One Of The Perils Of Getting Older Is That Many Things End Up Reminding You Of Other Things, Which Leads To This Sort Of Post

Over the weekend, I was on a train, and saw two young-ish chaps talking quite excitedly. They were twenty years old at most, and they were chatting as they passed what looked like a glossy magazine back and forth.

If you're thinking it might have been a ... let's say 'gentlemen's leisure interest periodical', then I'm sorry to disappoint you; it was, as I saw when they sat quite close to me, a glossy rulebook or other supplement for a role-playing (or tabletop miniature combat) game, and their excitement and interest seemed to stem from the implications of this on their chosen game - I could hear them saying things like 'magic attacks' and 'stats', which rather reminded me of my teen years.

It probably won't surprise longtime blog readers to know that I was what is now known as 'a nerd', though back in those days you were more likely to be labelled a 'square' or 'boffin'. But we all know what that means - probably wearing glasses, not physically confident, not very good at talking to girls, and so likely to have solitary (or at least indoor) hobbies such as playing Dungeons & Dragons or computer games, or reading books or comics. And of course there were quite a few of us at school, as well as all the others who weren't like that.

Strangely enough - on a mathematical basis if nothing else - my school's equivalent of the cheerleaders and jocks so often shown in American films seems to have been known as 'the popular kids'. I say 'strangely' because the school year I was in had so many 'factions' in it (why, even the secretary in Ferris Bueller's Day Off refers to "the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads" at Bueller's school), that if you took out my group of friends, the other groups such as the gothic kids and the very studious kids, and the various loners, there were probably only about fifteen of the so-called 'popular kids', and none of us really gave a monkey's about them and what they did, so I have no idea where the presumed 'popularity' came from.

It's not like we ever took a vote on it or anything... though maybe it was an early example of the kind of 'implied consensus' or 'silent majority' that you often come across in later life. Returning to a film that was out at the time (and whilst it may seem lazy to refer to 1980s films, they were the cultural backdrop of the time, and I think we tend to try to find something that mirrors our own experiences in films and other stories), there's a nice exchange in The Breakfast Club which may touch on the truth of this:

THE PRINCESS

Your friends [...] look up to us.

THE GEEK (LAUGHING)

You're so conceited, Claire. You're so conceited.

... I never actually heard the 'school dynamic' verbalised like this, but I hope I would have responded in this fashion, as my circle of friend didn't look up to the 'popular kids'. We were too busy worrying that playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon on our ZX Spectrum computers would, as legend had it, kill the keyboard before its natural expiry date.

Anyway, when I saw the two chaps on the train at the weekend, I looked at them with a mixture of recognition and almost-pity; I say 'almost' because I was genuinely happy with my life in my teen years, even if the things that made me happy were incomprehensible - or risible - to other people: I was more concerned about whether I'd get my D&D character to Level 5 than whether I'd get to home base (no, not the shop) with a girl (and one of those events certainly seemed much more probable than the other during that era of my life). So I can't honestly look back on that period, and the way I led my life, in such a way that I pity those who seem to be treading the same path.

Yes, I could have shouted to the chaps on the train, "for the love of God, shave off the wispy beards and get some contact lenses and spend more money on cool clothes than 20-sided dice, and maybe you'll get to touch a boob this year", but they seemed pleasant and happy enough, and besides it's possible that they were both total hits with the ladies (or gents, I don't want to presuppose too much), and that I'm just projecting.

But after I'd thought about this sort of thing a bit, and both wallowed in nostalgia and cringed at the recollection of the clothes and large aviator-style glasses I wore, it occurred to me that there are often articles in papers and magazines nowadays with headings such as 'The Geeks Inherit The Earth', talking about how the rise of the internet, and the information age, has meant that many of my pasty cohorts have become very successful in their chosen fields, with the financial rewards attached to that. The heads of IT firms, founders of websites, creators of best-selling computer games and apps, and even the directors of films, are shown to have had classically nerdy formative years - and whilst some of them have made their way in the world by appealing to nerds alone, many of them work in fields with wider audiences.

It's intellectually amusing to see large crowds of people getting excited about seeing films like Watchmen and Avengers Assemble, when I was reading the source comics twenty-odd years ago, and whilst there's a slight frisson of 'Hah! I was right all along!', I can't get too triumphant about it - possibly because having that kind of teenagehood doesn't necessarily prepare you for being the victor, and maybe because of that sense of loving something niche that gets a little soured when it breaks through to a larger market (which of us hasn't either been or known someone who talks up a band, but the minute they get big, starts talking about them 'selling out'?). More than anything else, though, I think it's because the stuff I was into back then, like the stuff I'm into now, was a genuine interest, and wasn't on my list of 'Likes' to impress other people: it was stuff I was actually into.

Which, it strikes me, is probably why there are fewer bold claims of triumph from the swots and nerds and squares; whilst the people who were concerned about looking cool as teenagers are keen to claim they were right all along, when offered the chance to write a book, Bill Gates writes about future technology and the like. Whilst the 'popular kids' at school spent a lot of time (and, I'll wager, their parents' money) on their outfits for the '5th year social' (aka what would now probably be called a Prom), I was reading and re-reading Batman Year One, and not bothering about what anyone might think about this.

I think that's why the articles you see about the Rise Of The Nerds will tend to be written in the third person plural - that is, not written by the geeks in question; because they're still out there, doing their thing - coding, writing, rolling dice or whatever. But the chances are it's indoors.

They say the best revenge is living well, but I suspect many of those who were made to feel somehow 'geeky' will be living well albeit unseen by those who may have ostracised them in the past. Except for those of us who decide to post about it on the internet, of course.

I Am Not Dead

... and nor is this blog, I assure you.

So, apologies to regular readers for the hiatus in updates - consider this, if you will, my summer holiday - and there will be a return to regular blogging soon.

After all, if I didn't post my idiotic and fleeting notions here, they'd just be lost to time and memory, and that simply would not do.

Thanks to those of you who've been so sweet as to send me a message asking if I'm okay - I assure you I most definitely am - it's just proving difficult to find time to blog in recent weeks. But that may change soon, and who knows what nonsensical thought-posting, its hour come round at last, slouches out of bedlam to be typed?

I Have No Mic, And I Must Speak

Back in the 1980s, my family went to stay with some relatives for New Year's Eve. I don't remember much of the festivities itself, but one thing I do remember - for reasons that will become clear - is that nearby, about five minutes walk away in fact, was a comic shop.

Now, I'd been reading comics for a while, but my 'local' shop in Sheffield wasn't very local at all - it was a couple of bus rides away, and of course that kind of travel ate into the potential spending money (this was after Sheffield's insanely cheap bus fares had been abolished - boo! A flat fare of 2p was a fab thing to a cash-starved kid), so I tended to walk there with my friend Simon. Which took about an hour there and an hour back, so you can see why a shorter walk was so appealing.

This comic shop - I don't think it's there any more - had a pretty decent selection of recent comics, and also, as was often the case back then, also sold a lot of paperbacks (mainly SF, fantasy and horror), which you could then sell back to them for half the price in credit. So, being a bookish child and having a bit of Christmas money, I bought myself a book and a comic: All The Sounds Of Fear by Harlan Ellison, and the Warrior Summer Special (both pictured). Small pressies to myself, as it were.

I think I can, without fear of exaggeration, state that it was the greatest couple of pounds I ever spent, and that the combined effect of the two did strange things to my brain for which I will always be grateful.

The Warrior comic featured some stories by Alan Moore, whose work I was already starting to look out for (from the cover-date of that comic, I guess I was something like 12, and was just learning that certain names recurred on the credits of things I liked), and other writers as well, all of which made it a pretty heady brew, and then when I started to read the Ellison, my noggin was permanently bent out of shape.

If you've never read anything by Harlan Ellison... well, obviously, I think you should, but there's a fair chance you don't recognise the name, especially in the UK; this is pretty odd really, given that he is one of the most-recognised writers ever, but he tends to fly under the radar for a lot of people. Still, have you seen that original Star Trek episode with Joan Collins in? He wrote the screenplay for that? Seen The Terminator? Yeah, he provided (ahem) 'inspiration' for that. What about Babylon 5? He consulted on that, and the new version of The Twilight Zone and heaps of other stuff - and that's just his filmed work, his short stories are allegedly among the most reprinted in the English Language. So yes, I think you should read his stuff - it often has futurist backdrops, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's science fiction. Cos it isn't.

Anyway, I read the collection of stories in All The Sounds Of Fear, and whatever else that new year brought, it certainly opened with me having a new and strange outlook on just what the written word, when combined with imagination, could do. It's probably very much one of the reasons that I started writing - not because I sought to emulate his work, or anything so straightforward, but rather because it suggested there was a place in the world for writing down the more spiky and awkward of ideas, if you could do it. And that's why I cite him as my favourite writer, when asked - it sounds wilfully obscure to most people, but I like to think it's actually the truth.

Jump forward many years (past 1986, incidentally, when The Singing Detective made me realise just how unlimited the medium of TV could be), to last Friday night, on London's Southbank; it was raining, and England were playing a World Cup match, and that's why there was a limited turnout at the screening of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a film about Harlan Ellison.

There were probably about 30 of us, plus screenwriter and friend of Harlan Ellison James Moran and the film's director, Erik Nelson, but the limited numbers weren't any kind of damper on the event - the film was funny and smart and showed HE in what looks like a fairly balanced light. Yes, there were scenes where he was a bit short-tempered, but there were others where he spoke about writing and literature with a passion, and when he read sections from his stories the talent was painfully evident. So yes, it was a good film.

Afterwards, Messrs Moran and Nelson asked the audience to come nearer the front, as they were going to do a link-up to LA, where they'd ask Harlan some questions. I moved down as requested, and indeed got a front-row seat, which I was pretty pleased about. They linked up okay, and asked him a few questions, and then they asked if anyone in the audience had any questions. There was a pause, and then I realised that my hand was up, and they were nodding towards me.

I'll freely admit I was quite nervous about asking my question, not because I was speaking in front of a small crowd (as anyone who knows me will be aware, I'm a hopeless attention-seeker), but rather because this was probably likely to be my only actual interaction with Harlan Ellison, whose work I've enjoyed for over a quarter of a century. If there's anyone whose work you admire, imagine how you'd feel in a similar situation. Yep, there you go, now you get it.

Anyway, with both the film and my own personal 'history with HE' (recounted above at length - and you probably just thought it was the usual self-indulgent rambling, but hopefully now it reveals itself as the vital backstory it was intended to be) in mind, I asked my question, which came out in a slightly gabbled and nervous way, and sounded something like this:

"We see you in the film speaking to college students, and a couple of people in the film say that your work should be taught in schools - what, do you think, would be the ideal age for people to first read your work? When would you most want to get hold of their fragile minds? Teenagers? Ten? Eight? One?"

As those of you who can read will probably note, this is actually a series of questions, mainly because I was gabbling to fill the gap caused by the satellite delay, and I didn't actually have a microphone, so it was a bit uncertain to me whether Harlan could actually hear any of what I was saying. But he'd heard some of it, it seems, because he asked "Was that a question, or a diatribe?"

Erik then summarised the question, and Harlan answered it, giving a solid and considered answer - but then again, I probably would say that, as he seemed to suggest that the age of 14 or so was about right, thus making me ahead of my time as a child - and I was suitably pleased, on a number of levels.

And as the second - and only other - question was about the long-delayed third volume of Dangerous Visions, which is decades past its due date, and HE tends to get a bit fed up with being asked about (and showed as much on this occasion), I think that I probably did all right, all things considered.

Apologies for length here, but I was really rather chuffed about it, and wanted to record the event in what, I guess, is probably the closest thing I have to a diary. Given that I've met Alan Moore a couple of times, and that Dennis Potter has been dead for a number of years, I guess I've completed my interaction with the people whose work remoulded my thinking in the 1980s, which feels oddly satisfying.

One final point: if you want to see a terrific example of HE's writing, read the short story I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, from which the title of this post derives. The title's remarkable enough, but the story itself... well, to say "it lingers in the mind" is several kinds of understatement.

Two Comic Covers From 1984

Normally, I'd suggest plagiarism, but these were both drawn by the same chap (Brian Bolland), so I'll just chalk it up to a similar approach taken to both the pieces of work.

No criticism here at all, by the way; Bolland's an absolute master of comic art: if you want clean lines, he's yer artist. And I particularly like the way that the design plays on the left-to-right approach to reading, drawing the eye across the image to make you wonder just who or what is firing at the characters.

Anyway, this slight coincidence freaked out my 13-year-old self, so I thought I'd share it.

Previous Price: 75p. New Price: 0p.

Back in May 2009 I gave a resounding thumbs-up to the first issue of the comic The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross.

This week, it's been made available online for free in PDF format, so you can have a look at it and see if I was way off the mark or not.

In the months since its release, another ten or so issues have been published, and I feel they've fleshed out the underlying 'mythology' rather well, including a number of historic figures such as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and even Joseph Goebells.

It's currently one of the comics I look forward to most each month, so I'd urge you to have a look at the freebie first issue and see if it's your kind of thing.

Proving That, Even In The Far-Flung Future, Intelligence Will Not Equate With Social Skills...

... in the 25th Century, Brainiac 5 demonstrates his contempt for those members of the Legion Of Super-Heroes too stupid to figure out how to make their own flight-rings.

Go on, Brainy! Flick them the rods!

Perhaps I Should Just Re-jig This Blog To Make It About Pointing Out Similarities And Be Done With It

On the left, an image from a current Marvel comic, relating to their latest cross-over story, Siege.

On the right, the cover for a DVD of a performance of The Wall which took place in Berlin, with a logo dating back to when the concert took place in 1990.

Hmm.

I rather hope it's a pre-established icon or image which is being re-used here, so do let me know if you know better.

First 'Book Twins' Of 2010...

... though I doubt they'll be the last.

For the record, I have no objection to Brad Meltzer's work - I really enjoyed The Tenth Justice - it's the derivative book design I have a beef with. Though judging from his comics work, Brad and I clearly differ in our fondness for Red Tornado. Ah well, tis but a small matter.

A Well-Known Joke Amongst Comic Readers, But One Which Deserves A Wider Audience, I Think...

It's almost impossible to conclude somebody didn't giggle when they suggested the title of this comic to the folks at Marvel.


Probably a good job that search engines didn't exist at the time. How many innocent comic readers* would have been made to look like a filthmaniac by their Internet History?


*Possibly a contradiction in terms, mind you. I've been to enough shops and conventions to know. Oh by jiminy yes.

If You Saw The British Comedy Awards At The Weekend...

... you may, like me, have been wondering who did the rather clever depictions of comedians as superheroes.

Wonder no more: Jon Haward did some of them, and jolly well too, I think you'll agree.

More images, in the form of screengrabs, here.

Mind Your Language

You have to be careful if you're marketing a product overseas; we've all seen articles about funny-named foodstuffs from overseas which have names like Krappi, Bumm and Peroneum.

Take, for example, this current advert for a fine fragrance:

Leaving the whole Catwoman similarities thing, I'd say the name's a bit of a misfire for international use; in the USA and many other countries, the Name Ricci Ricci will make many people think of the Harvey comics character portrayed on the big screen by Macauley Culkin...

...which at least has the cachet of wealth, if not necessarily glamour, but in the UK people are probably more likely to hear "Ricci Ricci" and think of -


- Rik Mayall as Richard Richard from Bottom.

And whilst I'm no marketing guru, I'd guess that kind of association is probably not what sells fancy perfume.

In America, Archie Comics Are Seen as Child-Friendly. Tch.

Forget the language used, what's actually most offensive about this cover is Archie's ability to walk on water.

You wouldn't get that kind of talk from that nice Carpenter chap with the Mexican name. Shocking.

Nothing New Under The Sun? Whatever.

Obviously, it's fun for the papers to pretend that the youth of today invented disaffection and nonchalance (a stance which appears to forget the popularity of, say, Brando in The Wild One), and of course it means you can fill column inches with Why Oh Why Oh Why Are The Youth Of Today Impregnating Each Other And Causing House Prices To Collapse? and the like.

However, the shoulder-shrugging lack of interest which young people are often accused of displaying can be traced back many years - to my father's generation, if not before that; here, for example, is Tommy Walls, a character who appeared in many issues of the classic comic Eagle, including its first edition in 1950:


Like so many of the young people on my television set in modern shows such as Police Camera Action Stop Or I'll Shoot in HD, Master Walls appears to be showing a lack of respec' for the official standing next to him, and he doesn't seem in the least bothered that another member of his gang of street toughs is being put into a police van in the background.

Young people thenadays, eh? Tch.

For 'Livejournal', Read 'Blog'

If you're not familiar with the webcomic XKCD, I heartily recommend it.

Or, as it's Sunday afternoon, you might prefer to walk around the world instead.

They're Just Like You And Me Really

Spotted at a London Underground station this morning, one of the new posters for Habitat, featuring Helena Christiansen.

The version of the image here is, obviously, much smaller than the one I saw on the wall of the tube station, so you probably won't be able to make out the detail, but on the huge version it was amusing to note that the penultimate book on the table next to her (the slim brown-spined one on top of the larger white tome) appears to be a graphic novel - or, as many of us would call them, 'a comic with cardboard covers'.

Specifically, it seemed to be The Little Man by Chester Brown, a collection of his strips from 1980-1995.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it oddly reassuring to think that, at the end of a day's modelling, Helena likes to sit on a sofa and read about a man sitting round in his pants and listening to the radio and picking his nose.

In a way, it probably provides cosmic balance for all the men who sit round in their pants and look at pictures of models in magazines.

Whoever we are, it seems that we're interested in the lives of others. As Sartre almost put it, "L'interest? C'est les autres".

Not Judging The Book, Just The Cover

As comic creators go, I have slightly mixed feelings about Chris Ware; I've read his Jimmy Corrigan book a couple of times now, and whilst there's no question at all about Ware's talent, I have to say that the slightly formal and mannered nature of the art rather defused the emotional weight of the work for me. Rather like having a song of heartbreak sung in a voice so pure and on-note that it loses the human element.

That said, he's got a terrific eye for design (and indeed general innovation) in print, as is amply demonstrated by his work for the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine - here's the cover:


Inside, there's a four-page strip by Ware too, which you can read by clicking here. Worth the clickage involved, if only to see that not all comics are men in capes punching each other through walls.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

Originally found on Graham Linehan's blog. Graham knows his comics, as anyone who's ever seen The IT Crowd will know.

The Comedy Of Errors Has The Joke Of Two People Looking Like Each Other. Twice.

So I had an idea the other day - yes, yes, I know, it's a real Dear Diary moment, ha de har har - specifically, an idea for a story; I liked the idea, and it seemed to pop into my head fully-formed, and I could see various avenues to it, and how it could be made a bit more real-world than a lot of stories, and I could see myself enjoying writing it, though there was one big hurdle to all this...

It felt like I'd stolen it from somewhere.

Now, I don't know if this is actually the case or not, but the way the idea seemed to (as they say in House) present, with a lot of features already in place, seemed a bit too easy somehow, as if I could only have come up with the notion by nicking it.

Anyway, here's the idea:

Two brothers - identical twins. One of them is murdered, and returns to the other as a ghost - as twins, they always had a strong 'connection', and death doesn't seem to have ended that. The ghost twin helps his living brother look into the circumstances of the murder, and it turns out that in fact the wrong twin was killed, due to the similarity of appearance. In investigating all this, though, the living twin would not find people co-operative and willing to let him in to chat, as so often seems to be the case in such tales, but instead would struggle to get people to talk to him at all, as they're still dealing with their grief. And of course, when he discovers that he was the target, the killer, at much the same time, realises that he hasn't finished the job after
all...

Okay, so a couple of obvious touchstones are Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) and the comic character Deadman, and there's a wilful element to the 'difficulty of investigation' aspect that clearly comes from me having seen too many episodes of Murder, She Wrote and similar TV shows, as well as a wish to do something crime-based but not with too much of a standard gumshoe element. So it's just a bundle of influences, I guess, but my sneaking feeling that this is a film or book I've previously experienced is enough to put me off writing it at the moment (in any form other than the summary in the paragraph above, I mean).

I spend a lot of time on this blog posting images I feel are similar - some of them clearly intended to be, others mere chance - but I'm equally interested in the similarity of ideas, and the way that two people can come to similar conclusions, or come up with similar notions, by what seems to be pure chance; granted, there are scientists who do work in specific fields with the same aim, which is perhaps more inevitable, and Charles Fort wrote about what I think he called 'Steam-Engine time', which was the idea that certain ideas or inventions have a 'time' when their creation is almost inevitable; being a pretentious sort, I'm rather reminded of the final lines from Yeats's poem The Second Coming, which ask "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

I always marvel at the inventiveness of musicians, apparently able to create new songs from the limited number of musical notes in the octave, and it's often claimed that there are a limited number of stories - the exact number varies, it seems, but it's rarely more than about a dozen - so I guess I shouldn't really be surprised that the ideas which flit across the landscape of my mind sometimes strike me as pleasing, but at the same time as probably being a swipe.

So anyway, I dismissed the twins story idea (well, scribbled it in the notebook and may do something with it in an altered form in the future, but for now that's much the same thing), and didn't really think anything more about it.

Until, over the weekend, when I was out and about, and I saw a pair of identically dressed identical twin girls. And then, less than an hour later, a pair of identically dressed identical twin boys.

Which wasn't creepy in the least. No, not at all.

This Admission May Connect In Some Way To Me Not Getting Married Until I Was 37 Years Old

As readers with long memories and brain cells to spare may recall, just over a year ago, I got married.

One of the many benefits of this was that I now have (and indeed always wear) a wedding ring - because, obviously, when this cat's on the prowl, the ladies need to be warned that hey, easy, I'm a married man!. Yes, that's definitely the reason. Anyway, bear my be-ringedness in mind while I scoot off at what will appear to be a tangent...

The building where I work in London (which is a very hush-hush-top-secret-oh-all-right-I-admit-it-not-that-big-a-deal-building) has a pass system, as many buildings do nowadays. You use your pass to get in, and on the way out, the method is a bit less hasslesome - on the basis that keeping people out is more important that keeping them in, I guess. So the usual way I leave the building is to press a large button set into a nearby wall, and then open the door.

However, these buttons are usually green (for go, I suppose), and as a pathetic comic reading geek who's aware of the superhero Green Lantern, who recharges his power ring (stop giggling at the back) thus...

... you can probably imagine how I envision myself as I punch the green exit button at work with my left hand.

Several times a day. Smiling to myself every time I do it. Oh yes.

Hey, I'm just being honest with you. And anyway, they're talking about a Green Lantern film starring Ryan Reynolds, so the character'll probably be like Iron Man in a couple of years. Lunchboxes and pyjamas for the kids, you wait and see... and probably in adult sizes for people like me too, let's face it. The emotionally and intellectually stunted male is a sizable market. In every sense.

Apropos Of The Latter Link, If Anyone Could Recommend Me A Good E-Reader That Supports PDFs And Has A Black Case, I'd Be Grateful

I notice that the new Jeffrey Archer paperback features a re-telling of the life story of mountaineer George Mallory.

As you probably know, Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine may have been the first people to summit Mount Everest; on June 8 1924, Mallory and Irvine were climbing Everest and were seen from afar, as black specks just below the summit ridge, by another member of their party.

And then they were never seen again, though Mallory's body was found about a decade ago. There's never been any completely conclusive evidence to eastblish whether or not Mallory and Irvine made it to the top and died on the way down, or died en route.

Anyway, though I've never read an Archer book, the fact that his last book was a re-telling of The Count of Monte Cristo (one of my favourite novels) and his latest one is about another subject close to my heart inevitably makes me conclude that Archer's deliberately trying to get my attention and make me read his books. And as a contrary type, I shan't be duped so easily into parting with my cash (especially not to the funds of a convicted perjurer).

Instead, if you want to read about this subject, I'd recommend you either read The Ghosts Of Everest by Hemmleb, Johnson and Simonson for a very solid recounting of the search for the bodies and belongings of Mallory and Irvine; or - as pictured above - for a more fictional angle on it, have a look at The Summit of the Gods by Yumemakura Baku and Jiro Taniguchi.

It's the first volume of a Japanese comic story based around a chap who thinks he may have found Mallory's camera (and the camera did exist and has never been recovered), with some lovely art. I'll freely admit that I'm only halfway through reading it myself at present, but it's a very good read, with several storylines running at once - including, of course, flashbacks to the 1924 expedition.

What's that you say? You want evidence of the loveliness of the art? Well, all right, you demanding tyke, have a look at this five-page preview here. And as it's a Japanese comic, don't forget you have to read from right to left.

.ti naem I ,ylsuoires, oN

A Day Late And $4,000,000,000 Short

Possibly because I was busy enjoying the day off work and staying away from online matters, I didn't find out until this morning that Marvel Comics has been bought by Disney for $4bn, which is pretty surprising.

As Marvel has had the lion's share of success with comics-to-film adaptations in recent years, I can see why Disney might want a bit of that, and also why they'd want to have some of Marvel's most recognisable characters - Spider-Man, Hulk and Iron Man, for example - in their portfolio.

There are quite of lot of concerns and questions online about the deal, though I'm most inclined to wonder if Disney's brand and commercial clout might mean a return to comics being readily available on news-stands and in supermarkets in the US; I think the fact that this generally isn't the case has been one of the factors in the sales decline comics have seen in the past couple of decades - I discovered comics in my local newsagent (both UK comics and imported US titles), but I have no idea where the next generation of comic readers is meant to come from. So I'd be interested to see if there's a return to comics being stocked in Wal-Marts and the like.

Oh, and given Disney's family-friendly orientation, I'd be interested to see what effect their purchase of Marvel might have on the possibility of reprinting the more adult sequences in Marvelman stories from the past. But it may not come to pass...

Speaking of comics, DC Comics have recently offered freebie rings (as pictured) to people when they buy copies of certain comics, and they've been very popular. And by 'very' I mean weirdly popular, with a lot of online posting of an unhealthily excitable nature. Granted, they're an amusing little item - and they tie in nicely to the Blackest Night storyline in which the rings appear - but surely they're not worth that much giddiness. Anyone out there remember Pogs? Chromium covers? Fleeting fads in comic promotion, I think, and a mean-spirited part of me wonders if some people are getting a bit giddy about these rings because they're the only rings they're ever likely to give or receive in their lifetime... but that part of me is often silenced by the recollection of how geeky I've been about comics and many other things.

Many, many other things.