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?
The angels have the phonebox
Okay okay okay.
Okay.
Okay okay.
O.
Kay.
I think I’ve rediscovered myself.
You see, sometimes you have to be part of the world. And that’s not fun. Being part of the world.
I’m really not part of the world. Not part of the world. That’s the best bit. I’m the guy with two hearts. I’m the ladybird man. I don’t fit and that’s good. I’m Naboo, that’s who. And yeah, the world wants you to fit in. It wants you to be part of the system. But there are ways of working to a greater good that don’t involve being part of things. Oh yes.
And all those silly ideas, that you have to sleep with people to be important, that you have to be noisy and that you have to drink and that you have to blah blah blah blah blah.
No.
When I was a kid I knew you didn’t have to. And being an adult is about compromise, about not being yourself to fit in. Being a kid, I didn’t have to.
Kids know. Listen to your kid.
Turmoil
A couple of things are swirling around in my head at the moment, one is how effortlessly the idea for my RPG scenario came, and how come it’s so much harder to write real stories. I keep thinking that I need an inciting event.
A friend’s girlfriend asked me, apropos of nothing, the other day if I’d met anyone nice yet. And then assured me that one day I would. This, of course, set me thinking about how I won’t meet anyone nice and the fact that I am deeply unattractive (or so women have told me, again apropos of nothing). So I’ve been trying to cast that aside.
It doesn’t help that I’ve been watching season 6 of Buffy and have found myself increasingly disturbed by the endless scenes of Sarah Michelle Gellar and James Marsters semi-naked and simulating sex. It embarrasses me, sure, partially because I don’t understand sex and probably feel excluded, but at the same time it’s the voyeurism and the objectification of the actors and the idea that I would want to see them doing that thing, when I’d be perfectly happy if we saw Buffy after it all happened, looking disgusted with herself. I don’t need to see the act, and it doesn’t add anything to the emotional impact of the storyline to have that titillation thrust in my face. Even little Michelle Trachtenberg has to say a line about a pizza creating a “meat party” in her mouth, which is a hideously awkward thing for anyone to say anyway and clearly written to set up a humorous aside, and then acknowledging the “unintentional” innuendo, just to make sure that those of us who would like to ignore it can’t.
The comic Buffy works immensely though. And part of this is that the forced sexuality isn’t there. The characters and the story are, but the fan service isn’t. Except that bit with Buffy sleeping with a girl. Which might have come from a good idea of reminding people that Buffy is selfish and uses sex for comfort, but ultimately feels like an attempt to make people look because, oh Buffy slept with a girl. Someone recently pointed out that the comments in Doctor Who about men with boyfriends and women with girlfriends probably do more to make gay relationships accepted by “mainstream” society because we don’t have to have the acts pushed in our face, children are simply indoctrinated with the idea that it’s no big deal. In the Buffy comic, all of Buffy’s friends walk into the bedroom and see what has happened and comment on it.
Am also playing with linux. And it’s rather nice. I have it dual-booted on a nettop. I’m not really that sure why people insist it’s somehow better than windows. Non-proprietorial yes, but you must be on the net to have everything working, which isn’t the case with windows. Though we’re moving towards that. But the idea was that it’s a good environment for me to play with php and other web languages.
Personally the internet is something I visit, but I don’t want to live there. A lot of the stuff I’m intrigued by is most easily accessible via the internet because I’m not mainstream - I like, ironically or not, all the things that are dismissed as being the reserves of the virginal, comics, role-playing, science fiction, computers, because oh how everyone must have sex to prove their worth - and in the past that was facilitated by visits to cities or secondhand bookshops. But as a medium I find the internet very boring. More and more so I hate it because all the problems of society, the bullying, the elitism, the lying and fraud are easily replicated there.
I think it’s interesting that in Star Trek, they didn’t have the internet. Not even in the later series. (Though they did have the vaguely creepy applications of the holodeck…) Mmm. I think it’s the culture on the internet I don’t like, not the technology. But that’s much the same with everything.
Lionel Jeffries RIP
Ah yes, the great Lionel Jeffries is dead. My childhood, apart from all the science fiction and the comics, was spent watching comedies from the 50s and 60s and 70s and warped my idea of what England should be. Because all those character actors, they were my heroes. I didn’t want to be Spider-Man, I wanted to be Peter Sellers. And Lionel Jeffries was one of those great men, those true Englishmen, that meant so much to me. Did you know he was in Lexx, incredibly?
Do you think that there’s another Lionel Jeffries out there? Actually David Tennant has that style of acting.
Rest in peace, big man.
Infested with ladybirds
My flat is infested with ladybirds. And many-spotted ladybirds, huge and angry. One of the swines landed on me as I was exercising and bit me. Twice.
And, dear reader, I killed the little bastard. I’m sorry. I’ll rot in various hells but these are mutant rage ladybirds from hell anyway, so they get what they deserve.
They’re also not easy to kill. Squash. No still alive. Squash. Is it… Squash. Mmm. Not moving now.
Biting mutant Lovecraftian ladybirds. It’ll be the fairtrade bananas. I know it. You do some little thing to make the world better and it comes back and bites you on the leg.
And things had been going well. Because a friend and I are having a go at roleplaying I’d ordered myself the Starter set for Dungeons and Dragons because I’m a retarded manchild, and it came today and I’d gotten inordinately excited about the Dragonborn Paladin character type. Imagine that, a Dragon who is a knight. Can it get any better?
As it is we’re using the RUGS free roleplaying system which is less hidebound by rules and stats, but does need a d20 - which is a twenty-sided dice. Which is an immensely cool thing. I’ve gotten hopelessly enthusiastic about it all, because it’s going to be great, because I wanted to do this when I was a kid and now finally I’m fulfilling the dream and the little boy in me is looking up at me and thinking, this is the man I was meant to grow into.
But also, when I sat down to write my scenario - we’re going to take it in turns at DMing - I found all sorts of creativity flowing out that may find its way into prose form. The city of Tyr Fresca is coming, and the Caliph El Garym. And I have a player character who is a kitsune. And my friend is a sailor with a harpoon. I can’t wait. Though I think mood music is required… And I’m going to do drawings…
Is this how other people feel?
Forging a new path
So, I forgot to mention that I didn’t become First Reader at Strange Horizons. Simply put, I didn’t fit the bill. The first reader needed to be in tune with the editors, and I kind of knew going in that I wasn’t but was willing to see if it was possible I was wrong. I also think that pointing out that a couple of their stories were kind of rotten and unimaginative and not saying anything new might not have helped. I held back from doing that when I read an issue of Hub recently that pinched a Kim Newman story and swapped Frankenstein film for football. But given that it was such an obvious steal, I probably should have.
Of course, this is hardly a surprise. I’m too honest about my tastes to actually fit in with most people. It’s why I stopped frequenting internet fora. I just couldn’t find people with a similar perspective to me. I also have quite wide-ranging tastes and none of them are built on current trends.
But it raises another issue. Is my eclecticism, my strong views of what I think is good, making good fiction and an individual voice that will serve me well, or is it divorcing me from the market?
Oh oh oh. To be Japanese. I’ve long been a fan of Japanese culture, not least because I grew up on those silly transforming robots and video games (”All your base are belong to us”) but because I think that the Japanese have similar preoccupations to the British. Both had very class based societies that were destroyed by the Second World War, both have found new success on the world stage since the War, both have had empires that peaked. I think our visions of the apocalypse are quite close together, too. The Japanese also have an inability not to see humour in a situation, and off-beat humour at that, much like the British are meant to. And they prize science and intelligence… Which the British used to do… But they’re also wonderfully alien as well. They have a perspective that I wouldn’t expect.
And they haven’t been infiltrated by a desire to be American. Please British television people, stop trying to be American. And stop trying to be earnest. (It’s disturbing, probably, that I think of Terry Gilliam as inherently British in what he does.)
But also, the Japanese have manga and anime, and they don’t walk down the same old path that UK and US science fiction and fantasy so often does. They’re edgier.
But is that because Japanese audiences are more receptive to experimentation? Do British audiences just want the same smooth pre-processed rubbish? Because I could do that.