Robin Hood is a thief.
We don’t do heroes very well. We don’t really believe in them, because a hero is a show-off, and that’s not a very British thing unless it’s undercutting itself with irony. (Or it used not to be.)
So Excalibur was never straightforward superheroes. It was always about whimsy and magic and universal jackanapery. It was fun and it was about relationships. It was about Sat-Yr-9 pretending to be Courtney Ross and perverting Kitty. It was about the love triangles revolving around Kurt, Brian and Meggan and Kitty, Alistaire and Rachel. It was about the mystery of Widget.
And then it lost its way. They tried to make it into just another X-men book by getting rid of anyone who wasn’t an X-Man. And then they gave it to Warren Ellis.
And Warren took the British fear of the apocalypse, so strong in our fiction since H. G. Wells at least, through Johns Wyndham and Christopher and Michael Moorcock, through Alan Moore, and he ground that into the Britishness of black humour and gentle perversion and brought something of the old magic back.
And as such, Excalibur remains a favourite. I just re-read a few issues and found myself sucked in again. It’s not the sort of thing being done at the moment. Paul Cornell had a go a year ago but was too jingoistic, gloried too much in celebrating being British, that he stole any bite that Captain Britain and the MI:13 might’ve had. As well as saddling CB with being a superhero! Not right, he got past that a long time ago.
What would the Hulk do?
When I was a wee lad I tried to order Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing on inter library loan from my local library. They came back and told me that “it wasn’t in good enough condition” to be lent. I would later discover that Saga of the Swamp Thing was “mature readers” and that they probably thought my nine year old self would be warped in some way if I read the Anatomy Lesson, which is the story in which Moore revealed that (gasp) Alec Holland wasn’t really the Swamp Thing, the Swamp Thing was a collection of plants that thought they were Alec Holland. And there was blood and guts and incest and stuff. It’s hard for me to decide now whether they were right or not to do that, because a couple of years later I was buying Shadows from the newsagent which had a Grant Morrison Hellblazer story in which people are driven mad, and a man digs out his sheepdog’s eyes with a spoon and then his own. And someone else is castrated (we don’t see these things happening, just the aftermath in the case of the first, with eyeballs on the tabletop and the lead-up in the latter, where people walk into a room with a knife and a sharpening stone). It also had Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid story which fascinated me as a boy because of the bits that weren’t fantastic. Phil and Susan as kids playing house, and the beginning with Black Orchid in disguise, and when her rubber mask is taken off, she’s wearing her costume underneath. Shadows folded before the story could be completed, and when I finally read the conclusion I was underwhelmed by an open-ended conclusion where a Black Orchid and her clone, robbed of the distinctive design of the costume, disappear into the forests. (Gaiman’s endings are always weak, like he just sort of stops writing, but could go on a while longer. Compare it with the ending of Halo Jones Book 3, something I also read around the age of 10, where Halo casually murders her lover and then runs away in his personal spaceship, after all the tortures of being a soldier in a hopeless war. Everybody read Halo Jones.)
My mother, when I had a long bout of insomnia as we moved and which looking back was no doubt brought about by a fairly heavy trauma of losing all my friends and being then isolated in the middle of a forest, told me it was down to the comics I read. Probably this was brought about by me asking her to pick up Judge Dredd/Batman: Judgment in Gotham, in which Simon Bisley goes mad in displaying Judge Death’s capacity for murder. It was a bout of insomnia that I think also ruined my eyes. But the fact was that the comics weren’t the problem. The comics presented a world that was, if nothing else, bound to end well. There was an issue of Doom Patrol I picked up, in which characters talked about dying their pubic hair green and there were men with skulls for heads that was a little too weird for my imaginative self, but generally John Byrne Superman stories and issues of Excalibur and X-Men were a salve, because here were people to look up to.
And that was what I was looking for. Interaction with intelligent funny people, not with crass, ignorant children. The monsters they fought weren’t to be feared because those monsters were the things that I had to fight. If Peter Parker kept trying, being a brainy nerd and always being beaten up, and he managed to get girls and save the day, then so could I. Kurt Wagner, similarly, was someone I aspired to be like.
(I should point out I never noticed things like the way women were drawn. Someone looked at a comic I was reading, I think it was an issue of New Men, an underrated rip off of X-Men, and commented on the size of a female character’s breasts. And I hadn’t really noticed until he said. But then, I had no way of making a comparison. And the men were drawn in a similar overblown way. Nowadays it’s slightly more obvious to me but I write it off as part of the shorthand. It’s like drawing long eyelashes and big lips to make it more obvious that a character is female.)
Nowadays looking up to heroes is difficult. The writers nowadays have a way of dirtying characters up. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a lot of writers in television and comics inject a lot of sex into everything and force women to be sex objects, in a supposedly ironic way, but there’s little ironic about it. They use terms I don’t understand, and have to look up and then wish I hadn’t looked up. But what’s worse is they don’t think big enough. Alan Moore routinely writes his stories as an expression of what life is. He undoubtedly inspired the work of Neal Stephenson in this. He shows violence for what it is, doesn’t glorify it. (Oh how I hope they reprint his Miracleman/Marvelman stuff so I can talk to other people about it.) A lot of writers nowadays take a Tarantino kind of joy in their violence. They took the graphic representation Moore, amongst others, brought to comics, but they didn’t see the morality behind it.
I can’t respect Mal Reynolds when he kicks a man into a spaceship turbine, but I can when he won’t take advantage of Christina Hendricks. I can’t feel that a Captain America who uses a gun is someone to look up to or a Superman who spies on Lois Lane. Superman! Superman is goodness personified, don’t sully that.
Moral integrity is something that should be valued. Maybe it’s a difficult thing, but it should be allowed.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the anti-heroes. But I always wonder where the kids today find their heroes.
Fight the future
I never understood what that meant. How can you fight the future? Why would you fight the future? Surely like Buck Rogers would, I should embrace the future like the big old genetically-engineered bear-soldier it is? Surely?
I’ve just gone through one of my periodic reformulations of Benny and Burke. (Although I always called them Benny and Berk, we have Mr David Thomas to thank for that spelling of Burke. Like Burke’s law, rather than like Berk of Trapdoor. Oh Willy Rushton, how we miss you. And Leo McKern too. And Kenneth Williams. I digress.) So now, Burke is an ex-spy who ends up helping out Benny who is a hapless private eye. This because I’m reading a Campion novel by Margery Allingham (purely because Peter Davison played Campion on telly) and I like the idea that the detective did stuff in the war that he doesn’t talk about, but acts like some reticent, flippant gentleman. Don’t know why that appeals to me. No sir.
The thing about Benny and Berk is this. They’re like Batman or Laurel and Hardy. You can re-format them for anything. My original conception was that they would appear in a series of films, like L&H, with wildly differing stories and settings. So they could be in the wild west, or fighting a cyborg Russian, or on a pirate ship. And it’s therefore hard to build a cohesive world picture around them, because things have to be loose to allow this re-purposing.
They’re like Sam and Max, but they’re not a dog and a bunny.
Also, I’m pleased and surprised to see that MicMacs is out at the cinema. I’ll see that next week I think.
Fantasy redux
So then I watched the end of Buffy Season 6 where Willow goes all out of character. Well, she’d gone out of character from the beginning of that season. We’re supposed to believe that the highly moral Willow is not going to know that casually using magic on her girlfriend is wrong. And that she is going to give in to rage, rather than despair when her girlfriend is murdered. But when in the past has she shown anger like that? It’s not a response that fits the character, except the apparent desire to make her into a superbeing. Which she already was anyway before the magic. It’s a highly irritating story arc on a lot of levels, if only because it’s saying that you can’t succeed in life unless you have superpowers.
And why? Because Willow represents the good nerd to Warren, Jonathan and Andrew’s bad nerds, and therefore is the character that the writers probably feel a connection to. They were no doubt mousy individuals at school with their book learning. But I’m expected to believe that she does a bit of magic and she can fight as well as a slayer? That she has the wisdom and perspective of Giles?
The other problem is that I doubt very much that Alyson Hannigan is smart. Well, not as smart as the character she’s portraying. So it never comes across properly, anyway.
It is, of course, a tribute to the Dark Phoenix saga, but lacks the driving force of that story, that Jean is seduced and manipulated into slipping down the wrong path.
Aside from that, I liked most of it. But it did shore up the fact that you’ve got to play your characters true to form, and don’t twist them out of shape.
And this is kind of the inside of my brain, watching things and taking them apart and figuring out what’s wrong.
It’s an exquisite piece of work that you can’t see where they’ve gone wrong. And everyone goes a bit wrong.
Fantasy
From a fairly early age, I was reading this stuff about writing and how using fiction to follow through revenge fantasies, etc etc, was a bad thing. So a lot of my writing was built around subverting that idea. Superstu clearly isn’t a power fantasy, because the poor sad bugger gets kicked around by life, can’t get a girlfriend, can’t keep a girlfriend. (Oh yeah, I never got to revealing that Stu and Wanda’s relationship lasted about a month before Stu broke it by running away after causing Dan to burst into flames. Oh yes.)
But here’s the thing, the older I get, the more I think that’s wrong. Aspiration is a good thing and there’s no reason not to be doing stories about that. And seeing people achieve things is entertaining. Yes, there should be conflict, yes, there should be hardship, but there should also be glory and success.
My stuff tends to be a little downbeat and to miss that. If there is success, it’s bittersweet or quiet like a smile. But there are grand moments in life.
And oh, I’m just watching an episode of Buffy and after a prolonged scene of Tara and Willow kissing (which looked like Amber Benson and Alyson Hannigan were trying their best to make work but no), Buffy walks into the nerds’ lair (and a show mostly watched by nerds is disparaging of nerds? Why?) and sees a Vampirella statue and pulls a face. Sexuality forced into people’s faces in a vampire context? Yes, there’s an irony there that I’m sure the creators of the programme didn’t see. Feh. And tshaw. And now there’s a scene where some character is complaining about their fat sister. And this show is about empowering women? Think again.
Sorry, distracted. Mostly it kind of works in a low rent way. Like that new trailer for the new Doctor. He’s a very Doctor-y Doctor it seems. Trust him, he says, and I do. I’m looking forward to having a Doctor-y Doctor again, after the raging celebrity era Doctor that Tennant gave us.
Anyway, writing again. So what is this optimism? Who knows?