Deerwoman

I'm not sure now how I found out about Native Realities Publishing, but I'm glad I did. They publish comics by Native American authors and illustrators. The first comic I bought from them was Captain Paiute, the origin story of a Native American superhero, and since I enjoyed that I thought I'd treat myself to Deerwoman, an anthology of stories by a variety of Native writers.
The name that was familiar to me (and I will get round to buying Trail of Lightning eventually, when the Mountain of Unread Books gets a little smaller) was Rebecca Roanhorse. Her story is called The Taste of White Flowers, Staining Her Lips. It's only two pages, but it draws you in, so that you're there in the bar drinking with the characters, one of whom is more than she seems....
The artwork is in a variety of styles, and the stories are about modern Native women, who go to High School, live in modern apartments, are in lesbian relationships - and always there's the threat of violence from men, and sometimes Deerwoman takes revenge.
Some of the stories that stood out for me were Deerwoman: A Vignette, by Elizabeth LaPensee, illustrated by Jonathan R Thunder and Wives by Darcie Little Badger, with illustrations by Tara Ogaick, and Changing Woman by Tatum Bowie - but it's all good stuff.
It's not necessarily easy reading - and it's suggested for mature readers - but it brings up serious issues. The publishers are supporting Arming Sisters, an organisation that is helping indigenous communities through self-defence. Indigenous women have a high risk of violence, and organisations like Arming Sisters and the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women (these and other organisations are listed at the back of the book) are working to improve the situation.

Captain Paiute

I'm not sure now where I heard of this comic - it may have been via the blog American Indians in Children's Literature by Debbie Reese. Anyway, I was intrigued enough to send off for it, despite the postage and packing being more than the comic itself. Their offices are in Albuquerque, New Mexico - a long way from the Welsh Borders!
Captain Paiute is by Theo Tso, who did the story and the art work, and is basically an origin story for the Indigenous Defender of the South West. I hope he tells more stories, showing Captain Paiute working to save his tribe.

Native Realities Press is especially for stories about Native Americans, by Native Americans. Other comics available from them are about the Code Talkers of the Second World War, Deer Woman, and Kaui (a Polynesian tale of Beauty and the Beast).
They also have a poster for sale of Pueblo Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Art. Now there's a story I'd like to read!

Mancunicon Saturday

On Friday morning, we went in search of the free bus service that serves the town centre, but it was a bit of a long way to walk to the bus stop by Oxford Road railway station (the first railway station in the world!) with my Young Man still needing his crutch, so for the rest of the weekend we got taxis either way instead. I could definitely get used to helpful staff phoning for a cab which arrives within five minutes every time I want one!

I wanted to see the A Feminist Fantasy Canon panel, which included one of the guests of honour, Aliette de Bodard. The consensus was that we don't actually want a fixed canon of women fantasy writers, because that would be bound to exclude other writers, but we do want the existance of women SF and fantasy writers to be acknowledged, instead of being discovered anew every generation with astonishment, as if women had never written SF or fantasy before (except for Ursula le Guin!).
At the moment I'm following the re-read of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books on Tor.com - she was writing historical fantasy in the 1970s which was influential, but overlooked now. One edition of her books has an introduction by Lin Carter, who did a huge amount of work to get fantasy books published, and he was astonished that the first four authors he had published were women, and that they were better than any of the men's work he had looked at! Another of those authors was Joy Chant, whose Red Moon and Black Mountain deserves to be far better known.

Lunch was down on the ground floor, with more helpful staff behind the counter - we had a burger and potato wedges, and drinks from the American Craft Beer stand which the hotel had laid on specially for the Con. I never usually drink lager, but the Amber Lager I had was really very nice (and now I've forgotten the brewers!). Outside the windows, the rain was blowing sideways, which really made me feel I was back home!

Later, the Young Man went to the Tribute to Tanith Lee, another great fantasy writer, while I went to the Kaffeeklatch with Charles Stross.
This was very exciting. I first became aware of Charles Stross when he won a Hugo for Equoid - and thought that I probably wouldn't like to read it because it was described as horror. Then I saw him at EasterCon last year, sharing a stage with Jim Butcher - and they were both very funny together. So I tried one of the Laundry Files series, and was instantly hooked. For me, horror is a lot easier to read when it's also very funny. The other people in the room with Charlie were far better versed in his work than I was - now I need to look out for the Merchant Princes series, too.
He is immensely busy at the moment, with five books on the go at different stages (on another panel the following day he said he managed to watch about two new films a decade, prompting the response "That's why you meet your deadlines!"). He also gleefully described the way he's going to blow up Leeds (with added dragons and elves) in his next Laundry Files book, and make Bob (main character in the Laundry Files) go on TV to be interviewed/grilled by Jeremy Paxman at the beginning of the following book about elvish immigration policy!

Later, we went to the talk by Lilian Edwards entitled Privacy and Identity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which she said was her Daredevil talk, with a bit of Captain America. She works in the area of privacy laws, and casually mentioned being quoted in New Scientist, and attending a House of Lords committee - but she's also a great Daredevil fan (and a fan of the present trend for male heroes to take their tops off for the delectation and delight of middle aged women!). The talk also went off into the areas of real names on Facebook - and the good reasons some people have for using a pseudonym, illustrated with the way Matt Murdock's life was ruined by him being outed as Daredevil.

We were going to the Little-Known British SF TV shows of the 1950s to 1970s talk - but it was in Room 6 and there was no way we were going to squeeze in, so we went up to the Presidential Suite for the Elsewhen Press book launch. We didn't stay too long, because the Young Man needed to sit, and all the chairs were taken, but several of the authors appearing in the new anthology read from their work, with the backdrop of sunset over Manchester from a great height.

We finished the evening off with An Adventure in Time and Space: 53 Years in 53 Rels - a play dashing through the entire history of Doctor Who, with a small cast who all played several parts (and were all holding their scripts, which didn't detract from the fun at all), with minimal costume changes (Adric had his gold star of mathematical excellence; Davros sat in a chair holding his arm at an odd angle etc.) with Daleks and dinosaurs being represented by toys being waved in the air from the side of the stage. It was very funny.
There was a running gag about girl companions leaving to get married ("Yay! Feminism!"), topped off by Missy snogging the Doctor near the end ("Yay! Feminism!"), and the chap playing the War Doctor did a very good John Hurt impression. He also played the Fourth Doctor. Oh, and Leela had a Scandinavian accent for some reason.

The Big Elfquest Gatherum

I first came across Elfquest in the 1980s, when I saw the novelisation of the comics on a stall at a Star Trek convention. I enjoyed it, and after that I looked out for the comics, and started buying the Blood of Ten Chiefs anthologies, which are also great fun.
I never did get much further in the story than the Go-Backs, though I'm told that they did find the High Ones space ship in the end. The Wolfriders, for those who are unfamiliar with the story, are a tribe of elves who are forced out of their forest home, and find their way to another group, the Sun Folk, who live in a desert. Cutter, the leader of the Wolfriders, then begins a quest to find all the other scattered elves of the World With Two Moons, and find out what happened to their distant ancestors the High Ones. It's quite different from superhero comics, and good fantasy comic stories are quite rare. This one also has a wide range of good female characters (and Winnowill, who is a wonderful villain!), and that rarity in comic books, a happily married family with children - Cutter, Leetah of the Sun Folk, and their two children Ember and Suntop.
Occasionally I go down to Booth Bookshop's cellar, where the SF is, and the last time I browsed there, I found I book I had not suspected to exist - the Big Elfquest Gatherum. It's a sort of encyclopaedia of Elfquest knowledge, interviews, artwork and so on, and it's fascinating. I hadn't realised the effort Richard and Wendy Pini had put in to trying to get an animated film or TV series off the ground - though reading the struggles they went through, I'm glad we never got the live action film made with children on the backs of large dogs (a serious suggestion by the studio they were dealing with at the time!) or the cartoon series where they wanted to make Leetah's skin lighter because they didn't want to be seen to be endorsing mixed marriages!
There's also information about the Beauty and the Beast graphic novels that Wendy Pini did the artwork for. I used to have the one where Vincent paints an oil painting of Catherine, and I recently got the one where Vincent has to help Catherine's soul move on after death - both of them are beautiful, and quite a different style to the Elfquest elves.
And, it seems, there is more Elfquest out there - stories I was never aware of before, but which I'll be looking out for in future.

Widdershins: Piece of Cake

This is the fourth Widdershins comic book to come out - and I now have the full set, plus a pin for The Royal Society of Bounty Hunters, with smoking pipe logo, which I've clipped to the cape of my Sherlock Holmes coat.
Each story has been a little bit different, but they all centre on the magical town of Widdershins. This one starts in 2013, as an amateur cook heads for a baking competition in the Hotel Gula (which means throat in Italian) - only to find herself imprisoned in a time travelling gluttony spell. The link to previous books is one of the Victorian servants of the hotel, sister to the bounty hunter of previous stories.
It's nice to see a black lead character whose colour is incidental - she's a baker of delicious cakes, first and foremost. Other characters include a pair of cocktail making con artists from the 1920s, a gay chef from 2032 (whose sexual preferences are also incidental - he's first and foremost a chef and antagonist to our heroine) and a cookery book writer from the 1950s, all kidnapped by the insatiable hotel.
It's all great fun, and a satisfying read.
Kate Ashwin, writer and artist, has a website at www.widdershinscomic.com

The House of Wisdom

I was reading tor.com today, and came across a piece about a comic called The 99, about a group of Muslim superheroes each of whom embodies the attributes of one of the 99 Names of Allah - and about the creator of the comic, Naif Al-Mutawa, who is at present on trial for heresy in Saudi Arabia.
Describing the background to the story in the comic, Naif Al-Mutawa talked about the Siege of Baghdad in 1258, by the Mongols, and the destruction of the Grand Library, or House of Wisdom. They said that so many books were thrown into the Tigris that it ran black with the ink, and red with the blood of the philosophers and scientists who were slaughtered.

Why had I never heard of this before?
Just about everybody (in the West, anyway) who loves books knows about the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, but this destruction seems to be on a similar scale and I'd never heard of it. Naif Al-Mutawa said that it was a well-known story to generations of Arabs, and a natural place for his story to start.

By the second half of the ninth century, according to Wikipedia, this Library had become one of the greatest hubs of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages, and the great scholars who were attracted to it established Baghdad as a major seat of learning. It was also linked to astronomical observatories and was a centre of translation of academic and scientific works, including many Ancient Greek texts. Mathemeticians there also developed algebra, and introduced the Hindu numerical system that we use today to the Western world.
Despite the great destruction of 1258 about 400,000 manuscripts were saved, by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and taken to Maragheh - but Baghdad, and Islamic scholarship and science, never really recovered.

Comics at WorldCon

One of the highlights of WorldCon for us was Bryan Talbot (who turns out to be a lovely man!). As Guest of Honour, he gave several talks - the first we attended was on the history of anthropomorphic animals in comics, which was very comprehensive. Mind you, I felt a little bit of a fraud when I put my hand up to knowing about 1930s annuals like Teddy Tail and Tiger Tim, because I knew about them from my time working at the Children's Bookshop in Hay, rather than from my own childhood experience. We're now eagerly awaiting Grandville:Noel, which is due out in November.
There's also a film called Graphic Novel Man, which was shown at the Con (my Young Man bought a copy - it's fascinating), about Bryan Talbot's life and work - and he also gave a talk called How I make a Graphic Novel which will make me look at the layout of comics with new eyes. He talked about making things absolutely clear on the page, to lead the reader's eye to speech bubbles in the right order, and to draw the eye across, and how it made sense to finish one scene at the bottom of the right hand page, so you could turn over and see that you were in a new scene - "It's no use having people wonder about so-and-so's secret identity on one page, if you can see him taking his mask off in the next!" He also showed the perils of letting the letterers choose where they put the speech bubbles over the picture, with an image of Magneto - but all you could see of him were his feet, the rest being hidden by the speech bubble!
Another panel we went to was called In Space, No One Can Hear You Ink: the Best SF Comics. Here we had a French perspective on comics, from a physicist (I think - certainly a scientist) called Sakuya - the French are seriously into comics as an adult literary form. Also on the panel was Phil Foglio, who was up for a Hugo for Volume 13 of his Girl Genius comic. Being unfamiliar with any earlier volumes, when I read the Hugo packet I hadn't got a clue what was going on, so I didn't rate the series very highly, but after the panel we went back to the Girl Genius table in the dealers' hall to find that Volume One had already sold out, so my Young Man got Volume Two to start off with - and suddenly it made so much more sense. He'll be looking for more, I think. We also noticed that Agatha, the Girl Genius of the title, looked uncannily like Phil Foglio, complete with large round glasses. He said he had no problem in getting the domain name on the web, because the words "Girl" and "Genius" were never used together! Other members of the panel were Ade Brown and Scott Edelman.
The last thing that we went to on the Monday, after the Closing Ceremony where the gavel was passed from LonCon to Sasquan in Spokane, Washington, complete with their own Sasquatch (and the audience was pelted with huckleberry sweets), was a film called Comics Britannia - Anarchy in the UK. I've never been much of a fan of Viz, but the other stuff was interesting - and it also showed how different things were in the 1970s, when young men on the dole could spend that time honing their creative skills or, in the case of Viz, starting to put out a comic from their back bedroom. That sort of thing would probably get you 'sanctioned' these days.

John Constantine and Hellblazer

A little while ago, my Young Man showed me a copy of a film called Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves. It seemed strange and depressing - the main character never seemed to have a lucky break and was followed around by hordes of insects. The saving grace of the film was Tilda Swinton as a mad Angel Gabriel.

Later I found out that the main character was supposed to have come from Liverpool....
And in the last week or so, I have seen a trailer for a new TV series about the same character. This time he really does sound Liverpudlian (though the actor,Matt Ryan, is Welsh) which gives the character a sort of gallows humour and cockiness that Keanu Reeves never managed to put across. It looks very promising, and on the strength of it I picked up an odd copy of one of the comics that I found in Addyman's bookshop in Hay-on-Wye.
It was a good choice, as it turned out, being a self-contained story from 1989 by Jamie Delano and Ron Tiner. It's about Jerry, an acquaintance of Constantine's who turns out to be a fictional character - and other fictional characters keep turning up to take him back to the world of fiction, because only the really famous ones (who are also free of copyright) have the right to roam the real world. Among the characters they meet along the way are Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, and Nancy and Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist.
The first character to tap his way across the pages is Blind Pew.
"Blind Who?" asks Constantine.
"From Treasure Island, you illiterate plebian!" says Jerry, who has just been handed the Black Spot.
And that's the point where I thought I've got to read more of this....

More Widdershins

My Young Man has lent me the two Widdershins graphic novels that he bought at London Super Comic Con - and now I'm truly hooked on Kate Ashwin's world and looking forward to more stories.
This is a world just on the edge of becoming Victorian - Princess Victoria is mentioned in one of the stories - but where magic is real, and the town of Widdershins is the home of both a university of magic and a new railway station.
The second book, No Rest for the Wicked, introduces two new characters - an Irishman who can see spirits, and his friend a jolly German violinist. Jack O'Malley's unique talent is useful to wizards in Widdershins who are trying to get rid of unwanted manifestations caused by conjurations that went wrong (or "buggerups"). They also uncover a fiendish plot pitting science against magic.
In the third story we're back to Harriet and Sid with Vanishing Act, a story that was inspired by the classic Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng Chiang. Tim Chiang is the stage magician, and his assistant is missing - an assistant who has a talent for making mechanical marvels.
Once again there are good female characters - Harriet the bounty hunter, obviously, and Lei the Chinese mechanical genius in Vanishing Act, and in No Rest for the Wicked, police Captain Barber and Councilwoman Fairbairn.
Kate Ashwin updates her website www.widdershinscomic.com every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Rudiments of Wisdom

I was so keen to find more comics like the Captain Britain series by Paul Cornell that I went on the dreaded Amazon - and found Rudiments of Wisdom, which focuses on Pete Wisdom and MI-13 (the British government department for Weird Happenings).
So - they send a helicopter gunship to Avalon to stop a fairy invasion (John the Skrull and Captain Midlands are along for the ride).
The giant Pantagruel awakes under a village in rural England, giving everyone there bad dreams.
Pete Wisdom provokes a fight in a Cardiff pub by making anti-Welsh remarks, to bring the Red Dragon into the open. That's The Red Dragon of Wales, Y Ddraig Goch, who has forgotten his glorious past and is now a thug and criminal. And there's a Bruce Lee look-alike to fight him.
A man who runs Jack the Ripper walks around Whitechapel opens the door to all the alternate universes where the different theories about the Ripper are true, and brings them through to this one - and then HG Wells' Martian war machines arrive, and the Skrull Beatles get the band back together....

I enjoyed this immensely.
There are some lovely in jokes, like Pete Wisdom's boss being called Mr Grimsdale (anyone from Albania would get this joke instantly, because for a long time the films of Norman Wisdom were about the only films that were allowed to be seen there - and his boss in the comedies was Mr Grimsdale. When Norman Wisdom visited Albania, he was treated like a superstar.). The dialogue is witty and intelligent, the female characters are well rounded, and there's a sub-plot where Pete is making a bit of a mess of choosing between the two women in his life, Tink the fairy (who he has to keep happy to keep her father Oberon, the King of the Fairies, happy) and Maureen Raven, who is a clair-sentient who works for MI-13.
The art, by Trevor Hairsine and Manuel Garcia, is also very good indeed.

Steed and Mrs Peel

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Emma Peel - elegant, sophisticated, brave, and intelligent. I wanted to dress in a slinky cat suit and throw villains across the room.
So my Young Man bought me a comic book for my birthday, A Very Civil Armageddon, with a story that pits Steed and Mrs Peel against the Hellfire Club (partly, I suspect, so they can use that costume with the spiky collar that she wore in the TV episode). The writer is Mark Waid (with Caleb Monroe) - I've been reading Mark Waid's Daredevil comics, and I like them a lot, but I wasn't sure initially that he would be able to pull off dialogue for two such English characters at the height of the Sixties.
The artists are Steve Bryant and Will Sliney.
In fact, he did the dialogue very well indeed, and he also brought out how much Emma and Steed care about each other between the witticisms, as well as getting the whimsical oddness that characterised the original series.
There was one point where I felt as if I'd missed something important - I wasn't quite clear how a bunch of cabinet ministers, Steed and Mrs Peel and members of the Hellfire Club all came to be sharing a nuclear bunker - but our heroes solved the mystery very satisfactorily - and now I'm going to be rewatching a few old episodes, and wondering if I could still fit into a cat suit!

Widdershins, a comic book

At London Super Comic Con, my Young Man insisted we had to visit the table of Kate Ashwin. He had a copy of her comic book, Widdershins, Sleight of Hand, and wanted to buy the second and third installments.
He lent me the first book. I've just got round to reading it - and I can see now why he was so keen to buy more! It's a slightly alternative-history 1830s, and Sid Malik, a failed wizard who is about to be evicted from his lodgings, gets accidentally involved with pipe-smoking Harriet Barber, bounty hunter (and her dog). Chases, railway journeys, green demons, and the King of Thieves combine in a witty and enjoyable story, and Sid and Harriet are an engaging couple of characters.
And now I want to get the next installments, too.
Kate Ashwin has a website at www.widdershinscomic.com

How to Become a Female Superhero

I picked up a couple of comics at the recent London Super Comic Con, put out by zenescope - Robyn Hood volumes one and two. This is part of their Grimm Fairy Tales series. I enjoyed the story, but there was something about it that also made me feel uncomfortable.
I rather liked the way the heroine scoffed at the idea that she was a "fantasy land orphan" brought through a magic portal (even though she was).
And then she got into deep trouble at high school and .... seriously - did it have to be rape?

I don't have an in-depth knowledge of comic book characters, but I do know some origin stories. Batman saw his parents shot dead. Green Arrow was stranded on an island and forced to find a way to survive. Daredevil was blinded by radioactive gunk. Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider. There are all sorts of ways to become a superhero, so why are the women so often raped?
Half an hour of googling has yielded me twelve female superheroes who have been raped at some point, and four male superheroes - Batman (depending on which version of the story you read), Green Arrow, Nightwing and Swamp Thing (not sure how that one worked).
As an origin story, Red Sonja is raped and calls upon the goddess Scathach for revenge, and so gets her powers. Frank Miller's version of Catwoman was raped. So was Lady Bullseye from the Daredevil comics (by the yakuza). I understand there are more, but the names of the characters mean very little to me.

The Robin Hood parallels in this story (by Pat Shand, Joe Brusha, Raven Gregory and Ralph Tedesco) are quite fun, and Gisborne seems to be rather more than just King John's henchman, so I want to know what happens next.
I just wish they'd found some other origin story.

Stocking up on Comics

I've been for a fun day out in Cardiff - at one point I was walking along a pedestrianised area and it occurred to me that I'd probably seen it in a leaked clip from the next Doctor Who series, where Clara is making a phone call, and Peter Capaldi comes out of the Tardis, and gets a big hug.
The decision to shop in Cardiff was partly in order to use my Marks and Spencer gift voucher, but mostly I wanted to treat myself to comics. So I was delighted when I found Hunters Moon, the Green Arrow story which is the follow up to The Longbow Hunters by Mike Grell, at the Cardiff branch of Forbidden Planet. I found a Captain Marvel comic there, too, which has whet my appetite for the next collection (a big space battle, unlikely allies, and Captain Marvel has lost certain of her memories since I last read about her).
Cardiff Indoor Market has an interesting little book stall with lots of comics, too - in fact, he said they'd got a lot more that they hadn't sorted out yet, waiting to come in, all from the late 1970s to 1990s. He had 15 issues of Elfquest, starting from the first issue, with a few gaps, and he let me have them for £5!
At WH Smiths I got the first two Ben Aaronovitch novels in the Rivers of London series, the police procedural with magic. It'll be interesting to see how they compare with Paul Cornell's London Falling, which starts from a very similar premise.
And at Waterstones I found Death, the High Cost of Living by Neil Gaiman. I've only read bits of his Sandman stories, but I always liked Dream's sister Death, and this is a lovely story about her. And Mad Hetty who has lost her heart, and a New York teenager who is thinking about suicide.
So I've got lots of goodies to keep me occupied :)

Super Heroines?

I'm fairly new to the comic scene, so my knowledge is sketchy at best.
There have been lots of films about Superman, and Batman, and Spiderman, as well as the Hulk, and Thor, and Iron Man - I love Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man - it's his sarcasm and extreme cleverness, I think. I love Captain America, too - he makes me want to hug him, and take him home and feed him home-made apple pie. But where are the films about female superheroes?
Recently, I've been seeing speculation on the web about just that. Joss Whedon wants to make a Wonder Woman film - and it struck me that I don't really know about that many other super-heroines. Or female superheroes. Women, in costume, fighting crime. I thought Black Widow, in Avengers Assemble, was brilliant, and I understand Joss Whedon had to do some arguing to even include her in the picture. I liked her so much that I went looking for the comics, and came across something that combined two of my interests. Paul Cornell, who also writes for Doctor Who, wrote a comic called Black Widow, Deadly Origin - which was an ideal starting point for me, because it included a lot of her back-story and some of the other super-heroes that she had been involved with (including Hercules! Which seemed - well, no more bizarre than Thor and Loki, I suppose)
But who else is there?
I grew up with Lynda Carter, twirling around in her red, white and blue outfit as Wonder Woman, and lassoing people with her lasso of truth - but there doesn't seem to have been a film. All those re-boots of Superman, and not one single Wonder Woman film.
But there must be some more?
I'm vaguely aware that Captain Marvel is a woman now (having originally been a man), but I know nothing else about her.
I understand there are female versions of the Hulk (She-Hulk) and Spiderman (Spiderwoman), there's Supergirl and Batgirl - but are all the female superheroes just pale imitations of a male superhero?
I've heard of Scarlet Witch, and Oracle, but I know next to nothing about them, and they certainly haven't been the subject of a film that I know of.
When I first stumbled across comics, my immediate favourite was Green Arrow, because of the archery - but he had a girlfriend called Black Canary, and I thought she was extremely cool. Not sure about the fishnet tights and blonde wig, but as a character, I thought she was very good.
So, where are the interesting, three dimensional, female superheroes? And why can't there be a film about even one of them?

The Black Orchid

What a pity this only ever ran to three issues!
It's a complete story in itself, of course, but I don't think there's ever been a sequel featuring purple plant ladies from the Amazon jungle!
In 1988, Neil Gaiman took the character of Black Orchid, a costumed super hero, and made her into something rich and strange, as only he can.
Back in 1988, I was almost as innocent of the Gotham City universe as Black Orchid's recently woken sister, though that didn't spoil my enjoyment of the story. Reading it now, I find that the story has a lot more depth to it that I didn't appreciate the first time round - because now I know about Arkham Asylum, and Swamp Thing, and some of the other little touches that were put into the story.
And now I'm wondering about reading some of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing stories....

Slaine and the Celtic Dream

I've recently been reading my way through Slaine: Books of Invasions, three volumes of the most gorgeous artwork and gory battles, starring the 2000AD Celtic hero, Slaine mac Roth.
I started reading 2000AD among archaeologists, and Slaine came in for special praise because it was so well researched. Slaine was shown becoming High King in just the way that Gerald of Wales described, for instance, and some of the characters' faces were based on Celtic Iron Age stone heads.
It's also a very violent comic strip, of course. Slaine's catchphrase is "Kiss My Axe," after all. Pat Mills, one of the creators of Slaine, points out in an editorial at the back of the third volume of Books of Invasions that Slaine is not just a "hack and slay barbarian hero". He recalls criticism for having Slaine talking instead of just killing things every week, and the editorial team at 2000AD told him not to write any more "emotional stories" after he did a Slaine version of The Swan Children of Lir. They, too, wanted more hack and slash, and less talking.
In Hollywood, they don't like the Celtic names - too difficult - though there has been talk of a Slaine film for years. There's a group of Spanish fans (Slaine is very big in Europe, apparently) who made a short film sequence - and it looks just like the comics. It's absolutely beautiful work, by Miguel Mesas, and it can be found on YouTube as Slaine: The Horned God.

Other people, as Pat Mills says, 'get it'. The Celtic Dream. The Irish legends that are not as clear cut as Roman or Greek or Anglo-Saxon, "imbued with an anarchic sense of the fantastic, mixed with a deep and unique mysticism".

So the comic strip went through a rather rocky few years, with the Books of Invasions showing a triumphant return to form with the artists Clint Langley and Luke Preece, and the editors of 2000AD and the Graphic Novel, Matt Smith and Jonathan Oliver.

And Pat Mills mentions another group of people who 'get' Slaine - the road protesters trying to save the prehistoric landscape of Tara from a motorway a few years ago. They even used the slogan: "This beast you are calling a motorway can kiss my axe."
Sadly, the motorway was finally built - the government of Ireland has been rightly criticised for failing to protect the amazingly rich archaeological remains of the country in favour of short term profit.

Green Arrow

The other day I made a trip down memory lane when I read The Longbow Hunters by Mike Grell, a Green Arrow story.
When I worked in London, I found a little comic shop near my office. I wasn't too sure what to try, until I found a Green Arrow comic - a superhero with a bow was just my cup of tea! I used to sit in the canteen at lunchtimes reading while I ate the frankly quite disgusting "curry" that they served up (it was cheap!). One of the things that impressed me back then was how adult the comics were - the characters went to bed together, and talked about getting married (or not). It wasn't just about fighting crime - the characters had real relationships.
Those stories must have come not long after the story in The Longbow Hunters, because I remember the Black Canary was recovering from some very traumatic incident in her recent past, and this story tells you what that traumatic incident was.
There's also a rival archer lurking on the rooftops of Seattle, where Oliver Queen has set up his shop the Sherwood Florist, a meaty plot involving Japanese gold and drugs and money laundering - and it was all great fun!
I'll be hunting down the sequels now to find out more about Green Arrow and the Black Canary.

I was interested to see that there's a new TV series, called just Arrow, but about the same character. I saw a trailer for it, but I haven't seen any episodes yet. The TV Oliver Queen is a lot younger than the comic book one I'm familiar with, though, and I understand he hasn't got together with his Black Canary yet. It should be fun to find out the differences, and the similarities, with the comics, when I finally get round to it (so many good stories out there, in so many formats - and so little time!)

Judge Dredd

When I was a young archaeologist, camping out over the summer somewhere near Preston, one of the other diggers used to buy a 2000AD comic, which he would share around in the site hut. It was my first introduction to comics that were not June and Schoolfriend, or Bunty, or Mandy - so a bit of a culture shock!
One of the most popular characters, of course, was Judge Dredd, dispensing The Law in Mega City One. It was violent, and sometimes funny, and we all enjoyed it (though some of us got slightly worried about the sort of children who sent in pictures of alien plague bugs they had drawn!).
When a film was announced, I was quite interested - it would be good to see a story move from British comic to Hollywood big screen.
Then they said that Sylvester Stallone would be starring in it. Hmmm, not sure about that.
And then in the movie - he took his helmet off!!!!
If there is one element of the character that is non-negotiable, it is that Judge Dredd NEVER takes his helmet off.
There were other things wrong with that movie as well, but never mind them....

More recently, there was an announcement that there would be a new Judge Dredd film. I was quite interested.
Then they said that Karl Urban would be starring in it. So, that's the Karl Urban who was Eomer in Lord of the Rings, and Doctor McCoy in the Star Trek re-boot? This could be good....
Then they said that Karl Urban is a fan of Judge Dredd himself, and only took the part on condition that he never took the helmet off!
That's when I knew the film was in safe hands.
I was a bit unsure about actually going to see it, though - I'm not over-keen on violent films, and to be true to the comics it would have to be violent.
I needn't have worried. It is very violent. Many people die horribly - but it is all integral to the plot. It's all necessary to show what Mega City One is like and why the Judges are so - uncompromising. They're fighting a losing battle, and can only ever deal with a tiny fraction of the crime that goes on there. Karl Urban said that the fans would want to see him in the helmet, and riding his Lawmaster motorbike through heavy traffic, and you got all of that right at the start of the movie. It's a proper, powerful motorbike, too, unlike the one in the previous film with the really wide tires (which were like the comic strip, but not actually practical). Where the first film went for the look of the comic, this film went for the reality behind the pictures, and they got it. When Dredd finally says the iconic line: "I am the Law," you really believe it.
It's a very good script. It was a good idea to start with Judge Anderson's first day on the job - it means Dredd has someone to explain things to for the audience, and Judge Anderson is a popular character in the comic. They did a good job with different camera techniques to show her psychic abilities and the effects of the slow-mo drug that the villain of the piece was peddling.
Lena Headey played the villain - and Ma-Ma was very different from Cercei Lannister in Game of Thrones! Just as ruthless, though.
The film even passes the Bechdel Test! There are two female characters who talk to each other - and not about a man. In such a testosterone fuelled film as this, that's something to celebrate.
ComicbookGRRRL has a very fine review of the film on her blog, dated last October.

Really, I think it's best to pretend that the Stallone film never happened. Karl Urban is The Law.
I hope they do another one.