Amanda Palmer..... We Are The Media

It's in my brain and on my ipod:

And for those of you who don't realise; Map Of Tasmania?

Amanda Palmer's blog explanation (and if you're in a hurry here's Urban Dictionary). And there's lyrics here.

Buy it now.

Oh, I forgot - Film of 2010.....

Toy Story 3.

I blubbed. There was never going to be any question about that. But what surprised me about Toy Story 3 was just how wonderful and terribly sad it was.

So many reviews of the movie have talked about the tremendous sadness the reviewer felt, about the tears they shed when the child found it was time to give up it's toys and moved on.

But it wasn't like that at all. certainly not for me.

Toy Story 3 is all about growing up, certainly. But it's not about the child giving up the toys, not as toys.

It's an allegory - where the toys are the grown ups, the toys are the parents. And they're the ones who are doing the letting go, the child is moving away from the parents (toys) and it's the parents (toys) who have to stand back and pretend that they're singularly happy for their children, that this moment and countless moments along the way are not tearing their hearts into tiny pieces.

I can't believe I haven't read that more. It was as plain as the tears streaming down my face as I sat next to my 11 year old daughter. The same daughter who was about 5 when we first saw Toy Story 1 & 2 on dvd together.

It's about that moment when the child no longer wants to play with us, no longer needs us, has better and far more important things to do with their life than spend time with their parents - that's the emotion that Toy Story 3 brought forth so well.

Simply a wonderful film. And part of perhaps the only perfect trilogy there's ever been.

Planetary - a decade to tell the tale... and worth it.

Planetary

Written by Warren Ellis, Art by John Cassaday, Colours by Laura Martin, David Baron

DC Comics / Wildstorm



Although it started in April 1999, various problems with the series meant that the final issue; 27, was eventually published in 2009. It took a decade to finish the series and it was well worth the wait.

I love it perhaps more than I should. It’s something I go back to regularly, and will always re-read it at least once per year. This year, as a special Christmas present to myself I decided that, even though I had the whole series as Hardbacks, I really, really wanted to get the beautiful Absolute editions.

Expensive but oh so worth it. My Boxing Day was spent engrossed, yet again, in a wonderful world created by Ellis, Cassaday, Martin and Baron. The huge pages make the art so much more impressive than it already was at normal comic size and Ellis’ ideas fly even greater at this scale.



(John Cassaday’s beautiful cover to the final issue of Planetary)

Warren Ellis’ Planetary is a beautiful, optimistic, humanist, sentimental masterpiece, a magnificent superhero fantasy mythology with each self contained chapter taking some aspect of genre fiction and spinning a tale of awe and wonder. This love story of 20th Century fictions just has so much going on- Doc Savage’s pulp heroes, John Woo style Hong Kong action cinema ghost stories, giant irradiated Japanese monsters, Steranko era Nick Fury super spies, Sherlock Holmes and much more. But taken as a whole, as one supremely interconnected, expansive story it becomes Ellis’ masterpiece with it’s signature style of vast, open storytelling, tech obsessions, fast, witty dialogue and far reaching ideas of optimism and hope.

And every step of the way artist John Cassaday’s classical artwork perfectly visualises every wonderfully strange idea. It may have taken many, many years to complete the series’ 27 issues and many of these delays may have been art led. But never has the concept of “good or on time?” been proven.

Planetary is absolutely full of ideas – wonderful, incredible ideas. But the first idea is the greatest of all; making Planetary an organisation dedicated to uncovering the secret history of the 20th Century – “mystery archaeologists”, dedicated to uncovering the secret history of the 20th Century. At a stroke this allows Ellis free range over every incredible facet of the 20th Century, all the weirdness, all the impossible tech, all the amazing adventures and all the wonderful characters of it’s fictions.



(More fabulous Cassaday artwork from the softcover collection Planetary Volume 1: All Over The World)

New recruit Elijah Snow is 100 years old, one of the group of century babies, born at the dawn of the 20th Century, superpowered, but a broken man, his memory shot to hell. Planetary allows him to tortuously piece together his mysterious past and uncover the secrets his team-mates are hiding from him about the identity of the Fourth Man, Planetary’s mysterious backer.

With the Fourth Man problem solved in the first half of the story, Snow then turns Planetary’s attention to the 4; Ellis’ dark and twisted version of Marvel’s Fantastic 4, reimaged as malevolent, secret masters of the world. Over 50 years they’ve made the world mediocre, robbing it of wonders and costing millions of lives in the process. It’s Snow’s obsessive mission to save his planet from their yoke that drives the second half of Planetary, although there’s still time for interludes and one off stories, that somehow never fail to impress as they reveal some tiny bit more in Snow’s mission to save the world.



In the end, Snow’s purpose is revealed, simply and profoundly, as a man who saves things; people, information, experiences, the wonders of the world from the straitjacket of the 4. And it’s Snow’s final obsession, to save his dearest friend and team-mate, dead following a Planetary encounter with a fictional reality, that gives the book, always full of wonder, it’s beating heart. This is Ellis’ goodbye, to his readers and most touchingly his father, who died during Planetary’s troubled 10 year genesis.

Planetary starts out as Ellis’ love letter to the world of genre fiction but finishes as a hugely poignant and affecting story of loss and redemption. Planetary is a call to arms to make a finer world, and stands as one of the greatest superhero fantasy series ever told. It’s a book I’ll return to regularly, and every time I read it through I never loss any of the sense of wonder and excitement I had that very first time I picked up issue 1. From first page to last, I love it.



It’s a classic and should be in your library. If I had to pick one series that I loved more than any other this would be it.

Reviews at the FPI blog.... another long list....

And it's only a long list because I'm a bit crap at keeping this up to date. Idiot me.

40

Oh yes. That's me.

Am I at all concerned with hitting 40? Nope.

What bothers me more is generally getting old.

But in the short term, seeing as I'm writing this a few days ahead and I've got stuff needs writing before I go to be - what bothers me right now is getting another G&T and writing 500 decent words about a comic.

So that was the two thousand and ten show.....

2010. The year I stopped blogging here. (pretty much - less than 10 posts for most months of the year - terrible).

The year Molly stopped being an adorable primary school child and turned into an adorable secondary school child. Or at least she did right now, with the rose tinted spectacles that a reflective look back at the year always seems to provide.

The year when everything pretty much stayed the same, in all it's wonder and loveliness. Work was good, as usual. Computers, children and teaching suit me very well indeed. And the end of the year even saw me taking on a new, unexpected role - that of unofficial school librarian. Much more on that in the new year. Much more. Libraries, shelving, design, blagging huge amounts of graphic novels for the school library - this is going to be a great 2011 at work. As long as all of those lovely computers keep working.

Louise has had a good year, despite receiving very few mentions on the blog. Something she's both pleased about and annoyed about. As always when she complains that the blog sometimes reads like a single dad's memoirs I do remind her that she has always made it quite clear that she doesn't want her life talked about here.

And increasingly, as Molly gets older, I'm well aware that this blog is a quick google search away for any of her friends or school colleagues. Which means I may have to stop talking about her quite so much and in quite so soppy a tone. Which is a shame - and yet another horrible indicator of the fact she's growing up.

The secondary school experience has certainly been a wild ride. Not that the choice of secondary schools - that was so easy it was almost untrue. It was a big plus in moving up to Yorkshire in the first place - we still talk about the feeling of relief when we first talked to Molly's Pocklington primary school about secondary school choices and were told that she had automatic entry to not one, but because of the Catholic thing, two good secondary schools. That was quite amazing to us - and certainly not something we would have fall so easily into place back in Birmingham.

But once the decision was made - by Molly (although it was the secondary school we both hoped she'd pick) - then the problems started. Homework was the main problem. For September and October it was, frankly, utter hell. It took so long for us to fit into any sort of routine and only getting her a desk in her room rather than having to do her homework on the kitchen table seemed to sort it out. Or maybe it was just that she got used to it and I calmed down about it. But my top advice for secondary school - get a desk for their room in August.

It's a strange time, getting used to Molly growing up. But, just like every time she's changed, it's a wonderful experience, made all the more so by the fact she's a truly wonderful child. She's turning into a truly wonderful young person and Louise and I are continually amazed at what we managed to bring into the world.

On the comics front it's been a year of reviewing and more reviewing. For those few of you reading this that don't know, I'm a writer on the Forbidden Planet International blog. It's something that came about almost accidentally, as a result of many years working at Birmingham's Nostalgia & Comics store - read about me and N&C here and the taking Propaganda Reviews from the shopfloor to the FPI blog here and here.

The year started and ended with me desperately struggling to clear the review pile so I could actually do what I always planned to do - review the books as I got them rather than looking at the shelf next to my desk and deciding which of the oh too long overdue for review books I should look at next. And I'm still not there. But I still plan to be. Maybe if I'm writing similar moany words at the start of 2012 I'll just have to admit it's a futile aim and give up, settle down to my lot and just get over it?

The major problem is really one of success. Personally I think the majority of what I write is somewhere between not that good and oh my god I never want to see that again. But people seem to like what I write, my name's known in the (admittedly small) circle of comics in the UK and more and more I find I'm receiving comics and books in the post for review. Sometimes, I have to admit, too many. And because of my nature and my perfectionism, I feel I have to read and review everything I receive.

This means 2011 will progress much like 2010. Lots of comic reading, lots of comic writing. Luckily I enjoy it. I may not like most of what I write, but sometimes I'll finish something, some little piece of writing, and think it's a job well done. And that feeling is what makes it worthwhile.

The downside to writing more and more about comics is that something has to suffer. And that something is this here blog. Fictions has become a shadow of it's former self. I promise I shall try to do better this year.

Right, enough for 2010. A quick month by month and then onwards, onwards into the New Year..........

January - I started as I pretty much went on - apologising for not blogging as much as I should. A little on Molly's vomit and then straight into talking about the seemingly never-ending review list. Plus ca change eh?

February - almost nothing. Quitting mentioned. Didn't really work.

March - Molly chooses her secondary school - Louise and I profoundly relieved.

April - The Brutons went to Butlins. And incredibly, spectacularly, against all expectations - I absolutely loved it. In other news - pigs did fly, hell had a cold spell.

May - Molly's dreams came true - and she got "the boys". A beautiful pair of rats - Woody and Buzz.

June - There was a world cup. It was shite. And my dear little computer decided to sort-of give up the ghost.

July - Molly left primary school. Tears? Oh yes.

August - Bruton's holiday in Anglesey and Dublin. Molly finally gets to go abroad (or at least that's the way she was talking about it. fantastic holiday.

September - this was it - the end of childhood, Molly off to secondary school. Oh hell, the homework hell kicks in. As does the teenage-isms.

October - Computer stuff. And we discovered that the "boys" Buzz & Woody, Molly's lovely pet rats were actually the "girls". Pets At Home. Bless 'em. Plus British International Comics Show - great show, but more additions to the review pile.

November - Molly gets a desk for her room and finally, thank god, the homework hell seems to calm down just a little. Thought Bubble comic show was a great time but by god it adds to the review list.

December - That would be Christmas then.

Want List - January 2011

All the things I've thought - ooooh, that looks interesting in the coming months.

February 2011

March 2011:

April 2011:

August 2011:

2011:

2013

sometime in the future...... but when???