The Big Pendulum

When it comes to literary (or film) criticism, one can present incredible interpretations of the text in question without ever assuming that this is how the original author intended it to be interpreted. A sterling example is found in an article called 'The Return of Hobbes' by a chap named Galvin P. Chow (Google it, do I have to do everything myself?). This postulates that Hobbes from Calvin & Hobbes is somehow the same character as Tyler Durden from Fight Club. At first you think 'uh-huh, right' but then after reading some of it you realize that it's making sense, and by the end of the article, you're thinking 'damn it, that sounds downright plausible!' Chow piles on the evidence, and once you start to regard the issue correctly, the similarities become almost unavoidable.

Now, do I reckon that Bill Watterson or David Fincher really intended their works to be seen this way?

Come on.

Chow so expertly teases aspects of both works, re-moulding them according to his own wants, that he is able to convince us that there was an intended connection where in fact there must have been none (perhaps this is how conspiracy theories get started. But I am getting ahead of myself). This is a large part of how literary criticism seems to work. In school, while doing my Leaving Cert, I was often told that I could take any stance on a novel when writing an essay, as long as I backed up my idea with evidence and examples from the text. Any stance. Any text. There's a wide sargasso sea of potential stupid ideas right there.

Dipping my toes into this sea, I will begin by noting what I see as some bizarre similarities between The Big Lebowski, and the book Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Yeah, you know The Big Lebowski, and if you don't, boy have you come to the wrong place.

Foucault's Pendulum, on the other hand... I will understand if you don't. It's a large, complex, demanding book about Italian magazine editors who concoct a super-conspiracy theory (told you I'd get around to them) that includes every other such theory ever flaunted. All your old favourites are trotted out- the Templars, the Jesuits, the Nazis, the Rosicrucians, Count St. Germaine, etc (Tellingly, Eco is even more fond of lists than I am). It's been described as 'the thinking man's Da Vinci Code'.

To be honest, this book will probably ruin conspiracy theories for you forever. The joke is that though the book deals with every conspiracy theory ever hatched (pre David Ike) with more detail and accuracy than you'll find (or want to find) anywhere else, he still understands that it's all nonsense. The reader is drawn into the narrator's paranoid way of thinking as the characters begin to believe their own hype. They find connections between events that can only (to their fevered imaginations) be explained by a vast, all-encompassing Plan. And yet we the reader know it's applesauce. The conspiracy theorist's mind, and his reasons for believing, are examined so convincingly that you'll never be able to take another 911-truther seriously again (if you ever did anyway).

Phew. All of which is a long way from the Dude and his soiled rug. Or is it?

Consider. Both deal with three middle-aged (or nearly middle-aged) guys who hang out together because they have too much free time, and have few other meaningful relationships in their lives. In Lebowski, the trio are the Dude, Walter and Donny. Dude is the laid-back main character. Walter is an angry, offense-taking overgrown child who is obsessed with being Jewish, though his racial background suggests otherwise. Though Donny does very little, he does serve a purpose (through his death, hard cheese). The Dude and Walter do not share one scene together in which they do not fight or fail to communicate with each other. Donny's 'funeral' is one of the only scenes where we realize that they really do care for each other. And though we may have suspected it throughout the film, the lack of anybody else at this pitiful ceremony shows for sure that these three guys (now two) are the only close friends or family any of them have. It's a touching (and hilarious) scene.

In Pendulum, our trio consist of Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi. Though a bit younger than the others, and a dab hand with the ladies, narrator Casaubon is still rather detached from society. He drifts further and further from his girlfriend as the three become immersed in their obsessive creation, the Plan. It is clear that until meeting the other two, he has never been so challenged or stimulated intellectually. Belbo is arguably the main character- his twisted genius drives the creation of the Plan, and his cynicism makes him the most laid-back of the three (though we do eventually find out that this is a front). He has few close aquaintences besides the other two, and he seems more or less okay with this. Diotallevi is the quiet, abused one, though a direct comparison with Donny would perhaps be unfair to him. However, the kicker here is that he is obsessed with being Jewish, despite his racial background. In his own case, it stems from his being a foundling. In his need for identity, he watches his Jewish neighbours preparing for Shomor Shabbas (which Walter is also obsessed with) the night before, longing to take part. In any case, both texts deal with the friendship and need between a trio of men who, unusually for their stage in life, have no other strong relationships.

Both the Dude and Walter are obviously products of the 60's- the Dude represents the hippie generation with his take-it-easy attitude and his history of protest, sit-ins and dope-smoking. Walter represents the other side of the same coin- obsessed with rules, firearms and Vietnam, he is everything the Dude stood against at that time. But they seem to get on fine.

Similarly, Belbo and co. have their background in the student politics of the 60's. Belbo and Casaubon first meet at a student protest during this time. Back then, they chanted slogans and marched, and got chased by the police. The only difference is their cynicism to the ideals of this era. Really, they take part in this stuff because they feel it is expected of them, or because they think they will pick up girls. Still, the connection is noticeable.

There is also the film noir element. I've already mentioned that Lebowski is basically a subversion of Chandler (a few scenes and plot elements are robbed from The Big Sleep, in particular), with the Dude as a clueless stand-in for Philip Marlowe. Dirty dealings, red herrings, L.A. setting- all present and correct. In Pendulum, Casaubon actively compares himeslf to noir heroes Sam Spade and Marlowe on more than one occasion.

Perhaps the final similarity is how the plots of both texts stem from misconceptions. In both cases, events quickly spiral out of control in terms of complexity, with a conspicuous nothing at the centre. In Lebowsky, all the characters believe there has been a kidnapping, and a twisted trail of deception develops around it precisely because nobody knows what's going on (it's a pastiche of the LA-set Chandler novels). Of course, there was no kidnapping. Eventually, one of the characters (Donny) dies, arguably as a result of the stress and excitement of where their adventure finally takes them. The script could have had him shot by the nihilists, but instead points out that it was a heart attack. We'll never know if he died as a result of the events of the movie, or if it was something that might just have happened anyway.

In Pendulum, the trio at first construct the Plan as a joke, knowing it is false, but slowly become convinced of its veracity, as do several other nefarious characters. These troublemakers assume that Belbo and his friends must know something because they refuse to tell (of course there is nothing to tell, the plan is false). By the same token, Belbo figures that the Plan must be real because these people already take it seriously. In both cases there is a case of 'much ado about nothing'. Towards the end, one of the trio (again, Diotallevi, the quiet one) dies. He contracts cancer, again something which may have happened naturally, but which he in his obsession views as somehow being caused by their association with the Plan. Convinced?

Perhaps the ability to make such comparisons between such disparate works is possible because any decent book, film, or whatever that's had any modicum of thought put into it will have some deep or fascinating ideas that can be easily hijacked to grind one's own personal axe on.

Alan Moore

(This article was first published a few years before it became obvious that the Watchmen movie really was going to happen, and when I felt that some of Moore's works still needed a bit of explaining to the general public.)

Everybody has hang-ups- including legendary comics writer Alan Moore. To those in the know, Moore is the main man in comics. His work has challenged and changed the industry. He’s also an insanely bearded guy who worships a spoof Roman snake-god.

Almost all of Moore’s well-known works are preoccupied with super heroes- in particular, with making the super hero ‘genre’ somehow respectable. Comics have been synonymous with super-heroes since the 40’s. As a form of story-telling in which the story-teller is not bound by the limits of reality, budget or practicality, anything can happen. And yet most western comics on sale today belong to, or are indebted to, a single genre.

Moore’s first major work which is still popular today is V for Vendetta. Many will recall the (surprisingly good) film of the same name. Written in the darkest depths of Thatcherite Britain, it posits a not-too-distant-future in which Britain is a totalitarian state. It’s a setting familiar from 1984 and its many rip-offs. There are curfews, CCTV cameras everywhere, secret police, and mantras designed to drive all independent thought from the minds of men. Into this situation Moore throws the character of V- an anarchy-loving theatrical showman who blows up the Old Bailey to the strains of the 1812 overture. In the comic version, V was quite clearly a terrorist. Given todays political climate, this aspect of his character was toned down somewhat in the American-made movie.

Despite the dressing of the setting, Vendetta is a superhero story, and V is a superhero. He has a distinctive costume (his Guy Fawkes outfit), a secret identity, a distinctive weapon (his foot-long throwing knives), and he descends from the darkness to rescue helpless girls from bullying thugs. Perhaps Moore’s real point of reference here is not 1984, but Batman. Moore has worked hard to give this hero more depth than the traditional spandex-clad ones. V is morally ambiguous, possibly villainously homicidal, and definitely insane. Unlike the heroes of old, in V’s world the issues are not clear-cut. Though the government is portrayed as being corrupt, the actions V carries out against them (basically terrorism) are not softened of watered down.

Alongside Frank Miller, Moore helped to bring comics (and inevitably, superheroes) into the mainstream in the 80’s with works like Batman: The Killing Joke. In this regard his most important work is Watchmen. A movie version of this has been in development hell for about ten years. What’s good about the book is that its one of the earliest comics to construct an insanely realistic and thought-out world on such a scale. Close examination of the art shows that much of the action takes place over a single block in New York, and that the dimensions and geography of this area could be worked out (I wasn’t bothered, but it’s impressive anyway). In this alternate world, locations, brand names and histiry are used consistently for hundreds of pages. But Watchmen too is a superhero story.

The central conceit of the book is that in the 40’s, people were inspired by superhero comics to dress up in ridiculous costumes and actually go out and fight crime in the real world. Thus we are presented with a selection of heroes who are actually people with no real powers, but plenty of real-life problems. We’re not talking ‘Peter Parker’s gotta fight the Green Goblin while worrying about his date with Mary Jane’ problems, though. There’s Hooded Justice, who commits suicide after rumours of homosexuality ruin his life. There’s Nite Owl, who has become a lonely old man who fixes antique cars. The Comedian is a right-wing fascist who fights in Vietman for a three-times elected Richard Nixon. These characters are not the ageless, perfect citizens of comic lore.

I guess that Watchmen best displays Alan Moore’s hang-up about superheroes. The adventures of these super-powered beings clearly meant a lot to him as a kid (though they didn’t to me). At some later point he began to realise how patently ridiculous the notion was, and became fascinated with the idea of placing them in some kind of real-world situation. How would the simplistic, primary-coloured superheroes fare in an age of civil-rights movements, distrust of the government and international terrorism? How would they deal with loneliness, alcoholism, divorce and other personal problems?

Watchmen is a multi-tiered work in which every image is a motif that connects with what has gone before or will come after. It is told in fragments from different time periods, and reading them in order can be no more enlightening than reading them randomly. Like Ulysses, it can be opened at any page. Now there’s a pretentious recommendation. Basically, by the standards of any art-form, it’s damn good. Yet Moore himself has stated that however good it is, Watchmen can never rise above its genre. He has pushed the superhero story to places it was never designed to go… but its still a superhero story.

Choose Your Fate!

1

You are standing in a bleak and alien landscape. The land is patterned in a black-and-white checkerboard formation that stretches to the horizon. Above you a blood-red sky boils angrily. Bizarre architectural ruins seem to hang suspended from the clouds in the distance. Your eye falls to the bottom of the paragraph where you notice that there are several options allowing you to decide what happens from here on…With mounting trepidation you realize that you are reading a critique of those old choose-your-own-path books which is itself written in the style of a choose-your-own-path book! A more cryptic and fiendish literary device you have never come across. A wizened old man approaches you and asks "Say kid, do you remember the 80’s?"
If you do remember the 80’s, read section 5. If not, read section 3.

2

Anger radiates from the old man. “You filthy cheater! There IS no Pendant of Scaramanga in this game! Dammit, that was always the problem with those stupid gamebooks-there was no way to stop cheating bastards.” He sulks and will not talk to you. Your adventure is OVER. We hope you’ve enjoyed this interactive conversation.

3

The old man pauses to swallow a bug that was buzzing too close to his mouth before beginning his narrative. “In the 80’s, before there were videogames, there were gamebooks. People wanted very much for there to be videogames that featured orcs and wizard’s keys and locked dungeons and villages where you had to talk to everybody in the town square to acquire the Pendant of Scaramanga in order to access the Trident of Aaaargorn and that kind of thing. They just didn’t know it yet, because all they had at the time was Pong and Space Invaders. So, they invented elaborate role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. While taking part in such activities was seen (and still is) as social suicide, at least it got you out of your dorm and mixing with other pointy-hat wearers. Gamebooks were like a condensed form of this, except you played them on your own.”

“Each book told a more-or-less Tolkienesque story broken up into 400 paragraphs. At the end of each paragraph options were given on how to advance the story.” You interrupt here to say that you are indeed familiar with this technique. “The parallels with modern videogames are striking. Each book had zero character development, a plot that makes Scooby-Doo look inventive, and gameplay that hinged on collecting ridiculously titled items to defeat bosses and challenges. The player invariably assumed the role of some adventure-craving Conan-alike that makes the marine from Doom seem like a complex and rounded character, and was sent off to the pit/castle/dungeon of Eternal Terror to defeat some hideous if uncreative adversary. The game mechanics meant that the player could not turn back or retry anything during the quest, which resulted in some bastardly unfair and difficult adventures. Some adventures were truly enormous, well thought-out puzzles, and part of the appeal was deconstructing the book and learning how the author thinks.”

“The most well known series was the Fighting Fantasy series, which had Brit authors Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone plastered on the cover even though they stopped actually writing the damn books less than halfway through the series. Weirdly, the first book written by a ‘secondary’ author, Scorpion Swamp, was written by an American also called Steve Jackson. These books had a pretty nifty system for keeping character stats which was simple but effective, and showcased how gamebooks were descended from RPG’s. All the creatures and monsters the player had to fight also had stats that were displayed like this”- as the old man says this an enormous snarling sabre-tooth tiger appears before you.

SABRE-TOOTH TIGER SKILL-6 STAMINA-12

The man waves his hand and the tiger is no more. There is no sound but the eerie whistling of the wind. The man smiles and says “The Fighting Fantasy series also had great pulp magazine-style painted covers featuring monsters which were frequently super bad-ass and cool. Sadly, like all fads, the gamebooks died out. They sold like hotcakes from 1982 till about 1990.” You are about to say that you think you saw a re-released gamebook in Waterstones recently when the old man stares at you intensely and says “Now, in order to survive this final task, you must possess the Pendant of Scaramanga.”
If you possess the Pendant, read section 2. If not, read section 6.

4

You sense that he doesn’t believe you. An angry snarl appears on his face. Read section 6.

5

‘Of course’, says the old man sagely. Old men are always wise and sagely in fantasy. “You look about old enough. According to Wikipedia, one of your generation’s defining characteristics is a particular fondness for 80’s nostalgia- Transformers, Michael Jackson, that kind of thing. However for some reason one bizarre yet hugely popular 80’s phenomenon, the choose-your-own-path gamebooks, is totally forgotten about today! Seriously, even the biggest nerds you’ll ever meet, the guys who have every Yu-Ghi-Oh card ever don’t know about them, and yet they were huge in their day.” What will you say to the old man?
If you wish to tell him that in fact you were a nerd in the 80’s and you do remember these gamebooks, read section 4. Otherwise read section 3.

6

You realise with horror that you have stumbled upon an Instant Death Paragraph. The ground beneath you begins to tremble. The checkerboard earth heaves as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse erupt from the bowels of the planet to drag you to the 7th layer of Dante’s Inferno where you will be forced to listen to both Killers albums. Simultaneously. Your adventure is OVER.

Rebels of Total Recall

Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles Fontenay- a review

It's pulp time again, so we should all know what to expect. I picked up this volume many years ago, in a now-defunct bookshop in Enniscorthy, Wexford, and it's one of my old favourites. It really shows that there is a difference between good and bad pulp fiction.

Trashy novels (back in the day, at least) sold based on what fantastic and sensational thrills the cover depicted. This cover shows a 'futuristic' city (complete with monorail, natch) and a forest of hands raised as if pledging their allegiance to some grand revolutionary cause. One of them appears to be holding a passport. Will any of this be relevant to the story within? Read on (surely with barely concealed anticipation).

In this tale, Mars is a newly-colonised world under the grip of the tyrannical Marscorp. They control all supplies from Earth, and in particular they control the supply of air to the people of Mars. Of course, a rebellion is brewing, under the control of an organisation called the Phoenix (sound familiar? More on that later). Spies and counter-spies ply their trade across the scattered cities. Amid all this political strife, a man returns to Mars City. He is Dark Kensington (!), former leader of the Phoenix, a man thought to have perished twenty years earlier. Where has he been? What is his connection to the mad and strangely-named scientist Goat Hennessy (maybe he's from the old country!) And what role will the misunderstood, dying race of Martians play in the proceedings? The stage is truly set for some pulp nonsense of the highest order.

The proceedings begin, uncharacteristically, with a fine piece of purple prose. See for yourself-

It is a sea, though they call it sand.
They call it sand because it is still and red and dense with grains. They call it sand because the thin wind whips and whirls its dusty skim away to the tight horizons of Mars.
But only a sea could so brood with the memory of aeons.
Only a sea, lying so silent beneath the high skies, could hint the mystery of life still behind its barren veil.

Now I don't know my Heaney from my Hemmingway, but that's fairly poetic stuff coming from a novel about ray-guns and space monsters. Doesn't it conjure the endless majesty and loneliness and barrenness of the Martian desert? Fantastic stuff. Tellingly, there's nothing else in the bok as good as it. Fontenay soon drops this kind of style and gets down to the business of telling a nice two-fisted adventure story. More power to him.

Anyway, Dark Kensington (Dark Kensington!) hooks up with his old intelligence buddies, and it turns out that the rebel base on Mars City is located in... a barber college. The book is truly chock full of strange details like this. Yep, up front it's a fully functional barber college, while out back there's secret rooms full of rebels being taught how to lift sticks of chalk and pour buckets of lambs blood using only their minds. You see, they aim to become independent from Marscorp by transporting all supplies using ESP. From Earth.

And of course since this is the future-as-imagined-from-the-sixties, everyone smokes. Big black cigars. In a confined colony on an airless world. (This bizarre cultural oversight, once commonplace, can still be noted as late at 1997, in Event Horizon. Watch for the scene where they all spark up. In space).

There's a memorable scene near enough to the beginning of the book where the college is raided by the authorities, and the rebel boss escapes in a helicopter(!) that punctures the dome of Mars City. Immediately, shutters close on all buildings to contain the atmosphere. This scene functions to establish early on the theme of the inhospitibility of Mars (sound familiar?) and the importance and scarcity of good quality O2 (except when you need a good smoke, of course).

There are several more great (and strange) scenes scattered throughout the book, including Goat Hennessy's disturbing attempts to create a human that will survive the martian atmosphere and a seductive spy's bungled attempt to arrest Kensington at a Martian holiday resort. The whole shebang climaxes with a showdown at a hydroponic plant, by which point Fontenay has amassed a rogues gallery of bizarre heroes and villains. Essentially, it's a silly tale well told.

I'd imagine that this book is fairly obscure. Pick it up if you see it in a charity shop (you are unlikely to see it anywhere else). Now, how likely do you think it is that this book graced the desk of someone in Hollywood during the late 80s? I mean, who reads this kind of stuff anyway? And yet, the similarities to Total Recall are numerous and unavoidable. If you don't know Total Recall, you've sure come to the wrong place (think Red Faction, another take on the same idea).

Both feature a rebellion on a frontier-like Mars. Both have shadowy rag-tag revolutionary organisations fighting against The Man. Both feature rebels with ESP powers. And in both cases, Mars is not an arbitrary setting, it is almost a central character. Both deal, as an ongoing theme as well as a climactic plot-device, with the problem of breathing on Mars, though they approach it from completely different angles. Many of these aspects are absent from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the story that Total Recall is based on. Strange.

There's something about Mars. It occupies a special place in our myths, our hopes and fears. Percival Lowell, H.G. Wells and John Carter have helped created a mystique about the place. Because of this, there's a certain responsibility to setting a story on Mars. It isn't interchangeable with any other planetary location. It must feel like Mars. Both Rebels of the Red Planet and Total Recall achieve this admirably.

The History of Mars Attacks

In 1996 Warner Brothers released Mars Attacks. It featured more big-name stars than it knew what to do with, so it killed most of them off- none of the top-billed actors lived to see the end credits. This aside, it was very much a Tim Burton movie- the photo-realistic (at the time, anyway) rendering of a completely ludicrous B-movie situation was oddly creepy, and had the familiar Burton mix of merriment and the macabre (Jack Nicholson’s death scene is particularly memorable). The eerie, skeletal Martians and their array of cheesy but terrifying weapons and vehicles were ludicrous and straight out of a cold-war era 1950’s communism-parable invasion movie. However, the characters within the movie accepted this situation with po-faced seriousness, and as the script was unafraid to serve up horrible deaths to them, the audience was forced to take it seriously too. A quick scan of the net shows that this movie traumatised quite a few youngsters during its original run.

The inspiration behind the film came from an unusual and far more disturbing source- it may in fact be the only movie ever made based on a set of trading cards. In 1962, the company Topps, who specialised in baseball cards and bubblegum, released Mars Attacks, a series of cards that featured science fiction scenes. Topps had previously scored big with a civil war series of cards popular with the kids due to their high gore content. The idea of the Mars Attacks cards was to up the gore while presenting a loose retelling of a ‘War of the Worlds’ type invasion story, updated with 50’s sci-fi staples like flying saucers, ray-guns, marauding robots and giant insects.

The art was by Norm Saunders, a man known for many a lurid cover during the pulp-magazine era. These covers hinted (usually inaccurately) at the wonders within- scantily clad broads writhed in the grip of hideous monsters and unscrupulous Nazis, and square-jawed heroes and detectives shouldered open doors to come to their rescue. Saunders brought to the Mars Attacks cards a kind of hideous and gritty comic-book realism.

The plot wasn’t much to write home about- Mars is about to self-combust due to a build-up of internal pressure, so the big-brained Martians send thousands of warships to clear some new real estate for themselves on Earth. This they achieve with a violence that is genuinely astonishing. Flying saucers with mysterious heat-rays deal death onto army bases, topple skyscrapers, burn entire herds of cattle, leave Washington and New York in flames, slice passenger planes in two and make human torches of individual civilians. The scenes of death and destruction feature gory close-ups of humans with pained and agonised expressions that are occasionally quite unsettling. The Empire State building tumbles, trapping thousands of workers in a hellish blaze while hundreds more kill each other in the panic to leave the city by car. The cockpit of a fighter plane becomes a ‘’flaming coffin’ for a valiant pilot foolish enough to try to intercept a saucer.

Throughout the story, the sense of hopelessness is palpable. People hide out in basements until forced by hunger to leave their homes and walk streets where marauding bands of Martians exterminate humans on sight. Any brave attempt to resist or fight back is rewarded only with instant and horrible death. Martians capture beautiful girls to perform sadistic experiments on (there is a card depicting a dying mans’ removed heart being shown to him by his grotesque surgeon) in order to learn how to more effectively dispose of us, something at which they are extraordinarily creative. Saucers with giant shovels clear the streets of people and crush them against walls, Martians shrink humans to nothing or make frozen statues of them, and gargantuan robots walk the streets crushing humans beneath their spiked heels. Any prisoners captured by the Martians are no use to them due to the language difference, so they are strapped to the exhaust ports of their enormous machinery to be blown to oblivion. The diabolical scientists of the Red Planet have also devised a way to enlarge insects, and soon the world is overrun with a new horror. The US army is overwhelmed by a horde of homicidal spiders and the Eiffel Tower is consumed by a monstrous caterpillar- all in lurid comic-book Technicolor. And all the while the masters of the invasion watch and laugh from Mars.

Finally, the combined military of the ‘world’ (though only WASP American soldiers are shown) gets its act together and sends rockets to Mars to counterattack. This part of the story is gloriously ludicrous- because of a forcefield around the planet that prevents orbital bombing, soldiers wearing military helmets under their glass spacesuit helmets (why?) parachute to the surface and enter the Martians domed cities to deal out some vengeance. And yes, the cities have monorails (all ‘futuristic’ domed cities from the 60’s have monorails). The soldiers use their weapons to rip open the Martians huge, exposed brains. Nice. Actual earth tanks with US symbols on them (!) roll across the sands of Mars and smash their civilization into the ground. Eventually, the stars and stripes is hoisted on Mars and the soldiers leave just before geological forces tear the planet apart. All in all, it’s an enjoyably silly and unapologetic end to an otherwise harrowing tale.

Unsurprisingly, the cards were pulled from shops due to parental complaints. They are extremely rare nowadays, and a full set is worth around 2,500 US$. Scans of the cards are easily found on the Internet, and many of the images still have the power to shock. Due to the cult nature of Mars Attacks, in the 80’s a similar series was released called Dinosaurs Attack, which similarly featured a fanciful sci-fi premise, ridiculous amounts of gore, and scant regard for scientific or paleontological facts. Perhaps the most disturbing descendant of Mars Attacks is Don’t Let it Happen Here, a‘patriotically’ themed set of cards with artwork depicting scenes of hideous torture, terrorism and human rights abuses in countries other than the US. Scenes include an Iraqi man having his tongue cut off for speaking on television against Saddam Hussein, the Tokyo underground nerve gas killings, and young women in Bangladesh being scarred with sulphuric acid for rejecting suitors, a crime which, according to the card, is endorsed by their government. Presumably the reader is expected to think ‘thank God I live in America where nothing bad ever happens!’

Trading cards are not a phenomenon that ever really caught on outside the States. Just don’t get me started on Premier League Stickers…

Black Dossier Review

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore

The following is a review first published when this book came out, back in 2007. It's probably still unavailable in Europe. I haven't checked recently.

Comic fans will know that this, the eagerly-awaited and serially-delayed third instalment (though strangely, not the third volume) of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is currently only available in the US due to copyright issues. It is, after all, a series which exists solely to bring together various pre-existing fictional characters in a sort of ‘communal memory’ universe. With this latest volume, Moore expands his vision further, seemingly indicating that the world of the ‘League’ consists not only of characters from fantastic Victorian fantasy, as in the previous volumes, but the multitude of characters from all of fiction, be it books, comics, film, television or radio. But is it any good?

Moore presents us with a 1950s Britain in which Big Brother and the Ingsoc government from Orwell’s 1984 has just fallen. (Apparently Orwell originally intended his terrifying parable to take place in 1948, but was convinced by his publishers to set it in that fateful year instead.) Against this backdrop, the remaining characters of the turn-of-the-century league struggle against their supervisors for possession of an item chronicling hundreds of years of secret League history- the titular Black Dossier.

As is frequently the case with Moore, the chief pleasure of the Black Dossier is perusing the detailed panels spotting familiar characters. Enthusiasts of 50’s era culture will not be disappointed, with appearances and nods to Emma Peel (from the Avengers), Jack Kerouac, James Bond, and that timeless hero of British comics, Dan Dare. Even the newspapers note the antics of aging screen legend Norma Desmond (from the classic film noir Sunset Boulevard) and Roy of the Rovers’ team, Melchester Rovers. It’s the unusual nature of some of the source material, as well as the treatment of some of the more well-known characters that provide much of the enjoyment in the Black Dossier. For example, the James Bond that features is Flemming’s Bond, not the more well-known screen incarnation- and as such is far more misogynistic and hateful than most readers will expect, as befitting his actual literary origins. All this is conveyed through the distinctive scratchy-yet-crisp drawing style of Kevin O’Neill which gives the series its flavour.

This fiction-based name-dropping is taken to a whole new level with the inclusion of excerpts from the Dossier itself- each written in a different style, reflecting the facet of society that created it. Thus we are presented with the history of the League as told through a sequel to Fanny Hill, an undiscovered work by Shakespeare, a beat novel, and a miniature 50s porno comic. To Moore, all are as valid as any ‘real’ art when it comes to representing culture. Moore utilises the very substance of the book to make his point- different paper types, sizes and textures are used to create different atmospheres. The tale finishes with a metaphysical trip to a 4-dimensional land where characters seem to realize the true nature of their existence- presented to us, the reader, in 3D (via a pair of glasses that come with the book). It’s not just a gimmick- it’s a bizarre attempt to alter the relationship between the reader and the book, to use mixed mediums to tell the story, such as it is.

And therein lies the sting- for all Moore’s genre-busting (and medium-busting), some of the terrific dialogue and characterisation of the previous volumes has been lost. The plot is merely a vehicle for Moore to cram as many self-indulgent references into his universe as possible. A little restraint can go a long way. Moore and O’Neill aimed high, producing a unique creation which succeeds at being quite unlike anything which has gone before, yet ultimately fails at being a satisfying comic book. That said, its still better than most shelf-cloggers in the comics shop, and hardcore fans are doubtlessly off to Amazon.com as you read this.

Tales to give you Goosebumps

Horror High
Chapter 1

I’m Josh, and I’m thirteen years old. I was just leaving my third period maths class with my best friend Stacy at Timber Falls Junior High when this whole mess started. “You’re such a dork Josh… I can’t believe you’ve never even heard the legend of the Timber Falls Vampire. Every kid in town knows that story!” Stacy was always crazy about spooky stuff. I figured her parents let her watch too many dumb movies. She’s the same age as me, with curly black hair, and an ok fashion sense. I guess she’s kinda cute as well. Anyway, she was just about to tell me the legend of the Timber Falls Vampire. “They say his body still rests in a hidden basement somewhere beneath the school…” I told her to quit it, not because I was scared or anything, but because-
At that moment there came from the next classroom a terrifying and blood-curdling shriek. My stomach turned to jelly as somebody screamed in agony “ THE VAMPIRE! HE’S BACK!!!”

Chapter 2

We breathlessly ran into the classroom to find…my bratty cousin Norman! He’s a real jerk and he’s always paying tricks on me. “Stop laughing Norm you creep, I wasn’t even scared!” I yelled at him. Stacy was laughing as well, so the whole scene was really embarrassing. “I can’t believe Josh fell for it,” Norman congratulated himself, “ As if we’d introduce the monster in chapter 1! Come on let’s get out of here, I want you guys to meet the new kid in school, he’s from Europe or something…”

Should any of the above seem familiar to you, then it is certain you remember the Goosebumps fad. Above I have recreated the opening of every single book ever written by the prolific (or diarrhoeic) R. L. Stine. (That’s almost certainly a nom de plume, and it really sounds to me like it’s supposed to be a pun or something. Try saying it out loud. R. L. Stine. Nope, still don’t get it.)

The Goosebumps books were seemingly a ploy to get kids to read by using simple language, short chapters, and the promise of big scares within. Each book told a simple and usually derivative spooky story about young teenagers encountering some kind of strangeness. Many of the books were scaled-down domestic versions of classic horror sagas – hence It Came from Beneath The Sea becomes It Came from Beneath the Sink, Phantom of the Opera becomes Phantom of the Auditorium, and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze becomes The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena (it's a loose adaptation, granted). The stories invariably employed the kind of shock ending known as the ‘jar of marmalade’ ending. Bear with me on this one, it requires some familiarity with bad-writing terminology.

A ‘jar of marmalade’ story is a story constructed solely to spring some completely unrelated and silly surprise on the reader; a story constructed only so the author can cry ‘fooled you!’ at the end. Imagine a tale set in a desert of orange sand surrounded by an impenetrable barrier – surprise! Our heroes are actually MICROBES LIVING IN A JAR OF MARMALADE. That kind of thing. (thanks to the Turkey City Lexicon for that one- hey, it's public domain!) For example-

-Warning! Spoilers ahead! -

One of the books features a kid who applies a mysterious lotion to his face and finds that he is suddenly growing thick unsightly hair all over his face and body. The book relates his quest to hide this unfortunate condition from his family, friends and the girl he likes while trying to figure out who made the lotion and how to reverse the process. In the end, however, he finds out that the real reason he is growing this hair is because the entire town is actually a gigantic testing lab and ALL THE KIDS IN TOWN ARE ACTUALLY DOGS WHO HAVE BEEN MUTATED TO LOOK LIKE PEOPLE, BUT NOW THEY’RE TURNING BACK INTO DOGS. The lotion was completely irrelevant. Kudos for originality and willingness to break the mould, but that ending makes the whole book pointless, really.

Regardless, the books were a phenomenon in schools at the time, mine very much included. Kids would collect the books, read them in one night and spoil the endings for everyone the next day in school. Nobody really seemed to enjoy reading them because aside from the premise and the screwed-up ending there was only an interchangeable sequence of events that had nothing to do with the outcome, but everyone wanted to be the first to have read the newest ones.

Encouraging kids to read is not an ignoble goal, and like all good ideas (rock & roll included) it soon got hijacked by the Man. Many other companies saw that there was gold in them thar literary hills, so they started producing their own Goosebumps knock-offs. A quick search through the recesses of my own book cupboard reveals items from several identically themed series aimed at 9-12 year olds -Shivers, Bugs, Max Power. The legacy lives on.


Chapter 20

The entire basement filled with a strange glow as Desmond, the vampire-kid from Europe, collapsed and became a heap of rotting flesh. “It’s finally over”, I gasped as Stacy and Norm crawled a safe distance away from the bizarre, decomposing corpse. “We defeated his evil powers!” But Stacy didn’t seem to be listening. Her eyes bulged and turned a fiery red. Eight enormous arachnid legs erupted from within the confines of her dress and spread across the room. “You fools” she hissed, “ Desmond wasn’t really a vampire. This was all a ploy to get you alone down here so I could feed you to my children”. As I was fed to her hideous mutant arachnid progeny my last thought was “Dammit this makes our entire adventure completely irrelevant!”

THE END