Rorschach

Tom King, Jorge Fornés & Dave Stewart Rorschach (2021)
I've mostly steered clear of all the Watchmen stuff which hasn't been drawn by Dave Gibbons. I somehow ended up with a copy of a Comedian comic book written by one of those young lads who writes fucking everything these days, and aside from the obligatory labyrinthine foreshadowing it was about as good as I expected it to be; the HBO TV series was mostly a decent effort, I guess, aside from recycling the story Alan Moore had already told; but this grabbed me, partially because it doesn't actually look like a Watchmen spin-off, and of course, it's Tom King.

For those of you requiring spoilers at this juncture, grow up.

This isn't the ginger nutcase from the original run, but rather a later individual or individuals inhabiting the same universe who assume the mantle, one of whom is hired to assassinate a presidential candidate. The comic book follows a detective who tries to work out what the fuck is going on. The trail of clues leads to conspiracy theorists who believe that a blank tape contains messages from the original Rorschach, and the guy currently behind the wibbly-wobbly mask seems to be Steve Ditko with the serial numbers filed off, creator of a comic book clearly based on Ditko's Objectivist hero, Mr. A - himself a forerunner to Alan Moore's remix of the character. So there's also a commentary on aspects of the comics industry and its cultural significance, with both Otto Binder and Frank Miller showing up as themselves, specifically as Rorshach conspiracy theorists. There's a lot to unpack, as the saying goes.

Anyway, the artwork is gorgeous and it's wonderfully moody, beautifully written - at least in terms of pace and dialogue - but also thematically dense and ponderous. Even if you were paying close attention, a second or third reread may be necessary for full appreciation, although this shouldn't count against Rorschach which ultimately rewards the effort.

Day of the Giants

Lester Del Rey Day of the Giants (1959)
Firstly, the flying saucers shown destroying a city with rays of some description on the cover appear nowhere in the novel. Weirdly, I find this sort of inattention to detail on the part of a publisher often serves to indicate that something truly special is to be found behind the wildly misleading painting; and so it is here. I can't say anything I've read by Lester Del Rey ever truly blew my nuts off, but there was always, I felt, a lot of promise, enough so as to suggest there might be a genuine classic hidden somewhere in the back catalogue. It might be this one.

Our story transports an average farmhand and his twin brother to Asgard, realm of the Norse Gods of legend. Ragnarok is approaching and so the Gods are recruiting, and the twin brother has the makings of a hero. Unfortunately our guy was caught up by accident, and being as Asgard doesn't take kindly to non-heroic types, he strives to make himself useful so as to avoid the wrath of his hosts. This he does by teaching them about gunpowder, how to make hand grenades, uranium-235, and other martial innovations which had never occurred to them, Asgard being a stubbornly traditional society. He also undertakes some pruning and restores Yggdrasil, the world tree, to full health; and his advanced weaponry aids in the defeat of the frost giants at the end.

It probably doesn't sound like much, aside from predating Marvel's similarly urbane version of Asgard by a few years, and the story approximately distills Lord of the Rings down to a snappier 128 pages - unassuming rustic type travels far to battle terrible power and so on and so forth; but the telling seals the deal. Where the one about how the chess club loser defeats the thickies, so beloved of Asimov and others, is almost a genre in its own right, Del Rey writes something which almost feels like Simak in its good natured understatement - no lecturing, no speechifying, and Leif Svensen really is just a regular guy, as distinct from the former star of the Charles Atlas adverts created in revenge for some high school wedgie which Isaac the author can neither forgive nor forget. Asgardian magic is explained, or at least accounted for, without any stretching of points or ill-fitting lectures about protons, and most of the book is simply our man titting about in Asgard, making sense of things, and teaching dwarves about firearms. There's no hint of questing, nor of any attempt to get the reader's pulse racing, and it's funny without telling jokes. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Loki as amiable and witty, but long-suffering given most of his peers being mainly about the mead and fighting; and by the time he nips back to Earth to bring back cartons of fags for Leif and his twin, I was sold. It's fantasy without the hey nonny no, or science-fiction which remembers that it also has to tell a story, which it does before delivering a lesson about conservatism, tradition, and the importance of taking chances; so it's a great story, well told, and it even has something to say. Wonderful.

I always suspected he had one like this hidden away somewhere.

Adolf Hitler

John Toland Adolf Hitler (1976)
I've read this as research for something or other which will hopefully be in the bag by the time you read this, and which was itself indirectly inspired by Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, a sort of book burning game show hosted by the enduringly unpleasant Carr. The show was produced by Channel 4 who purchased one of Hitler's watercolours for £11,500 so that a studio audience could decide whether or not to have it destroyed, thus posing deeply philosophical questions about whether it's possible to separate the art from the legacy of its creator. I don't suppose anyone suspected that so thoughtful a presentation could ever be viewed with such controversy.

Naturally the internet exploded in response, and I would regard most of the criticism I've seen as entirely justified, although it has since emerged that the painting which ended up shredded was almost certainly a fake. My personal view is that whether or not it is possible to differentiate the art from the artist doesn't really matter, but that book burning or equivalent is never a good look because it's better to understand evil, or that which we have come to perceive as evil, than to settle for screaming this is evil in the face of anyone who happens to ask; because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana wrote, although admittedly I actually thought that one was a Jim Jones original. The thing about destroying the evidence, particularly in the case of Adolf Hitler, is that it facilitates mystery and even mythology, neither of which are much use in preventing the re-occurrence of the same shit.

Further to this, we seem to have a great many monsters these days, and whilst it's difficult to deny that Hitler became the very definition of monster, it limits the possibility of him ever having been just some bloke. This means that we've somewhat lost the ability to spot the emergence of monsters in our own time, because we can't accept that people very much like ourselves were complicit in the deaths of six-million or more Jews; and so those describing immigrants as cockroaches, for one example, are often overlooked as simply persons with strong opinions who just happen to love their country.

Additionally, Hitler's monstrous qualities should be self-evident without having to have it spelled out for us in the name of viewing figures. Lazy fuckers attempting to score points by drawing our attention to monsters whilst screeching don't you think this is terrible? Well, don't you? Don't you? have really begun to bore me shitless. So, I said to myself, let's discover Hitler.

Toland's biography seems to be viewed as the best of the bunch by someone on the internet, so that's why I picked it. The review I read emphasised Toland's attempts to maintain an impartial view, which sounded promising given that I'm reasonably familiar with the arguments against. The arguments against, as summarised and simplified by a million wearying science-fiction scenarios, are that he was a bit of a loser, a sad, sad man who couldn't paint, was chucked out of art college and spent his youth as a homeless for a while - the wrong sort of homeless, rather than the noble victim types we tend to prefer - and he made for a cowardly soldier during the first world war. Also he hated Jews despite probably being half-Jewish, only had one bollock, suffered from uncontrollable farting, couldn't get it up, and no-one liked him. Ha ha. What a loser!

Unfortunately none of this turns out to be entirely true. Although he was repeatedly rejected by the art schools to which he applied and thus never actually had the chance to be chucked out, and he was mostly self taught, the notion that he had no artistic ability whatsoever is patently untrue - which could also be said of many of us. He was distinguished and even decorated for his soldiering during the first world war, and was popular amongst his comrades. His ballbag seems to have contained the traditional quota of bollocks so far as we are able to tell, and the story of his unidentified paternal grandfather being Jewish seems to have been a story told by his enemies, and as is probably obvious, he made quite a few of those.

More curious still is the question of his antisemitism which, from what Toland describes, seems to have been poorly defined at best. He had Jewish friends in his youth, and was eternally grateful to the Jewish doctor who treated his mother's cancer, and his antisemitism seems to have been conditional, something on roughly the same level of my own grandmother's culturally characteristic regard of black people - gushingly favourable if a black person had been friendly to her in the supermarket, but otherwise synchronised to whatever she'd read in the Sun that week. I haven't read Mein Kampf and have no desire to do so, but it sounds very much like an expression of the early Nazi party's struggle to gain the popular vote - a convenient fulcrum by which to get bums on seats with a promise of saving the country from those bad people over there, specifically by associating the perceived threat of Communism with something a bit more tangible, namely funny foreigners. This isn't to diminish the awful influence of Mein Kampf, but it seems significant that Hitler himself came to regard his book as incoherent populist drivel which nevertheless got the job done. More startling still is that as the party graduated to being the only option on the ballot sheet, the awful treatment of Germany's Jewish population was never quite subject to full support, meaning the reduction of the historical narrative to racist Germany unanimous against former friends and neighbours isn't entirely accurate, and more closely resembles the sort of bullshit that - for example - the western Muslim community has had to endure in recent times. In other words, never mind the claim that it couldn't happen here, because it actually is happening, meaning we as a society need to be seriously fucking vigilant about what comes next.

At least during the thirties, it seems the Reich was keen to downplay the antisemitic aspect of its program in pursuit of a more respectable image, one less likely to sour diplomatic relations with other countries, hence Hitler's disowning the thuggish brownshirt element around 1934 in furthering the support of the respectable middle and upper classes. The Kristallnacht of 1938 in which Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship were ransacked or destroyed seems to have been mainly a spontaneous uprising by the brownshirts, and one about which many of the higher-ups felt distinctly uncomfortable, and which Göring* in particular regarded as insane given the significant role of Jewish business within the larger German economy.

So the antisemitism would seem to have been an expedient use of existing prejudices which spiralled out of control as the Nazis, and particularly Hitler, fell more and more in love with their own mythology. I state this not to diminish its significance, but rather to illustrate that the pattern is something we should immediately recognise rather than dismiss as something which can't happen again because we're much nicer these days.

Toland suggests that had Hitler died in 1937, he probably would have been remembered mostly as a great statesman and orator, which doesn't seem such a stretch given that we've tended to overlook antisemitic or similar tendencies amongst other historical leaders simply because, for whatever reason, we haven't chosen to remember them as monsters.

The strangest, most unexpected detail I take from this biography has been that Adolf Hitler was personable, funny, reasonably intelligent, self-effacing and likable providing you were on the right side of the argument. He was clearly a little odd and self-absorbed as a young man, which hardly makes him unique, but rendered him prone to mysticism and an intuitive faith in what he thought should be right to which he adhered regardless of objective reality. It's therefore not entirely surprising that he more or less completely lost it by the end, thus becoming the monster we remember.

Toland's biography is nine-hundred pages, which is a long time to spend immersed in the most terrible period of human history, but it's mostly fascinating - excepting a few instances of inner circle politics and policy wibbling back and forth for more pages than seems quite necessary. Surprisingly, everyone comes out of it a little better than you might expect, which is also chilling because, as I say, these people were not exceptional and most of them seem unfortunately familiar. It is specifically this rendering of the Third Reich and its cast of colourful characters as approximately regular people which leaves this era seeming, if anything, more horrifying than has been made apparent by the contemporary denouncement of monsters; because it isn't Darth Vader or the Daleks. It's us, regardless of how righteous you may deem yourself to be. We did this.

This must not happen again.

Someone somewhere will read the above and find themselves unable to tell the difference between what I've written and an affirmation of Adolf Hitler being a great man who simply made poor choices, probably additionally pointing out that actually he was a monster; and so it will happen again.

*: I think it was Göring. It's difficult keeping track of them all.

Flight 714

Hergé Flight 714 (1968)
Several people have told me I shouldn't be reading Tintin just as I shouldn't be reading the works of others on the list. Hergé was a collaborator and Nazi sympathiser, you see, except as per fucking usual he actually wasn't, just as it is with those other persons on the roll call of individuals denounced due to the contemporary equivalent of Rik from the Young Ones jumping up and down and screaming, look at me, everybody, I found one, because that's apparently all it takes. That said, I probably shouldn't mention that I picked this up as light relief from John Toland's nine-hundred page biography of Adolf Hitler on the grounds that it gets a bit depressing once you hit 1942.

Apparently I just did. Never mind.

I grew up on a farm in the middle of the rural English nowhere, and every two weeks or so we were subject to a visit by a mobile library. I was just about big enough to cope with the steps and would climb up into the rear of the truck, lined with shelves, and toddle off towards the back where they kept the children's books. The cover of this one really grabbed my attention, and so it served as my introduction to Tintin, an obsession which kept me going for the next couple of years. I came to prefer Asterix, but at the time I felt the cover of Asterix in Spain seemed smug and frivolous, whereas Tintin took itself just seriously enough to appeal to me as I struggled to make sense of the world. So this is possibly where it all started, whatever it may be.

Hergé - not actually a Nazi sympathiser by any meaningful description unless you believe my opening paragraph makes me one - seemed to be on a mission to educate his audience, to send them to far flung places and cultures without patronising them, and to portray those cultures and encounters with realism and a degree of sympathy, formative efforts predating The Blue Lotus notwithstanding. Of course, Tintin wasn't actually journalism and took an occasionally speculative digression - sending the gang to the moon for one example, and Flight 714 for another.

If Destination Moon skates fairly close to the hard science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, this one gets even weirder in drawing on the theories, such as they are, of Robert Charroux who significantly influenced Erich von Däniken. So not only do we have the discovery of hidden subterranean temples constructed by ancient astronauts, but also telepathy, and a lift back to civilisation facilitated by flying saucer, albeit in hallucinatory terms.

This was Hergé's penultimate Tintin adventure, assembled following failure to relaunch as an abstract artist, while significantly disgruntled by the success of Asterix, and himself somewhat bored of his own characters. This much is roughly apparent from Flight 714 only barely having a story - and the title names the flight they didn't take because they ended up on this one - with nothing so complex as the intrigue and espionage of previous escapades; and the paranormal element feels a little as though Georges was simply trying to keep himself invested. Additionally, some of the background material, notably the then fairly trendy supersonic passenger jet, were drawn by assistants.

Nevertheless, despite all that's stacked against it, Flight 714 is a great book - just stranger than we'd come to expect. The slapstick is never far away, never overdone, and remains funny throughout; and the pacing is such that it never feels as though we're treading water, waiting for the next scene, even where the lack of obvious direction has become apparent; and of course the art is, as ever, outstanding.

Even as the comeback album its author didn't really want to record, Flight 714 stands with the best of them, and enough so as to have retained its charm half a century later.

The Man with a Thousand Names

A.E. van Vogt The Man with a Thousand Names (1974)
John Clute reckoned van Vogt's drive had gone by the seventies, and whilst it's probably true that his greatest work had been written a couple of decades earlier - greatest at least in terms of generating an atmosphere so weird as to smooth over instances where the narrative fails to join up - I'd say his success rate remained mostly undiminished. Sure there were a few duds, which was as true in the forties as in the later years. The Man with a Thousand Names kicks off in typically bewildering fashion, so I paid attention and held on tight, skipping back to re-read anything I wasn't too sure about; and for at least the first half it began to feel as though this might even be his greatest work after The Violent Man, possibly due to A.E.'s customarily foggy disregard for cause and effect being written with unusual clarity; meaning that providing one is resigned to the fact that not everything is going to add up, it sort of makes sense.

Our main guy is the thoroughly obnoxious heir to a private fortune, an amoral playboy who is used to getting what he wants without having to care less about the consequences. This seemingly presents a problem for Goodreads types who expect relatable characters, but never mind. Our guy pilots a spaceship to Mittend, our nearest habitable planet, then instantaneously finds himself back on Earth inhabiting the body and life of Mark Broehm, a bartender he once wronged. This occurs a few more times, zapping his brain into the bodies of others he's screwed over, with no real explanation as to why it's happening, and it doesn't even seem to be karma catching up with our boy who remains a heel regardless, even committing rape at one point, suggesting - at least to me - that he's probably not supposed to be relatable. Eventually we learn that this is something to do with Mother, a sort of psychic gestalt representing the first wave of an invasion from another galaxy, by which point I was lost despite my best intentions.

The narrative zips about at least as much as that of Null-A and presumably for similarly non-Aristotelian reasons, and is accordingly dreamlike, albeit a dream reported with the hard-boiled pragmatism of detective fiction; and the whole somehow reminds me of David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus in so much as that it feels heavily allegorical, even symbolic to the point of meaning eclipsing the demands of linear progress from one part of the story to another. I still don't know what it's about beyond that it's obviously about something, but as exercise for my brain, it felt good and was mostly gripping.

The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

Joel McIver
The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (2005)
Here's an oddity, one of a series of books examining classic movies - classic movies such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Scarface and er… The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

Me neither.

I guess the general public must have been similarly mystified given that I picked this up cheap from a remaindered section somewhere in the general vicinity of its publication date. It's been sat on my bookshelves ever since, five different bookshelves given the number of times I've moved house since my presumed purchase - presumed because it's a vague impression rather than a definitive memory. I assume it's been there sandwiched between Lydon and Milligan all this time, somehow eluding even those sweeps deliberately intended to select volumes I never got around to reading. Similarly, I've seen The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and don't remember much about that either. I rate the soundtrack album quite highly, and even Moorcock's bizarre pseudo-novelisation of the film is pretty great, but the movie itself…

McIver's autopsy handily includes a scene by scene synopsis, thus allowing me to remember why I've failed to remember the thing, specifically that it was mostly existing footage cobbled together like a last minute homework assignment which cleverly admits to being crap in the hope we won't notice that it is, in actual fact, crap; plus it was McLaren's vision of the Pistols and therefore pretty much a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless, in discussing a movie which wasn't anywhere near as amazing as I hoped it would be when I was fourteen, McIver pulls together all sorts of fascinating historical details which somehow failed to make it into other Pistols biographies, or were else so underplayed that I didn't notice. Sid, in particular, comes out of it quite well, and actual light is shed upon why he almost certainly wasn't responsible for killing his girlfriend, which is good to know; and crap as the film was, Julian Temple's justification is interesting. Even Russ Meyer comes out of it well enough to suggest his version might have been worth a look, had it been made.

It's surprising that anyone should have found something new to say about punk rock in 2005 - or if not new, at least something obvious which hadn't been said before - but McIver pulled it off. I'm still not too bothered about watching the movie ever again, but I'm glad this thing found its way onto my shelves.

Star Trek Log One

Alan Dean Foster Star Trek Log One (1974)
While I've never been a massive unreserved fan of Trek, I've enjoyed some of it, and some of it I've enjoyed a lot. I watched the animated version at the time - around four-ish on a Saturday afternoon as I recall - but have never had any burning desire to revisit the thing beyond vague curiosity about the guy with the three arms who made the cut because they couldn't afford Walter Koenig. Naturally I had no idea anyone had novelised the series in those days before VHS, but they did and so my curiosity achieved the necessary critical mass because it's Alan Dean Foster - who can generally be relied upon to do a decent job in cases such as we have here.

This one rather tidily adapts the first three episodes of the first series, the first of which is oddly familiar, so I guess I must have revisited that debut episode at some point fairly recently, unless they recycled the story for Enterprise or one of the other variations. On the subject of recycling, Beyond the Farthest Star has our cartoon Kirk and pals investigating an alien derelict of several million years vintage, formerly inhabited by massive aliens who were seemingly killed off by the thing which duly wakes up and tries to knacker the Enterprise. It's probably a coincidence that it so strongly foreshadows the half of Ridley Scott's Alien which didn't so strongly resemble A.E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle that the father of the iconic Hovis advert ended up settling out of court.

Yes, a coincidence. That'll be it. I'm sure of it.

Still talking of recycling, a fair chunk of One of Our Planets is Missing later turned up in the 1979 movie, it could be argued.

Anyway, Log One comprises three decent and generally engaging stories, all with the inevitably modular quality of Trek episodes, but which nevertheless manage to work some pleasing flashes of imagination into the formula. Alan Dean Foster has the reputation of being something of a hack, having written about a million of these things; but you can't really tell from this one which reads more like kin to the aforementioned Voyage of the Space Beagle - itself an obvious precursor to Star Trek - than words copied from a screen with linking material. Indeed, Foster's retelling crackles with character and jazzy asides and observations, possibly more so than most of what we saw on the telly. This isn't Terrance bleeding Dicks rearranging the usual phrases and expressions in a slightly different order to the last one.

I'm probably not massively likely to start hunting down the other nine volumes, but neither am I averse to the idea. Being what amounts to apple-polishing boy scouts having wholesome adventures in space, Star Trek succeeds mainly when it does something weird or spontaneous, and Alan Dean Foster really brings out the best in the mythology*.

*: I refuse point fucking blank to refer to it, or indeed to anything as a franchise.

A William Burroughs Reader

William S. Burroughs & John Calder (editor)
A William Burroughs Reader (1982)
This was my first Burroughs, and actually the first I ever saw in a high street store, proving for me that the man existed in the real world beyond the limits of Throbbing Gristle fandom. The high street store - or more accurately shop - from which I purchased this book for £2.50 was Midland Educational in Stratford-upon-Avon. I know this because the receipt fell out from between the pages as I was reading on Friday the 11th of November, 2022, and I was interested to note that I'd bought the thing on Thursday the 11th of November, 1982. So I bought the book, read it, and then exactly forty years later to the day, I plucked it from the shelf more or less at random and decided to give it another look.

Weird, as Burroughs himself would doubtless have said whilst pulling that boggle-eyed face which people do when they've just noticed something weird.

Arguably weirder still, is that this sampler is quite a tough read, where the novels from which the various excerpts were lifted generally aren't; and given Billy's love of jamming random slabs of text together, you would think this might have been the bestest Burroughs book ever. The most surprising realisation I draw from this is that Burroughs' writing is less effective out of context, where you might think it wouldn't matter. One possible reason may be psychological in that for all their scrambled narrative, his novels tend to be quite breezy - never more than a couple of hundred pages with large type widely spaced. A William Burroughs Reader on the other hand crams everything in with type so small it could be an anarchist pamphlet from the eighties. It feels heavy, and it feels uphill, which works against what is communicated - or at least the means of its communication - by emphasising the disorientation. I suppose it could be argued that one is expected to dip into a sampler such as this rather than dutifully plough through the whole thing from cover to cover, but that's not how I read.

As a greatest hits of sorts, I was expecting to glean an overview, some sort of perspective on the shape of Burrough's career; which emerges albeit in a vague sense, and although the selections communicate why one might like to read The Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night, and most of those which came between, this remains a surprisingly poor second to making the effort with the actual novels.

It was nice to find a few chapters from The Third Mind included given that it's presently out of print, but otherwise I guess Burroughs is simply one of those authors who doesn't translate well into shorthand.

The Empire of Glass

Andy Lane The Empire of Glass (1995)
Simply, I was in the mood for more Hartnell and had no memory of having read this - although obviously I did - thus allowing for the possibility of pleasure taken in trying to work out what the fuck is going on. Going back to old Who things which I thought were amazing all those years ago has bitten me on the ass more than once, but thankfully this turned out to be one of the good ones.

By one of the good ones I mean it's a respectable science-fiction novel in its own right, albeit one which just happens to make use of characters and situations from a television show; and, as with Perry Rhodan, Doc Savage, Sexton Blake or any other star of the written serial, the author gets to play with an existing universe without feeling obliged to spend half the page count explaining it because if we're reading, we probably already know what we're dealing with.

Of course, it all falls apart when you get a writer with nothing to say, no ambition beyond adding to the ugh - franchise or brand or property or whatever the well-dressed product-sponge-cunt about town is calling it this year; but happily, that isn't what we have here, and I'd say that The Empire of Glass dates from a lost golden age when quality still had the edge over quantity most of the time.

Our man travels to Venice in the early sixteenth century, and we learn a lot about Venice because Lane does his research and additionally bothers to make it interesting, which is nice. The environment of our tale is solid and well grounded, evocatively described without any hint of box ticking, and so much so as to support an ambitiously ludicrous narrative juggling alien incursions, extraterrestrial espionage, Venetian politics, Galileo, William Shakespeare's career as a spy for the court of King James, and a flying island drawn indirectly from Jonathan Swift. There's one passage where Galileo's biography shows through with more fidelity than we really need…

As he watched, entranced, a small shape like a flattened egg that glinted like metal rose up rapidly from the far side of the island, moving upward as smoothly and inexorably as the ebony balls that he had dropped from the tower of Pisa to test Aristotle's theory had fallen.

All the same, in the context of a novel which gets so much right, it amuses rather than annoys. Credibility is stretched to such a point as to border on the sort of thing Moorcock used to write, and yet everything holds, amounting to a substantially satisfying read of the kind I wish more science-fiction authors could achieve, not least a few of the better known guys, Alastair Reynolds and others.

As with John Peel's rendition of The Chase, it's been nice - even oddly life affirming - to find myself reminded of Who as something weird and exciting and not entirely predictable.

The Chase

John Peel The Chase (1989)
Here's another Target I bought for the sake of completism, sad fucker that I am, and fairly recently too. I hadn't read one in years and noticed that I had all but about fifteen of the things, so I hit eBay on the grounds that most of them were still affordable and it would give me a massive hard on to see them lined up in order on a shelf.

Something like that anyway, and it's nice to have the option of re-reading them given that I no longer have the patience to watch it on telly. It even feels a bit weird watching the old ones which I once loved, although that's more to do with me and television in general than me and Who. At the risk of repeating myself, Who was once very special to me, and if I squint a bit - at least enough so as to occlude everything since about 2005, particularly the fans - I can still sense a bit of the magic.

When I was a kid, it felt like something which got made almost in spite of the company responsible, something which bordered on horror - as it did in the early seventies - and a fairly extreme existential horror to anyone under the age of ten. The 1973 Radio Times special was mind blowing because it hadn't occurred to me that there might have been Who before I'd started watching, or that there had been monsters I'd never heard of.

Anyway, I think The Chase may have been the first Hartnell I watched on VHS, simply because I'd taken to renting a VCR and I happened to see it in a sale. It probably wasn't a great place to start, but I thought it was wonderful regardless; and if I still frequented such places, virtual or otherwise, which rated Who stories in order of artistic merit, I'm sure I'd still be getting massively defensive over this particular dog's dinner. For those who spent their youth engaged in healthier pursuits, The Chase was apparently plotted by giving action figures to a couple of three-year olds, setting them out in the garden, then seeing what they came up with. So they start off in the sandpit, which all goes pear-shaped when someone gets their bollocks out; leading to brief experiments by the pond, or pretending the garden shed is haunted; ultimately ending up in the flower bed with a load of ping pong balls brought into play because of reasons. This at least saved Terry Nation the embarrassment of recycling the usual plot, I suppose.

All the same, The Chase bulges with beautifully stupid ideas, even if they're strung together in a rhythm which suggests everyone's treading water until Peter Butterworth can get time off from whatever Carry On they were shooting back in June 1965. Nation's script did more than we saw on the screen, and Peel's adaptation makes use of this, filling in details for which neither time nor budget allowed first time around; and it's hardly Stephen Baxter, but considering the extended Crackerjack sketch which Peel attempts to pummel into something vaguely less ridiculous, it's not half bad either.

The first part, as you may be aware, occurs on the planet Aridius, inadvertently presenting a harsh lesson in nominative determinism; but where the screen version was cut to the essentials of amusingly theatrical aliens and the notorious ballbag octopus, here we get something that could almost have been Richard Shaver thanks to just the slightest expansion of this first third of the story. After Aridius, it's mostly business as we probably expect, and not even Peel can make Morton C. Dill either funny or interesting but, you know, we're already off on a good foot, and I kept on reading, and nothing insulted my intelligence like some of the recent stuff, and mostly it reminded me of why I had once been so endlessly fascinated by Who.

See! Sometimes I do have something nice to say about it.

Trejo

Danny Trejo & Donal Logue Trejo (2021)
I bought this autobiography for my wife's birthday with no particular plan to read it myself; but she insisted that I do so, and I like Danny Trejo, so I did and here we are. The two of us - Bess and myself, not me and Danny - saw the man speak at some vaguely charitable thing to do with the opening of a rehab clinic a few years ago. He was very entertaining and I've been well-disposed towards him ever since, to the point of believing that people who don't like Danny Trejo probably have something wrong with them.

I had some vague idea of the general shape of his existence, how he got where he is today, but not in this sort of detail. He was a bad ass, a career criminal, a violent nutcase, a substance abuser in and out of prison; and then he had a revelation about where his life was going, cleaned up, and has now spent the majority of his life dedicated to being a better person, and above all to helping others be better people. Never having struggled with addiction - apart from the fags, I suppose - I've occasionally found the language of recovery and its ruthless optimism a little headachey, but then it doesn't really matter what I think and if it works, as it certainly can do, then it's a beautiful thing; and by describing the context of his formerly troubled existence with such powerful clarity, Trejo really slams the message home without even a trace of preaching, or indeed anything surplus to requirements, resulting in a genuinely inspirational autobiography.

The account of his criminal past is, honestly, about a thousand times more interesting than Genet, and framed in such a way as to involve the reader. You know exactly where he's coming from, or at least I did; and sure, it's a celebrity biography with two names on the front cover and at least one account of hanging out with De Niro, but it's really a great fucking book because Trejo is a great fucking guy, and he's very funny, and being a genuine tough guy, he has no need to keep telling us how tough he is.

Edward James Olmos doesn't come out of it very well though, which is unfortunately amusing.

Collected Essays

Aldous Huxley Collected Essays (1956)
I've been well-disposed towards Huxley since I read Brave New World, then Crome Yellow, and more so since I discovered his association with D.H. Lawrence; and while the sheer volume of this collection (four-hundred pages, dense text, shitloads of classical references) meant it took me at least a year to gear up to reading it, I'm glad I made the effort. Huxley writes about more or less everything ever at exhaustive length and in painstaking detail, inevitably yielding a number of essays which went way over my head, being outside the scope of either my interests or my schooling; but for the most part he's perceptive and insightful even when navigating territory which is, for me, relatively unfamiliar. In this respect his essays remind me a little of the mighty Kenneth Clark, or Brian Sewell, or even Robert Hughes; and most of this stuff still applies today - perhaps now more than ever before.

It is vulgar, in literature, to make a display of emotions which you do not naturally have, but you think you ought to have, because all the best people do have them. It is also vulgar (and this is the more common case) to have emotions, but to express them so badly, with so many, too many protestings, that you seem to have no natural feelings, but to be merely fabricating emotions by a process of literary forgery. Sincerity in art, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is mainly a matter of talent.

Written in 1931, this nevertheless neatly summarises much that is wrong with the stories we tell, social media and, by extension, western civilisation in 2022. While, focused on the work of Breuhgel for one example, Huxley's specific observations often seem to have a near universal prescience.

In every age theory has caused men to like much that was bad and reject much that was good. The only prejudice that the ideal art critic should have is against the incompetent, the mentally dishonest and the futile. The number of ways in which good pictures can be painted is quite incalculable, depending only on the variability of the human mind. Every good painter invents a new way of painting. Is this man a competent painter? Has he something to say, is he genuine? These are the questions a critic must ask himself. Not, does he conform with my theory of imitation, or distortion, or moral purity, or significant form?

That one's from 1925, back in the days - one might suppose - when we still had the chance to learn the lessons which we are quite clearly still to take on board.

The history of medical fashions, it may be remarked, is at least as grotesque as the history of fashion in women's hats—at least as grotesque and, since human lives are at stake, considerably more tragic.

Elsewhere in the collection, Huxley covers more or less everything you could possibly want from him - art, music, literature, travel, politics, religion, society - without shorthand, summary or skimming for the sake of anyone failing to keep up, including me, meaning I never quite made it to the end of 1941's Politics and Religion. Much of what was written here fed into Brave New World by one means or another, and the collection also includes that other smash hit, The Doors of Perception from which the band took their name, and which is interesting but probably not so earth-shattering as its reputation might suggest. If you have the patience, Huxley's Collected Essays otherwise rewards the effort many times over.

The Zaucer of Zilk

Al Ewing & Brendan McCarthy The Zaucer of Zilk (2012)
This was one of those things I missed, having long given up on 2000AD comic. I'd heard of it, but the title sounded like something you would expect to find in 2000AD and thus failed to pique my curiosity; at least until I happened upon this reprint and realised it was by Brendan McCarthy - which changes everything, obviously.

I still don't really know what to call this sort of thing, or even that it matters. The Zaucer of Zilk is Brendan McCarthy doing what he does best, and nothing else has really come close, certainly not Hewligan's fucking Haircut or - ugh - Really & Truly, or even Rogan Gosh for that matter. This, on the other hand, seems to exhibit kinship with Alice in Wonderland, Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Windsor McCay, and thankfully none of the also-rans who would give their collective left one to be this strange but just don't fucking get it - looking at you, Tim, Neil, and all of your self-consciously kooky spawn - also anyone who ever mistook the Cure for a wild display of imagination.

The Zaucer of Zilk tells a surprisingly traditional story using characters and settings which wouldn't seem out of place on a Nurse With Wound album, and to similarly disorientating effect but for the presence of a beating heart where one might, under other circumstances, expect to find the usual emotive button pushing. McCarthy has always been in a class of his own, but rarely has it been so obvious as it is here.

Nerves

Lester Del Rey Nerves (1942)
This is the novelisation - updated and expanded in 1975 - of a shorter story first published in 1942, but Lester insists it's essentially the same thing so that's what I'm going with. With the passage of time having overtaken the science-fiction element, Nerves was left beached as, I suppose, a medical thriller - not really my sort of thing, but scooped up regardless for reasons described nearly a year ago. It's set in a nuclear power plant, and the title refers to the tension which tends to mount when a nuclear power plant explodes, but also to the synaptic connections of Jorgensen, the man who knows how to stop the nuclear power plant exploding if only they can get him to wake up after the core went meltdown with himself inside.

Having been written in 1942, Nerves imagines those nuclear power plants of the future in the same way that Gernsback imagined us eventually sucking baby food from feed tubes so as to dispense with the grinding hardship of chewing. The power plant of Nerves not only supplies power to a massive community of erm… atomjacks and their families, but also manufactures super-heavy stable isotopes for use in whatever sciencey stuff we'll be doing in the future; and these super-heavy isotopes found somewhere on the periodic table way past plutonium and the others are stable, as I say, so they aren't really radioactive; but even if they were it wouldn't matter because if you're exposed to radiation there are all sorts of treatments available and in certain cases you just have a bit of a rest and you're usually fine. I suppose I should just be happy that no-one develops mysterious super powers.

Science-fiction has generally had a lousy track record in predictive terms, and Nerves is an example of science-fiction getting it really wrong. Science-fiction getting it really wrong can often be massively entertaining, but Nerves focusses on the tension, which doesn't work quite so well as it probably did in 1942, before even the immediate effects of exposure to radiation were fully understood, never mind what happens when one of the fucking things blows up. Furthermore, it attempts to weave tension from too large a cast of fairly generic characters, at least a couple of whom spend time talking about how they'll be able to pipe the waste into the local river and get rid of it that way - and these are good guys saving the day, not Mr. Burns and Smithers.

I assume Nerves was pulled out and given a fresh coat of paint partially in response to just how much the public loved their disaster movies during the seventies, but given how faithful it seemingly remains to the magazine version of 1942, it seems a little like reprinting First Men in the Moon as a Star Wars cash-in.

D.H. Lawrence and His World

Harry T. Moore & Warren Roberts D.H. Lawrence and His World (1966)
Always room for one more biography of D.H. Lawrence, I guess, and this one made the cut because it's full of photographs I'd never seen before, which really helps refine one's impression of the man and his world - as promised by the title. Additionally, being more visually orientated than usual, the text is snappy and to the point, distilling the usual four-hundred page account into just over a quarter of that, so what it may lack in detail is compensated by a more coherent summary of Lawrence's life as a whole. This is the third biography I've read of the man, and I've found plenty that I missed through other versions having their noses pressed up so much closer to the screen, figuratively speaking.

One minor reason for my enduring interest in this writer is how my own life seems to have echoed his, at least geographically speaking, and entirely by accident. We were both born in the Midlands, gravitated to south London, then Mexico City and Oaxaca, and then the American southwest give or take a few hundred miles. The patterns are only loosely parallel with plenty that doesn't match up, but are at least close enough for me to have raised an eyebrow at instances of having stayed in the same hotel and suchlike; and I feel it affords me a certain perspective on at least some of what he wrote, which this biography underscores.

How to Get to Apocalypse

Erica L. Satifka How to Get to Apocalypse (2021)
Keeping in mind that I make no claim as to having my finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction publishing, I'm nevertheless beginning to suspect that Satifka may actually be our greatest living science-fiction author. At least I don't recall having read anything vaguely of the moment which has been anything like so good, and even if we expand our definition of contemporary back by a decade or so to include a few of the allegedly heavy hitters - Reynolds, Stross or whoever - I stand by my statement.

Her writing has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick with some frequency, and some justification, although it also recalls the parables of Ursula LeGuin and, more than anything, the dynamic of all those cyberpunk writers warning against the corporate commodification of society; although personally I've only read William Gibson on that last count and I like Satifka more. Whilst I'm reluctant to analyse my own preferences, or possibly biases, there are certain things I look for in a piece of science-fiction writing.

• I like to be drawn in by something which doesn't make immediate sense, which needs figuring out, and which, once I've figured it out, will have something to say beyond simple statements of its own weirdness.
• I dislike the weird or brain-meltingly futuristic just for its own sake. I'm not keen on flashy or self-consciously edgy.
• I'm not actually adverse to adventures, except they're usually too predictable to allow for much wiggle room in terms of the first point. I'd prefer to avoid anything which reads like it would rather be on TV.

Satifka ticks all of these boxes while telling stories of survival, or of just about getting by, amongst people who work at fast food restaurants or have trouble making rent, the sort of people Dick wrote about - those of us who, if we ever make it into space, will still be cleaning the fucking toilets because they can't get a robot to do it. This means a lot to me, because I don't want to read another novel opening with anything like this ever again:

Space Security Agent Lucas Manning watched the red light winking across the screen of his operations monitor with a growing sense of alarm.

In case it's not obvious why I should regard the above as the worst sort of generic bollocks, State of Emergency, the first of the twenty-three short stories in this collection, kicks off like so:

In a no-tell motel just outside Billings, the psychotic cattle rancher known as Paranoid Jack freezes when he sees the baby-blue eyeball glowering at him from the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone.

See! It only gets stranger from that point on, but stranger by terms which come to make perfect sense. All of the stories here inhabit variant versions of the end of the world, or of a world, none concluding with a bang but most with a sigh of such depressing resonance as to crack the foundations of whatever you're stood upon; and depressing because this is satire at its finest, a horrible mirror held up to our own increasingly desperate existence with home truths delivered before you've even noticed anyone was maybe trying to tell you something you needed to hear.

Satifka delivers accounts of places which feel like the world outside our windows, at least thematically, combining the painfully and playfully familiar with wildly flamboyant flourishes of imagination that - just like the real world - defy our ability to predict just what the fuck is happening; and she writes clearly and beautifully without treading narrative water, while making it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

Honestly, this one makes all of those New York Times Bestseller guys clogging up the book store carousels with their eight-hundred page contributions to the Asimov revival look like wankers.

DON'T PISS ME OFF!!!

Meg McCarville DON'T PISS ME OFF!!! (2022)
I've come across this sort of thing before, even done it myself to a certain extent - self-published collections of emails and the like which you really felt were worth preserving for the benefit of future generations. However, this is different because we're talking Meg McCarville, with what she describes as a collection of my most violent, viral, and vicious emails, text messages, and Yelp! reviews. This isn't one of those things where some web designer you've never heard of passive-aggressively corrects plebeian clients who have failed to comprehend the basic principles of design.

The next day it was 90 degrees outside and I slowly started to realize that my room had no air conditioning. Besides that, it had black mold in the bathroom, no remote control, a bizarre closet with no bar with a door that might only barely fit a human carcass inside, with a wooden desk pushed up against the door. The desk had a drawer that had FUCK OFF carved into it. This drawer also had creepily opened and closed of its own will, but I have two dealbreakers. Bed bugs and no AC.

The first message kicks off on the very first page, no foreplay, no preamble, just straight into are we LONELY on thanksgiving you dumb fucking crackhead CUNT? There's no title page, no fancy shit, a freewheeling approach to punctuation, a ton of the angriest CAPSLOCK you ever did see, and what amounts to Meg backing an eighteen wheeler dump truck up to the reader and unloading a megaton of weapons grade sarcasm and wrath, the kind which reduces the harshest, blackest metal band you've ever heard to Daniel O'Donnell; and she's very, very funny because these are mostly righteous sermons which really needed to be made; and they're massively satisfying because most of us have been on the same end of at least one of the shitty sticks described herein, or at least I have. That said, some of the fury tips over into the sort of disturbing territory which means you're probably not going to find copies of this on sale at the counter of your local bookstore next to Who Farted? She reaches such a peak of anger during the final ten page tirade against an unidentified party that she's hitting the wrong keys half the time, leaving us to unscramble the RESULTIDGN cASPLOK CHOAS, which actually sort of works, weirdly enough. If I had any complaint, I suppose it could have been longer, but being as the existing sixty-nine pages read like a continuous rocket blast in the face of everyone who ever said something stupid, it's probably the length it needs to be.

Buy as many copies as you need here, then also pick up American Victim which is incredible and for which I'll get around to posting a review at some point.

The Yage Letters

William S. Burroughs The Yage Letters (1963)
I know Ginsberg gets equal credit as co-author on the cover, but I'll come to that in a minute.

The Yage Letters is one of those obscure early pamphlets dating from before Lady Luck smiled upon Uncle Bill and got everybody to buy his books. It was always listed as one of his numerous works in the front of those I read, and some time passed before I realised it had been reprinted. Chronologically speaking, it's approximately the one after Junkie but before Queer, although its status as a novel is questionable, even by Burroughs' standards. All we know for certain is that our boy envisioned something along the lines of travel writing, beyond which it seems to have found its own way into print without much conscious direction on the part of the author. It's billed as letters, specifically Burroughs writing to Ginsberg about his daily experiences as he schleps around Colombia and Peru in search of a hallucinogenic vine, but this was most likely simply a means of framing his observations long after the fact; although I gather some of the material duplicates actual letters sent to Ginsberg at the time.

Burroughs had studied ethnography in Mexico City, but his travels were specifically conducted in search of a drug which he'd been told bestowed telepathic abilities on the user; so as with much of his writing, we need to take a shitload of poetic license into account. That being done, we're nevertheless left with something which is pretty readable and rarely boring. He hangs out in villages with Shamanic types, he chugs ayahuasca, he throws up quite a lot, and he struggles towards some sort of insight.

That described thus far comprises the main section of the book, aptly named In Search of Yage, which is supplemented by additional material which may or may not have turned up in later editions - the introduction from Oliver Harris who edited the thing could have used a little more focus and I've lost track of what first appeared when. The supplementary material comprises Ginsberg's analysis of the first part, and Burroughs response to the same; which would be fine but Ginsberg's analysis is mostly blandly mystic observations on the nature of reality, third eyes opening, all that sort of guff. I'm sure I recall the Bhagavad Gita getting a mention at some point. I personally find Ginsberg marginally more interesting as Billy's pal than as a writer, but even then, honestly not that interesting. I'm quite happy to believe that the manuscript would have ended up at the back of a drawer were it not for Ginsberg's efforts, but his writing simply doesn't interest me because I don't see that it adds anything.

In Search of Yage is mostly worth a look, even if it's hard to tell quite what it's supposed to be, beyond which Yage Letters mostly serves as a testament to less being more.

Analog July 1971

John W. Campbell (editor)
Analog July 1971 (1961 but felt more like 1931)
This looks interesting, you think, so the next time you see a copy in a second hand place, you pick it up, maybe acquiring a stack of back issues before you've actually read any of them. Then you read them and a hard lesson is learned.

Campbell's editorial comprises the usual ranting about how hippy beatnik liberals are living in cloud cuckoo land, DDT is good, and how he'd like to see every endangered species wiped off the fucking face of the Earth; and on page seven there's an advert for a hardback collection of previous editorials should you wish to charge your pipe with a goodly plug of tobacco and sit chuckling over accounts of damn liberals and long hairs revealed for the fools they are by the mighty power of scientific discourse; and so to the stories...

Joseph P. Martino's Zero Sum seems to be a loose analogy of what was going on in Vietnam, which eventually comes out as one of those Asimov-style logic puzzles. Here's one sparkling example of its dialogue.

'Anyway, the point is there's one best mix of tactics, and you can't improve your situation by deviating from it. In fact, if you do deviate, your average losses increase. The way we figure it, on each engagement between a Destroyer and a Monitor, on average we should lose three quarters of a man less than they do. Instead, their losses average one and three eights man per engagement more than ours. And the reason is they're using the wrong mix of tactics. If they'd use the right mix, they could cut their losses, and there wouldn't be a thing we could do about it.'

There's a scene of our lads watching governmental speeches about the war on telly which lasts for nine pages. To be fair, it picks up a little in the second half but only in the sense that an Ed Sheeran album probably won't be anything like so terrible as you expect it to be.

F. Paul Wilson's The Man with the Anteater starts off with both the charm and the cast promised by the title, then turns into a pseudo libertarian opinion column while the reader is distracted by union bashing comments on just the third or second page, all of which leaves a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste.

I managed about four pages of Gordon R. Dickson's The Outposter, presumably the second half of a novel here serialised in instalments. It's probably unfair to judge something so poorly on the strength of four pages somewhere in the middle, but I couldn't even plough my gaze through the synopsis of what had already happened in the previous episode. I think it's about a ragtag crew of rebellious space renegades, or pirates, or something. I guess I'll never know.

James H. Schmitz's Poltergeist is, if not amazing, certainly readable; and A Little Edge by S. Kye Boult seems massively out of place here in terms of quality and, weirdest of all, seems to foreshadow the general tone of certain things by China Miéville.

Also there's an article about a computer game excitingly named Spacewar, which is probably hilarious if you care about such things given that this was 1971 and the guy spends twelve pages gushing over what may as well be Pong, but I couldn't give a shit about computer games. I tried half a page and found myself granted particular insight into Midge Ure's feelings regarding the city of Vienna.

The book review section uses up quite a few words in sneering at mainstream literary authors who dabble with science-fiction, for their admittedly well-written efforts are as naught compared to the power of Gordon R. Dickson, or indeed everything else published in the mighty pages of Analog; then spunks away what little validity the argument may have accumulated with praise for something by - ugh - Colin Wilson; which leaves us with just the letters page, which is mostly praise for previous Campbell editorials, including an angry housewife fulminating against kids these days. The one note of dissent comes from an anthropologist defending his field as a legitimate area of study, warranting a significantly longer response from Campbell restating his position that it's not science if it doesn't involved a blackboard covered in complicated equations, and only a fool would claim that blah blah blah…

I've got another four of these fucking things on my reading pile.

Seven Tickets to Hell

Robert Moore Williams Seven Tickets to Hell (1972)
Aside from occasional encounters with Abbott and Costello, little is known of the activities of Frankenstein's monster after the events of Mary Shelley's book, not least his brief career in publishing which brought us the Frankenstein Horror Series back in the early seventies. Frank Belknap Long wrote one, and this is by Robert Moore Williams, of whom I've become quite the fan.

Perhaps anticipating a variant audience to that which presumably read his science-fiction novels, Williams seems to have played it safe with this one in certain respects, channeling his love of Abraham Merritt into a relatively generic adventure which would probably transfer to the big screen with ease, rather than making it up as he went along and stuffing it full of his weirder ideas about the universe and our place therein. It's still reasonably strange given Williams choosing to write in second person, swapping between two main characters addressed as you.

The men you can face. Perhaps they were not as badly wounded as you had thought. This is what you tell yourself. You know this isn't true, you know these men were dead, but you can lie to yourself about them.

He sustains this for the full 190 pages, which is impressive, and the prose positively crackles with that weird energy found in his best books, or his strangest books depending on how you look at it.

Should he require introduction, Williams was a man with certain psychological issues which informed much of his fiction, and many of his common preoccupations and themes appear here as detail to what is more or less Indiana Jones taking on the Mexican narcotics trade, liberally spiced with a heap of mythology-cum-pseudoscience. Of Williams' staples, we get the sacred mountain, ancient underground races, that which man once knew but has since forgotten, a vague cosmic connection, biological robots, and love as a mysterious universal force. There's enough Mexican mythology to suggest the man did his research, and although he gets it somewhat skew-whiff in places, you don't mind because it's Robert Moore Williams and you keep reading just to find out what the hell he's going to do next. Unfortunately what he does next betrays the influence of Merritt more than is usual for this author, so Seven Tickets to Hell isn't anything like so unpredictable or arrestingly weird as Beachhead Planet or The Bell from Infinity; having said which, he's always worth reading, and this one still delivers much more than is promised by the cover - excepting the female secret agent who doesn't seem to be in the book at all, but then it was the seventies.

The Boy in the Bush

D.H. Lawrence & M.L. Skinner The Boy in the Bush (1924)
Mollie Skinner ran a guesthouse in Darlington, Western Australia at which Dave and Frieda stayed. She'd published a couple of books and Lawrence took an interest in her novel The House of Ellis which was then a work in progress. After leaving Australia, he corresponded with Skinner and offered to rewrite The House of Ellis so that it might be published as a collaborative effort, albeit as The Boy in the Bush. It's the story of Jack who arrives in Australia, fresh from England, and views the country through his eyes as he tries to make his way, thus echoing Lawrence's recent experience and allowing him the opportunity to map what he saw as Australia's spiritual dimension.

Unfortunately, if Lawrence rewrote Skinner's prose, it doesn't really show, perhaps testifying to that maxim about the futility of attempting to polish a turd. His own prose on the other hand sticks out a mile, concentrating as it does on the psychic disposition of his characters and their setting, and it's mostly powerful stuff which foreshadows the blood consciousness of The Plumed Serpent to a considerable degree; but these passages form remote islands divided by page after page of Skinner writing something which reminds me a lot of [sentimental garbage written by one of my wife's relatives who will not be identified here for obvious reasons] - coming, going, people eating dinner, other people asking whether they've eaten dinner, ranching, and so on; and I tried but it's barely readable, not grammatically incorrect, just tedious and repetitive. After two or three chapters I was reduced to skimming, which was actually fairly easy, Lawrence's text tending to take the form of lengthy, ponderous paragraphs as distinct from Skinner's endless chit chat. One day someone will isolate just Dave's material to form a decent if slightly disjointed novella, but until then The Boy in the Bush does very little to reward the effort of trawling through for the passages which are worth reading.

Kirby - King of Comics

Mark Evanier Kirby - King of Comics (2008)
I've read several versions of the story of how Stan Lee created Marvel Comics and is directly responsible for more or less everything, ever, and it seemed like high time I took a look at what was happening on the other side of the wall, Jack Kirby being the man who drew a humongous number of those comics which Stan may or may not have written. I found Kirby's art a bit weird when I was a kid and resident of the age group for which they were intended. There was something about his art, but I found the figures weird, forever reaching forward out of the page, smiling hard like John Wayne with that single dazzling white tooth spanning the entire width of the grin. All the same, he obviously made a huge impression judging by how much I loved some of those strips, even though his style had become the standard - from where I was stood - which is probably why 2000AD seemed like such a breath of fresh air.

However, my appreciation has grown in recent years, partially through a better understanding of what Kirby was doing, when he was doing it, and how starkly it contrasted with what everyone else had been doing up until that point. You may already know that Kirby created and even wrote a lot of the stuff for which Stan Lee has been given credit, and sometimes so much credit as to relegate his artist to some talented monkey who was able to hold a pen without dropping it on the floor; and if you're a regular working class person such as like what I am, you'll probably recognise the pattern because getting stiffed by the boss is the story of our lives. This isn't to suggest that Lee was without talent or failed to put in the work but, let's face it, it was mostly Jack. I'm not sure comics as we know them today wouldn't have happened without Jack in the right time and place, but at best it would probably be a completely different landscape.

Evanier's book, which may be one of the greatest things I've read on the subject of the comics biz, balances a sensitive, sympathetic biography with just the right quota of lovingly reproduced artwork to illustrate the tale without it becoming some luxurious portfolio, which most of the other Kirby books seem to be from what I can tell. As a friend and colleague of Kirby, Evanier is particularly well qualified to tell the man's story, and he does so with an incredible warmth which never slides over into sentiment or arse kissing. He paints Kirby as someone you would like to have known, with whom you would have wanted to hang out - or at least I would: imaginative, seriously talented, and above all just a regular working class guy trying to get by, who wanted to do a good job. Weirdly, Kirby puts me in mind of Ray, a former work colleague of mine - English, but the same generation, who bore a more than passing resemblance and who was likewise no stranger to getting stiffed by the boss. This biography accordingly left me with a few feelings I don't normally get from the accounts of the lives of people I've never met. It felt sort of personal, key to which might be Street Code, one of Kirby's very few - possibly only - autobiographical strips, eight pages shining a light on his having grown up under circumstances of grinding poverty during the depression. It's almost Harvey Pekar and has some of the same power.

I can't actually think of anything more useful, or even more coherent to say, but this is a frankly fucking incredible book about an incredible guy who, from my point of view, was one of us.

A Man & His Cat

Umi Sakurai A Man & His Cat (2018)
Some facebook thread on a friend's page recently threw up the assertion that western comics are crap because it's all superheroes while manga is amazing because it can be about anything. This one is about a man and his cat, as the title implies. Unfortunately though, despite the sheer force with which the subject alone socks it to anyone who ever dared take pleasure in an issue of Superman Family, it's still manga.

I'm well aware that manga has its admirers.

I'm not one of them, because to admire something simply because of its format would be fucking stupid, like enjoying vinyl records regardless of what's recorded on them. I liked a few of the Godzilla comics which Dark Horse reprinted back in the late eighteenth century, and Akira and Grave of the Fireflies were great - although they're movies - but I remain otherwise unconvinced.

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of cats, which is why my wife and I have a number of them - not less than thirteen, usually more depending on who turns up for breakfast - and we also volunteer for a local cat rescue organisation; so you can sort of see how I ended up with this book, which is a manga.

The story is about an old man - or one who is referred to as an old man despite his depiction - who buys a cat, followed by the usual realisations which occur to anyone who takes on a cat regarding their feeding, use of litter tray, and so on and so forth. Of course, it's mainly about how much the man and his cat love each other.

It's a nice idea except the cat resembles a Pokémon character and seems to have been written by someone who doesn't understand cats - so Fukumaru, as the cat is named, is written with the needy qualities of a dog and eyes abrim with tears for almost half the page count. The purpose of the story seems to be delivery of the narrative equivalent of a series of emoticons, emotional currents reduced to a series of hearts and frowny faces. Consequently A Man & His Cat feels like one-hundred pages of button pushing.

Even with more of a story, I'm not convinced it would work. As you might expect, it's all giant eyes, tiny mouths and infantilised women, the same style as drawn by a billion others churning out this same corporate variant on cereal box design, all distinctive qualities flattened out to the artificial texture of mass production and candy. This saddens me because I respond to anything involving a cat, but this one doesn't feel entirely sincere. Fukumaru's dialogue substituting you for mew and my for meow just isn't that funny, and the whole thing has the unpleasant angular look of a style copied without much underlying ability to draw or to arrange shapes on a piece of paper; and the supposedly old man looks about thirty, or would if he didn't resemble Christian Bale in American Psycho, or would if he looked remotely human with that weird angular chin. Seriously, it all makes Rob Liefeld look like Leonardo da Vinci and I don't know how people can be satisfied with anything so thin, so lacking in character.