I've cut down on how many comics I get lately - the obvious financial reasons don't intersect well with rising comics prices, and even beyond that there's a bit of a lull underway in the artform/industry anyway these past few months. But yesterday I picked up four weeks' worth, as well as having this week dropped in on a couple of libraries I've not visited in ages and found a stack of collections*. Not all superheroes, there are some crime ones and a goth sitcom thing, but mostly. And I've realised something - third-rate superhero comics are my celebrity mags. I can read a collection in twenty minutes or so, and if it doesn't improve my life in any meaningful way, I find it soothing nonetheless. And if it doesn't stand up by itself, it feeds into that vast tapestry that is a shared universe, just like the exclusive nightclubs of London and LA form a shared universe for a Heat reader; this would explain also why I can't continue reading a book or watching a TV show which I don't think is very good, but can carry on with a comic, so long as no expenditure is involved beyond time ie it's from the library. And fundamentally, you can't tell me Green Lantern is any more unreal than Lady Gaga.
Clearly I'm not talking about something like All-Star Superman, say, which is at once a truly first-class work of fiction and a holy book far preferable to any of the currently popular choices. A Watchmen or Enigma stands deservedly amongst the great literature of the past few decades, and even at the level below them you have stuff coming out at the moment like The Boys, Ultimate Spider-Man or Batman and Robin which, if not quite great art, are nonetheless so well-crafted as to justify themselves without embarrassment and outclass anything on this (or most) year's Booker shortlist.
Conversely, I'm not talking about the worst of the worst. Some of those I'll read when I get home from the pub, for the car-crash fascination of it. A little above them are the only things I won't touch at all, the ones which aren't atrocious beyond all reckoning but simply dull and miserable and confused - ie, the majority of DC's recent output. But between that and the good stuff there's a vast range of workmanlike, competent material - words I would use as an insult if applied to any other medium, pop especially, but which in comics, I find scratches an itch.
In summary: just because Facebook tells you I've read a comic, don't necessarily take that as a recommendation. I'm an addict.

*Plus a few actual books, I should add (Wodehouse, Arthur C Clarke, Anais Nin), but broadly speaking I still own literally hundreds of books I've not read, and almost no comics I haven't.

So we're sending two Nazis to Europe. On the plus side, at least the christians don't have any seats - though aren't there some still to declare? That would put the sour cherry on the carrot cake and no mistake. And I see this news just after reading the Captain Britain and MI13 annual. This being the best new superhero comic in years, one which took a character even Alan Moore couldn't make sing, and made him into the national icon he always should have been, our own Captain America as opposed to a cheap knock-off. The series hit around the same time as Garth Ennis' Dan Dare reboot, and they shared an attempt to build a sense of a British patriotism which was strong and unashamed, but which gave no quarter to the racist scum who profane the flag and the history they so tattily invoke. And the annual? Well, that's the first issue to come out since the news that Captain Britain and MI13 is cancelled. There's just not enough of a market for it. And as above, so below. It's not that I feel any shame over how this will make us look in Europe's eyes, you understand - enough other countries are sending their own fascists, and as per last century, I'm confident that ours are hardly the biggest threat of the bunch. Besides which, the European Parliament is a bad joke in the first place. I'm more embarrassed over how this makes us look to ourselves, how much it exacerbates the national mood of bemused decline. Hopefully, it'll at least be enough of a wake-up call to improve matters, but it could as easily be another step down that sorry road. In the meantime, yesterday's jokes about "ask David to bring The Final Solution" (which worked better verbally, italics and capitals being silent) and the unicorn lynching seem slightly less amusing.

Othergates:
I don't normally mind waits at the doctor's; in accord with Sarll's First Rule, I always have plenty to read about my person. Except my surgery has now installed a TV broadcasting inane health programming, noisily. Desist!
Unusually old-school Stay Beautiful this weekend, both in terms of those attending, and in not having a live act. "This is how we used to do it in the olden days!", I tell bemused youngsters for whom the night has only ever been at the Purple Turtle. The playlist is less old-school, which is a shame as such a direction might have saved me from accidentally dancing to La Roux.
Two Grant Morrison comics out last week, and while Batman & Robin was a great, straightforward superhero story with art by the ever-impressive Frank Quitely, it wasn't a patch on the glorious, tragic, yearning final issue of Seaguy's second act. Guess which one sells about ten times as much as the other?

All those Sam Tyler references in Ashes to Ashes had me thinking, whoever's mysteriously contacting Alex...could that voice be John Simm doing posh? It could, couldn't it? And then the trailer for next week blew my theory apart. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, and now I'm back to having no idea at all where they're going with this, but being confident that it will be somewhere good. And I've been reading a 2000 issue of Select which I found while clearing out my desk, all articles about 'what are MP3s?' and *video* reviews and interviews saying how Embrace's second album will take them to the next level, and this isn't even from so very long ago - I moved to London in 2000 - and it makes me more than ever think that after Ashes to Ashes is done, the nineties are now strange and distant enough for Dead Man Walking to be a perfectly viable series.

Speaking of changing eras, I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando yesterday, and what a glorious confection of rhapsody, absurdity and time it is. Yes, it's 13 years since I got into the band of the same name and followed up plenty of the other reference points, but I'd seen the film and I don't like reading books too soon after seeing the film, even in cases like this where knowing the plot is a fairly abstract concern. It's the starring role The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has now found for Orlando (the androgyne, not the band, though that I would also love to see) which had me investigating, because the infuriating braggart of '1910' is not at all how I remembered Tilda Swinton in the film. And indeed, is not what I find in Woolf's original. I think Moore and O'Neill have the promiscuity and the rough-housing down better than Swinton, but she has that distracted quality which they've lost. And while inserting side adventures during and after the novel's timeline works perfectly, I question whether LoEG has not done a certain damage to the premise by making Orlando an ancient who fought at Troy and Actium; one of the features which I feel most strongly in Woolf's novel is the sense of Orlando's rootedness in the English countryside, the ancestry which ties Orlando to the soil regardless of gender or distance. And it's a shame, because the way in which Woolf's Orlando moves so self-consciously yet seamlessly from age to age - a gigantic cloud rolling in as the 18th Century gives way to the 19th, for instance, and England suddenly, gradually growing damper - is just the sort of play on the eras' conceptions of themselves and each others to which the League project draws such delightful attention*.

In much the same spirit of meditative Englishess as Orlando, I finally watched Cloudspotting, which I apologise for not plugging while it could still be caught on iPlayer. I've raved about Gavin Pretor-Pinney's Cloudspotter's Guide here before, I'm sure, and the new appreciation it gave me for the beauty which floats above us most every day. But the concept works even better on TV, with the BBC's archive of near Miyazaki-quality flying footage to plunder, and Pretor-Pinney himself so naturally and thoroughly engaging, like a cross between Jim Broadbent and Mark Gatiss, except more fun. One credit did surprise me, though: Script editor: Steve Aylett.

Never got around to writing about that Keith TOTP/Glam Chops show last week, did I? In part because I only wrote about them a week or so earlier, and not much changed except that Eddie was drunker and Glam Chops have a new song called 'Thunderstruck'. Which kicks arse. Oh, and I finally watched a Gregg Araki film, Mysterious Skin. Which was much as I expected in terms of tormented small-town US gayness, but all that UFO stuff and missing memories made me think of Velvet Goldmine and Flex Mentallo, which can never be a bad thing. Also, it has Dawn from Buffy as an off-the-rails fag hag with great eye make-up! It is, alas, let down by the standard problem afflicting any film which addresses wrongcockery - even in a world where cinema can convincingly show us an army of thousands of orcs and undead rucking in front of Minas Tirith, if you're showing a kiddy-fiddler on film, the effects and editing have to be so clunky as to make entirely clear even to madmen and magistrates that the child was not on stage while the nasty man said the rude things.

*Of course, nerd polyfilla is easily applied here: in the League world Woolf's book is known by the title which is in any case its full title here: Orlando - A Biography. Woolf was one of those eminently readable but maddeningly agenda-led biographers, who in satirising the conventions of biography, ran roughshod over a real life rather than a fictional one.

Well, after some pretty half-arsed efforts over the past hour or so, the rain looks to be picking up to a proper bank holiday level now, and any plans of sitting in the park are dissolving nicely in it; a game of Gloom would mark the day better than a dance around the maypole. Yesterday, though, was lovely; after 18 Carat Love Affair's set (including hospitalsoup's second best 'Pink Glove' cover) we fled Sexy Kid (remarkably, worse than their name suggests) and a definition of Britpop which encompassed Finley Quaye (though also, to their credit, Ultrasound's 'I'll Show You Mine') for Tavistock Square and the sun, from which it's a lovely walk through the backstreets to Fleet Street (why didn't I know London had a pub called The Knights Templar?) to Fleet Street, where Mr Punch serves ruinously tasty West Country cider, the rogue.

If you want to get overexcited about the new Grant Morrison multiverse comic, or just want to see a picture of Batman punching out Rorschach, click here.

Black Plastic on Saturday was a classic example of how London's greedy venues threaten to cripple their own trade with the short-termist desire for a buck; the Star had also booked in two or three birthday parties, taking up lots of space (including, for the first few hours, what should have been the dancefloor) with people who had no particular interest in the music or the night. Or indeed, much interest in music in general; they were in a trendy East London venue, so whatever they were hearing, must be cool. Not cool enough to make them dance or anything, but cool enough that whatever had been played, wouldn't have been able to scare them off. Even once the tables finally moved, there were too many of them standing around talking, making the place feel like a bar, and have I ever mentioned how much I hate bars? I salute the courage and indefatigibility of the DJs for making sure that there were still classic moments in amongst all this, but why does doing a night in this city have to be such an uphill struggle?

The temperature seemed to be trying to cycle through three seasons in a day, but I finally made it down to Shooter's* Hill on Friday. I'm not sure quite why this had become such a goal of mine, even with the Luxembourg lyric bolstering the Alan Moore story; perhaps it's just like when you're looking for a particular pen absent-mindedly, and it imperceptibly mounts to become an obsessive hunt, because I can't claim any particular epiphany as the lodestone which was drawing me there. Although it is lovely...well, not so much the main road which takes you there, but you can start from Greenwich and wander through the bit of the park which always seems to get neglected in picnic season, with the flowers and the woodpeckers and deer. And then out across Blackheath, which is so open and happy in the sun, when the werewolves aren't out. And then the rather dusty, concrete, Ballardian stretch - but then you're between commons and woods and the sudden apparition of a tower which claims the awesome name of Severndroog Castle, and these are proper broad-leafed, light, English woods, where bluetits titter and kids are still making rope swings rather than doing anything edgy or urban or Mail-baiting. And if you carry on over the hill, and come out of the wood, you'll realise there's no postcode on the street sign, and you've accidentally walked out of London, and you need a drink and a sit down.

When Grant Morrison released Seaguy back in 2004, it wasn't very well received. The story of a superhero born too late, living in a world where everything is perfect (isn't it?) and there's no evil left to fight (is there?) just didn't seem to strike a chord in the boom years. Now we've realised that the whole age of ever-rising prosperity and ever-bigger plasma screens was a mirage, it looks so astonishingly prescient that one wonders at people ever missing the point. Perfect timing, then, for the sequel over which Morrison essentially held DC to ransom for his big event work, Slaves of Mickey Eye. Except now his point (those cuddly institutions who told you everything was OK? Do you really trust them?) seems almost too obvious. Prophecy's a tough game. Fortunately, there's quite enough Mad Brilliant Ideas TM, moments of genuine pathos and mysteries as yet unsolved to keep one interested beyond the obvious message. If you prefer the Invisibles and Filth Morrison to the superheroics (not that I've ever felt the distinction was particularly noticeable), then this one is for you.

*The apostrophe seems to come and go, but I prefer it with one.

I find myself worrying that Charlie Brooker might be the new Bill Hicks - ie, awesome, and usually right, but too easily quoted in too many situations in a way which makes the over-quoter seem a bit of a prick. And I'm as guilty of this as anyone, and I think maybe I need to scale it back a bit. Except why did this revelation hit me in the same week he returns to our TV screens? Ah, my timing.

Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years aims to overturn the idea that the first 14 years of the twentieth century were a peaceful, if shadowed, idyll, the last days of the old world before the wars and revolutions made the modern world. Like most history with an agenda, the hand is overplayed, but if only as a counterbalance, it's a valuable take on how much was as new and strange and unsettling a hundred years ago as whatever's causing the latest panic now. More than the old 'how very similar then was to now' trick, though, it was little details which caught my attention. Wooden ships of the line, Trafalgar-style, when would you think the last of those was launched by the Royal Navy? 1879. The creator of Bambi also wrote p0rn (I'm surprised that didn't somehow make it into Lost Girls, though the Rite of Spring riot is here in detail). The borders between 'a very long time ago' and 'a long time ago', in other words, are as permeable as those between 'the old days' and 'I remember when'. Oh, and while I knew the Belgians had been utter gits in the Congo, I had no idea the death toll was ten million. Hitler gets all the press, but he doesn't even have the twentieth century's second highest total for genocide by a European ruler. Lightweight.

Obviously it's great news that Grant Morrison is back with Frank Quitely for (some of) the new Batman & Robin comic, and that he's getting to continue with Seaguy and do a Multiverse book and various other bits and pieces. But..."I’ve just been doing an Earth Four book, which is the Charlton characters but I’ve decided to write it like “Watchmen.” [laughs] So it’s written backwards and sideways and filled with all kinds of symbolism". It was obvious from the first time we glimpsed Earth Four in 52 that it was very much a Dark Charlton world, playing up the Watchmen correspondences; they even showed Peacemaker in a window as a nod to the exit of his analogue, the Comedian. I assumed that world would be used in passing for the sort of third-stringer-written continuity frottage that makes up so much of DC's output - it may have cropped up in Countdown for all I know, and that was very much the sort of place where I assumed it would stay. Morrison's use of a multiversal Captain Atom as a Dr Manhattan piss-take in Superman Beyond...well, it was one of the weakest things in there, but it was forgivable. A whole series, though? Morrison is the second best comics writer in the world. Moore has pretty much departed comics. Is it not about time that Morrison got over the anxiety of influence?
(In arguably related news, I swear our team could have done better at the pub quiz last night had it not been for the distractingly cute girl two tables over with a copy and a badge of Watchmen)

Last week I was asked to write something about my journey, and it turned out rather well, so in the parlance of Nu-Facebook, I thought I might 'share': ( Stroud Green )

On last night's Mad Men, did I mishear or were Peggy's nephews called Gerard and Mikey? Never thought I'd catch a My Chemical Romance reference in Don Draper's sixties.

Bionic eye! And apparently one good enough to sort socks, something I only attempt by natural light. Then again, my socks are mainly tiny variations on the theme of 'black'.

I've seen the guy who walks his ferret in Finsbury Park itself a few times, but on Monday, shortly before heading off to explore Tottenham (whatever the view from Harringay station bridge might do to seduce you into thinking otherwise, I can report that it really isn't a whole other London of wonderment hidden away to the side), I saw a woman outside Tesco with an...albino stoat? A mink? It definitely had red eyes as well as white fur, so not just a winter coat on the usual one, and it was very fluffy - you could see how a Cruella type would look at it and see a stole.

Sad news from CMU:
SELECTADISC IN NOTTINGHAM TO GO
More doom and gloom. Nottingham independent record store Selectadisc is to close later this month, after its owner, Phil Barton, decided he can't pump any more money into the company. He told Music Week: "Everyone here has crawled across the field of broken glass to keep this open, but in the end it didn't work. I think it is one of the top three independent stores in Britain. But that doesn't stop it being uneconomic. Everyone here is aware of tough things have been for the last two years". High overheads, declining record sales and the credit crunch have all contributed to Selectadisc's position.
As previously reported, a recent Entertainment Retailers Association report said that there were now just 300 odd independent record stores left in the UK, compared to 408 at the start of last year, and 1064 ten years ago.
Back in the days before London, before the internet, Selectadisc - or back then, the three Selectadiscs spread along Market Street - were my shops. Derby eventually got in on the act with Reveal, but really, you wanted Nottingham - with those three, Wayahead and Arcade you'd always find at least one thing of which you'd vaguely heard, or which just looked intriguing, and which was cheap enough to take a punt on. OK, the staff in the singles shop were surly dance snobs, but that was forgivable when you'd find all the singles that had been raved about in Melody Maker two weeks previously marked down to a quid each.

Contrary to previous reports, apparently Grant Morrison's Authority is still happening: "It'll come when it comes. He's working on it." But no word on his WildCATS which, as of that last interview, was the one which was still happening. I'll believe them when I see them solicited. Maybe not even then, given what happened to The Boys and Micah Wright's Stormwatch, both also at Wildstorm.

Finally saw the hilarious Superbad on Friday; I loved it, though being shown it by a female friend I could see that her amusement was purer, in that it wasn't tempered with that terrible recognition anyone who's ever been a teenage boy must feel. Mentioning it to augstone later, he thought I was asking if he'd seen Superman; I wasn't, but if his secret identity were McLovin instead of Clark Kent, wouldn't that be glorious? Also on Friday night: got lost in Emirates, impersonated a chessboard, saw Sex Tourists/Doe Face Lilian/The Firm. As is traditional on Holloway Road love-ins, the roster also included one band I didn't know; as is traditional, they were pants, ie so pants that even being pretty girls in knee-length socks covering 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' couldn't save them. Let's hope tradition stops before the Gaff burns down, though.
Saturday and Sunday also fun, but Monday...that Monday was overacting. It hammered its point home with a scenery-chewing excess of Mondayness. I did not approve.

Glen David Gold's Carter Beats The Devil was, quite deservedly if unusually, a success both with the general public and with people I know. His follow-up has been delayed and delayed, but should finally be with us this year. Except, just like various bands have had exclusive distribution deals with various chains (mainly in the States), in the UK Waterstone's get Sunnyside in July, and everyone else has to wait 'til Autumn. What makes this even stranger - that's the hardback, ie the prestige edition aimed at people who have money to spare and really can't wait for the book. Which comes out in the US in May, and can be pre-ordered from amazon.com for $17.79. That's not quite the bargain it would have been two years ago, but if you're into the book enough to get a hardback in July, for about the same price you can get one in May instead. So what do Waterstone's and the UK publishers get out of this, except for winding up other booksellers?

Comics links: have a bunch of Grant Morrison rarities, including Batman and Superman text stories from 1986 - two decades before he got to do definitive runs in the main titles - and Alan Moore interviewed on the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Obama, and his grimoire-in-progress:
"We want it to be a lot of fun and we also want it to be exactly like the way you would have imagined a book to magic to be when you were a small child and had first heard of such things."
As someone who has attempted to read Crowley, that sounds like just what Doctor Dee ordered.

I'd been looking forward to Tin Man, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz starring Alan Cumming, Callum Keith Rennie and lovely, lovely Zooey Deschanel. Not only was I disappointed, but I don't even have much to add to USA Today's disappointment when they say that "Ambitious and intriguing though it may be, Tin Man is simply too long, too grim and too determined to impose a Lord of the Rings universe-saving quest on top of a simpler, gentler story." It perhaps doesn't help that Alan Moore so recently finished showing how you could reinvent that story to a darker end, so long as you had a point, rather than just mashing together various fashionable SF and fantasy tropes into a world with no thematic consistency or resonance, much less plausibility.

Anyone know how to find the Search toolbar in Mediaplayer? I didn't even know there was one, but having seen it in action I want it, yet am experiencing IT Fail in finding it. Hurrah for pressing random buttons.

I was unaware until I happened past it on Tuesday, but there's a new Book & Comic Exchange branch in Soho, just up from the MVE on Berwick Street. Which isn't quite so bursting-at-the-seams as Notting Hill yet, but I still got a pretty good haul - the Spider-Man's Tangled Web collection with the Garth Ennis/John McCrea and Peter Milligan/Duncan Fegredo stories for £3, the one issue I was missing from the Morrison/Millar Flash run (a rather lovely Jay Garrick one-shot, 'Still Life In The Fast Lane'), and an issue of Warren Ellis' Doctor Strange run. Except it turns out he only did plot, not script, and what's the point of a Warren Ellis comic without inventive insults? The whole thing is a bit of a mess, though, even with some of the art coming from Mark Buckingham; it was part of the Marvel Edge line, which was Marvel's attempt to get some of that Vertigo action, which is here represented by such cringeworthy details as Strange's cloak being replaced with an Overcoat of Levitation...
I was in that neck of the woods because I'd been invited to lunch at a health food place in Covent Garden. Accepting which, and then being off the sauce all day, was clearly foolishness, because last night I was quite as ill as I've been in years. ( TMI ) And of course, when your time's your own then sick days lack even the compensatory charms they hold for workers.
Before this kicked in, though, I also had chance to make my first visit to the Wallace Collection, which I think maybe made a better home than it makes a museum. The stuff they have is generally the sort of stuff which makes for a good background, rather than something I wish to stand and contemplate - although the gender balance amuses me, rooms of arms and armour balanced by all that froofy Rococo stuff.

Won the pub quiz jackpot on Monday, but only just - we were exactly as far off the tie-break as one other team, and then in the tie-break tie-break, which was essentially guessing a random date, we were only one day closer than them. Perhaps it was the tension of that which undid me last night? Nah, I'm still blaming the so-called healthy living.

edit: More comics news just in - DC Announces 'After Watchmen - What's Next?' Program? And it has been amazing me how the Watchmen trade is now *everywhere*, although that is a mainly happy amazement as opposed to some people's reaction, so this is a smart move. So what comics are DC suggesting as the next step?( Read more... )Whenever I think DC might be regaining some small fragment of the plot, they pull a stunt like this.

I've learned my lesson when it comes to talking online about pubs I hope to use regularly (curse you, Neil Morrissey!) but since I'm not in West London very often, I have no hesitation in making this recommendation to those who are. The Pelican, near Portobello Road, loses points for a lack of draught cider, but since all the drinks seem to be the same price anyway, I object less to Bulmers. Good decor, properly twilit like an old-style pub but not scuzzy. Not bad music, except for the reggae. But here's the clincher - Thursday, from 6pm to 9pm, you order your drinks and then roll two dice. The bar also rolls two dice. You roll higher - your drinks are free. You don't - you just pay what you would have anyway. Obviously the gamer in me thinks that this lacks nuance - double 6 should be a critical hit, where you also get champagne, while on a double 1 you have critically failed, pay double and get punched in the face. But hey, it's their business. And I did see three double 1s rolled by punters, once twice by the same guy, so I can see how that might lose custom.
Portobello Road, though - that was one of the first London locations etched in my mind ("street where the riches of ages are sold"), and it looks to be dying on its arse. Half the shops are shut and look like that's long-term, and the rest were short on customers. Really took me aback. As did the 'coming attractions' signboard still up on the Astoria, and the realisation that Don Draper is only 35. Meaning that in the first series of Mad Men, set 18 months earlier, he was presumably 33. He can't only be two years older than me, he's a grown-up!

The first issue of Neil Gaiman's Batman story...maybe it was just because I read it drunk, but I have no idea where he's going with this. It is nonetheless brilliant, and coming so hot on the heels of Grant Morrison's third definitive take on the character, that's impressive. In other comics news, Kieron Gillen's Sabretooth one-shot is probably not essential reading for all Phonogram fans, but is pretty good, and the new issue of Captain Britain has DRACULA MEETING DOCTOR DOOM ON THE MOON. I love comics.

Proxy Music are the only time I've ever seen a tribute band where I've also seen the real band. Well, I once saw a Smiths tribute and I've seen Morrissey live, which I suppose the Eno hardcore might say is the same thing - although pleasingly, and contrary to what I heard, they're not entirely an Eno-era band. The shouts for 'Dance Away' failed to provoke a Step Brothers-style riot, and acknowledging that even Eno knows Stranded is the best album, they played a stunning 'Mother of Pearl'. If they have a problem it's that their Bryan Ferry is too naturally beautiful and too good a singer, but I suppose it's easier to find that than someone overcoming his deficiencies with sheer force of character like the original, who by definition would probably be busy being famous in his own right.
The Lexington, aka relaunched Clockwork, is not bad either. They've gone for a whiskey joint feel downstairs, like the Boogaloo with a more dedicated palette, but also got in more draught at prices which are the cheaper end of London pub. Plus, if people are still dancing and drinking they seem happy for a night to carry on past the advertised end time for, ooh, about 90 minutes when I left and it was still going strong. Recommended.

When all hope seemed lost, when the forces of darkness seemed to have triumphed and even our best and brightest to be unable to salvage things this time - Grant Morrison finally managed to write an issue of Final Crisis as we knew it should have been written. Where previous issues have been incomprehensible in a DC continuity frottage sort of way, this was incomprehensible in that joyous 'Grant's brain's exploding!' way we know and love. I am hesitant to quote it because I don't want to spoil it, and because I have little comment to add beyond wanting to punch the air pretty much every page. Those of you who read the collections - it will be worth reading this one, and putting up with the mess earlier, just for this ending. Although you might be best off waiting for an omnibus which includes all the Morrison components ie 'Submit' and Superman Beyond and 'Last Rites' too, because I can understand why people who didn't read those found it baffling. But as with Secret Invasion - if spin-offs are being written by the writer of the core series, why aren't people reading those too? What kind of mentality reads a comic Because It's An Event and not because they like the creators?
In an exit interview Morrison insists there were no rewrites - which I find implausible, but whatever. He also confirms something I've long suspected, that he really has no affinity with the character of Wonder Woman.

Went to the Science Museum's late session on Wednesday - what this means is, there are no bloody children cluttering the place up, so you can play with all the toys, and there's booze. Free booze if one member of your party is star enough to find a laminated 'free drinks' card lying around, which one of ours did. Go her. We were late in on account of a science jam when we arrived (the queue was around two sides of the fairly sizeable building. I am beginning to fear queues, I have seen too many lately). I was entertained by Foucault's Pendulum (chiefly on account of reading the book recently, it bored everyone else), loved the stargate-y laser-y thing (it had no placard I could see, so not that educational, but still awesome) and accidentally set off George III's microscope. Science!
In other Science! news, saw a guy at Russell Square yesterday who had about a dozen wires in his head, Just normal wires, in various colours, coming up from the back of his collar and then connecting to his scalp at various points where they went at least under the skin, and possibly further.

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of Mick Harvey leaving the Bad Seeds. Mick's been working with Nick since The Boys Next Door, and I've always wondered how much of what we think of as Cave is in fact Harvey, particularly when listening to Harvey's other projects. I suppose now we get to find out.

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond's second issue confirms that this is the comic Final Crisis should have been. Yes, Grant Morrison is reusing his old tropes again - breaking the fourth wall, Limbo, the self-evolving hyperstory, creators trapped in creation - but here there's a manic, fizzing joy and ingenuity I'm not getting from the parent Rock of Ages reprise. Some great 3D sequences, too - though should you happen, as I did, to look out of the window with your glasses still on, it brings a real moment of Crisis terror - RED SKIES!
Elsewhere in comics, Bendis' Dark Avengers may not have any lines to equal the best of Warren Ellis' Thunderbolts run, but in so far as it's taking that series' concept - Marvel's biggest bastards given the keys to the kingdom - to the next level, I'm very much interested. Thunderbolts, meanwhile, has gone deeper and darker under Andy Diggle, and this issue includes a considerably more substantial Barack Obama appearance than that meaningless fluff-piece of a Spider-Man back-up strip, albeit to considerably less fanfare.

Have been left with a nagging sensation that I've not used my leisure to best advantage this week, to the extent that I started getting quite angry with myself/the world and had to go wander the British Museum for a while to calm down. Silly, really - even aside from the nebulous business of Seeing Nice People, I've watched another Losey/Pinter/Bogarde masterpiece, Accident; seen the Soft Close-Ups and Mr Solo; and made a reasonably good start on Ulysses, so it's not as if I'm flicking myself off to Trisha just yet.

I know list articles are intrinsically pointless, and I know they're designed to provoke quibbling, so I'm not going to get up in arms about the omissions from the Guardian's Novels You Must Read, or the times where they've chosen a book which isn't the author's best. And I should be glad, I suppose, that one of the seven sections was science fiction and fantasy. But since when was Kavalier & Clay, The Man Who Was Thursday or The Wasp Factory science fiction or fantasy? They may not be dull enough to be literary fiction, but none of them takes place in a world that is not the consensus version of this one - except in so far as they are not true. If we say that the fictional comics in Chabon's book make it an alternate world, then so does the fictional MP in The Line of Beauty, and down that line every book bar the most tiresomely domestic becomes SF. Which would amuse me at least a little, it's true, but is patently nonsense.

The new Morrissey album, based on two listens, is deeply patchy, and the new Anthony & the Johnsons is basically the same as the last one, but slightly less so. More to my surprise, given I liked You Could Have It So Much Better, first impressions of the new Franz Ferdinand are that for the most part, it's a bloody mess. icecoldinalex, this means that thus far you're still Album of the Year.

I know BSG's Number Six Cylon was named in honour of The Prisoner, but I'd never thought the parallels went much beyond that. I'm reconsidering in light of Season Three, where as with my Prisoner DVD, all the faintly pointless episodes seem to be contained on Disc Four. Homage!
Anyway, I have now finished the third season. Frakking Hell.

Finished The Worm Ouroboros and...well, I'm not cutting this, it was written near 90 years ago, but if you're planning to read it for the plot then look away now. I know the title should have given this away, but in some senses I have never read a more pointless book. Our heroes break the power of Witchland utterly - and then sit around moping, worrying that life will never again offer them anything so awesome as that war. This a war in which, aside from the danger to themselves and the deaths of their men, their land was despoiled and one of their sisters damn near raped. This in a book written by an Englishman mere years after the War To End All Wars might even seem, at terrible cost, to have succeeded. So by calling in a boon from the gods - they resurrect Witchland and take us right back to the start! I've seen the idea of Valhallan eternal war crop up a few times for examination in art - Grant Morrison was intrigued by it in early days, from his climactic Zoids to the Warner Bros deconstruction of 'The Coyote Gospel'. But I'm hard pressed to think of anything else written since the Middle Ages which quite so unambiguously celebrates that idea, particularly when the conflict encompasses innocents as well as the protagonists.
As a palate cleanser, have now moved on to the charming eccentricity of Dry Store Room No. 1. This has already been extensively blogged of late by my friendslist, so I shall restrain myself to mentioning how glad I am that I started this *after* my recent return visit to the Natural History Museum, such that when Richard Fortey says:
"There are still galleries in the Natural History Museum displaying minerals, the objects themselves - a kind of museum of a museum, preserved in aspic from the days of such systematic rather than thematic exhibits. Few people now find their way to these galleries."
- and think, after the Great Hall, that was the first place I went! And I got to surreptitiously touch a thing from another world, some witch-iron! It wouldn't be nearly so much fun if that had happened the other way round; I'd feel like I was being worthy, being watched, rather than naturally doing the right thing.

So, in a clear effort to confound the suggestion that Final Crisis is just a bloated and less compelling rewrite of his own JLA: Rock of Ages, it was nice to see Grant Morrison ( spoilers ) Really - he's better than this, and he must know that.
Also in comics this week (and last, I missed a pick-up):
- delightful Anglophile teen comedy Blue Monday finally returns! Hoorah!
- Warren Ellis makes an ill-advised attempt to tie Doktor Sleepless to Freakangels!
- Pete Wisdom kills furries!

The Natural History museum is far too interactive and accessible nowadays. If I want a moving, roaring dinosaur, I shall go to a theme park, and for all that I respect Zoids and Grimlock, they do not belong in the dinosaur room of a major museum.
The glyptodon (it's an armadillo the size of a small car!), the strokeable meteoric iron and some of the loopier gem formations are still lovely, though.

Why do people scurry? I've been noticing it a lot in these cold, foggy nights - people see me looming out of the haze, and they start scurrying - hunch shoulders, head down, pace uneasily quickened. Scurrying never helped anyone. I mean, I used to work with a guy who did it really badly, even in the office in the daytime, and even though I quite liked him and have never done anything of the sort in my life, I still had to clamp down on an atavistic reflex which wanted to mug him. And this guy was forever getting mugged, assaulted and what-have-you, to a degree which would be baffling if it weren't for the way he walked. Seriously, if you want to take evasive action - cross the road, speed up, whatever - then fine. In many circumstances, it might be the sensible thing to do. But for heavens' sake, do it with your head held high and your spine straight, because the minute you start scurrying, you look like prey. And if whoever's looming out of the fog is a predator, they will notice that, and you will have become one more contributor to the ranks of self-fulfilling prophecies.
(And not that I should have to say this, but this verges on certain sensitive issues so for the sake of clarity - no, this is not to even remotely absolve the predators and no, this is not to say that walking (apparently) unafraid is an entirely infallible strategy for avoiding harm. But it does work a lot better than scurrying)

Over-rated Fables scribe Bill Willingham has written a piece opposing grim'n'gritty 'superhero decadence', and arguing that ' the superhero genre should be “different, better, with higher standards, loftier ideals and a more virtuous — more American — point of view.”' Cue applauding comments from the sort of charmers who object to foreigners and non-white superheroes, or have plain creepy thoughts about Lois Lane, which for all Willingham's noted right-wing politics, is possibly not quite what he was getting at. More to the point, just as this C-lister is claiming that his own Elementals was one of the comics which kicked off the darker trend - a claim I've never seen from anyone but him - he's now acting as though he's the first to object to the trend, a trend he presents as still at its height through highly selective quoting of recent comics and films. Alan Moore - who alongside Frank Miller and maybe Howard Chaykin, *actually* started grim and gritty - has been saying for years that it got silly, that comics have had enough solve and now need a little coagula (or as the less alchemical* might put it, enough deconstruction and now need some reconstruction). Grant Morrison has been arguing something similar since at least Flex Mentallo, whose final issue was meant to be taking us past the Dark Age and into the Neon Age; you could argue that Final Crisis shows a funny way of going about this agenda, but All Star Superman was as purestrain heroic as the Superman comics Willingham seems to want, even if it was perhaps a little lacking in USA! USA! jingoism for his tastes.

*Speaking of alchemy, I never mentioned anything about Foucault's Pendulum on here, did I? From now on, I'm going to tell every conspiracy theorist I meet to read that book before they try it on with their controlled-demolition-of-Twin-Towers crap. Because even if it doesn't convince them - and part of the dark beauty of a real conspiracy mindset is, nothing will - then 650 pages should buy me a fair period of peace.

Since I made it back from Devon and a resurgent cold it's been a delightful haze of parties and pubs (and thank you all for a lovely birthday, it made entering the rather characterless age of 31 a pleasure rather than a puzzle). I love these inbetween days - one of my presents was Intermission, a compilation of solo Go-Betweens tracks from the period of their split, and as well as being lovely anyway, the name and the cold sun outside make it a good fit for right now.

My reservations about that BBC4 series on fantasy have been strengthened now that I've made a start on ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, a book to which The Lord of the Rings was compared at its launch. It's at once recognisable as part of the same tradition, and a bizarre vision of an alternate track fantasy could have taken. Not so much in the style - although it makes Tolkien look like a dirty realist at times* - as in how it lays out the toolbox. Eddison does much what Tolkien did to people Middle Earth - he takes the names of spirits from folklore, and then ascribes them to human-like races in his imagined world. But after sixty years of Tolkien-derived fantasy, we're used to elves and dwarves and goblins. Eddison, on the other hand, calls his races witches and demons and imps, and from those names we don't expect solid, human-like races, even if the demons do make the concession of having little horns. There are also the foliots, whose name baffled me entirely until I then also started the deranged encyclopaedia that is The Anatomy of Melancholy and learned accidentally and almost at once that they are visitors to forlorn houses who make strange noises in the night. Except here they're not, they're a rather sappy bunch who live on an island and remind me faintly of the Dutch.

Have fulfilled the first of my definite plans for the life of leisure, with a one-sitting reread of All-Star Superman. Which is at times even more perfect than I remember - I especially like how fractal it gets, with lines like "I always write the Superman headlines before they happen" encompassing the whole - but I remain uncomfortably certain that the Bizarro story didn't need to cover two issues.

Finally got round to seeing The Last King of Scotland, and while I was almost as impressed as I expected to be - the central performances are stunning, Forrest Whitaker possibly even excelling his turn in The Shield (whose first series is a tenner on DVD in the HMV sale, and strongly recommended to anyone feeling a Wire-shaped gap in their viewing) - the ending left a little of a nasty taste in my mouth. Clearly the film is massively engaged with the idea of white exceptionalism, but it still seemed to fall slightly into it at the last.

*'"I like not the dirty face of the Ambassador," said Lord Zigg. "His nose sitteth flat on the face of him as it were a dab of clay, and I can see pat up his nostrils a summer day's journey into his head. If's upper lip bespeak him not a rare spouter of rank fustian, perdition catch me. Were it a finger's breadth longer, a might tuck it into his collar to keep his chin warm of a winter's night."
"I like not the smell of the Ambassador," said Lord Brandoch Daha. And he called for censers and sprinklers of lavender and rose water to purify the chamber, and let open the crystal windows that the breezes of heaven might enter and make all sweet.'

In Victoria HMV, there's a box set of all eight Alien and Predator films, including the two crossovers, for £15. It's shelved next to an earlier box set of what were at the time all seven Alien and Predator films, including the crossover. This costs £30. I know Alien vs Predator: Requiem is meant to be bad, but -£15 bad? And how much would a box with neither crossover cost?
(While musing on this, I caught an ad from the corner of my eye at Pimlico station, advertising Doctor Who - the Sylvester McCoy box set. Ooooh, how did I miss that? Turns out it's a Mock the Week ad with a list of 'Presents We Don't Want' or similar. Gits.

A bad week for icons; I have seen plenty of (richly deserved) tributes to Bettie Page and Oliver Postgate, but less about Forrest J Ackerman, superfan, inventor of the term 'sci-fi', honorary lesbian (this one was news to me) and inspiration to everyone from Ray Bradbury through Joe Dante to...well, pick someone cool, they were probably in his thrall. Rest in peace, all three of you.

Bands advertising tours on TV: is this normal? Genuine question, I don't watch much commercial TV these days, but it felt very odd when one of the breaks during the final Devil's Whore* incorporated a plug for Coldplay tickets. So odd, in fact, that it even bypassed the normal outrage I feel whenever reminded of this tour's existence - I am grudgingly prepared to forgive Coldplay's existence, but that they should reduce Girls Aloud and Jay-Z to support acts? Not acceptable.

"Gordon Brown has been called "Superman" in Parliament as the fallout from the prime minister's inadvertent claim to have "saved the world" continues. The Tories have been mocking Mr Brown after his slip of the tongue over the economy at Prime Minister's Questions...But Commons leader Harriet Harman told Tory MPs that she would "rather have Superman as our leader than their leader who is The Joker"."
1) Even by the standards of Parliamentary name-calling, isn't accusing the other side's leader of being a mass-murdering psychopath rather strong? I suppose there's always the remote chance that she appreciates the Grant Morrison perspective on the Joker's personality, whereby he has no essential 'self' and reinvents himself in line with each new circumstance; this would be a pretty good charge to level at Cameron, who has never really managed to articulate a stance or principle beyond 'I'm not the other guy'. Somehow, though, I doubt there's a copy of Arkham Asylum or 'The Clown at Midnight' on Harman's shelves.
2) Equally, I can only conclude that Harman has never read Kingdom Come, in which Superman's failure to confront the Joker with sufficient conviction leads to the death of Lois Lane, Superman's retirement, and the collapse of the superheroic age into carnage and anarchy.
3) At a simpler level, I think most of us would rather have Superman as party leader than The Joker. What her riposte signally fails to grasp is the difference between Superman, and an all-too-human leader who has made a slip of the tongue which looks very like it was as Freudian as it was hubristic.
(That third point is really banal, isn't it? And yet without it, the whole item looked that little bit too abstract/Comic Book Guy. Speaking of comics - I was a little worried about Phonogram series 2 starting with a Pipettes issue, but Seth Bingo's anti-Pipettes rant assuaged all my fears. Great comic, and the launch party wasn't too bad either. Yeah, get me with the schmoozing)

*Which was still a bit of a mess, wasn't it? Moments of genuine power eclipsed by the overall sensation of a story whose truncation made it didactic and rushed. Not to mention repetitive, in the way that over four episodes Angelica Fanshawe managed four deaths for four shagpieces. Has anyone yet written a crossover in which she turns out somehow to be an ancestor of Torchwood's Tosh and her Fanny Of Doom? If not - please don't.

Miserable bloody day out there, isn't it? Although it's stretching it to call it a day at all when it's this blank - it's more like a gap of non-time. I would call it archetypally Sundayish had yesterday not been cut from the same cloth - although yesterday I probably exacerbated matters by braving the bad bits of Ealing. There are some lovely pubs down the Broadway end, and of course the studios which gave us Ealing comedy, but at the other end of town it's an Ealing tragedy, whether the desolation of Gunnersbury Park or Tudor Row, which true to its name is the most soul-sappingly mock Tudor street I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I'm going to have to leave the house at some point today, but I'm putting it off for as long as possible. Thank heavens for a four-week comics backlog to keep me entertained (on days like this, comics somehow do a better job than prose of lifting the spirits - I would say that maybe it's just all that colour, except that the black-and-white Wasteland seemed to work just as well). Still can't believe that Batman RIP got mainstream press coverage, though - not that I'm dissing Brubaker's Death of Captain America storyline, but that was pretty much what it said on the tin - a story about Cap's death, a story which can be taken as a political comment on our times. Whereas Batman RIP is Morrison musing on Batman through the traditional Morrison obsessions of identity, Eastern mysticism, order and chaos - or alternately, musing on them using Batman as a tool. It's a good read, but it's not going to convert anyone to comics (except maybe a confirmed psychonaut), and I pity any journos hoping to get an op ed out of it.

Yesterday I was handed a flyer for Czech mail-order brides, "unspoiled by feminism". Which is not just sleazy, but baffling. If you want the loaded and lonely, surely you flyer on Friday night as the City bars are chucking out, or in Knightsbridge tobacconists, not in Victoria on a Wednesday lunchtime?
Then again, this was shortly after I learned that Cardinal Place has a wind consultant called Professor Breeze, so it may just have been one of those days when plausibility goes out the window. Consider also the state of the Comedy that evening, where they had hybrid Hallowe'en/Christmas decorations up - so there's a werewolf menacing the tree, for instance, which has been decked with a string of skulls. I was there to see The Melting Ice Caps, aka Luxembourg's David Shah solo. And that is *solo* as in a one-man show, just him and a backing track (except for the two songs where he's joined by a flipbook wrangler). It can't be easy to stand up there and perform with no band, no instrument, no Dutch courage, not even any of the overacting and performance art techniques you'd get from someone like Simon Bookish, but he does it - stands there and sings his songs, beautiful songs about love and time and making the best of it all. Lovely, if heartbreaking - both for the songs in and of themselves, and that this is happening at half eight in a pub basement, rather than in the grand setting it deserves.
So of course because it's an implausible day, why wouldn't he be followed by a band with Foxy Brown on vocals, a total Shoreditch refugee on rhythm guitar and one of the From Dusk 'Til Dawn vampires on histrionic lead?

Newsarama are running a pretty revealing ten-part interview with Grant Morrison about All-Star Superman, one of the best superhero comics ever. I post this for the fans but seriously, even if you're only a casual/Greatest Hits comics reader, even if you think you don't like Superman, I don't blame you but this is the exception.

I finally remembered to check for an update on the story about the pirates stealing 30 tanks, which has been driven from the news by the small matter of the world's economy falling over and bursting into flames. Apparently:
"United States warships have surrounded the Faina for weeks to prevent the pirates from trying to unload the weapons, and a Russian guided missile frigate is traveling to the area."
It was seized a month ago! If the Russian navy is always this slow, we have so little to worry about from Putin.

For anyone given to complaining about txtspk as part of the decline of modern literacy &c, I give you 1880s emoticons.

...which title I pick not just because the song's been stuck in my head since Saturday's Prom Night, but because the first issue of Grant Morrison's 'Superman Beyond 3D' is the comic I was hoping and expecting Final Crisis would be. Only in one spread does the 3D effect have quite the same mind-twisting force as it did in the Blazing World scenes of Alan Moore's Black Dossier, but even if for the rest of the issue it's just a gimmick then hey, 3D is a pretty cool gimmick. And this...this is what I want from a Grant Morrison Event. Dead worlds! Limbo! Dr Manhattan with the serial numbers filed off! Cross-time lunacy and alternate heroes and giant crashing spaceships and only Superman left to save the day. It's as if Levitzseid has got Grant enchained at the heart of his monstrous engine of destruction, perverting his mighty Morrison powers in the furtherance of DC's Anti-Fun Equation...but Grant's too good to go down without a fight, and so by some ludicrous contrivance freed an aspect of himself to write a good Final Crisis comic.
The second best comic of last week, incidentally, was the conclusion to Book One of Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless. Just when I was worried we were getting a Planetary-style loss of focus, it turns out that the mysticism and the techno-evangelism have a perfectly sensible reason for being in the same book. I think we were perhaps meant to come away from the book with the idea that Doktor Sleepless is not the hero after all; personally, I'm backing him all the way.

Speaking of mad science: never mind the cure for cancer - isn't unlocking telomere structure the first step on the road to immortality in the Fall Revolution books?

Finally got round to watching Brokeback Mountain on Sunday - yes, I know, I fail at gay. I was a bit puzzled at first; I was expecting it to be one of those manly American buddy movies where you're thinking guys, just bone already - except then they do. But whether this was intended or not, I really didn't feel any chemistry off them until it happened. Which worked, I think. As did the scenery, obviously; I'm sure if that hadn't been so beautifully, expansively shot then the film would never have been able to cross over to the extent that it did. I wasn't convinced by the flashbacks - I thought they upset a flow which was otherwise brilliantly established - but otherwise, it's just such a well-judged film. Details which don't sit right at first (are the women being deliberately established as deadening forces, in the manner beloved of misogynist homosexuals?) come clear in time: it's not that the women are dead hands, it's that society is. A homophobic rural society especially, but not exclusively; even if Jack and Ennis had settled down somewhere nice and friendly just outside San Francisco, the mere fact of domesticity would mean what they had couldn't stay as pure as it was when it was born up on Brokeback Mountain.
(For another consideration of how uneasily passion sits in a mundane world, consider My Zinc Bed, which features excellent performances from Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine, and a rather strange accent from Uma Thurman. Of course, neither of these made me cry a fraction as much as Kiki's Delivery Service; I already know how malformed this world is, it's seeing the contrast of what a decent one would be like which breaks me down)