Comics


Shelf Space

In my move before last, I measured up how many litres of CDs and books I owned as I stuffed them into rucksacks (80 litres of CD, 90 of book). In their current house move, Michael Frayn and his wife have estimated they possess 250 metres of books, prompting Alan Coren to desperately try to convert this measurement back into a number of units.

(By now I’ve probably cleared the 125 litre mark for books, despite a clear out on the recent move. The CDs haven’t bred as much and are only up to about 90 litres, with 40+ litres of comics despite my best Ebaying. Alan and Brian undoubtedly possess greater volumes than I, if they’d like to guesstimate the displacement of their collections I’d love to hear.)


Permanent Damage

Another interesting column from Steven Grant. Topped and tailed by comics news, he takes in the DareDevil movie, comics movies in general and life under an Orange Alert (and snowstorms).

Homeland security agents this morning raided the winter home of Mother Nature in Vail, Colorado and whisked her off to an undisclosed location to be interrogated about reputed connections to Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, as severe weather conditions along the East Coast closed airports and highways, hindered police and protective services, shut down power in several states, and, as threatened in a recent tape alleged to have been made by Al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden, brought much of the American community to a standstill…..

Ari Fleischer suggested the intelligence has long been known to the President. “President Bush in fact declared war on nature the instant his presidency began,”


High Seas

Damn! The world keeps stealing my best ideas. The first story of the DEx comic (another of my many stalled projects) revolved around a ship loaded with weapons smuggled out of Afghanistan and/ or Iraq. I was thinking more in terms of conventional weapons and things like Stingers with maybe the basis of a dirty bomb thrown in for good measure. Now there are rumours abroad that Iraqi NBC weaponry has been smuggled out of the country and is afloat in three large container ships.


Gloat

Today I plan to have a highly productive day. How will I manage this I hear you cry. I took the day off work. My first task was to sleep in until noon. I feel that I did an excellent job of this. My next task is to eat a large and unhealthy lunch. I plan to follow this up with buying comics and DVDs. This may not seem like a productive day to you but it beats a normal day in the office (‘work posing’ as John has just put it).


Sunday at the Office:

Ok. You need to bid for the White Mans Guide to Pimpin. How else can geeks get on the social scene? In addition, Steve Jobs at Apple has decided to branch out their core market into retail. It was only a matter of time. Once again, it is time to plug a favourite of mine, Hardware Pron2, and yes, dark overload, it is safe for work and home. Worth a click every time.

I have been looking into SImCity4 lately, but have found something much better in NationStates, like SimCity but without all the effort. And while on the gaming topic, the boys over at PopCap have devised another cool flash game.

Some people, read the webmaster of this site might like to know that DC Comics and Post Cereals have teamed up to have a create a villain contest. I am not sure if entrants are allowed from outside the States, but you could always lie or use my old address. I am not sure who my new villain might be, but it could be a presedential figure with no intelligence leading the last superpower in the world. Sound familiar?

A new issue of the The Onion hit the streets on Thursday. So much for working at the office on Sunday. I’m tired.


BNP

The British National Party has taken a council seat in Yorkshire. This looks bad, but it isn’t as big a disaster (or victory) as people like to make out. More people voted against them than for them (over 2:1), and you can bet there was a low turnout- most of the people who didn’t vote would have gone for one of the other candidates. What is interesting is that they intend to go for seats in Allerdale next time. This is quite close to home and I remember, a few years ago, reading that the parliamentary seat of Workington, within the council’s boundaries, was the third most white constituency in the country. Which is probably why they’re trying out there.

[Actually, Workington is the only place I’ve ever seen the National Front trying to sell their paper. This was in the mid eighties. Whenever we went shopping there on a Saturday I’d pop into the town’s big newsagent to get model magazines and comics and outside would be the NF man trying to sell The Briton, or whatever it was called. The amusing thing, for me, was that he was always shadowed by a Socialist Worker who would be across the precinct touting copies of the eponymous rag. I stopped visiting so regularly, but it stopped some time around when I went to University. Any Workingtonians dropping by want to tell me when?]


Imagineering

The Pentagon wants to create a huge new section to combat terrorism. Amongst the group’s jobs will be encouraging terrorist groups to act so they can be caught (isn’t that entrapment? And isn’t this worse than criminal entrapment because any number of innocent people could lose their lives if there’s a screw up?), keeping a reserve of retired intelligence experts to be called up during times of crisis and creating a ‘Red Team’ with analysts and authors who would dream up potential threats. The DEx comic features a former MI6 analyst pensioned off after being injured on duty. If there was a chance he might be called back at any time it could lead to other possible plots.


Garage Comics

Matt Fraction puts forward an argument for a new attitude amongst comics creators.

Make the kind of thing you want to be seen reading. Make the kind of thing that can get you laid. Read comics in public.

These things we make should be enviable. Read comics to pick up girls. Or boys.

Whichever you prefer.

Comics that can get you laid? That’s my kind of comics!


Four colour world

Mark Millar, writer of some of the best (and best selling) superhero books of the moment is certain that we’re not just living in the future, we’re living in a comic book.

…a doctor friend of mine was telling me that six Muslim extremists had been arrested in Edinburgh last week before they could scatter anthrax over our country’s major New Year’s Eve celebrations from hang-gliders. All that’s missing from these scenarios is the eleven-page brawl and the witty one-liners…


Batman: superhero or not?

Ok, the question comes down to this, was/is Batman a superhero? I get the distinct feeling of treading ground thoroughly trampled on before by others. He didn’t have any superpowers and that’s what started it. Since that revelation, I’ve been trying to think of other relatively mainstream superheroes from the major comics such as DC or Marvel. I can’t think of any, the nearest I’ve got so far is the Shadow, but I believe he had some mental abilities. Mind you, on that page I see the statement from Amazon that “[…]Customers who wear clothes also shop for:

Clean Underwear[…]”. I’d generally hope that was the case.

Anyway, whatever Batman was he was cool. Looking around, I see indeed that the ground was thoroughly trampled by others. To the point that some just didn’t get on with Batman at all. Mind you when superheroes get transfered so badly to cartoons, you can’t really them.

I hate cyclists. Having been one in the past (and still hope to be again when I get by bike out), I can see their point in that it’s a cleaner way of transport. But that assumes that the world is full of bicycles, pedestrians and dinghies. Mix cars into that and you end up with 6 cars, billowing out lots of nasty gases due to being stuck in first or second gear behind the cyclist who’s too frightened to pedal downhill around a country lane. Therefore cyclists are bad for the health – they also scratch the paintwork when they bounce off the bonnet.


Resolutions

In a vain attempt to make sure I keep some of them, I’m going to put forward a huge list of resolutions. With so many things to aim for, I should hit one or two.
Stop
Worrying so much.
Paying attention to negative people. So much of what passes for political debate is just one attack after another on the opposition. Occasionally an attack is deserved, and I know I won’t be able to keep from making one or two myself, but I’m going to try to make positive suggestions more often than insults.
Start
A health regime. More exercise, better food, etc.
A better paying job/ making money from this site. (Might happen.)
Tidying up the computer/ books room.
Begin
The Sounds of Soldiers. A satire on the works of Clancy and the like.
Finish
Heavensent.
All the models I started this year.
DEx, the comic I started work on last year.
All the unread books on my shelves before I buy any new ones.


Permanent Damage

Steven Grant’s weekly column is an interesting read, whether you’re a comic fan or not. This week- ‘Homage’ as insult, Dubya’s lack of a domestic policy, Bond’s dual nature and season four of The Sopranos-

“But is Anthony Jr. not the dumbest male on television? I have this fantasy that he somehow hooks up with TV�s dumbest female, 24�s Kim Bauer. And all their children get careers as doorstops.”

The English Nation is proving heavy going. I think I’m going to put it aside until I’ve got a better understanding of the timeline of the last two millennia. The central argument, however, is powerful. The ‘official’ history of Britain, the one used by anti euro politicians and tabloids, is a lie. Our island nation’s thousand uninterrupted years of existence independent of mainland Europe never existed, and the history that proves it was actually a retcon that Henry VIII and his deputy Thomas Cromwell used to justify the Reformation. The severing of the ties to Rome kick-started the splintering of Europe into nation states with the associated chauvinism, parochialism and nationalism that saw their final expression in WW1 and WW2. In the age of age of The War Against Terrorism it’s a warning against accepting, promoting or allowing to go unquestioned the government version of events.

All of this because a fat man with a comedy beard was having marriage problems.

(PS retcon comic geek phrase, short for retroactive continuity, meaning to adjust, reframe or just plain ignore the events of previous tales to suit the story currently being told.)


Just finished- Dear Mr. President by Gabe Hudson It’s easy to see why Dubya called this book “unpatriotic and ridiculous”, with surreal stories of Gulf War Syndrome manifesting as a vestigial ear and hallucinations, military technology and doctrine taken to illogical extremes and Norman Schwarzkopf’s ‘raisin heart’. Not easy or coherent reading, more of a bunch of twisted allegories on the damage done by war.

Just started- Children of Chaos by Douglas Rushkoff. Snowboarding, video games and comics as a way to understand a fragmenting future. Hmmmm.


After reading the fucking article, I decided to take the How English Are You? quiz. I am ‘practically French’, which is fuckin’ brilliant. Mais, je ne parle bien le Francais. Mon Francais est tres merde. Whilst I’m on the subject of French, can anyone give me a translation of nom d’un chien!. I’ve got a pretty good idea, based upon the context of its appearances in the comics I bought in Chamonix, but I’d be interested in a literal and an equivalent translation.

I just remembered that my mother reads this blog, so I should really shut the fu…… Erm, cut down on the expletives. Even the foreign ones.


Click the image for the full picture

I’m starting a slow process of uncluttering my life. I’m selling off comics and stuff on EBay, I’m going to rip all my CD singles to the hard drive and I might sell them as well, and I’m thinking about getting rid of the television. The last is because I watched a whole two hours of TV this week- The Shield, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Coupling (if I hadn’t been out last night I would probably have watched Have I Got News For You, but that’s it). It was on for the sake of moving pictures whilst I ate, but that doesn’t really count.
I’ve gone without TV before. In 1998, the portable set I then had fused and I lasted over six months before hiring a replacement set. People thought I was a bit odd and the TV licencing folks couldn’t cope with it, but I got on. I read, I wrote, I surfed. It was quite constructive. This time it would be even easier because there’s a DVD drive in my PC.