Wis[s]e Words

Bill Blackbeard for the Eisner!

Published on March 21, 2011

Tom Spurgeon campaigns to get Bill Blackbeard in the Eisner Hall of Fame:

Bill Blackbeard is the embodiment of the impulse to see comics as more than that thing that is right before our eyes, more than that which is here and gone. He is comics’ Prester John. So much of what we value and enjoy in comics today and so much of what our grandsons and granddaughters and their progeny will enjoy 100 years from now owes its rescue from oblivion to his hard work and discerning eye.

It’s not just that Bill Blackbeard has been and still is instrumental in safeguarding the history of American comics, it’s that he showed, with The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics and his 200 (!) other books, that this history is so much older and richer than is apparent at first sight. Before Blackbeard, it was easy to assume that the American comic strip was at best the prehistory to the real birth of the American comic book, which, with some obvious exceptions can be ignored. But Blackbeard not only told us that the truth was otherwise, he showed us. As Tom says, books like the The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics opened people’s eyes to what had been published decades before they were, decades before the birth of the comic book itself and how sophisticated, interesting and good those comics were. If he hadn’t been there this history might have been partially or wholly lost, because it took somebody like Blackbeard to see the value in bundles of aging newsprint.

Reading David Weber on my mobile phone

Published on March 20, 2011

Cover of Ashes of Victory

Ashes of Victory & War of Honor
David Weber
Kindle editions
published in 2000 and 2002

Bear with me because this is relevant. This January, about a year or so after everybody else, I finally broke down and got myself a smart phone on a not too onerous subscription plan. The phone I got was a HTC Wildfire, a dear little thing with some annoyances, but nothing major and because it was an Android phone, it had a version of Amazon’s Kindle available for it. Earlier this month I got this, then was looking around for some free books to put on it. Got the usual set of the Classics from Project Gutenberg of course, but I also wanted something more modern, something light and preferably science fiction, something I could read on the tram without having to pay too much attention to it.

Enter David Weber and his Honor Harrington series. Back in the nineties I devoured those books, but even then I knew they were not by any measure good books: wish fulfillment war porn with a severe case of hero worship and occasional dodgy politics and more than occasional dodgy science. Even on a sentence and paragraph level Weber is often just not very good: awkward dialogue, oodles of infodumps just as the spacewars heat up and in general too much verbiage with stock phrases repeated over and over again. Yet for all that I kept reading. I was going to just read a bit of Ashes of Victory just to test Kindle on my phone, yet here I am having read both that and War of Honor. Weber must be doing something right.

Honey is all right but beeswax is right out

Published on March 19, 20112 Comments

Bottle and glass of St Peters Honey Porter

So I was looking for something to drink during the last day of the Six Nations rugby and amongst others, found this: St Peter’s Honey Porter (dark brown, 4.5 % alcohol by volume). Now I like porters and I like honey flavoured beer, so the combination seemed a natural for me to try. Unfortunately, it turned out a bad idea. Perhaps this particular bottle had gone off somehow because I found it to be undrinkable, like biting into honey flavoured potpourri or beeswax. My first impression was the honey, then came the more disagreeable elements. The mouth feel was like drinking liquid soap, all smooth and cloying without any of the fizziness you expect from beer, while the taste evolved into a mixture of Cadbury’s milk chocolate and perfume, all floral and sweet. Very unpleasant indeed and in the end I poured it down the drain.

If this was how it was supposed, it wasn’t for me, though some people certainly like it.

Much more to my liking was the ordinary porter I drank before this abomination, the Klein Duimpje Porter: Light golden brown in colour, 5.5 % alcohol by volume. Starts off light, with metallic overtones, almost lager like, but becomes more bitter as the bottle progresses and ends at the Kilkenny or Murphy’s Red end of things. Something you could drink all day long without damaging your taste buds.

Truly outrageous

Published on March 18, 2011

So so eighties.

Back in the day any half decent cartoon on Dutch telly was watched, whether or not it was a “girls” cartoon or not and Jem was better than most, mainly due to the writing talents of Christy Marx, who you may know from her work on Conan and Red Sonja for Marvel, as well as Sisterhood of Steel for Epic and Eclipse. Animation paid better, which is a bit of a shame because it’s not as comics in the eighties was overburdened with female writers…

It’s just not an English murder with a Black victim

Published on March 17, 20111 Comment

Midsomer Murders creator explains why he wants to keep his murders white:

The ITV1 detective show, which has run for 14 series, ‘wouldn’t work’ if there was any racial diversity in it, producer True-May said.

‘We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way,’ he told Radio Times.

He insisted he had never been tackled before about the ‘whites only’ rule in the show, which stars John Nettles as Det Ch Insp Tom Barnaby.

He said: ‘I’ve never been picked up on that but quite honestly I wouldn’t want to change it.

‘We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work.

‘Suddenly we might be in Slough. Ironically, Causton (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Slough. And if you went into Slough you wouldn’t see a white face there.’

Racist, obnoxious, outrageous, call it what you want, but it’s the creative bankruptcy of his statement that explains why I’ve never watched a full eposde of Midsomer Murders. As if you can’t get that specific brand of sophorific excitement with the occasional Black or Asian face, as if the cozy menace can’t be created without some pasty white 1930ties England that never was.