“published on a slow day to a gentle chorus of mooing”

Tories
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As Alex called Gove’s latest brainwave, to bring back o-levels for thickos, as discussed at Jamie’s. Also from there, The Financial Times (!) comes down hard on it, arguing it would reduce social mobility and condemn the poorest and the northern to inferior qualifications:

The most significant issues around this idea are related to social mobility: the CSE will tend to be an exam for poorer children. Consider who would take the CSE if schools could select the quarter of pupils with the lowest average grades with perfect foresight.

[…]

There will be a geographical effect, too, with some areas switching heavily to it. I have marked this map showing what proportion of children in each neighbourhood will finish in the bottom quarter on the same measure. The CSE will be a northern qualification, too.

Go look: there’s graphs and everything.

It all does once again beg the question why a certain breed of tory, both in the UK as in the States, is so obsessed with bringing back obsolete forms of teaching to the point of fetishism. The phonics fights in the US, the eleven plus in the UK, the alleged degradation of a-levels, undsoweiter, all operating on prejudice rather than fact. Granted, that’s the conservative m.o. in a nutshell, but education does tend to bring the kooks out even more so than other subjects.

Go look at what Tom Spurgeon read in the eighties

Comix
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Love and Rockets #1 cover

The Comics Reporter is the one comix newsblog I read daily, both for roughly keeping up with what’s happening in American comics as because Tom Spurgeon is one of the people whose tastes I trust and have ever since we were both on the old Comix-L e-mail list. This month he has been looking back three decades to what he was reading in the eighties, as a teenager.

I myself only came to comics slightly later, from about 1987 or so and much of what he talked about I only know from reading about it in Amazing Heroes, comics Scene or Comics Interview, scouring the back issue bins in local comics shops and at local cons all during the nineties and of course from ads in other comics. Love & Rockets especially, the quintessential eighties comic, but I only know it from ads in other comics.

Hard to imagine these days, when we’ve long become accustomed to the idea that anything even halfway decent will be collected eventually, while it’s easier to just list the classic comics anf newspaper strips that haven’t been reprinted yet. But who would’ve thought even ten years ago, let alone thirty, that Fantagraphics would one day be better known as a publisher of high quality archival comics reprint projects than of avant garde alternative comix?

In the eighties and long through the nineties, trade collections were the exception, not the rule and if something was collected, it rarely stayed in print long; except for Watchmen of course. Which mean that the back issue bins were the only way to get any issues or series you missed and it was easier to read about a series like Reid Fleming than actually find it. You had to take what you could get and bugger proper reading order.

Tom’s series of reminiscences are interesting not just as excercises in nostalgia, or as a quick rundown of the better comics of the eighties, but as a contrast to the current state of the medium, in how we talked about them, bought them and looked at them. The traditional weekly comic shop ritual of getting the latest floppies is dying, comics have become more like books, something you buy online or in a general bookstore rather than in a specialised shop. There are good and bad sides to this, but it’s good to see it put into context every now and again.

Tom Spurgeon’s list so far:

Spotted in Arnhem

Comix
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Huge wallposter of Eric the Noorman in Arnbhem

I had to be in Arnhem for work yesterday and spotted this poster on a building opposite the station. As you no doubt have recognised, this is an image of Eric the Noorman, drawn by Hans Kresse, no doubt Holland’s greatest realistic cartoonist, comparable to a Burne Hogarth or Hal Foster in stature. The poster is a remnant from the 2006 celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the first appearance of the Eric de Noorman newspaper strip. More than 21 Kresse drawings and some ten homages from other Dutch cartoonists had been made into art projects and put together around the city, a bit like Brussels also long has had its comics route. Whether or not the other drawings are still in place I don’t know, as I’ve only had to visit the station and a dreary office building in the outskirts of the town.

But still, nice to see one of the comic strip heroes of my youtfh blown up more than life like in the middle of a city.

Now I know how an England fan feels

Football, funny, video
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Robben on his knees

Twentyfour hours later it still hurts. From being second in the worldcup to going home in the group phase of the European Cup, with nil points, never showing up in any match for more than fifteen minutes. The best players of their generation and they twatted it. Worse, they lost from not just two of the teams we most love to hate (portugal and, need I say it, Germany), they also lost from Denmark, a country they should’ve never lost to and one which had already cost us so much heartbreak in ’92 by eliminating us then and with it our chance to be in the final. Oh well, let’s have good old David Mitchell to put it all in perspective:



In fantasy football land meanwhile it’s 2016 and Plymouth Argyle has just won the Premiership, the League Cup and the Europa League… Not that I’m a Football Manager obsessive or anything.