(Guest) Staring Into The Abyss

Well, hello there!

I’ve not done more than glance at a copy of Previews in years. I don’t need to. The internet gives me all the news I need, and working Saturdays in a comicbook shop gives me more than enough exposure to excitable geekery.  But, as sometimes happens, I had little to do and a strange urge to have something to talk to the punters about, so the shop copy got dragged out for a flick-through.

Previews comes in two parts these days; the main, thick-as-a-brick magazine and the smaller, Sunday supplement/TV listings-sized Marvel Previews, which, if you resolutely despise all other comicbook publishers, magazine publishers,book publishers, toy manufacturers, purveyors of apparel and anybody else whose products appear in Previews but who are not Marvel Comics, you may buy separately for a bargain $1.25.

I’m assuming here that MP is put together by taking solicitation bumph from various editorial departments – the X-office, the Spider-Man office, etc – and wrangling it into the one magazine. But, you know what? It’s a product. It carries a price tag, it’s asking its audience to put down good coin for something they could easily source on the net. It should have standards.

That’s why there’s no excuse for nearly all of the Spider-Man solicits in this issue to feature the word ‘guest-staring’.

Unless that’s what happening in the books. Maybe Spidey’s just going to sit there and gaze intently at whoever’s passing through that month.

Ach, who cares. It’s on a par with ‘kidnaping’, a word that used to crop up on covers every couple of issues. We all have blind spots. We’re not all paid to check twice before we pull out, though.

Anyway: here’s something far worse.

It’s very easy to take the piss out of Rob Liefeld, but what else can he expect? He sets himself up for it so often, and so well. Here’s something coming soon from the mind of Rob: a revival of his old Youngblood series. Now, to be fair, Rob’s not being very hands-on with this one. It’s written by someone else, it’s drawn by someone else, but Rob’s provided the cover and his name’s all over the whole thing, much in the way that Tekno Comix used to splash the name of Leonard Nimoy all over something that had been written by an intern during his lunch break. So Rob should take responsibility. He’s a grown man, after all.

And after all, what we’ve seen so far of this new Youngblood – and again, to be fair, I’ve seen only what’s been offered up so far, i.e. a cover image and a few interior pages - pretty much follows the Liefeld template.

Here’s a character, name of Shaft. Maybe he’s a sex machine with all the chicks. I don’t know. 

Look! His world has no backgrounds in it. Just a load of speed lines. Maybe he’s six feet off the ground. Maybe he’s just about to smash his chin open. I don’t know. There’s no reference. I do know that he’s got a dislocated spine, and probably both arms are having an in-need-of-counselling relationship with the rest of him, and maybe that’s why he needs such big shoulder pads, otherwise he’d just collapse in a big pile of random limbs like a rag doll that’s been thrown out of a second-story window.

And here’s a page. 

It’s not a good page. It looks pretty much like whoever drew it took a lot of reference either from a bunch of magazine photographs or from other comicbooks. The faces on his characters are just that little bit not-cartoony, just that smidgen away from being attempts at photo-realism while, perversely, also being typical comicbook exaggerations.

And golly, those women! Look at the one in red in panel one. She looks both anorexic and annoyed. Luckily, she has no eyes. The eyes are the windows to the soul. As she has no eyes, we cannot see into her soul. If we could, we would probably want to look away again, very quickly. Maybe she’s annoyed about her tiny tiny waist and tiny tiny hips, or the short, short skirt she’s wearing. Maybe she’s thinking dark thoughts about the blonde.

What about the blonde? Well, in the first panel we can see that she’s remarkably well-built. And in the third panel we can see that her body is barely wider than her head. Given her breast and head sizes, if we extrapolate from the given information we can work out that she is approximately three feet tall. And as we can see from panel one and panel three that she is roughly the same height as the other characters, then we must conclude that this is a book about very short superheroes. Well done. Midget heroes have been an untold, criminally-ignored area of comics for far too long. Whoever drew this page deserves a pat on the back for bringing Heroes Of Restricted Growth, or HORGs, into the spotlight where they deserve to be.

Mind you, as there are no backgrounds, and as no character is shown to have knees, lower legs, or feet (See! The hand of Liefeld!), there is a strong possibility that this is simply fucking awful drawing.

Would you now read the words on this page, please?

Now, I’m quite willing to give the benefit of the doubt and allow that as this is a preview, there may be a final polish to come on the dialogue.

Christ, I hope so.

Look at the blonde’s dialogue in panel one. Note the dissonant phrase “Words and all”. Now go to panel two where this phrase is repeated, but this time as the phrase it’s supposed to be. 

“Warts and all”. 

You know, the old Cromwell thing. 

I read this page three or four times before I realised what was meant to be said in panel one. First I wondered if it was my fault, if perhaps ‘words and all’ was some neologism that, as a fully paid-up middle-aged git, I’d not yet come across. Then I wondered if the reference in panel two to a team member as ‘one big wart’ was meant to be taken literally. After all, this is comics. The chap with the bow and arrow could conceivably actually be one big wart. It would explain the disconnected arms.

But no. All it comes down to is that somebody was either too stupid or, more likely, too bloody lazy to either type the correct phrase in the first place, or to correct it in the second. Or, and this is scary, they thought ‘words and all’ was the correct phrase to begin with. The idea that somebody with that level of stupidity is allowed to write their own name in crayon on a wall, let alone something for public consumption, is quite simply bloody terrifying.

I’ll err towards lazy editing, though, given that the very next dialogue balloon – attributed to the blonde – contains the words ‘I can’t imaging that’s possible’. Imaging. From the context, the word can only be meant to be ‘imagine’. But it's not. It's 'imaging'. 

Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I won’t err towards lazy editing. I won’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt. Instead, given these examples and given the additional clumsy attempt at flirtatiousness in panel three that comes across as just plain flat-out rapey, I’ll point my finger and say this is the laziest excuse for a comicbook I have come across in many a year. It shows contempt for its characters, it shows contempt for the medium and worst of all it shows nothing but unveiled contempt for its readers. Its creators have thrown the least possible effort at the page, secure in the knowledge that several thousand idiots will pay for this lack of effort notwithstanding its sheer, undiluted hackery.

And if you’re one of those thousands, you bloody well deserve it. 

She Is...

I’ve written before about Shelby Lynne. I shall again in the future, no doubt. Last Saturday, we went to see her. We’ve done this before, DP and I; I wrote about it last March (Christ! Last March! Time’s winged chariot and all that…).

This time, as Ms Lynne is now catering to a more selective audience, she performed at the Union Chapel in Islington. I’d been there once before for an entertainment, DP had been there for a conference. It’s a beautiful building, set slightly back from the self-regarding fashionality of Upper Street’s bars and those who frequent them, the few scant yards that may as well be a mile or more into the country, so much does the area change.

The thing is, the Union Chapel is just that; a chapel. And as a house of religion it has no facility to offer a reserved seat within its pews. So; we arrived just before the opening time of seven o’clock, saw there were twenty or so people queueing outside, and decided to get a quick drink in before entering.

One swift gin and tonic later, the queue stretched several hundred yards and our plan to go for dinner before the gig lay shattered like a piece of Lalique in the hands of an angry toddler.

So we went in. Took in the mouldings, and the roof carvings, and the sheer size of the pulpit, and wondered if anybody who’d played there had ever sung from it. We got ourselves some drinks and we bagged ourselves a couple of seats nine or ten rows back.

And, eventually, a very small slim woman dressed in grey came out from a door behind the stage, carrying a guitar. She connected it to the chapel’s PA system, and she started to sing. She sang most – possibly all – of the songs from her new album, Revelation Road. She sang them all with no other accompaniment except that one guitar. She told us stories about the songs, about who and what they were about. She sounded raw and honest and her voice was astonishing, direct, freed from fancy embellishments; freed by performing solo even from the need to consider other musicians who would constrain her. An Anti-Whitney. 

About twentyfive minutes into this mesmerising evening, it struck me: every one of her songs was downbeat; not only following a leisurely tempo, but also a litany of misery, heartbreak, disappointment, loneliness… Actually, the thought that struck me was ‘For chrissake cheer up, love’.

This thought continued with the performance. When the Revelation Road songs were done, Ms Lynne surprised us – surprised me, anyway - by playing Jesus On A Greyhound from the maligned and neglected ‘New Dusty Springfield’ album Love, Shelby, which elicited a tiny, under-the-breath cry of surprise from me. She followed it with 10 Rocks from Identity Crisis, the nearest we’d get to an upbeat song despite its lyrics of damnation and pain. Then a stripped-down Your Lies, the first song of hers I’d ever heard, now shorn of the drums that had seemed so essential to it yet still absolutely stunning. Two more from Love, Shelby, which saw murmurs of appreciation rippling through an audience who beforehand had sat completely silent during the songs.  Most of the I Am Shelby Lynne album, with a little story about Leavin’ thrown in.  Audience participation during Where I’m From. Killing Kind and Tarpoleon Napoleon and Johnny Met June. Songs that had been drenched in strings and backing vocals and all manner of extraneous matter – but which sounded perfectly good despite that – were now reduced to bare chords strummed out of one guitar and the naked perfection of that voice.

She took off the guitar, and left. We clapped. She came back. She said thank you. Then she said ‘I know you wanna leave’; somebody shouted ‘no we don’t’, so she said “I can see it in your eyes’ and we realised she was starting to sing Pretend from Just A Little Lovin'. Just her. Just the voice, just a tiny blonde woman, standing dwarfed by the chapel pulpit, hugging herself as she sang, swinging one strangely long arm out to one side every now and then, and as I watched and saw the almost beatific look on her face, it hit me: no matter how downbeat the songs are, she has to sing them. They’re her. They’re her life, and singing them is what she simply has to do because singing is what brings her happiness. Right then, I couldn’t think of anybody I’d ever seen so happy.

Back on with the guitar, for the traditional show-closer Iced Tea, and she was gone.

We went back onto Upper Street, among the drunks and the staggerers, the badly-dressed and the desperate. We found a little Turkish place. She had cuttlefish, I had lamb.

Oh Yeah

We got burgled.

This house is never empty. Usually both myself and Dave The Lodger are here. If I’m out, he’s at home. Vice versa. That actually pisses me off at times as it seems that I’m the only one who ever leaves the house and a lot of the time I leave the house purely to get away from the constant presence of Dave The Lodger, and that’s not the kind of feeling a man should have about his own home, but there it is.

Whatever: this one Sunday I had a great-niece’s birthday party to go to because I am a Great Uncle, and Dave was off out to see his mate who lives somewhere a bit north of here. So the house was empty. Dave left around half one. I left around half three. Doors and windows locked. Cat asleep on the upstairs landing.

I came home around eight. Noticed a light on upstairs, thought ‘Dave’s home, that’s his bedroom light’. Had a slight doubt in that the light was obviously coming from his open bedroom door, which is usually a closed bedroom door. But the general feel was that Dave was home.

I put my key in the lock and felt it slide round in the double-lock way rather than the slight resistance of the tumblers, and wondered how he’d managed to lock himself in. Walked through the door, thought it felt colder than it should; called up to say hello, no response: bingo. Through the living room, see the back door wide open. Oh fuck.

My first thought was “where’s the cat?”  Second thought: “where’s my laptop?” Dashed upstairs to where the laptop is kept when not being used, saw it still sitting in its place. On the way, took in fact that Dave’s bedroom door was open, the light was on, and things were strewn all over the place.

In my room, a couple of draws had been opened, a box that had been on top of the wardrobe was now on the carpet as were a couple of mugs that had been on a low shelf and full of loose change. That was all, as far as I could see, the lightbulb having chosen just that moment to go ping.

Called Dave, got him to cut short his afternoon out so he could see what was missing from his room. Called the police. Dave got there first, had a look around, couldn’t see anything missing. I sized up the damage to the back door: the lock had been crowbarred and the frame around it had been smashed, the strike plate lay bent on the floor. Just then the police arrived two officers, neither of them over thirteen years old -  did the police thing, gave a reference number and left.

So what had been taken? Sod all. My father’s pocket watch, which grieves me more than I can say. And a small black plastic briefcase with a Batman symbol on the side, which contained some of Dave’s old music demos from when he played bass in a few bands. Demos which were on old-fashioned tape cassettes.

Not touched: four laptops, some external hard drives, a bunch of cash, some jewellery.

Which makes me question the sanity of burglars round our way. They’re obviously kids or junkies looking for something to turn into cash on the quick, but a bunch of cassettes? That’s going to make it worthwhile, isn’t it?

I got the door fixed and a new lock fitted, at a cost low enough to make it not worth claiming on the insurance without it bumping up the premium so far that the whole thing costs more in the long run that the value of the items taken.

And, of course, the revenge plan has been put in place. My former brother-in-law, father of my sister’s children, was a bit of a bad lad in his younger days. Reformed now, but he’s done plenty of time and he’s still both pretty handy and in touch with some of his old spars. Word went round among his community within two hours of the break-in that anybody with even a sniff of a suspicion about them would regret their actions.

Not that they didn’t do the same thing to a house not a hundred yards away, a few days later.

And finally, this very morning, I got out of the bath and decided to trim my finger and toenails. Reached for the spot where there usually sits a small black leather-cased manicure set that I’ve had for about ten years. Gone.

So; a gang of idiots with a taste for bad 1980s poodle rock and immaculate fingernails. That’s our perps.

As Shaw Taylor used to say about oranges: keep ‘em peeled.

We Have No Problem

 So anyway, Whitney Houston died.

Whereas any man’s death diminishes me, is anybody really surprised? There hadn’t been a good news story about her since she married the wife-beater, and in the last fifteen years or so, which she’d obviously spent on the sauce or on the powder, the most memorable thing about her was that rumour about Bobby Brown having to manually excavate compacted faeces from her bowel.

It’s a shame, because at her height she was inarguably beautiful and in possession of a stunning voice. And it’s a shame because her stunning voice was wasted, not only on manufactured pop music – she would have been astonishing on an unadorned gospel album, say, and if you don’t believe me Google ‘Whitney Houston Isolated Vocal’ – but also on the ridiculous melismae, the inability to actually sing a note without running up and down the scale and stretching it out way beyond its artistic boundary, that afflicted her as badly as it does Mariah Carey (somebody else with the potential to be an astonishing singer if only she’d just, y’know, sing).

Still, look on the bright side. Houston’s biggest hit was “I Will Always Love You”, which was written by Dolly Parton, who recorded the original, simple, delicate and heartfelt version, and who will doubtless soon be in line for a nice little windfall in royalties.

And, keeping it closer to home, that song was on the soundtrack to the film ‘The Bodyguard’, which will no doubt sell  by the boatload in the next couple of months. Also on that soundtrack: a version by Curtis Stigers of ‘What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love And Understanding?’, written by England’s Glory, Nick Lowe. Nick says that when the film was first released and the soundtrack started selling in giant heaps, somebody reversed a truckful of cash up to his house and told him there’d be another one tomorrow, and that’s what let him record the kind of albums he does, albums like ‘The Convincer’ and 'At My Age’ and ‘The Old Magic’, albums full of intimate, personal songs about ageing and failure and proper long-lasting love, songs full of genuine emotion in a world of Ndubz and Jedward.

There should be another truckload backing up to Nick’s house soon.

Cheers, Whitney. 

Sumptuous Tales Of Flagellation

The other night I had a dream. In the dream I was the chauffeur of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, driving her around in a dirty great black Bentley.

I wasn’t very good at it. For a start I kept looking over my shoulder and asking Her Majesty if she was doing alright in the back there, but she took that rather well, smiled, made a bit of conversation about the corgis. Then I lost my way around Hyde Park Corner and went down Oxford Street the wrong way, but that was okay because, well, I had The Queen in the back and a flag on my bonnet so really, I could go where I wanted, couldn’t I?

Then we ended up somewhere around Camden, can’t tell you where, got no idea, Gospel Oak probably. I was on a double decker that get lost around that way once, you ever seen a night bus full of pissheads come up against a low railway bridge and have to do a three-point turn in a sidestreet?

The Queen was alright about it, she got off her seat and came and sat right behind me, leant over the passenger seat and pointed the way she thought we should be heading, so that’s where we went, but we ended up in a cul-de-sac and it wasn’t wide enough to do a three-point, you’ve seen how big those Bentleys are that she rides around in and this one had all the armour-plating on it as well so it was a bugger to manoeuvre. I said to her, ‘Ma’am, I can’t turn her round in this space, I’m going to have to reverse her up and out. That alright with you?’ She said it was, but she was going to phone the Palace and get them to put Phil’s warm milk on.

So that’s how it ended up, me twisted round in the driver’s seat, reversing this big old Bentley, trying not to scrape the paintwork; The Queen looking out of the back window telling me when I was going off the straight.

When we got back to the Palace, she said “Well that was a laugh” and went in.

She had her own key and everything. 

...Then I'm a banana

Two stories caught my eye this week, both concerned with sentencing somebody found guilty of a crime. First, this: in which a psychology lecturer was sent to prison for three months for contempt of court. She’d been on jury duty, had looked up some details regarding the defendant on Google, and shared those with other jurors. Somebody told the judge, and she ended up in jail.

Fair enough: contempt is a serious business. The British legal system is flawed but it’s still the best available, and we have to cleave to the idea that the accused is tried solely on the evidence presented in court. Still, the severity of the sentence in this case leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth. There’s a feeling of examples being made, of a judge seeking a form of revenge for the disturbance caused to his court. It’s good law, but bad justice.

The second story came to my notice a little late, as it concerns a sentence passed a good few weeks ago on a defendant who was found guilty late last summer. The details – and they’re not pretty – are here (apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, but in its apoplexy it gave the most comprehensive account of the sentencing and the reasoning behind it).

This second story caused concern, not because of any defensive feelings towards children outside of the default concern that any human being with any morals or compassion should feel – I have no children and have no desire to do so, and outside of default compassion I frankly consider the majority of children to be unnecessary nuisances – but because it affected directly my own sensibilities.

I have no time for those who commit crimes of this nature, and am certainly not about to defend paedophilia. Nevertheless, the intense anger I felt on reading this story came as a surprise to me. I’ve always considered myself to be strongly liberal in matters of sentencing, always seeing a need to get to the root of a criminal’s psychopathy and work on the cause of their actions rather than just banging them up inside for life. I’ve studied the ‘three strikes’ law – though by no means deeply – and seen how it led to greatly increased crime everywhere it was enacted. I’m a Guardian reader who doesn’t read the Guardian.

The difference in this case is that it directly affected me. I know the man involved. Not in any personal capacity and certainly not in any way involved with his activities. He was a business acquaintance; I’d go so far as to say that although I knew his name, he probably wouldn’t have known mine as I was not the man he directly did business with. At best I’d be a nodding acquaintance within our common circle and an unknown outside of it.

He was known as a slightly strange man, even before the nature of his crime became public: he’d offer a can of beer, with the proviso that he opened it, from the bottom, and that you returned the empty can, undamaged, uncrushed. There was running joke in our business sector that if you needed to point him out to someone who’d not previously met him, you could just tell them to look for the guy in the light blue shirt, as that was what he always, invariably, wore. In fact, if you look at the photo in the report linked above, you’ll see that’s what he wore to court.

We know now that these quirks were the socially acceptable aspect of his terribly deep psychological problems, and again, while I don’t believe anybody could use those problems as a basis to condone or legitimise his actions, they do give us a form of insight into why he committed his crimes. I’d go so far as to say that given his psychology, he found it difficult to see a crime being committed. Bear in mind that although he was found with the country’s largest yet-known collection of pornographic images of children, and although he also made ‘pseudo-images’ of children, there is no evidence that he acted on or even felt any paedophilic impulses. His crime came about not as a result of his sexuality but as an extension of his compulsion to collect.

This is where the liberal side of me would say that we should seek to more fully understand the criminal act, and that prison would be a detrimental influence on any attempt at rehabilitation. The liberal side of me certainly would suggest some form of incarceration, but in an institution where he’d get the help he obviously needs rather than in a prison where he’d be ostracised at best.

But instead, I feel an unpleasant anger with him, a feeling that his sentence was trifling and insulting, that he should have been banged up and made to take his chances as a nonce, a kiddie-fiddler in a harsh environment where his kind would be the lowest of the low, subject to violence and abuse from other prisoners, serving a sentence brought upon him by a justice outside any known to you or I.

Why is this? As much as I dislike considering this, it’s become plain that I felt as angry with him as I did (and do) because he caused personal distress and inconvenience to me. Being informed that a person of your acquaintance is a criminal, especially of this sort, is not a pleasant thing to experience. There’s also the outrage felt that, given a slightly different slant on the reporting of the case, the industry I’m still a part of, which serves an artform that I still love, would have been tarred with the same brush.

There’s also a very strong feeling of betrayal, which I know I’m not alone in feeling; without trivialising the matter, it’s very much a third-act reveal where a trusted lieutenant steps out of the shadows and shows he’s been the leader of the bad guys all along. All of us who knew him, and happily chatted with him about whatever we’d chat about, are shocked at what’s been reported. We wonder if there was a darker aspect to the role he played for us, if his years of organising trade shows had always been a smokescreen or at best a way of facilitating his baser needs. We all stand at these shows and happily check out the female (or male) attendees; what if he was doing the same with the attendee’s children, or worse, the children who occasionally attended unaccompanied?

And lastly, the feeling that brings about the strongest sense of self-revulsion, is this: the initial reporting of this case was a major factor in the decision of the company with which I would attend these trade shows to stop doing so. As a direct result, I lost a small but nonetheless welcome portion of my income. So I am feeling this burning righteousness because of a crime, or because it’s cost me money? I wish I could give you a definite, honest answer. 

Unfortunately, I can’t. 

It's Been A Hard Day's Night

How long has it been?

Too long.

Christmas came, and with it - or just before it - came the worst flu I've known in my life. I just about got through the main meal, picking at the things I'd spent the last three days preparing, then made my excuses and cadged a lift home. Within the hour I was in bed, where I stayed for the next three days.

Since then, I've not felt any need to post here, or any need to do anything else except sit about feeling tired, so it's been in hibernation, on hiatus, until now.

Normal service may be resumed.

Don't hold your breath.