A Recommended Author

A Sinister Aura - Bret Herholz

And now for something completely different. If the autumn felt like a good time to be reading old detective novels set in simpler times, then the winter is definitely time for pulling the curtains closed, sticking on the fire and curling up in a big round chair, reading kids' books, ghost stories and comic books.

This is the first of Herholz's graphic novels I've read, though I've loved his Edward Gorey style illustrations since I first saw them (to the extent that I'm delighted that he has graciously agreed to do a cover for an upcoming Iris book).

It's the story of a strange suicide/murder in 19th century America and one potential, scandalous solution.

Herholz moves the story from its original 1889 setting to one about 30 years later, in order to make the apparently clairvoyant Miss Polly a little more modern while retaining the Crichton/Jeeves style manservant Handgraves (it's a lovely detail that these are the adventures of Polly and Handgraves, and not vice-versa as one might expect). It's a good idea, I think, as the drawing (which is particularly fabulous in those panels which feature what appear to be ghosts) lends itself particularly well to the post-Victorian period.

The mystery is intriguing, the writing taut and without a pound of waste and the illustration and lettering all top notch. Throw in an additional short story, a note from the author and a preview of Herholz's next work, and this comes highly recommended to anyone looking for something more than the latest Spider-Man.

Saddest Comic Strip Ever Part III

Not that I expect anyone to remember but some time ago I did a post saying this was the saddest comic strip ever written.

Then later I did another one suggesting this was in fact the biggest bummer in the history of comic strips.

Now, I'm wondering if it's this strip here, which I came across the other day. I don't know who Chris Aubry is (maybe this guy?) but this really is a beautiful if depressing comic.

Random Recommendations

In proper lazy blogger fashion, here's some thoughts on stuff I've enjoyed recently, including stuff I've already posted on a mailing list.

Doctor Who - Black Orchid (1982)

The first episode of Black Orchid is the best single episode of the Davison years. Discuss.

Best start to an episode? Check. Man gets murdered by mysterious figure. Nyssa apparently sleeping in a four poster bed, tossing in her sleep. Wierd Indian looking guy with a plate in his mouth. It's like a 'proper' mystery from the start.

Best joke? Check.
"That was a performance worthy of the Master"
"The Master?!"
"Yes, the other Doctor" (pause) "WG Grace."

Best setting? Check. No monsters for once and in a country house, so properly lit and shot by the BBC. A cricket match, the world's biggest Priest's Hole and a fancy dress ball - what could be better? The Doctor wandering about in his dressing gown, that's what.

Best performances? Check. There's not a bad supporting performance in Black Orchid, and Sarah Sutton turns in her best performance on the show. Janet Fielding is excellent as a flirtatious rathen than complaining Tegan, and Terence Dudley/Matthew Waterhouse manage between them to give Adric a genuine (if shallow) personality in this story (cleverly one which is stolen wholesale from turn of the century Boys Adventure stories - Adric as the Fat Owl of the Remove is something they should have run with instead of killing him off).

Best cliffhanger? Well, no (that would be the firing squad in 'Androzani'), but it's still a decent one, with the viewer unsure if it's Ann or Nyssa under the mask, and therefore uncertain whether she might in fact be killed.

Episode 2 isn't quite as good, but the performances remain solid, George Cranleigh's make-up is excellent (his hand perhaps less so) and the ending is satisfying dramatically and never over-played, for all its obvious literary antecedents.

Other good moments worth mentioning as they pop randomly into my head - Nyssa unknowingly asking for booze and Cranleigh saying 'lemonade for the children' thereby implicitly suggesting that Cranleigh thinks of his fiance Ann as a child; the avuncular policeman failing to be overly rattled by the interior of the TARDIS; and Nyssa and Tegan doing the Charleston long before the Doctor Dances.

It was a Golden Age...

Twin Freaks - Paul Magrs (2007)

Twin Freaks is the new children's novel from Paul Magrs and is well worth taking a look at, either as a quick read for an adult or a slightly longer one for a child.

Like 2002's All the Rage, in Twin Freaks Magrs takes his inspiration from culture so popular as to leave me feeling like Sir Jeremiah Harman confronted by Gazza. Instead of the horror of boy bands, however, this time round Paul plumbs the painful depths of X-Factor.

It's a nice idea - take one beautiful, but talent free, sister and one plain, but vocally exceptional, sister (who's also a dwarf), mix them together and ta da - beautiful and talented Siamese twins.

There's not a great deal more I can say about this book - I said it was a book for 'children' rather than 'young adult' because unlike his most recent non-adult book, Exchange, Twin Freaks is most definitely aimed at the younger audience. As with the earlier Hands Up this is funny, clever and entertaining and makes a point about the problems of growing up in a non-traditional family, without descending into the preachy or forgetting that the book would be nothing without a good story as its backbone. You can't really ask for more and I suspect pre-teen readers will like this a lot (Alex will no doubt tell me when she reads it).

Description of a car journey in Mumbai

This is even lazier since it's just a link - but I think this is the best non-fiction Scott has ever written, full of lovely imagery and strange detail. Skip past the first bit, whcih is a bit dull, and go straight to the section that starts 'Night falls quickly in the tropics'. A beautiful, evocative piece of writing.

Night falls quickly in the tropics

Achewood

Another link, but today's Achewood perfectly sums up the glory of that comic strip - funny, sad, odd and with an alt tag that adds to the whole.

The Hardest Call

Scrabulous

Either via Facebook or on the dedicated website, online Scrabble is the latest craze to hit the little corner of the 'net I generally sit in. Give it a go - even better, if you're rubbish, challenge me to a game and let me boost my fragile ego by beating you!

A (very) Selective Guide to Web Comics

Things I simply don't 'get':

1. Transformers.
2. Anything 'starring' Richard Ayoade. The man is a talent vampire, leeching the ability out of even gifted people he works with.
3. Comics. With the exception of 'Maus' and 'From Hell' they're just nonsense aren't they?

Web comics though are a different thing entirely.

I'd say they were a wondrous new world but truthfully they're mainly not - a few of them, however, are unmissable. To be exact, the ones below meet the stringent criteria of 'Stuff I look at First Thing in the Morning when I Should be Starting Work'.*

Wapsi Square

Wapsi Square is more of an ongoing serial than the other strips I read daily. Starring Monica Villareal, a short, large chested anthropologist, WS started as a straight-forward semi-humorous drama but quickly evolved into a far odder and less mundane experience.

At times in fact, creator Paul Taylor leaves humour behind entirely, particularly in the early strips featuring the creation of the three drunken parts of the chimera and those strips covering the cast's unhappy formative years. Wapsi Square isn't a strip for belly laughs, but the increasing maturity of the writing is mirrored in the fabulous artwork, which often features intricate and complimentary backgrounds in each panel, fronted by cleanly drawn characters.

I've just ordered the two paperback collections from lulu.com. Highly recommended.

A Softer World

A Softer World is about as far away from Wapsi Square as you can get. Generally made up of three panels and updated only every Friday, ASW is a series of standalone strips which isn't even drawn but is instead created from photographs, with text added on a white background in an old-fashioned typewriter font.

Sometimes it's just one photograph stretching across all three panels, sometimes it's three distinct photos, but the result is usually...bittersweet is the word, I think. Sometimes, in fact, the strip doesn't even seem to make much sense but regardless, many of the comics engender a genuine sense of sadness and of the passing of time. On the other hand, some are just plain funny.

And I'm convinced Steven Moffat has seen this one.

Player vs Player

Player vs Player is a far more traditional comic strip, in the grand tradition of Charles Schulz' Peanuts. Set in the office of a computer gaming magazine, PvP generally appears in three panel form with each strip ending with a humorous pay-off, although the strips are all linked chronologically and tend to follow loose storylines.

Of the comic strips I like, PvP takes the least risks but is probably the most successful, with an animated version now showing on US TV. Traditional it may be, but it's often very, very funny and the fact that creator Scott Kurtz does do the very best PC wallpaper is not something to be taken lightly.

Achewood

Achewood is genius, no matter how hyperbolic that sounds. Not genius in the sense that people might say 'Lawrence Miles is a genius' or 'Tracey Emin's My Bed is a work of genius' (that is, the sense of 'exaggerating wildly' and 'talking shite' respectively), but genius in the proper 'christ, that made my brain shudder and stall' sense. The adventures of some toy animals and a handful of cats with personality disorders, it may not sound all that promising, but reading the entire archive in one sitting is the equivalent of reading one of the good Faulkner novels or watching a Pinter play. Ignoring for a second the fact that it's frequently coffee spat over monitor funny and that it can switch from that to genuinely sad in the space of a single strip, Achewood's primary strength is creator Chris Onstad's wonderful use of language. Each character has his own individual voice, while characters modify their syntax to create fractured sentences full of meaning in a world in which Heaven and Hell are easily reachable (and where Robert Johnson plays nightly in the latter)

Start at the beginning and read right through or, if you definitely want to waste your time doing something else, then just read the Great Outdoor Fight section, and marvel.

Perry Bible Fellowship

PBF is amongst the more successful web comics, with a weekly spot in The Guardian and a book collection out soon. PBF always goes for the laugh in its unconnected weekly strip, but uniquely in those strips I read it always makes you work to figure out the gag. This strip in which a vulture has slipped in amongst the baby-delivering storks is a relatively straight-forward one, but this one had me scratching my head for half an hour before I got the (excellent) joke, while I had to have this one explained to me by Greg.

The fact that it's usually worth making the effort to understand the entire joke tells you all you need to know, I think.

Other Comics

Other comics which I read every day but which aren't at the very top level include Overcompensating (good but inconsistent), Scary Go Round (British for a change, but 'wry smile' level at best), and xkcd (sometimes hilarious, too often a bit sciencey).

* If Scott is reading this, then that obviously should read 'Stuff I look at First Thing in the Morning Before I Leave for Work'

Saddest Comic Strip Ever (no hyperbole)

Courtesy of the very talented Graham Linehan, the last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip*

Click here for the saddest three panels ever commited to print.


* It's fake, presumably - surely Bill Watterson couldn't be that cruel?

Back from the Smoke

It's been a trying few days chez Douglas.

First off, we have gardeners in digging up the Paschendale-themed diaster
area which is our back garden and replacing it with slabbed paving
(Marketstone from Stonemarket for those interesetd, and very pleasing on the
eye it is too). This involved having both our front and back doors open all
day as wheelbarrows full of sand were pushed hither and yon, with the
knock-on effect that Sandy, our somewhat boisterous Retriever, has had to be
locked in the living room for most of the day.

Secondly, J has been away to London for her annual trip with her mum and our
girl, leaving me with the two boys. Luckily the eldest is at school most of
the day and can go to after school club thereafter, but the little 'un is
still at nursery and therefore needs watching in the afternoon, meaning I've
been taking half days at work. I still managed to forget to bath them for three days though.*

Thirdly, I still have the chocolate business to run on top of that. This
task is hampered to a great extent by the fact that the printing of said
chocolate is done in the world's biggest workshop at the back of our garden
- and there are gardeners and dirt and the like between me and it.

Fourthly, I discovered on Tuesday night that heating a two day old
MacDonalds which had been left in the fridge in the microwave is *not* the
same as cooking silverside slowly in an oven and so I spent most of
Wednesday feeling quite unwell.

On the plus side, J brought the boys back a Talking Attack
Cybertrooper each, amongst other things (which should default to me when they
grow out of Who) and me a copy of Oblivion, the third volume of the 8th
Doctor comic strips**

And she brought herself and my girl back safely as well which was (if I may
get a little soft and non-Scottish sounding for a second) the best thing of
all, since I missed them both millions.




* Baths were, I'm sure, considerably less common when I was eight, mind - so
did we all stink in the early seventies or was dirt more fragrant back then?

** Nowhere near as good as the Tom Baker and Davison strips***, I might add.

*** Why no collected McCoy strips so far, I wonder?