Signed and delivered

Today's randomly-chosen comic from my collection is number 1010 - Hellions #3, from 2005! Let's see what the next next next generation of mutant superheroes was up to, at that moment!

 A brief history of the X-Men comics is necessary at this point. The X-Men first appeared in 1963 - a comic about a team of teenage mutants at Professor X's school. It was a little bit lost among the many other superhero comics Marvel launched at that time, revolutionising the whole concept of superhero comics and remaining popular to this day, fifty-plus years later. The comic was cancelled in 1970.

It was relaunched in 1975, with a mostly all-new team, adults now (the originals had grown up in a slightly ambiguous way, but weren't teenagers any more at any rate), and became very, very, very popular. The coolest comic in the world, in fact, and so ripe for spin-offs, although at first Marvel were concerned about diluting the concept, and so kept these to a minimum.

The one they did allow, in fact, was New Mutants - a 1982 comic about a small number of teenage heroes who became the adult X-Men's students, and had adventures befitting the next generation of superheroes. There was a rival school of teenage mutants, more evil, called the Hellions and run by Emma Frost, the White Queen. The New Mutants carried on for a while, eventually embracing the gritty, tough, cool trends of the early nineties, changing their name to X-Force, carrying great big guns around and so forth.

In 1993, Marvel launched a new series with a whole new bunch of teenage mutants. This one was called Generation X, and they were, I suppose, the next next generation of mutant superheroes. They had a school too, separate but allied to the X-Men, and one of their teachers was Emma Frost, now on the X-Men's side but still basically the same evil person she's always been. They were cool, for a little while. The 'Generation X' thing got old quite fast, though...

In 2000 came the X-Men movie, which decided to go with the Hogwarts approach and depict the X-Men as having a school catering to hundreds of teenage mutants with cool superpowers (if anyone's wondering who copied whom, the movie came before the Harry Potter movies, but after the first few Harry Potter books), and before long the comics followed the movie's lead, and the X-Men now had a school full of the next next next generation of mutants!

After just being in the background of the grown-up X-Men's comics for a while, the students got their own comic, confusingly called New Mutants (although nobody referred to the characters by that name) in 2003. It focused on a small group of friends at the school, and was very slice-of-life rather than superhero-action - they went to classes, had dates, had arguments, had love triangles, and so forth. Then in 2004 the whole thing was shaken up a bit, the comic was renamed New X-Men: Academy X (in the hope that having "X-Men" on the cover would sell more copies), and the stories got a lot more superheroey - the students were split into squads of six, each under the supervision of one of the older X-Men, and they used their powers a lot more, in cool tests and training challenges. The comic focused on the six heroes, a squad called the New Mutants (that's right, as soon as the title stops being "New Mutants", the characters in it start being called "New Mutants") supervised by one of the original New Mutants, Moonstar; with their antagonists being the Hellions, supervised by Emma Frost.

That brings us up to 2005, when the Hellions were given their own four-issue limited series, and it just shows the problem with 'next generation of superheroes' comics - the previous generations aren't going anywhere! The original X-Men are still around, as young and active as they've always been! The New Mutants are still there, in a sort of uncomfortable no-man's-land of not being quite as grown-up as the X-Men but still being sort of more grown up than they used to be. Generation X are shunted off into limbo, because nobody knows what to do with them. How can we thrill to the adventures of this latest generation, knowing that we can't really see them grow and develop into adult superheroes in their own right, because of the classic superhero-aging problem? (And guess what, it's now 2016, and of course there's a next next next next generation of mutant superheroes out there now...)


So let's turn our attention to the Hellions. This comic has a helpful first page, telling us who the characters are and summarising the story so far - the kind of thing that was badly needed but missing from a lot of comics in this era of paperback-size stories chopped into six issues, but isn't at all necessary for this one, which follows the traditional superhero comic style; the characters mention in dialogue who they are and what's happened until now, they have a self-contained adventure in each issue, building up on sub-plots along the way, and ending with a nice cliffhanger leading into the next. Still, for the purposes of this review, the first page is very helpful:

 (It does seem to promise us Doctor Octopus, who doesn't appear in this comic at all, though...)

The first page doesn't have the creator credits, which come a bit later on - it's written by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir (a husband-and-wife partnership), pencilled by Clayton Henry and inked by Mark Morales with (in smaller font) Jay Leisten and Rick Ketcham. When you see a penciller and three inkers, it usually means the artwork is a panic-to-hit-the-deadline kind of job, but this one actually looks very nice, all the way through! A lot of panels don't have backgrounds, but the characters all look good, detailed and consistently the same, the poses are a little bit stagey but quite acceptable, and the whole story flows very nicely. I like it a lot.

Colours are (particularly well done) by Wil Quintana, letters by Dave Sharpe, and the editorial board consists of assistant editor Sean Ryan, associate editor Nick Lowe, editor Mike Marts, editor in chief Joe Quesada and publisher Dan Buckley.

The Hellions, it turns out, work perfectly well as protagonists of their own series! They're not just a stereotypical group of bullies at all, even in the parent comic - Brian is a nice guy who just happens to be Julian's best friend; Sooraya is perfectly okay, just a bit unsociable and stand-offish; Kevin is the tortured loner who longs to touch other human beings but never can. This series lets us get to know them a little better, and it's very very well done, too.

We open in the research facilities of Genetassist, in the California Desert. Paladin and Diamondback, two long-established minor Marvel characters who work as mercenaries, generally on the side of good, are at work here, stealing "the sample" and deleting all the data on it from the computer files, while fighting off other people who are after it too. All the major players will be out to get it, Diamondback observes, so they'd better hurry.

Suddenly, the case is snatched - Cessily has slithered her way through the laser beams, as shown on the cover, and nabbed it! The mercenaries are confronted by the full lineup of Hellions - "Didn't anyone teach you that stealing is wrong?" Julian quips.

Then we flash back to two hours previously, with the team discussing the cool things the Kingmaker has done. Cessily is selfishly upset that Kevin can touch anyone now - she fancies him, so it was really quite good when she was the only one he could touch. She and Julian (the most self-centred and unpleasant pair on the team) have a really nice brief heart-to-heart about it, before the Kingmaker calls them in to the meeting room and tells them it's time to sign their contracts. They've had their wishes, now he takes Kevin's cure back, won't bring Sooraya's mother to America and so forth, until they agree to do a favour for him. Reasonably, he even agrees to tell them what this favour will be.

The relationship with the Kingmaker is nicely done, too - even Julian, who's always so cocky and confident around his fellow schoolchildren, looks a lot more nervous and teenagery in the company of a big, assured adult. He shows them Genetassist, explains that they've just completed a major project, and that the Hellions' job is to "stop it being stolen, and bring it to me." He explains that Paladin and Diamondback, among others, are after it. Most of the squad are happy to sign contracts straight away, Cessily needs a little more persuading, but eventually signs.

Back to the present moment, it's time for the big fight. And it's a good one, too - Paladin and Diamondback are outnumbered and don't have any particularly cool powers (they're normal humans with fancy but low-level technology), but they have the advantage of long experience in the superhero game. They both take the attitude that the kids are the ones who are outclassed, and it shows in the first part of the fight.

Brian takes the simple approach and "tags" the briefcase, making the mercenaries run away, but as soon as Diamondback gets out of range, she spins and throws one of her diamonds at his head, knocking him out and cancelling his powers. While Kevin laments that he's useless in this situation (his powers are still turned off by his last dose of the cure, even if he could find a way to use them in the fight), Santo and Cessily go on the attack but are taken down by the pros. Sooraya follows, but not before the mercs have pointed out that the Hellions are stealing a weapon, not doing whatever they think they're doing. Julian's more of a problem - his telekinesis stops him being harmed, and he can just smash Paladin and Diamondback into the walls by exerting his will (he'd probably have done that right at the start, but he was busy getting the unconscious Brian out of the way in case he got hurt). Unimpressed with Diamondback's insistence that she's one of the good guys,  he shuts her up.

The squad fly away with the case (Julian can fly, and he telekinetically carries the others behind him). The others are uncertain whether they're doing the right thing, and Julian rattles off a succession of valid explanations in a single speech bubble (I love this speech - he's uncertain too, so he's babbling, but the things he says do all make some kind of sense) "Even if they were with SHIELD, where were the agents? Why mercs? They were stealing it, too! You really trust the government any more than the Kingmaker? We made a deal, guys. Signed and delivered."

Back at the Kingmaker's base, Kevin's still not happy and doesn't want to hand over the case. Julian does, Brian agrees with him, but Santo steps in and insists he wants to know what's inside too. So does Cessily, and she can easily use her powers to pick the lock. Sooraya, characteristically, stands back and doesn't get involved. But the case turns out to contain some kind of canister, and the Hellions are none the wiser, until the Kingmaker comes along and tells them it's a biological weapon that could kill millions of people. And yes, it doesn't belong to him, his client "didn't want to have to pay them for the weapon, and he didn't want the government to get it." He insists that the team hand it over, and Julian snatches the case back from Kevin, and does so. A deal's a deal. Cliffhanger ending!


It's a really fun story, I'm glad I got the nudge to go back and read it again. Marvel never did enough with these characters - poor Brian and Kevin have been killed off since this series (though that's not such a permanent problem with Marvel characters as it is with most people), the other four are sort of hanging around in the background among all the millions of other X-Men and not doing much. But they all really shone for a little while in 2005...


If you'd like to see another random comic, give me a number between 2 and 3333! Thanks!

You invited everyone

Mid-Life Krysis is a song by Travis, from their 2003 album "12 Memories", which was full of protest songs about the Iraq war that were very worthy and admirable but nowhere near as good as their previous albums of non-political but much more musically appealing songs. They were probably having a mid-life crisis at the time they wrote it. I was never sure why they spelt it 'krysis' instead of 'crisis', but now I realise that it was an impressively ahead-of-its-time reference to 'Krysis', the latest episode of Red Dwarf, in which Kryten celebrates his birthday and has a mid-life crisis.

It sort of made me wonder, what with it being my 40th birthday, whether I should have a mid-life crisis. It might be fun, but on the other hand, it just seems like too much effort. Besides, I'm not mid-life. Since I'm not planning on ever dying, it follows that I'll never reach the mid-point of my life either, so I'll just plod along as I have been doing until I get bored with it.

I really must unsubscribe from those recruitment agencies, though - look at this one I've just got: "There is a chance to manage a small but busy team also so if you have not managed people before, this is your opportunity to add this to your CV. This company offers flexible working hours so great for anyone who works hard but who wants to finish early on a Friday or to get to that gym class mid week. "

What kind of person do they think I am? Adding important management experience to my CV by day, dashing off to that gym class at night? If they send me an email about a job that will encourage me to watch Red Dwarf and eat cake, well, then I might just be interested.

I'm turning 40 tomorrow

Could someone do something about that, please? Because I'm sure there must be some mistake.

Northern exposure

Do I count as 'northern' any more? I'm something like twenty miles south of Birmingham nowadays. Well, I'm not southern, anyway.

I get regular spam emails from all the recruitment agencies I've ever registered with, informing me about all the thrilling accountancy jobs out there that would suit someone of my qualifications and experience. The funny thing about it is that all of them come with a paragraph from the agency saying that this job would be a great thing to add a specific kind of experience to my CV.

Add to my CV? I'm (very) nearly forty years old. Even when I was in my twenties, I never looked for a job that I could add to my CV and use as a stepping-stone to some mythical future better job, further down the line. Who does that? Who cares so much about their career development that they apply for a job with the intention of later applying for another job and boasting that they worked in the first job? This is probably why I'm not a financial director.

It's the same with my sort-of career as a memory man. Someone really did once offer me some kind of memory performance gig (I forget what it was) and tell me it would be "great exposure" for me. This is showbiz talk for "not going to pay you" and I was quite thrilled to get it - it means someone, somewhere, thinks my memory tricks are the kind of thing I expect to get paid for!

Is the world truly ending?

In the latest random-number selection from my comic collection, thanks to an unimaginative anonymouse who wanted to see what came first on my list, I give you 1602, part one, from November 2003.

 Written by the famous author Neil Gaiman, this was a high-prestige project for Marvel, part of their policy (new at the time) of moving away from just telling stories set in the boring old Marvel universe, and branching out into new interpretations of their characters. In 1996, they "killed off" all the cool characters and relaunched them as Heroes Reborn, telling the old stories but in cooler 1990s ways. It was rubbish, and abandoned after a year, but it paved the way for "Ultimate" versions of the heroes a couple of years later, this time running alongside the old-style comics. 1602, on the other hand, isn't an attempt to launch a new universe, it's basically just letting Neil Gaiman play with the characters by writing them in a story set in 1602.

Unlike the previous two comics I reviewed, this one came out when the internet was up and running, and so it got a lot of attention from fans, wondering what was going on - not helped by Marvel first claiming that the series would be connected in some way to the mainstream universe, and then backtracking and saying that no, it wouldn't, really, sort of. But no comic is improved by knowing what internet fans said about it, so let's just ignore that whole side of things. It was fun at the time, though!

Art is by the big-name comic artist Andy Kubert, and 'digitally painted' by Richard Isanove, although the cover is drawn by Scott McKowen. Todd Klein does the lettering, and this is probably the peak of Marvel's too-many-cooks editorial policy - Joe Quesada is editor, Nick Lowe is assistant editor, Nanci Dakesian is managing editor, Kelly Lamy is assistant managing editor, Joe Quesada (again) is editor in chief and Bill Jemas is president. It's a wonder there was room for any comic after all those credits.


There really isn't much story in this issue. Some sort of plot does develop in the course of the eight-issue series, but this opening one is really just about introducing the characters. None of it makes any sense to readers who aren't familiar with the classic Marvel superheroes (the cast is strictly limited to characters from the 1960s), and if you are, the appeal basically lies in saying 'oh, that's a clever take on what such-and-such-a-character's 1602 counterpart would be'. Over and over again. Despite this, though, the whole thing is a fun read, and I do recommend it!

The art is quite epic, very nicely coloured to suggest candlelight, sunrise, sunset, night and so on (not a single scene in this one takes place in broad daylight), although some of the character posing is stiff and unnatural, and the facial expressions are a bit strange - people always seem to have their eyes half closed.


We open our story in Hampton Court, England, in 1602. Continuing straight on from the cover, we see that our cloaked figure is Doctor Stephen Strange (as in, Dr Strange, master of the mystic arts). He wears an Elizabethan ruff and a beard, rather than his classic moustache, and enters a room to meet Queen Elizabeth herself, and Sir Nicholas Fury (Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD). He's got a beard too, of course, as well as his traditional eyepatch. Elizabeth has her face plastered in white makeup, and coughs into a bloodstained handkerchief throughout the conversation, in a historically-accurate way.

She introduces the two men to each other, and they discuss whether the recent earthquakes, red skies and so on are signs of the apocalypse. Dr Strange isn't prepared to go that far ("No man shall know the day or the hour, eh?") but explains that he needs Sir Nicholas's help to convey something powerful from the Holy Land to England. He agrees, and the two of them go their separate ways.

Meanwhile, in Domdaniel, Spain, a young man with wings is chained up in the Inquisition's dungeon. His name doesn't seem to be mentioned in this comic, but it's clearly the Angel, of the X-Men. He laments his fate.

In Westminster, young Peter Parquagh (guess who?) studies a spider while a blind Irish singer called Matthew (that'll be Daredevil) entertains the customers of a tavern with the ballad of the Four from the Fantastick. Peter works for Sir Nicholas, while Matthew secretly has acrobatic powers, can see in the dark, and works as Sir Nicholas's informant, agreeing to help bring the mysterious treasure safely to England.

Dr Strange, meanwhile, goes back to his house in the village of Greenwich (see what we did there? He lives in Greenwich Village, New York, in the classic comics) where his beloved Clea speculates with him about the possibility of James of Scotland becoming King of England when Elizabeth dies, and then helps him gaze into a magic mirror to see visions of what is to come. It's not very enlightening - a red-garbed nun in the court of the Inquisition perceives his astral form and dismisses him.

She's Sister Wanda (the Scarlet Witch), and she and Petros (Quicksilver) serve the Inquisitor (who doesn't look anything like Magneto, but doesn't really need to, because who else could it be?) and discuss their planned alliance with King James to make common cause against the witchbreed (as in, mutants like the X-Men and themselves). It's all part of a typical plan to rise to power, convincing the English that the witchbreed plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The Inquisitor's enemy, Javier, will be powerless to stop him!

On board the Virginia Maid, in the middle of the Atlantic, is a young girl accompanied by a monosyllabic blond-haired native American called Rojhaz (Captain America), and she's worried what might happen if she 'changes' again... She's not actually a Marvel character, and caused much confusion among readers at the time. She's a real-life person, Virginia Dare, who's the subject of a legend that Neil Gaiman thought was common knowledge and was rather surprised to find out that nobody else had heard of it.

Sir Nicholas and Peter discuss the Templar treasure and fight off an assassin, while Matthew goes to his friend Captain Nelson's ship (hey, look, it's Daredevil's fat friend Foggy Nelson!) before dawn breaks in Spain and it's time to burn the Angel at the stake. But he's saved by two more witchbreed heroes!

 They identify themselves as Scotius Summerisle (Scott Summers, Cyclops) and Robert Trefusis (Bobby Drake, Iceman - and why he doesn't get to keep the surname Drake, which was a famous name in 1602 England, I don't know). Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth has a dream of the Old Man (the Ancient One, Dr Strange's mentor) beginning on his journey from Jerusalem with the artifact. Then the witchbreed go back to their ship and introduce the Angel to John Grey (as in Jean Grey, Marvel Girl, doing the classic Shakespearean thing and disguising herself as a boy), before setting sail to their schoolhouse. And that's the rather anticlimactic end.

Like I say, it's a fun enough story, but the appeal is pretty much entirely in the novelty value of seeing the classic Marvel characters in new forms. The rest of the series is more entertaining in its own right, so I'd recommend that you check out the collected edition!


Despite being part of the Marvel Knights 'hardcore comics' kind of imprint, and having "Marvel PSR" (which probably stood for parental supervision recommended, although Marvel had only just introduced these ratings at the time and didn't go out of their way to tell anyone what they meant) on the cover, the moody Elizabethan artwork of this one is interspersed with a full complement of 'teen' adverts. Most notably, we get the high-point of the Lorillard Tobacco Company's legally-mandated youth smoking prevention policy, which consisted of running ads in comics using the slogan "Tobacco is whacko! (if you're a teen)"

Once you turn twenty, of course, tobacco is great. But it's kind of hard to see how this particularly strange picture is trying to convey the idea that smoking is a bad thing, isn't it? Especially if you read British comics of the 1950s and are used to 'whacko' meaning 'really jolly good'. Perhaps it's just meant to give teens nightmares about cigarettes with scary faces on them.


If you'd like to see another random comic review, give me a number between 3 and 3333, and I'll pull the appropriate comic from the pile!

I want Chromobots in my Beano!

A great benefit of the Beano's new policy of crediting its writers and artists is the unexpected pleasure of seeing that this week's fill-in artist for the Bash Street Kids is Mychailo Kazybrid!

... You know, Mike Kazybrid! The one who drew back-up strips for the Transformers comics for a little while in the mid-1980s! Well, maybe you have to be my generation to get it, but if you were eight years old when the Transformers first came along, you'll have been as enraptured as me with the two-page black-and-white filler strip "Chromobots" with its thrilling robot adventures, every fortnight until the comic went weekly and changed its format in 1985. It was great, it really was. He also drew the longer-running half-page comedy strip Matt and the Cat, but I never liked that one. Still, it's great to see him still around - or if not him (because you can't really tell from the Bash Street Kids art if it's the same person, since he has to copy the David Sutherland style, and someone else wrote the script so you can't see if it's got his old style of writing to it either) then somebody else with the same unusual name. And there can't be all that many artists called Mychailo Kazybrid, so let's assume it is. I'd love to see more Chromobots!

I made this!

I was joint runner-up employee of the month in September, you know. That's quite impressive for someone who does so very little work, and so ineptly, as I do. But that means I got £50 worth of Compliments Vouchers to spend in a wide range of high street stores, so I took them into Argos and bought a little desk and chair, and an oscillating fan heater that'll probably come in handy in my new flat when it really gets cold.

The desk, though, will definitely come in handy right now, because being without one has been a minor inconvenience ever since I moved in! So I spent this evening with screwdriver in hand (did you know I've got a screwdriver? I didn't think I had, but one turned up when I was rummaging through my box of miscellaneous rubbish looking for the electric screwdriver I thought I did own but which seems to have disappeared entirely) putting together big heavy pieces of wood and only occasionally saying things like "There's no holes where it says there are holes! Wait, it's upside-down. No, there's still no holes... oh, wait, there are holes but they're tiny little pinpricks, how am I supposed to get a screw into those?" and "Two people are needed here? You can't get to step 6 of the instructions before you tell me two people are needed! I'm six-seventeenths of the way through putting it together and I'm on my own! Actually, though, I don't need two people at all, I'll just prop it up like this..." and so on. And it looks really nice! The top's a bit loose, and has a hole in it that's not meant to be there, but it's out at the side so it won't get in the way. Now I've got a thing I can sit at and draw pictures or write things or memorise things in a non-computery way! Or even in a computery way when it comes to filming my qualifying sessions for next year's XMT (or whatever it gets called; the name's changing). I feel quite accomplished now.

On further reflection

This week's episode of Red Dwarf, "Give and Take", actually made me laugh out loud, which is something Red Dwarf hasn't done for years! I approve, and officially recant my 'not as funny as it used to be' complaints. Well, like 90% of them, since it's still not actually as funny as the funniest episodes of the early series, but the point is that now I feel bad about saying it's not.

The greater concern is with the "I don't watch live TV any more" thing, since I'm actually watching it on UKTVWatch, or whatever it's called, the week before it's on live TV. That means I'm watching it even more up-to-dately than I would be if I had a telly, and might be seen as violating this recently-acquired but deeply-held principle. But since the TV Licensing people have written me a nasty letter, I've changed my principle to "just not watching anything that would require a TV licence for me to watch". That'll teach them.

Eighteen googly years

The google doodle for today says it's their 18th birthday (though when I do a google search for google, it tells me they were founded on September 4th). Remember the days when you couldn't just type anything into google and see what the internet says about it? There were search engines with names like WebCrawler, but they were rubbish. The world was very different before 1998.

On mature reflection

You know, I think I was unduly harsh on Red Dwarf the other night. Watching it again, Samsara has some great moments. It's probably the best new episode we've had for a long time!

Genome

There's a cool thing that I just discovered last night - The BBC Genome Project, with all the Radio Times listings of BBC radio and television programmes from 1923 onwards! It's really cool, even if it is scanned in with text-recognition software that doesn't always get it right. So, after staying up all night researching and cataloguing all the BBC broadcasts of Thundercats cartoons and cross-referencing it with my own taped-from-the-TV video collection (because, I'm sorry, there are some things that are vastly, top-priority important and you really have to be me to understand it), today I had the idea of seeing how many times the name Pridmore shows up in the history of the BBC. Turns out it's seven.

Really? Seven? From 1923 to 2009, people with my surname can only muster seven mentions in the Radio Times? I know we're not exactly a foremost-in-the-land kind of family, but that's a bit bad, isn't it? One of them's me, from that "Make Me Smart" thing, the others are a fascinating mixed bunch...

Saturday 20 May 1933, 9:15pm, BBC Regional Programme - "The Bottle Imp". A radio adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's story, with the list of characters including "Pridmore, a young American in Honolulu". This is a bit strange, really, since there isn't a character called Pridmore in the original story. From his position in the 'in order of appearance' list, I assume Pridmore is the originally-unnamed idiot who bought the cursed bottle for two cents (it grants you great powers, but if you die owning it you're damned to Hell for eternity, and it can only be sold at a loss). What made James MacGregor, the radio adaptor, call him Pridmore? Maybe he had an enemy of that name.

Friday 14 June 1940, 8:00pm, For the Forces - "Thirsty Work". An evening of country singing recorded by the BBC Mobile Recording Unit. Singers: Bill Pridmore , Peter Wilson , Thomas Hendrie , Luke Webster , Bill Prodger , Frank Smart and other regulars of The Exeter's Arms, Wakerley, Northamptonshire. Hmm, Uncle Bill would have been 17 then, and in Sheffield, so it's probably not him. June 14th is my brother's birthday, too.

Sunday 15 March 1964, 6:15pm, BBC TV - "Meeting Point". "This is My Story - Faith on the River Kwai". How important is faith in conditions where all else which usually makes life acceptable— comfort, security, even human dignity-have gone? Neil Matheson, Leonard Morrison, Robert Pridmore who in the Second World War worked as prisoners on the ' railway of death' —the Burma-Siam railway-give their own answers in the light of their experiences, in a conversation with William Purcell. I don't know of any relatives on the Pridmore side of the family who were in Burma during the war. I assume Robert's answer was along the lines of "very important", because it was that kind of TV programme.

Friday 20 January 1967, 2:40pm, BBC Home Service - "Brave and Bold", a radio poetry programme with, down at the bottom of the listing, "also poems by Jane Pridmore, Zoe Bailey and Hal Summers". I've come across the name Jane Pridmore in books of poems before, but I don't know anything about her beyond that.

Thursday 20 August 1988, 11:30pm, BBC Radio 4 - "Fresh Air Media", A four-part series of feature-making by non-professional broadcasters. 3: Voices Four pieces with a common interest in the voice. Presenter Geoff Pridmore. Never heard of him.

Sunday 9 August 2009, 7:00am, BBC Radio 2 - "Good Morning Sunday", Aled Jones talks to that John Pridmore who I've come across in Google searches before, who seems to make a comfortable living for himself claiming to be a former gangster who found God.


Quite a motley crew, I must say. We really need to get more Pridmores on the BBC. Family pride is at stake!

DADDY! You KILLED her!

Number 910 in my comic collection, as randomly picked by my loyal blogling who goes by various aliases involving Dominic O'Brien's internal organs, is the first issue of the 1986-87 limited series "Fantastic Four versus the X-Men". (The cover says February 1987, it was actually published in late 1986; this is how comics work in America) Funnily enough, that makes two comics in a row involving team-ups of two superhero groups, and a whole lot of heroes crammed into one comic. To be fair, I like groups much more than I like solo heroes, so my comic collection is a bit biased that way anyway...

 Okay, this is a good one. After a not-all-that-special issue of Alpha Flight from the first random choice, we get something really quite cool here. Just look at this atmospheric, eerie opening page and that unmistakably Chris Claremont narration!

 So, this series is written by Chris Claremont, who at this point had been chronicling the adventures of the X-Men for more than a decade, and in that time had taken them from fringe characters in the Marvel universe up to the point where they were the most popular superhero comic in the world. Actually, this crossover series came out just at the point that modern fans, with hindsight, have pinpointed as the moment when "Marvel screwed up the X-Men" - just starting to cash in on their huge popularity with spin-off series, which was followed by insisting the writers give prominent roles to the 'cool' characters, and then there was a huge surge of popularity of certain artists, so they were given a bigger say in what happened, and eventually Claremont quit, and so on and so forth. But that was 1990, we're just at the start of the buildup to that here, and everything's going swimmingly. (Frankly, the fans who say things like that are a bit on the weird side, anyway)

Art is by Jon Bogdanove, who was young and still new to comic work at this time, and he does a wonderful job. He quite nicely emulates the look of John Byrne, the artist legendary for his work on both X-Men and Fantastic Four, and captures really well the haunting dream sequences, domestic life scenes and action moments that Claremont's script demands of him. It's a great comic to look at. Terry Austin's inks probably help a lot - he was a regular inker for Byrne. Tom Orzechowski is the letterer, Glynis Oliver the colourist, and there's a surprising number of editors. Ann Nocenti was the regular editor of X-Men, Don Daley was the editor of Fantastic Four, so it makes sense that he'd be a consulting editor. I've been searching the internet to try and find what Mike Carlin was doing at that time and why he was involved in this one too, but to no avail. Jim Shooter is the editor-in-chief.

The first five pages consist of a nightmare suffered by Franklin Richards, the young son of Reed and Sue, Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, who form half of the Fantastic Four. Franklin is a somewhat troublesome character. For one thing, the problem of superheroes not aging (because nobody wants to read about a 70-year-old Spider-Man, do they?) come across much more strongly in him than in anyone else - his age has boomeranged inconsistently backwards and forwards over the years; he's around five years old here, which is his sort of default status. But more importantly, writers have tended to give him infuriatingly omnipotent universe-altering powers, to the extent that it became really easy to justify anything people want to happen in any Marvel comic by saying "Franklin Richards did it". On the other hand, Chris Claremont always liked him, and he's used well in this series - his powers here just involve prophetic dreams and astral projection, which isn't so bad.

In the dream, Franklin sees his father carrying his mother's corpse and tearfully demands to know why. "It was logical, Franklin. It was necessary," says Reed, adding that he's always certain, because he's a scientist. The bodies of the rest of the Fantastic Four - the Thing, the Human Torch and even the She-Hulk (who had filled in for the Thing a little while ago) are lying around too, and looking pretty gruesome. Along comes Wolverine, carrying the dead Shadowcat in his arms, and points out that Reed has killed the X-Men, too - they're all impaled through the chest on dead trees. The X-Men line-up here is Havok, Psylocke, Storm, Longshot, Rogue, Magneto and Dazzler. Ignoring Franklin's begging, Wolverine lunges at Reed, then drops dead. Reed, callously dismissing his son, ascends a flight of stairs and opens a book, "Reed Richards - Journal - State University" and although Franklin implores him not to, turns into Doctor Doom. It's great stuff, it really is.

Franklin wakes up, and in a nice touch his bedroom is decorated with a poster of the Thing, a photo of the FF during the She-Hulk era, a photo of the Power family (with whom Franklin has adventures in the much-better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Power Pack comic about a family of child superheroes), a photo of the Avengers' butler Jarvis who usually ends up babysitting Franklin whenever the heroes are busy, and Franklin's own drawings of Kofi and Friday, from Power Pack. He goes to find his father, who (typically) is busy working on scientific stuff, with his trademark pipe in his mouth, and hasn't time to listen to Franklin, calling Sue on the video screen and asking her to deal with the child. Sue (a spotted kerchief on her head, just to show she's busy with housework - the Richards family really do live in the 1950s) does so, creating an invisible forcefield to bring Franklin to her. She comforts him with a hug, and gets on with what she was doing - unpacking some old boxes she's recently found. In one of them, naturally, is Reed's State University journal! Franklin is terrified and urges Sue to throw it away!

Then we cut to the X-Men, currently hanging out in their friend Moira McTaggert's lab on an island off the coast of Scotland (Chris Claremont is one of those unfortunate Americans who think Britain, and especially Scotland, is really really neat-o). We're filled-in on their current situation; with Nightcrawler and Colossus comatose and Shadowcat reduced to an intangible collection of molecules gradually drifting apart in a tube, they've roped in new members Havok (who, as he protests to Rogue in a scene that takes up a whole page but has no other bearing on what happens in this comic, was an X-Man in the old days before any of the others and feels he should be treated with more respect), Psylocke, Dazzler and Longshot. Their old leader, Professor X, also isn't around at this point - he's living up in space right now - and their arch-enemy Magneto, the former evil villain, is now on their side. He has been looking into ways to save Shadowcat's life, and found out about a device of Reed Richards's - he tells Storm he intends to contact Reed, even though the Fantastic Four still consider him to be an evil villain.

Dazzler and Longshot are out on a boat, and Longshot rescues a strangely sinister drowning fisherman, to take him back to Muir Isle. This is just something to remember if you read the rest of the series, nobody mentions it again in this issue.

Sue, back in New York (the narrator, with unusual accuracy for this kind of comic, points out that it's still night there, though it's dawn in Scotland), furiously confronts Reed with the journal! She's found out that it contains horrible revelations! "Especially the pages relating to the rocket flight that transformed you, me, Ben and Johnny into the Fantastic Four!" Franklin, in his astral form (wearing his Power Pack uniform, in another nice touch for regular readers) is horrified!

Elsewhere, the She-Hulk (who has the honour of being the only hero to appear in both of the comics I've reviewed here so far!) is busy researching; she's going to go back to her previous lawyer career for the sake of "a weird sort of fund-raiser" in which the trial of Magneto is re-staged. She's the defence counsel. The Thing also happens to be in the library (reading a book of Federal Aviation Regulations, just to remind us of his previous pilot career), and the two chat for a while before being interrupted by a series of massive explosions at a construction site. The comic gives no suggestion whatsoever of what's caused these explosions - the Thing and She-Hulk, being both defined as "the big, strong one", just get to work preventing the building from completely falling down and harming anyone. They're soon joined by Magneto, who helps out with his magnetic powers, despite the Thing not unreasonably suggesting "creep probably blew this place up inna first place!" and the Human Torch, whose impromptu welding comes in handy too.

Once that's dealt with, they all go back to the FF's headquarters, Four Freedoms Plaza, where Magneto (sealed in one of Sue's forcefields to stop him causing trouble) explains the situation. Reed apologises to Sue, but says he has to go and help. She stays at home while the others jet away - She-Hulk too, taking the time to change into her old FF uniform (do they keep it at the base?) for the occasion. On the way across the Atlantic, Reed asks Ben "Am I ruthless?", to which Ben replies that Reed is always certain in his convictions, and pretty much always right to be - with the exception of that rocket flight, when he didn't account for those cosmic rays...

They arrive at Muir Isle, with Reed now racked with indecision, thinking to himself that having made that significant mistake in the past, maybe he's wrong here too? With Franklin's astral form still watching, he decides not to use his device on Shadowcat. It might go wrong. The X-Men are not happy, and Wolverine attacks Reed - save her, or you die! To be continued!

It's a great story, it really is. Classic X-Men stuff from the late Claremont era, with a nice take on the Fantastic Four too (although it feels much more like an X-Men story, as is only natural). The whole limited series is really hugely worth reading and highly recommended! I leave you with the kind of thing that would give anyone nightmares:

Next up, we have number 2, selected by an anonymouse, which (in my sort-of-alphabetical but also category-based list) gives us 1602 #1, from 2003! If you want to see another random comic from my collection here, just give me a number between 2 and 3333!

Red Dwarf returns!

Having watched the first two episodes (which is totally not a breach of my who-wants-to-watch-live-TV-nowadays-anyway rule because I watched them on catch-up internet stuff and not quite immediately as soon as they became available), I have to say it's not as funny as it used to be. And after getting used to Kryten's new make-up and considering why, it seems to be a deliberate choice - the actors are playing the parts now as if they're in a serious science-fiction show, rather than a comedy. Did someone tell them to do that, or are they just too old to tell jokes these days?

Look at the scene in the latest episode when Kryten illustrates a point by strangling Lister - afterwards, he says "Thanks for the demonstration, Kryten!" in a seriously underplayed way. Compare it to the similar scene in "Justice", many years ago, when Rimmer does the same kind of thing, and Lister reacts with overblown sarcastic outrage, and the audience howls with laughter! All through this episode, in fact (which is quite up-front about re-using old ideas, and there's really nothing wrong with that unless the writer pretends they're not), Lister especially delivers lines so flatly, when he used to be so much more exaggerated in the way he said things. The other three are all more subdued than they once were, too, it really jumps out at me when I think about it. I should probably stop thinking about it...

Astounding Science Fiction

My favourite writer of the moment is H. Beam Piper. Well, I say "of the moment", he died in 1964, but from my perspective he's new and exciting. Most of his works can be found for free on the internet (a concept his future worlds couldn't imagine; they still use a lot of film reels and radio) and I heartily recommend them! Try Police Operation as a starter - the first in the wonderful series of "Paratime" stories, written in 1948 and providing a creative explanation for the flying saucer mania that had gripped the USA in the previous year. The exploits of Verkan Vall, policing the countless alternate universes, are my favourites, but you should also check out the extensive series of future-set adventures, creating a whole universe and describing its progress over the millennia.

I'll admit there's nothing strikingly original about Piper's works, but the appeal lies in the way he tells it, and the detail he goes into; far beyond the call of duty for a 1940s pulp sci-fi writer. And there's a great kitsch value to the worlds he depicts where men are real men, always with a pipe or cigarette in their mouths and a wide range of guns in their hands and holsters, getting the job done in the face of namby-pamby bureaucrats. Women are 'girls' and exist solely to be lusted over; atomic energy is the be-all and end-all and the most important development in history, even in stories set thousands of years in the future; and democracy is a silly idea that would never really work. A clear preference for a hereditary feudal system of government is perhaps Piper's most distinctive quirk. But all his works are well-written, imaginative and creative, and hugely enjoyable. Check them out, do!

Faster, Pussycat! Memorise! Memorise!

After really quite a long time of hoping I'd manage to get obsessed with something memory-related again, I've finally managed it this last week - someone pointed out that I was down to position 10 on the Memocamp speed cards high-score list. Tenth? I mean, I never really used Memocamp with any kind of regularity, but I DID do a sub-30-second time on it once, and that's now only good enough for tenth? What is the world coming to?

So I set myself a target of getting back up towards the top of the list, and because I'm approaching it in a slightly different way, it seems to have circumvented the ennui effect of memory practice I've been suffering from of late. For possibly the first time ever, certainly the first I can remember, I'm not having the official one minute of mental preparation time and then waiting for the whole five minutes of memory time to elapse before starting the recall - my aim isn't to practice the way I'm going to be memorising in a competition, it's just to get a good time on this website, by hook or by crook.

(But not by cheating; that would sort of defeat the object.)

And I have so far managed to get a very impressive 22.21 seconds! I'm trying to get used to going at that kind of speed, because mostly I have more gaps than filled-in-spaces when I do that, but I think I'm gradually getting better. A little more of that, another unusually-memorable combination of cards, and I'm sure I can edge just slightly closer to the golden 20-second mark.

Because 22.21 seconds is still only good enough for 5th, nowadays! I still have Alex, Simon, Lance and Marlo all sitting there above me, with times under 20 seconds (something I never managed to achieve, even in my heyday), so I've got them in my sights now. My enthusiasm is back! Ssssssh, don't scare it away...

Walk for memory

Biking up to Birmingham today, I found that part of the cycle route clashed with the Alzheimer's Society Walk for Memory; oodles of people walking along, wearing white T-shirts with the "Walk for Memory" logo on them. I've got one of those shirts, from years ago when I did some kind of promotional thing for the Alzheimer's Society, and it's found its way into my regular rotation, so I thought it was a good thing that I didn't happen to be wearing it today. Imagine, wearing a Walk for Memory shirt while riding my bike and overtaking all the walkers! Someone would take a photo and it'd end up in all the papers. That's the kind of scandal that could bring the Alzheimer's Society to its knees.

2 Scantily-Clad Interstellar She-Warriors

Welcome to the first in a series of reviews of comics randomly picked from my collection based on random numbers thrown at me by blog-readers! Today we have number 175 - Alpha Flight #99, from August 1991!

Written by Fabian Nicieza, pencils by Michael Bair, inks by Chris Ivy. Letterer Janice Chiang, colourist Bob Sharen, editor Bobbie Chase, editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco

The first thing you notice about this comic (apart from the scantily-clad interstellar she-warriors promised on the cover) is that it's part three of a four-part story, designed to climax with the double-sized hundredth issue of Alpha Flight next month. And it really makes little or no concession to readers who have picked the comic up without having read the first two parts of the story! This is part of an interesting long-term trend in comics - in the sixties, when superhero comics were at an all-time high of popularity, each issue tended to be a self-contained story, with continuing subplots retaining the reader's interest. This seems such a logical way to do things, it's rather strange that by the eighties it was the norm to see comics like this one, which can only really appeal to people who have read the previous few issues as a bare minimum. It's a strategy that would seem to practically guarantee declining sales numbers with every issue! But then, by this point Alpha Flight, like most superhero comics, was only available in specialist comic shops, not in newsagents' - the only people who would get to see it would be people who already liked superhero comics and were looking for it specifically.

Nowadays, all the superhero comics are also published as paperback books containing usually six issues, so the approach of spreading a story over multiple monthly installments works fine, but in 1991 we still had this strange halfway house situation - these Alpha Flight comics were never reprinted (except that issues #97-100 were, bafflingly, simultaneously released, unchanged except for the number on the front cover, as #1-4 of a "limited series"), but you did have to have at least a fair understanding of what had happened in previous comics to know what's supposed to be going on in this one.

The opening page gives us a brief recap of what has happened so far - Her, one of those interstellar she-warriors, crashed in Toronto on the run from a vast intergalactic army called The Consortium, and Alpha Flight, joined by the Avengers, are helping to fight them off. There are a LOT of superheroes in this one. Alpha Flight at this point (as the text box on the splash page tells us) consist of Guardian, Vindicator, Sasquatch, Northstar, Puck, Diamond Lil, Windshear and Box - most of them are named in the dialogue of this issue, and if you really concentrate, you can figure out who is who. But a lot of them only show up in one or two panels, so it's not easy...

The Avengers lineup in this comic is Captain America, Quasar, Sersi, the Vision, Hercules, She-Hulk and the Black Widow. That's seven, although the cover promised us a dozen. Add Her to the mix, and we've got sixteen heroes fighting innumerable aliens of many different kinds! Enough to fill 23 pages of comic, you'd think, but instead we start off with the secondary plot of this comic, not mentioned on the opening page narration...

Nova (the scantily-clad interstellar she-warrior who serves as herald to Galactus the planet-eating giant) asks the Quwrlln (big pink space squid-things) what's going on - she was just arriving at their planet to announce Galactus's coming, when all of a sudden she, it, and everyone on it, were teleported into another dimension. The Quwrlln explain that their entire civilisation has for millennia been based solely on avoiding being eaten by Galactus, which Nova thinks is ridiculous - a strange argument, since Galactus WOULD have eaten them by now if not for the nifty dimensional-teleport - but which was anyway unsuccessful, as Galactus can home in on Nova and teleport himself across dimensions. He does so, and gets a full-page drawing to emphasize how big he is.

Only then do we go back to Toronto, where a huge number of Consortium spaceships are on the attack, aliens are on the streets, chaos all over the place. Guardian takes a moment to briefly explain to Captain America what's going on, while Alpha Flight and the Avengers fight aliens in, around and above the city.

Michael Bair isn't a great artist. He's not a terrible one either, and compared to some artists who'd recently graced Alpha Flight with their work (I'm looking at you, John Calimee), he was wonderful, a real breath of fresh air. But he's not one of those artists who can tell a story - he draws disconnected pictures of characters standing in weird, unnatural poses (the cover is a good example) and he's entirely incapable of making a visual story flow from one panel to the next. But this particular comic actually uses that artistic style to great effect! It captures the vast, city-wide nature of the battle with the Consortium by cutting away with each successive panel between what's happening up in the sky and what's happening elsewhere on the ground. It really works, and I'd be fascinated to know whether that was a deliberate decision by Fabian Nicieza or Bair himself, to get the most out of the artist's limitations. Deliberate or accidental, this might actually be the best comic Michael Bair ever drew.

In the back streets of Toronto, Diamond Lil has been chasing one particular little alien. She corners him and explains that since his gun proved able to penetrate her skin (last issue), she's going to take it. As she mentions briefly in passing later on in this issue, this is because she's got a suspicious lump in her breast and doctors aren't able to get a good look at it because of her uncuttable diamond-hard skin. This gun would therefore be a big help to her. The alien protests that the gun is biocybernetically attached to his body and mind, and removing it would kill him - Lil calls him an idiot and says she's going to take it anyway.

Back in that other dimension, while Galactus assembles his planet-devouring equipment (he doesn't actually take big bites out of planets, he converts them to energy and consumes that), the Quwrlln decide they need to activate Plan B - contact their agent on Earth and have the super-heroes of the only planet ever to repulse Galactus come to their aid. That agent, as people who've read the previous issues know but new readers are not told at all, is Vindicator. He's in Toronto, in the middle of the fight, when there's a momentary lull and the heroes all regroup on the ground. They beat up a few stray aliens, Diamond Lil rejoins them with the alien's gun but doesn't describe how she got it, and Her briefly recaps the events of Marvel Comics Presents #35, the comic from two years previously in which she got on the Consortium's bad side and started this whole mess. The Chief Executive Officer of the Consortium offers the heroes three options - they can hand Her over, or, "honor barring such a transaction," she can just leave the planet and the Consortium will chase her in space. Alternatively, they'll take over the entire planet Earth.

Her decides to surrender, to minimise the danger to anyone else. But just at that inconvenient moment, the Quwrlln signal reaches Vindicator, the machine parts of his body take control, and he teleports all the most powerful nearby heroes (Vision, Her, Quasar, Guardian, Sersi, Box, Hercules, Windshear and himself) away to save the Quwrlln from Galactus. Thus the remaining seven less-powerful heroes are left to face the furious Consortium, while the others find themselves face to face with Galactus - the issue ends on another full-page picture to show us how big he is!


And so that's that. To be concluded in #100. We don't get a letters page in this issue; it looks like they had to add an extra page of story to squeeze in all the action. There are the usual adverts, but nothing interesting enough to be worth mentioning. It's a fun story if you take it in the context of the Alpha Flight series as a whole, but as a one-off read I just can't recommend it, it's much too impenetrable to the new reader, and there are way too many characters to understand what's going on unless you already know who everyone is.

Fabian Nicieza is one of the all-time greatest writers of Marvel Comics, but his short run as Alpha Flight writer never entirely clicked (at the same time, he was writing New Warriors, which was so much better). I think he was over-burdened with characters (the eight Alphans we see in this issue are just the tip of the iceberg), and had too many ideas that he never had the time and space to develop. He left the comic after #101, and it meandered on under two more writers I hugely admire, Scott Lobdell and Simon Furman, without ever quite reaching any great heights. Are Alpha Flight so difficult to write about?


Bonus trivia that doesn't come into this single issue at all - this is the second consecutive issue of Alpha Flight in which half the team are abruptly teleported away to another dimension by one of their own. In #98, Alpha's comatose associate Laura Dean woke up from the coma she'd been in for the past year and suddenly used her teleportation power to disappear along with almost all of Alpha's supporting cast - Persuasion, Shaman, Aurora, Witchfire and Laura's parents. And nobody so much as mentions it in this one, nor in the big celebration #100! I don't know if Nicieza had plans to follow it up, or if he was just asked to clear the board of a lot of extraneous characters so the new writer didn't have to deal with them, but it's very strange. Don't worry, they did come back eventually...

Okay, okay, you wanted two scantily-clad interstellar she-warriors, and I haven't given you a picture of Nova. Here she is, striking a few more of those weird poses that only Michael Bair could draw...

Give me a number between 2 and 3333, and I'll pull that comic from my collection and write about it for you!

Let's get blogging!

First of all, if you haven't seen the Facebook event page for the Friendly Memory Championship, please go and check it out now! Facebook pages for all those other competitions will follow shortly!

Or, if you're not one of those blog-readers who cares about my memory competitions... tell me what you do care about! I need to get back in the habit of writing this thing more often, so I'd love it if people would ask me questions and things in the comments section below, please!

Or if you can't think of a question, you could give me a number. You may recall that I've got thousands of comics lying around the place that I was meaning to get rid of before I moved house. I didn't, but I did make the effort of listing them all in a spreadsheet. There's 3332 of them (a few more turned up while I was moving, but there's 3332 on the spreadsheet anyway), so if you pick a random number between 2 and 3333 (the top row is column headers), I'll write an extensive review of that comic in my blog! I've been meaning to write more random comic reviews, and this is an exciting way to involve my bloglings!

They just use your mind and they never give you credit

Flicking through the Beano at lunch today, I noticed a new innovation - the names of the writer and artist of each strip, unobtrusively written in the white border of the page! It's a very welcome break from eighty years of traditionally not crediting the creative talent, and I heartily approve! I should really have bought a copy in celebration, and extensively reviewed it on my blog, shouldn't I? Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe I'll wait and see whether David Sutherland has permanently stopped drawing the Bash Street Kids, because it really won't be the same if he has.

The world of the MSO

I'm down in London, having popped in to the Mind Sports Olympiad tonight to join in the nightly poker tournament, only to get eliminated practically immediately, and it's really great to see how many people are at this 20th annual MSO who were also at the first one, back in 1997. Next year I'll definitely be along for the whole thing - maybe I'll get a wig and go with the stylish moustache look I was sporting back then, too!