The Fractal Hall Journal

Hello, readers, and a happy new year to all. A proper one this time, rather than the perfunctory one from the other day.

Plenty of ups and downs over the past few months all over the place, which is a bit of an understatement. I certainly can’t remember a New Year starting so, you know, unpredictably. Where the Journal’s concerned, I think I’ve just about got ahead of the problems that kicked off in November. Unsurprisingly, blogging’s a habit like any other, and you get out of it after a few weeks of not doing it.

Part of the problem is trying to find somewhere to start. It’s not like plenty of things haven’t kicked off in the realms of the nerdish, from whatever the heck is going on in comics to the inauguration of perhaps the most important public figure on the planet: the 11th Doctor.

I’m really looking forward to Matt Smith on Who while dreading Tennant’s departure, and for whatever reason Smith’s arrival is causing a lot of- discomfort, I suppose is the word. Which is a good thing. The Doctor should never be a completely comfortable character, and Tennant’s made it very easy for the audience to be comfortable with him.

On a slightly related point, do you know the number one thing I fucking detest about the internet? When the very first thing any commentator feels the need to add onto any post, be it blog, twitter or fucking Facebook status, is a dismissive comment about the content.

For example:

Jimmy Fanboy is excited about matt smith as who!!!

John McFucknuts says: Eh, I don’t like him. Won’t be watching.

You know what I mean. A terse, pointless and uncorroborated one liner that adds nothing to the conversation. A little dig that says more about someone’s need to be noticed than to actually contribute. The Doctor thing was just the most obvious recent example.

I don’t mind disagreement. Not at all. By all means, should anyone disagree with me on anything, well, that’s why Comments are On. But at least try and make it look like a conversation. Facebook and its ilk are the worst perpetrators, because if you post a blog you’re asking for interaction. If you’re just telling the world what you’re happy about, it seems really mean that the first thing so many of your Fake Internet Friends want to do is kill your mood.

I know, I know. Mean? The internet? Heavens forefend.

I’m reminded of two parallel examples, one recent and one from a while ago that annoyed me so much it’s stayed with me. MightyGodKing notes that a drum and base track- Propane Nightmares by Pendulum- would be good to use in a trailer for a Flash movie. My first thought on listening to the track was to disagree. Not to jump into comments and let the world know that with a one sentence dismissal, mind, just to disagree. I don’t like drum and base, and I don’t really like the track.

But after listening to a while, I found myself agreeing with him. He’s right, it would do the job perfectly. And I found the song growing on me a bit. That kind of thing isn’t my cup of tea, but I can appreciate the merit of a piece of work that’s had some skill applied to it.

John Scalzi once posted a YouTube clip of Travis Barker overlaying drums onto the somewhat duff Soulja Boy track Crank That (incidentally, Trigg, if you’re reading this I meant to send you this link ages ago.) I like R’n'B even less than drum and base, and I’ve never been that big a fan of Blink-182, but even so the Barker video is brilliant. It’s a fantastic example of a different spin the application of specific talent can put on something.

Needless to say, the comments on the posts are a list of banal denials and disagreements. I don’t know how Scalzi does it, incidentally. It must be like having Statler and fucking Waldorf appended to everything you write.

I didn’t really want the first post back to be so negative, but it’s got on my nerves recently and I needed to get it off my chest. Expect tomorrow’s post to be a little bit brighter.

     Feed

Well that was a close one, readers. Turns out I didn’t have Ebola Gulf-A after all, but whatever I did have has burned out my blogging mojo, because I’ve started writing this post four times now, and haven’t managed to get further than the first hundred words. Let’s see how I do this time.

I mean, it’s not like there’s a shortage of things to talk about. Like Russell T. Davies’ new book (well, collection of emails), “The Writer’s Tale”. I’ve read the first couple of chapters of this particularly heavy tome, and so far it’s been fascinating. As well as having some candid information about the nuts and bolts of getting Doctor Who made, because it’s made up of the typed back-and-forth between him and Benjamin Cook it’s almost like going through someone else’s inbox. It’s particularly interesting how similar his writing here is to his demeanour in television and print interviews. If nothing else, the man is exceptionally enthusiastic about damn near everything. If you’re a Whovian of any stripe, you really need to read this.

I was going to do a bit on violence in comics, and in popular culture generally, but to be honest people’s reactions to the subject (sometimes valid, sometimes not) have convinced me to shelve it until I can think a bit more clearly about it.

I will say this, though: the phrase “torture porn” has been thrown around a bit in recent years. In some ways, depending on what exactly we’re talking about, I think it’s a misnomer. I mean, I know I’ve used the phrase as a criticism in the past, and to be honest in retrospect I think I was wrong. What it comes down to is that the creators of either the Hostel films or the Saw series didn’t write them to get people off. They just didn’t. Yet that’s what the “porn” tag suggests.

Horror fiction has a very specific function. I am absolutely certain we get attracted to darker types of fiction, be it Silence of the Lambs, Dexter, or even Lovecraft, not because we want to actually eat human flesh/slice people up/summon slimy tentacled nethergods to consume our very Reality, but because it’s a relatively safe way of facing our worst fears, and our own inevitable death. It’s no different to the way comedy makes us face our own pomposity, absurdity or prejudice, and for that reason it doesn’t really surprise me that comedic films and shows get criticised almost as much as slasher flicks do.

Let me put it this way: the Saw franchise is hugely profitable. They are relatively consistant in quality (regardless of what initial value anyone may place on that quality, and besides, compare Saw IV to, say, Halloween IV, and tell me the series doesn’t buck the usual nosedive trend of endless horror sequels), cheap to make, and every film so far has made over $100 million dollars world wide. Leaving the DVD sales to the side for a moment, that means at least 10 million people on the planet have seen at least one of the films. Does anyone honestly want to tell me that these 10 million people wanted to see it because they get off on the violence? Of course not. They went because they wanted to be scared, and that isn’t the function of pornography.

When it comes down to it, people like to be scared. And that kind of catharsis isn’t necessarily damaging.

Wow, this week’s Google hits are going to be interesting.

     Feed

A little bit swamped today, so just a single item for you good people. And it’s a real WTfuckingfuckingF? moment, from Ain’t It Cool News:

“Screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh (’Die Hard With A Vengeance,’ ‘Jumanji,’ ‘The Saint,’ ‘Armageddon,’ ‘The Punisher,’ ‘Next’) is developing an AMC series based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1992 sci-fi novel ‘Red Mars’.”

The guy who co-wrote Armageddon. And The Punisher. And the fucking Saint. Producing one of the few true hard-SF classics of the past twenty years.

Utilising the kind of reasoning on display here, in terms of the assignment of individuals with a certain skill-set to important works of fiction, can I be the first to request a television adaptation of Asimov’s Foundation by the production team behind Battlefield Earth, a remake of Seven Samurai where the cast is made up entirely of subtitled monkeys dressed in garb appropriate to the English Restoration period, and a radical reboot, a reimagining, of the Epic of Gilgamesh by an illiterate alcoholic whom, after spending the last twenty years literally drinking nothing but White Lightning, is blind and unable to stop soiling himself constantly and then rubbing it in his own face and the faces of anyone near to him.

     Feed

Secret Invasion: Fuck me, is it still going on? Haven’t they invaded by now? Isn’t this better characterised as Secret Occupation? Secret War Of Attrition?

Doctor Who at the Hugo Awards: Meant to write about this at the time, but forgot to, and now I can’t recall if I had anything interesting or longish to say about it, so I’ll keep it brief. Firstly, after watching all the Battlestar episodes to date, Moffat’s Who episodes beating Ron Moore’s show for three years running is a spectacular achievement, because Battlestar is some of the best television writing full stop, never mind in SF. The Pegasus episodes in particular, because that stuff is very, very good. And very, very harrowing. However, the Razor TV movie didn’t hold together quite as well as other episodes in Series 3 (regardless of apparent fan reaction to that series), so wasn’t that much of a challenge to Blink.

Secondly, the real challenge to Moffat’s episode was actually Paul Cornell’s Human Nature/Family Of Blood two-parter, and it really should’ve won. I mean, Blink was funny and brilliant, but Cornell’s just pips it, thanks in no small part to David Tennant and Jessica Hynes (Daisy in Spaced, of course), who were extraordinary.

And speaking of the Hugos, it must have been a poor year for film if Stardust was really the best long-form genre flick from ‘07. It was good, but Sunday afternoon family film good, not award-winning good. Other recent winners include Pan’s Labyrinth, Serenity and The Lord of the Rings (all of them), and it’s nowhere near as good as them. Hell, it isn’t even in the same league as recent nominees, like The Prestige and Spirited Away.

And to think Transformers wasn’t even nominated. Scandalous.

Knight Rider: And you can bet this show is never getting nominated either. I love that Mustang, but to be brutally honest the pilot was shit and the series looks worse. The thing is, this:

A big part of season one is going to be why Kitt is here with this group, why is he learning, and why is an artificial intelligence in this car. There is a bigger mythology to it and what I wanted to do was bring some from the original and update it. It’s been 25 years since Knight Industries was seen so what’s happened to them and where have they gone? [from an io9 spoiler post]

Sounds like a good idea in the right hands. But oh dear Lord are these hands the wrongest hands imaginable.

An observation of possible interest to the kind of nerd that even other nerds like to pick on: I’ve finally finished the big chunk of work I mentioned the other day, and it’s the first completed thing written entirely on my Linux-infused laptop.

Those who’ve been hanging round the Hall for a while may recall a few months ago I attempted to salvage my utterly out-of-date yet faithful and broadly functional old warhorse, a Thinkpad that got me through University. I didn’t really want to get rid of it and have to shovel out money for a new one, because it was only really going to be used as a word processor, and I wanted to see if Linux really was getting more user friendly.

The main problem with the plan was that the hardware’s a little too old to run Ubuntu, which I’ve been told is the dead simple Linux. Fluxbuntu and Xubuntu both ran on it, but the former wouldn’t recognise a USB memory stick and I didn’t really want to have to fudge around that much to get it working. Xubuntu ran really slowly at first, but I managed to set up some swap space on the hard disk that largely took care of the problem. It doesn’t really load any faster than XP did (old system, though, so not surprising) but it certainly hibernates and shuts down quickly, and there’s no sudden slow-downs or apparently random accessing of the hard drive, which is practically worth the bother on its own.

The USB stick works fine, which is the most important thing because printing duties will have to be done by transferring the files over to the Windows PC. I can’t be bothered faffing around with getting an internet or network connection on the laptop, and I think I’m better off without the distraction. Besides, I think the AbiWord writing package is just about all the creaky old system can handle.

To be honest, I wouldn’t call the Linux packages that will run on this relatively old system user friendly at all. I’ve just about got enough knowledge to do the minimum of what I need to do, but that’s it. Unless the more modern Linux packages are more user-friendly by a good distance (like, light-years distance) then I can’t see Linux ever being a realistic choice for most. But you never know, they might be.

     Feed

I’m nearing the end of a sizeable piece of work at the moment, and it’s been been a pigging annoyance for weeks. But I’m tantalisingly close to finishing. I don’t know about you lot, but there’s always number of ways that let me know when I’ve reached this point.

A) Suddenly, everything in the kitchen needs a wash.

B) The small hole in the shed must be patched up immediately.

C) My faithful old acoustic guitar gets cleaned, polished and the strings changed for the first time in about two years.

Things were complicated further last weekend by Virgin 1’s Klingon-themed Star Trek episode marathon and MTV Two’s “Vintage 300″, the first time in the history of music television where 90% of the tracks were actually really good. I lost a couple of hours to the latter, and I hate the music channels. Seriously, they had Free tracks, Bad Company tracks, and lots of other tracks that didn’t feature Paul Rodgers.

This is likely of interest to the very small subsection of humanity who like Star Trek and also 70s blues rock vocalists from Middlesbrough.

I bring this up as a way of saying things are likely to be a little light here at the Journal till after the weekend, but let me attempt to distract you from your inevitable disappointment, as always, with a picture of my cats:

You love it.

     Feed

Today’s Arthurian Snark, from Wikipedia (I know, I know):

“…[H]e was a peerless warrior who functioned as the monster-hunting protector of Britain from all internal and external threats. Some of these are human threats, such as the Saxons he fights in the Historia Brittonum, but the majority are supernatural, including giant cat-monsters, destructive divine boars, dragons, dogheads, giants and witches.”

So, would you like a film about this Arthur, or the guy from the castle once again going off hunting for a carpenter’s drinking recepticle while his cock of a best mate knobs his wife? I bring this up because BBC Wales are currently filming a new series which is essentially the Adventures of Teen Arthur and Teen Merlin, i.e. SmallCamelotVille. The Welsh: We Do It To Ourselves, We Really Do.

Speaking of superhero films (and in doing so now, this post becomes the 100th entry into the Journal’s “Comics” category. Huzzah!), as we have been doing a lot recently, one I’ve not mentioned here is next year’s Billy Batson and the Legend of Shazam, in danger of not featuring on anyone’s radar. Captain Marvel is a bit of a difficult one to translate to the screen, I would imagine. On the other hand, I actually thing that the title sounds kind of right, has the correct weight of playfulness and bluster. I think it might absolutely work as an 80s kid’s adventure type film, like a mix of The Goonies and Big. What absolutely isn’t going to work is a Hollywood horror remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Just when you think the film industry can’t possibly get any stupider.

Battlestar spoilers ahead.

Just watched the third series episode with the strike on the fuel refinery ship. I was skeptical at first, because, you know, Americans talking about labour relations doesn’t usually bode well. Baltar, the closest the series has at the moment to Amoral Irredeemable Baddie, gets cast as the Marx figure, writing influential revolutionary pamphlets from jail, which struck me as a little less than even-handed.

However, the episode really did win me over, stressing the appalling conditions the workers had to operate in, and how intrenched the class system is becoming in the exiled fleet. I was expecting a full-on condemnation of industrial action, which was somewhat prejudicial of me, because the writers did a brilliant job of balancing up the different sides of the debate.

The heart of dilemma, of course, is the strike eventually being led by Chief Tyrol. He had to act, but he’s military personnel. More than that, he’s military personnel during events that could lead to the total annihilation of the human race. The fuel workers have to work in terrible conditions, but it isn’t for the benefit of, for example, the bank accounts of the upper class, but the survival of humanity. Yet, as the show makes clear, it’s only the working class who get the shitty jobs.

For a while, I thought they were going to do something to really screw up Admiral Adama, but the resolution was just perfect. Adama had to make it clear to the Chief that he couldn’t tolerate orders being construed as optional, while at the same time agreeing to meet the worker’s demands. Sure, he comes across as an overbearing authoritarian, but that’s in keeping with his history and his current role, and besides, the best thing about the series is how every single character has deeply disturbing flaws as well as virtues.

I notice some online chatter about how the latter half of the third season wasn’t taken very well by the fans, because in an attempt to draw in more viewers they slowed down on the overarching stories in favour of done-in-one standalones. Now, I don’t get the problem. I’ve really enjoyed the standalones, and I think they’ve been necessary for a number of reasons.

The series has been a non-stop rollercoaster since the original mini-series. There’s so much going on I think it benefitted from a little breathing room. It certainly hasn’t been any less intense, dealing with themes of religious persecution, racism, social class, murder, betrayal, and a fuck-ton more. Also, because of the unrelenting pace up until now, it’s been essential to understand who the characters are through a series of episodes that have dealt with cast members who’s characters aren’t always explored, or who’s screen time gets split up into the odd scene here and there between the action sequences. Helo, Starbuck, Apollo and Tyrol in particular have all been served well by this.

Also, actor James Callis putting on what sounded like a stereotypical Yorkshire farmer accent to represent Baltar’s unsophisticated origins was a bit of a surprise. They should shove the cast of Heartbeat on one of the ships to represent diversity, as if one of the Twelve Colonies were Planet The North. Of course, as the Ninth Doctor once said, lots of planets have a North.

     Feed

I mentioned yesterday that I prefer Cyclops to Wolverine in the X-Men, although most people can’t seem to stick him. I guess I just think he’s got a cool power. His personality is a little dull, sure, but that really is the fault of the writers. Because you need that kind of dullish leader-character, the person who keeps everything together; the Nico in Runaways, the Jack in Lost. You remove that character from the team dynamic and, like a plot-vacuum, someone else steps in to the breach, and all you end up doing is watering down that character, whether it’s a neutered Logan in X-Men 3 or an edgeless Sawyer in the latter part of That Weird Island Show.

Grant Morrison, as always, handles the character best, by realising that an uncompromising idealist in the Marvel U, one that believes completely in Xavier’s dream, that believes he will trumph in any situation regardless of the odds, must have one personality characteristic above all others. He’d have to be completely fucking barmy. The “ice-cold lunacy” Wolverine refers to in the very first Morrison issue. It’s a great spin, a way of making the character compelling while retaining the idealism, and also goes someway to explaining the whole leaving the mother of his child for the woman she was cloned from plot point of the 80s, a character twist meant to make the boring character more interesting but ultimately kind of broke him.

Morrison’s take also allowed for an interesting comparison between Scott Summers and the Hairy Short Guy, examining the way their relationship could oscillate between friendship and antagonism. It led to the Assault on Weapon Plus storyline that had him and Logan team up for a mismatched buddies on a mission vibe, like a mutant Lethal Weapon. And for future reference, I would absolutely pay cold, hard cash to watch a Wolverine/Cyclops road trip flick.

Right, what else has tweaked the radar recently? Looking forward to Hellboy 2, finally landing this side of the Pond on Thursday. I know I had a bit of a go at the original film a couple of weeks ago, but this one looks like Del Toro has more of a grip on what he wants to do. I think I’m a little more used to the idea that it is Del Toro’s world rather than Mignola’s, and with that in mind I’m interested to see what kind of original take he has on it. I watched the first one last week, and while I don’t disagree with the negative things I’ve written about it (it really doesn’t quite hold together), what it gets right, it gets very right, and ultimately it’s a fun, engaging, good natured film, which bodes well. Ron Perlman was born to play the role, and John Hurt was brilliant too. And the sequence set in 1944 is absolutely brilliant, really spot on, and I hope the second film takes its cue from that.

And speaking of live action, BBC 4’s been showing a lot of the old 60s Batman series. I keep forgetting they’re on, so I haven’t managed to catch a whole one, but I caught the end of the one with the Green Hornet and Kato in it. It is beyond strange to watch Bruce Lee turn up in Batman. I’ve also watched a few YouTube clips of Kevin Smith doing his lecture series, ones where he mentioned his abortive attempts at writing screenplays for The Six Million Dollar Man and Green Hornet. The idea of Smith doing Green Hornet is really laughable, and it’s not really surprising the pitch was based in the 90s. The infamous First Wave of John Peters-driven superhero movies led to so many crazy properties being thrown round on the grounds that any of that shit would make money, regardless of whether the world really wanted a film version of the Lone Ranger’s grand-nephew.

Of course, what’s even crazier is that now were in the Second Wave, shit is still being flung just to see what sticks, and now Seth Rogen’s on writing duties. This is how insane Hollywood is. Kevin Smith writes about Superman’s sex life, so obviously he’s the man who should do Green Hornet, regardless of suitability. And when he can’t do it, they employ another funny fat guy on the grounds that, I don’t know, he also writes films with lots of naughty words in them.

     Feed

Holy crap do I want to own an Alien/Predator chessboard. I have no idea where this sudden need for overpriced AVP tat is coming from, but boy is it intense.

I also notice io9 reporting an American live-action remake of Akira. Oh no oh no oh no. Is not going to work. Whinge whinge whinge.

In nicer news, getting through the latter half of Series 3 of Battlestar Galactica. It’s been awesome to see Dean Stockwell, Al Calavicci from Quantum Leap, turn up again, this time as a bad guy. Reminds me of how creepy he was as Devil-Al in that QL episode with Stephen King in it. Damn, I loved that show, and damn the show’s final episode was shitty. I really hope Galactica doesn’t screw the pooch when it comes to an end, because the rest of it’s been so very good.

With all the other superhero films doing so well, it’s going to be interesting to see how the X-Men franchise pans out in the next couple of years. It’s really the series that proved the viability of a new approach to rubber-trouser characters, in terms of faithfulness to the themes and stories of the original material, and a way of taking the best bits of what went before. Sure, Blade is technically the first of the successful comic book adaptations, but that really is in spite of the original rather than because. And I like the Tomb Of Dracula stuff.

If I were being pessimistic, I’d say I don’t have a whole lot of hope with the Magneto prequel. First of all, you’re not likely to find a young actor as good as Ian McKellan to take over the role, and someone of the calibre of, say, Hayden Christensen isn’t going to be able to handle what will inevitably be a pretty dark film. It was never going to be all bright pink flower-bunnies, but after The Dark Knight you can bet the message Hollywood will be taking from the public reaction is nightmarish, unrelenting grim is what’s required. There’s too much scope to mishandle this one.

Wolverine, on the other hand, had got Hugh Jackman going for it. The stupidest thing about X-Men 3 was the way Cyclops was killed off for essentially being a boring goody-goody leader type, only to be immediately replaced by a neutered Logan in the exact same role. A prequel means angry loner Logan, hopefully with a dollop of the sinister slaughter from X-Men 2. Also, Deadpool, and who doesn’t want to see a cinematic Deadpool? I just hope they use some of Grant Morrison’s take on the Weapon X programme; after all, there was a split-second shot of a “Weapon Plus” vial in The Incredible Hulk. Also, I don’t notice any stinkers on director Gavin Hood’s IMDB page, in the way that Brett Ratner’s previous convictions correctly indicated a screw-up.

Negatives? Well, Morrison aside I’ve never liked the Weapon X stuff. Gambit’s in it. The last X-Men film was poor and allegedly plagued with studio meddling, so is that going to play out this time too?

Wolverine’s a funny old character. First time I saw him was in Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends when I was but a lad. He used his claws to make an impromptu kebab. So I kind of missed out on the edgy killer persona that so captivated a generation. Then he turned up in a few places- a Hulk comic, Spider-Man, a few other things- and he was, frankly, a bit of a dickhead. I must have missed out on the nuance of his mysterious loner thing, but then he was a short-arse in yellow lycra with a daft haircut who was being a twat to Peter Parker. I couldn’t really see the attraction, and to make it worse he turned up in every fucking issue of every fucking comic during the 90s.

I wouldn’t say I ever really warmed to the character, but he certainly bugged me less as time went on. And thanks to Jackman’s performance in the first film, I finally understood where the character was coming from. It was properly surprising, really, but I ended up rooting for him, in particular during the aforementioned rampage in the mansion in the second film. Funny how things change, but that really goes to show how good Jackman did at grounding the character, leaving me more optimistic than not for the solo film.

Still prefer Cyclops, though.

     Feed

I notice Marvel’s got a Saxon poncing round with Excalibur in this week’s comics.

</Interminable Weekly Arthurian Snark>

In other news, modern design as applied to the humble drinks flask has brought the field of liquid containment immesurably further than it stood all those years ago when I had a plastic thing with a picture of M.A.S.K. on it. Speaking of which, stuff GI JOE, I want a motion picture event based around that 80s franchise, with Adam Baldwin as Matt Trakker, Hollywood’s All-Purpose Asian Guy John Cho as Bruce Sato and a darker, edgier T-BOB. Because I just can’t get enough of transforming vehicles.

And Spectrum’s got such sooh-per vih-hision. Muh muh muh muh, MASK.

My God, I think I may have found my life’s purpose; the pursuit of a faithful film adaptation of this lost gem, with Boulder Hill and everything.

But back to the flask. The heat retention ability of the Thermos® is nothing short of revolutionary, and it doesn’t leak. It’s what living in the 21st Century is all about, folks.

Anyway, I ended up bashing the smaller model and decide to upgrade. Only the 1L version is a hell of a lot bigger in real life than it looks in the box. Seriously, you could refuel a Boeing with the fucker. Plus, it means I’m getting through a litre of coffee a day. I’m not a hundred percent certain why I bring this whole flask thing up, except maybe to explain why posting is likely to get a little odd, then sporadic, then stop entirely when the palapatations assplode my heart.

While we’re waiting, let’s get our geek on.

• I’ve had a lot of good things to say about The Dark Knight, so here’s a bad thing. Comic book movies- well, movies period- aren’t really any good with their portrayal of women. The Dark Knight isn’t particularly exploitative, I don’t think, beyond Bruce Wayne’s dating habits as a cover for the Bat missions. The problem is how women are essentially an irrelevance in the film. Wayne’s mother is nothing more than an afterthought (hell, even Thomas Wayne got screen time in the first one), and Rachel Dawes is the definition of a pointless character. Or rather, a character who’s only point is to die and motivate the male characters. She’s subordinate to every man in the film, and only drives the plot by dying. They shove her right into the refridgerator, then nuke it, Spielberg-style. I know the problem’s caused mainly by faithfulness to almost 70 years worth of man-centric storytelling, but that’s just not a good enough excuse anymore.

• Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, does far better gender-wise. A little shaky when it comes to race, maybe, but points for having a Latino lead character. Veeeeery heteronormative, though. I’ve finally started to catch up, finishing Series Two and starting on Series Three. Bloody hell, this is grim stuff. And incredibly close to the bone, what with its use of insurgents, bombings and prisoner torture. I’ll probably have more to say after I’ve watched a bit more.

• I’m just finishing the sixth Rebus novel, Mortal Causes. It looks like Ian Rankin’s comics writing debut will be happening at the new Vertigo Crime imprint rather than as a Hellblazer story, which may be for the best. After all, while I’ve got no idea whether the man can do horror fiction or not, he can write the shit out of crime stuff. I’ll probably do a round-up of the Rebus series once I’ve finished with them. As Rankin himself says in the foreword, Mortal Causes is certainly the first of the “grown-up” novels, in that there’s less of an emphasis on a good-gosh-whodunnit twist than on the lives and motives of the police officers and the criminals. Pretty grim, too.

• Incredibly, it’s been over two months since I picked up any comics, and over a month since I got the first JMS Thor hardcover (have I written about that yet? Can’t remember. Anyway, very good, very epic, fantastic art and bound to be cocked up once it stops being a self-contained series and starts getting all crossovery). I still need to plug a few single issue gaps, like the last issue of Casanova and the last couple of All-Star Supermen, but apart from that I think I’m pretty much dedicated to the waiting-for-the-trade thing. Thank you, Comics Companies, for being so crap over the past year with one thing or another and making the decision so easy.

• This post has turned all too negative. Let’s go look at pictures of M.A.S.K. toys instead.

     Feed