Category: blog

General blog posts.

  • Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars

    Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars

    I’m currently working my way through Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series of pulp adventure novels. A Princess of Mars, the first of the series, was a surprisingly enjoyable romp reminding me of a mix of Gulliver’s Travels, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. While I’ve always been aware of John Carter, I’d not read any of the books in my youth. I’m not sure why as it would have been the sort of thing I’d have loved.

    Burroughs – who is possibly more famous for penning the Tarzan books – secured publication of A Princess of Mars (initially titled Under the Martian Moons) in All-Story Magazine in 1912. It was his first novel. It relates the adventures of a Confederate soldier named John Carter who is mysteriously transported to Mars and, owing to his superior strength and tenacity, manages to unite the warring races and rescue a princess. It’s clear the influence this series had from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in the 1930s to Star Wars.

    What is most striking is how elaborately Burroughs describes the geography and cultures of Barsoom, the native name for Mars. It reads very much like a travelogue and recounts Carter’s extraordinary adventures across the planet. Despite its advanced science, the people’s of Barsoom spend a great deal of time in violent conflicts. They seem to revel in getting up close and fighting each other with swords. While the plot is straightforward – and 100 years later – almost entirely predictable, it’s Burrough’s world-building that is the attraction for me.

    Bearing in mind the period it was written, what I’ve read of the John Carter series so far gives me the same impression I had when I read the Tarzan books: Carter plays the role of a white saviour (he literally is the only white man on Mars!) who brings peace to the warring red and green races. Equally, Dejah Thoris, the red princess plays a far more passive role than I expected and is little more than a love-interest for Carter who is always in some sort of danger (she’s always presented as an assertive, dynamic character in the Dynamite Comics).

    Even so, I would quite happily recommend A Princess of Mars and The Gods of Mars as companion reads to The First Men in the Moon and Autour de la Lune or even as a gateway into the adventures of pulp heroes like Zorro, Conan the Barbarian, Doc Savage, The Shadow and even Biggles (oh, how my junior school teacher, Mr Lee, encouraged us to read Biggles!).

  • Back to the Back of a Block-rocking Comic Book!

    Back to the Back of a Block-rocking Comic Book!

    One of my monthly pleasures before Lockdown was to scan the pages of Previews, the catalogue that would announce upcoming comic book and graphic novel releases. Things have changed since March: lots of titles have been cancelled (some creators have been cancelled, too, but that’s a whole different matter) and DC has split from Diamond distributors which has thrown the comics business into a great sense of foreboding and confusion. UK comics are being released a week later than the US at the moment which is a bit rubbish as the online hype and conversations about each week’s releases will undoubtedly spoil things over here. It’s good to have new releases, though.

    I’ve just looked through the pages of DC Connect, which presents DC’s September solicitations. While DC is focused on celebrating the 1000th issue of Batman in Detective Comics (actually issue #1027), what interests me more are the crazy-looking spin-offs from Dark Knights: Death Metal – Multiverse’s End, Speed Metal and Trinity Crisis. The first Metal series was fantastically crazy (I remember I was camping the day the first issue came out and had to track down a local comic shop to get the first copy).

    Even more interesting are what look like very attractive hardback editions of the Hill House horror comics. Basketful of Heads by Joe Hill himself is a captivatingly gruesome tale in the tradition of Warren Comics. Mike Carey’s The Dollhouse Family was pretty good (though rushed at the end). I’ve heard good things about The Low, Low Woods, too. If they release The Plunge, I’ll probably buy that purely on the basis of having read its first issue.

    I’d be tempted to get the single-volume Doomsday Clock but it’s a softcover and I try my best only to by hardcovers. Perhaps they’ll be a later hardcover release early next year. (If not, there are the two 6-issue hardback volumes to fall back on). When I read Doomsday Clock in single issues I liked the first few issues but it seemed to fall foul of whatever real-world crisis was going on editorially at DC and I didn’t think it ended well. It was certainly much better than the terrible HBO tv series. There’s also the deluxe edition of King’s and Gerads’ Mister Miracle that I’d love to buy. Likewise the new deluxe edition of Gaiman’s The Sandman (a comic I have to admit I don’t have in any form and haven’t read since university!). UPDATE: Just pre-ordered Sandman.

    Bizarrely, right in the middle of DC Connect is a Word document informing comic shops that Diamond is no longer fulfilling orders and giving addresses of new distributors. It looks like UK distribution is being handled by Sideshow Collectibles (though I can remember reading somewhere that Diamond was continuing UK distribution for the time being). It’s pretty weird seeing such a jarring business letter in the middle of a stylish catalogue.

  • Room at the Top

    Room at the Top

    After I was born my mother took me home from hospital to a small rented attic room at the top of a Victorian house in Rochester.

    We walked past the house today and I pointed it out to Alice and Soren. “That’s where I lived as a baby,” I told them, pointing at the top far-left window.

    It’s a tall, dark and Dickensian-looking house that hasn’t changed at all. My mother was on her own when I was born and she told me that she spent a very cold winter with me in her room. She became unwell and her parents had to take her and me to live with them (apparently they’d been against my mother having me because she was only 15 when she became pregnant). She said she had a meagre time in the house. No money, no friends and nothing to do apart from looking after a baby alone meant what was supposed to be a special moment in her life (and mine) was actually a terrible experience. In many respects it set the tenor of the rest of her life. She died miserably of cancer at the age of 54.

    Of course I can’t remember living in the attic room. My first memories of home are of a council flat on the outskirts of Rochester. They are golden memories of my bedroom walls painted with Disney characters, playing with other children on the grass outside in the sunshine and a kindly old woman called Aunty Nell who lived in the flat above who fed me stale biscuits sprinkled with sugar.

  • Florian Schneider, “sonic perfectionist”

    Florian Schneider, “sonic perfectionist”

    This month’s Electronic Sound has a heartwarming tribute to the enigmatic Florian Schneider, who died earlier this year. The piece, by Stephen Dalton, gives an excellent account of Schneider’s role in Kraftwerk.

    It’s particularly good in establishing the nature of the tensions between Schneider and Ralf Hütter that eventually led to Schneider leaving the group in 2008.

    I loved the ending of the piece: “Their Kraftwerk Konzept still visionary, their musical legacy unassailable. Humans may die but The Man-Machine goes on forever.”

  • "a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat"

    "a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat"

    Frankie Boyle on the British government:

    Boris Johnson, flapping about like a poorly-tethered bouncy castle, is supposed to serve as a distraction, a furball coughed up by a supervillain’s cat. He isn’t supposed to actually lead us through anything. We have a government that has no interest in governing up against an opposition uninterested in opposing. It feels like we’ve got Owen Jones, graffiti, and breakfast news against a ruling class, media, and virus that are broadly in agreement.

  • “this weird thing of hyper-normalness”

    Mark Fisher in an old interview:

    “What we have got with this digital culture now is this weird thing of hyper-ordinariness. You have got people who are done up to the nines but it isn’t like David Bowie where you are playing with some abstract aestheticisation. We have got people who have this uber ordinariness – it is a normative model: perfect teeth, right skin tone. An utterly conservative artificiality.”

  • Discover, with a deflating quotidian horror

    Mark Fisher on Doctor Who:

    “To look at the old Doctor; Who is not only to fail to recover a lost moment; it is to discover, with a deflating quotidian horror, that this moment never existed in the first place. An experience of awe and wonder dissolves into a pile of dressing up clothes and cheap special effects.”

  • micro.blog

    As much as I’m enjoying the Twin Peaks anniversary stuff, UK-based newspapers seem to have forgotten – or decided it wasn’t important – that those of us in UK didn’t see the first episode until October. By then the big reveals were already being spoiled…

  • Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

    Frankie Boyle: Did you ever wonder what you’d be doing during an apocalypse?

    Indeed, you have to wonder if the virus is so very different from extractive capitalism. It commandeers the manufacturing elements of its hosts, gets them to make stuff for it; kills a fair few, but not enough to stop it spreading. There is no normal for us to go back to. People sleeping in the streets wasn’t normal; children living in poverty wasn’t normal; neither was our taxes helping to bomb the people of Yemen. Using other people’s lives to pile up objects wasn’t normal, the whole thing was absurd. Governments are currently busy pouring money into propping up existing inequalities, and bailing out businesses that have made their shareholders rich. The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

  • “democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one”

    David Runciman on what the Covina-19 crisis reveals about democracy, politics, power and order:

    Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices. Pre-emption – the ability to tackle a problem before it becomes acute – has never been a democratic strength. We wait until we have no choice and then we adapt. That means democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one, though some are better at playing catch-up than others.