That's numberwang

 Being sent to Coventry by your friends is generally seen as a bad thing, but in this case it's definitely a plus. A friend has pointed me to the Logic and Mathematical Games Final at Coventry University tomorrow, and we're going to go and take part!

Looking at last year's paper, it's the kind of question I'd want to practice more and learn the obvious short-cut tricks to (things like 'what's the minimum number of ways to do something' that people have probably identified a formula for that I've never heard of), but it'll be fun anyway! I won't tell you my score unless I do really unexpectedly well.

Did you know if A=1, B=2 and so on, Coventry is 122? And that if you ignore all letters that aren't Roman numerals, Coventry is 105? And that if you take the latter from the former, the answer is 17? And that since the trains are on strike tomorrow I'm getting to Coventry by the X19 and then the X18 bus?

That's the kind of numerical mood this puts me in. I was trying to come up with some really interesting number trivia, but that's the best I can do.

So what's the big deal about height?

 

There aren't many people in the world who would instantly recognise what the title of this blog post is quoting, so perhaps I should be kinder to my younger brother and less publicly abusive of him for being so persistently taller than me, ever since we were very small. But instead I choose to use this photo to tell the world how very much I sympathise with unfortunate people like Rigby and Unemployed Brendon.

Rigby's tragic story from Regular Show resonates with me particularly strongly for many reasons (which, again, there's probably only one person in the world who entirely understands):

And in the spirit of being kinder, I should warn anyone with a puppet phobia (which is, of course, a completely reasonable and perfectly normal thing for an intelligent middle-aged man to suffer from) not to watch this next video, but I'm very much on Don't Hug Me I'm Scared star Unemployed Brendon's side too:

But actually, this photo makes me think the most of yet a third brilliant TV show that everyone should be au fait with - Infinity Train. Although Min Gi and Ryan are the same height and age, and not brothers but lifelong friends born on the same day... the flashback to their younger days is very familiar to me. "I'm Gonna Dress My Dog In A Toque" could compete with our own masterpiece "Ripe Lettuce", I assure you:

Right, having got all that off my chest, I'll go back to my undersized, unexceptional life now. Thanks for listening.

It could be you

 But it's definitely me. Here's the story so far - I bought a lottery ticket for £2 on Saturday, and it won £5 and a free lucky dip for the next normal-lottery draw on Wednesday. So with the winnings I bought a set-for-life ticket on Monday (£1.50) and that one won £5! So I bought a Euromillions ticket for Tuesday (£2.50) and that one won £3! And then that free lucky-dip ticket in tonight's draw got me another free lucky dip!

So that makes four consecutive lottery wins (if you follow the lotto logic that 'free lucky dips' count as 'winning an actual prize') and a net profit of £7.00! The sky's the limit.

The sport of the future

If you follow my Facebook, you might have seen me boasting yesterday that I've qualified for the Microsoft Excel World Championship 2023 in the monthly competition. In fairness, I was very chuffed to achieve that, although I do think I was perhaps a bit lucky, as there are plenty of people out there who are rather a lot better than me at these things.

But for the benefit of Hua Wei, Francis and anyone else who wondered exactly what these competitions involve, it goes a bit like this - each competition has a theme, gives you a lot of data, and your job is to answer as many of the questions as possible in 30 minutes, using Excel formulas and quite a lot of creative thinking.

The theme this time was flights, and we get this data on our spreadsheets:

Each competition has five levels, and three bonus questions that can be answered at any time. They start with the very easy, like this one:

... which obviously can be done with a simple lookup formula or two (the first three answers in each level have to be entered on the competition website, along with the total or code word generated from all the other answers by a formula in the bottom code).

By the time we get to level 3, it's got a lot more complicated:

This fun little task involved a bit of text-to-columns to separate the forty flights in each line, lookups to the master table and a quickly-cobbled-together list of numbers and the next number that contains a 7, and a few simple formulas. I think a lot of competitors tried to be too clever with this one, and my more basic approach got me through it.

Levels 4 and 5 got more complicated than that, and nobody came close to finishing them all in the 30 minutes. So that's how the whole Excel Esports thing works! I urge you to go to the website, download some of the sample cases, and join in the next online battle, on May 26th!

The devil's in the details

 I was quietly but hugely irritated last weekend by not being able to find on the internet exactly when the two William stories I mentioned were first published in magazines. Having to be vague about something that really should be specified gets on my nerves. Luckily for anyone who finds the post from now on, I've acquired a new copy of "The William Companion" by Mary Cadogan and updated the article with precise publication details. I feel this is an essential service to the world, and as a bonus it's a really great book too.

Earworms

 Facebook occasionally shows me interesting things in the hope I'll click on them - today I saw the top 40 at such-and-such a date and my thought process went a bit like this...

"Oh wow, Theme From S-Express, I haven't thought about that in decades! And it was number 1 ahead of Heart by the Pet Shop Boys, I really liked that one at the time, it was right in the middle of my Pet Shop Boys obsession. And oh, hey, Mary's Prayer at number three! That's such a great song, I still listen to it now and then today. Hmm, number four Who's Leaving Who, I don't remember that oneOH WAIT, Who's Leaving Who? Is it me? Is it you? Oh please tell me who's leaving whooo-ooo-ooo-oooooo..."

At that point I decided it was best to stop looking at the list because I'm clearly never going to get all of those songs out of my head now.

Meanwhile, ASICS are still keen to give me things, even though I've tried to explain that I really can't afford to go to memory competitions at the moment (which is a shame, because there's German competitions I would be at this weekend if I had money to splash out on plane tickets) and I'm gradually losing the use of my legs these days so I should probably be looking into wheelchair racing rather than jogging. But they've just sent me a pile of new kit in the latest styles, and some more trainers, so I'm still very well equipped to make sure I've got a corpore sano!

[I don't speak Latin, but I have an idea you need to change the ending of 'sano' when it's in that kind of position in a sentence. But Latin's a silly kind of language. Romanes eunt domus.]

The adventures of Alex, Jimminy and Howie

 Continuing the occasional series of blog posts about the early comics work of the writers of the classic Thundercats cartoon (which really can't continue much further than this, because once you've done Bob Haney and Leonard Starr, you've basically run out of material), let's talk about the earliest works of Howard Post!

Well, he's credited with writing two episodes of Thundercats, and although I'll eat my hat if the second of them, "Return of the Driller", wasn't almost entirely written by Peter Lawrence, I think we can be sure that Howard was responsible for "Spitting Image", at least. And they're both great episodes!

Born in 1926, Howard Post got into the comics business when still in his teens, in 1945. He was the central attraction of Wonderland Comics, from Prize Publications, drawing the covers and the lead story "Alex in Wonderland".

Alex is a boy who refuses to believe anything, who finds himself transported to Wonderland along with a talking macaw sidekick and finds a magical land populated by nursery rhyme characters who persist in not doing the things that the nursery rhymes say they should do. Alex sets out on a campaign to force them all to behave properly and save the children of the world from having to learn new rhymes.

The first story has a writing credit to Jerry Gale; subsequent ones just have one of Howie Post's signatures (he varies between "Post", "Howard Post" and "Howard W. Post"), and since they're basically the same story every time we can maybe assume the artist was also the writer. Wonderland Comics was cancelled after nine issues, but the artwork had evolved and improved over that time until it had become a very proficient Walt Kelly impersonation, perfectly suited to the nursery rhyme theme. And it clearly caught the attention of the big-name publisher DC, in their latest quest to find a new Superman to catch the public imagination and restore their flagging sales!

Yes, this is the new character who was going to rank alongside Superman, Batman and the Boy Commandos. Making his debut in More Fun Comics #121 (cover dated April 1947), it's Jimminy and the Magic Book! DC absolutely flooded their comics with ads for Jimminy! Nobody who picked up any comic in 1947 could have failed to be aware what was happening in More Fun, DC's earliest and longest-running title, going all the way back to the very dawn of American comic books (it was called New Fun when it started up). The title's long history had given the world many classic characters over the years, even if it never quite topped the sales charts, and could our new hero be the one to take it to new heights in the post-war era?

Jimminy is basically just Alex. He's a bit smaller, and he's got a magic book rather than a magic macaw, but it's essentially the exact same thing. Beautiful artwork, though, and Prize could hardly complain about the plagiarism - one of the back-up strips of Wonderland Comics, called "Neighbors", was a carbon copy of the Fox and the Crow, the Columbia cartoon characters who DC had paid good money for the comic rights to!

There were not one but two Jimminy stories in each issue of More Fun, just to really cement him in the readers' minds as the new big thing. Or maybe DC were really short of material and Howard Post was able to draw an impressive number of very detailed pages every month (he also drew some funny-animal strips for them at the same time). But one nice feature of the stories is that Jimminy is a legacy hero - the magic book has been passed down through the generations of his family, as he's told by his father (who says 'ye' instead of 'you', but otherwise seems to be more or less sane and reliable). I'm sure that there are descendants of the Crockett family out there today, having magic adventures and just waiting for someone to put them in the comics!

Nothing bad can possibly have happened to the heroes or the book, as Jimminy's mother points out with an impressive certainty at the end of the first story...

But somehow, Jimminy and the Magic Book didn't catch the imagination. More Fun Comics was cancelled with #127, and burnt off the entire inventory in that final issue - FIVE adventures for Jimminy in that one comic! Another advert had Superboy and Robin showing their support for the hero, perhaps hoping the readers would buy his comic in such quantities as to save it from oblivion. But clearly they didn't, and that was the end of More Fun.

Certainly not the end of Howard Post, though, who had a lengthy and successful career both in comics with Harvey and animation with Paramount / Famous Studios. And, of course, those two episodes of Thundercats!

Nasties

 "William and the Nasties" , the short story by Richmal Crompton, first appeared in "Happy Mag" in June 1934, and was collected in the seventeenth book in the series, "William - the Detective" in July 1935. It continued to be included in the book until the seventies - I had it in an Armada paperback with photo from the TV series on the cover - but was omitted from the Macmillan editions of the late eighties onwards when somebody apparently noticed the subject matter.

It's fair to say it was a misjudgement on the part of Crompton, to say the very least, but more of an understandable one when you consider that the stories were originally written with an adult audience in mind (although by 1934 they'd certainly become an accepted part of children's entertainment) and it was a common theme for William and his Outlaws to find out about some historical atrocity and decide it would be fun to try to emulate it. The problem with "William and the Nasties" was that this time they were finding out about current events, and you might expect the author to handle it with a little more tact. But plenty has been written about the story already, so I want to particularly focus on what it says about Henry and his family.

For someone who's a central feature of the William stories throughout their fifty year run, we know very little about Henry. He never gets a surname, and is always just one of the four Outlaws - William the star of the series, his best friend Ginger, and also Douglas and Henry. The most recent TV series strangely cast Henry as a much younger boy than the others, but in the original books (although it's not entirely consistent or clear) he seems to be the oldest; perhaps as much as a whole year older than William. He's certainly the most knowledgeable of the gang, and seems to do the best in school.

His parents - of whom we see very little - might be a different matter. William, Ginger and Douglas all have siblings as much as ten years older than them, and their parents seem to be well into their forties or even older. Henry, who just has a baby sister [except in "Just William's Luck", the book of the film, which seems to be set in an alternate universe] might be the child of significantly younger people. But the most interesting biographical detail comes in the February 1935 story, "William the Conspirator". William, annoyed by Henry's usual habit of using big words, says "Why couldn't you say it in English? You're always swanking with that bit of German your aunt taught you."

The word in question was 'encyclopaedia', but it seems clear that Henry has German relatives - the Outlaws, much to their disgruntlement, learn French and Latin in school, but don't know anything about German. It wasn't routinely taught in England in the thirties. Bearing that in mind, it's interesting to consider the latest piece of information that Henry brings to the Outlaws as our story begins...

Henry has learnt that there are people called 'nasties' who rule Germany and make everyone do jus' what they like, and chase out Jews and take the stuff they leave behind. "It's a jolly good idea," he observes. And since Mr Isaacs, the new and less generous proprietor of the sweetshop, is a Jew, the rest of the Outlaws agree. [As an aside, Richmal Crompton has got the name of his predecessor wrong; she made a lot of slip-ups like that. He was previously called Mr. Moss - Mr. Monks is the vicar.]

William announces that it's high time someone started up the nasties in England (assuming it started in Germany because someone got mad with a mean sweetshop man) and the others agree. It's Henry who points out that there won't be many sweets to go round if they let anyone else join, and then two paragraphs later points out that the big storeroom upstairs in the shop is absolutely full of sweets which will last them a jolly long time when they've taken them.

Henry's further knowledge of nasties consists of knowing that the leader is called Her Hitler, because 'her' means a man in German, and that the means of chasing out Jews is to sort of get 'em scared, using a sort of picture of a snake all curled up called a swastika. "I s'pose Jews are scared of snakes. I dunno."

The newly-founded nasties' attempt to chase Mr. Isaacs out doesn't meet with much success. Douglas's picture of a snake fails to strike fear into the shopkeeper, just making him give William a painful clip round the ear (Henry complains that it's because snakes don't have ears, but Douglas insists that they must have, or how else would they hear - although he admits he might maybe have drawn them a bit too big), and the threatening message ("BEWEAR") on a card through his letter box just gets swept up and put in the bin without being noticed. It's very funny all round, like all the William stories, although nothing you can't find and laugh at in the hundreds of others.

So William looks to Henry for more information,and Henry goes to get it at teatime.

This is the fascinating part. Henry has gone home for tea, and unlike most stories he can't have found this new information in his history book or encyclopaedia. His information about Germany must have come from his parents in the first place, and again he goes back to them to ask more detail. He returns happily to the nasties with the report that "they've got people called storm troops an' when these Jews don't run away they knock 'em about till they do."

Note that he hasn't picked up any sense that this way of carrying on is anything other than a jolly good idea. Henry, unlike William, is not prone to failing to pick up on the tone when people tell him things. I can only assume his mother or father, being possibly of German origin themselves, talked quite enthusiastically about the whole idea. It's a bit worrying, really.

Strangely, that's the last line of dialogue Henry gets in this story. He's with the others when they enact their plan to break into the sweetshop - Douglas, as usual, worries constantly that they're going to get in trouble and he doesn't want to go to prison, and even Ginger has to admit that "it does seem a bit like ordin'ry stealin'," but Henry's opinions are unrecorded. William eventually agrees that they should really just give up the whole nasties thing, but maybe just take a few sweets while they're there - which by a stroke of luck and some commendable quick thinking leads to a happy ending after all. The former nasties end up with all the sweets they can carry, and Henry (whose tastes seem to be a bit more savoury than the others, inclining to buttered almonds, pontefract cakes and popcorn) gets the final word, or at least the final ecstatic grunt.

[As a separate kind of grumble, the original publication of the book put Thomas Henry's final illustration before the final page, completely spoiling the ending for anyone reading it for the first time. Careless presentation.]

Learning a lesson from their adventures is not something the Outlaws ever did. And since of course Henry and the others never grow up, being 11 or 12 years old from 1919 right through to Richmal Crompton's death in 1969, we don't have to worry about what might happen over the turbulent next few years or Henry being a teenager from that kind of background at the time when the war breaks out. But looking just at this story on its own, I'd be a bit worried about how his future life would go from this point. We're lucky this was just a long-forgotten blip in the career of my favourite Outlaw [I always like the 'clever' one of any group the best], and he otherwise sets a consistent shining example for the readers!

Hey ho, come on let's go to Nowhere Land!

 I don't think there's any better way to spend the four-day Easter weekend than in watching my way through the first season of Maggie and the Ferocious Beast.

Someone asked me to recommend some non-serialised cartoons they could watch random episodes of on shuffle, and Maggie was one of the first that came to mind - there are no continuing storylines, after all. But after a moment's thought, I remembered that it actually works much better if you watch the whole series in sequence - new recurring characters are introduced along the way, and passing references are occasionally made to previous episodes.

And more importantly, it's fascinating to look at the three seasons (13 triple-episodes in each, making a grand total of 117 seven-minute self-contained stories) and pick up on the generally different feel of each one. Most cartoons that run to multiple seasons have one (often the second, funnily enough) that stands out as the best of the bunch, but Maggie doesn't really do that - it's consistently great all the way through, with some excellent episodes in each season.

But the first, which more than any other is made up mostly just of stories with the three central characters, provides the first real statements of what the whole series is about. No other show gives you such masterpieces as "The Lemonade Stand" (in which they set up a lemonade stand and sit around hoping a customer will come by, while the Beast keeps pretending to fall over and hurt himself because he wants a plaster on his knee like Maggie), or "Pack Up Your Troubles" (in which they decide to send all their troubles away down the river in paper boats, and end up concluding that they don't have any troubles after all, so just sail the boats), or perhaps the greatest of the first season, "Say Cheese" (in which Hamilton is upset because Maggie has a photo of herself and the Beast and she has to eventually persuade him to tell her what's wrong). These are stories where literally nothing happens, but it's absolutely riveting! And when there is some kind of conflict or happening, like in "The Push-Me Popper", when the Beast accidentally breaks Hamilton's new toy and they have a furious argument about it, things sort themselves out quickly enough when Maggie just puts it back together and everything's all right.

And that's just the first season! When we get into the second and third, with bigger roles for the wonderfully amoral Nedley, experimentation like "Morning in Nowhere Land" (no dialogue, and no Maggie, just Hamilton and the Beast getting ready for the day to musical accompaniment) and the amazing series-ending "Where's Maggie?" which raises the possibility that Maggie might not be coming back... well, you should really go and watch the entire series if you haven't already. You won't regret it!

And do watch the UK dubbed version - the voice acting is just so much better.

DBG

There are very few people in this world who appreciate why it's clever and entirely appropriate to create a picture of Dust Brain wearing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's clothes, so I thought I would share it with the internet just in case one of those people happens to see it.

I feel I should probably add the disclaimer that this is not at all intended to be any kind of suggestion that the late and much admired Supreme Court Justice resembled a hideous mummy. She really didn't.

 

Time flies when you're not doing anything worth writing about

 I don't seem to have posted anything here for a month, which really wasn't intentional. I should make a point of saying something here regularly - even if nobody else reads it, it's a very useful way to remind myself what I was doing at any point in history (history before 2005 doesn't really count, because nobody remembers back that far). So I'll follow the advice of one of my favourite other blogs on the internet, Dirty Feed, which is frequently devoted to complaining about other people's blogs that aren't updated frequently, but also spends a lot of time writing absolutely brilliant articles about minutiae of television production history. It's really worth reading through the whole thing, if you haven't already.

While I'm recommending things, is everyone reading Tom Brevoort's blog? If you've got even a passing interest in the history of superhero comics, you can spend hours engrossed in his fascinating writings!

That makes me feel better about not giving my loyal readers, if any, sufficient reading matter just lately. So what am I doing these days? Well, working for a living, which is a bit tiresome. I'd rather be making more documentaries about exercising and competing in memory competitions, but there's probably a limit on how much the public can stomach of that kind of thing. Mind you, I've been thinking for the best part of twenty years that my occasional worldwide TV star career has surely worn out its welcome by now, and new things keep on turning up, so who knows?

Also, I am not a number; I am a free man. But if you want to keep track of how I'm doing at Excel esports and find that their ranking tables list most of the competitors by a number rather than a name for some reason, I'm #408184. I came 34th out of the 80 competitors who registered a score in today's competition, and I think I'm still gradually improving. World champion one of these years, once I learn or develop a few new clever tricks with spreadsheets. I just wouldn't want you to think I'm hiding my mediocre performance behind the anonymity of numbers. There's probably a box to tick somewhere to say it's okay for them to publish my name, but I'm not a box-ticker, I'm an Excel wizard. Although I do know how to do things with tick-boxes on Excel.

Today's competition was at 7:30 in the morning. I did that, then worked from home from nine till half past twelve, then I had a Memory League match scheduled on my lunch hour only for my opponent not to turn up, then some more accountancy until five o'clock, and now I'm watching Italy v England play football on telly. This is how my life goes, and I really do think it's fascinating enough to merit blogging about regularly.

Also, I'm inclined to write at length about Frankenstein. Look forward to it.

Coup de chapeau

 I'm on my way home from Cambridge as I write this, after a weekend's othelloing. The finals are still going on, although as usual I was never in contention to finish in the top four. I did, however, impress myself yesterday by beating the entire Tastet family (or at least the three representatives of it who came to the tournament) one after the other in ascending order of seniority. And Marc assures me that 'coup de chapeau' is the French equivalent of the English 'hat-trick', and I'm not going to turn down the opportunity of making a hat-related remark when it's so appropriate.

Apart from that, I wasn't all that impressive over the eleven rounds - but I wasn't as absolutely terrible as anyone who's seen the two of my games that were covered on liveothello.com might think! Those were by far my worst games of the weekend, and I happen to think I played fairly well in most of the others. Honest. I finished the first day on four wins out of seven, having also beaten Carlo Affatigato and lost reasonably good games to Imre Leader and Emmanuel Lazard and one awful live-internetted one against Matthias Berg, and felt in good shape to achieve my usual aim of 50% success - maybe even having only played the best players at the event.

But this morning, after being wiped out ruthlessly by Takuji Kashiwabara in my second liveothello disaster and then losing a game I really felt I should have won against Luke Plowman, I was very much in the mood to inflict a vengeful wipeout on his little sister Anya (although all of Guy's kids, like so many people nowadays, are disturbingly grown up nowadays; it's almost enough to make me think I might be getting old, but that's just crazy talk). Anyway, I couldn't quite manage to completely wipe her out, and decided to pretend I was just too gallant to do it, only for Anya to jump in before I even had a chance to proclaim how nice I am and remind me I was the first person ever to wipe her out, years ago when she actually was extremely young.

But that only brought me out to five out of ten, and the final game against Emmanuel Caspard didn't work out as I'd hoped, though it looked for a while like I might end up on top, so five out of eleven is what I had to settle for. Still, a good weekend's fun all round!

Pic-a-nic baskets

I've said it before, but Excel Esports is a great pastime for anyone who's even slightly smarter than the average bear. This month's challenge involved calculating the revenue and costs of selling picnic baskets, with the added complication that any bears in the vicinity will steal the baskets and not give them back unless you give them a treat. And then for the final task, the bears are all out to get you and you have to calculate the quickest escape route!

As before, I did okay with it, but with a little bit more practice of thinking at high speed, I could do better. I've definitely got a real buzz of adrenaline after this session! Well, either that or I've drunk too much cherry coke again.

Anyway, this weekend it's back to merry old Cambridge for the EGP othello tournament! You know, twenty years ago at the 2003 tournament I was temporarily living in Cambridge and doing a course in teaching English as a foreign language. It turned out not to be a great career choice, and I quickly went back to number-crunching. But that weekend it unexpectedly snowed a blizzard and I was caught outside in Cambridge city centre in light, summery clothes. I hope that doesn't happen again this time, but I'm not packing any winter woolies anyway, so it'll be entirely my fault if it does.

The top part of Pridmore turned into painted iron and glass

Having re-read my way through all three-and-a-bit books about the Bastable siblings, I couldn't resist moving on to some of E. Nesbit's more magical (and brilliantly silly) children's stories - particularly her significant 1901 work, "The Cockatoucan". It's significant because of the nursemaid you can see in the centre of this picture. Her name? Pridmore!

Pridmore is a fairly uncommon name, an exclusively working-class one, and one that's historically been limited to the north and midlands areas. So when it comes to Victorian fiction (and for that matter modern-day fiction too), you'll never see a central character named Pridmore. You might, if you're very lucky, find the name applied to a servant... but even then, this one story by the great E. Nesbit seems to be the only time that's ever happened in history!

I don't know where Nesbit (the E stands for Edith, but she was always credited as E. so I feel I should just call her that) got the name from - this story, like all the stories back then, is set in London, where Pridmores were and still are vanishingly rare. Maybe she encountered a distant relative of mine, somehow!

She might not have really liked this relative, mind you. Pridmore in this story is a disagreeably strict kind of nursemaid, and the magical bird (which causes strange things to happen whenever it laughs) turns her into an Automatic Nagging Machine.

For before her eyes she saw an awful change taking place in Pridmore.

In an instant all that was left of the original Pridmore were the boots

and the hem of her skirt—the top part of her had changed into painted

iron and glass, and even as Matilda looked the bit of skirt that was

left got flat and hard and square. The two feet turned into four feet,

and they were iron feet, and there was no more Pridmore.

 

“Oh, my poor child,” said the King, “your maid has turned into an

Automatic Machine.”

 

It was too true. The maid had turned into a machine such as those which

you see in a railway station—greedy, grasping things which take your

pennies and give you next to nothing in chocolate and no change.

 

But there was no chocolate to be seen through the glass of the machine

that once had been Pridmore. Only little rolls of paper.

 

The King silently handed some pennies to Matilda. She dropped one into

the machine and pulled out the little drawer. There was a scroll of

paper. Matilda opened it and read—

 

“Don’t be tiresome.”

 

She tried again. This time it was—

 

“If you don’t give over I’ll tell your Ma first thing when she comes

home.”

 

The next was—

 

“Go along with you do—always worrying;” so then Matilda knew.

 

“Yes,” said the King sadly, “I fear there’s no doubt about it. Your

maid has turned into an Automatic Nagging Machine. Never mind, my

dear, she’ll be all right to-morrow.”

 

“I like her best like this, thank you,” said Matilda quickly. “I

needn’t put in any more pennies, you see.”

 

“Oh, we mustn’t be unkind and neglectful,” said the King gently, and he

dropped in a penny. He got—

 

“You tiresome boy, you. Leave me be this minute.”

 

Pridmore saves the day in the end. The only way to undo all the Cockatoucan's magic (which also included turning the King into a villa-residence, replete with every modern improvement, and the Prime Minister into a comic opera) is to make him laugh on the wrong side of his mouth, and Pridmore gladly obliges. "It was a terrible sight to witness, and the sound of that wrong-sided laughter was horrible to hear." I think we should all follow this shining example!

Krakoa, east of Java

 I'm trying not to spend money recklessly at the moment, after a year of mostly being idly and deliberately unemployed and also surprisingly physically active for the TV cameras. So when I say I've bought 95 comics over the last couple of weekends you'll probably just nod and say "Yes, that's consistent with your usual behaviour when you haven't got enough money and are trying not to spend it recklessly." But when I explain that they were very reasonably priced comics by the standards of American superhero comics generally, and that I was entirely justified in buying them because certain other comics are extremely good, you'll entirely forgive and heartily applaud my splurging, I'm sure!

You see, I may have mentioned before that we're in one of those rare eras when X-Men comics are great, just at the moment. Ever since the epic House of X / Powers of X series starting in July 2019, the mutants of the Marvel universe, good and bad alike, have all been living on Krakoa the sentient island in the Pacific, and generally lording it over the non-mutant humans in a new kind of way. And yes, according to this map in the first issue, Krakoa (unlike Krakatoa) actually is located somewhere to the east of Java.

Anyway, the location isn't important - the mutants now have access to a system of magic gates that can teleport them all over the world and beyond. Also, they have the ability to resurrect the dead. All of this was established by that original twelve-issue series and it felt like one of those cases where the comics would write a great story setting up the status quo, spend a couple of months failing to tell any readable stories in it, then tear everything down again in the next epic.

But one way or another, even though the first batch of comics spinning off the new set-up were unexceptional and then the pandemic stopped them altogether for a little while, the basic Krakoa premise really had legs, and they kept on producing stories set within it. And now, there are some totally awesome stories being told! The new epic that's just starting, "Sins of Sinister", I would have just dismissed as one of those 'spend a couple of months telling alternate-reality stories and then press the reset button implausibly at the end' things, except that this time the plot mechanism by which things will be reset has been spelt out clearly in advance and plays an integral part in the story, so that somehow makes me a lot more eager to read it.

And before that even started, the real masterpiece was "Immortal X-Men", which ties all the other comics in the range together and makes it all feel like a cohesive universe with a cast of hundreds all actively involved in one big, sprawling, fascinating adventure! Seriously, go out and read at least the last year's worth of X-Men comics, if you can find them.

Which brings me back to my splurging. See, Worlds Apart, the comic shop in Birmingham, was selling off its leftover comics (95p each or 10 for £5!), and I couldn't resist picking up a big pile of early Krakoa-era comics. Actually, 81 of them, over a couple of days, because I miscounted one pile and thought it was a multiple of ten, but well worth it! And then I went to a comics fair and got 14 more of the things from a 75p box for another tenner. But even though fifty pounds still sounds like quite a lot to spend on a pile of comics I just described as unexceptional, when you sit down and read proper old-fashioned paper comics (if you hadn't followed the trends in comic-reading, you might be thrilled to know you can get them digitally nowadays) all at once, you notice all the best parts. Even the ones that were widely dismissed as awful are really quite compelling, in my humble opinion!

I'm going to have to get a complete Krakoa collection now. Maybe after I've controlled my spending for a bit longer. Or at least not until I next see a big box with 'sale' written on it.

All Ages

That shot of my comic collection in Mind Games: The Experiment actually gives a glimpse of two more comics, apart from the ones I listed in the 'annotations' post (which, incidentally, seems to have got much fewer pageviews than the 'errata' post - I guess it really IS more fun to pick holes in things!) so I thought it was only fair to give them some time in the spotlight too.

Luckily, I haven't rearranged my piles of comics too much since they filmed that bit (it was part of the last bit of filming around my house, when they'd decided what story they wanted to tell and wanted to make sure there was footage to support it), and I can safely identify them from the blurry picture and their position in the cupboard - the one on top of the pile at the back is Last Hero Standing #3, from 2005, and the one out on the right is the Funny Stuff miniature edition that came free with Wheaties breakfast cereal in 1947. An eclectic kind of pair, so let's have a look at them!

I don't know why the third of this five-issue series is on top of one of my piles; all five of them are in the cupboard somewhere, but they must have got separated since last I sorted the things into order. This one is rather tatty all round, in fact, considering I bought it new when it came out in 2005, which maybe shows that it's more something I bought as a fun read and didn't think about much after reading it.

Last Hero Standing is an epic adventure in the MC2 universe. This was a family of Marvel comics launched in 1998, revolving around the flagship title Spider-Girl, about the teenage daughter of Spider-Man, with the other titles also following the theme of the next generation of the Marvel universe, fifteen years on. Yes, Spider-Man had a baby daughter, in 1996. She was quickly wiped out of existence in one of Marvel's periodic bouts of panic that readers will desert them in droves if they change anything about their characters, but Spider-Girl was conceived at a time when Baby May was still fresh in the memories of the type of creator and fan who cared about character development.

Although I'm that kind of fan in principle, I never liked the Spider-Girl comic all that much. Some of the short-lived supporting titles were better, and the idea of a newly-created universe of superheroes that was still connected in a way to the mainstream Marvel comics was definitely appealing. They're "All Ages" comics, meaning that the aim is to market them to new young readers. Marvel tried without great success to get the comics into shops where young readers might learn that they exist, but sales were pretty awful. Spider-Girl lurched along being reprieved from cancellation on a regular basis, but the wider universe wasn't able to support any other titles. By 2005, it was nice to see that the supporting characters were all going to get a moment or two on panel in a new limited series!

You see the general theme here on the first-page cast of characters. For example, Speedball is a goofy teenager in present-day Marvel continuity, so in MC2 he's a mature, grown up, respected hero. The established heroes of the present day are retired or otherwise less involved in superheroing than they used to be, and teenagers have taken over old mantles. It's the kind of thing you wish would happen in the 'real' Marvel universe, but you know never will.

Last Hero Standing, like all the MC2 comics, is the brainchild of Tom DeFalco, a real old-school writer who was passionate about this kind of thing. In fact, this kind of "event" miniseries is the antithesis of what MC2 was traditionally all about - good, old-fashioned self-contained stories in each issue with continually building subplots in the background. This is like an infusion of modern Marvel into the new old-fashioned universe, and probably not what DeFalco would have preferred to write if sales figures had permitted it. But the idea attracted me to the limited series, at least!

The creators of this issue are credited as "Tom DeFalco & Pat Olliffe - script, plot & pencils". I assume that means the traditional arrangement where they create the plot together, Olliffe draws it and DeFalco writes the words, but it's not laid out in the traditional way with 'script' under the first name and 'pencils' under the second. Scott Koblish is credited with "finished art".

Reading this one issue on its own isn't the best way to get into it - the five-issue series is really designed to be released as a trade paperback, or one of the popular little digest books Marvel had some success with around that time. But in the last couple of issues various heroes have been mysteriously kidnapped, and now they're starting to mysteriously come back with shiny black eyes and a new 'grim and gritty' attitude full of enthusiasm to take a more proactive approach to crimefighting. One of them is Spider-Man, who goes out and gets seriously violent with robbers in the street and then picks a fight with superhero Darkdevil.

And meanwhile, Spider-Girl has stumbled through a dimensional doorway along with fellow legacy heroes J2, Wild Thing and Thunderstrike, plus Captain America. And they're fighting an army of Asgardian trolls! The artwork in this comic is really sensational, both in the big battle scenes and the quieter moments. It's what all superhero comics should be like! Captain America isn't happy with these new heroes (he comes across very nicely in MC2 comics as someone who's past his prime but still trying to do his best) and thinks J2 and Spider-Girl have run away and abandoned them, when of course they're just going to save the day. They discover that Loki, arch-foe of the Avengers, is behind everything, but back on Earth he's already put his plan into action! To be continued with a big hero versus hero fight!

It's a pretty good comic all in all, but it didn't manage to generate any better sales for Spider-Girl or the MC2. It's about time they brought them back for another try - I think the general mood of comics is heading back that way.

One thing that seems less likely to make a return is the days when you could get a free comic with your breakfast cereal. But in spring 1947 in America, that was a reality!

A free comic book with your Wheaties! There were four different ones available, two from DC Comics, and two from Fawcett. Which is an interesting arrangement, and the choice of titles to release in miniature form is interesting too - Fawcett went with their two biggest titles, Whiz Comics and Captain Marvel Adventures, but DC went for Flash Comics and Funny Stuff.

Those two titles were both ones that had previously been produced by All-American comics - originally a part-owned sister company, briefly an entirely independent enterprise (at least on paper) but now bought out in full by DC/National. But at this point it was still basically being run as a separate company, with Sheldon Mayer the editor in chief, and he was probably the one to choose which comics to tape to double-packs of Wheaties.

Normal comics of the time had 52 pages, counting the covers (which were made of superior paper). These miniature giveaways, a bit more than half-size, had 32 pages, all on the cheapest newsprint, and you'll never find them in mint condition because they were attached to the cereal boxes with two strips of tape at the top and two at the bottom, and detaching them must have been quite a struggle for Pauline Howe, who's signed this copy on the cover and filled in her name and address on the coupon to send off for Wheaties premiums inside.She wanted the parachute ball kit (one Wheaties box top and 10c) and the navy signal mirror (one Wheaties box top and 25c), but perhaps she didn't have the money. The offer expired December 1, 1947.

Despite the poor condition, the Wheaties comics with superheroes in them command the usual ridiculous prices second-hand, but Funny Stuff can sometimes be found for an almost reasonable sum, because it was full of funny animals!

And funniest of them was Blackie Bear! Fascinatingly, he gets the cover and the first six pages of this miniature edition - in the regular monthly full-size Funny Stuff, that honour almost always went to The Dodo and the Frog. Since they made their debut in #18 (cover-dated February 1947), Blackie had only made the cover twice, and he normally had to be content with playing second fiddle. Which was a shame, because he really was the best of the bunch in Funny Stuff every month, so it's nice to see him and those pesky cubs getting their moment in the spotlight on Wheaties boxes!

It's the cubs who are the real stars. Rather than talking, they communicate by holding up wooden signs, with hilarious effect. In later years, just before funny animal comics died out once and for all, the 'sign language' was dropped and they started using speech bubbles like everyone else, thanks to some lazy artist, but I don't see how anybody could get tired of Blackie failing to realise that the adult authority figure he's talking to is actually just the cubs, one on the other's shoulders, wearing a trenchcoat and 'talking' to him by holding up two signs, one from the sleeve and one between buttons at waist height.

Blackie is followed by six pages of Henry the Laffing Hyena, who's made a poor choice of career...

Six pages of J. Rufus Lion, who's got a Wheaties-themed adventure about box top collections!

Six pages of the Three Mouseketeers (who shouldn't be confused with the more famous Three Mouseketeers who appeared in DC comics only a few years later but are entirely different; and nor should they be confused with the contemporary adventures of Marmaduke Mouse, who also worked for King Louie)

And just three and a half pages, filling the remaining space after the other animals and all the Wheaties promotions, of the usual stars of the series Dunbar Dodo and Fenimore Frog!

These guys are the headline stars whenever DC trawls the archives and tries to interest readers in a funny-animal revival today, but in 1947 they were at best the second-most important stars of DC animal comics - the Fox and the Crow, who were licensed characters and no longer owned by DC, were the big names. If DC would bring back Blackie and the cubs instead, it would probably go down better!

Personally, I might have liked this one more than the adventures of the Flash or Captain Marvel if I'd ended up with it stuck to my Wheaties boxes!