I liked it better when people dressed up

Here's another comic story that I really love. And I have to ask - it it just me who finds this six-page tale by "Beto" (Gilbert Hernandez) to be hauntingly beautiful and just plain wonderful in its own unique way?

 

This comes from the second issue of "Measles", the Hernandez brothers' comic for all ages, in 1999. And there's nothing remotely like this in any of the other stories that filled the pages of Measles, not even in the other adventures of Venus. The sense of emptiness in the wide panels, the silence, the wind blowing Venus's hair, her delighted reactions to the mundane Space Fun exhibits... the whole thing just has an eerie, quiet magnificence about it.

Maybe it is just me. Or me and my brother, anyway, because he showed me it in 1999 and agrees completely. What do you think?

Thundercats and Mike Nomad

 

In 1954, William Overgard took over as the artist of the "Steve Roper" newspaper comic strip. Overgard had previously tried and failed to sell his own comic strip about Mike Nomad, a tough former commando who got the job done. Within a couple of years, Mike Nomad had joined forces with Steve Roper and became the foremost character in the comic, which was eventually renamed "Steve Roper and Mike Nomad".

Back in the fifties, William Overgard was sharing an artists' studio in New York with Leonard Starr, another talented artist and writer of comics. And thirty years later, when Leonard Starr got a very cool gig as head writer of the new Thundercats cartoon, William Overgard came on board to contribute some stories. He hadn't changed much in those three decades, it seems. Let's take a quick look at the six Thundercats episodes in the Overgard oeuvre...

Mandora - The Evil Chaser

This first episode spells out what William Overgard's approach to writing Thundercats is going to be. Lion-O and Snarf stumble across a big box dumped in the middle of a field, ignore the warning signs and open it to release three interplanetary criminals. Space police officer Mandora arrives and takes over the show, enlisting Lion-O as a sidekick to recapture the villains. One of them, the thief Quickpick, is a quirky rogue who joins forces with Mandora and Lion-O when they're all captured by Mudhogs. The rest of the Thundercats are completely absent from most of the episode, and just come along at the end for the final battle.

It's really different from what had been seen in Thundercats before (this was the first episode shown after the initial scene-setting nine stories by Leonard Starr and Jules Bass) but has a definite coolness to it that the series hadn't seen before. Mandora, with her no-nonsense attitude, cool space uniform and technology and flying motorbike ("the Electrocharger") is something very different. But it takes a while to get used to the minimal involvement of the Thundercats in what's supposed to be their cartoon...

The Fireballs of Plun-Darr

This is more of a traditional Thundercats story - probably the first one Overgard wrote, but since it followed on from Starr's "The Spaceship Beneath the Sands", Mandora probably ended up being produced first. It features the toy-based characters more prominently, as Tygra is captured by the Mutants and Lion-O has to come to his rescue along with non-toy-based but established supporting character Willa. The rest of the Thundercats are once more only in a cameo at the end.

William Overgard's knowledge of "Spaceship Beneath the Sands", incidentally, is clearly based on just knowing the episode would introduce the two new Mutant vehicles. Otherwise, he was just working from the earliest premise of the series - the Other Mutants appear in this one, having been dropped by the other writers after the pilot episode. S-S-Slithe and his minions are also very evil in this one, far from the usual comical bungling that became the norm!

Mandora and the Pirates

And this one is barely a Thundercats episode at all. It's an adventure for Mandora, tackling the space robot pirate Captain Cracker, who takes over the Grey Prison Planet and releases the evil creatures held there. Quickpick is among them, and joins forces with Mandora, ending the episode by officially becoming her sidekick.

Lion-O also comes along to help, playing a smaller supporting role. All the rest of the Thundercats (ie the toys who this cartoon is supposed to be advertising) make only the briefest of appearances, as usual coming along right at the end to help catch the villains. More than any other Overgard story, this one feels like a tale from a completely different universe, with a Thundercat hastily added into the mix.

Dr Dometone

This one's very similar, although Lion-O is joined here by Wilykat and Wilykit. They help Dr Dometone and his giant robot frog protect the Great Oceanic Plug from space villain Scrape and his giant robot electric eel. All these new characters, robots and settings aren't at all part of the usual Thundercats setup. And as usual, the rest of the team turn up late on to make a token contribution to sorting things out.

Mandora gets mentioned at the end - Lion-O says he's handed Scrape over to her - and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was fully written and planned as a Mandora and Quickpick adventure before being modified for Thundercats.

The Thunder-Cutter

This episode is more toy-based than usual. It introduces Hachiman, who seems to have been already created as a toy rather than being one of William Overgard's inventions. And he's teamed with Lion-O and non-toy series regular Nayda, against Mumm-Ra and the Mutants. Throw in the usual cameo of the rest of the Thundercat team at the end of the episode, and you've got more toys in this one than any other Overgard!

It's still a bit strange to have a mediaeval samurai in Thundercats, but it's such a divergence from William Overgard's usual predilection for space robots, I don't think we can blame him for that.

Sword in a Hole

Mumm-Ra hires space mercenary Captain Shiner to throw the Sword of Omens into a black hole, and Lion-O and Panthro have to rescue it. A big part of the episode, though, is devoted to telling us all how very cool Captain Shiner is - and to be fair, he really is awesome. It's just that he's not very "Thundercats".

Captain Shiner did get made into a toy for the third range of action figures, when they were going through the cartoon episodes to find new characters. So did Captain Cracker, but I can't help thinking William Overgard would have preferred to see toys of Mandora and Quickpick.

The most distinctive feature of William Overgard's writing, apart from the minimal role of the Thundercats and the unique rigmarole they recite when rushing to save the day ("Tygra ready, ho! Cheetara ready, ho!" etc) is a love of outer space adventure and a galloping lack of understanding of how outer space is supposed to work. Words like 'galaxy' and 'light year' can mean anything. If your spaceship has inconveniently blown up, you can stand around in space and have a conversation waiting for someone to come and pick you up. Captain Cracker makes Lion-O walk the plank, in space, saying he'll fall a zillion miles. And then there's travel times - the Thundercats always drive from Cats' Lair to Lion-O's location at the end of the episode in a matter of seconds. Even when, as in "The Thunder-Cutter", he's somewhere explicitly several days' walk away.

But though you can laugh at his peculiarities, there's no denying that William Overgard was one of the very best writers of this generally excellent cartoon. His adventures are so much fun to watch that I can (and do) still get a kick out of putting them on again now, 38 years after watching them for the first time. If you've been unlucky enough not to watch Thundercats before (even despite all the times I've told you to watch it), you could do a lot worse than starting with the Overgards!

Did you ever see a dozen dunderheads?

 One of my most popular posts on this blog is the one about Combat Kelly and the Deadly Dozen. So let's talk about the gang who they totally stole the name from, and more specifically their leader, Sniffer!

This is just the first part of the long and fascinating history of Sniffer, which encompasses a lot of other characters and genres along the way! Part One - How the gang got together!

Actually, Marvel Comics almost certainly didn't steal the "Deadly Dozen" name from the Deadly Dozen who first appeared in Lev Gleason Comics in 1941; they were stealing the concept from the 1967 Dirty Dozen movie and just picked the most obvious D-word for their version. But Marvel definitely did steal another famous comics D-word from Lev Gleason, and our story starts in the very popular forties comic, "Daredevil"!

The bichromatic boomerang-wielding superhero had first appeared as a backup strip in Silver Streak Comics #6, cover date September 1940 (published in July) and was if not actually "the greatest name in comics" as that cover claims, certainly popular enough to quickly be promoted to his own title, the first issue cover-dated July 1941. In his own comic, Daredevil was written and drawn by Charles Biro, a very big name in comics history, and the comic kept running all the way to 1956, when Lev Gleason went out of business - although by that time superheroes were all but gone and forgotten, and Daredevil had long since disappeared from his own comic, which now starred the Little Wise Guys. Marvel Comics remembered the hero, though, and quite deliberately swiped the now-available name for their own latest hero when he launched in 1964. That Daredevil is still being published in his own comic today.

But back in 1941, the fifth issue of "Daredevil" was a standard 64-page comic (not counting the covers) with a host of different features. Adventure! War! Intrigue! Sports! Patriotism! Mystery! The contents page on the inside front cover lists them in a rather strange order, , but the only one we're interested in here is the main event, Daredevil himself. His 13-page story starts with a notice that "The Case of the Mysterious Trunk", advertised last month, won't be appearing until next issue. Instead, we get a story that starts out as a tale about a machine that can predict whether or not a person is capable of murder, and turns into a story about a nationwide convention of criminals getting together to kill Daredevil.

It's not until page 9 that we see they've assembled a team of twelve deadly killers!

The Deadly Dozen - Crusher, Egghead, Snake Eyes, Skully, Benito, Butcher, Giant Killer, Owl, Satan, Sniffer, Turk and Lady Killer all line up for inspection. Sniffer clearly stands out from the crowd, by virtue of being the only one who does anything other than just standing there. He displays his unusual sniffing abilities, and it's immediately obvious that Charles Biro likes him and wants us all to like him too!

Daredevil spends the first half of page 10 beating up the generic crooks, then escapes, with the Deadly Dozen sent out to find and kill him. Daredevil beats them all up, one or two at a time, over the next couple of pages. Not one of them gets any kind of personality beyond a namecheck. Sniffer, still sniffing, is the last of them, and after the whole Dozen have been handed over to the cops, Daredevil speaks to the readers, asking them "Which of the twelve would you like to see me tangle with again?"

This isn't much of a contest. Eleven of the twelve have done nothing, and only Sniffer is at all noticeable in the story we've just read. It really looks like Charles Biro wants to tell Sniffer stories, and wants to get some reader feedback to convince Lev Gleason that that's what the kids want to see. Rigging the results of a popularity contest is very much the kind of thing Sniffer would do in the future, so it's very appropriate.

Sure enough, three months later (Daredevil spent #6 battling a wolfman and #7 finally exploring the much-delayed case of the mysterious trunk), it's the return of Sniffer! By popular request!

Daredevil #8 was cover-dated March 1942, and went on sale in January. So America is already at war, but this issue was prepared before Pearl Harbor. The battle between Daredevil and the Nazis is just the standard pre-war theme that has been appearing in Lev Gleason comics for years, urging the USA to do something about Germany. The first issue of the comic was actually titled "Daredevil Battles Hitler", complete with photo of der Führer's face on the cover.

It's an interesting story. It revolves around an evil insidious German Bund, planning to spread propaganda and ultimately take over the entire USA. And working for them is Sniffer - clearly doing it for the money and resenting being given anything to do that isn't killing people.

But when the evil Herr Herring and his evil Bundists actually give Sniffer the job of killing the young American boy who tried to betray them (I love that he's only resisting the Nazis because he's been to college and been corrupted by free-thinking notions), he contemptuously refuses to do it. Sniffer is a killer, but only of people who deserve killing. And he has nothing to do with the subsequent spread of Lies! Propaganda! Hatred! That's really quite the opposite of what our loveable rogue murderer is all about!

The Nazis confine Sniffer to their dungeon, Daredevil rescues him, and the two join forces to smash the Bund. Sniffer displays some impressive fighting skills along the way!

And our two heroes save the day, and the nation, without any real trouble. Daredevil makes it clear that Sniffer is a great guy, and is more or less going straight, maybe!

It's a strange way to launch a new comedy backup strip, but a later page in the same comic confirms that that's what we're doing here. Sniffer has been granted his own comic strip, starting next month!

And so, as promised, the next month's Daredevil #9 gives Sniffer his own strip, unrelated to the Daredevil adventures, and telling us once again that it's the result of popular demand!

Thousands of letters have poured in after his second appearance, apparently - although this story clearly must have been produced long before the previous story saw print - and it sees Sniffer setting up in business himself, with his Brush 'Em Off Syndicate! Almost certainly written by Charles Biro, but now he's being drawn by Carl "Hub" Hubbell.

He tries to go about it in an unusually honourable way, but ends up killing off a rival mob in the course of his misadventures, showing himself in the process to be an expert hitman. But it's all done in a very light-hearted kind of way, and ends with another panel urging readers to write in and ask for more Sniffer! It seems to have worked, one way or another - Sniffer becomes a fixture in the Daredevil comic from now on.

Daredevil #10, cover dated May 1942, is obviously the first issue produced after Pearl Harbor. Like all the other American comics, it temporarily drops the Germans from its rogues' gallery and focuses on the Japanese. The cover tells us that Daredevil "vows that one hundred Japs will fall for every drop of American blood spilled by their treachery" and his own story in this issue has him join the air force and spill a heck of a lot of Japanese blood.

But the contents page tells us it's Sniffer who's "slated to be America's number one comic character", and he stars in a story clearly written before the war.

Contracted to kill a bookie who absconded with a crook's money, Sniffer sympathises with the bookie when he finds out he's got a wife in hospital and a baby to take care of, and he resolves the issue without killing anyone, even winning a beautiful baby contest along the way (by threatening the judges with his gatling gun). And he talks to the readers again, thanking them for their letters of support!

Sniffer's skin, incidentally, fluctuates from pink to yellow to orange from one page to the next. I'm really not sure what it's supposed to be.

Anyway, in Daredevil #11, the Second World War has caught up to Sniffer at last - business for a hired killer is slack because of the war, so he figures he might as well join the army for something to do. We also get a caption on the first page of his story telling us that "Since he first appeared as a minor character in a Daredevil story," Sniffer has become enormously popular! Charles Biro is still really pushing that 'by popular demand' legend about him!

So Sniffer joins up, and proves an unconventional kind of soldier - he doesn't like the uniform, saying "Even Crimebuster's monkey wouldn't look good in dis!" and picks out a scruffy, ill-fitting outfit for himself instead. More of C.B. and his monkey later; he's the star of Boy Comics, and Sniffer will be meeting him eventually! Sniffer is kept on by the army because of his expert marksmanship, and when assigned to the traditional army potato-peeling, who should be meet but Satan himself!

Yes, it's the return of the Deadly Dozen! Incidentally, "Satan" was a very common name for unexceptional bad guys in American comics of the time. It wasn't until later years that Americans really seemed to associate the name with evil and power.

And so Sniffer and Satan decide to round up the old gang, and get the whole Dozen into the army with them!

I just love that when we see the Dozen going about their everyday lives, Lady Killer is casually killing a lady, and is annoyed when Sniffer interrupts him. And Daredevil takes the final panel to tell us how great this latest development is!

So that's how the gang got together (and split up, and got together again) - from now on the Dozen are a team, although eleven of them will be nothing more than occasionally-seen background characters behind Sniffer. It's a strange setup, made even stranger by being hammered into a war-propaganda context!

And also in this issue of Daredevil, there's an interesting announcement about the future of comic magazines...

Lev Gleason had three titles at this time - Daredevil, Boy Comics and Silver Streak Comics. But now three of the characters from Silver Streak are moving into Daredevil, because Silver Streak Comics is being replaced by an all-new title, Crime Does Not Pay. No superheroes there (the Silver Streak, a very unexceptional kind of hero, was just axed altogether), this new comic was the all-new genre of gritty tales of crime. It took a few years to really become controversial, but crime comics - dwelling gruesomely on the nasty details of crime, with a perfunctory 'crime is bad' moral at the end - upset a lot of people. And it all starts here, but maybe Sniffer and the Deadly Dozen could be seen as paving the way!

Stay tuned for part two of the chronicle - what did Sniffer do in the war?

This is all William Overgard's fault

 I've never done a 'early comics work by writers of the Thundercats cartoon' blog about William Overgard, which is a shocking omission. In my defence, his early comics work consists of:

a) 31 years on the 'Steve Roper' newspaper comic strip, which I have never read but which sounds like it has many wonderful and fascinating similarities to his Thundercats work that I could write about, and

b) A few years drawing comics for Lev Gleason in the fifties, where he's following someone else's script without the opportunity to innovate on his own, and frequently just drawing isolated chapters of a bigger storyline, that would look strange if I just wrote about them alone.

So, obviously, my thought process goes, I need to read the whole history of Steve Roper, right? Individual scans of daily newspapers are available online. And the strip started in 1936 and finished in 2004, so I'd have to read all the pre- and post-Overgard years too, for context...

Maybe I'll have a look at his Lev Gleason credits and see if there's something a bit simpler... ooh, Sniffer and the Deadly Dozen and Iron Jaw...

One long rabbit hole later, there's nothing else for it. I'm going to have to write up the entire history of Sniffer. Most of it's nothing to do with William Overgard at all, so forget the Thundercats angle. I thought I could just do a quick-ish simple summary of the different approaches to the character over the years, but most of it is so good that I can't just skim through it - there's a brief period during the war when it was very dull, but for the most part every single story has funny and interesting things I want to highlight. 

So stay tuned for what will have to be a multi-part catalogue of the saga of Sniffer and the Deadly Dozen and Iron Jaw and Crimebuster and Daredevil. Which might take months or years to write in full. And also an article about William Overgard's episodes of Thundercats, because it really isn't fair to exclude him when he started this whole monstrosity!

The Adventures of T-Shirt

 My life has been plagued by loathsome little girls! Deborahs, Hollys, bleuch!

YouTube randomly recommended me the first episode of the fifth series of T-Bag (or "T. Bag" as I see they traditionally punctuated it, but somehow writing it with a dash feels more natural), and it takes me back. I remember watching that episode, particularly T-Bag's line above, when it first aired in January 1989. I was twelve, and I'd been a fan since at least the second series in 1986 (the one with the numbers), though I'm not sure if I'd seen the first series (with letters) the year before.

1989 was the one with the spoons, and the last one with Elizabeth Estensen as T-Bag. It declined a little after that, but I kept in touch right until the ninth and final series (late 1992 rather than early 1993, to get it shown before Thames TV disappeared). That one really wasn't very good at all.

But the point is, if you haven't heard of T-Bag, it was a British children's TV institution! Each series of ten episodes followed a strict formula - the evil T-Bag was embarking on some kind of nebulous evil scheme, which was thwarted by scattering a group of objects across time and space, and one heroic young girl had to travel around and gather the objects before T-Bag and her assistant T-Shirt could find them. Each episode would feature exactly two guest actors who the girl would interact with and end up retrieving one of the objects, and in the final episode T-Bag would be defeated. It was great.

You were meant to cheer for the girl (Debbie for the first three series, then one with Holly, two with Sally, and I don't remember the rest), but in my usual chauvinistic way I didn't care about them at all. Not even Sally, who turns out to have been played by Kellie Bright, who I subsequently watched in The Upper Hand and Maid Marian and her Merry Men, and plenty of other things too. No, I was always watching it for T-Shirt.

T-Shirt's story arc was the same in each series. Thomas starts out free and happy in the antique shop he apparently inhabits with Debbie, but then is dragged back into T-Bag's service, struggling against it until he's magically mind-controlled to be her willing slave and tea-caddy. Over the course of the series he gradually starts to rebel, and by the final episode he's broken free and joined forces with the girl to vanquish T-Bag once and for all (until next year). He was very cool.

It's possible that I don't like the later years so much because I was growing more mature, but of course T-Shirt was doing the same. Played from start to finish by the wonderful John Hasler, he's around nine years old when they made the first series, and so of course he's around seventeen by the end. Fans of the series got to see him grow up, roughly a year ahead of me, and the way his character and interactions with T-Bag grow and develop while staying true to the consistent feel of the show in general is just brilliant. They should make some more episodes today, it'd be just the same, and I'm sure it'd be a big hit!

I have no shame

 Did you know there's a website dedicated to Digitser? The 1990s Channel 4 Teletext video game page, famously hosted by The Man With A Long Chin?

Well, there is. And one page on it contains a selection from their letters page, and it's time I confessed something that has been a dark secret for more than thirty years...

I was a regular correspondent to Digitiser in 1993/1994 (as I recall, by the time I went to university in autumn 94, I'd stopped), under the name of The Man With No Shame.

A few earlier letters were under the less imaginative name of Ben Pridmore (which I also used when entering their competitions, some of which I won!), and I also wrote one as "Miriam the Mystic", which got printed too. But it was mainly The Man With No Shame.

I wasn't one of the superstar writers who everyone thought were cool, but I was thrilled to see my pseudonym show up occasionally for the world to see! Once I won a subscription to Gamesmaster magazine by having the star letter on the theme of the week, "What makes you a Digitiser 'super viewer'?"

I can only see one of my letters on that page, and I don't remember writing it at all. But it has to be me, with that name and location...

Most of the letters collected there are from after my time, but for some reason I remember this one (not written by me) and its answer word for word, after all these years...

The "Miriam the Mystic" letter, if I'm remembering the name right, included references to a lot of famous letter-writers, and I slipped my brother "T. Prophet" in there too, which was very nice of me. And they edited that line out when they printed it, obviously recognising that we wrote from the same address. So thanks, Digitiser - do you know how rare it was for me to do something nice for my brother like that? And I never got to show him it...

Cantabrigian othelloing

 Ah, the Cambridge EGP, biggest and coolest othello tournament of the year. And I scraped the funds together to go to it, and it was a fantastic weekend! 39 competitors, running the full range of old* and new, old* and young, local and international, there was a bit of everything!

*'Old' the first time there means people who've been playing for fifty years, 'old' the second time just means generally geriatric like me. There were beginners and very young people there too, and whatever your level of experience and skill, you'd find another competitor around the same level! It really was a perfect lineup of participants.

I was basically terrible, but ended up with five wins out of eleven, which could have been worse. It's hard to find a way to pretend I achieved my "fifty percent success" target, but I wasn't far off! And it was nice to get away to the familiar surroundings of Trinity College and pretend I'm some kind of varsity type. I've been going to that tournament since I don't remember when. I was definitely there in 2003 (it snowed), but I'd possibly been there at least once before. I'd look it up, but I'm too lazy. I'll research it before I have to tell someone I've forgotten, because that's always embarrassing for a memory master like me...

Heavens to Murgatroyd

 This is a real case of "Why did nobody tell me about this before?" I mean, if there's something everyone should know I would love, it's got to be a gritty period-drama comic about the effects of Communist witch hunts on the 1950s American theatre, starring Snagglepuss as the central character! And yet "Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles" six-issue limited series came out in 2018, and it took until last week for an acquaintance to mention it in passing to me!

I clearly need to spend even more time reading comic review websites...

Between the Lions

 There are two things I want to write about, and each of them features a lion as the central character. So stay tuned tomorrow for the more mountainous type, but today let's talk about what I did yesterday! I went to "Gottle o' Geer", a ventriloquists' convention in London, and I really loved it! The guest list really was the creme de la creme of ventriloquy and related fields...

Lenny the Lion, who's been living in happy retirement since Terry Hall died, was very much the guest of honour in his first public appearance for many years, but there were puppets and people old and new all over the place, lovely memories of the greats of ventriloquist history - it was a day of quite wonderful entertainment from start to finish!

And it really gets me fired up to try to come up with a real act for myself. Pretty much everyone there was a serious performer, and I do like occasionally being in a crowd where I can explain that I'm a Memory Man, and mention a few of the shows I've been on without seeming big-headed. And it gave me a lot of prompts for how the world of entertainment works and made me think of what I could do in it. So now I'm making plans. They may involve throwing my voice, if I learn how to do that. Or magic. I do have a rabbit puppet still living with me, and I do own a hat, and several packs of cards. If you need more than that to be a magician, then I don't know what it is.

A Challenge to my sensibilities

If there's one thing this blog emphatically isn't about, it's linking to other, better blogs and telling my readers to go there and read the interesting things they've said. Which is why I do that exact thing only every once in a while and only when I really want to and can't resist the urge. And now Dirty Feed, which I only just linked to in my blog a month ago, has posted a list of blog-related questions that I really wanted to answer too, and it just feels like I'm devoting my entire bloggery to leeching off the popularity of someone else if I do another post about this other blog. But I'm going to do it anyway, so never mind.

Actually, my first thought on seeing that post on that blog was "Ooh, if I'm lucky, Christopher Wickham - a regular reader of Dirty Feed with his own really cool blog which I haven't previously linked to - will take those questions and answer them, so I can link to him and redress the universal balance." But he hasn't yet, so I can only recommend that you all go there and read his extremely cool posts about old British comics in particular!

So I'm just going to answer these questions now. Because they get into my whole unique philosophy about blogging, and provide fascinating insight into the Mind of Zoomy...

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Someone told me that blogs are a thing now, so I created one. Then a bit later, I decided to start having a blog that I updated on a daily basis, all about my life and anything I found interesting. And it was fun and (with hindsight) a very useful tool for reminding me what I was doing nearly twenty years ago!

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I'm "managing my blog" using Blogger. Which I found back in 2004 by being top of a google search, even though Google probably didn't own them yet. And I've used it ever since, in the most basic format. And it works just fine! This is the thing - there are other platforms that let you do more fancy things, and for that matter Blogger lets you do more fancy things with your blog, but I've always wanted this to be the most stripped-to-the-basics kind of blog it's possible to have - default formats and everything. I always think that if you focus on style over substance, it's a terrible way to go. Yes, even if there's nothing in your blog that could possibly be described as "substance".

Although I did change the template after a few years to one that has 'next post' and 'previous post' buttons, which are quite handy for people reading through it. But it's another firm principle of mine that I never use tags to categorise my posts by subject! I've always felt that the ideal reader of this blog is someone who reads the whole thing, whatever I'm choosing to ramble about today!

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Just click the "Compose" button on Blogger, and a box pops up to write in. If you're feeling fancy, and want to add links or something, you can click the 'HTML' button and add commands in little pointy brackets < >, and I sometimes feel the urge to do something clever with that, like the footnotes in this one, but mostly I don't. You can add pictures to your post really easily here, and really, Blogger has everything you could wish for.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

There's no regular routine or pattern here. Sometimes I'm in the mood to write something epic, sometimes I'm not. It's invariably a spur-of-the-moment thing, even if it's a post about comics that takes a huge amount of research and scanning or finding pictures to illustrate it.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Immediately after writing, with almost no exceptions. I've got one half-written draft that's been sitting in my folder for years (about Marvel comics of summer 1963) that I might finish one day, but otherwise it's publish straight away without a thought for the possible consequences!

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Now that's the thing. In the early days, I remember saying most of my posts would revolve around memory, othello, comics and cartoons, and I think the blog has mostly stuck to that kind of thing over the years, along with occasional vague references to things I'm doing in normal life. Excel competitions have become a regular subject in recent times, and another category that shows up a fair bit is Victorian novels, but the original guiding thought here was that it should always be a mixture of everything I find interesting, rather than have a central 'theme' to the things I blog about.

Who are you writing for?

Now, this is a good question. Ideally, I'm writing for friends who are interested in maybe one or even none of the subjects I write about, but read my blog anyway out of politeness, and find something else they can be interested in too! When someone says to me something like "I even liked that thing you wrote about comics the other day, even though I'm not into that stuff", I feel like my work here is done. That's a genuine quote, and it was about my Skull the Slayer post, which is a great example of my unnecessarily-exhaustive chronicling of an obscure piece of comics history, so it's delightful to find someone reading it and liking what they read!

I mean, at heart, I'm basically writing for my own amusement, but it really is the icing on the cake when I find that someone else out there actually likes to read it!

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

The ones I particularly like are probably that kind of comic post referenced there, especially if I dig up some historical context or supporting material that probably nobody's documented in exactly that way before. This post about Shermy is a great example that I'm proud of, combining the newspaper comics, cartoons and extra features like the TV Guide and Mad Magazine that featured our hero. Or the complete history of Manikin, a superhero nobody in the world is interested in except maybe a few wonderful weirdos. I think it's a fine example of almost-complete documenting of Whit's life - I'm still torn about whether I should have included a reference to the Marvel Age that mentions him, and maybe one day I'll go back and add it in, but that's another story. I also really love when I get into detailing my thought processes during memory competitions, because they're fun to look back on in the future, and I think a lot of people like to read them. But perhaps my favourite posts of all are when I've chronicled something that isn't widely known, and other people have found it and been delighted with it! The best of these is when I listed Kid Jensen's Favourite Chart Breakers - the comments section of that, with more and more people coming across it years and years after I wrote it and rediscovering a piece of their childhood, is a delight to experience! 

I'm also very fond of my family tree research - the last one of those three links is the kind of fun detail you can pick up when you're digging into things, and quite apart from the way this kind of post has connected me with family members I never knew existed, it's provided entertaining things like my great-grandparents' wedding certificate, which provokes a whole lot of discussion! And even when my obsessive tendencies extend to transcribing an entire 25-minute cartoon and highlighting the bits that were cut out of it to trim it for time, I feel a great sense of accomplishment on producing something I can share with equally interested readers! Really, I could go on and on for pages about favourite posts on my blog - it's very much a way to express myself about whatever subject is on my mind. For one final fave, I'll just share this message of affection to my brother, hidden in a post about a very relevant episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Never! My future plans for the blog are to keep doing things exactly the same way I've always done! Consistency is victory, as Ultra Magnus tells us!

Next?

This is where you "tag" other people, apparently, and get them to do these questions. That's a bit "professional blogger community" for me, but if you'd like to answer these questions, I'd be fascinated to see what you have to say!

I'm a hardcore gamer

 Or at least, I'm a fan of trivia about ancient arcade games. I'm rubbish at actually playing Donkey Kong, which they didn't have in any arcades I knew growing up (well, they did have it in the cafe on Skegness train station for a while, but I never really played it there), but I do know in mind-numbing detail the reason why level 22 is a kill screen...

Or is it? Because the awesome "Kosmic" has just posted a super cool video about how it's at least theoretically possible to beat the first level 22 screen even despite the timer bug only giving you a couple of seconds, which is exactly the kind of fascinating detail I always love to hear!

I really can't get enough of this kind of video. Ultimately, I'm just a huge nerd. But I hope at least some of my readers share my fascination!

Remembering People's Names

 I was reminded of this classic comic today, couldn't remember whether I'd ever mentioned it on my blog, and after a quick search concluded that I haven't. So here you go - click on it to be taken to The Jenkins, full of entertainment like this.

And really, if that isn't written about me, then there's two of us out there. But if it IS written about me, it should really be a playing card deck from 2011. That's when we made the DJ Shadow video, and so is the card sequence I'm most likely to tell anonymous strangers about. Just don't expect me to remember your name, that's all.

The Old Masters

 The road to the Microsoft Excel World Championship 2025 kicked off last Thursday, with the first of nine monthly competitions. It's fair to say I didn't set the world on fire with my performance, but it really was the kind of puzzle I struggle with more than most, so I'm still hopeful of getting a better result than 93rd place in future months...

And qualifying might be easier this year than previously - this time round, since so many more people are trying to qualify for the main event, it's been expanded from 128 to 256 people in the finals of the World Championship! And ninety of these come from the monthly events - each month, the top performer of the four live-streamed competitors, the top seven of the non-streamed players, the top under-25 and the top 'Master' qualify. Top of the ones who haven't qualified in a previous month, that is, so I'm hopeful that by the time we get to September, if I have a good day, I might scrape in and not have to go through the big open qualification round to fill the remaining spots.

But let's talk about that 'Masters' category. That's the tactful way to describe competitors aged 50 and over. People who are too old to know about computers and so need a little extra support. Poor things. Now, as I've said many times before with reference to memory competitions, I don't like to see special age categories, or any other kind of categories, in mental sports. The whole appeal of these things is that everyone can compete in them on equal terms, be they an old fogey of fifty or an annoyingly precocious two-year-old!

But I don't say that too forcefully, since it just makes me sound resentful about being in the default category that's assumed to be best at these things. And the thing about the "over 50" category in the Excel championship is that they go by year of birth. So anyone born in 1975 is a 'Master' and has a slightly better chance of securing qualification to the main draw.

I was born in 1976. If they keep these rules for next year's competition... I'll be officially an old man. A doddering old fool who remembers the days before Excel. And needs to be given a little extra advantage to compensate for it. I'm not sure I approve of this, but I'll take it, gladly! Thank you very much!

And in all fairness, I didn't use Excel until 1996. And the version of Excel that existed in those days was pretty hopeless. And the people in our office didn't even have a computer each! Most of the accounts work was quite genuinely done with pencil and paper! Tell that to young people today and they won't believe you. AND we had to pay t'mill owner to let us work there!

On a related note, this is actually one of the reasons why I always like to read Tom Brevoort's blog every weekend. He writes quite brilliant analysis of old comics, but I always feel like I'm slightly too young to be part of that crowd. The blog is definitely written to appeal to people who were teenagers in the seventies, and Tom and most of the blog's regular commentators fit into that age group. I'm like a younger kid trying to hang out with the cooler big boys if I join in with the discussion there. And believe me, when you're a year away from being an antiquated 'Master' in Excel Esports world, that's actually a very nice thing to feel!

Asking the important questions

An all-new podcast is available on the world wide web! Remember the interview I did a couple of years ago for "The Human Podcast"? Here's an all-new video of me answering ten quick-fire questions all about the world of memory techniques and competitions! Ideal for people who know nothing at all about the subject but want a gentle introduction, or for people who already know all about it and like to hear me talking! Check it out now!

Freezing rain

 It's snowing as I write this¹ and I'm not a fan of snow, as I've mentioned many times before. Increases the likelihood of me falling down and severely injuring myself. I'm an old man, you see. But tomorrow the weather forecast says it's going to get a lot warmer and just pour down with rain all day, and then be cold again the day after. "I wish it would make up its mind," as old people like to say. Personally, I just wish it'd be summer. But the BBC weather for today also says there's a chance of freezing rain, so I can't stay mad at the weather or the BBC for too long, since it reminds me of a truly wonderful comic...

If you haven't read Phoebe and her Unicorn - The Magic Storm, by Dana Simpson, then please go out and buy it now. It's really brilliant in so many ways, I can't recommend it highly enough! Or just borrow my copy. It's a definitive text for Phoebe's second-best friend Max, another cartoon hero of mine.

Now, will someone do something magical with the weather, and make it summer again?

¹ It's Saturday night as I write this. I'm trying to write a blog a day, in advance, and post them in the early morning. But the one I posted this morning seems to show as being posted the previous evening, so the whole system has already broken down. I think I'll just go back to posting things whenever I feel like writing something...

Let's get memorising!

The Memory League World Championship is kicking off once more! I'm not in it, on account of not being good enough, but it's still very worth watching! And the matches are streamed live on Memory Sports TV, so tune in and watch over the next month! It really is fun and exciting, even if you know little or nothing about memory sports! (See, this is the exact opposite of my post two days ago - this is getting the comic fans who read this blog to start liking memory competitions!)

I really like the double elimination format. It really adds to everyone's enjoyment of the event! And makes it all look more complicated and clever, which can only be a good thing.

Am I ever going to scale the lofty heights of the ranking list, and qualify for future world championships here? Probably not, but I'm going to start by getting back in practice at the whole Memory League thing, and then just maybe work on improving my scores in the Images and Words disciplines - because you can't really get by in competitions here just by being pretty good at Cards and Numbers, even if my scores in those still count as 'pretty good'. I could probably improve my performance all round with a little more dedication, so maybe I'll give it a try...

A Methuselah of a blog

I've been blogging here for a long time now. In fact, it's been more than twenty years, if you count the couple of silly things I posted in October 2004 when I first heard about the concept of "blogs" and created one. And in July of this year, we'll reach the twentieth anniversary of when I actually started posting things here!

I only think of this now, because one of my favourite blogs to read on the internet, Dirty Feed, is celebrating its comparatively measly fifteen years of existence - a mere Jared of a blog compared to mine, and the name sounds a bit, well, dirty, but you should really check it out anyway! It's mostly about the production of TV comedy, and there are so many wonderful and fascinating pieces of writing there, you can get lost in it for days! I don't think you can say that about my twenty years of rambling on whatever subject comes to mind.

But perhaps I should follow that example and list the most popular things I've written here? Or maybe just one of them - because by far and away the most read article here on Zoomy's Thing is the Krypton Force videos! It's been so consistently popular over the years, attracting actual human people who've contacted me about it and not just robots, that I'm rather impressed. I think it's played a big part in increasing awareness of those British bootlegs of American bowdlerisations of Japanese cartoons, which can only be a good thing!

So here's to another twenty years, if I and Blogspot both live that long!

No Place To Run

 I should write more about old comics I like but that my readers might not have heard of. It's all part of my plan to get people who read my blog hoping I'll share some kind of memory secret reading comics and watching cartoons too. I won't rest until everyone reading this blog is fully conversant in all my weird hobbies and interests!

So I was just re-reading Marvel Team Up Annual #7, from the summer of 1984. It's an extra-long story in which Spider-Man teams up with five members of Alpha Flight to try to escape the clutches of The Collector. It's great. But tucked away in the back pages, there's a little five-page backup strip, and I'd forgotten just how cool it is!

"No Place To Run", written by Bob de Natale (who wrote a handful of backups and fillers for Marvel around this time; this one was his first) and drawn by David Mazzucchelli (who was drawing Daredevil at the time, and was probably used to having his name spelt wrongly, like in the credits box here) is a story about the ordinary people who live in the mad world of the Marvel Universe.

It's a long-established law of superhero comics that the presence of people with godlike powers waging constant war with each other somehow doesn't prevent the normal human world from existing. Readers just have to ignore the logical inconsistency. But around this time, people started to write about what it's like to be a normal human in this crazy universe. It was a central theme of the definitive text Watchmen in 1986, and reached its pinnacle with Astro City in the nineties - but this five-pager filling up the space at the end of a Marvel annual predates those, and captures the feel perfectly!

There's an ad for war games between pages 1 and 2, and an ad for comic subscriptions between 2 and 3. The reader isn't really encouraged to stick with this story. But please do read it here, and enjoy!

Playing the Aasvogel

 I thought I'd quote Adrian Mole as the title of a blog post, to create a sort of theme of new year's resolutions. I remembered a funny section of his diary in which he resolved to "learn a new word and use it every day", which was followed by something like:

January 2nd - I'd like to go to Africa to hunt an aardvark.

January 3rd - And then I'd go south and hunt an aardwolf.

January 4th - How interesting that aasvogel should be a kind of musical instrument.

After which he gives up. So I looked up the passage, which I haven't read for twenty or thirty years, and found that it goes:

Saturday January 2nd 

How interesting it is that Aabec should be an Australian bark used for making sweat. 

Sunday January 3rd 

I wouldn’t mind going to Africa and hunting an Aardvark. 

Monday January 4th 

Whilst in Africa I would go south and look out for an Aardwolf. 

Tuesday January 5th 

And I would avoid tangling with an Aasvogel

What? It STARTS with "How interesting..."?! I always remembered that the whole joke was that on the third day he gave up trying to work the new word into any kind of sentence and just wrote the dictionary definition! And it isn't! There's not a proper punchline to the series of diary entries at all, it just stops!

My version is funnier. I think we need to rewrite The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ to make it right, and give me credit as the co-author. It would be only fair. People used to jeer at me for looking like Adrian Mole, as I've probably mentioned several times before. Although I'll probably never write anything funnier than the entry for January 7th:

Thursday January 7th

Nigel came round to look at my racing bike. He said that it was mass produced, unlike his bike that was ‘made by a craftsman in Nottingham’. I have gone off Nigel, and I have also gone off my bike a bit.

And yes, I do know that "Vogel" means bird, and that "Aasvogel" is unlikely to be a musical instrument if you think about it. But I never have thought about it, and just kept my mistaken memory in my mind all these years. In my defence, though, I probably read the book for the first time before learning German, so it's understandable that I never made the mental connection. Luckily, we have the internet now, and I have just today, for the first time in my entire life, looked up the word "Aasvogel" to find out what it means. An archaic South African word for vulture, apparently. So now you know.

I was going to half-heartedly suggest resolving to write a new and interesting blog post every day in 2025, but now that I've actually learned something this morning, improved my general knowledge when it's not even half past nine yet, I feel very accomplished already. I don't need any resolutions. I can just go back to bed.