AAAGH! meets the Doctor

Another AAAGH!, this time from Doctor Who Adventures #213 earlier this year. You might like to know that AAAGH! goes to war in the current issue out in shops now, in a strip featuring the Krotons, a Slitheen and Chris Moyles.

As always, the above strip is by me, illustrated by Brian Williamson and edited by the splendid Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, and posted up here with permission. Paul's also posted up one of his AAAGH!s - in which Nervil and Mrs Tinkle meet the EastEnders.

AAAGH! and the Atraxi

Another AAAGH!, this time from issue #209 and featuring the Atraxi and a Weeping Angel. As before, script by me, art by Brian Williamson, edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes, and posted up here with the kind permission of the lovely Doctor Who Adventures.

AAAGH! and the Racnoss

Putting up my AAAGH! meets Idris comic strip went down well so I've permission from my splendid bosses at Doctor Who Adventures magazine (every Thursday, with free gifts and mayhem) to put up more.

Each week, young Nervil and his robot Mrs Tinkle, find jobs for old Doctor Who monsters. This is my first one, from issue 207 in February. It features the Empress of the Racnoss (from The Runaway Bride), and a joke in the last panel which I came up with when I was little.

Written by me, illustrated by clever Brian Williamson, edited by Paul Lang and Natalie Barnes.

Some comics

Very exciting to see that there'll be a book of Jamie Smart's amazing Doctor Who searches. I've loved Jamie's work since I first saw Fish-Head Steve in the DFC - which you can now read in full on his site. And for older but no less silly readers, there's also Corporate Skull, again free and on the internet, you lucky, lucky swine.

But enough about other people.

As well as lovely, silly, AAAGH!, I've also been writing a few other comic strips for Doctor Who Adventures. That includes "The Very Cool Bow Tie!" in issue 218 (from a couple of weeks back) which included Amy and Rory in pre-Raphaelite costume for no other reason than my amusement.

I raise this as I've not really talked about comics work on here before. I've pitched on-and-off to 2000AD since I was 16, and am still gathering rejections. But as well as Doctor Who Adventures, I've written comics and short stories for GE Fabbri's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, have just completed a comic drawn by William Potter about a team of superheroes, some of whom are autistic, and wrote an eight-page strip for Electric Sheep magazine.

The strip, "Final Cut" is drawn by Pearlyn Quan and you can see a PDF preview here. I wrote it last summer, and am a bit surprised reading it now how not-entirely-cheery it is.

AAAGH!

Since January, Doctor Who Adventures has featured a back-up comic strip, AAAGH, in which a small boy and a robot lady find odd jobs for Doctor Who monsters. It's basically an excuse for mayhem, silliness and celebrity guests. I have written a whole bundle of them, usually while giggling madly. Here's Idris, Doctor Who's wife and wheels in one, popping by the office.


Doctor Who Adventures is out every Thursday. Thanks to Paul Lang, creator of AAAGH and evil overlord, and editor Natalie Barnes.

Books finished, June 2010

Got all caught up in work and real life this past month, hence the lack of blogging. But I did get through some books.

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve is superb: a thrilling adventure in a rich and vivid world, packed full of wild ideas, brilliant characters and eye-popping surprises. Just wow.

I'd read a lot of Lance Parkin's fanzine material in the original fanzines, so a lot of this collected edition felt like revisiting my years as a student in Preston. Lance has often been keen and forthright in his views and there are all kinds of nuggets of insight here, along with stuff where perhaps his enthusiasm goes a bit far.

"1974, then, was perhaps the year when the Copernican revolution came for Doctor Who - the year when Doctor Who stopped revolving around the TV series."
Lance Parkin, 'A forty-year adventure in time and space', in Time Unincorporated - The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives Volume 1: Lance Parkin, p. 29.

I wonder what fans who've come to the show since 2005 will make of this insight into those dark days when there was No Doctor Who On Telly, and we clung to books and audios as keepers of the flame. There's some wild-eyed True Belief here, that the show will come back and be brilliant and prove all the Heretics wrong. How brilliant that he's been proven right.

You can still read Lance's blog about the writing of his Doctor Who book "The Eyeless", on which I commented back in November 2008.

The Gift by Lewis Hyde was a present from m'colleague Ben, and I made pages and pages of notes on it while on holiday in Malta. I'll endeavour to write those up some day properly. The book comes in two halves: first we're shown the difference between a market economy for products and a gift economy for ideas. I read-up on gift economies when I wrote The Judgement of Isskar and had the Doctor explain them this way:

DOCTOR:
Oh. Well, you send Christmas cards out to everyone, and then it’s on their honour to send you a Christmas card back.

It doesn't quite work like that: a gift economy isn't about two people sending stuff back and forth between them; you pass the gift onwards. So really the Doctor should have said:

DOCTOR:
Oh. Well, you send Christmas cards out to everyone, and then it’s on their honour to send out Christmas cards themselves.

Ideas and artworks, Hyde argues, have always flourished in gift economies, and he cites all sorts examples. In the second half, he focuses on the lives of two poets - Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound - to explore the problems of being an artist and at the same time getting paid.

I'm not going to attempt a fully fledged reply now, but the book really prickled my brain, challenging me on what I do for a living and how. I squawked with horror at the snobbishness about getting a day job to pay your way, and Hyde's sense that any kind of compromise or patronage is selling out. And Whitman and Pound, whose lives both went so awry, are hardly people we should aspire to emulate. More on this as soon as life allows...

The Three Incestuous Sisters is a picture book by Audrey Niffenegger. I loved The Time Traveller's Wife and have her next one on my pile of imminent reads. This is a twisted, gothy story that reminded me a bit of Tim Burton's melancholy tales and also Edward Gorey. Strange and broken and haunting, it echoes with some of my Real Life. And also, there are goth girls without any clothes on.

Three, Ten and Eleven

A few things to announce, excitingly. First, I've written for the eleventh Doctor Who. My four-page comic strip "Booked Up" appears in Doctor Who Adventures issue #164, available from tomorrow for a week. Artist John Ross has worked wonders on my silly script: I could not be more delighted.

Also just out is "Shadow of the Past", an audio "Companion Chronicle" featuring Caroline John as the third Doctor's chum Liz Shaw. Am thrilled at how it's come out - the cast and crew really going for the excitement and emotion. Hooray! As a bonus, you can hear me stumble through an interview at the end.

(ETA: Oh! And they've put up a trailer for "The Guardian of the Solar System", out in July. I know what happens but it still makes me tingly.)

And from May (next week!) you can download the audio version of "The Slitheen Excursion", featuring the tenth Doctor and his one-off companion June. This entirely unabridged version is read by Debbie Chazen, who was so splendid in The Smoking Room.


On Sunday, the director of the audio book, Neil Gardner, and I will be speaking on "The Birth of Modern Doctor Who" at Sci-Fi London, along with other slebs. Do come along and join us.

Belgium and the master detective – not Poirot

Had a fine weekend in Brussels, sampling beer and museums. It was a little odd how quiet the museums were, and how many had bits closed or empty or being moved.

Comics are a big Belgian thing, with huge great murals of favourite characters painted on various buildings and a huge Tintin in pride of place at the Gare Midi, where the Eurostar comes in. The Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinee showcases a massive range of original comic artworks, profiles of major figures in the genre, and lots of stuff about Tintin. Found the shop a bit disappointing, partly because so little of the comics on offer were available in translation, and partly because the souvenir things were all madly expensive. For a museum devoted to the subject, it didn't seem to be trying too hard to spread the word.

The museum is housed in an old department store designed by Victor Horta, and we also had a nose round his beautiful Art Nouveau house. Horta and his contemporaries went a step further than William Morris, applying the elegant curves of his furniture and interior design to architecture itself. The Dr's a big Morris groupie, so Horta's house was perhaps the highlight of the trip.

It's a tall, multi-story terraced town house, the insides scooped out to maximise the light. Even on a dreary grey day the glass roof and yellow furnishings filled the place with golden glow, so it felt warm and homely. And for all the rich elegance of the construction and furnishing, I could easily see small children and cats gamboling about the place; a practical family home as well as a work of art. There were so many lovely little features, like the flip-round urinal in the master bedroom.

Afterwards, we toured nearby streets on the trail of other houses by Horta and his mates. There were several gorgeous, decorative frontages – though they're private houses now so we couldn't peak inside. I'd love to know how the interiors work for their modern owners, how much has been remodelled and how well Ikea furniture fits in those elegant spaces.

In fact, we did a lot of walking, pottering around, our route linked together by the places and bars of interest as listed in the Rough Guide. (The Dr, the seasoned traveller, swears by the Rough Guide and has a whole shelf of different editions and countries.) There was some really very fine beer along the way – the 9% Chimay Blue brewed by the Trappists, the 8% Kwak in it's distinctive, round-bottomed glass that needed its own special stand, and the traditional Timmermans Geuze Lambic which is full of yeast and bits of dandruff, tastes more like cider than beer, and wasn't really me.

Then there was the food. We sampled a skewer each of strawberries dipped in white chocolate, which was quite difficult to eat without looking filthy. There were freshly grilled waffles and cream, a bucket load of mussels, and on our last night a really good meal in Le Kanoudou Resto.

Belgium seems to have played some kind of piggy-in-the-middle for most of its history. It was at the heart of disputes between Catholics and Protestants and their relevant empires, and was at one time referred to as the Spanish Netherlands. There's still a certain tension between the French and Flemish-speaking populations, so we tried to offend no one by only speaking English. In 1830, the poor lot got lumbered with Queen Victoria's uncle Leopold as king, the other European nations again deciding what was best for Belgium. Leopold did okay, it seems, but his son Leopold II is probably best remembered for the country's total disaster in bossing someone else around for a change.

We took the tram out to the palatial Museum de l'Afrique Central, which is about to close and be re-fitted with a slightly less racist elan. The place was built on the profits of the rubber trade and Leopold II's internationally censured colonies in the Congo. And inside it's like a stepping back into another age.

For one thing, the entrance lobby is full of statues of helpful white folk bringing civilisation to the black savages. The exhibits are of stuffed and mocked-up wildlife, with – I felt – the indigenous people grouped in with the flora and fauna. There's an argument that the museum merely shows the attitudes of a previous age – Tintin and the comics in the Comic Museum showed a similar racial stereotyping, and Tintin and the Congo these days comes with a warning. But just seven years after the museum first opened, the 1904 Casement report attacked the abuses in the Belgian colonies – so much so Leopold II gave them up.

There was a small exhibit on the history of the Congo, and another on Stanley – whose archive the museum now holds, and who denied all the stuff being said about abuses (I must read Tim Jeal's biography of Stanley, which is staring at me on the shelf). Though, too, a few of the captions in the rest of the place admitted perhaps the whole enterprise hadn't exactly been a Good Thing, it hardly scratched the long and complex history. We'd like to go again after the re-fit, though the Dr wasn't sure how radical that would be...

Got back yesterday and having waded through the emails I rushed out to the Albert Hall to hear AN Wilson and Steven Moffat discuss Sherlock Holmes with Matthew Sweet, with suitable passages from the canon read by David Warner. It was a lively, funny and insightful natter, available on iPlayer for the next few days. Steven let slip a few clues about his forthcoming, modern-day version which will star Benedict Cumberbatch. He also said something interesting about the problems of setting Sherlock Holmes in period, where the background details become more important than the adventure.

Later this month, I've got to give a talk at the Royal Observatory about the proper science in the sci-fi nonsense I knock out, so I'm nicking that.

Glass of vino with some chums afterwards – some of whom I'd not seen in an aeon – and then curry. Was a bit starey-eyed and tired after the long weekend, but don't think I did anything too foolish. Or at least, no more foolish than normal. Now pelting through a big thing that needs writing that's not yet been announced, while on Thursday I think I have to be a policeman. More on that in due course...

Meet the meerkats!

I am thrilled - thrilled! - to see the new issue of Doctor Who Adventures (#108, 26 March 2009). The cover boasts my space-pirate meerkats!

(I first saw them in Sainsburys when I went to get more cat food; a rack of different mags all Jade Goody, and then, on the far left, one that was Not The Same.)

"Good Old Days" is my second strip for DWA. John Ross has worked wonders bringing my tortuously complex scripts into being. Hooray, too, to colourist Alan Craddock and letterer Paul Vyse. It's a huge tick on the list of childhood ambitions to be a proper, published writer of comics.

And also, the issue comes with a free time-watch and two glittering badges. Squee!

Destined for closure

The new issue of The DFC has some very sad news: it's closing in two issue's time. What a shame.

As I blogged last year, it's the first original, non-tie-in comic to launch since the short-lived Wildcat in 1988. For the past 41 weeks it has boasted no tie-ins to TV or movies or computer games, no cover-mounted freebies, no advertising. Just a mad squodge of new comic-strips through your letterbox to look forward to every Friday. Says the announcement:

"We're really sorry that we have to stop so suddenly, and that your stories are going to be interrupted. But we haven't been able to find the funding to cover the cost of creating more comics."

They promise there'll be ways to "find out what happens next in all the stories", but that's not quite the same.

My favourite strip is probably Fish-Head Steve by Jamie Smart, about a village of people who all have strange heads. But the range of styles and stories had been extraordinary: from the dark and scary Mezolith to the kooky Bodkin and the Bear, from the beautifully drawn sci-fi epic The Spider Moon to the strange adventure of Sneaky - cleverest Elephant in the world.

It's a been a fantastic ride for the last 41 weeks. I've had concerns about some of it: a couple of strips that left me cold, and sometimes the structure of strips has been odd, episodes not adding anything to what we've already learnt or finishing on what are hardly cliffhangers. But on the whole it's been a brilliant, fresh and vibrant read.

And, obviously, I learn it's closing the day after I sent them a submission.

Who stocks the Guardian?

So what to to make of Watchmen? I loved the comic in my teens (though not as much as I loved V For Vendetta), and recall the bloke who wrote Batman (1989) and Terry Gilliam both saying it could never be filmed. It's complex and strange, packed full of incident and the juxtaposition of repeated images. So any film would surely just be not quite as good as the source. Which is what's happened whenever they've put Alan Moore's other great comics on screen.

And yet for the most part I think Watchmen works as a movie. It's complex and strange and I keep picking over it like with the gap between my teeth. There's an awful lot that I like – Rorshach's mask and his performance, the opening titles, the look and feel of Archie. But there's also much that is bothersome...

Spoilers

obviously

follow

for

both

the

comic

and

the

film...

The choice in any adaptation is what to keep and what to cut out. Director Zack Snyder has slavishly kept close to the source: it's evident Dave Gibbons' artwork has been used to storyboard the film, and whole sections of the film's dialogue are lifted from the comic's balloons.

I'm surprised by how much of the comic makes it into the film. In fact, it feels too long at two-and-a-half hours. They could have cut back more.

The change to the ending in the comic keeps things simpler, and cuts out a whole sub-plot about pirate comics and a writer off making a movie. Veidt setting up Dr Manhattan works better than the comic's faked alien menace anyway. It makes Manhattan's slow separation from humanity part of the plot rather than an intriguing aside.

But my major concern is not with what's been taken out but added. In the comic, the murder of the Comedian is shown in the first four pages, in flashback, pressed in between panels of the cops looking round over the dead man's flat. Eddie Blake doesn't have a chance to fight back.

In the movie, there's a whole martial arts sequence like out of any superhero movie. Blake goes out fighting, punching through bricks and the kitchen cabinets, revealing super-human speed and strength. It misses something fundamental about what the comic's doing: grounding the outlandish events and characters in a grubby, mundane reality. These heroes are (for the most part) ordinary mortals. They're as fallible, flawed and falling apart as the rest of us.

The film's costumed heroes sport the same PVC chic as the comic-book movies since Batman in '89. They fight in the same ways as other comic-book movies, and there are the same fast CGI pull-backs to reveal huge buildings and landscapes. As a result it feels like a response to those movies: more about the X-Men of the 21st century than the 1980s.

That's not helped by the music. I know a few people who love the film's music, but I found the choices of tune just odd. It doesn't give any sense of the period: Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix both suggest the 60s. “All along the watchtower” is used in Withnail & I to a much better effect.

While the comic had a very particular sense of its period – an alternative, awful “now” - the film is a mish-mash of the nostalgic and contemporary, and neither quite feels right. If only it could have felt more like the brilliant title sequence, showing American history with the added bonus of heroes. Well, brilliant but for one little grumble.

The sequence shows assassination of JFK and then shows the Comedian wielding the rifle. It's a crass realisation of what in the comic is just an aside, the Comedian boasting to some mates at a party.

Too often the film favours the crass and simplistic over the more intriguing and complex. Laurie tells her mother she loves her, while in the comic those words never need to be said because its implicit in the scene.

The Dr was concerned by the not-quite-brilliant qualities of the actresses playing Laurie and her mum. But there’s no subtlety in their dialogue to play off: they seem awkward and stupid for stating the bleeding obvious.

More than that, special effects movies mean playing to green curtains and ping-pong balls on sticks. The film's editor can be more thrilled by the assembly of the disparate elements of the shot than the quality of performance. Just as Dr Manhattan sees human beings and their feelings as merely some tricky jigsaw. (See also the affect on Star Wars once technology let George Lucas build his empire whatever way he liked.)

It also doesn't help how “false” a lot of the film feels. The comic is grounded in realism: heroes who get dementia and drunk, who get old and die. There's something still strange and disturbing about superheroes being drafted into the war in Vietnam. In the film, the Nam sequences felt especially contrived, more Photoshop than photo realism.

There's been some mocking of the prosthetics and President Nixon's nose. The film makes more of him – and Kissinger – than the comic does, which diminishes his impact. He's a weird caricature in the film, a credible world leader bent under terrible pressure when we glimpse him in the comic – where he never says a word. There's nothing in the comic I can think of that Nixon's estate might want to sue.

The film also gets in a gag about Americans not accepting a cowboy into the White House. To do this they fudge a better gag in the comic, where it's Robert Redford standing for election in 1988. Would Reagan have been well enough to stand in ’88? And surely the point about Redford is he offers an alternative to the hard-line Republicanism Nixon represents in this world. The film throws out the political reality in favour of a cheap gag.

Likewise, Ozymandias says in the film that he's “not a comic book villain”, when that's plainly what he is. In the comic its “republic serial villain” because in a world where there are real superheroes, they don’t feature in comics. Again, the film loses out by putting things so bluntly.

The comic is violent but this is more so: there are extended and bigger fight scenes, a man having his arms cut off where he's just quickly stabbed in the comic, Dr Manhattan not just disintegrating people but spattering them all over the ceiling.

While the comic shows sex and bosoms and a full frontal blue willy, in the film it feels much more like titillation. Like some of the swearing in the first series of Torchwood (or when I took over Benny) this desperate effort to appear more adult just makes it seem more adolescent. The sex scene between Dan and Laurie should have felt more like the one in Don't Look Now: no soft focus, unglamorous, tender.

But the film also pulls its punches. The scenes of devastated New York are much bloodier in the comic. Even the “clean” nuclear explosion would leave people burned and horribly disfigured. Perhaps this film plays to a modern audience's subconscious horror of 9/11 (I was surprised not to see the Twin Towers collapse in that final attack), but it didn’t seem horrific enough. We need to be utterly appalled by what Veidt has done for the moral conundrum of the last scenes to carry any weight. It's not enough in the film that one of those killed in New York is Rorschach's psychologist. The comic introduces a whole load of familiar faces, and we don't even know their names.

It's a bold film full of flickers of brilliance. This great long post suggests I didn't enjoy it when I largely did. But I keep thinking how it might have been done differently. How the same cast and crew made a better version. Just in a world not that different from our own...

Sara 2 Kingdom

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine announces I've written "The Drowned World" for release in July 2009. It will star Jean Marsh as the Doctor's old (and, er, dead) friend Sara Kingdom, and is a direct sequel to my Home Truths.

The same issue includes an as-ever-brilliant article by Andrew Pixley on how close Sara got to starring in her own Dalek TV series on American telly in the 60s. Cor.

And the reviews have generally nice things to say about some of my stuff:

"Smart and intriguingly structured, The Prisoner's Dilemma is an essential appendix to the Key 2 Time plays."

and

"[The Judgement of Isskar] is solid stuff, if becoming slightly convoluted in the second half as various insect and Martian factions squabble. It ends on a great cliffhanger leaving me eagerly awaiting the search for the next segment."

Matt Michael, The DWM Review, Doctor Who Magazine #406 (1 April 2009), p. 62.

SFX, meanwhile, gives Isskar an above-average 3 out of 5 stars.

"With heaps of intrigue and incident, it's lively stuff but the bizarre structure leaves it feeling like three separate stories welded together".

Saxon Bullock, RATEDmisc, SFX #179 (February 2009), p. 130.

In other news, issue #105 of Doctor Who Adventures features a comic strip written by me, "Secret Army". I've received my first copy of The Slitheen Excursion.

And tomorrow I'll be manning the Big Finish stall at Time Quest in Barking. Do say hello if you're there. And also if you're not.

Schoolgirl Milky Crisis…

…is the title of a new book by m’colleague Jonathan Clements, and an accompanying promotional blog. Best Name Of Anything Ever.

(And I have named characters "Zing Zang", "Georgina Wet-Eleven" and "Harmonious 14 Zinc"...)

Says Clemmo:

“I have been writing about Japanese comics and animation for almost two decades, taking potshots at anime, manga and related fields, spreading scurrilous gossip and telling tall tales. And my friends in the business didn’t seem to mind, as long as they had plausible deniability, which meant that sometimes, even though the real name of a work was obvious to everyone, I needed to call it something else.”

Jonathan Clements, Welcome to Schoolgirl Milky Crisis blog, 11 November 2008.

A-viking his way through the industry’s oddest stories, Clemmo positively sweats Opinion and Insight. It’s mad, it’s funny, it’s not-quite-explicitly rude. And I’m told it might yet feature a post called “Cat moves”, whose point-and-laugh subject is me.

The book is published by those splendid fellows at Titan, who are also publishing my Fire and Water.

By timely coincidence, YouTube has a trailer for the third series of Primeval, which will be on ITV1 at some point in the new year. There’s no clips of the one set in South Africa, which must just be an oversight. But I’ve read scripts and seen rough-cuts and generally been In The Room and important, and it is wholly fabtastic. Dinosaurs! Chasing pretty people! What is not to be in love with?

Gotta be larger than life

As well as jamming lasagne and booze down my head-hole, Psychonomy leant me comics on Saturday. The collected edition of DC: The New Frontier comes in two volumes – a bit odd considering it's just a six-issue run. Both volumes together aren't nearly as thick as DC's famous Watchmen.

In other ways, it's very reminiscent of Watchmen. It plays on twee nostalgia for the golden age of comics – all beefcake heroes and gee-golly earnest dialogue. The wheeze here – as with Watchmen – is that, as well as super villains, our heroes get entangled in real historical events. That makes the familiar archetypes problematic. The civil rights movement and the Cold War muddy up simple gradations of “good” and “bad”. Our heroes are faced with – and commit - “necessary” evils, the moments of bloody violence all the more shocking for being side-by-side with the cheesy clichés.

Like Watchmen, we reappraise the characters as we go, learning about them, seeing them change – getting the kind of development that's still pretty rare in the medium. Like Watchmen, the heroes must unite to stop the world being destroyed by a vast monster from hell, an End of Level Baddie that doesn't talk back and they have just have to Kill.

What this ostensibly has over Watchmen, though, is that it's not specially invented heroes here. It's Superman fighting in Korea, Batman being charged of UnAmerican Activities, Wonder Woman stitched up by Nixon. New Frontiers is a radical new origins story for the Justice League – that is, the gang of space heroes comprising Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and a whole bunch of their less-famous friends.

And that's where I found it difficult. There are a hell of a lot of less-famous friends crammed in here, and it's kind of assumed you know who they all are. One whole plotline revolves around a guy whose dad flew with Chuck Yeager but who keeps being cut out of the action. Only late on – when he gains super powers – did it occur to me that all the stalling would seem more clever had I recognised his name. He introduces himself early on as Hal Jordan – real name of Superman's less-famous friend, Green Lantern.

The comic is playing, probably cleverly, on the expectation of readers who already know Hal's name. But I didn't, so it kind of whooshed me by. Likewise, I assume the hero John Henry is some other DC character I'd just never heard of, or he’s related to one or somehow cleverly mirroring someone else... No, I didn't need anyone to explain.

This is something that Neil Gaiman's 1602 could have floundered on. The wheeze there is packing all Marvel’s famous characters into Elizabethan England – so the X-Men are hunted as witches, and so on. Gaiman wisely chose to focus on the more famous Marvel heroes. A gag of a spider not biting Peter Parker works because even relative comic-book dunces know the basic premise of Spider-Man.

New Frontiers works well at mixing the complex comic continuity with real and complex history. The bizarre clash of black and white heroism with murky politics gives the story real frisson. But often the clashes are just too bizarre. When the vicious thug Batman suddenly reveals that he didn't fall out with Superman, it works as a nice character thing. But when that about-turn also shows him teamed up with a mad-keen, cart-wheeling Boy Wonder, even Superman boggles:

Superman: “Bruce, you're such a cynic. Which begs the question, what's with the new look and the sidekick?”

Batman: “I set out to scare criminals, not children. As for the boy... Well, I guess we're just two lost souls who found each other.”

Darwyn Cooke, DC: The New Frontier, Volume II, chapter 11.

Okay, so he didn’t beat up on Superman, but we’ve seen him terrorising criminals and breaking a guy’s wrists. Having bedded the story in complex history, Robin feels a glibly, awkwardly shoehorned in.

I suspect my problem is that I'm less impressed by this squeezing in of so much continuity, though I can see it would reward more DC's faithful readers. New Frontiers is reminiscent of Watchmen, but it's not quite as smart and lacks the moments of meekness and humour that counterpoint all the muscular hero stuff. More than that, by creating its own superheroes and history, Watchmen need only refer to continuity when it suits the story.

New Frontiers is great in places and a very involving read. But its very selling point – that it uses DC’s own canon of heroes – is what makes it not quite work.

Prevarication

The BBC news site it full of interesting stuff right this minute (or perhaps it's just greener than the grass of my own writing chores...).

Lisa Jardine has written a very sensible analysis of the statistics relating to knife crime, which undercuts the hyperbolic furore whirling through the papers. I'm not for a moment downplaying the awfulness of any of the incidents themselves, but there's often a desperate streak in newspapers, playing up base urges of greed and fear to get us to notice.

(They of course argue that's it their job just to report stuff as widely as possible, that news is effectively a form of entertainment. But if the media won't take responsibility for the ethical value of their efforts, why should those they judge?)

Then there's this extraordinary time-lapse film from space of the moon circling the Earth. And the rediscovered dance track by Delia Derbyshire.

Nimbos let me know, since I had missed it, that Jamie Hewlett's Monkey will be the BBC's mascot for the Olympics, which is just a world of cool. A blog post from May explains the thinking and background, but misses off just how splendiferous Hewlett's stuff is. Beside the giddy joy of Tank Girl, I loved his work for Senseless Things - and still cherish the edition of Deadline which featured a two-page strip featuring the same characters. And then there was Hewligan's Haircut. And Fireball. And and and and...

And then Peter mentioned his friend Roo Reynolds - who is about to join the BBC - and especially his geeky lecture on how Lego is full of WIN.

All this and Dr Horrible. How am I meant to get any work done?

I have a name for my pain

M. rather marvellously smuggled me into the IMAX last night for a press screening of The Dark Knight. It's a huge, 2.5 hour epic full of thrill and excitement, and six whole scenes of especially IMAX-tastic hugeness. Golly.

Long-toothed readers of this blog may recall my review of Batman Begins for Film Focus, where I dared suggest the general cool marvellousness was a little dulled by the lack of good roles for women. Rachel, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal rather than Mrs Tom Cruise, seems to agree. She's now shacking up with Harvey Dent, the cool district attorney and white knight to the city – a man who's everything Bruce/Bats can't be.

But Harvey doesn't just want Bruce's girl, he also wants in on Batman's crusade to bring down the Gotham mob. The mob, led by my old mate Eric Roberts (well, I met him once), is a bit cheesed off by all this and then find themselves being made an offer they can't refuse by a kray-zee new kid called the Joker.

The late Heath Ledger's performance has been the focus for a lot of reviews so far, and it's an eye-popping, compelling and terrifying thing. Yes, Ledger should get an Oscar nomination, but then Nicholson should have had one for the same role 19 years ago. To my delight, there's no (single) explanation for where the Joker comes from here or what unhinged him. He's all the more appalling for not being explained. While Bats and Bruce and all their good-guy pals wrangle over how and when they can bend their own rules, Joker's an anarchic live-wire just in it for the explosions. The violence comes without warning; it's a shocking, brutal film and not all the regulars will be back for the third one.

As I argued with the first one, comic-book movies are all about reshuffling the established genre rules and conventions so that they come out looking new. The Dark Knight is a lot more complex, rich and full of strange moral ideas than it has really any need to be, which give the huge-scale set pieces and fast-cut fighting that much more of an edge.

It's still relentlessly male. There's really only two women in it besides Rachel: Jim Gordon's colleague Ramirez and his wife Barbara. And, I'd argue, both are there because of what they add to Jim, rather than having roles and motives of their own.

Yet it's notable that our regulars are faced with these reflections; their motives and behaviour is constantly being questioned by all sides. This doesn't bolster one particular viewpoint that comes with all the answers (as in Socratic dialogue) as to continually muddy the water. The film has plenty to say about vigilantes and civil liberties, but from lots of different voices. Batman and the goodies give their best to the cause, but the question hanging over them through it whether that best is good enough.

Batman Begins seemed to be riffing of stuff in old comics Year One and The Long Halloween. This nicks elements from The Dark Knight Returns and, I'd argue, The Killing Joke. Spider-Man has already done the hero as emblematic of the city at large, an inspiration to ever more kray-zee super-villains and yet also to the noble instincts of the city's people. There's a nice prisoner's dilemma late on in this (which I won't spoil here) that hangs on how Joker – and Batman – expect people to behave.

It reminded me of Midnight in that it's not just the predicament that's so horrifying but how characters react to it. The result, though, felt a bit too plot convenient rather than earned: two characters respond in way that's surprising because it's not consistent with what little we know about them...

That makes it sound like a criticism, but it's less a niggle as it having been swimming round my feeble brain all day. While I'm meant to be writing my own set-piece action adventure I'm tonguing the sore-tooth of the film's “message”. I'm not sure it has one. Does Batman win at the end? Are things any better for his having been involved? How thrilling, innovative and bold that such a mainstream movie doesn't seem to know...

Dinosaur-flavour custard

“On paper, it may have looked as though Wildcat was a no-brainer – sci-fi thrills for the junior audience – but in fact it was a decidedly dicey proposition. With the comic audience aging dramatically in the Eighties, it just didn’t seem as though there was a new generation coming through to pick up the habit. As a result, juvenile publications were dropping like flies and , in truth, it flew in the face of all the evidence to tailor a new publication to what was the once traditional eight to twelve-year-old target group.”

Graham Kibble-White, “Wildcat”, The Ultimate Book of British Comics, p. 285.

Fleetway’s Wildcat ran for just 12 fortnightly issues from 1988-89 and was “the last new traditional adventure comic (to date) to be launched in this country” (Kibble-White, p. 287).

Until now.

The DFC launched two weeks ago. It’s not a tie-in with films or telly or computer games or a newspaper. It’s not trying to flog you something. It doesn’t carry advertising and – amazingly – the first issue didn’t come with some precious free gift sellotaped to the cover.

Instead, it’s a subscriber only comic, delivered to your door every Friday in a distinctive red-and-yellow striped envelope. There’s a subscription offer where you get issues free, but it’s basically £3 per shot of 36 full-colour pages. Issue two arrived yesterday and, after a lot of prologueish scene-setting in issue one, it seems already to have hit its stride.

The contents page includes a running gag about what DFC might stand for – though this Times interview with the thing’s creator reveals it’s really the David Fickling Comic. And Fickling, who publishes Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time in the North, is the reason the headline strip is by Philip Pullman.

Illustrated by John Aggs, “John Blake” is about a ghost ship seen sailing about the Pacific – seeing it augers a sudden change in fortune. In issue two the Henderson family are out sailing round the world, when they’re suddenly caught in a unexpected tropical storm…

As you’d expect from Pullman, it’s a rich and involving story that gets going really quickly. It’s also quite scary and strange, and I was a bit surprised by Mr Henderson shouting “bastards” on page 7. But I’m already caught up in the story. And, like the best stuff I used to read (and watch) when I was eight-to-twelve, it feels a little like we’re getting away with something too adult here, that it’s almost not really suitable and Mum and Dad wouldn’t approve…

The other science-fiction adventure story is Kate Brown’s “The Spider Moon”, about Bekka Kiski’s diving exam in a strange and doomed sci-fi landscape. Somehow as yet unexplained, Bekka’s diving can save the world.

I love the artwork, and the story is playful as well as strange. Fickling talks in the Times interview about the Manga influence on this one. I can see what he means, but am also aware of how many people will shout, “But Manga just means ‘comics’”.

There are two school stories. “The Boss” by John Aggs and his mum sees a whole bunch of school kids involved in foiling a crime, all taking their lead from one organised kid who shows his authority by not wearing a blazer. Neill Cameron’s “Mo-Bot High” sees Asha arriving at a new school to discover everyone has Digital Mobile Combat-suits – or giant robots – with which to settle playground scores.

Both work on the wheeze of empowering the kids and both are distinctive and fun, though both are still setting up their stories at this point.

Dave Shelton’s “Good Dog, Bad Dog” is about two detectives in what looks like a 1930s American city… where everyone is a dog. It’s smart and funny, and nicely orchestrates some great slapstick set pieces – something I’ve not seen much in comics. The two detectives have just met up, caught two crooks and it looks like issue three will be a new adventure.

The Etherington Brothers’ “Monkey Nuts” really got going with issue two, in which Sid the newly unemployed tap-dancing monkey meets Rivet the newly unemployed robot coffee machine, just in time for the flashoom entrance of The Amazing Amazing, who’s going to flatten the whole town unless everyone submits to slavery. As Sid says in the last panel so far, “Do you think dancing will help?”

The other comedy strips are all one-pagers. James Turner’s “Super Animal Adventure Squad” is about “the world’s maddest mad scientist” stealing some cakes. Sarah McIntyre’s “Vern and Lettuce” and Jim Medway’s “At the Zoo” have both so far based themselves round terrible puns. Oh, and on the back page is Simone Lia’s “Sausage and Carrots”, a four-panel delight of weirdness.

With a competition page which leads to extra web content, a puzzle page and endorsements to draw your own comics, there’s plenty to get involved with, too.

All the stories are very different, which should mean there’s something for everyone here. It's a shame they're all part ones of ongoing series; it’d be nice to have an anthology series of one-off stories so that each issue offers something complete. And some of the part ones did feel a bit too prologuey, so it's hard to judge the strips just yet.

But this is a bold and exciting comic, and very much worth supporting. I am already looking forward to Friday.

Antediluvian heritage

Adam Grose's blog announces the not untimely publication of Flood, an anthology of one-page comic strips to raise money for the British Red Cross in the name of flood relief. It includes my first ever commissioned comic strip, "The Coral Invasion of London" - with art by Tony Suleri - which Adam posts as an inducement.

It's just £3.75 a copy and all in a good cause. Buy Flood now.

Persian automatic

I’d meant to read Persepolis for ages, but the new film version and not being able to think what else to get the Dr for an anniversary present finally got me buying a copy. I didn’t know that much about it till then; it was about Iran and it was meant to be good. Perhaps it would have something to do with the ancient city.

It’s a memoir by Marjane Satrapi, growing up during interesting times as the Shah falls, fundamentalism grips the country and then the long war with Iraq. It’s a keenly observed, often shocking, often very funny comic strip, narrated and drawn in deceptively simple style.

Yes, a comic strip. Just deal with it.

Iran is, obviously, a timely, provocative subject and the book is an insightful, personal view. But it’s more than that, and I think particularly effective because of its being a comic.

Alan Moore has argued that what sets comics apart from other media is the potential for juxtaposition. Satrapi is very good at gleaning the ironies from her mixed-up life. There’s a complex, compelling blend of personal incident and observation alongside a broader political and cultural history.

For example, her nervous Uncle Taher suffers a third heart attack at the sound of a grenade. Marjane and her auntie rush to the hospital and struggle to get past the bureaucracy. Her auntie needs permission to see her husband, and the director who can grant this turns out to be her former, “creepy window washer” – a ne’er-do-well doing fine under the wartime regime, a fundamentalist now who won’t even look at a woman.

And then… Oh, how do I quote from a comic strip? Here goes:

“After the director we went to see the chief of staff, Dr. Fathi.

Dr Fathi: ‘Ma’am, we’ll do what we can. We are terribly strapped at the moment.

‘Look in this room. They’re all victims of chemical weapons.

‘The Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.’

Marjane’s auntie, shouting: ‘Why are you telling me this?! I couldn’t care less. I want my husband to get well!’”

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, p. 122.

There’s a constant undercurrent of incredible violence. Deaths and beatings are part of daily life even before the war with Iraq. Marjane’s family are descended from the deposed royals (the surname “Satrapi” is a clue to that) and she goes to see her favourite uncle in prison the night before he is executed.

The frustrated anger at the regime and the constant sense of vulnerability and loss give the book an awful depth. Like Maus, the suffering is juxtaposed and made in any way bearable by funny and wry observance, petty human jealousies and foibles including the author’s own.

She feels awkward in the street one time, so reports an innocent man for making lude suggestions and gets him arrested. Or she and her babysitter conspire to chat up the next door neighbour. Her middle class, leftie parents still stick by social orders that define who can date who. After their next-door neighbours are flattened in an Iraqi raid – Marjane glimpses the mangled something that is left of their daughter, her age – they send her to study in Austria.

It’s again with the contrasts, Marjane a duck out of water who barely speaks the language. The richness and ease of the West sits uncomfortably with what we’ve already seen, and there’s something comic about the punk “rebellion” compared to Marjane’s parents smuggling posters of Kim Wilde. Marjanne stands to lose far more buying illegal pop music tapes in Iran than she does hash for her Austrian friends. The book as a whole is constantly probing, exploring and monkeying around with ideas of freedom and independence – what that means, what we do with it, what our obligations are. (Hence the title of this post, do you see?)

Marjane finds herself in the difficult, lonely state of the migrant: a misfitting foreigner who doesn’t ever quite get accepted by the new country; and changed by her sojourn so that she doesn’t fit at home any more. We see the colossal pressures she’s put under by petty racism and mean-mindedness; a far worse affect than the guilty parties can ever have considered. In fact, what with lying nuns and and a landlady who assumes she’s a whore, Marjane is lucky to survive her time away from home.

She names names as she details her clumsy assignations with boys: one who turned out to be gay; one who was a shit; the husband she should never have married. Yet she’s also often guarded about details in a way she’s not when describing torture and brutality. It surprised me when she admits to jealous sniping friends that, at 19, she’s lost her virginity. When and who with, I thought. And do I really want to flick back to see?

But what’s most extraordinary is how she makes the specific general. These are personal, individual experiences in a world so distant from our own, and yet it’s the tale of ordinary people with ordinary wants and feelings.

I think that easy empathy is helped by Marjane’s drawing style. It’s simplistic – deceptively so when you note the keenly observed cars and buildings – and high contrast, without shading or grey. Things are always either black or white (again a juxtaposition with what’s being shown). Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics argues that this simplification to the abstract makes the people depicted more universal – the less detailed, realistic and specific a drawing of a person, the more it becomes not just any but everyone.

This also makes it easy to print this film tie-in edition on ordinary paperback paper, with its rough pulpy feel and potential for yellowy lignin. (I looked into the feasibility of doing something with Adrian Salmon’s similarly high-contrast illustrations, but a Benny comic proved to be a more expensive proposition than a year of audios and books all together.) You might need to squint to read all the captions, but the format disguises this being a comic; it might be an ordinary, proper sort of book.

Only doing things an ordinary, proper book couldn’t do: showing not telling that we are not different, whatever war, religion and politics might try to claim.

Wet bits

Adam Grose has announced my inclusion in his forthcoming FLOOD comic, which features one-page strips and drabbles to raise money for flood charities.

My one-pager is called "The Coral Invasion of London", features some fine quality sci-fi motifs, and is illustrated by a fantastically talented fellow called Tony Suleri.

The FLOOD comic is not available to download or buy just yet - I'll holler again when it is.