The Story of the Loch Ness Monster

Tim Dinsdale The Story of the Loch Ness Monster (1973)
Retracing my book reading footsteps back even further than Doctor Who and the Zarbi, as discussed the other week, raw nostalgia brings me to Tim Dinsdale's The Story of the Loch Ness Monster, which was certainly the first Target book I ever bought, and was probably the first book I ever bought in which text took precedence over pictures. I have vague memories of reading the listings in the back of this and being surprised to note that Target had published novels of Doctor Who stories I hadn't seen on the box; so it began here for me. Unfortunately, I have no memories - vague or otherwise - of actually reading this and may have found it all a little dry, what with it not being off the telly.

Dinsdale wisely took the position that the best way to address children is to speak to them as though they are adults, because they can already do all that where's the dolly gone? shit and it encourages them to keep up. The Story of the Loch Ness Monster is therefore only a children's book in terms of the occasional aside to explain a few of the longer words, which is as it should be. Regarding the proposed existence of Nessie, I don't actually have a water horse in this race, and Dinsdale was one of those properly educated good eggs who had spent time in the RAF - as opposed to some lone nutcase - so he presents what there is to present on an even keel, by necessity concentrating on investigations of the hypothetical monster rather than the monster itself. The book is interesting and readable - if not exactly mind-blowing to someone reading it nearly fifty years later - and only the later chapters listing different types of tripod which might be purchased by the budding monster hunter get a bit chewy, somewhat revealing how little there was to actually write about regarding Nessie back in 1973.

Still, I finished the thing suspecting that there probably was a Loch Ness monster or monsters, regardless of more recent puritanical rationalists insisting it can only have been an escaped circus elephant seen reflected from the planet Venus; and it didn't make me irritable, so that has to be a plus.

Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free

Randy Henderson Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free (2016)
I couldn't make it past page fifty-three, which at least disqualifies Bigfootloose from having been the worst thing I've ever read. It's an urban fantasy and sequel to some other thing I'd never heard of, which amounts to magic, elves, and fairies in a contemporary setting cunningly juxtaposed with sardonic references to episodes of Star Trek. The author refers to Tolkien and others on his blog, which is to be found on the interwebs - tee hee - and yet this novel reads as though his literary foundation was rooted in watching a shitload of television and hanging out with people who dress up as wizards. The narrative is almost all dialogue interspersed with faintly sardonic commentary from the narrator.

Pete removed the customised embalming tubes with the kind of delicateness one might expect from a Jedi manscaping his nethers with a lightsabre.

I think you probably meant delicacy, although I'm sure there's a better term. As author, it was your job to come up with one, yeah?

Elsewhere our man exclaims shazbot in homage to Robin Williams' character from Mork & Mindy, and surprise-fucking-surprise, each page is spattered with extraneous fullstops in the usual attempt to recreate the portentous mood of a cinematic voice-over, instead simply breaking the flow with clumsy sentences lacking subject or action. Like this one. Or beginning with and.

And then we come to:

Oh absolutely. We plotted to replace George Lucas with one of our changelings and have him create movies so terrible they would destroy all hope. We called it Operation Pandora's Jar Jar. And it almost worked.

Ha! Ha! Do you see? He called out George Lucas, dude!

My twenty-five years exiled in the Other Realm had been spent in the wildlands outside of the shaped Demesnes, confined to a pocket of space not unlike a holodeck where I could re-experience any memory but not create anything new, nor control my own appearance or apply imagination.

Yes, you see I can't help noticing how we're now discussing imagination within a sentence dependent on the reader having watched Star Trek: the Next Generation, which is interesting. Reviews quoted on the cover praise Henderson's allegedly ripe sense of humour, and yet aside from a sasquatch engaged in knitting - which is really only an absurdist juxtaposition, albeit a comic one - the only humour I can find is the sort of deal passed off as such in episodes of the Big Bang Theory, references to pop culture and something which once happened in an issue of Green Lantern; which isn't humour. It's button-pushing. It's culty dog-whistling. It's a list calculated to bring smiles of recognition to the faces of readers, with the comedy, such as it is, sprung from the incongruity of someone in a fantasy novel making a reference to Star Wars, a joke which actually isn't that side-splitting after the first few hundred iterations and particularly not if that's all you know how to do.

So, it's mostly dialogue, pop culture references, sentences which were probably suffixed with dude prior to editing, assuming there was editing, and let's not forget chapters named after eighties pop songs, and mostly fucking awful eighties pop songs; and what I could follow of the story is incomprehensible. Henderson attempts to fill us in on the background by describing his characters watching an instructional video called So, You're a Feyblood Now, which itself is reduced to a meaningless information free gag by the wearying MST3K style interjections of its viewers. This is fiction for people who dress up as characters from television shows. I don't know how it got published.

Starlight

Mark Millar & Goran Parlov Starlight (2014)
There probably isn't a whole lot I can say about this one beyond just wow. Someone or other described it as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with Buzz Lightyear in the lead - which seems pretty close - although it reminds me more of Flash Gordon, what with the alien world of castles, giants, elves, and at least one princess deposed by an intergalactic despot. It could have been awful, but Parlov's art lends everything a timeless, statuesque grace in the vein of Giraud and those guys, whilst Millar's writing is perfect, understated, and touching, telling a story which is mainly about an old war horse making peace with age and the death of his wife. Starlight is probably what Alan Moore's Tom Strong should have been.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
I first read this for my English 'O' level exam back in the eighties, then bought my own copy of the novel shortly after, having been so impressed by it. Coming back to it in 2019, I now have to wonder whether the influence of this book runs deeper than I realised, and that attitudes and opinions I regarded as having come from a combination of parental influence, punk rock, and general common sense first achieved form when reading this.

Saturday Night is the story of Arthur, a young working class man employed on a factory assembly line, who drinks a lot, enjoys a fight, and prefers to shag married women because the secretive nature of the arrangement allows him the freedom to spread it about. He's selfish, vindictive, and his entire existence is founded upon a web of lies. He's a complete wanker, and yet really he's not, because he's funny, intelligent, hard to dislike, and there's a refreshing honesty to his nihilism. The novel is a straightforward allegory about growing up, a coming of age deal, I suppose, as Arthur achieves conditional enlightenment through having all of his wife-shagging, arse-kicking chickens come home to roost. It's literally the alcohol-fuelled night club punch-up of Saturday leading into the reflective hangover and recovery of Sunday morning.

The success of the book is in the portrayal of the working class as sympathetic, complex characters without recourse to sentiment, but rather celebrating the devious ingenuity of those obliged to get by with limited means. I've known a few Arthurs, even worked and lived in similar conditions, and Sillitoe really nails it, articulating the spirit of working class resistance and not letting the bastards grind you down like few others. The fidelity of Sillitoe's attention to detail is most capably demonstrated with the appearance of Sam and Chumley towards the end, respectively African and Indian, and neither entirely at home within the environment of white working class Nottingham in the fifties. Whilst both are treated as curiosities, there's no ill will because everyone has enough on their own plate without getting too upset about anyone else's business, painting what I would suggest is a generally more accurate picture of the attitude of the British working class to race than the one more commonly communicated by the media towards political ends.

At least since I first discovered the internet, more and more I've come to wonder at the herd mentality of my fellow citizens and the eagerness with which we will guzzle down whatever shit the media happen to be telling us this week. I'm not talking fake news or whatever mirage the architects of the current regime may be invoking to deflect from the fact of their having been caught with their pants down yet again. I'm talking about the many heads nodding and bleating innit terrible to whichever contemporary demon Rupert Murdoch, Jeremy Kyle, or whoever else happens to be waving in our faces in the name of scaring us into voting for Adolf fucking Hitler this week. Somehow I recall growing up with the idea that authority was not necessarily to be trusted, and that claims made by the media, particularly of the politically loaded variety, should be taken with a pinch of salt. This message seemed to be communicated by more or less everything which caught my attention from the Bash Street Kids onwards, and yet it's beginning to feel as though I grew up in some sort of bubble beyond which rock and roll - for example - was only ever about entertainment, and the version you'll see played out on America's Got Talent is probably as good as anything else you're likely to find for the same price. The squares and the head boys and the good little soldiers seem to be inheriting the earth.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is therefore a powerful memorial to a world we've left behind, to attitudes which should not be forgotten because while we're still fighting, it means we're alive; and being alive should be fun.

Doctor Who and the Zarbi

Bill Strutton Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965)
This would have been the third or maybe fourth book I ever read, excepting Asterix, Tintin and stuff like Where the Wild Things Are in which the pictures are either equal to or more important than the text. Being a children's book, this one features a token line illustration every few chapters so as to sweeten the pill, I suppose, but I'm not counting those. I'm guessing I would have been about eight. I was ill with something or other, and my mother had let me spend the day - or possibly days - convalescing in my parents' bed, probably because it was more comfortable than my own. On one of these days she came back from Stratford, our nearest town, with a copy of Terrance Dicks' Target novelisation of Spearhead from Space, probably because I'd spent so much time gaping at the cover in WHSmith. So that was, in theory, the first novel I ever read, and the other four Who adaptations then in print followed soon after, although I'd presumably recovered from whatever had struck me down by that point.

The Web Planet, here retitled so as to remind us that our purchase shall be rewarded with monsters, had accumulated the reputation of being amongst the worst Who tales ever to disgrace the screen last time I looked, although that was admittedly a while back. It was too long, too slow, and the effects were comical, leading to the Zarbi being sarcastically described as pantomime ants by Steve Lyons and Chris Howarth. I never shared this view, having enjoyed the VHS release on several occasions. It was slow, but I felt the weird pensive, atmosphere more than compensated; and whilst it's true that if you look very closely, you can see they're in a television studio rather than actually on the planet Vortis, and those creatures are really just underpaid human actors in costumes knocked up on the cheap, I never really saw why this should be considered a problem.

The novelisation worked better for my eight-year old self than it does now, probably because it duplicates the television script so closely, specifically identifies the star as Doctor Who at every opportunity - just like the strip in TV Comic - and is mostly a cycle of our heroes being captured then escaping, over and over until someone explains that they've just invented what may as well have been named the anti-Animus-gun and saves the day, the Animus being the entity which is controlling the Zarbi and causing them to behave like a set of cunts*.

In its favour, someone had actually bothered to teach Bill Strutton how to write a sentence, so it's competent, reasonably paced given the somewhat repetitive structure of the story, and with none of that tedious reliance on full-stops and non-sentences as an easy source of dramatic tension, the usual ham-fisted attempt to imply the cadence of a portentous voice-over. Also in its favour is that the original six telly episodes were at least trying to do something different in a peculiarly alien environment populated by creatures trying hard to be something stranger than yet more humans with knobbly foreheads. Subsequent authors have found Lovecraftian overtones in this one, which actually isn't too much of a stretch; and whilst a bit slow for me, the novelisation has a weirdness which very much reminds me of van Vogt, albeit in simplified form; so in summary, it's nothing amazing, but I've read worse.

*: The Animus isn't identified by that name in the book, and I don't remember if it was named as such on the telly, so probably that detail came later courtesy of Virgin publishing. Similarly, whilst I'm sure Hartnell's Doctor may well have referred to the Zarbi as a set of cunts, this wasn't in the book either.

Lobo: Infanticide

Keith Giffen & Alan Grant Lobo: Infanticide (1993)
I vaguely recall this having been the third four-issue series to star Lobo, who is more or less Vyvyan from the Young Ones in space. The first two were decent as I recall, but this was the point at which the law of diminishing returns had patently kicked in. Where it was once thought that puerile humour of the gratuitously violent and wilfully offensive kind should, logically speaking, become funnier with repetition, research undertaken by the Insane Clown Posse has since demonstrated this to be a falsehood. The problem with this one was the abrupt absence of the distraction of Simon Bisley's gorgeous yet ridiculous artwork on the first two series. Giffen drew Infanticide himself, but did so in a style varying wildly from his usual thing, presumably imagining it would better fit the subject in the absence of Bisley's spacehopper muscularity and guns bigger than the people firing them. It's not a bad style but it's a bit of a mess, and without colour to give definition would probably resemble Jackson Pollock; which is probably why I noticed that the enterprise wasn't actually very good, and that there's something a bit pitiful about the hyperbole of brace yourselves because it's gonna get real fuckin' offensive up in this bitch any moment now in a DC comic which won't allow naughty words. There are a few smirks, I guess, but once you get to the Schulz pastiche doodled in the margin - Lobo as Charlie Brown shooting his Lucy equivalent when she pulls the football away, or blowing up the kite-eating tree - it all starts to look a bit familiar and a bit bleeding obvious. The problem is that Giffen himself is well aware of this:

I have no idea why Lobo took off... I came up with him as an indictment of the Punisher, Wolverine hero prototype, and somehow he caught on as the high violence poster boy. Go figure.

So Lobo was never a labour of love, which should probably come as something of a relief, and Infanticide feels like something churned out to a very limited formula because that's what it is - good for one joke, which is admittedly a great joke, but not something you want to hear told over and over again.

Mister Miracle

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Mister Miracle (2019)
Just over a month ago I wrote about an Avengers comic book, suggesting that to describe it as ludicrous would imply that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't. Whilst I haven't actually had cause to revise this opinion, it turns out that there actually is a ponderous superhero equivalent of Samuel Beckett, and it's Tom King's version of Mister Miracle.

Mister Miracle is some kind of super escape artist, a sort of cosmic Houdini with a cape born from the peculiarly vivid imagination of Jack Kirby as part of his Fourth World mythology. The aforementioned Fourth World never really featured in anything I read, so I don't fully understand what it's about beyond that it's something to do with Apokolips, New Genesis, the New Gods, and Darkseid's search for the anti-life equation which will eliminate free will across the universe; so the whole deal is about a million times weirder and more interesting than most of the rest of DC's jock-infested whitebread canon, and at the risk of seeming repetitive, there's something very van Vogt about it all.

Here we see our escape artist fail a suicide attempt and father a child with Big Barda, then war breaks out on New Genesis and Darkseid demands custody of the child as a price for ending the war. The more dramatic, far-fetched, cosmic elements of the story occur in the background almost to the point of being off the side of the page, and as such come across as belonging to something truly vast and unknowable, having been spared the diminishing effects of a sharper focus. Yet even when we can see the fighting, battles we wouldn't understand conducted with bizarre technology, these details are just background noise, of no more significance than a car journey or a trip to the drug store. The real story is that of Scott and Barda having a kid, sleepless nights, trips to the hospital, the sort of stuff you would more expect to find in something written by Harvey Pekar and told with the same muted tone: it's the small details which matter, which is the whole point of the story.

The art is gorgeous too, in case anyone was wondering, tender realism which emphasises the strangeness of certain events unfolding in the background, and doing so without anyone jumping up and down screaming look at me, I'm weird! This thing is simply beautiful, and possibly even the greatest comic book ever published, or at least I'm having trouble recalling anything which has impressed me more right now. As for Watchmen and other beacons of supposed graphic eloquence, Mister Miracle makes most of them look like Scrooge McDuck.