PROPAGANDA reviews: Scary Godmother

A special seasonal selection for this spookiest of seasons.
Witches, ghosties and spooks abound in Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother series of beautiful illustrated books. These gothic children’s books are equally suited for young and old ghouls.

(Jill Thompson looking rather witchy herself, borrowed from her website)

The Scary Godmother is a kind, witchy type in a black tutu with purple and green striped stockings and a mass of red hair (that makes her very similar to Jill Thompson). Scary Godmother lives on the Fright Side, just beyond our world and home to Halloween monsters and all manner of things that go bump in the night. There’s Scary Godmother’s ghostly cat Boozle, Mr Pettibone the skeleton and best of all Bug-A-Boo; three-time Champion Monster Under the Bed, whose job is to scare kids, not eat them, and he’s the best at what he does.

In the very first book we’re introduced to this endearing cast of spooky characters and meet Hannah – the little girl who’s about to discover how much fun having a scary Halloween can be. At first she’s very scared of being out with the older kids for the first time and is tricked by her older cousin Jimmy into visiting the neighbourhood haunted house. He wants her to get scared and go home, leaving them free to get candy without being slowed up by Hannah. Once inside the house she’s befriended by Scary Godmother and her monstrous friends and manages to turn the tables on Jimmy.

The next book, set the following year is Revenge of Jimmy and sees Hannah’s cousin Jimmy living in mortal fear of Halloween after his experiences the year before. Using perfect childish logic he decides his only hope is to sabotage this year’s festivities. Over the course of his nefarious deeds he becomes more and more like the monsters he’s trying to avoid but is rescued in the end by Scary Godmother as he too realises that Halloween isn’t nearly as scary as it seems.
The Mystery Date and The Boo Flu are the other books in this series of gorgeous hardbacks each telling their delightful stories with a warmth and joy that will have both old and young thoroughly enchanted. Subsequent volumes are in a more traditional comics form, rather than the Comic Illustrated storybook of these four hardback volumes.

(a page of gloriously colourful art from Jill Thompson’s Boo Flu,
borrowed from her website, where you can actually buy it! (C) Jill Thompson)

Thompson’s art is at its best in these wonderful hardback volumes. Her colours are just sumptuous – all autumnal reds and browns in her gorgeous washes. The full colour and larger panels really let the characters come alive. So what are you waiting for? All of you have got someone special you can buy this for. It’s a great bedtime reader for little ones and perfect holiday reading. It’s one of those rarities in modern comics, a great book for young souls. My daughter Molly thinks it’s great – yours’ will as well.

PROPAGANDA Reviews: Doktor Sleepless: Zzzzzzzzz

Doktor Sleepless
By Warren Ellis & Ivan Rodriguez
The worst thing about Doktor Sleepless is that I was really looking forward to this, thinking it might just be the new Transmetropolitan, which was the book where Warren’s stylings and voice perfectly synched with a killer story. But this just reads like someone ghosting Ellis after reading a few of his books, taking all the obvious aspects of his writing and ignoring the smaller, quieter touches that elevate his work above sci-fi hackery into something thoroughly enjoyable and exciting. It’s listening to a favourite song destroyed by a really awful covers band or admitting that your favourite band’s latest album is, after all, crap.
Either that or this is half an idea from Ellis’ over-fertile imagination that was rushed into print and is knocked off, one issue at a time, in between projects he cares more about. If you’ve ever read a Warren Ellis book you’ll immediately recognise the nasty edge, the sarcastic tone and the technological one-liners. For example, Page 1:
“Today I stop being real. No-one’s going to listen to a boy genius. No-one’s going to listen to a philosopher or a traveller.”
“People like listening to characters. Characters are safe, because they’re not real. So today I become a character.”
“…Doktor Sleepless. He’s something else entirely. Who’s afraid of a cartoon mad scientist?”
So Doktor Sleepless careers around the city hitting people and spouting slogans. Inconsequential stuff happens, there’s a plot twist over the true identity of Doktor Sleepless and not a lot else.

(panels from Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis, with art by Ivan Rodriguez, published Avatar)
So let’s just pretend this didn’t happen shall we?
If you’re after a sleep deprived anti-hero with a mysterious past living in a world that promised utopia but delivered a dirtier version of now, you would do far better reading Dean Motter’s sublime 1980s comic Mr X. This was recently re-released as two volumes featuring art by Paul Rivoche, the Hernandez Brothers and Seth. It’s everything Doktor Sleepless isn’t. Good being just the start of a long list.
And the saddest thing about all this; I love Warren Ellis’ work normally. Planetary, Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Ministry of Space are huge favourites. So the disappointment that is an issue of Doktor Sleepless just hits much harder than reading some other crap comic from a writer I don’t care about. I’ll be over here in the corner pretending Doktor Sleepless isn’t real and re-reading Planetary for comfort and reassurance.
Originally published here at PROPAGANDA on the FPI weblog.

PROPAGANDA Reviews: Crecy by Warren Ellis. French 0 : Us 1

Crecy
By Warren Ellis & Raulo Caceres

Having seemingly tried every other possible iteration of subject in comics, Warren Ellis has now provided us with Crecy; possibly the only example in comics of the historical first person comic fiction lecture. And I’ll warn you now, this features scenes of violence and very naughty language, so if you are easily offended you might want to skip this. Of course, if you are easily offended you probably don’t read Warren Ellis much, which is your loss.

Now the thing about Warren Ellis is that you always know what you’ll be getting. He has a style of writing that is just instantly recognisable, no matter what the story is. The overwhelming feeling with an Ellis book is one of nastiness, sarcasm and bile. I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact it’s rare to find a Warren Ellis comic that I don’t like and the worst criticism I can bring to bear is that sometimes his ideas are too plentiful and some of his material seems ill thought out and produced too quickly in an attempt to get the next idea into production.

But with Crecy, he’s on top form, producing something quite unlike anything on the shelves at the moment. A historical fiction with a modern sensibility, full of the nastiness and attention to detail that Ellis does so very well. It’s all here; the sharpness of his dialogue, the obsession with technology, a violence in his language, a delight in the details and more than anything else, when he’s writing to his top form, a sheer exuberance and love of knowing and sharing his subject.

(panels from Crecy by Warren and Ellis Raulo Caceres,
with Warren no doubt riffing on the term ‘bugger’; published by Avatar)

Crecy is a great, entertaining, bawdy romp through the story of the famous battle of Crecy. Ignore the back cover blurb where some ad exec at Avatar decided to not too subtly draw parallels with the American invasion of Iraq and just dive into the story. Ellis presents the entire battle of Crecy in these 64 pages where a small and completely outnumbered English army faced a French force of crossbowmen and knights and, over the course of the battle, completely devastated not just the French army, but the French aristocracy. Less than 300 Englishmen were killed, but the French death toll exceeded 30,000, including 11 princes, an archbishop and 1200 knights and noblemen. Crecy established the English army as a major force in the world and is credited as being the point in history where the ideas of chivalry and decency in warfare were lost forever.

And if there’s one writer in comics eminently suited to write about a loss of the chivalrous ideal it’s Warren Ellis. The main protagonist, William of Stonham, is one of the seven thousand five hundred longbowmen in a twelve thousand strong army marching their way around Northern France, destroying village after village in a grand tour taking in the beautiful French countryside of Caen, Paris, Abbeville and now Crecy, leaving the simple message: Don’t fuck with the English, if we’re mad enough to do this, you really don’t want to even think about invading us.

The whole book is presented as a first person lecture delivered to the modern audience by William of Stonham. Ellis has his narrator / lecturer report and editorialise in modern English totally aware of the modern audience he’s addressing, which not only reads a damn sight better than the usual historical narrative of “foresoth my King, I see the French approaching. Today shalt be a good day to die” etc, etc, but also allows the narrator to step further out of his own story to present the greater historical and military picture to us, the readers.

It also lets Ellis utilise his almost patented nasty, sarcastic first person dialogue. These English soldiers are common men, full of the xenophobic hatred of anything they don’t know. And this is 1346; they don’t know much, a trip to the next village is seen as a grand adventure into the unknown. The tone of the book is set from the very first page:

“This is a story about the English and the French and why the English hate the French.
Which is because they eat frogs, they smell bad, and they’re twenty five miles away”

“I am, of course, a complete bloody xenophobe who comes from a time when it was acceptable to treat people in the next village like they were subhumans. On the other hand, the French make sausages out of horse’s arseholes and have a history of using England as their toilet.”

“So we call the French snail-eating cunts and they can fucking like it. There’s a word you’ll have to get used to. Cunt. This is a word that many people do not like. But you have to understand the English. In England, the word cunt is punctuation.”

And it goes on like that for all 64 wonderfully nasty, detailed and historically accurate pages. What follows reads like a stand up comedy routine and historical lecture channelled through equal parts Simon Schama and Bill Hicks. This is not the pleasant, cleaned up version of history that we’re usually presented with. This version has all the drudgery, pain, dirt and shit left in. In fact, thanks to Warren I now know that the dirt is used to coat the arrowheads to make the wounds even worse and the longbowmen smear shit on their swords to make even the smallest cut a fatal one. Cheers for that Warren.

The artwork on Crecy is a pleasant change from the usual choice of Avatar artist. In the past the artists have been distinctly average at best, but in Crecy, Raulo Caceres delivers quality, detailed black and white brilliance. The dirt, the shit, the sheer drudgery of the march followed by the terror and insanity of the battle is all captured on the page better than many name artists could begin to manage.

So, if you fancy a nice little historical drama, full of the romance and decency of days gone by, go and read Bernard Cornwell. This is Warren Ellis and he doesn’t do nice. But he does do brilliant comicbooks. Maybe this could become an irregular series? Waterloo next maybe?

Originally published for PROPAGANDA on the FPIweblog here.

PROPAGADA Reviews Phonogram. Exhuming the corpse of the pop that was Brit.

Phonogram

By Kieron Gillen and Jame McKelvie

Phonogram the comic hit like a breath of fresh air. The individual issues on the shelves at Nostalgia & Comics looked stunning, completely iconic and different, which is ironic since each issue’s cover was a pastiche of a famous 90s Britpop-esque CD cover. I’m hardly giving it away by saying its Elastica, Black Grape, Oasis, Blur, Suede and the Manic Street Preachers. Thankfully they continue the riff by making Rue Britannia’s cover a tribute to Pulp’s This is Hardcore.

(the first six issues of the Image-published Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jame McKelvie, all riffing on well-known British albums, borrowed from the creators’ website)

Why music covers for comic covers? Because Phonogram is all about music and the special power it has, that ability to enter into our lives and profoundly affect us, the almost magically quality it possesses. Hopefully you know what I mean. That feeling certain songs give you, that glorious emotional connection where 3 or 4 minutes of music can put you on hold, stop your life and fill you with more emotional power than a first kiss. When the music is more important than breathing. If you’re one of the few who’ve never experienced that feeling, I feel sorry for you. Maybe Phonogram’s not for you; back to your Chris De Burgh, Simply Red, and James Blunt CDs.

Phonogram takes that idea of music having an emotional power and posits the theory that maybe music could have a magical power of its own. From this key, brilliant hook, Phonogram then launches into a world where some people make a higher connection and realise that music is magic. Songs have power, to spellbind, to entrance - even to kill. In Phonogram, David Kohl is a one of a select breed of Phonomancers: musical magicians. His particular brand of magic is tied to the spirit of Britannia, the demi-goddess who gets her power through the works of Suede, Blur, Oasis and all the followers of the pop we once called Brit. Hell, there’s even room for Echobelly, Sleeper and Ocean Colour Scene in there as well.

Heaven help us all, we loved it at the time, but reason and age has taken hold for both us as readers and for David Kohl as a Phonomancer. For Kohl, the death of Britannia means his powers are unravelling and his very life could be going the same way. We’re dragged delightfully through the corpse of the music, stopping only to gaze wistfully at the pop stars, wonder what we saw in some of the bands and imagine what the musical landscape would be like if it were Luke Haines rather than Brett Anderson that the music papers all decided to elevate to near godhead. Better, methinks.

(page from issue#1 of Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jame McKelvie,
borrowed from the previews on the creators’ website)

This story is a little love letter to music and especially Britpop. Like Gillen and McKelvie, I was there, singing along with Jarvis, Damon, Brett and the rest. Whether the book will have as great an emotional impact with those who didn’t play along with Britpop I really don’t know; somehow I doubt it.

I’ve talked a little about the stunning covers already, but Jamie McKelvie’s interior art is just as good, with a minimalist style and careful use of black space that succeeds in making it redolent of pop art in places. But it doesn’t just look pretty on the page, it tells the story, simply and easily.

(Suede’s eponymous debut album and Phonogram #5’s cover - remember when this album cover was controversial and NME told you that you had to have this album or be uncool?)

Phonogram really, really works. It analyses the music and the movement with a passion only available to those who really loved it. It also takes the whole thing apart with the venom of those who’ve come out the other side. It’s a cheap shot perhaps, but it is true that Ocean Colour Scene were shit and Kulashaker should never have been allowed a single note in music’s history. But that is something we learn in time. The whole point of Phonogram is to celebrate the insanity of music, of the way it can make you feel and the glorious magic it can bring into your life. It envelops you, takes you deeper than any lover could and blinds you to its faults. While you’re in the moment there’s nowhere better and God help us, even Kulashaker sounded good while we were there. (Or maybe that really is stretching things). For those wanting to read more the guys maintain a Phonogram blog here.

Originally published here as PROPAGANDA on the FPI blog.

Rugby vs Football.......

The other week, when we were all down in Dudley for our dentist appointment Louise and i stayed in the Plough and Harrow for a treat whilst Molly was having fun at Grandma & Grandpa's place. The Plough And Harrow is a delightful old hotel a little out of Birmingham City Centre. The plan was to drop our gear off and head off for a nice meal and drink in Birmingham, but of course, by the time we'd dropped Molly off at Grandma and Grandpa's and made it out to Birmingham we were left with the option of heading out into Birmingham and having a nice night of it or staying in the hotel and watching the Rugby World Cup final in the comfort of our very nice, very large room.
With both of us feeling absolutely knackered there was no contest.

So we stayed in the hotel and watched another England team lose in a major tournament. Of course the difference between the Rugby team and the Football team was that at least the Rugby team managed to raise their game for the big occasion, at least the Rugby team looked like they really wanted the thing and weren't paralysed with fear in the face of the opposition. And that's to say nothing of the ongoing question of discipline, both players and fans. The classic example of this on Saturday was the England player's reactions to the disputed try. When the fourth official finished watching the replays and the try wasn't given just one player had a quick word with the referee and he was told to go away. And he did.
Contrast that with any football match you've ever seen. Referee makes one decision and all the players immediately surround him and start badgering him almost to the point of physical abuse.
Is this the reason the England football team fails every time when the Rugby team seems to be able to lift themselves and their game to greater heights.
It's certainly the case that this Rugby team will come home soon to plaudits despite losing in the final. Whereas the football team always seems to come home in ignominy.

Simply Red to split up. Mick Hucknell to be shot for being a pompous prick.

Okay, I made the second bit up

But how exactly is that pompous twat going to split Simply Red up?
He is Simply Red. No-one else can stand to be in a room for that lomng with him to actually be in a band.

Mick Hucknell - famously present at the Sex Pistols Lesser Free Trade Hall 1976 Manchester gig.

Everyone else present seemed to form groups that radically change the music scene;
Joy Division, Buzzcocks, The Fall, The Smiths.

Mick Hucknell gives us Simply fucking Red.

If we're very lucky, his decision to split up Simply Red means he's decided to leave the music industry. Which would be nice. But only really good if he were also to delete his entire catalogue of work.

(and breathe.......)

Miss Molly wants a doggie .......

Molly wants one of these

Molly's desperate for a dog. Ever since she's moved up here she's seen all of the dogs around the place and become more and more obsessed with them. Of course, we've pointed out to her that there's absolutely no chance of getting a dog because it just wouldn't be fair to get a dog since both Louise and myself are out at work all day.

Or one of these

And bless her, she understands this.
And being a very smart little girl she's already sorted out exactly how she's going to get round this small problem.

Grandma and Grandpa will move up to Pocklington.
Since they're retired they can get a dog.
And because they're not able to walk the dog, that will be her job.
A perfect solution. At least in Molly's mind.

Or him. She'd love him.

So in the meantime we keep looking at all of the dogs around and putting them into those two important categories: real dogs and silly dogs.
Real dogs are cool. Silly dogs are those stupid yappy things dressed in doggy jumpers and carried around in some dumb woman's arms.

The Mollyless weekend .......

This weekend we've been practically Mollyless. She's had her friend Grace over for a sleepover and the house dynamic has changed completely.

Usually Louise and I are actively involved with stuff Molly does, even though she's a pretty independent and resourceful sort who can keep herself occupied for ages, it's still nice for her to play with us.
But almost as soon as Grace arrived we completely lost our daughter. Suddenly we realised what it's like for families with more than one child. Two small people manage to keep each other perfectly entertained for hours it seems.
Now I'm not fooling myself that this is normal for houses with more than a single child. I imagine that most of the time the house is reverberating with the screams, cries, moans, whines and generally whinging of children falling out and arguing. But for us, borrowing the occasional child for a weekend seems to be a really nice way of occupying Molly.

I wish I could say that having Grace over to keep Molly occupied has meant a nice relaxing weekend chilling out in the house and unwinding. But it hasn't. It's been a very frantic weekend of school work to top off an equally frantic week of school work. There's so much stuff to complete for the first week back and sadly it's all been taking longer than it was meant to. Bah. Overcomplicated things.

Tara Garnett - back in the comics biz!!!

Tara, ex of Nostalgia & Comics just emailed to let me know that she's taking the brave step of moving to London. But the great news is that she's landed a job in Mega City Comics in Camden.

Good for you girl. Tara will be mortally embarrassed by me saying this, but she's one of the bravest and strongest people I've ever met and for her life to be working out so well is a great thing.
If you're in London, please pop in and say hello to her.

And go look at her Live Journal and video blogging.

Bogged down with this work stuff .......anyone fancy making a vector diagram of the olympic stadium?

I've said before how the one downside to having the perfect job doing ICT at my primary school is that I really can't leave it behind when I leave at night.
Unfortunately a lot of big projects have come up that all need doing pretty much immediately.
Including:
Redesign the reports for November,
Write my own job description (should have been done by now)
Create comprehensive internet use, network use, website photo permission documents to go out to parents (should also have been done by now),
Create the next Year 4 ICT module set of lesson plans. (The Year 4 teacher isn't exactly ICT literate and it's easier this way!)
Re-familiarise myself with Powerpoint (which I haven't used for years and years) for Year 6 multimedia presentation lessons.
Completely learn a new Multimedia presentation package for Year 6.

And finally, my favourite and the thing that's been keeping me up for some very late nights (early mornings) over the past few days - Year 5's Vector diagram package. The teacher wants to get the pupils using a vector drawing package to manipulate shapes to make a model of a sports stadium - tying his work nicely in to the History work on the Greeks.
First problem was my hideous unfamiliarity with graphical packages in general - I'm a scientist by trade and a writer by desire. Not a bloody artist. So using grahics packages is always a chore at best and an absolute nightmare at worst.
This was an absolute nightmare.

Eventually I worked out what I wanted to do:
Vectorise this:
Of course, simply vectorising the nbitmap turns out a piece of shit for a drawing. That would be far to easy. So using this as a guide I set about carefully constructing my own vector shapes version.
Creating individual vector shapes for each part - the running track, the javelin run, the shot put area, the high jump etc.
It has taken hours and hours and hours.
But it's done.


Now I've just got all the other stuff to do before going back to school on Monday.
Oh crap, that's just 2 days!!

Luckily Molly's got her friend round this weekend and is pretty much ignoring me - which in this case is good.

CARE International Cartoon auction.....

Joe sends news of the CARE international charity cartoon auction over at Luckner's Auction House.

There are many lots of political cartoons, many of them looking at the global environmental crisis. The auction's in it's early stages, running until 1st November, but there are a lot of very reasonable prices with most of the estimates around the £20-£60 mark. Although obviously with big names such as Ralph Steadman, Nicholas Garland and Peter Schrank the top end estimates go up to £800.

To have a look and bid click here, then register on the site.

Mike Williams - Well, so much for Plan 'A.'
Could be yours for as little as £10 at the time of writing!

Tom Lubbock 2002
£14 and it's yours - but how much higher will it go?

What a wonderful technological world....

For a while I've been bemused at best at technology, antagonistic at worst. Working with computers tends to make you think of them as problems rather than spangly bundles of futureness.

But then I read articles like this on Boing Boing and am reminded exactly why I think I'm living in my own future.... NASA, civilian airborne drones, google maps imaging fire hotspots to direct firefighters to the worst areas. A bizarre future but definitely a fututre.


And then a few links in and Im looking at huge supertankers; DC-10s and a 747 outfitted for firefighting duty and I realise it's not my future I appear to be living in - it's Gerry Andersons.

Jamie Hernandez Dylan poster

Gorgeous Jamie Hernandez piece for the Bob Dylan theme time radio hour folks. (As broadcast every Friday 9-10pm on 6 Music)Each little vignette of the poster is based upon the voiceover at the start of the show.
As is the way with these things, this probably paid more than the last few years of comics work for Jamie.
Really, really gorgeous.
No really. You should click to look at the bigger image.
(via Tom & more details via Joe who got it via Boing Boing - oh what a tangled web we weave)

Daryl Cunningham - help required

With my increasingly failing memory, I have no idea whether I've met Daryl Cunningham.
I remember his name from things like John Dark and other Slab O'Concrete stuff.

But, following a nudge from Pete I've just been following his Live Journal feed and it's heartbreaking stuff - he's in a terrible mess financially and mentally and things don't look like they're going to be getting any better anytime soon.
Whether you know him or not, it's very probably worth dropping what you can into his paypal acount. Click here to help.
After all, in these difficult times, you never really know when things can take a turn for the worse.

Daryl's flickr stream & blog
(via Pete)

Eddie Campbell - Posy Simmonds review & the claws are out for Bryan Talbot. Ouch

Eddie Campbell puts up a lovely piece praising the wonderful Posy Simmonds, particularly her seminal Graphic Novel True Love
(or, in a nod to Mr Campbell, who doesn't much care for the GN tag - insert preferred description here).
It's a well written, interesting read that should make you scuttle off to Amazon or ebay and snap up some Posy. Or nip down to the comic shop to pick up the next Comics Journal which has a huge Posy interview done by Paul Gravett.

But what will be picked up on in the post, certainly the thing that made me go Ouch will be this snippet:

"Firstly, Bryan Talbot in what was very much his own version of the history of 'comics' recently in the Guardian, credited himself along with Raymond Briggs with introducing the 'graphic novel' to Britain in 1982. Even allowing for the existence of such a thing, that would of course be complete bollocks. Posy's True Love came out in 1981. I'm not putting up a different candidate for primacy, because you know I have no time for that race-to-the-patents-office mentality, but we can't let faulty facts end up in Wikipedia"

And in further news - Here's today's post:

"wait, it's the phone
"hi, honeybee. eh? the blog?"
"yes i've written today's. the public apology to Brian? well, yeah, kind of. And then the one where I start writing about trees from now on and forget all that 'graphic novel' shit.
well, uh...."

Ladies & Gentlemen: Eddie Campbell - always entertaining, always worth reading, both his blog and his work!


In related news - Posy's latest book, Tamara Drewe, is out on 1st November. Perfect Christmas present.

York Ghost Walk ......

Yesterday we surprised Molly with the news that we were off to York to meet up with one of her old school friends and go Ghost Walking.
Very, very excited.

We met up, exchanged gossip and headed off for the walk. Huge group of us, about 30, all thoroughly entertained by the guide Mark Graham, doing his spookiest best, all in black and waving a cane around at various haunted buildings.
It was all very good, and a lovely walk right through York. Mark, it seems, hasn't seen a ghost himself but does have vivid astral dreams. This was recounted on one of his many stops along the way.
He was a great storyteller, with a voice dripping in Barnsley accent much like the wonderful voice of poet Ian McMillan. But he didn't give us enough, personally I wanted more scares, more tales and much more detail about the dark goings on.
But it was a great way to spend a couple of hours in York. (a more detailed review of the Ghost Walk - from a Boston travel site of all places is here).

Starting point - The King's Arm. One of the first places to flood whenever the Ouse rises. Allegedly they don't close until the water is over the bar.

Ghost?

Nope, just Molly.

Wrapped up and happy as could be.

A rather shaky shot of the Ghost Walk crowd.

ASBOs come to Trumpton. Laura Howell's new Beano strip.....

As I mentioned in the posts from the Birmingham Comic Show, Laura Howell has been working on a brand new Beano strip.
Well, the good news is that it's out this week (issue no. 3404, dated 27th October). It's called Tales of Johnny Bean and it looks pretty darned great.....
Go say hi, either on her website or her blog. And form a nice orderly queue at the newsagents.

Dudley - a couple of nice things......

Of course, there are some nice things about Dudley:

We parked right next to the Library, and on a whim we popped in - memories came flooding back of hours and hours of browsing and discovering new books and music.

Dudley Public Library.
Source of the majority of my musical obsessions.

There's obviously Dudley Zoo & Castle to go to as well. Perhaps the regions finest attraction. And thankfully a lot better nowadays than it used to be. It's also a huge architectural landmark - with the entire site littered with examples of Lubetkin's modernist buildings. Crap for the animals they wanted to keep in there, but beautiful as objects.

Dudley as a town also has some beautiful architecture. The library building is just the start of a whole street's worth of beauty. The Museum and Art Gallery, the Town Hall and many of the lovely pubs and buildings are a delight.
But for every thing of beauty, there is a monstrous carbuncle. In fact, most of the experiments of the 50s and 60s are slowly decaying and falling into the ground. Masses of brutally ugly concrete shells line the streets, there's a whole underground structure and car park that used to be Sainsburys back in the 70s but is now just a void, used by skaters and tat shops.
Even things like the marvelous Town Hall and civic buildings have been extended and modernised by a team of incompetent lemmings rather than extended in sympathy with the original.

Dudley Civic Buildings

Hideous modern redevelopment not pictured

And there's also the peace and tranquility of Priory ruins and park. At least until the darkness falls, after which it becomes a haven for drinking teens and noise.

Priory Ruins

Dudley - down and out in yam-yam land*

We spent last weekend at my Mom & Dad's house in Dudley. The main reason for going down was obviously to see them and for them to see their grand-daughter. But we also had the delights of our dentist appointment.
(We're lucky that he kept us on as NHS patients - well worth the trip down!)

But unlike our usual visits to Dudley, this time we had a couple of hours to wander around the place.
God almighty it's a culture shock.

Dudley is the 19th largest settlement in the UK (York, by way of comparison is 40th)
It's home to 194919 people.
And from my birth to the age of 18 it was my home as well.

But it's changed beyond recognition from the town I grew up in. The other big thing we noticed about Dudley this time around was a general feeling that the whole place was on such a downward spiral towards economic depravity and decay.
In Pocklington the people are lovely, generally nice and pretty much intelligent and decent folks.
Dudley, not so much. The place seems like it's hemorrhaging IQ by the day.

shopping in Dudley

I bought my first sleeping bag from here, many years ago

Everywhere we went it seemed we were surrounded by crying children and screaming adults. The default parenting option seems to be shouting as loud as possible, preferably whilst dragging your child along behind you screaming and crying at the top of their lungs. Without missing a beat the parent screams back at their child, preferably without turning round to address them. The screams are then shared with everyone in the immediate area.

We have to go there every so often - some contractual thing for the grandparents and their will I think. But I don't think we'll be doing the grand tour again any time soon.

Dudley's once thriving marketplace.

And the only thing that does seem to be increasing - waistlines.
Lunch for a £1.
Heart attacks for free.

* In case you were wondering. Yam-Yam is a derogatory reference to Dudley & Black Country people. It comes from the dialect where "I am" becomes "I yam" hence yam yam.

Richard is sleeping....

No blog post tonight because I'm asleep.
Well, meant to be anyway.
This is day 1 of new regime.
But oh dear look at the time.......

Duran Duran comic?????

There's a nice piece in the New York Times - Superhero Stylings From Stars Of Pop about the recent high profile star turns writing comics - focusing inevitably on Gerard Way with Umbrella Academy (still haven't read it yet - will do over the next week or so).

But what immediately caught my eye a little down the page was the tantalising prospect of a Duran Duran comic coming from Virgin.
Now you know my love of Duran Duran is great so this is interesting news.
Although the last "oh isn't it great the 5 are all together again" album Astronaut was arse of the biggest scale and I'm having a hard time listening to the two songs from the new album Red Carpet Massacre - one is Nite Runner; a bizarre Timbaland and Timberlake collaboration & the other is Falling Down, a semi ballad thing.
Not sure of either yet. Ho Hum.

More Moore - Blake reading & thoughts on anarchy....

& whilst we're talking all things Moore;


Mr Wilson; How are you tonight?
You Tube video of Alan reading his tribute to Robert Anton Wilson.

Link to an interview dealing with Alan's views on anarchy.

Scans Daily of a gorgeous Jamie Hernandez drawn Tesla Strong tale - Tesla Time

(via)

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier Preview.....

EW has a preview of the November released LoEG: Black Dossier by Alan Moore & Kev O'Neil.
This is already looking like being one of the best books of the year. (Certainly the most fun)

Of course, because DC/Wildstorm have decided that this is only going to be released in the US this is potentially the nearest you'll be getting to the thing.
Unless of course you talk nicely to your friendly neighbourhood comics shop or head over to amazon US that is.
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19th October 2006 - 19th October 2007Pocklington Year 1

It's been one whole year since we arrived here in Pocklington. One whole year since we left this:


for the last time and travelled 131 miles north to start living in this:


The move from inner city Birmingham to market town Pocklington has been an amazing, life changing thing. It's with great surprise that we actually find ourselves celebrating the anniversary. In many ways it seems but yesterday we were living in Birmingham and equally it seems like we've been here forever.

Pocklington has given us so much already; a lovely school and future for Molly, a new job for Louise and a complete change of career for me.

There are few regrets. Luckily we still see most of those we want to see fairly regularly. We've lost touch with only a few of our friends and we're going to try to make amends for that in the coming months.
Selfishly perhaps, my biggest regret of our time up here is that I didn't make more of the time from October to December last year when I was unemployed. I seem to spend so much time looking for work that I wasn't really able to completely enjoy what I had gained.
Still, it all worked out in the end.
Louise's job takes her out early and gets her home late, but she's enjoyingh it nonetheless. It's harder, more challenging but still enjoyable.
My job is just a delight. Everyday brings some new enjoyment, another great child doing another great thing. I'm truly lucky to be doing what I'm doing.

But Molly was always the main reason for moving. And she's having such a great time up here. Her school is lovely, she's made loads of friends and is turning into a fantastic little girl.

First year is done. Now for the next 50.

Birmingham Comic Show 2007 and that explains what the hell Kev F Sutherland was doing with those socks......

You know, I kept seeing Kev do these weird interviews all weekend and never got around to asking him what on earth was going on.
This explains it all........

Birmingham Comic Show 2007 Part 7

Standing in line for Kevin Nowlan I was pleased to finally meet Laura Howell. (pictured below with another of Birmingham's finest Lew Stringer)I knew she was at the show as I'd asked Hunt Emerson earlier about her whereabouts. But hours of wandering hadn't managed to find her. So it was a pleasant surprise to see her stood behind me in the queue. She's very busy at the moment and showed me the fantastic pages for her brand new solo Beano strip. Coming soon. Details as soon as she can on her website.

Laura Howell & Lew Stringer.

And that was it. The second Birmingham Comic Show was over. A grand time had been had by all. Roll on BICS 2008.

One last photo....... Please smile Mr Joker.......