Review all the things
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Nemo: Heart of Ice (the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen)
In the words of a character from another Alan Moore story, I keep coming back. I came back after the criminally boring and self-indulgent Black Dossier, I came back after dragging myself through the tedium of three volumes of Century, and I’ll no doubt come back for whatever follows Nemo: Heart of Ice. I keep coming back to the League. My name is Stu West and I’m an Alan Moore fanboy.
Heart of Ice is the best addition to Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen sequence since volume two in 2003 (!), thanks to an intriguing concept (Captain Nemo’s daughter encounters Lovecraftian horrors on an expedition to the Antarctic) and a plot that doesn’t purely consist of navigating from one fictional reference to another. Still, it left me vaguely dissatisfied, partly because Janni’s story seems to end in a denouement that’s never actually set up in the pages of the comic I was reading.
The League format, as it has developed, seems to make a virtue out of failing basic levels of storytelling craft, like introducing characters and establishing their relationships to one another. No need for that! Everything’s a reference to some other work! It’ll all make sense once Jess Nevins explains it! Heart of Ice does better on this score than the other recent instalments, which basically devolved into a catalogue of Moore’s more unlovely stylistic tics, but I still feel there’s some way to go before I can read a League comic and enjoy it as a satisfying work in its own right. In the meantime, I’ll keep coming back.
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a guide to uk cities for foreign people
- manchester: gays. you will probably get mugged.
- liverpool: like manchester, but less gay. you will definitely get mugged.
- newcastle: probably quite good for canadians as exists in permafrost and has never left the 90s.
- leeds: it's a lot cheaper than london
- bradford: leeds but awful
- nottingham: gun death capital of the uk!
- derby: intense rivalry with nottingham, literally no one else in the country or world gives any fucks about this.
- hull: violently resist anyone who attempts to take you here
- leicester: i'm not sure this is a real place
- york: this is an illustration from the top of a christmas biscuit assortment
- birmingham: NO.
- brighton & hove: more gays. is only a pretend city. mild to moderate chance of mugging. contains some deeply annoying hippies. basically if san francisco was british.
- portsmouth: there is literally nothing here.
- southampton: exactly the same as portsmouth but smells of off milk
- bristol: you have a 1 in 10 chance of ending up in a bbc recording. everyone sounds like a farmer or bob marley.
- cardiff: you have a 1 in 5 chance of ending up in a bbc recording, and a 1 in 3 chance of being glassed.
- plymouth: post apocalyptic wind tunnel full of drunk sailors pissing on depressed hookers. do not enter.
- penzance: everyone here is from london now.
- london: no one from london is actually from london and even breathing is expensive.
- cambridge: windy and full of equal amounts of homeless drug addicts and public schoolboys. the junkies are nicer.
- oxford: same number of cunts as cambridge but easier to escape from due to all-night bus to london
- edinburgh: a goth turned into a city. basically london but slightly more scottish.
- glasgow: it is impossible to tell whether people are angry or happy.
- aberdeen: las vegas at the point when vegas starts crying uncontrollably
- belfast: do not order "an irish car bomb" OR "a black and tan" here.
- wolverhampton: really, really don't.
- norwich: count people's fingers. mutations walk here.
- coventry: like plymouth, bombed flat in ww2. like plymouth, failed to take the hint. like plymouth: do not alight here.
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Seen any footage of Burt Reynolds shot in the past 20 or so years? He’s had so much work done that his eyes and mouth can only move enough to convey about three different intensities of a single facial expression. And in Marvel’s new Iron Man series, artist Greg Land draws Tony Stark with the 40 year old’s equivalent of that face. A couple of pages after this panel a supporting character describes Tony as good looking and my first reaction was “Wait, what? No he fucking isn’t.”
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Day old peppermint tea
So I was sitting on the bus to work this morning when I suddenly realised I had left my travel mug of peppermint tea on the kitchen worktop. How did this suck, let me count the ways:
1. I had no tea.
2. Since the kitchen at work is on the ground floor and you can’t carry an open container of hot fluid up the stairs because health and safety, this lack of a travel mug meant that my tea status for THE ENTIRE DAY would hinge on access to the kettle in the generally oversubscribed upstairs conference room.
3. Leaving anything on the worktop is basically giving Devon the kitten an open invitation to barrel into it and scatter it everywhere so chances were good I’d be coming home to a kitchen featuring a massive minty puddle.
Well, somehow I managed to survive a tea-deficient workday and came home to find the travel mug still sitting where I’d left it, unmolested by cat. This got me wondering: what does two-bag peppermint tea taste like when it’s been brewing for an entire day? Would it be the mintiest experience of all time? Would it even be able to top that expensive mint tea I bought at Harrod’s years ago that made me weirdly aware of my own teeth whenever I drank it?
I removed the teabags. I poured the tea into a microwaveable mug. I heated it for a minute. Stirred it. Heated it for forty-five seconds more. Held it between my hands. Inhaled the minty aroma. Brought it over to my computer desk. Sat it next to the keyboard. Devon barrelled into it and spilled it everywhere.
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Thirty-odd years too early, yes.
(From Daredevil vol 1 #11, 1965.)
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Okay no THIS is what Jack Kirby’s career looks like. Not shown: all those pages of concept art he did for things like Thundarr the Barbarian and the Centurions cartoon after he left comics because honestly even my obsessiveness has its limits.
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John Carter
The most ill-judged movie trailer I’ve ever seen was for Roman Polanski’s 2005 adaptation of Oliver Twist. Everyone at least thinks they know the story of Oliver Twist inside out, so it was up to the trailer to let them know that the film was going to surprise them, that there were things here they hadn’t already seen 15 times. What did it show instead? Oliver saying “Please sir, can I have some more?” I didn’t see that film and neither did anyone else I know.
Disney’s big-budget adaptation of John Carter had a similar problem: it seemed like we’d seen the whole thing before. It’s probably not fair to describe John Carter as derivative, since the bits of the movie that felt like warmed-over retreads of Star Wars, Flash Gordon, etc. probably originated in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars stories a hundred years ago. But in the intervening century, those bones have been picked clean. It was up to director Andrew Stanton and his screenwriters to somehow make it all seem new again. Unfortunately, the few bits of John Carter that didn’t come off like pale imitations of better-known movies just felt either boring or stupid. John Carter isn’t remotely the worst film I’ve ever seen, but it is a lengthy, dull mediocrity.
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I have devised the ultimate cure for Sunday afternoon boredom: making a graph of Jack Kirby’s comics art productivity over time. LOOK AT THE EARLY SIXTIES. LOOK AT THEM. 1,246 published comics art pages in a single year at his peak. If you wondered why his post-1960 work had that hallucinatory quality to it, here’s why.
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Philadelphia’s Big Macs
There are things I know a lot about and one of those things is: the taste of a Big Mac. When I’m working, I eat a Big Mac meal an average of three times a week. This despite two of the most disgusting things I can think of being Mac-related.
One: the smell of rancid Big Mac sauce. This was pervasive in the bin rooms of the McDonald’s I worked at as a teenager. It smelled like someone had taken a vat of sweetened clotted cream, topped it up with vinegar and left it for a month in an overheated room full of wild rats.
Two: the Big Mac meal I had a week ago in Philadelphia. The bun was untoasted and sludgy. The dill pickle (I never eat them anyway) was an unsettling yellow colour. There was the tiniest wisp of lettuce. The burgers were cold in the middle.
If I had noticed the bits of grit floating around in my paper drink cup I’d probably never have eaten any of it to start with. As it was I had a stomach ache and regrets for the rest of the day.
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A thing the internet lacks
I have some fairly obscure interests. Not totally obscure, like “I’m interested in relics of the Ming Dynasty, specifically jewel-handled daggers first used in fights during the first quarter of the 1400s” but things that are sub-interests of sub-interests. Things which maybe a few hundred or a couple of thousand other people on the internet also like.
For example: I like comics. And I’m interested in hearing people talk about the creative process. And I love the work of cartoonist David Mazzucchelli. So if I find an mp3 of an interview where David Mazzuchelli talks about the creative process, what is the simple process I can follow to share the link with the perhaps several hundred other people interested in hearing it?
There should be a site for sharing resources on things like this. There should be a permanent page for each subject. It should cover any subject you care to name. It should be spam-filtered, up- and down-votable, searchable, subscribable via RSS. I should be able to open Google Reader in the morning and see, under the category “Comics - creative process” or “David Mazzuchelli” that someone has shared a link I’d be interested in.
Now you can say that — for example — Mazzuchelli could start a personal website where he can share these sorts of things. But that’s beside the point! Firstly, what if we were instead talking about, say, Harvey Kurtzman, who has been dead for decades. Secondly, even if the person is alive and has a good website, like Greg Rucka (to pick an example), I can’t necessarily look at it and see what comics he has in stores this week or which podcast featuring him has just become available. For one thing, he may not actually know, but at any rate this is the sort of trivia fans are best able to keep track of, and someone like that is too busy to spend much time being a fan of himself.
It is of course possible for people to start fan sites and forums on any given topic, but you know what? Not good enough. When the internet lacks an encyclopaedia entry on some subject, do we demand that an aficionado solely write, host, incorporate corrections and addenda to and publicise the entry herself? No. That’s what Wikipedia is for. And the net needs this just as much as it needed Wikipedia. Every time I contemplate a web that lacks it I feel like a visitor from the pre-Wiki era who has to look up references using a shelf full of Microsoft Encarta CDs.
