It ain't that kind: 18 months on

As some readers will know, in September 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer of unknown primary. A progress report:

Warp spasm!

Athletes tend to be highly superstitious when it comes to anything that might improve performance. So they're a ready market for commercially-hyped scientifically-unproven talismans, which this Olympics manifested in the practive of sticking magic blue go-faster tape on themselves (see Olympians Showcase Superstition With Mysterious Kinesio Tape, Scientists Doubtful, Peter Murray August 12th, 2012).

Whatever the actual claims for this stuff may be, a number of news media sites have circulated this factoid about its claimed mode of operation:

... it separates the upper layer of the skin from muscle tissue. This extra space allows for muscles to fire and recover more quickly.

 I don't know who originated this, but did no-one put brain into gear about this statement? The skin is anchored by the underlying 'superficial fascia' to the fibrous 'deep fascia' that sheaths the muscles. To separate these would involve major subcutaneous tearing of tissue, and I doubt that would do much for athletic performance ...

I was tickled by one commenter's ridicule of the idea - "you could turn round in your own skin" - as it reminded me of the ríastrad (battle frenzy) of the Celtic mythological hero Cúchulainn, as described in the prose epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (aka The Táin). Turning around in his own skin was just one of many weird physical transformations; Cieran Carson, one translator of The Táin, rendered "ríastrad" as "torque", but I much prefer Thomas Kinsella's term "warp spasm". One such description is:

"The first warp-spasm seized Cúchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front… On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child… he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram's fleece reached his mouth from his throat… The hair of his head twisted like the tange of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage."

I first ran into the word, not realising its credentials, in the comic strip Sláine in the comic 2000 AD. Its barbarian hero Sláine is somewhere between Cúchulainn and Conan the Barbarian, and the series is a very ingenious adaptation of Celtic mythology as fantasy with SF elements.

Sláine in full warp spasm
Redbubble / ISODIAWD Drawing and Illustration HQ / Comic Art Thread #4 - SLAINE

- Ray

Vampire Poets!

It's Charles Babbage's 220th birthday today, and if you want a spot of relevant, erudite and heavily-footnoted post-Christmas steampunk webcomic entertainment, I recommend Sydney Padua's website 2D Goggles, where you'll find the continuing saga of Babbage & Lovelace as 19th century crimefighters. Their current adventure involves Vampire Poets. Read on (the strange numbering is, I assume, intentional):

Vampire Poets, Prologue (in which the shade of a Gothic poet arises to set the scene, and we get examples of real-world bad Victorian poetry featuring the protagonists).
Vampire Poets - Part One! (in which Babbage, collecting statistics on window-smashing, encounters a mysterious young woman high on maddening draughts of Hippocrene; she later disappears, and her sisters - she is in fact Emily Brontë - enlist Babbage's help in finding her).
Vampire Poets Part the Third (in which Babbage introduces the sisters to Lovelace, whose hereditary temperament has acquainted her with the dangers of poetry. We see a spot of Byronic/Holmesian target practice, and get no explanation from Babbage as to why he thought he would have been a poet if he had been blind).

Here's the index to all the stories. And there's a great list of primary documents.

- Ray

Voyage into the Deep

Also from Salisbury, a very nice find in a charity shop: a 75p hardback copy of Voyage into the Deep, a graphic novel written by François Rivière and illustrated by Serge Micheli (originally published in French in 2003 as Voyage sous les eaux).

The name derives from Jules Verne's working title for his 1870 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the book is an SF/fantasy exploration of the creation of the novel. It begins in 1866 in the seaport of Le Crotoy, where a mysterious boy - Verne calls him 'Bert' - gives the author a cryptic letter and bottle of green-glowing water "with electric properties". Inspired, Verne begins to write, and the book tells interwoven narratives of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Verne's own adventures; these include acquaintance with an Indian self-styled Princess, Mikah, who is searching for her father; an artist called Daniel Wragg, whose architectural design for his London 'Sarcophagus Club' becomes reflected in Verne's concept for the interior of Captain Nemo's Nautilus; and a Nosferatu-like Margate medium called Robert Lee, whose seance makes direct contact between Verne and Nemo.

Rivière explains in the afterward that the story sprang from his personal fascination with Verne and the character of Captain Nemo, and the book is rich in internal allusions to Victoriana, Verne's life, and his works. Mikah strongly recalls Princess Aouda in Around the World in Eighty Days, and there's reference to Verne's repeated legal issues over plagiarism (both accused of doing it, and being plagiarised from - see Jules Verne: journeys in writing, Timothy A. Unwin, 2005 and Twenty thousand leagues under the seas, Jules Verne, trans. William Butcher, 1998). "Daniel Wragg" is fictitious, but his Sarcophagus Club appears to allude to the architecturally eclectic club of that name in Thackeray's Book of Snobs. (I did spot one anachronism here - Verne likens it to Luna Park, an amusement park near Porte Maillot, Paris, but this didn't exist until two years after Verne's death).

Any graphic novel exploring the mythos of Captain Nemo is bound to fall under the shadow of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; and Rivière's story, while interesting and evocative, is not as tightly plotted, leaving far more loose ends. Who is 'Bert', and why does he closely resemble Verne's wife? Is Mikah Nemo's daughter? What is the vicious aquatic homunculus that makes several unexplained appearances? Is the whole adventure Verne's fabulation in a fever? Some of these questions are probably answered in the second volume, Voyage sous les eaux: L’île mystérieuse, but Voyage into the Deep is nevertheless more than adequately accessible as a standalone work. It's beautifully-drawn, and thought-provoking: a good 75p's worth.

The Wikipedia article on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is worth reading for its account of the personal and bibliographic issues. These include Verne's problematic relationship with his publisher, Hetzel, that necessitated repeated changes in Nemo's back-story to steer clear of political hot potatoes; and the mangling of the book by the 1873 translator, Lewis Mercier. The Mercier translation is online at Project Gutenberg (E-Text No. 164) as are restored versions: the public domain Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by FP Walter, and (as far as I tell can tell, authorised) a PDF version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas translated by William Butcher. The last is especially worth reading for its extensive critical introduction.

- Ray

... our fathers that begat us

A couple of years back - see M and other non-comical comics - I briefly mentioned Chris Ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which I've just been re-reading.  It's a poignant and semi-autobiographical exploration of the psychology of  Corrigan, a timid postal worker in his 30s, as he meets his father for the first time.  It is, however, a nonlinear story, with the main thread interwoven with Jimmy's dreams and fantasies and with flashbacks, particularly to the childhood of Corrigan's grandfather at the time of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (see this hypertext thesis and this Illinois Institute of Technology project) with its 600-acre stucco-coated "White City".

The threads weave even more tightly with interactions between past and present also interact: Jimmy's neuroses and dreams (such as his fear of women and his recurring dream of a tiny horse) appear to come from the traumas of his grandfather's childhood rather than his own. Through these connected narratives, the story gradually reveals and dissects the history of a family with a repeating motif of fractured relationships, all leading to Jimmy's crippling inability assert himself and interact with the world.  I'm pleased to see that the sampler at Random House, and the CNN review (A not-so-comic comic book) and interview with Chris Ware are still online.

Somewhat in contrast, I've also been reading Exit Wounds, also an acclaimed graphic novel, by the Israeli artist Rutu Modan.  This takes a somewhat different angle on fatherhood, beginning when Koby Franco, a 20-something taxi driver in Tel Aviv, gets a call from the nearby Army Headquarters, where a female soldier, Numi, tells him his estranged father Gabriel may be dead, possibly the single unidentified victim of a suicide bombing. He isn't much interested, but Numi (who is keener than him to investigate) gradually draws him into following official and unofficial avenues to see if Gabriel is the unknown victim.  Initially Franco thinks of the tall and gangly Numi as 'The Giraffe', but the two become increasingly close as they pursue the puzzle of Gabriel's whereabouts.  Numi, however, has an agenda of her own, and Koby becomes increasingly troubled at the revelations of his father's complex love life.

Although the blurb at Drawn and Quarterly (here, and see the sampler) describes Exit Wounds as particular "portrait of modern Israel, a place where sudden death mingles with the slow dissolution of family ties", the location doesn't strike me as crucial to the story; any kind of mass accident, anywhere, could have led to the mystery. The central theme is, like Jimmy Corrigan, an investigation of a single fractured family. It's not as convoluted as the stream-of-consciousness Corrigan, but it's nevertheless sensitive and gripping, and it was rightly nominated for the 2007 Quill Awards.

- RG

Musical miscellany

Maria Kalaniemi: Arctic Paradise. More on this below.

A regular glance at Sydney Padua's 2D Goggles finds a new story under way in her beautifully drawn steampunk comic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: Lovelace and Babbage Vs The Organist! (part 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) pits Babbage against his nemesis - street musicians - and Lovelace against the inner demons of her poetic ancestry. The erudite commentary brings to light a wealth of connections in the early 19th century scientific and social circuit: in this case, that the English concertina was one of a number of musical inventions by the physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone.

In that territory of instrument - the more complex free-bass accordion - I continue to be delighted and amazed by Finnish accordion virtuosity; a number of classically-trained exponents are creating exciting folk / classical / jazz / ethnic fusion. Check out Pauliina Lerche (for example Tulikatriili on accordion, and her vocal/instrumental work in general, such as Tanssi poika and Vot I Kaalina); Johanna Juhola (for example, Painajainen Leikkikentll); and Maria Kalaniemi (my current favourites are the reflective Arctic Paradise and Taklax I, whose folk-classical fusion reminds me a lot of Methera) . Accordion aside, exploring associated YouTube links has led me to Ulla Pirttijarvi, a Sámi musician whose work combines the traditional Sámi "yoik" form with modern arrangements (for instance, Northern Silk); and Gjallarhorn, a band from the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnian region of Finland, who fuse "the folk music of Finland with a global range of influences and instrumentation including the didgeridoo and Australian wood flute" (for instance, O-Vals and Eldgjald). Oh, talking of Finnish music, I find - mutters curses - that I missed a Värttinä concert in Exeter three years ago, when they were in the UK following the West End premiere of The Lord of the Rings stage production, for which they co-composed the music.


Markku Lepistö Company: Concerto Diatonique

Addition upgraded from comment: Alan.98 (who is Alan Brignull) recommends the addition of Markku Lepistö to the list. Definitely!

Continuing the theme of instrumental virtuosity, I just ran into Seeing Ear Theatre's audio adaptation of Jack Vance's 1961 short SF story The Moon Moth. (also in the anthology The Moon Moth and Other Stories). In the scene-setting introduction (not in the print story), a drunken man attempts to force his attentions on a young woman. He is stopped and, despite protesting that he is a Consular Representative, is executed on the spot: not for the attempted assault, but for misjudging the woman's 'strakh' - social prestige level, as denoted by her mask. This is typical of Sirene, a planet with a highly xenophobic mask-wearing culture where all interactions depend on level of strakh (an unwritten scale of social prestige) and furthermore must be conducted in song accompanied by bizarre instruments whose choice again depends on relative strakh levels (for instance, the hymerkin - "a clapping, slapping, clattering device of wood and stone" - is used primarily to talk to slaves, and would be a deadly insult in other contexts).

The Moon Moth (plot spoiler, if you want, here) is a social satire and murder mystery telling of the misadventures of Edwer Thissell, the replacement Consular Representative, who has to catch a murderer despite his own inexperience in Sirenese culture. I think the Seeing Ear Theatre version could do with a bit more musicality in the dialogue and accompaniments, which don't fully convey the virtuosity and complexity of Sirenese music, but it's not a bad effort overall. Here it is: part 1 / part 2.

- Ray

Onhey!

I've been lying abed with a bug - must've breathed some plague cloud - but amid general weirdness a word surfaced that pestered me so much I had to get up to Google it.

I remember from childhood a cowboy comic where an Indian character shouted "Onhey!" as he attacked. If I ever recalled it, I just assumed it was made up. To my surprise, it turns out to be authentic (or at least sourceable to period accounts). It turns up in a number of accounts of the Battle of Little Big Horn, as in that reportedly told by White Bull to Stanley Vestal:

White Bull said, “I saw a mounted soldier waver in his saddle. I quirted my pony and raced up to strike him and count the first coup on this enemy. Before I could reach him, he fell dying from his saddle. I reined up my pony, jumped down and struck the body with my quirt. I yelled, ‘Onhey! I have overcome this one.’ I took the man’s revolver and cartridge belt.
- The man who killed Custer ("To Stanley Vestal, the old Sioux warrior White Bull describes the day when he counted his greatest coup", American Heritage Magazine, February 1957, Volume 8, Issue 2

Another account, Vestal's book about Jim Bridger, makes the context even clearer: that it's one of a set of standard expressions used by the Sioux when counting coup or in real attacks.

Mr. Frank Zahn, the Upper Missouri Interpreter, states that the Sioux, in punishing a member of their own tribe, used the same expressions as when counting coup upon an enemy. The man who first struck shouted "Onhey." The second to strike shouted "Okihewakte"—I kill him second." The third, "Iyamini-wakte —I kill him third." The fourth warrior shouted in like manner in his turn.
- Jim Bridger, Mountain Man, 1946 (Internet Archive jimbridgermounta001190mbp)

It all sounds plausible enough for closure for the moment, though both of these sources come via Stanley Vestal; it'd be nice to see independent confirmation. I don't know what language it would be; "Sioux" covers three main languages (Lakota, Western Dakota and Easten Dakota) with multiple dialects.
- Ray

Comic and animation miscellany

The best contemporary Japanese novel is a manga. Chris Michael at the Guardian Books Blog comments: "The ingeniously satirical Legend of Koizumi tells you far more about the country, far more entertainingly than any novel of recent years". The manga comic portrays the erudite but popular former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi as an action hero, and portrays Japanese international diplomacy as an intense mahjong game between titans ("simultaneously channelling and mocking the widely held Japanese idea that politics is a game played out between warring egos on a scale that dwarfs the common man"). The first episode of the anime adaptation is trailered on YouTube.

Miracleman: The Golden Age I've just been reading Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham's follow-up to the Marvelman/Miracleman mythos developed by Alan Moore. Unlike (say) the Superman mythos, where the hero does good but scarcely alters the status quo, the Miracleman story takes us into a world where the heroes have effectively become gods and transformed it (for instance, starting by dumping all fissile material into the Sun). Miracleman: The Golden Age focuses on the discontents and strange cultural developments of this Utopia. Supplicants climb Mount Olympus to seek favours from Miracleman. Unpopular and ugly children secretly worship "Bates", Miracleman's nemesis who destroyed London, whose ruin is preserved as memorial "Killing Fields". Miraclewoman takes a human lover, in a gender-reversed retelling of the Eros and Pysche myth. There are people whose paranoid worldview can't adjust to Utopia. There's Miraclewoman, again, who is unhappy in her super form but just as unhappy in her human persona, a plain and depressed doctor who most wants the love of her young daughter, who as a superbeing - though benign - is so otherworldly that she's incapable of tact, empathy or love. Though it does need knowledge of the backstory, it's a superb take - magical yet gloomy - on comic-book staples already transformed by Alan Moore. Lev Grossman of Time magazine included it among his Top 10 Graphic Novels (link and his full list).

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. I've mentioned before this open access journal from the English Department at the University of Florida; there's always something there of interest. The current issue - Volume 5, Issue 1 - has a number of articles on famous graphic novels. Graphic Whiteness and the Lessons of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, by Juda Bennett and Cassandra Jackson, looks at the neglected racial angle of Jimmy Corrigan; Watchmen: The Graphic Novel as Trauma Fiction, by Brandy Ball Blake, looks at how personal trauma is an essential driving force to the narrative to Watchmen, whose characters (in my view) personify the different moral stances - amoral, utilitarian, and so on - all under the banner of fighting evil; and "To the Stables, Robin": Regenerating the Frontier in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, by Theo Finigan, engages with the 'American monomyth' . This a reversal of the 'Campbell monomyth' - in which a hero goes out to adventure and comes back enlightened - to a motif where the hero comes from outside, defeats evil, then goes away again. See Heroes, previously.

Æon Flux. While skimming YouTube for tracks by Nightwish tracks, I found one used as backing for a tribute compilation for the animated series Æon Flux. This was a jolt to the memory; in the early 1990s, Channel 4 ran a series called Liquid Television co-produced with MTV. It featured a rather strange science fiction animation about an ultra-competent and acrobatic female spy, Æon Flux, with a fetishy costume and bizarre hairstyle, who in each episode was trying to thwart the plans of any enemy state (sometimes by infiltration, sometimes by direct attack with massive carnage). But every episode ended with her death, and the details were inconsistent; in some episodes, the enemy leader (now revealed to be called Trevor Goodchild) was her nemesis; in others her lover. In the first showing, there was no intelligible dialogue.

I recall a deal of discussion in the local SF club. It was claimed, for instance, that the repeated deaths and reincarnations meant the various Æon Fluxes were clones; or that the non-continuty and lack of dialogue were because the series had been hurriedly adapted from an anime series. Now Æon Flux is throughly documented, and all turns out to be intentional; the Korean-American animator Peter Chung "has said that this plot ambiguity and disregard for continuity are meant as a satire of mainstream action films, and his stories often emphasize the futility of violence and the ambiguity of personal morality". Whatever the reason, I find the series weirdly compelling; it has bizarre little touches that give depth to the dystopian world it's set in - details of characterisation and props that aren't directly pertinent to moving the plot forward 1. According to Wikipedia, the visual style was deeply influenced by the figurative paintings and drawings of Egon Schiele.

See Spike.com for the pilot episode, among others. There was a 2005 film based on the series. I missed it and don't intend to bother finding it; by all accounts it shoehorns the strangeness of the animation into a standard SF action movie with a linear plot.

1. "Gratuitous" details in fact; according Samuel R Delany a necessary component to successful literary characterization via three kinds of actions: gratuitous, purposeful and habitual. Animations tend to restrict themselves to the purposeful and habitual.
- Ray

Webcomic recommendations

Via MetaFilter: The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator, an excruciatingly accurate flowsheet for steampunk / cyberpunk / fantasy fiction. This is from Wondermark, David Malki's "illustrated jocularity" based on Victorian clipart. See examples - In which Sparky changes Ownership, In which a Heroine scowls a lot, and In which a Cat plays the Piano, In which it Keeps Going ("You'll not hear much of anything once my Cynthia finishes initiating her binary defense protocols") - and the Archive.

I've already enthused about 2D Googles (illustrator Sydney Padua's development blog for a proto-strip about Babbage and Lovelace as a crimefighting duo).

XKCD, "A webcomic of sarcasm, romance, math and language", by Randall Munroe: generally recommended on the science/computing circuit, as well as Language Log. See examples - Theft of the Magi, Iambic pentameter, and Beliefs - and the Archive. Oh, and the XKCD guest slot at Wondermark.

The Abominable Charles Christopher by Karl Kerschl - "the adventures of a dim-witted yeti through a forest full of colourful animal characters". Hard to tell what this is about: Charles pursues a rather dark and mystical quest amid light relief from anthropomorphized forest creatures, but I'm not sure whether to take it at face value or if the creatures are actually human and have been somehow transformed. See examples - Blunt force drama, Private practice, Time is relative, and The Godfather - and the Archive.

Digger, by Ursula Vernon. "A wombat. A dead god. A very peculiar epic", starting here.
- Ray

Comic and uncomic destruction

From Examiner.com (also variously on the comics niche circuit) Marvelman to return: David Looney, the San Antonio Comic Books Examiner reports on the news from SDCC (San Diego Comic-Con) 2009 the news that Marvel Comics have bought the rights to Marvelman (aka Miracleman). This looks like the end to one of the most long-running wrangles over legal rights to a comic character, and it could mean we finally see reprints of classic work by Alan Moore (with later contributions by Neil Gaiman).

Moore revived this defunct character with extensive deconstruction: the unexceptional storylines of the original Marvelman (a British equivalent to Captain Marvel) were revealed to be dreams fed to a sleeping group of experimental subjects to keep control of them. One of these subjects, Mike Moran, is now a flabby middle-aged man who has migraines and dreams of flying, until he remembers the word, "Kimota", that gives him the ability given to him by the experiment: to swap to the alternate super-powered body that is Marvelman. As the Examiner.com piece says:

Marvelman was one of the first truly ‘realistic’ takes on the superhero genre, with Marvelman having a serious impact on the world once he appears in public, along with one of the earliest attempts to show what a superhero taking over the world would do to the world itself. In addition it stands as the earliest work of both Moore and Gaiman, which should be of interest to any comic book fan.

Unlike classic comics - Superman, say, operates in a world where the social order remains unchanged by his presence - Marvelman and others with the same powers eventually take over the world, acting effectively as gods. (It paved the way for works such as Watchmen, in which the world economy is radically altered by the godlike Doc Manhattan's ability to transmute and create rare elements). In one scene in the Marvelman seqquence, after the superhumans have disposed of all nuclear weapons by dumping them into the sun, Margaret Thatcher has to be comforted for her distress at realising she no longer has any power.

The series also featured probably the most apocalyptic imaginings of any comic seen, when Johnny Bates, a traumatised young boy whose own alter-ego is the psychotic Kid Miracleman, is bullied and abused to the point where he reverts to the latter and goes on a sadistic rampage in London. This, and the ensuing battle to destroy him, leaves 40,000 dead and central London in ruins (see the review of Miracleman 15, Nemesis, at Ink destroyed my brush).


Not that it takes super-beings to destroy a city. A recent post at Ptak Science Books, The Most Lethal Number: M-69 vs. U-235 (Japan, 1945), looked at the devastation to multiple Japanese cities - little-remembered compared to the nuclear attacks - caused by M-69 incendiaries. It's as good a reason as any to recommend Grave of the Fireflies, the anime adaptation of Hotaru no Haka (A Grave of Fireflies), Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical novel about an orphaned brother and sister who have to fend for themselves during the famine after the firebombing of Kobe in 1945. It's quite the antithesis of the superhero genre: the big events and battles are peripheral to its harrowing personal story - simple, yet weaving together imagery with a novel-like complexity. It's one of the most moving films I've ever seen. Roger Ebert - see his review, Grave of the Fireflies (1988) - says "it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made" and quotes the animation historian Ernest Rister, who compared it to Schindler's List and said of it, "It is the most profoundly human animated film I've ever seen". Google finds various trailers and exerpts, such as the above from the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema.
- Ray

To the Difference Engine!

For fans of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage: 2D Goggles. This is the site for animator (Melina) Sydney Padua's steampunk webcomic about Lovelace and Babbage in a pocket dimension where they become crime-fighting adventurers. The strip is under development and bit fragmentary so far, but for coherent sections see the introductions to the characters at Lovelace - the origin (drawn for Ada Lovelace Day) and BBC Techlab; the three-part story Lovelace and Babbage vs The Economy (parts 1, 2, 3); The Person from Porlock (which reveals the truth behind Coleridge's famous interruption).

Sydney Padua, who admits the whole thing is experimental, as she's not a comic artist by profession, describes it as:

either the agonizing birth pangs, or monstrous death-throes, of a comic.

I hope it proceeds to fruition. Her style is brilliant (akin to that of Posy Simmonds) and the commentary about the history and development process is worth reading too:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was like the Wolverine of the early Victorians.
...
I read the extraordinary Charles Babbage’s comic masterpiece of an autobiography. I urge everyone to read it immediately. It has charts. CHARTS!

And there are generally interesting (if you're a bit geeky) Lovelace/Babbage links such as the Lego and Meccano Difference Engines. The merchandise is fun too, especially that with the nice ST:TNG pastiche of Ada working in the Difference Tubes.

- Ray

Wondering ...

For whatever reason, conversation with several blog contacts has lately been skating around the topic of superheroines, of which some particular points just crystallised in The Growlery's Superhero(in)es wot I have(n't) known:

my adult gut responses are three. First is an aversion to the whole superhero concept (this has been discussed before and I won't belabour the benevolent dictator, might is right point here). Second comes a dislike for gender differentiation of nouns which ought to be gender neutral (actor/actress, hero/heroine), suggesting that the male is the norm and the female a special case). Third, related to the second, is the fact that Superwoman's lack of evolutionary survival compared to Super Girl illustrates another patriarchal use of language (for men, after puberty, "boy" is generally a belittling term; women are widely referred to by the juvenile "girl" for much of their lives).

Yep. A recent exposition of the first point was by Alan Moore - see Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic at Wired - who isn't the first to see the whole superhero concept as a reflection of the politico-military stance of the USA, where the genre had its greatest success. Earlier critics, Matthew Wolf-Meyer 1 and Jason Dittmer 2, have argued that superhero stories foster the idea of maintenance of the status quo by a powerful elite.

And then there's the general stereotypical bias; as Felix says, it's significant that the direct counterpart of Superman is the juvenilized Supergirl, not Superwoman. It's also interesting to compare the publication histories of Supergirl and Superwoman. You find the former is a popular character of more or less stable appearance and persona; while the latter has been through a variety of identity tweaks, suggesting that the concept of a mature "super" woman didn't sit comfortably with comic creators and/or readers.

Counter to this, however, is the interesting story of Wonder Woman, well documented elsewhere but worth briefly re-telling. In 1940, a Family Circle interview appeared, "Don't Laugh at the Comics", in which the psychologist William Moulton Marston expounded his views on the educational possibilities of comics. On the strength of this, Marston was head-hunted by All-American Publications (later part of DC Comics), who gave him the go-ahead to develop the then radical concept of a female superhero, working name Suprema, who made her debut as Wonder Woman in 1941 and has been continuously in print ever since.

At one level, Wonder Woman's creation fits into trends of the time. In World War II, the USA government was campaigning to mobilise female labour through propaganda involving strong female characters such as Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter and J. Howard Miller's We Can Do It! lady. Wonder Woman, whatever her mythological trappings, was in many ways in the same vein (for instance, her costume was based on the US flag and eagle, and she began her career fighting Axis enemies). However, Marston's precise intentions are difficult to fathom. Marston was a definite original, whose life and career has many unusual facets. As a psychologist, he had devised "DISC theory", a psychological classification system (DISC = Dominance , Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) and, with his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, a blood pressure lie detection test. He wrote a number of books, some outside his field of work including F.F. Proctor, vaudeville pioneer and Venus with us; a tale of the Caesar (aka The Private Life of Julius Caesar). In personal life he was proto-feminist and (I'm not sure if this is a contradiction or not) lived in an amicable polyamorous relationship with his wife and his ex-student Olive Byrne, both of whom appear to have facets that inspired Wonder Woman (for instance, Byrne's wearing of heavy bracelets). See Who was Wonder Woman? (Marguerite Lamb, Bostonia, Fall 2001).

The complication was that Wonder Woman appeared to have a somewhat strange agenda. Whatever the mission statement

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.
- William Moulton Marson, in The American Scholar, 1943

it was a matter of observation that the series, while Marston was involved, had a fixation with bondage, and with overt games of dominance and submission played by the Amazon-like characters in the all-female society from which Wonder Woman hailed (see El blog Ausente). As the Bostonia article says, Marston seemed to have a "competing fascination with female submission and female strength". Quite what he was trying to express isn't made much clearer by the interview Our Women Are Our Future (Olive Richard, Family Circle, August 14, 1942 - an insider job, as Olive Richard is Olive Byrne). He seems to swing between pro-feminism, pro fem-dom, and complete flakery

"In all seriousness," he continued, "I regard that as the greatest-no, even more-as the only hope for permanent peace. And as a psychologist I'm convinced that the ever-increasing counterparts of Wonder Woman in real life will lead the way. More power to them! Let them keep their Amazon chain bands polished. And their magic lassos limbered up! Women are nature-endowed soldiers of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, and theirs is the only conquering army to which men will permanently submit-not only without resentment or resistance or secret desires for revenge, but also with positive willingness and joy!"

No wonder critics are still puzzling over the subtexts, even to the point of speculating if the original Wonder Woman was lesbian - see Wonder Woman: lesbian or dyke?, Trian Robbins - which would explain the non-consummation of her non-relationship with Major Steve Trevor. This interpretation had been made in the 1950s, on largely reactionary and sexist grounds, in Frederick Wertham's moral panic book about the influence of comics, Seduction of the Innocent); but even non-hostile commentators can scarcely ignore that the strip presented unconventional gender relationships, apparently to a purpose. The Wonder Woman phenomenon is extensively discussed in Doing science + culture (Roddey Reid, Sharon Traweek, Routledge, 2000, ISBN 0415921120); see the section Wonder Woman and Her Disciplinary Powers: The Queer Intersection of Scientific Authority and Mass Culture by Molly Rhodes:

Wonder Woman emerged within a surprising national network of academic intellectuals, reform ideologies, science, and mass culture, a network focused not on what kind of cultural objects would further a short-term national war effort, but on the long-term resolution of national social ills through new forms of cultural literacy.

Wonder Woman had a brief appearance in newspapers, but

Unlike comic book audiences, who lapped it all up, newspaper readers never found these psychological intricacies particularly compelling. In August 1945 the Wonder Woman strip was unceremoniously dumped by the syndicate.
- 100 Years of American Comics, Maurice Horn, Gramercy Books, 1996

Wonder Woman has been through various incarnations. After Marston was out of the picture (he died in 1947) the fetishy elements were toned down, as eventually were WW's powers. Originally comparable to Superman, she was downgraded to a secret agent in the 1960s, but as told at Dance of the Puppets she got her powers back after a campaign by Gloria Steinem, who hailed her as a feminist icon. I admit I'm of an age to have first encountered the character through the campy TV series starring Lynda Carter, who made Wonder Woman thoroughly wholesome but distinctly lightweight. A number of more recent artists have drawn the character for comics and graphic novels. Some went down the standard superhero route and gave her body-builder musculature; but my favourite interpretation is that of Alex Ross, who works in a hyperrealistic style in watercolour gouache (see the example, left). His Wonder Woman in Spirit of Truth, modelled on his friend Rhonda Hampton, is both stylistically accomplished (see examples at the Alex Ross official site) - a million miles from the oddly naive 1940s comics - and, I think, highly successful in portraying her as a strong mature woman, neither juvenilized nor masculinized, in line with the original concept of the character.

1. The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference, The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 36 Issue 3, pp. 497-517.
2. The Tyranny of the Serial: Popular Geopolitics, the Nation, and Comic Book Discourse, Antipode, Volume 39 Issue 2, pp. 247-268.

- Ray

Jughead's hat

From I'm Learning to Share!, an amazing trivia research post: Search term: "Jughead's hat", which explores why certain American cartoon characters of the 1940s-1960s appear to be wearing crowns. It turns out to be a US fashion - I'd have to say, a remarkably stupid-looking one - of wearing an inside-out raggedly-trimmed fedora, deriving from an originally functional hat made by workers as a homebrew equivalent of the protective beanie. It seems to have been a kind of token nonconformism permitted to teenagers in a totally conformist era, who could signal their nonconformism by wearing a silly hat - commercially produced and adorned wth commercial badges - while not actually doing anything nonconformist. (Found via Languagehat).
- Ray

Watchmen: the movie - update

Further to Watchmen: the movie, time for graphic novel enthusiasts to start looking at cinema schedules: Watchmen just had its premiere screening, and initial reviews are good. 1 The MetaFilter post links to a couple of interesting Wired magazine interviews with the graphic novel's creators. Artist Dave Gibbons' Gut Feelings on the Watchmen Movie explores an artist's reaction to seeing his 2D work expanded into a realistic medium, and Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic explores various themes from his work (Moore, following past unsatisfactory dealings with Hollywood, has dissociated himself from the film).

Moore and O'Neill's forthcoming The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III) (previewed here) looks worth checking out: moving on 12 years from Vol II, which retold The War of the Worlds, its setting is the early 20th century of The Threepenny Opera

Because—as ever with the League—we tend to base the adventures upon the fictional landscape that was around at that particular time. Since this is set in 1910, we found the idea of bringing in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill irresistible. So I've rewritten the libretto for a number of the more gutsy and dark and powerful and sardonic Kurt Weill numbers. There's a new "Mack the Knife," a new "Pirate Jenny," a new "MacHeath's Plea From the Gallows," a new "What Keeps Mankind Alive."

The third part of the Moore interview is especially interesting for his exposition of what the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mythos is attempting to achieve

Moore: ... I suppose we're attempting to come up with a kind of unified field theory of culture that actually links up all of these various works, whether they're high culture or low culture or no culture.

Wired: How do you position yourself on the continuum from homage to parody to commentary? If you're engaging with all of these other texts to try to do what they did, to talk about what they did?

Moore: ... It's a matter of tying these things in. Sometimes they are lesser-known works that we think should be better known, and we're including them in the hope that people might actually go out and pick up the original books. Sometimes we have characters who are greatly revered that we feel are perhaps too revered, and we would like to give a more accurate picture of them ... So, yes, it is a big literary game, but it is one that lets us touch upon a surprising amount of stuff that's in some way relevant to the contemporary world

Moore goes on to give examples from The Black Dossier' (the interim volume) of its deconstruction of various characters and literary relationships: the sadism and misogyny of James Bond (who appears in TBD as a brutal womanizer called "Jimmy"); the literary interconnections of the spy Kim Philby (nicknamed after Kipling's Kim and, as a friend of Graham Greene, quite possibly a model for The Third Man, Harry Lime); and the hostility between George Orwell and "Frank Richards" 2 over Billy Bunter books (see Orwell's essay, Boys' Weeklies, and Richards' reply - which is fairly embarrassing. Taken to task for depicting foreigners as figures of fun, Richards' reply is "I must shock Mr Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny: they lack the sense of humour which is the special gift of our own chosen nation...").

A literary game maybe, but one that takes the reader down such intriguing byways is worth playing. For more on the mythos, see Jess Nevins' Black Dossier Annotations. While it obviously needs reading in juxtaposition with the graphic novel, it is quite readable in itself (a set of footnotes that have a life of their own) for the tasters and followable references to historical miscellanea and little-known works of fiction.

1. And if you want local interest, I didn't realise that Matthew Goode, who plays Ozymandias, is from Exeter (see City actor's sci-fi blockbuster role); he's the son of Jenny Goode, director of the Exeter Gilbert & Sullivan society St David's Players.
2. "Frank Richards" was the pseudonym of the fairly enigmatic author Charles Harold St John Hamilton (1876–1961), who is probably the most prolific English language writer of all time, having written "the equivalent of nearly a thousand full-length novels" (ODNB). Certainly this beats the 904 books of Mary Faulkner: see league table. See Billy Bunter and 'The Magnet' by Bill Nagelkerke for an analysis of the Bunter mythos in relation to the rather complex peronsality of its author.

Ray

Tamara Drewe

From the Guardian books section, an interesting video, Posy Simmonds speaks about her comic Tamara Drewe. I briefly mentioned Gemma Bovary a while back. Tamara Drewe, originally serialised as a Guardian comic strip, is likewise loosely based on a classic, in this case (as the TLS review says - Tamara Drewe's Wessex) on Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.

In a series of allusive namings, Harding's setting of Weatherbury becomes Ewedown. Tamara (in the Bible, Tamar is a daughter of David) is the analogue of Bathsheba Everdene, and three also very recognisable men are attracted to her: the working-class handyman Andy Cobb, the Indie band drummer Ben Sergeant, and the established novelist neighbour Nicholas Hardiman. As with Bathsheba's unwise joke of sending a Valentine to Farmer Boldwood, tragedy ensues when a prankster sends out an e-mail - "I want to give you the biggest shagging of your life" - from Tamara's laptop.

While Tamara Drew follows the skeleton of Far from the Madding Crowd, Simmonds , has sufficiently altered it that the ending is not a foregone conclusion: for instance, the adulterous Hardiman is the caddish character rather than Sergeant, and there are a number of new characters who provide new viewpoints. The focus is also not merely on Tamara's relationships with the three men, but also on the various angsts of writers and the satirising the tensions between locals and incomers in English rural settings. Apart from her general excellence as an observational cartoonist, the latter is an area where Simmonds is particularly sharp; for instance, her earlier creation of "Tresoddit" - see Rock of Ages - is a pleasantly barbed take on the Yuppification of Rock in Cornwall).

I haven't read the expanded and embellished book version of Tamara Drewe, but it's on my wish-list for Christmas. Clive James enthuses about Posy Simmonds here, with a few Tamara Drewe samples (Cover, Drinks at Stonefield, Dr Glen Larson, Jody and Casey), and in general about Bande dessinée (up-market Francophone comic art, to which genre Posy Simmonds' work is closely equivalent) - though I'm not sure I agree with his view that the ponderous satire Flook was so wonderful, nor that there was nothing between it and Posy Simmonds (since he misses out SF comics - both writer and artist of Watchmen are English, as is Brian Bolland). There is also the problem of comparing essentially realistic social satire (as in Tamara Drewe) with the non-realistic "morality play" approach of superhero comics (which may nevertheless present a sophisticated take on moral and philosophical topics - see, again, the journal ImageTexT).

Anyhow, publication details: Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds, Jonathan Cape Ltd, Nov 2007, ISBN 022407816X).

Update, August 2010: See Tamara Drewe movie.

- Ray

Heroes

Further to Watchmen: The Movie, I see there's a serious glitch in the production - as The War for Watchmen reports, Fox and Warner Bros. are in dispute over the rights. Hopefully, as happened with Dukes of Hazzard, it'll just come down to a financial settlement rather than a permanent block, as films that at some level analyse the genre they portray are always interesting.

The superhero genre has been a remarkable literary/cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, conventionally traced to Segal & Schuster's invention of Superman in the late 1930s. However, the superhero wasn't entirely without precedent: Victorian and early 20th century fiction was full of crime-fighters, adventurers and villains with attributes such as particular costumes, special abilities and secret identities. Rather than try listing them, the easiest recomendation is to point to the The Wold Newton Universe, Philip José Farmer's lovely unifying conceit of the "Wold Newton Family". Its premise is that these outstanding fictional individuals - notably Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Doc Savage - are all related, their powers arising from mutations when the occupants of a carriage were exposed to radiation from the 1795 Wold Newton meteorite.

Nevertheless, the idea builds on mythic motifs going back as far as you like. M Night Shyamalan's film Unbreakable, which also analyses comic books, takes as its superhero definition one who has powers but a particular vulnerability. This fits Samson (super-strong as long as his hair isn't cut); Achilles and Siegfried (invulnerable except for one location), or Lleu Llaw Gyffes in the Mabinogion, who can't be killed

during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not naked, nor by any weapon lawfully made

Like Samson, he makes the mistake of telling his lover how this can be circumvented. If you ignore the vulnerability part, there are many others: in Greek mythology the obvious one is the super-strong Herakles (who meets at least one super-villain, Antaeus), and in Celtic mythology, the warrior band of the Fianna contained individuals with unusual and idiosyncratic powers. Quite apart from the basic qualifications ...

the applicant would stand in a waist-deep hole armed with a shield while nine warriors threw spears at him; if he was wounded, he failed. In another his hair would be braided, and he would be pursued through the forest; he would fail if he was caught, if a branch cracked under his feet, or if the braids in his hair were disturbed. He would have to be able to leap over a branch the height of his forehead, pass under one as low as his knee, and pull a thorn from his foot without slowing down. He also needed to be a skilled poet
- Wikipedia, probably paraphrased from Celtic Myth and Legend, Charles Squire, 1905

... many of the Fianna had special powers: Diarmuid Ua Duibhne had a "love spot" on his forehead, which would make any woman who saw it fall in love with him; Caílte mac Rónáin could run remarkably fast and communicate with animals; and the leader, Fionn mac Cumhaill, had tasted the Salmon of Knowledge after burning his thumb while cooking it, and could access special knowledge and wisdom thereafter (I suppose the equivalent of Googling) by sucking on that thumb. Another hero from the same mythology, Cúchulainn, achieved immense powers in battle by a shape-changing frenzy that makes the Incredible Hulk look effete. In his battle frenzy, termed "warp spasm" by the translator Thomas Kinsella, Cúchulainn became:

a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front... On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child... he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram's fleece reached his mouth from his throat... The hair of his head twisted like the tange of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.
- The Táin, trans. Thomas Kinsella, Oxford University Press, 1969

There are similar examples - see Google Books - in The Epic Hero (Dean A Miller, JHU Press, 2002, ISBN 0801862396) which looks generally worth finding for its exhaustive survey of the characteristics of the epic hero (a deal of it is previewable via Google). Miller devotes considerable space to the many attempts by commentators - JG Frazer, FR Somerset (Lord Raglan), RB Onians, and Joseph Campbell - to fit into a common framework the often very similar life scripts of epic heroes. Judging by the Campbell section from The Epic Hero shows, Miller doesn't appear to much like Campbell's work, especially later when he turned very Jungian and New Age; nor is Miller the only critic (more later). Nevertheless, Campbell's analysis of hero myth is probably the most celebrated and popularly known.

Campbell's iconic work is The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which proposes a "monomyth", a single heroic story (commonly called the "Campbell Cycle"). In its simplest form, it can be summarised as

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man

Click to enlarge the diagram:

There are various text descriptions that describe it in more detail; Wikipedia's Monomyth page summarises it pretty well. The applicability as a storyline to a number of classic heroes such as Herakles and Gilgamesh (including major religious figures such as Moses and Jesus Christ) is pretty clear. Jesus, Herakles and Moses, for instance, all suffer threats on their lives in babyhood. There's a bit of a wimpy tendency for modern expositions to tone it down by removing the final fall from grace and death of the hero (with this final quadrant included, the monomyth looks like an allegory of the human life-span).

Many works of fiction draw on the concept; I first ran into it in John Barth's Chimera, a self-conscious exploration of mythic storytelling which interweaves the tales of Dunyazade (sister of Scheherazade), Perseus and Bellerophon (the above diagram comes from that book). MK Joseph's The Hole in the Zero has a segment explicitly showing the cyclic nature of a Campbell myth. In that segment, Paradine becomes such a hero, but finds himself in a book:

"Lord Paradine is, in fact, a typical example of the kind of heroic superman almost invariably invented in cultures undergoing a final period of steep decline, as compensation for the experience of cultural overthrow. They are then normally taken over and elaborated in the romance cycles of the succeeding culture".

How accepted an observation this is, I don't know, but it certainly fits King Arthur (suggested by some to be based on a chieftain holding out against the Saxons in the Sub-Roman period) and Robin Hood (a mythical Saxon guerilla in an England long since taken over by the Normans).

However, the Campbell Cycle has acquired a particular foothold in cinema.

Movie and other myths

The best-known cinematic connection is with Star Wars, who was a fan and friend of Campbell, which led to a great deal of synergy: see, for instance, The Power of Myth, in which Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch; and The Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas and Bill Moyers. How much the Campbell monomyth shaped the original Star Wars trilogy isn't entirely clear; some critics have spotted that Lucas didn't begin talking about Campbell motifs until after their completion, even suggesting a degree of retrofitting. For example, Steven Hart - Galactic gasbag, Salon - finds more credible roots in pulp SF, and Lucas himself acknowledged influence from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress.

Campbell-spotting has become a bit of a hobby among movie buffs - The Matrix is another that's applicable with little effort - but it can be hard to separate stories that use a monomyth framework by happenstance from those that rework older heroic stories already following that framework, and those that use it by conscious choice (especially as Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey is standard reading for screenwriting courses).

Another director interested in the Campbell and myth is George Miller, and this manifested particularly in his post-apocalyptic Mad Max trilogy. These films, particularly Beyond Thunderdome, are full of standard mythic motifs - acquiring of helpers, puzzles and perils, and tricksters. The point where Max awakes from a coma to emerge from a cave in an idyllic gorge called Crack-in-the-Earth is about as blatant a figurative rebirth as you can get. Heroic Apocalypse: Mad Max, Mythology and the Millennium (Mick Broderick, orig. in Chris Sharrett (ed), Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, Maissoneuvre Press, Washington DC, 1993, pp. 250-272) is a detailed analysis in Campbellian terms; and there's more at Transparency Now's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: Salvaging the Future. (A couple of bits of Mad Max connection trivia: 1) the uncredited RiddleyWalkerisms in the "doing the tell" segment; 2) Paul A Cantor's lovely description of the works of Odd Nerdrum - such as The Water Protectors - as "the result if Rembrandt had painted the sets of The Road Warrior").

I don't 100% buy the Campbell interpretation of Mad Max. Even taking the whole trilogy together, in many ways Max doesn't fit the model of the Campbell hero. He doesn't particularly go on a quest. There is, arguably, a general theme of his personal development (from driven avenger toward altruism), but mostly he turns up out of the wilderness for routine aims such as finding fuel or recovering stolen property, eventually grudgingly facilitates the rescue of others, then departs back into the wilderness. In fact he is a character more in the mould of the "Man with No Name" style of hero whose story runs:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

This is not Campbell at all, but the "American Monomyth" postulated by the theologian Robert Jewett and the philosopher John Shelton Lawrence in their books beginning with the 1977 The American Monomyth. For the basics, see this Dialogic Interview with John Shelton Lawrence and this Humanist reviewof The Myth of the American Superhero. Jewett and Lawrence argue that American storytelling, particularly within modern cinema, focuses on an essentially antidemocratic monomyth involving a hero wading in to alter a society that isn't working. They argue further that this even flavours US social policy (paradoxically, in a society for which collective democracy is supposed to be a core ideal; the same phenomenon as noticed by revisionist historian Ray Raphael - see July 4th and invented traditions - who is also concerned at the USA's perception of its past in terms of superhuman figures).

There is, then, a dark side to heroic myth, and that's one of the aspects that appeals about Watchmen. It's not just about darkness for its own sake; there has been a drift toward darker treatments of superheroes, but movies (as in the latest Dark Knight interpretation of Batman) still lean toward an implicit "end justifies the means" conclusion. Watchmen, at least in the book, uses darkness in a way that subverts the genre; some of its nominal heroes are intrinsically toxic (the Comedian, for instance, shoots his pregnant mistress, attempts to rape a fellow crimefighter, and throughly enjoys napalming the enemy in Vietnam) - something that as Zach Snyder says would never be countenanced in mainstream superhero movies that are linked to corporate franchises.

It comes down to world-view. Generally the superhero world is one in which these powerful individuals are presented as trustworthy to make decisions on humanity's behalf, and Moore's Watchmen runs counter to that. The Tides of History: Alan Moore's Historiographic Vision explores his stance in detail; it argues that, unfortunately, the comics industry didn't grasp his intentions and took Watchmen merely as precedent to "transform superheroes into violent, amoral killers". The essay is at ImageTexT, "a peer-reviewed, open access journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and related media", which looks likely to repay further exploration.

Addendum: I forget to mention that it was Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19th - which reminds me of one of the premises of Watchmen. In its world where costumed crimefighters actually exist, comic genres had taken a different turn and focused instead on lurid pirate stories. Tales of the Black Freighter at The Boredom Festival has stripped out the extraneous main story to reconstruct Marooned, the counterpointed pirate comic within Watchmen, about a shipwrecked mariner undergoing a horrific journey to warn his home town. ("The Black Freighter" alludes to Seeräuber Jenny from Die Dreigroschenoper).

- Ray

All the books in the world...

Via Bill Ectric's Place (a literary weblog I recommend), Mister Bookseller, an appropriately-themed short story in comic format by Darko Macan and Tihomir Čelanović.
- Ray

HG Wells adaptations

I just watched the 2005 Spielberg War of the Worlds: a competent enough adaptation run through the usual Hollywood filter of contemporary American setting. I didn't realise until Googling it that there were two straight-to-DVD adaptations also released in mid-2005. One, HG Wells' War of the Worlds by The Asylum is also a modern US retelling; the other, The War of the Worlds from the independent film company Pendragon Pictures, looks intriguing as the only version so far to retain the original setting. In fact the director, Timothy Hines, has stuck as faithfully as possible to the book. I'm not a purism-freak, so this isn't automatically a plus point (for instance, in my view, Wells is tediously didactic in places and the deus ex machina he uses to kill the Martians is pretty lame). Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting take on the adaptation, and judging by the sample material, well done considering the low budget; Pendragon have online a stills gallery and YouTube trailers. Reviews appear to be mixed and have commented on the rather stylised flavour (Hines' deliberate simulation of the style of early film).

Reading The War of the Worlds I've often thought it was ripe for a sequel

Neither is the composition of the Black Smoke known, which the Martians used with such deadly effect, and the generator of the Heat-Rays remains a puzzle. The terrible disasters at the Ealing and South Kensington laboratories have disinclined analysts for further investigations upon the latter.

It's hard to believe governments would give up so quickly with the prospect of having such a powerful weapon, and one could easily envisage an early 20th century made very different by adaptation of Martian technology. Two of many follow-up works, the comics Scarlet Traces and Scarlet Traces: The Great Game by Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, follow exactly this thread to create a steampunk scenario (they've also done a very nice graphic novel version of WotW: see the webcomic).

On the subject of HG Wells sequels, one worth reading is Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships (HarperCollins/Voyager, 1995, ISBN 0006480128). There have been many sequels to The Time Machine, such as KW Jeter's Morlock Night (also steampunk, Jeter being one of the coiners of that genre) and Ronald Wright's A Scientific Romance (see After London). However, Baxter's book, which rightly won numerous awards, was authorised by the Wells estate as the official sequel.

The general thrust of The Time Ships is the increasingly complex, ultimately cosmic, changes to the timeline arising from the Time Machine's invention. At the end of The Time Machine, the Traveller leaves for the future, we assume to go back to Weena. However, in The Time Ships he finds that the future is different, somehow changed by the writing of The Time Machine so that it is dominated by civilised technologically-advanced Morlocks. Accompanied by one of them, Nebogipfel, he returns to the past to warn his younger self, only to be caught up in a battle involving a time-travelling tank from the First World War, which is still going on in 1938 due to a Time War caused by the Traveller's work being developed by both the English and the Germans (who have their own "Zeitmaschine"). And so on.

But more than a straight sequel, which would be good in itself, The Time Ships is additionally a skit on HG Wells works in general, with references to other works such as The Plattner Story, The Land Ironclads, The Chronic Argonauts, The World Set Free, and so on. Do check it out.

These titles, as well as WotW itself, are all available online for readers in the USA, where most of Wells' works are out of copright. Hyperlinks that UK readers can follow - here, he's in copright until the end of 2016 - would probably count as contributory infringement. The World Set Free is, by the way, remarkable for its prediction of nuclear weapons, although Wells was wrong about the mechanism; his "Carolinum" bombs use not a chain reaction, but a large chunk of unstable isotope whose radioactive decay can be held in stasis.
- Ray

Addendum: a couple of out-takes on the deus ex machina of Earth's bacteria killing the Martians in WotW. Firstly, this plot weakness was subverted very neatly in book II of the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (see the earlier Rider Haggard post), altogether an extremely good retelling of The War of the Worlds. In this, the "Earth bacteria" explanation is revealed to be the cover story for the British Government's use of a biological warfare agent against the Martians with deliberate disregard for collateral civilian casualties.

Secondly, the intro and outro to the Spielberg movie featured an animation of these Earth bacteria in a water drop, with a Morgan Freeman voice-over - very hard to take seriously after having heard the poem Morgan Freeman Narration

What is that sound? A familiar voice.
You might want someone else, but you don't have a choice.
Martians, and penguins, and Andy Dufresne;
If you pay me enough, I'll be there to explain.
...

This is one of the works of film and TV composers Jon and Al Kaplan, who excel in satirical musical adaptations. Their major opus is Silence! Silence of the Lambs: the Musical, which won the Overall Excellence Award: Outstanding Musical at the 2005 New York Fringe Festival: for a sample, try It's Me - lyrics here - based on the part of the film where Hannibal Lecter escapes using the policeman's skin as disguise). Quid Pro Quo (the "lambs" dialogue between Lecter and Starling) is also a particularly good song. The Kaplans' work combines lyrical tunes, clever impressions, and highly witty lyrics. The lyrics are, however, extremely frank, so be warned: www.jonandal.com
- Ray

Addendum 2: see Woking walker at MetaFilter, where they're discussing Woking’s awesome Martian fighting machine at the architecture blog Deputydog: nice pictures of Michael Condron's WotW-themed art installation, The Martian, in HG Wells' hometown. Also the local Wetherspoons is named The Herbert Wells in homage, and is one of a number of pubs serving Waylands Brewery's Martian Mild.
- Ray

Addendum 3: I just ran into Dr Zeus' nice The War of the Worlds Book Cover Collection. Among interesting images there, the site includes Peter Balch's animations and discussion of the problem of tripod gait, which isn't as straightforward as you might think. Although very stable while standing still, movement requires taking at least one foot off the ground, so it needs as much dynamic balancing as biped walking. Of related interest, Ansible 254 has a quotation from Elizabeth Bear's 2008 Ink and Steel that's food for thought:

Tripodal Stability Dept. 'She crouched on a three-legged stool as if warming herself before the fire, but Will knew her chill would take more melting than that. He knelt down before her. The stool wobbled under her when he took her hands, the one leg shorter than the other that his father hadn't mended in fifteen years gone past.'

- Ray