It was a Ford's voice

You might have noticed that I've been on something of a childhood-nostalgia kick just lately. My brother's been spending the week at my place, in celebration of his 45th birthday - an age so alarmingly ancient that it would drive anybody back to their infancy, even if we hadn't been sent an enormous pile of childhood photos to look through as well!

And one thing I've been recollecting is what was probably the second-coolest epic dream I had as a child (I'll have to tell you about the very coolest one some other time), and how I can pin it down to an almost exact date, because it related to the plot of this issue of the Transformers comic!

I think all my blog-readers need to read through this comic before I tell you about the dream it inspired - and please do read it in the right historical context. The autumn of 1986 was a very exciting time. I turned ten years old on October 14th, I was in my last year at primary school, and most significantly of all, there was the most amazingly thrilling and exciting story in Transformers! My parents must have separated at around this time too, but that made little or no impression on my conscious or subconscious mind, quite possibly because the Transformers comic was just so cool, I didn't pay attention to anything else.

The cover date is October 4th, 1986. The internet seems fairly certain that Marvel UK's cover dates at this point were the off-sale date, and the comics were released the previous Saturday. We got our comics (Transformers and the Beano) every week on Sunday, along with a Sunday Times for our father, from the newsagent in Tattershall, about a four mile drive away. We really did live in the middle of nowhere.

But that means I must have first read this one on Sunday 28th September - which was actually my dad's fortieth birthday. I'm sure I would have given him a card, and possibly even a present too, although he was a hopeless person to buy things for. And not being someone who celebrated birthdays, I'm sure he wouldn't have minded at all that his adoring sons spent the whole day reading this comic about toy robots and the Secret Wars sticker album that came with it as a free gift!

We're in part 3 of the unprecedentedly epic story, "Target: 2006", which was the first that British Transformers fans had heard of the upcoming theatrical Transformers movie - a concept so amazing that it captured the imagination of everyone in the country (except maybe the ones a bit older than nearly-ten).

The British Transformers comic divided its time between reprinted American stories and (much superior) original British adventures, worked into the same continuity. We'd had a run of eight consecutive weekly British issues over the summer containing American reprints (the US Transformers comic #17-#20), which gave ample breathing space to run a long string of UK original material - the four-part "In the National Interest" in №74-№77, followed immediately by the amazing eleven-part "Target: 2006" before it returned to the American comic.

(Incidentally, #21 of the American series is meant to follow immediately from #20, with Skids returning from his solo adventure. The dialogue was changed when it was printed in the UK comic to say that he was going to wait around for a while to let his wounds heal before going back to rejoin the Autobots. The UK comic was good at that kind of thing.)

If you haven't already, please go out and buy the whole of Target: 2006 in its collected edition. You won't regret it! Obviously it's best appreciated when read one weekly installment at a time, over eleven weeks in 1986, but the collected edition is the second best option.

In the story so far (and despite this being 'part 3', the 'prologue' in №78 is really just part of the story, so there have actually been three previous episodes), as the characters remind us here, the three senior Autobots have disappeared, three mysterious new Decepticons have arrived from the future, senior Decepticons Megatron and Soundwave have been taken out of action, new Autobot Ultra Magnus has arrived from Cybertron, and all kinds of things have happened. There's no shortage of incident in these 11-page chapters!

But what's really innovative in this particular chapter is the storytelling structure. Ironhide narrates it in the first person, from a point some way in the future of where the story left off last week. And he's telling us in flashback what has happened since we last saw him. It's fascinating and was a completely new narrative style to me at the time - it's no wonder it stuck in my brain! The tantalising mystery of exactly what Ironhide is doing, digging and lifting rocks, runs all through the chapter, outside the scope of the main story.

I think everybody was looking forward to seeing Ultra Magnus fighting Galvatron (they were the new big toys, released in time for Christmas shopping that year, and heavily promoted as "The New Leaders" and stars of the still-mysterious upcoming movie), but I for one didn't mind the slow build-up to the inevitable conflict. It was nice to see all the other Transformers get something to do - the American comics very rarely did that, strangely enough, with the focus often being more on one or two individual Transformers, and a lot of human supporting characters. Target: 2006 ignores the humans completely and gives us an all-robot cast! I wholeheartedly approved of that kind of thing!

Of course, some Autobots are more prominent than others in this story. Hoist (the green and orange truck there in the third panel) is bizarrely neglected throughout Target: 2006. He's in about three panels of the whole epic! And the omission is even more strange when you consider he's supposed to be the maintenance guy, who gives the Autobots their regular tune-ups and services. With chief medical officer Ratchet having disappeared, surely Hoist should be the emergency medic? But he doesn't seem to do anything like that here.

Not that I particularly cared about this in 1986 - that kind of quibble is strictly the province of grown-up me. As is wondering why neither Hoist nor Mirage appear in the rest of this issue, when Mirage doesn't look damaged so much as just upside-down. I guess it was more severe than it looks. Incidentally, the American comic had several of these Autobots already on the long-term-injury list at this point, but the British reality has them just fine and dandy. Gears seems to be back on his feet here too, having been badly damaged back in the Dinobot Hunt storyline, but that's not unreasonable, since he's meant to be something of a tough guy. The American comic was downright weird about Ratchet's inability to fix his friends for months and years on end.

This whole comic is really, really great at making you want the toys of these characters! It's October, and even if you haven't got a birthday coming up, everybody is making a Christmas list by now! The British comic actually only rarely had that kind of effect, even though it was the original reason for the Transformers comic existing - the priority for Simon Furman was always to tell a great story rather than to spotlight the newest and most expensive toys on the shelves (well, except those rare occasions when he was directly ordered to do just that), but this issue happens to do both, really well! The next chapter moves to the other plot thread, on the planet Cybertron, where some of the foremost characters are non-toy-based ones who were made up for the British comic, and a couple of characters whose toys were only available in the USA.

Eight against one? I only count seven Autobots there. Hoist is apparently still putting Mirage back on his wheels, Jetfire is up in the air, Hound and Ultra Magnus are back at the base (along with the injured Autobots and Omega Supreme), Smokescreen and Tracks are... somewhere else (Ironhide 'gets' them in a couple of pages), and that seems to account for all the active Autobots. Maybe Ironhide just can't count.

The classified ads were a part of every Transformers comic. These shops and special events seemed very exciting, but at this point in time I never got to go to the big cities where they existed. Well, Nottingham on very rare special occasions, maybe. But although Nostalgia & Comics in the Broadmarsh Centre no longer exists, and nor even does the Broadmarsh Centre, the original one in Birmingham (now called Worlds Apart) is still where it always was, and just as cool as ever!

I really liked Jeff Anderson's art in this issue (the storyline had multiple different artists, each doing a chapter or two) - Geoff Senior was the particularly sensational artist, but Anderson successfully makes all the characters look like robots, while also giving them a great range of facial expressions. The colouring is great too, making Galvatron look so shiny and metallic; the British comic had access to much better-looking artistic techniques than the American stories did, so it was always a bit disappointing to go back to the ugly-looking US material.

The Constructicons never got much in the way of personality, poor guys. And since their toys were among those who weren't sold in this country, they always had a slight unattainable mystique that made us want to read about them, but it's fitting that they only get a cameo in this particular comic, since it's otherwise full of the toys you could find in Woolworth's, Argos or wherever your parents did their Christmas shopping! And who could resist asking for Galvatron, after a display like this?

The complete and utter humiliating defeat of the heroes was quite shocking, if not all that unusual for the British Transformers comic - 'Dinobot Hunt' ended with an unequivocal Decepticon victory. But this issue ends back with Ironhide in the present day, and what is he doing?

He's digging up the ultimate evil (until Galvatron came along) enemy, Megatron! And also Soundwave! I really didn't get what was going on at the time I read this, and was anxious to see what would happen next issue. And of course what happened next issue was the other plot strand of Target: 2006 - we didn't get any follow-up on this story, or that cliffhanger scene it ends with, until the following week, in №83! I had a whole two weeks to stew on the implications of this story, and it's no wonder my dreams got to work on producing a continuation!

Of course, there was still a bit more of the comic to read, after the main story had finished. That was another difference from the American comics - in Britain we always had a back-up strip, and a couple of other little features...

Lew Stringer's Robo-Capers were a regular weekly fixture. It was now the only comedy mini-feature in Transformers, with Mychailo Kazybrid's Matt and the Cat having ended with №73 - in the early days, there were no end of other bits and pieces of filler in Transformers, but it was gradually developing into a comic that focused primarily on the main title feature. No British comic could possibly be without a Lew Stringer strip, though! The very idea is unthinkable!

And everyone wanted a BMX in 1986. I don't think many people particularly cared about buying special oil for it, but maybe this advert generated a couple of sales. I (probably) got a BMX for my birthday on October 14th, although as usual I've had to rely on my brother's superior autobiographical memory to tell me about it. It sounds right, though, and even with my own dull memory I can confirm that I never once oiled the thing.

The collected edition of Target: 2006 doesn't include the fact files. This one about Ultra Magnus gives us information about his origins that aren't mentioned in the comic stories themselves, and really should be read as an integral part of the whole storyline. Fact files in the Transformers comic were generally just lifted from the American material, but these ones were different.

And then of course there's the letters page. Grimlock had only just taken over from original letters-page host Soundwave, and the letters printed here are just catching up with the reaction to the new regime. I preferred Soundwave - he was an evil Decepticon, after all, and could be very nasty to letter-writers and Autobot-lovers. Grimlock, for all his rough and tough attitude, was still a goodie, and everyone secretly rooted for the baddies in comics (generations of British comic readers were taught by Dennis the Menace that this was the correct moral stance to adopt, especially in the eighties, when Dennis and similar characters were quite remorseless in their bullying of softies!)

And then there was Hercules. Transformers back-up strips were whatever American series Marvel UK had access to, with the sole criterion for suitability for the Transformers comic being that there was at least one robot, or something that looked like a robot, in it. So the Hercules limited series, in which he's accompanied by a robot Recorder, was an obvious choice. The previous back-up strip was Rocket Raccoon, and when Hercules finished it was Spitfire and the Troubleshooters. Hacked up into five or six-page chapters, the stories were never very readable, and certainly not something I'd do more than cast an uninterested eye over for the sake of completeness.

Ooh, it's Galactus. If I hadn't been so excited by the Transformers story, that might have provoked a bit of a reaction from me. Galactus, after all, features in the Secret Wars sticker album that came free with this comic! Which was, in fact, my first introduction to a lot of Marvel superheroes - I hadn't read the Secret Wars comic from Marvel UK, or more than a handful of other superhero comics here and there. My obsession with superheroes didn't start until my teenage years - at the age of nearly-ten, I didn't know much about the whole concept of superheroes except the few random fragments I'd happened to see in passing. Although those did include a couple of really really great Spider-Man stories, which gave me a basic grounding in just how good they could be!

We did indeed reserve Transformers with our newsagent, although there was really no need to fill in this form. It did mean that all our Transformers comics came with PRIDMORE written in capital letters on the cover - this copy I've scanned here isn't the original (which was read to pieces decades ago) but a more recent acquisition. I like that this form makes it clear you have to get your parent or guardian's signature before you can reserve the comic with your newsagent - perhaps there had been cases of parents being taken by surprise for demands of 30p for a comic their child had ordered!

And the back cover is an advert for The New Leaders! Which turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. Ultra Magnus is fleetingly the Autobot leader during the movie, but never in the comic stories. Still, at this point we all assumed he was going to take over Autobot leadership imminently, and were surprised when it never happened. Since the American comic (somehow) didn't have to use Ultra Magnus and Galvatron, they were reserved for the British stories, which had to fit into the American continuity in between issues. Poor Magnus never had a chance of ascending to the position of New Leader.

Now, as for this dream I promised to tell you about. It must have happened during the fortnight between reading this issue and reading the one where the Earth-based side of the storyline resumed, and have been spawned by my impatience to find out what was going to happen next! I can get even closer to fixing an exact date when I dreamed it, in fact, because I'm almost certain it was at our mother's house in Boston. At this point in time, we were spending every Tuesday and Wednesday night, and Fridays and Saturdays of alternate weeks, at Willoughby Road - an equitable arrangement presumably intended to keep everyone sort of happy, though I'm not sure it succeeded. I could certainly have done without the mid-week journeying all the way to Boston, ten miles away from our father's house, with school being nearly five miles more out the other side, but does anyone ask my opinion? I tell you, childhood is rough, and the only mitigating factor is that I didn't actually care in the slightest, and was really only interested in things like the Transformers comic.

(International readers of this blog might like to know, incidentally, that the 'Boston' I'm complaining about here is the real, original, genuine Boston, in Lincolnshire, England, and not that fake one in Massachusetts that some people think of when they hear 'Boston')

This wasn't the only time my dreams have provided an ending for a story I was half-way through. To this day I can't hear about the Doctor Who story The Keys of Marinus without struggling to remember which bits of it actually happened and which were part of the dream I had when I fell asleep half way through reading the novelisation. But in this case, I was actively involved in the next installment of Target: 2006! In fact, I was hanging out with the Autobots in our bedroom at Willoughby Road - I forget which ones, but Trailbreaker was definitely standing in the corner and supervising proceedings - and trying to make contact with the future. There was a small hole in the space-time continuum on the wall of the room (the bump in the wall made by the disused chimney), represented by a sort of pattern of blue and purple dots of the type you'd see in comics where this kind of thing happened, and by means of flying a kite through this hole, we were trying to establish a link to the Autobots of the year 2006.

There was a lot of static, but something definitely got through, and we heard a voice saying something. One of the Autobots told me excitedly that it must be a voice from the future, because it was a Ford's voice, and the only Ford among the Autobots is Ironhide, who's currently absent "digging his own grave", as seen in the comic.

I do love that Transformers who turn into distinct makes of car would have distinct voices. This is a wonderful innovation of my subconscious mind, and really needs to be worked into the next Transformers movie. Ironhide, of course, being originally a Japanese toy, turns into a Nissan rather than a Ford, but I didn't know that at the time, and he had a distinctly American accent on the cartoon, so naturally I'd think Ford.

But establishing contact with the future was a pivotal moment that meant the Autobots would be able to defeat Galvatron after all, despite their crushing defeat! All thanks to me! And so, having saved the day and brought Target: 2006 to a satisfactory conclusion, I woke up and told my brother all about the dream. He said I was making it up.

I don't want to alarm you...

... but Mad Karnock and his evil Karnoids are causing a lot of problems for Manta Force and the Viper Squad on Earth's twin planet.

 Because on a hot summer day, sometimes it's the most intelligent course of action to (instead of going to work) play with some really cool toys.

Grr! You American pest!

 I'm very grateful to an unknown blog-reader for informing me last month that the "Baby-Face" Finlayson comic libraries I so admire were the work of Henry Davies and not, as I had blithely assumed for all these years, Ron Spencer. It's nice to give credit where it's due, at least eventually!

And now, thanks to my brother, I've just got my hands on the Beano (No. 2338, May 9th, 1987) with Baby-Face's final weekly appearance, in which he tangles with a conspicuously off-model Dennis the Menace and the Beano editor, and gets himself posted back to America.

I wouldn't like to offer an opinion on who drew this one, under the circumstances, but it's not a very thrilling end to Baby-Face's Beano career. I grew up with the Britain-based "cutest bandit around" incarnation, tangling primarily with British-uniformed policemen, and the notion of him as an American bandit was by this point strictly confined to the comic libraries, so the idea of sending him back where he came from didn't really resonate with me as a fitting ending. I did always like those captions at the end of a final strip for a character who'd been dropped - things like "Well, that feast will keep The Three Bears busy for a while! Next week you can see [whoever replaced them] on this page!"

Back in May 1987, there's a trailer in this one for the two stars who'd be making their debut next week - Little Monkey and Karate Sid. As I recall, Little Monkey didn't last long at all, and though Sid had a bit more staying power, he never really made the big time. Not even when he acquired a fire-breathing dragon sidekick!

The League of Extraordinary Memory

 Hey. everybody, it's time to sign up for a new season of Memory League! If you're interested in fast memorisation of cards, numbers, words, names and images, come and join the fun!

Especially if you're an old-timer who hasn't been around for a while! I really want to build up more of a community of memory weirdos in this country especially - it's dwindled away of late, and I haven't had the time or money to arrange things myself. I'll see what I can do on the cheap and see if we can get another Friendly Championship, like in the good old days, up and running!

Meanwhile, head over to the Art of Memory forum and register!

Running activities

 Yes, I'm officially back in training! We started out the way I did last year around this time (it was May 19th last year, now I come to look it up. Feels like an eternity ago!) with a Cooper test and maximum push-ups. We're not going to follow exactly the same training regime as last year, but something along the same lines - only this time, I don't have to keep it a secret, and I can tell all my blog-readers about it! Aren't you thrilled?

I don't know who Cooper was, but he/she/it (it might have been the car) decided that the way to test people is to see how far they can run or walk in twelve minutes. Last year I managed to stagger only a short distance (I'm not sure exactly how far, because I didn't have the Runkeeper app yet; I have an idea it was just over 800m), but I worked up to an impressive 1.43km by September. This time, starting off at a comfortable pace, it was 1.21km, which I still think is pretty good for a brisk walk. And since I accidentally set Runkeeper to measure 'running' instead of 'walking', it told me I'd broken all my records for running activities!

But my ability to do push-ups has come on by leaps and bounds. At that first assessment a year ago I managed five before collapsing. At my final assessment in September I did 22. Today it was 25, and I'm sure I can get even better with a bit of regular training! Anyone who shouts "Drop and give me twenty" at me in future will have no cause to complain!

I'm in training

 I'm not in training for anything, but ASICS are apparently keen to "make sure you continue with exercise in whatever style and approach works for you," and are paying for Geoff to give me a personal training session once a week.

I assume they're paying him, anyway. Maybe they just told him to do it. But anyway, I'm getting trained. I have told them that I'm not even going to any memory competitions or anything, for strictly financial reasons, and thus even if (as demonstrated by an actual scientific study) physical exercise helps with performance at mental competition, it's pretty redundant in this case, but I've been assured that that doesn't matter in the slightest.

And so, in keeping with my philosophy of doing whatever someone tells me it would be a good idea to do (one of these days I'll meet that legendary person who tells friends to jump off a cliff), if training is what I should be doing, then by thunder I'll train. But without an officially-approved schedule of exercise, I'll have to decide exactly how to do this whole training thing myself! I'll consult with Geoff and see what he thinks. Maybe we'll just watch cartoons every week when he comes here.

Okay, this is a new thing!

 A new thing for me, that is. And a new thing for Britain, but not a new thing for France, where it's been going since 1987, and the rest of the French-speaking world, which has joined the party over the years.

It's "Logic and Mathematical Games", the British edition of which took place at Coventry University yesterday in the small-scale, friendly way that I always love competitions to happen. I'd certainly never heard of the French competitions before, and everybody there had never heard of the various mental calculation and mind sports competitions that exist in this country, which reminds me just how much this kind of thing always runs in its own little circle, gradually expanding and maybe one day intersecting with something similar.

But I came second (out of seven) in the "General Public" category, and I have to say that the questions weren't particularly difficult if you like puzzles and have a basic grounding in geometry. I'm slightly lacking in the latter, but I'm going to brush up on it in preparation for the next event (an online thing in October, apparently). Entry was free, refreshments were provided, and I won an Amazon gift voucher for £10! I need to spread the word to all the mathematical and puzzly types I associate with.

I also got to spend the day hanging out with one of my closest friends, having spent the bus journey to Coventry trying to remember what he looks like (I was thinking a couple of inches shorter than me, with black hair, but he's actually a bit taller, and it's light brown. I was picturing the right kind of glasses, though.) and after he'd fortunately greeted me from across the room, I took the opportunity to discreetly ask him what his real name is, in case it surprises people that I don't know it.

I've known him for many years now, he's been round to my house a couple of times, but our interaction is mostly internet-based, using nicknames. This is the kind of social circle I have. And now I've really made an effort to remember what he looks like (on this at least our sixth real-life meeting) I should be fine next time!

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.