I have no shame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cantabrigian othelloing

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

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

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

Heavens to Murgatroyd

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

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

Between the Lions

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

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

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

A Challenge to my sensibilities

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

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

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

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

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

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

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

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

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

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

When do you feel most inspired to write?

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

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

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

What are you generally interested in writing about?

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

Who are you writing for?

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

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

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

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

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

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

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

Next?

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

I'm a hardcore gamer

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

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

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

Remembering People's Names

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

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

The Old Masters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking the important questions

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

Freezing rain

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

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

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

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

Let's get memorising!

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

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

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

A Methuselah of a blog

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

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

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

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

No Place To Run

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

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

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

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

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

Playing the Aasvogel

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday January 2nd 

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

Sunday January 3rd 

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

Monday January 4th 

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

Tuesday January 5th 

And I would avoid tangling with an Aasvogel

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

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

Thursday January 7th

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

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

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

66 years on, you can't beat the Chipmunks for Christmas!

"Dave, I've been asking for the hula hoop for years. I would like to ask for something new, like roller skates or a new stereo. But I just got to get that hula hoop first. Please Dave.I feel I've been very patient."

 

The Kids of Class 2B

A great traditional thing to find under the tree on Christmas morning is this year's Bash Street Kids Book! Of course, the ones from the mid-1980s, when I was young, were the best, because things were so much better all round in the good old days. But the Kids were of course around long before I was born, and are continuing their misadventures unabated even today, so it's good to see there's at least a Bash Street Kids special on the shelves of Smiths right now, to delight the latest generation of readers!

You might remember how back in May 2022 I went on about how the Kids weren't as good as they used to be, only to find immediately afterwards that the good people at DC Thomson had taken my words to heart and revamped the strip once again. This new collection reprints the strips from that relaunch, with the usual smattering of bonus features to fill the 68 pages (including covers), it's a great successor to the classic books, and I heartily recommend it to anyone still shopping for stocking-fillers!

(Although six ninety-nine for a comic? Spoilt brats these days, getting such expensive things in their stockings. We were happy with a satsuma and a kick up the bum!)

Now, introducing the cast is an important part of this kind of comic, and for me the definitive roll-call of the Bash Street Kids came in the Beano Book 1979 - perhaps more because of it being the first one I read rather than any great literary merit. But I can still reel off that list of the classic nine characters, and I remember being grateful to have a proper checklist, since the weekly adventures wouldn't usually identify everyone by name.

A lot of the strips in the 1979 Beano Book still ended with violent, brutal and furious corporal punishment being meted out on the heroes by a parent or teacher. This was phased out over the eighties as fashions changed. Teacher hasn't wielded his cane in anger for many years now. This year's collection, though, gives us a very nice introduction to the Kids and their personalities - even to the extent of telling us their full names!

Wilfrid's name is misspelt, which is annoying. The Beano needs to hire me as a proof-reader to catch things like this. I inherit this pedantry from my dad, who was a teacher very much in the mould of the Teacher of 2B, and "Wilfird" makes me want to descend on the Beano offices with a cane of my own...

But apart from that, these names aren't all new! They're historically-established, in many cases, dating from the text stories that appeared in the Wizard comic in 1955! I don't own any of these classic comics, but they can be found for sale at reasonable prices in places like here and here. I'm so desperately poor at the moment, that I can't really buy them myself, but... it IS the season of giving, and if anyone was looking for a last-minute gift for MY stocking...

Anyway, the "Bash Street School" stories in the Wizard were narrated by Sidney Pye, and included characters like Death's Head Danny Morgan, Fatty Brown and Jimmy Smiff. This was before the comic in the weekly Beano had settled down into a fixed cast, but the main stars were already there. It's good to see the Kids have, mostly, kept their earliest identities!

A few points - Danny is short for Daniel (that's what Teacher always called him), so that should be mentioned here. Smiffy, as mentioned above, was a Jimmy in at least one Wizard comic, although to be fair he's not the type who can always remember what his name is. His surname, though, has always been given as Smiff rather than Smith before now. Stevie's real name is Super Star? Did he legally change it, or did his parents want to call him that? And check it out - Toots is Kate! I don't know if that's ever been mentioned before...

Yes, I approve of this. Long may the Bash Street Kids continue to wreak havoc!

The crazy 1986 calendar

The cartoon talked about in yesterday's blog post was first shown in October 2022, making its British debut in December that year. The book Cosmic Frontier that Gus and Hunter geek out about (and which Luz's mother was similarly geeky with when she was younger) was written in the nineties about the year 2008. "Can't wait for that new year's party!" Hunter enthuses.

All these dates might be confusing to some, but they feel perfectly natural to one who grew up in the golden age of the Transformers comic published by Marvel UK! It just puts me in mind of the strange chronological confusion of the Transformers' adventures in 1986, as published in the British comic.

By the summer of 1986, the Transformers comic had settled into a nice pattern. The monthly American comic could be reprinted, each issue split in half and spread across two consecutive weekly issues of the British title, and the other two or three weeks of a month could contain original British material, fitting cleverly in between the action of the US stories. And by this time, the British material was much, much better than the American stuff it had been created to fill in time waiting for! It was always a big disappointment when we had to go back to the American stuff after a really good run of British adventures written by Simon Furman!

The summer and autumn of 1986 was glorious - fifteen consecutive weeks of British material, with "In the National Interest" followed by the sensational "Target: 2006!" That was the story that unlocked the way to write British stories going forwards - the American stuff was becoming increasingly interlinked and harder to squeeze British side stories into, but they could now write stories set twenty years in the future and not conflict with the present-day American material at all!

Which is good, because both the UK and US stories in 1986 got into the habit of mentioning specific dates, and in 1986, it all got a bit weird. Here are four pages from the UK Transformers comic...

Transformers №84, cover date 25th Oct '86

(British Transformers comics were published a week before the date on the cover)

Target: 2006 takes place over a five-day period, with maybe a day either side for the prologue and epilogue. One day in the middle of this period, as shown on the time-travelling future Autobots' screen there, is the 11th of October, 1986.

(I mean, I suppose they could be writing in the American format, and it's the 10th of November, but no. By the year 2006, we'll have eliminated all these strange foreign ways of writing dates and standardised everything to the correct British format!)

And so after the whole time-travel adventure has been resolved, we can move on to further adventures for the present-day Transformers, and go back to reprinting the American comic...

Transformers №89, cover date 29th Nov.86

(I'm copying the erratic punctuation of the date on the cover of each British comic here, just because it's another thing I find fascinating. Just not quite fascinating enough to write a full blog devoted to it, just yet...)

This is reprinting the first half of the 21st issue of the American Transformers comic, cover-dated October 1986 and published in June. And set, very specifically, on July 4th. But it definitely follows directly on from Target: 2006, because that story is written to lead into it, with the Insecticons (including Bombshell, seen here), travelling to Earth to go on this mission. Time seems to have gone backwards.

But then, America is a weird and unfathomable place to the young (and somewhat dim) ten-year-old British reader of the time. It was probably news to me that the 4th of July was some kind of special day over there, and I wouldn't have been surprised if you'd told me that in America, July 4th happens in November.

Incidentally, notice that the Marvel UK people have corrected the spelling of "colourist" as usual, but have left "penciler" untouched. Unusually sloppy! But let's move ahead another month, for the Christmas issue of the British comic!

Transformers №93, cover date 27th Dec.86

It was traditional to have a Christmas story in British comics, even if, as in this case, we'd just had four weeks of summer-based American stories and another two to come directly after it. And actually, this British story kind of puts the lie to my claim that the British ones were always better than the American - this one seems like speedily-written filler stuff produced at the last minute when someone realised it was Christmas!

But it's definitely shortly before Christmas 86. Buster Witwicky has put up a non-reusable banner in his bedroom to prove it to us! Does he buy a new one with the current year's date every December? The boy's got too much pocket money.

And again, this one makes specific reference to stories that have appeared in the British comic in the last few months. Even throwing in a last-minute rewrite of the dialogue to cover up for Trailbreaker being in this story when he was meant to be near-fatally damaged during Target: 2006. So we've gone October-July-December in our stories so far - the next one must take place in 1987, right?

Transformers №95, cover date 10th Jan.87

We're back to the American continuity. This is the second half of the 23rd American issue, dated December and published in August 1986. Which makes the date on Donny Finkleberg's cheque there all the stranger - it's October 4th now?

A certain amount of time passes between issues of this continuing story, but it doesn't really feel like three whole months have elapsed since that July 4th adventure. The humans don't seem to make much progress in these three months, and the robots must have spent a lot of time sitting around doing nothing in that period if it really has been that long! And why did an American comic published in late August throw in a date of early October? Has the British time-travel continuity spread across the Atlantic?

I think Donny has just got understandably confused by the way the 1986 calendar works. It was a strange year, but a very fun one if you were a dim-witted ten-year-old who loved Transformers comics!

Let me count the ways

 I have a habit of falling in love with fictional characters. And of using the phrase "falling in love" to excess, even though I acknowledge it sounds all kinds of weird. Don't like weird, don't read my blog.

But when I use that expression, I mean I've found a character who reminds me of me, and who I want to take care of and protect from the world forever. The latest of these (although he hasn't supplanted Simon the chipmunk, who seems destined to be my number one crush forever) is Gus from The Owl House.

Here he is declaring his dream to become an ambassador to the Human Realm and re-establish contact with the giraffes (which of course were banished from the Demon Realm and exiled to Earth long ago, for just being too freaky).

In an attempt to pin down exactly what the magic formula is for this kind of obsession (and fit it into the right number of characters on social media), I compiled a list:

Why I love Gus:

He's a sidekick, and he embraces that role in life

He's little, but he gets to play with the big kids because he's clever

He always cheers people up with a friendly word of support whenever they need it

He loves his dad

He needs more hugs! People don't hug him enough when he's upset!

Also:

He's really really cute!

He's actually a super powerful witch!

He gets really geeky about the things he's interested in!

He's totally me. Exactly the kind of character I identify with.

... Which I think about sums it up. Yes, I do see myself as a perpetual sidekick to other, cooler people. I'm well aware that some, even most, of the people I associate with don't see me like that at all, but I assure you it's true. And Gus is the always-cheerful sidekick to the main characters and their myriad adventures and problems in this series!

But the one episode that really makes me want to hug Gus is "Thanks To Them", the first double-length special of the third and final season. Luz the Human and a small group of Demon Realm friends have become trapped on Earth, leaving behind everyone else to an unknown fate. Luz is hiding the fact she sort of caused the whole thing, introducing evil Emperor Belos to the all-powerful Collector. Hunter is concealing his discovery that he's an artificially-created Grimwalker clone. The others, like Gus, are just dealing with losing all their family and friends...

Luz's mother is impressively accepting of the existence of the magical Demon Realm, the universe-threatening danger and also her daughter's bisexuality, but she's clearly a bit old-fashioned when it comes to sleeping arrangements. So Luz and Amity (involved in a romantic relationship) get to share a bedroom with Willow and Vee (the latter of whom is a shape-changing basilisk in the form of a teenage girl), while the two boys, Gus and Hunter, are sent to bunk down in the basement. And this gives them a heart-to-heart conversation at bedtime...

Hunter is showing off the shirt he's sewn pictures of wolves (mystical beasts from the Human Realm!) to. He cut his finger on the sewing machine, but he's very happy with the result. Gus admires his handiwork.

That looks great! You know, you've been smiling a lot more since we've been here.

Hunter hides the shirt behind his back, and waves his hand in denial.

It-It's not like I don't want to return! I just, uh, need a way to pass the time. That's all.

He folds up the shirt neatly and puts it down by his mattress, getting into bed. Gus settles down into his bed on the couch.

No! It's good to see you happy! One of us might as well be. 

Awkward pause. Hunter looks at Gus, whose usual cheerful mood has dissipated. Hunter is completely unequipped to deal with other people's feelings, and can only wait for Gus to continue.

What was it like to be in the Emperor's Coven for so long?

Hunter thinks about it, lying in bed.

I... trained a lot. I studied a lot. I wasn't really allowed to be around the other scouts. But weekends were nice! I got to leave the castle for missions!

Do you miss it?

I miss... knowing who I'm supposed to be.

Gus rolls onto his back and looks up at the ceiling. Hunter does the same.

I miss my dad.

Gus tugs the blanket up closer around himself. Another awkward pause. Hunter's got a reply this time.

We'll find a way back. We have to.

Gus leaps back out of bed, beaming again and grabs a book!

Oh my Titan! That's a line from this book I found! Cosmic Frontier! It's a story that takes place in... the stars!

And so the two of them get excited about bad science fiction and cheer up again! I really love this scene. It tugs on my heartstrings so much, and it's a shining example of what's so brilliant about The Owl House!

(Although to be fair, I feel the same towards Simon when a girl's going to find out he wrote a love poem about her. I think the secret ingredient to win my heart is just nerds needing hugs.)

Your latest HSBC savings account statement is available to view

I don't really need an email from my bank to tell me that my latest bank statement is available to view. But if they have to send one every month, do they have to illustrate it with weird staged photos like this one?

I'm almost certain that nobody has ever shown such delight and excitement on reading their bank statement online. Or rejoiced in their bank balance while sitting in a scenic location and enjoying an al fresco cup of tea and bowl of fruit.

Or maybe it's just me. Maybe people do that all the time if they're the sort who can afford a state-of-the-art wheelchair or a height-of-fashion woolly hat? But there's no need for the bank to rub it in like that when they're emailing paupers like me about their meagre balance!

All eyes on Vaduz

 I've mentioned before that I love the Nations League. I mean, I'm not really bothered about whether England can avoid messing everything up against the Republic of Ireland tonight, I'm unmoved by Scotland's crunch game with Poland tomorrow and only take a passing interest in what happens between Wales and Iceland the day after. No, the one that fascinates me is the clash of the titans in group D1 tomorrow night, when Liechtenstein play the mighty San Marino!

Is there anyone in the world who hasn't been blown away by The World's Worst Football Team's amazing run of form this autumn? They won a game in September! Conquering the comparatively high-ranked Liechtenstein (currently ranked 200th of the 210 national football teams recognised by FIFA, and thus ten whole places above San Marino) and recording their first win since 2004 (also against Liechtenstein, in a friendly), bringing the all-time total to two games won! And they followed it up in October by drawing with Gibraltar! The San Marino Stadium in Serravalle has become a fortress, where the Sammarinese are unbeatable!

And now they travel to Liechtenstein knowing another win will put them top of the table and promote them to the unheard-of heights of Group C in the 2026 Nations League! Even a draw will get our heroes a play-off against one of the two best fourth-placed Group C teams (currently the comparatively huge countries of Luxembourg and Latvia) and keep those promotion hopes alive! It's all terribly exciting.

I'm not a knight

 There's been a rash of people asking me for memory advice lately (someone dug up an old post on the Art of Memory forum, and so a lot of other new memory-training enthusiasts discovered it and me), and despite all my polite requests, these people still keep addressing me as "sir".

I really don't like that. I get this from my dad, who would often get a new kid in his primary school class who tried to 'sir' him, and got the inevitable reply "Don't call me sir, I'm not a knight!" But it does bother me unreasonably when people call me Sir, or Mr Pridmore, or anything like that. I don't like honorifics. I don't merit any kind of deference or submission, and if you think I do then you're labouring under a misunderstanding as to how the whole friendly learning environment of memory sports works.

I mean, I know I have plenty of friends who would never dream of calling me sir, and doubtless no end of deadly enemies who would contemptuously refuse to call me sir even if I asked them to, but there's just this contingent of people who insist on doing it. Please don't, everyone! Thank you!

Safari Jo(e) does it again!

 There's a big elephant in the room of my occasional posts about the comics work of people who wrote my all-time favourite cartoon, Thundercats. I do have fun appreciating the varied and fascinating comics produced by the likes of Leonard Starr, Bob Haney, Howard Post and Ron Goulart in the course of their long, productive and successful lives, and I'd like to share more wonders from people who wrote really great Thundercats episodes and contributed in one way or another to really cool comics too. But there's a shortage of people who fall into that very narrow category, and there's just that one name that I haven't really been able to do an article about.

And that's Stephen Perry. I've refrained from writing about him for two reasons. Search for him on the internet, if you can find him among all the other notable people with the same name, and you'll only find one thing - the gory details of how he was horribly murdered in 2010. Maybe with a few added notes to the effect that he was penniless and unhappy before he died. It's the kind of thing that deflates a light-hearted ramble about comics, whether you actually mention it or not.

I might have written something before now anyway, if there was a comic of his I wanted to admire at length, but that's the second problem right there. His Thundercats writing was really, really great! There should be some other work of his out there that could captivate me, right? And I've tried my best to plough through Timespirits, which sounds like a personal project that would give full scope to his creativity, and I can't even finish it. Don't ask me why. Likewise, the opening story of Psi-Force, where Perry had the job of introducing the team of pre-designed new characters - something he should have been very good at - doesn't capture my interest at all. There must be something out there, surely, but I've never found it yet.

But someone has been chatting to me on the internet about their recent discovery of the wonders of Thundercats, including reference to this very specific subject, so having got all that bad stuff out in the open, please join me in scrutinising Safari Joe!

Joe with an E, you'll notice. That's the name that appears in the title card of the cartoon, and when they made a toy of the character, he was Safari Joe with an E too. But for some reason when the cartoon episode was adapted into comic form, with Steve Perry again the only credited writer, he'd changed for some reason into Safari Jo!

That's the title page of the 14th issue of Marvel's Star Comics Thundercats series. A bit of a strange double-credit for Steve Perry adapting the teleplay of Steve Perry, and when it was reprinted in the British Marvel comic they only credited him once, but at least it doesn't leave us in any doubt as to who wrote it!

Apart from a few new narrative captions, the script of the comic is basically identical to the dialogue of the cartoon. And it was a story specifically written for the animated form, which loses something when reduced to a comic. There are just two fun points worth talking about in detail...

In the cartoon version of this scene, Wilykit's line "I thought Panthro fixed it!" is missing. Safari Joe's quip is still there, but is a completely meaningless non-sequitur! I mean, even with the feed line it's still pretty meaningless, but at least it doesn't come completely out of nowhere. I assume it was in the original cartoon script, but somehow ended up being cut out to trim the episode for time, by someone who didn't really think it through. It's good to see the comic adaptation making some sort of sense of it, at least!

And incidentally, this whole spaceboarding scene is a specific reference to the earlier episode The Time Capsule, written by Peter Lawrence. This is intriguing, because Thundercats was a series where individual writers had an amazing amount of freedom to do their own thing without editorial interference! It's very rare to see such continuity between episodes written by different people! Which leads into the second fascinating difference...

The technical details of the Thundercats' powers and weapons are a lot more extensive in the comic than they were on screen. Maybe cut for time or pacing again, or maybe added into the comic script because technical jargon works a lot better in written form? But that's not the really fascinating bit. The bit that's really fun is Tygra's weakness - "Tygra cannot swim."

I don't know if that's something Stephen Perry randomly made up, or if it was a line from the character bible. Cheetara's weakness (can only maintain top speed for short distances) is certainly a defined character trait, used by head writer Leonard Starr elsewhere. But then, that's a standard feature of real-life cheetahs, while real-life tigers are excellent swimmers. So who knows?

The point is, that's not how it sounds on screen. In the cartoon episode, we get the absolutely ludicrous line "Except when he's invisible, Tygra cannot swim."

That was clearly an editorial change to Stephen Perry's script. It's handwaving away the episode The Fireballs of Plun-Darr (written by William Overgard), in which Tygra does a lot of swimming. Most but not all of it while he's invisible. Watching the episode for the first time as a ten-year-old, I thought this line extraordinarily stupid and thought they would have been better off just not lampshading it like that [people didn't say 'lampshading' in those days, but you know what I mean].

Because this is exactly the kind of thing that Thundercats never did! As mentioned above, each writer just did their own thing and nobody changed their scripts to fit with what some other writer had said! Except in this case. Was it Peter Lawrence's editing, or Stephen Perry noticing the discrepancy and fixing it? I'd like to know. One of these days I'll track Peter Lawrence down and bombard him with hopelessly minute questions about a cartoon he made forty years ago, but I'll wait till I've gone completely insane first.

Because Panthro's only weakness ("Panthro fears bats") in the following scene is also contradicted by The Fireballs of Plun-Darr! The comical ending of that episode tells us that Panthro's scared of spiders! And neither Lawrence nor Perry felt the need to add an "and spiders too" to the cartoon or comic script!

So that's the fun of Safari Jo or Joe - rest in peace, Stephen Perry! A great hero of cartoon history!

Return of the Hat

"There is probably no better proof of the accuracy of that definition of man which describes him as an imitative animal, than is to be found in the fact that the verdict of humanity is always against any individual member of the species who presumes to differ from the rest. A man is one of a flock, and his wool must be of the general color. He must drink when the rest drink, and graze where the rest graze. When the others are frightened by a dog, and scamper, starting with the right leg, he must be frightened by a dog, and scamper, starting with the right leg also. If he is not frightened, or even if, being frightened, he scampers and starts out of step with the rest, it is a proof at once that there is something not right about him. Let a man walk at noonday with perfect composure of countenance and decency of gait, with not the slightest appearance of vacancy in his eyes or wildness in his manner, from one end of Oxford Street to the other without his hat, and let every one of the thousands of hat-wearing people whom he passes be asked separately what they think of him, how many will abstain from deciding instantly that he is mad, on no other evidence than the evidence of his bare head? Nay, more; let him politely stop each one of those passengers, and let him explain in the plainest form of words, and in the most intelligible manner, that his head feels more easy and comfortable without a hat than with one, how many of his fellow mortals who decided that he was mad on first meeting him, will change their opinion when they part from him after hearing his explanation? In the vast majority of cases, the very explanation itself would be accepted as an excellent additional proof that the intellect of the hatless man was indisputably deranged." 

So said Wilkie Collins in 1857, the golden age of hat-wearing. If only we lived in that era now, but I'm doing my best to keep the hat-wearing dream alive. I've been sadly hatless most of this year, after the previous one was blown under a tube train in February or thereabouts (which was a refreshingly new way to lose a hat, considering that I normally just accidentally leave them behind on trains), and what with having no money I didn't really want to splash out on another one straight away. But today I couldn't resist the sight of a cool black hat on sale on a market stall, and splashed out a tenner on it. No longer will Victorians think me mad when I invent my time machine and go back to the good old days!

Collins goes on to observe of his hero Andrew Treverton: "Local reports described him as having bought the first cottage he could find which was cut off from other houses by a wall all round it. It was further rumored that he was living like a miser; that he had got an old man-servant, named Shrowl, who was even a greater enemy to mankind than himself; that he allowed no living soul, not even an occasional charwoman, to enter the house; that he was letting his beard grow, and that he had ordered his servant Shrowl to follow his example. In the year eighteen hundred and forty-four, the fact of a man's not shaving was regarded by the enlightened majority of the English nation as a proof of unsoundness of intellect. At the present time Mr. Treverton's beard would only have interfered with his reputation for respectability. Thirteen years ago it was accepted as so much additional evidence in support of the old theory that his intellects were deranged. He was at that very time, as his stockbroker could have testified, one of the sharpest men of business in London; he could argue on the wrong side of any question with an acuteness of sophistry and sarcasm that Dr. Johnson himself might have envied; he kept his household accounts right to a farthing, his manner was never disturbed in the slightest degree from morning to night, his eyes were all quickness and intelligence—but what did these advantages avail him, in the estimation of his neighbors, when he presumed to live on another plan than theirs, and when he wore a hairy certificate of lunacy on the lower part of his face? We have advanced a little in the matter of partial toleration of beards since that time; but we have still a good deal of ground to get over. In the present year of progress, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, would the most trustworthy banker's clerk in the whole metropolis have the slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his chin?"

... and I fully support his views on beardiness, too! I do take personal credit for making beards fashionable again, having worn one since the time when nobody else did, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before once more we live in enlightened times when anyone venturing outside the house hatless is shunned as a lunatic!

By the way, you really should read "The Dead Secret" - it's a criminally overlooked masterpiece of Collins' early days as a writer. Read the book, wear a hat and a beard, or I'll think your intellect is deranged!

Not enough hours in the day

 Except today, of course. Today has the right number of hours, apparently. I don't know if it's the extra hour or just that I've been so busy just lately, but today I've got so much done, I'm really impressed with myself! I've talked to all the people I've been needing to talk to, sorted out everything I've been needing to sort out, generally done everything. And it's only quarter past five now!

I should live on Mars. Days there last 35 minutes longer than days here, I'm told. It's clearly what I need, and the commute to work would be easy enough if I build a fast spaceship.

It's an improvement!

 The first two rounds of the Microsoft Excel World Championship were a lot of fun! I certainly found the first one easier than the second, but I wasn't too disappointed with how I performed in both. And I did say Brittany Deaton is awesome, so I don't mind losing to her. Reaching the round of 64 is a new high for me! Onwards and upwards next year!

This is the important bit of the draw:

But if you want to look at the whole thing and notice that my scores wouldn't have beaten a lot of opponents, the full details can be seen by squinting at this little picture, or clicking on it. The tasks for the morning session (yellow in the left-hand border) were different from the ones in the afternoon session (green), so the scores aren't comparable between the two.

Now I can happily spectate the remaining rounds, especially the climax in Las Vegas at the start of December! Excellent!

Weh!

I've now finished watching The Owl House, and still think it's awesome... what am I going to watch my way through now? I need to find some more good cartoons I haven't previously heard of. I'm going to ask everyone for recommendations! Any suggestions will be gratefully received!

Or maybe I'll watch the whole series again now. Especially the ones with Gus in a starring role. He's my new hero.