Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon

Hergé Destination Moon (1950) Explorers on the Moon (1953)
The first Tintin book I read as a child was either Flight 714 or Destination Moon, and the second was whichever of those two hadn't been first. We lived on a farm in rural Warwickshire serviced every two weeks by a mobile library, a sort of bread van full of books arranged upon shelves in the back, the arrival of which I found both magical and mysterious. I was working my way through their selection of Angela Banner's Ant & Bee books when I first noticed Tintin, which probably gives some indication of my age at the time. The cover of either Flight 714 or Destination Moon - whichever it was - intrigued me, displayed on the lower shelves with other larger format books such as Asterix in Spain, which I recall finding annoying because the characters on the cover seemed somehow arrogant. Then one day I guess my mother decided I was old enough to cope with Tintin, so that's where it started.

I read most of the Tintin books over the next couple of years, then graduated to Asterix's altogether wittier adventures, having at last overcome my weird aversion to the cover of the Spanish one. The books vanished from my shelves over the years, eventually reducing to just the hardback Tintin and the Lake of Sharks; and then the other night, seeking some more succinct, less aggravating relief from Tolkien, I realised I actually have a good few of these books and with no memory of their having returned to my collection, which is weird; so fuck it - Destination Moon, let's go, seeing as it's probably fifty years since I first read the thing, or indeed anything featuring Tintin.

Destination Moon and its sequel might be deemed hard science-fiction by certain definitions. Space travel was hardly a new idea in the fifties, having been a staple of the pulps for at least half a century, but Tintin belonged to an approximately sober, essentially realistic world for which Gernsbackian superscience would have been a poor fit. The forties had seen major advances in rocketry in the wake of the second world war, so it was only natural that Tintin should poke his investigative nose in at some point. Naturally the story conforms to the traditions of its kind, and so the first moon rocket is designed by Tintin's friend, Professor Calculus, then piloted by Tintin himself with all arrangements made according to nods, personal favours, and whoever feels they might like to give it a go. It's all very casual, even improbable, and yet it works because the story in which these characters are embedded is solid, as rigorously scientific as it can manage without quite lecturing. The timing is perfect and the art is breathtaking - both wonderfully simple and yet capable of dynamic elegance while conveying a technical sophistication which leaves your mouth hanging open.

So I'm reading something I probably first read when I was five, and yet it works just fine, not once leaving me feeling as though Destination Moon should be beneath me in the same way as - sorry - Harry Potter. Hergé apparently credited his readers with some intelligence and avoided talking down to them, and the humour, if gentle, is slapstick and more or less timeless aside from the slightly disconcerting realisation of just how much of it relies upon Captain Haddock's love of whisky. Being Tintin and hence a detective story at heart, there is inevitably a thread of nefarious deeds by representatives of foreign powers, typically culminating in revelations, exposure of the culprits, and arrest, but the thread runs through the story without overpowering it or turning it into Dick Barton; and it all remains quietly gripping, which is impressive when we consider the medium - a story told mostly inside a control centre then a rocket, with panels wherein those speaking are squashed into the lower third by dialogue. The sense of restraint induces a certain rhythm which carries everything along, so that when we come to the infrequent splash pages of that red and white chequered rocket in space or on the moon or about to take off, it's shocking and breathtaking all at once because it feels vaguely real, and it doesn't matter in the slightest that technology has since made such formative designs seem antiquated, along with the notion of a spacecraft piloted by levers and buttons.

Regardless of Hergé's having shot himself in the foot on several occasions with the institutional racism of the very first stories - and that whole grey area one tends to encounter with persons who collaborate during a Nazi occupation - lessons had been learned by this point and there's something good natured and wholesome about Tintin without it being preachy, sappy, or sentimental. The characters are likeable without bearing the burden of providing role models, and there's no dumbing down. Tintin was a wonderful start for me, progressive and inspiring my interest in a much wider world than the one I knew. I'm impressed that it has lost none of its power, and that it's still fun.

The Crossing Line

Fabian Nicieza etc. The Crossing Line (1990)
'Back on the Shakespeare, I see,' observed my wife as I lay in bed reading my sad little mylar bagged stack of Avengers comics. I didn't blush because there didn't seem to be much point. I freely admit that I bought the six issues of The Crossing Line because I was rifling through the used comic book racks at Half-Price when I noticed one of these with guest starring Alpha Flight proclaimed on the cover.

'Ooh Alpha Flight!' squealed the little voice within, and they had four of the six issues there in the racks which seemed nice and tidy, and for just a dollar a pop, and it was easy enough to find the other two online, and why the fuck not? In any case, half of my facebook friends list - admittedly the half I've unfollowed so that I don't have to read their characteristically inane reportage on cosplay, Funko Pops, or watching four thousand episodes of Charmed in a single sitting - are either Harry Potter fans, grown men presently engaged with a Puffin Books reading marathon, or people who are actually able to discuss what Steven Moffat was trying to say in such and such a terminally shite Who episode, so fuck you!

Anyway, I've been trying to read The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Jesus Christ it's boring. It hasn't quite reached Heinlein standards of loathsome which is why I'm still dutifully ploughing through page after page of space opera tedium, but I needed a break, and this seemed sufficiently unlike The Mote in God's Eye as to serve as a palate cleanser. Being a kid's superhero comic from the nineties, it quite naturally takes itself far too seriously, but no more so than Mote's wearying starship commanders responding to security breaches and other important sounding military shit.

The Crossing Line is a story of terrorists hijacking a British nuclear submarine, and how the mighty Avengers rush to the scene to save the day only to find themselves embroiled in a massive clusterfuck with Canadian and Russian superhero teams who had the same idea, just as the forces of Atlantis once again decide to wage war on the surface dwellers. There are probably about five persons with speaking roles in the entire story who don't have super-powers, or who haven't acquired super-powers by the last issue, so it's like that Simpsons comic in which the power plant blows up, irradiating the entire town of Springfield, transforming everyone into superheroes. It's deeply fucking ludicrous, but is a lot more fun than A Mote in God's Eye, and the fact of almost every single character being able to fly or to shoot beams from their hands roughly shuffles the story closer to science-fiction than most caped material; and besides, describing this as deeply fucking ludicrous implies that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't.

By my understanding, the appeal of eighties Marvel lay in its being a huge shared universe viewed only one small piece at a time through reading the comics and trying to work out who was who, what they could do, and what the hell was going on; so storytelling aside, it appealed to anyone who liked to collect sets of things as a kid, anyone who ever decided that their Shogun Warrior model kits could inhabit the same continuity as Micronauts action figures. That's how this stuff first drew me in, and how it still works up to a point. I'm older and wiser, but it's still kind of interesting trying to work out who the fuck these other Avengers were supposed to be, given that I don't even remember them from back in the day and otherwise recognise only Captain America and the Vision.

Whilst Fabian Nicieza has written some ropey stuff in his time, he always had something interesting going on, and was distinguished amongst the Marvel script droids of his era as someone with a distinctive style, even with themes common to his writing - specifically a pronounced tendency to draw from the real world politics of the time in ways which seem quite perceptive once you get past the people in costumes cracking jokes whilst fighting. This also means that we get to see not only George W. Bush in a nineties Marvel comic, but even the Thatch!

The Crossing Line is, as I guess we have probably established, ridiculous, although it differs only from more recent Grant Morrison efforts in method rather than substance, but it doesn't matter. It does everything it sets out to do and held my attention for a couple of hours without inducing either depression or embarrassment. I doubt anyone will ever collect this material as a graphic novel, but maybe it's fine as a stack of six comic books.

Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

Neil Gaiman etc. Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (1989)
I was quite excited by Gaiman's Sandman when it first appeared, and not least because of Dave McKean's covers which I regarded as amazing. I said as much to Charlie Adlard seeing as he was sort of my comics advisor at the time, and was a little surprised when he made sniffy noises. His objection, as I understood it, was that McKean's work failed to live up to the hype for a number of reasons, and I realised that he was right, much as it pained me to admit it. McKean's art is necessarily impressionistic because his drawing ability is fairly limited. He's good with lighting, which compensates for a multitude of sins; and he tends to favour certain colour combinations which create a striking effect regardless of what one does with them. It's mostly shorthand and distraction, but no-one notices because they're too busy boggling at electrical components and scraps of underwear stapled to the page. Bill Sienkiewicz did it first and did it better, but Bill Sienkiewicz really can draw and his visual experiments are conducted through choice rather than necessity. Of course, McKean's work isn't bad by any means, although it's certainly not wildly original. He has a wonderful sense of design, but as such has more in common with Vaughan Oliver than the aforementioned Sienkiewicz.

Anyway, I kept on buying Sandman, month after month, even past the point at which I was buying it in the hope of it eventually getting better again, which it didn't. Then in 2009 I flogged the lot, having decided I'd rather have the money, although I always remembered those early issues as having been something good.

So here we are again, and yes, I still enjoy those first issues, but not so much as was once the case. I've read too much Gaiman to ever get myself back to factory settings. He pushes buttons in the same way that Dave McKean pushes buttons so as to distract from the inherent weaknesses of the structure, which is probably why those covers seem such a good fit. He's doing an Alan Moore in the same way that McKean was doing a Bill Sienkiewicz. To be fair, he does more than just push characters through some Alan Moore algorithm, and he writes dialogue beautifully - at least some of it - but everywhere else, all I see are tricks, shortcuts, and sleight of hand distracting from what feels as much like recycled material as anything by J.K. Rowling. The mood suggests something specifically written with fans of the Cure in mind, all cobwebs and bits of antique jewellery; and allusions to literature come and go as props, like a James Joyce held open at no particular page for minute after minute as you wait for a certain someone to come through the door and be duly impressed; and then every once in a while, it pushes the weird horror button just to keep us on our toes

Somewhere in Basildon a maniac with a bacon slicer has made ice cream out of his own arse. He's serving it to little kids.

Shocked, aren't you?

Narrative works by pushing buttons, but it really shouldn't be quite so obvious if it's done right. Even just the fucking title, Preludes & Nocturnes…

Seriously?

Seriously?

Additionally, the art isn't overly great either, and the one thing in Sandman's favour is that it is at least consistent for the run of these first eight issues. It may have been drawn as an expressionist homage to those same horror comics which eventually led to the likes of Swamp Thing - and most of this story rummages around in Alan Moore's version of the Swamp Thing mythology, seeing as I didn't already mention that - but to me it looks like, at best, a promising eighties fanzine, everyone with massive wonky heads like Thunderbirds puppets, and facial expressions last seen drawn in biro on the back of a school exercise book amongst the logos of late seventies heavy metal bands.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed this one, and almost as much as I probably enjoyed it back in 1989, but I enjoyed it as an efficient impersonation. It's good, but if Sandman changed your life, that says more about your life than it does about the power of Gaiman's writing. Preludes & Nocturnes, my arse...

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾

Sue Townsend The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (1982)
I had the first two Adrian Mole books back when I was about the same age as the protagonist. I've now bought them again - my childhood copies having gone the way of my back issues of the Topper, amongst other things - initially so as to take the piss out of Alan Moore*, but also due to the inevitable burst of nostalgia which is apparently common amongst persons of my age. I was just going to read the thing. I couldn't see the point of writing the usual review, and yet here we are…

As I got older, I lost the desire to ever re-read Adrian Mole just as I lost the desire to revisit novels by Douglas Adams or Ben Elton. They seemed like books I'd read before I really read anything. It wasn't that I didn't read as a kid but, excepting stuff I was forced to read at school, it was rare that I read anything either lacking pictures or not directly tied into a TV show. It's therefore probably odd that I never really warmed to either the Mole television adaptation or all of those sequels, The Prostrate Years and so on, all of which seemed like a massive overegging of the pudding.

Coming back to this one now, I realise that not only was Adrian Mole the Harry Potter of my generation - and tellingly rooted in social realism rather than recycled nostalgia - but that he's aged extremely well, possibly because the book is so firmly rooted in its era, and specifically in the problems of its era; also because it's darkly amusing. Adrian's popularity after the fact has somehow given me cause to remember Mole as part of the same twee aspirationally middle-class chortleplex as the works of Jilly Cooper and Carla Lane, but it seems I was mistaken. Townsend, it turns out, had a hard, ordinary life, and most of Mole's troubles are drawn from direct, uncomfortable experience. What I somehow recalled as a series of zingers and not much more, is actually surprisingly gripping, poignant, and still, after all these years, very funny.

My own parents separated at some point not too long after I first read Mole, and with hindsight, the parallels border so much on the uncanny that I can't help wonder whether whoever gave me this for Christmas or my birthday - or whatever - felt it might somehow prepare me for things to come; and maybe it did.

*: The observations of Jake Butcher, as quoted here, are from the novel Adrian tries to write in Growing Pains - just in case anyone thought that was actually from Jerusalem.

Nemo: The Roses of Berlin

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill Nemo: The Roses of Berlin (2014)
This time it's the daughter of Verne's character invading a Nazi Germany combining elements of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator with Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The villainess is herself from H. Rider Haggard's She with cameos by Dr. Mabuse from the Norbert Jacques novel and nods to Verne's The Master of the World, Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and doubtless a ton of other stuff I didn't notice. Once you're done with the trainspotting aspect, The Roses of Berlin is generally fun, and the art is obviously wonderful, but somehow it feels a bit phoned-in compared to previous Extraordinary Gentlemen books, and when Nemo observes:

This strange place is putting me on edge. I'm nearing fifty. Perhaps I'm too old for all this...

Well, I mean it is Alan Moore, the guy who can barely scratch his arse without it allegorising five different things, and the same Alan Moore who recently announced he was packing in the comics; and the later duel between the youthful Nemo and the ancient Ayesha seems potentially symbolic when the timeless immortal accuses the newcomer of stealing from her. As to what it might actually be saying, if anything, I have no idea. I suppose it could be something along the lines of old masters not getting the recognition they deserve, that being what Moore seemed to be suggesting when he recast Harry Potter as the Antichrist elsewhere in the saga.

True enough, I was born in the sixties and I read a lot, but I barely get some of the references made here, which isn't something I'm particularly proud of; so I guess Nemo might be an exercise in pinning certain fading cultural artefacts to the present simply because they should be remembered, and remembering them enriches contemporary culture for the better. So that's good.

The Once and Future King

T.H. White The Once and Future King (1958)
I was about to read Philip Purser-Hallard's Trojans, the final part of his thus far exceptional Devices trilogy, when I saw this in the second-hand book store and bought it with the idea that a little homework couldn't hurt. Devices refers to large chunks of Arthurian legend, and I seem to recall White's book having been described as the definitive work bringing it all together into roughly the shape we recognise today; except it turns out that I was actually thinking of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur of 1485 to which The Once and Future King itself refers and which I am similarly yet to read; but I've started so I may as well finish.

The Once and Future King, rather than being the definitive version, brings Arthurian legend into the twentieth century in so much as that it's a modern novel written in a contemporary style whilst relating a tale set in the twelfth century or thereabouts. All those Arthurian occurrences are traditionally dated to times prior to even Egbert of Wessex, the first Saxon king and arguably the first English king by some definition; so the six-hundred year relocation initially unsettled me. At first it seemed like White just needed a way of bringing Robin Hood into the Arthurverse - curiously something which likewise occurs in Philip Purser-Hallard's The Locksley Exploit albeit with more satisfying purpose, to my mind - which demands the reader avoid thinking too hard about what Richard the Lionheart may or may not have been up to around the same time.

Even more disconcerting, at least for me, was that the first of the four books of The Once and Future King turns out to be The Sword in the Stone, as famously adapted by Walt Disney. I've never seen the animated film but would guess it's probably fairly true to the book, given that the tone of the book, occasionally harking back to the absurdity of Cervantes as it does, somewhat foreshadows Harry Potter and even the Monty Python version of this tale. Try to read this without thinking of John Cleese and the rest:

Sir Ector blushed deeply and called out: 'Ah, Grummore, come over here a minute, will you? I want to introduce a friend of mine, old chap, a chap called Wood, old chap—Wood with a W, you know, not an H. Yes, and this is King Pellinore, Master Wood—King Pellinore.'

'Hail,' said King Pellinore, who had not quite got out of the habit when nervous.

'How do?' said Sir Grummore. 'No relation to Robin Hood, I suppose?'

'Oh, not in the least,' interrupted Sir Ector hastily. 'Double you, double owe, dee, you know, like the stuff they make furniture out of—furniture, you know, and spears, and—well—spears, you know, and furniture.'

I was expecting more frowning, more grunting, more faces set sternly against the northern wind, which isn't to say I was necessarily disappointed so much as that it took more getting used to than I had anticipated. White talks quite directly to his audience as though we're sat before him upon the hearth rug, and so we have references such as to Merlyn putting his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes, and we are left with a strong impression of The Once and Future King having been written for English school boys at the upper end of the 1950s educational ladder.

Children believe such things to this day, and think that they will only be able to bowl well in the cricket match tomorrow, provided that they are good today.

As an aside, even without the references to Merlyn and his unsettling knowledge of centuries to come, anyone who enjoyed Marc Platt's Lungbarrow as I did might appreciate why I should raise an eyebrow at this passage:

'Would you show me your home?'

'Certainly,' said the badger, 'though, of course, I don't use it all. It is a rambling old place, much too big for a single man. I suppose some parts of it may be a thousand years old. There are about four families of us in it, here and there, take it by and large from cellar to attics, and sometimes we don't meet for months. A crazy old place, I suppose it must seem to you modern people—but there, it's cosy.'

At the risk of committing what is probably literary treason, there's a problem with The Once and Future King, or at least I experienced one. It's nothing to do with kids turning into Disney owls, the twelfth century remodelling, the disconcerting contemporary asides, or any of White's screwing around with the source material, all of which is done with a purpose which becomes gradually apparent. The problem is that said purpose takes so long to emerge from the narrative. I can understand the writer not wanting to play all of his cards at once, but as soon as we're past The Sword in the Stone it really gets to rambling and bumbling to itself with no clear indication of where we might be heading, and while the book remains readable throughout, personally I was a little bored in places. I'm putting this down to my never having read Le Morte D'Arthur.

That said, the point of it all is beautifully expressed once it becomes apparent why White felt compelled to write in the first place. The Once and Future King evokes the age of chivalry in contrast to White's era, and unfortunately also to our own - it might be argued. His invocation of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the pseudo-Darwinian cult of power as its own justification, as given by Agravaine during the first chapter of the fourth book, is hard to miss.

'We could say that we were in favour of a national movement. For that matter, we could join them together and call it national communism. But it has to be something broad and popular, which everybody can feel. It must be against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry.'

White also seemingly predicted Death in June and other neofolk types who have built careers on simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery, such as the controversial idea and image of Adolf Hitler as a great bloke who was only saying what everybody was thinking.

Mordred had begun dressing with this dramatic simplicity since the time when he had become a leader of the popular party. Their aims were some kind of nationalism, with Gaelic autonomy, and a massacre of the Jews as well, in revenge for a mythical saint called Hugh of Lincoln. There were already thousands, spread over the country, who carried the badge of a scarlet fist clenching a whip, and who called themselves Thrashers.

Once this novel stops messing about and gets down to the business of what is on its mind, it becomes a formidable work, and so much so as to oblige me to forget having been bored; and given the chilling accuracy of White's analysis of the rise of the Nazis, his argument seems unfortunately well-suited to our own era, and to how we respond to what is happening in our world.

At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

I suppose now I need to read Le Morte D'Arthur.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (2008)
To cut to the chase I really enjoyed this, which I mention so as to save readers the effort of skipping down in search of the point at which I'm not slagging something off. However, a huge rant came to me just as I finished reading, inspired by but only indirectly relating to The Umbrella Academy - actually no more than an expansion upon themes found in my usual rant - and I really need to get it out of my system so here we go. We will return to The Umbrella Academy following the next couple of paragraphs.

There's a dominant aesthetic which has emerged from western culture at the end of the twentieth century which I'll refer to as Titterism for the sake of convenience, and Titterism because its lowest forms suggest a person tittering as they photoshop, for example, a robot riding a penny-farthing whilst somehow imagining themselves to be a font of creative wit. I could be wrong but I suspect it all started when the Cure, having recorded the excellent Seventeen Seconds and Faith, turned to shit, although this may simply be when I first began to notice. I suppose it might be dated to the time Robert Smith spent playing guitar for Siouxsie & the Banshees then presumably came back with the wrong end of their aesthetic stick to record shite like The Love Cats and The Caterpillar. Titterism seems to have been born through a recontextualisation of Lewis Carroll, and in the wake of Robert Smith's pioneering work found expression in the art of Vaughan Oliver who famously set Victorian typefaces across blurred photographs of someone's grandma using a mangle. This led thematically to Dave McKean using rusty screws purchased from an antique shop to fix dead leaves to the cover of Sandman comics, and arguably to the stories contained in those comics and written by Neil Gaiman; and then to everything else whipped up from some tastefully blurred aspect of Victoriana or its associated images of childhood - Harry Potter, Doctor Who, steampunk, Peaky fucking Blinders, Tim Burton, you name it...

Gadzooks, chaps - why methinks 'tis one of those computing engines so fashioned as to resemble a gentleman and - oh my - he's riding a jolly old boneshaker! By the Lord Harry, what a to-do! What will they think of next?*

The appeal of Titterism - as I will continue to call it until it feels right - is not difficult to appreciate. We respond for the same reason we still respond to Dada and Surrealism, art movements to which much Titterist work appears to aspire. It looks interesting because it seems incongruous in the age of computer-driven mass communication. It looks incongruous because it looks conspicuously hand crafted and hints at values with which we are no longer fully connected; so contrast is the key element - hence what you get when you google steampunk Dalek. It's a space age robotic alien from the future, and yet it's powered by - tee hee - cogs and flywheels, so let the titters commence. No creative ability is required, just the capacity for standing an object next to its thematic opposite. This is probably why this whole thing has come about now, scored to the rise of information technology which allows those without clearly quantified artistic vision to endlessly quote, cut, paste, and rearrange what has gone before. Dada and Surrealism did the same but in sharp contrast to still strongly defined aesthetics of craft and beauty which modernism had only just begun to address, so the act of collage was itself a statement even before we consider any philosophical dimensions invoked by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, André Breton and others. The collage served subversion rather than tittering novelty the appeal of which is that it looks funny innit! Like everything, the subversion has been stripped of content and commodified as Titterism. It's old and weird and it reminds us of that which had content beyond the basic aesthetic, which saves us the trouble of thinking about it for longer than it takes to read this sentence.

So that is why I dislike Titterism. For every individual who understands exactly what they're doing and is able to offer art of some intrinsic value beyond mere collectibility, there are a million other cunts busily dangling Bulldog Drummond from a dirigible and expecting to get paid for it. This is partially why I browsed The Umbrella Academy in the book store two or three times before actually buying it. It looked potentially intriguing, but it looked like Titterism, a bit Tim Burton in places. I've tried with My Chemical Romance but I never really understood that emotional children music - as it's called - and The Black Parade still sounds like a noisier, more whiny Bay City Rollers to my ears; so the appeal of a Titterist comic book written by their singer did not seem obvious; but, I'd still have bought the first issue of the new Doom Patrol comic a couple of weeks back had it been written by Ben fucking Elton, never mind Gerard Way; and it was good, so of course I just had to read this.

The Umbrella Academy is a group of seven, slightly bizarre super-powered children, and whilst it skates close to the edge, occasionally threatening to slide over into a full blown Titterfest of monocles, penny-farthing bicycles, and Christmas puddings with sixpences in the middle - it has enough momentum and weird invention to get away with it, and ultimately to succeed with flying colours. On the surface of it, it's almost a homage to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol - and if you enjoyed that you'll almost certainly enjoy this - but maintains its own distinctive voice through, oddly enough, a seemingly more pronounced European aesthetic, or enough so as to imply that Way has sat through more than his fair share of bewildering black and white films with English subtitles. So it manages to feel significantly less mainstream than Morrison's Doom Patrol, thanks in part to Gabriel Bá's wonderful artwork falling somewhere between Tintin and Ted McKeever.

Aside from some muted wibbling noises about shitty parenting, it admittedly doesn't actually do a whole lot beyond looking amazing, but that doesn't have to be a problem, and it does more than just titter. If you really need it, The Umbrella Academy's surrealist short-circuiting of expectation might quite easily be taken as an end in itself. It throws interesting shapes, and is at heart deeply fucking stupid, but then all the best comic books usually are.

*: I could churn out this shit all day if anyone's interested: five cents a word but all reasonable offers will be considered.

Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass

Kari Sutherland & Linda Woolverton
Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)
I'm going to work with the assumption that this is a novel about a woman named Disney Alice, that being how her name appears on the cover and title page. I refuse to acknowledge Disney as referring to an author or authors because it would be undignified, given how the name of Lewis Carroll appears only once as small print, a creator credit, as though he were just one of the team, because Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass definitely wasn't written by Carroll. Its authorial heritage in full is given as adapted by Kari Sutherland, based on the screenplay by Linda Woolverton, based on characters created by Lewis Carroll, produced by Joe Roth, Suzanne Todd, Jennifer Todd, Tim Burton, and directed by James Bobin. The corporate efficiency of the list presents a stark contrast to the appearance of the book, a lavishly bound hardback with a colour plate on the cover and wonky pages of hand-knitted paper cut to uneven sizes. It's a real quality product, and I'm willing to bet that each copy was individually hand-crafted by authentic crofters living on the Arran Islands - which is over there in Englishland, which you probably didn't know; and it's been brought to us by the Disney Press - not Disney Books or Disney Publishing, but the Disney Press. I expect their head office is the stone hut next to the one with the artisan crofting craftsmen who didst forge the tome by the very sweat of their honest brows.

To get to the point, this isn't Through the Looking Glass, Carroll's sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as is probably obvious. Through the Looking Glass opens with Alice, who I would guess to be about eight, possibly younger, playing with her kittens in front of the fireplace in view of a large mirror through which she will soon travel. By contrast, here we meet Disney Alice as an adult, the feisty captain of a sailing ship returning to port from a series of adventures, and despite having been the presumably successful captain of her own ship for three years, returning home she is preoccupied with thoughts of her father and whether he will at last give her the blessing of his approval, because he's one of those bad dads who never said anything nice about us when we were young, which is why we now require analysts.

Where Through the Looking Glass is a beautifully-crafted nonsense tale based on the game of chess, this thing simply employs some of the same characters, additionally drafting in half the cast of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to tell an entirely different story; and familiar persons such as the Mad Hatter and Cheshire cat are given full names, families, motivation, resumes, and history. In this story, the Mad Hatter becomes a boring old square, thus significantly reducing his appeal. Something has turned him into a man with opinions about income tax and who no longer dreams crazy, magical dreams full of magic and wonderment. Alice therefore travels back in time to change the past so as to restore the Mad Hatter to his former magical state of magic, wonderment and crazy imagination. When I first read that Alice travels back in time to change the past, I assumed the reviewer was taking the piss, but no - that really is what happens, because they've invented a completely new kind of story.

I'm being sarcastic.

Anyway, we learn how the Mad Hatter's father once made some dismissive remark criticising the quality of a hat the boy had made at school and brought home hoping to impress his dear old dad. 'That's fucking shit,' the busy, working man observed whilst nevertheless holding down a job so as to put food in the mouths of his family and maintain the roof over their heads, which traumatised the junior Mad Hatter. To be fair, the hat he made at school sounds rubbish to me as well, but there's a lot to be blamed on shitty parenting in this book. The Red Queen for example is a bit of a cunt, but this is due to a bollocking from her parents, a bollocking resulting from her once having been charged with the spillage of some crumbs and a pie crust, which was actually her sister's doing. Apparently that's quite similar to how Hitler got started.

I haven't seen the movie, but I'm guessing this book more or less faithfully recreates both the story and the sense of constant motion, people falling out of the sky and catching a stray yardarm just in time, just like in a game, all in relentlessly screaming 3D for a couple of hours. The proto-Dadaist nonsense of Carroll's creation is implied with the usual blend of dollar store steampunk bollocks and low-calorie corporate surrealism with shitloads of cogs all over the shop, the sort of thing you will immediately recognise from whenever you last saw a commercial for anything remotely related to Christmas, this sort of deal:

He picked up a floral teapot—one of many on the table—and poured some tea into Time's cup.

'If you're really Time itself, or himself, or whatever you are, perhaps you can answer me this,' Hatter blathered on as he served their guest. 'I've always wondered when soon is.' He set down the teapot only to snatch up a plate of scones and shove it into Time's face. 'Is it before in a few minutes or after a little while?'

See, that's not actually the brain-wrecking psychedelic conundrum it seems to believe itself to be so much as just a fucking stupid question. Millions of years ago when I was at school, someone brought in their copy of Blondie's Parallel Lines album. A kid we knew as Trev - although that wasn't actually his name - got hold of it and was reading the back cover.

'Look at this,' he chortled, eyes wide, mind about ready to blow. He held up the record sleeve for us to see and pointed to the title of a song - I Know But I Don't Know, because for poor Trev that was the full Syd Barrett meeting André Breton at the Château de Lacoste; and most of Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass stays at more or less the same safe level of crossword puzzle surrealism. There will be no minds blown today, is the promise, just good value entertainment.

Elsewhere in the chamber, the Tweedles were also hugging.

'Let's never fight again,' Tweedledum said.

'Were we fighting before?' Tweedledee asked. He stared at his brother in puzzlement.

'No, so why start now?' Tweedledum said.

Gazing across the room, Alice watched her friends reunite with their families. Everyone seemed so happy, all their former fights—big and small—swept away. With a pang, she thought of her mother, wishing she were there to hold her close. The world had nearly ended, and Alice and her mother had not parted on good terms.

The formerly evil Red Queen is revealed as simply being in a lot of pain over the crumbs and a pie crust incident. She's really quite nice once you get to know her. Everyone makes friends, and we all learn a lesson about the importance of family. Alice's family have attempted to have her committed at one point, but it was just a misunderstanding or summink, because fambly. Alice has spent much of the book bemoaning the stifling influence of family, sexism, the glass ceiling, forces which would keep her from having adventures or spontaneous displays of imagination because she's just a girl or because she should maybe grow the fuck up, but nothing is as important as fambly. So the book or the film or whatever the fuck it is spends a couple of hours blasting us with messages about the madcap importance of breaking free, of wondrous imagination and magic and daring to dream and being a little bit crazy even if it means people think you're a bit weird; then it does an about face and tells us family is more important than anything, even if they've had you committed to a loony bin, even if they've dedicated their lives to shitting on your dreams. It's good to dream and to experience wonderment and to be like totally zany and shit, but only if you have your feet on the ground, if you show some responsibility, only if you honour your family; but in your own time - no pressure or anything.

Personally I don't believe in conspiracy theories, including the one about a corporate cabal of neofeudalist robber barons for whom capitalist society is one big chess game arranged so as to keep us docile and economically productive from behind the scenes, and that's because I don't believe those on the upper balconies have the intelligence or resources to organise such a thing or to keep it running. On the other hand, I do tend to believe that something which very much has the appearance of the same is in charge, roughly speaking, even if its organising principle is an unconscious process rather than a group of individuals. Corporations seem as much subject to Darwinian laws as any of us, so it may be helpful to regard them as organisms inhabiting a financial and political realm, their success determined by what they can get away with, how freely they are able to act and to establish themselves as intrinsic to the society they inhabit. So in other words, this probably wasn't even a conscious act, but there is a limit to the ways in which the machine expresses itself. There is a limit to what it is able to say.

The aspect of Disney Alice Through the Looking Glass which I dislike the most is the arrogance of the idea that an entertainment committee can improve on Lewis Carroll's original. It represents not an empowering fountain of imagination, but an attempt to colonise the same. It's a hostile commodification of superior art to which the company itself can only aspire, something it could never create because there is a limit to what it is able to say. It is designed to keep you dumb, insecure, and reliant upon its own product. It triggers all the familiar entertainment synapses - so thanks a fucking bunch for that, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, Stephen Moffat, Spielberg, Tim Burton, and all you other peddlers of twee content-free wonderment. It's a proven seller, and a light sprinkling of generic unwanted-child angst gives us that warm feeling of value for money, just like the book packaged so as to pretend it wasn't made by robots, or if it was, at least they're zany steampunk robots.

So no, I didn't enjoy it very much.

The Golden Compass

Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (1995)
I sometimes have the feeling that as of about a week ago I was the last person on the planet who hadn't actually read this. Even the woman working the till in Nine Lives Books was raving about it, promising me I would love every syllable. She wasn't the first, which is possibly one reason why it's taken me so long. Quite aside from having been promoted as fantasy fiction - something to which I am not automatically well disposed due to an allergy to anything involving dwarves, quests, or magic swords - there was a point at which everyone I knew seemed to have read this thing and was telling me I should give it a go, and this is just your sort of thing often has the opposite of the intended effect with me. I say everyone I knew, although I suppose actually I mean Carl and Eddy, both of whom I love as brothers from other mothers, but it hadn't even been a year since they had both - quite independent of one another - urged me to read Harry Potter, and frankly I wouldn't touch that one with yours, mate. The nail in the coffin was probably Marian, my girlfriend of the time, telling me that I needed to read Philip Pullman. She was very good at giving me things to read, great at telling me what I needed to do, and shit at taking even the remotest interest in anything I myself had read or considered worthwhile, plus her previous recommendation had been Yann Martel's Life of Pi and I'd had to give that one up as a complete waste of time after about twenty pages.

Anyway, time has passed and there it was, so what the fuck I thought; and wow - I can, at long last, see that at least some of the fuss was justified; and by the way - I saw the film, but I couldn't remember the first fucking thing about it, and reading The Golden Compass failed to even jog my memory on that score, so I suppose it must have been fairly shit.

In the event of my not being the last person on the planet to have read this, The Golden Compass is set in its own entirely unique version of our world, technologically and culturally at a tangent to 1920 or thereabouts, except everyone understands quantum theory, world history has obviously taken a quite different course, and everyone has their own daemon - or companion spirit animal for the sake of argument. Talking bears have their own civilisation, and witches fly around on something which may as well be a broomstick. Despite this, it doesn't quite feel like fantasy fiction in so much as it lacks the traditionally sappy quality I associate with most of the genre. This is almost certainly down to the pants-wetting excellence of Pullman's narrative, his rich imagery, elegant, descriptive prose, and perfect sense of timing. It's been a while since I derived quite this much pleasure, or at least this kind of pleasure from the simple process of following words across a series of pages. Such is the power of Pullman's writing that one may not actually notice that this is, technically speaking, children's literature - major clues being witches and talking bears I suppose, even if you hadn't spotted the significance of the main character being a twelve-year old girl; but, like any decent children's literature, it doesn't pander or condescend, and the main themes are such as to render it adult-compatible. Additionally, such is the power of Pullman's writing that I didn't actually notice the story being hung upon a naughty child fleeing from authority, going on a quest, and ending with a massive scrap - normally the sort of stuff that bores me shitless, but The Golden Compass invests such well-trodden paths with fresh verdure, clearly demonstrating that the substance of the tale is in the telling more than the mechanics of plot, on which so many crappier writers tend to fixate.

As for what it's about, I'll probably save that until I've read the other two. Rooting around on the internet, I find that the trilogy as a whole is in some sense an inversion of Milton's Paradise Lost, of which I am generally ignorant, although I recognised certain themes which I assume are expanded in the second and third part. Additionally, I've been dimly aware of His Dark Materials being on the receiving end of criticism as an atheist diatribe, with the term atheism seemingly used in the sense of that stuff which corrupts our kids and makes them listen to devil music, and so on and so forth. I don't yet know what occurs later - maybe Lyra listens to a Slayer album and then injects some marijuanas or something - but it sounds like a hysterical accusation, at least based on this first part of the story. Whilst the forces of evil appear represented here by the Catholic church, or something fairly similar, I had a strong sense of Pullman criticising dogmatic bureaucracy and political power structures in general rather than too many specific articles of faith, and what specific articles of faith are discussed must surely be considered suitable subject for debate, otherwise the critics simply prove Pullman's point about dogma. Anyway, the Archbishop of Canterbury seemed to think His Dark Materials was all right, so there you go...

A book living up to its own hype is a rare thing, but this one does just that; and anyone approaching The Golden Compass whilst mindful of terms like atheist propaganda is probably too stupid to be reading in the first place.

The Drug and other stories

Aleister Crowley The Drug and other stories (2010)
Whilst I've never exactly been enamoured of Aleister Crowley, I've taken enough of an interest to read past the somewhat hysterical reputation of the most wicked man in the world, as someone or other once put it. So far as I can recall from reading Martin Booth's biography, the worst of the man's crimes was most probably the beastly treatment meted out to Victor Neuburg towards the end of their relationship - although it's been a while since I read the book so I could be wrong there. Personally I'd say that whilst Crowley may well have qualified as the most faintly unsavoury character in the world, when looking to give out awards for actual evil, you might do better to consider Hitler or Stalin or even Fred bleeding West rather than someone who was just a bit of an oddball, the real-life Uncle Fester as at least one website has noted in recent times.

The trouble is that it's difficult to appreciate Crowley without his reputation getting in the way, not least when he himself encouraged the spread of at least some of that reputation, leaving us today with a barely recognisable Crowley as cultural icon to a clueless horde of pseudo-goth wankers with Psychic TV albums. Obviously there's not much good to be had discussing Crowley without some reference to magick, but one should be quite clear about what is meant by such a term in this context. What shouldn't be implied includes actual contact with non-corporeal entities on the grounds of there being no such thing, spells of the kind cast in Harry Potter films, or indeed anything which contradicts the existing laws of causality and physics. Roughly speaking this leaves us with magick as philosophy, a view of the world based not so much upon that which is directly perceived as the means by which it is understood, as expressed in the words of Ida Pendragon in Crowley's The Ordeal of Ida Pendragon:

'Realism,' she went on. 'We want truth, but we want beauty too. We don't want what our silly eyes call truth. We want the beauty that is seen by artists' souls. A photograph is a lie because a camera is not a God. And we would rather the truth coloured by the artist's personality than the lie that his mere eyes tell him. The women of Bougereau and Gerôme are more like what the eyes tell one of life than the women of Degas and Manet. I want the truth of Being, not the truth of Form.'

This view is further clarified by Edgar Rolles in the same tale:

'My good girl, perspective is an eccentricity, a symbol; no more. How can one ever represent a three-dimensional world in two dimensions? Only by symbolism. We have acquiesced in the method of the primitives - do you think men and women are really like Fra Angelico's pictures look to the eyes of the untaught?'

Then again, later:

'So Being is not in Form; it is however only to be understood through Form. Hence incarnations. The Universe is only a picture in the Mind of the Father, by which He wishes to convey - what? It is our Magnum Opus to discover what He means.'

None of which should be confused with beliefs born of a refusal to acknowledge objective reality, for as Crowley states in Felo de Se:

It is fear of death that has fooled men into belief in such absurdities and abominations as Spiritualism and Christian Science.

So, given that our boy wasn't entirely the pantomime villain described by persons subscribing to much weirder belief systems than anything ever claimed as valid by Crowley himself, just what was his game?

In terms of art and literature, the Symbolist movement flourished during Crowley's formative years as a reaction to naturalist tendencies in painting and writing, and perhaps as a resurgence of romanticism inflamed by the ever increasing cultural impact of science and industrialisation. Crowley would most certainly have been aware of all this, not least through the associate late nineteenth century Hermetic revival giving rise to magickal societies such as the Golden Dawn and Ordo Aurum Solis, amongst others. As a young man who spent some time mingling amongst Parisian café society - to which a number of his short stories refer - he could hardly have remained ignorant of Symbolism, or unmoved by its aesthetic as may be inferred from the reference to Symbolist painter Félicien Rops in the short story T'ien Tao. To make a possibly somewhat crass analogy, I suggest it may be in some sense useful to view Crowley as the Andy Warhol of Symbolism, a figure whose life epitomised the preoccupations of the movement, just as the distinctly less interesting Warhol later came to embody the commercialisation and commodification of art; so whilst Rops and Moreau painted it, and Paul Verlaine wrote it, Crowley lived it. On which note, one more from Edgar Rolles in The Ordeal of Ida Pendragon:

'Art,' said he, 'and do not imagine that Art or anything else is other than High Magic!—is a system of holy hieroglyph. The artist, the initiate, thus frames his mysteries.'

If any of that makes any sense, keeping in mind that much of what I have thus far written is suggested mainly for the sake of argument, then it's probably time to take a look at The Drug, a big, fat collection of Crowley's short stories picked up mainly out of curiosity because I'd forgotten that he ever wrote this stuff; and I was further intrigued by there being an introduction from David Tibet, who apparently stopped talking to me after I compared his singing to the mice of the mouse organ on Bagpuss.

Oh well.

As you might imagine given the author, a certain number of the forty-nine short stories gathered here - and many of them previously unpublished by the way - deal with esoteric subjects. Some of these - The Three Characteristics and T'ien Tao to name but two - may well make sense to folks who are really into that sort of thing, but were more or less incomprehensible to me, in places reading much like a man having a conversation with himself. Happily, he improved with practice, learning how to meet his readership halfway, so that by the time we come to 1913's The Testament of Magdalen Blair, if the narrative is still a little muddled in places, the whole is nevertheless rewarding; in this specific case proposing a mechanism of magick as a philosophical system, rather than just addressing those who already get the general idea.

Crowley it turns out was a capable author for the most part. The quality of his writing is rich and poetic, but is sometimes lacking focus, at worst leaving the reader wondering what the hell is going on as we swerve off into yet more digressive observations regarding characters whom we may or may not have already met. Unfortunately though, in some instances the problems are more subtle. For example, in God's Journey we read:

There was one person who had not the normal activity of the brain, that superficial quality of swift reaction without reflection, whose evidence is talk. This was a brain that apprehended situations in some deep stratum of the soul, and the result of whose subtle secret operations is to make decisions which really decide things.

When the hubbub chanced for a moment to be lulled, Nadia, who had been watching the scene silently out of the corners of her sombre eyes, came heavily across the floor towards the master of the house. Her very motion might have suggested some inexorable engine of destruction. She lurched clumsily like a tank, slow, stupid, and yet deadly.

She made the most humble reverence to Pavel Petrovich and said 'I saw Dascha with it.'

The words were quite enough. It let everybody out.

So whilst it's not terrible, the first paragraph is a mess with too much defined by that which is lacking or absent, and concluding with a clause that's pure George W. Bush; followed immediately by a less convoluted paragraph with adjectival content left laying around in awkward places, and which may nevertheless prove a little too rich to digest if one is still scrambling to decode the previous paragraph. Then we come to Dascha, and find ourselves backtracking in hope of deducing the nature of the it with which she was seen; ending with the confusion of the plural words which may or may not become the singular it by which everybody is let out. The sum total is readable, but at a pace dictated by a succession of narrative stumbling blocks. In other words, you need to be already more than averagely well-disposed towards Aleister Crowley to get something out of such passages.

Those individual tales namechecked as distinctly wonderful examples of this, that or the other in the foreword mostly left me unimpressed with the exception of The Drug about which in my notes I have written he forgot to include a story, but otherwise fairly readable. On the other hand, Cancer?, A Death Bed Repentance, The Vitriol-Thrower, The Testament of Magdalen Blair, Felo de Se, Robbing Miss Horniman, and Which Things are an Allegory all made enough of an impression to keep me reading until the end, more or less. The A∴A∴, the order which Crowley helped established in 1907 was dedicated to the pursuit of light and knowledge - as Wikipedia is my witness - an ambition expressed in the motto the method of science, the aim of religion. This seems to me a more accurate summary of that which motivated Aleister Crowley if his writings are any indication, at least more accurate than the pursuit of excess and saying important sounding things in a deep, boomy voice with too much echo; and whilst I'm not suggesting he was necessarily a misunderstood genius, he is clearly deserving of better understanding than has generally been his legacy.

Servant of the Underworld

Aliette de Bodard Servant of the Underworld (2010)
Having something of an interest in Mesoamerican culture reaching beyond that which can be gleaned from Big Bird's Book of Aztecs, I've tended to avoid this sort of thing for fear of blowing a gasket. I can't help it. Rightly or wrongly, I take a proprietorial view of Mexican culture. I don't like the fact of it having been demonised as crude and lacking in any qualities beyond the sanguinary for the last few hundred years, and nor do I appreciate its ham-fisted appropriation by hack writers looking for something exotic and just a teensy bit weird with which to spice up their latest exercise in paying off a credit card.

Anyway, Servant of the Underworld was free, one of a big pile of paperbacks published by Angry Robot from which guests at a San Antonio science-fiction convention were invited to take their pick.

The appendix, an essay in which the author describes how she came to write this - her debut novel - and to which I first turned, should perhaps have rung alarm bells. Aliette de Bodard speaks of the inspiration drawn from Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, then from a series of French novels set in ancient Egypt, and at length describes the plotting and research of Servant of the Underworld. I raised a Paxmanesque eyebrow at de Bodard's renaming the ruler Itzcoatl as Ixcoatl, a revision which recasts the Obsidian Serpent as some bloke called either Face of a Serpent, Serpent Eye, or One Who Appears Like a Serpent; and then I read of her concerns regarding the setting of her novel, studying maps, struggling to work out the distance between certain places, and how the chinampa plantations of Xochimilco would have appeared. I wondered to myself why she hadn't just gone to Mexico City and had a look around, particularly as the chinampas are still there and the city even has an airport, no longer requiring one to endure a five day hike across the mountains on the back of a donkey.

Anyway, suspecting I was probably just being sniffy for the sake of it, I turned to the first page...

I'm not accustomed to reading murder mysteries, and I've no idea whether they're all like this, but the first few chapters, if not exactly bad, comprise little but plot textured with a wearying check-list of local details. The prose is functional and not much more. To be fair, I'm not sure I've ever seen the appeal of this genre given that most stories will necessarily be a variation on the theme of someone being murdered, leading to someone else deducing the identity of the killer; and I don't know why I should be excited about that. I suppose then it must be the mood and sense of place which draws the reader, except Servant of the Underworld has all the personality of a diagram littered with fiddly plot points laboriously picked out through characters for whom it is very difficult to care. There is no art here, no poetry, just narrative mechanism. The writing isn't terrible, but neither is it particularly inspiring, and it really isn't helped by interludes such as the little girl looking at our hard-boiled Mesoamerican investigator with eyes like liquid pools, as opposed to eyes like football pools, I suppose.

Has anyone ever in the entire history of everything just once looked into another's eyes and been struck by their resemblance to liquid pools, presumably liquid pools bearing no similarity to those of asymmetrical shape which form when you spill your beer in the kitchen whilst trying to fry an apricot at two in the morning? Aside from those composed of light, don't most pools tend to be liquid?

This wouldn't bother me were the detail - that which is supposed to distinguish Servant of the Underworld from any other recycled Agatha Christie - not quite so poor. Please feel free to skip the inevitable list which follows because I'm sure no-one else finds this stuff of any interest; but for the record, contrary to that which is suggested in this novel:

• The honorific suffix of a name is indeed -tzin, but it only really works when replacing the existing, usually applicative suffix -tl, -li, or -tli. The name Acatl with an honorific suffix is therefore Acatzin, not fucking Acatl-tzin, which is like prefixing someone's name with Mister Sir.
  
  
• The nahual or nagual is an animal spirit, usually twinned to a specific individual (regardless of whether or not they are aware of this) and can be of any species, not just a jaguar. It is entirely unlike a Dementor from Harry Potter.


• There was no priesthood dedicated to the Death Gods. This is not a quirk of regional government or preference so much as something which, were it otherwise, would contradict much of the existing theology. I appreciate that Aliette de Bodard admits to taking a few liberties in regard to this, but that really doesn't make it better.


• Mictlan is a region of the underworld, not the underworld in its entirety.


• There is a character called Ohtli. Ohtli simply means Road, which seems reminiscent of those people with exotic tattoos of Chinese characters which actually read shirts cleaned $5.


• Girls in Tenochtitlan were generally taught in the home, not in schools, as described in detail in Codex Mendoza.


• The priesthood was almost exclusively male. There were very few priestesses, and none of high rank that we know of.


• Marriages were arranged and not a case of the young girl going out and having a look for some eligible bachelor, as is also described in detail in Codex Mendoza.

There's probably more but I gave up at around chapter four. None of the nits picked above are exactly unforgivable, excepting possibly the thing with honorific suffixes and getting Itzcoatl's name wrong, but it all adds up with all period or theological detail seeming so sloppy and arbitrary and incidental to the almighty labyrinthine plot that the whole becomes difficult to take seriously; and everyone speaks as though they could have been cast in almost any murder mystery from any era with just the furniture shuffled around for the sake of local flavour, all pulling stern Bruce Willis faces and exclaiming what in the Fifth World is going on here?

I hate giving up on a book, and I've only done it on three occasions over the last five years, and never on the same day as I began reading the thing; but this is horrible, a cynical exercise in writing a by-the-numbers fantasy bestseller, and life is too short.

Joe the Barbarian

Grant Morrison & Sean Murphy Joe the Barbarian (2011)
Joe the Barbarian is in essence Grant Morrison's rewrite of Harold and the Purple Crayon - the tale of a diabetic teenage boy experiencing hallucinatory adventures whilst suffering a hypoglycemic episode, an epic fantasy adventure spread across the realm of his own distorted home populated by legions of warriors that were once action figures. It's pretty much your standard Neil Gaiman or Tim Burton fare, and so obviously in the real world our boy is bullied, artistically talented, lacking a father, and about to become homeless; and thus the mystic quest for the soda which will pull Joe back from the diabetic brink leads to a letter inexplicably hidden in the frame of an old photograph by which the deceased dad bequeaths the house to Joe and his mother. It's nice enough, and if you're into this sort of thing I'm sure it will fill you with joy, but...

I don't know.

I just don't know.

It seems unfortunate that I should read Joe the Barbarian immediately after Ubik which similarly occurs in an illusory realm brought on by the approach of death. Ubik is a very difficult act to follow, particularly with the genre into which this roughly settles. Sword and sorcery so often does just the one basic thing - which is what it does here - so it rarely feels as though any of it matters, or that actions have consequences, particularly as we are informed from the start that none of this is happening, and the narrative amounts to whether or not Joe manages to get his bottle of fizzy pop.

I mean, it's decent of its type, and there are some nice lines, and the art is fucking gorgeous throughout, but I can't help feel that Morrison has scored an own goal here. It's a fine if not terribly original premise for a story, although the genuine drama of the real world events seem almost reduced to an angle by which the Duncan Goodhew of Magick justifies yet another load of nebulous guff about heroes and archetypes. In fact, in places it all felt so bolted on as to  bring to mind The Origin of Young Dan Pussey in which Dan Clowes' character is shown to be entirely unable to function or even communicate unless caped heroes are involved:

 

Why this story could only be told as emo Harry Potter I have no idea, and characters knowingly pointing out the cliché of their being engaged on a mystic quest does not in itself render said enterprise any less painful. Joe the Barbarian is fine, but it should have been better.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (2012)
As everyone in the universe is fully aware, this came out as three separate volumes respectively identified as 1910, 1969, and 2009, each being set in the year for which it is named and featuring the same effectively immortal cast. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen recycles characters from existing fiction - classic or otherwise - mashing them all together into the same universe because it's funny, and because it's a neat way to say something about the art of storytelling, and because the state of the art of storytelling speaks volumes about the society telling the stories. Amongst the characters I managed to spot are Aleister Crowley's Simon Iff, Patrick Troughton's Doctor Who, most of the regulars from the Carry On films, at least three versions of James Bond, Wellington and Boot from The Perishers, Parker from Thunderbirds, Sid the Sexist from Viz comic, Michael Moorcocks' Jerry Cornelius, Turner from Nic Roeg's Performance, The Rutles, Andrew Norton from Iain Sinclair's Slow Chocolate Autopsy, and of course Harry Potter.

The point, as with the previous volume, is that culture is built upon mythology, and can thus be judged by the quality of its art and by extension its storytelling. If our magical landscape, our art and fairytales and fictions, if that goes bad, Virginia Woolf's Orlando suggests, maybe the material world follows suit. Moore seems to believe that the quality of our storytelling, and by extension our culture, has been in decline for some years, as perhaps signified by the popularity of Harry Potter who turns out to be the Antichrist of Century, the terrible moonchild and herald of a cultural apocalypse brought into being by Oliver Haddo - W. Somerset Maugham's Aleister Crowley parody.

I've never really warmed to Harry Potter. I haven't read any of the books on the grounds that they don't really appeal to me, and it all seems to resemble similarly bespectacled schoolboy Tim Hunter from Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic from back in 1990, which itself seemed rather like a quaint mash-up of earlier material tapping into the growing market for cutesy English shite. Visiting a ruined school that was once obviously Hogwarts, Bram Stoker's Mina Harker observes this whole environment seems artificial, as if it's been constructed out of reassuring imagery from the 1940s... a storybook place gone horribly wrong, so I guess Alan Moore and I are on roughly the same page with regards to Harry Potter.

As a criticism, with the plucky wand-waving schoolboy ultimately manifested as a nightmarish many-eyed giant, Century hits its target with the same sort of impact as those records Tupac made about Biggie; and it's very, very funny, but at the same time, much as I dislike Rowling's chirpy juvenile tosspot of magic, I can't help feeling this is all a bit like shooting a fish in a barrel. Furthermore, I really have to wonder whether Harry is significantly worse than any of the 1900s pulp heroes in whom Moore seems to perceive at least some worth.

As a recovering former fan of that mysterious investment portfolio in time and space known only as the Doctor at least until Moffat daringly reveals that he's also known as Edgy McSex-Cock because that's like really gamechanging and brilliantly brilliant and shit I can certainly appreciate the idea that culture and by extension society were generally of a higher standard back in the old days when everything was better; but equally there's a danger of generalisations made by virtue of an extremely selective memory. Moore's brief rendering of the punk years in the final pages of 1969 seems in this respect particularly ambiguous, and I couldn't tell if it was a purposefully cock-eyed Two Ronnies safety-pin-through-the-head interpretation offered as a comment on historical revisionism, or if it really was just some beardy old fucker whining about it being too loud and not being able to understand the words but - hey - weren't the 1960s amaaaaaaazing...

Century is great, and I agree with what it does on principle, not least because it does it in a massively entertaining way, but I do wonder if there isn't an element of the new equated with the bad simply because it's new. Whatever you think of Harry Potter, or if like me you try not to, I'd say there are many more deserving targets out there.