Just saw the new Dr Who, with Matt Smith as the doctor and Steven “Coupling” Moffat as the lead writer. After several seasons with David Tennant and Russel T. Davies in the same roles Dr Who had become stale and somewhat boring, obsessed as it was with telling the same stories over and over. The teasers at the end of the last season already promised a new, lighter approach and I was glad to see this episode making good on this promise. As per usual at the start of a new seaosn much of it was spent showcasing the doctor again, with Matt Smith having the same sort of manic energy as Tennant and some of his mannerisms, but slightly wittier. The alien menace du jour looked cool and different, there were some nice hints about the overarching theme of the rest of the season and a good balance between tension and humour, we got a new companion and surprise surprise it’s another young woman already obsessed by the doctor and there’s nothing creepy about this, honest. All in all, quite an enjoyable episode, if slight.
I’m at my parents for Easter weekend btw. S. came out of hospital on Tuesday and had her son coming round for the holidays, so I could bugger off to Middelburg for some r&r. Which gave me the chance to sort through my comics collection again. I was a serious collector from about 1987 to about 2000, when I just stopped. It left me with some ten thousand or so comics, most in storage at my parents. As S. keeps telling me, we don’t have the storage to keep them all so I need to cull what I got.
Which has been …interesting, a sort of personal archaeology. So much shit I’ve bought over the years. No clue of what was good or not, just looking for a new superhero or following a favourite character and no matter it has crappy art and worse writing. It didn’t help that I started seriously collecting at a time the direct market went crazy, what with Image and Valiant and eight million copies of X-Men #1. So many comics bought because they were hyped up in Wizard or Previews, so many comics bought because they were cheap at a con and looked interesting, so many comics bought thanks to rec.arts.comics.misc or Comix-L. Then end result was a huge sprawling mess, which definitely needed culling.
But it’s hard. Getting rid of the shit comics is easy, but to get beyond that and cull the ones that are sort of okay, or even good, but just don’t fit — so many miniseries I only have two out of four issues of– that’s harder. I managed to lose about a thousand-two thousand comics in a first pass, but doubt I could do more at the moment…