Make Mine Marvel

Greetings True Believers.

You may recall that I, along with some like-minded and awesome chums, am currently partway through watching every episode of Doctor Who in order. We've nearly reached our first regeneration (SQUEE!). Well because one ludicrous, humongous challenge is never enough I have decided to undertake another.

I've been reading a lot of comics recently. Mostly The Walking Dead and Transmetropolitan. I love comics but ever since I became obsessed with Batman at the age of about twelve my comic reading has been a bit aimless, well apart from the pursuit of Batman titles (which always leaves me grinding my teeth at yet another huge game-changing crossover event).

On a whim I started reading the Fantastic Four from the beginning, then found myself seeking out contemporaneous Marvel comics (e.g. Ant-Man and Thor) to get a sense of the moment, if you will. I like to look at things in context.

I idly wondered if there was some sort of guide to the publication order of Marvel comics. I googled it. It was a fateful googling. I discovered Travis Starnes' The Complete Marvel Reading Order. "Challenge accepted" I tweeted flippantly. I had decided to read the Marvel Universe continuity in publication order.

I'm going to reserve the right to skip titles if find I don't like them as I don't see the point in slavishly reading something I'm not enjoying. Actually I was going to skip Ant-man because I think he's a bit ridiculous, but it turns out I really like him because he's a bit ridiculous.

I'll generally skip anything not connected with the main timeline. Titles set before or after (e.g. the 2099 series) I'll skip. I've already made a couple of exceptions to this rule though; Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and Conan.

At the time of writing I'm up to mid 1963 and finding it all very enjoyable. They are an interesting reflection of their time, prominently featuring Cold War concerns, radiation, communism, an obsession with transistors, magnetism and science in general. It's interesting to see how some attitudes have changed since the sixties too...


It's also interesting to see Stan "The Man" Lee and his colleagues refining their style as they launch new titles and the characters and books gradually become more sophisticated. I reckon there are some good lessons for writers here, and I may be posting about this some in the future.

If anyone cares to join in, or is already under way, feel free to say "Howdy!".

Excelsior!

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning...

A brief note on The Sound of Drums mainly to say that I'll comment in full once the final episode has been broadcast. I normally prefer to consider multiple parters as a whole (yes, I know I covered 'Utopia' on it's own but... my blog my rules, OK?).

I will say though that John Simm's Master is a triumph. A dark and twisted anti-Doctor able to do in one episode what the preceding three series and two Christmas specials worth of villains had failed to do - that is to shut the Doctor up and wipe the grin off his face. This Master visibly rejoices in chaos and destruction. The final close up on the Doctor, old and infirm, restrained by Mrs Saxon and the Master, is the most chilling image the series has yet offered us.

Good luck Martha, please look after him.

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In other news I continue to be totally useless at getting any work done. I intend to get a lot done this week and next week (it's another weeks holiday - yes it's writey-week again!) and hopefully kick start my routine again. Ever since we got the car everything seems to have gone to pot. What the connection is I've no idea.

Speaking of the car I'm driving up to Sedgley to meet Emma on Saturday morning. This will be my longest journey yet. Spare a thought for me with only Mo Dutta to keep me company!

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I got back into reading 2000AD at the start of this year for the first time in nearly ten years. While I've been enjoying it enough to keep buying it there's not really been much cause for me to mention it here... until now.

There are two new strips in the comic, just a few weeks into their run. Both are written by Pat Mills, one of them is excellent. Defoe concerns the adventures of a zombie exterminator in an alternative seventeenth century England overrun with the undead. Defoe is a character who seems to have much in common with the best anti-heroes of the western genre. He is a war veteran who lost his family in a terrible tragedy with a gruff demeanor and a nice line in monosyllabic answers. Such a character translates into this warped vision of historic London admirably and has quickly become the first story I read every week. Sorry Joe.

Elsewhere in the Galaxy's Greatest I've become quite fond of Nikolai Dante though it often seems like little more than an excuse to print nudie drawings of ladies. Judge Dredd has been pretty good and shows signs of something really exciting coming up. Detonator X was dull, Savage was excellent (though he doesn't look like Stanley Baker anymore, which is bad), Robohunter was very funny with beautiful art and Greysuit, that second new Pat Mills strip, is a tedious retread of Mach 1, which was a tedious retread of the Six Million Dollar Man, which was just tedious.

The Megazine's comic content has been outshone totally by it's non-fiction features, interviews and the excellent film reviews. Still the current Anderson story is good and Blood of Satanus III looks gorgeous thanks to the wonderfully wrong, wrong, wrong artwork of John Hicklenton.

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In fact, despite resisting for some years now I've recently been reading the odd comic. I was always more a fan of specific characters in the past so whilst I may have read every issue of 'Tec between about 1986 and 2003 I'd never tried Transmetropolitan or Bone. My slavish loyalty to the Dark Knight has finally been defeated now, thanks to getting burned once too often by DC's (and Marvel's) insistence on crossover 'events'.

It was a great pleasure therefore to enjoy book one of Warren Ellis's excellent Transmetropolitan collection. It's not often something stays with me so long after I read it yet I find snatches of Spider's wisdom flit into my head with surprising regularity. I will certainly be reading the rest of the series and looking for other interesting comics of the last ten years (feel free to offer suggestions).

It's liberating to finally be able to go into a comic shop without buckling under the crushing weight of responsibility that loyalty to certain characters or publishers can impose upon you.

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Finally a note to say if you missed Angry, Sexy and Working Class on Radio 2 on Friday night then you can listen to it via the stations interweb site and should doso at the earliest opportunity as it was excellent. Narrated by Christopher Eccleston it's a series about British New Wave cinema of the late fifties and early sixties. Lot's of soundbites from key people of the period and a timely reminder that British Cinema should not be an oxymoron and certainly shouldn't follow the crowd.

Look out for it on Friday nights at 7pm.

Q) How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

I impulse bought Writing Magazine in WH Smiths today. In spite of it's Womans Weekly-ish cover it does have some interesting tit bits. It's always educational to hear the insights and advice of other writers.


More educational were the poor proofing and spelling errors in a magazine about writing. Billy Piper? Another article uses an extract from a Katie Fforde book but can't quite decide how to spell her surname so alternates between a single and double use of the letter 'f'.


I'll stick to the Writers Handbooks from now on I think.

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The Counter is steadily rising down there under the 'Downloading Communism' poster (thank you Keith Topping). This reflects well on my work since I entered the 'blogosphere'.

The sad reality is that I get at least four hits a day from people searching for pictures of Kirsten Dunst (intel by Statcounter). I was thinking of removing the picture but why worry? It's all about footfall in this game. Apparently.

If you have come here looking for Kirsten Dunst she's just a little bit further down!

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Back at work since Monday but still doing my hour a day. An hour doesn't seem a lot but at least I'm making slow progress instead of no progress. Concentrating on a submission for the SFX Pulp Idol competition at the moment. I'm halfway through the draft. It will be finished this week (even at an hour a day!) without any worry.

In other news Emma and I went to the Comics Expo in Bristol on Sunday; despite the best efforts of biblical weather. It really inspired me to have a go at writing a comic script. With that in mind I've had the germ of an idea for a 2000AD Future Shock, the ideas really come thick and fast when you're writing every day.

Also at the Comics Expo I was lucky enough to meet Paul Cornell. They say you should never meet your heroes but I found him to be an enthusiastic and friendly man perfectly willing to indulge a nervous, damp and probably incoherent fan. This was the perfect end to a week of concentrating on my writing. There are people out there doing it every day and he's one of them.

I know I could be too.

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I've discovered a web site called Story War. You can post short fiction or poems on this site and people read and rate them. These ratings are tallied up into a league table of stories. This means you can watch your story get voted up and down the table at the slightest whim of a bored index finger. Sounds horrific doesn't it?

It's blighted by some conflict between users at the moment but I've put a few old stories up there out of curiosity. It's well worth a look.

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A) Practice, practice, practice.