Memory League May

 The World Ranking system in Memory League is quite badly flawed, I've always complained. Having achieved a high ranking, you can keep it almost indefinitely just by signing up to every tournament, even if you lose every game.

Well, I did say "almost indefinitely", because having failed to get through the first round of qualifying for the Pan American Open, I'm now going to sink below that 22nd place I've been undeservedly hanging onto for so long, and bottom out at a level more suitable to my performance in recent years.

So I'm resolving to work on it - play more games, start winning more often! Get my consistency back to the level it used to be! Anyone want to give me a game some time? Or many times? I want to play a lot, right now!

Tex, from West Bromwich

 Which comic has the invincible IRON MAN each week? Which comic contains the fabulous X-MEN each week? Which comic features the mighty THOR each week? The answer, back in 1967 Britain, was Fantastic. And that autumn, if your parents had an exorbitant nine shillings and sixpence to spend on an annual for a Christmas present, you could read not just a full-length story for each of those heroes, but a whole lot of other exciting filler stuff too! 96 pages, including the hardback covers (that's how the pages are numbered, weirdly), half of them in full colour and the other 48 in red-and-black duotone. We're going to look today at some excerpts from the exciting X-Men adventure!

Fantastic Annual 1968 version on the left, original American version (or a modern reprint of it, anyway) on the right. It's a reprint of the third issue of the American comic, from back in 1963. And a subtly altered reprint, too - the editors seem to be worried that the British audience will find out it's an American comic unless they change a few things here and there! As you can see on this first page, Professor X's use of the Americanism "gotten" has been changed to "got". Fair enough. And Iceman's "on the fly" has been Anglicised to "as they fly", which seems a bit strange to me. I didn't realise that was an expression that only Americans would use...

There are rather a lot of unnecessary changes to the dialogue, actually - a lot of the characters have a habit of droppin' the g at the end of words, and the Fantastic Annual restores it to some but not all of the speech bubbles. Iceman is allowed to keep doin' it, it's the bad guys who have their pronunciation fixed for the most part! But the best example of this editing comes on page 7, where Cyclops is investigating a newly-discovered mutant in the circus...

Naturally, "dollars" becomes "pounds", "clams" becomes "quid", and "bucks" becomes... "quid". A little unimaginative on the part of the British translator. But then the carnival barker (a phrase that was left unchanged) calls on Tex the cowboy to take centre stage. "Yes, sir! I'm ready!" he replies. Because the original "Yes suh! Ah'm ready!" couldn't possibly be allowed to stand, could it? Those British readers might have got the impression that this man called Tex, wearing a cowboy outfit, was some kind of American!

But Tex is definitely a local boy. The Angel confirms it on page 17, in the middle of the pitched battle between the X-Men and the circus freaks (who come out on top, impressively enough)...

"Spoken like a true son of the west, my friend! West Bromwich, that is!" The Angel's original reference to West Brooklyn has been quite brilliantly changed for the British audience. I think this is just perfect. Tex obviously sounds like a brummie in this alternate X-Men universe!

West Brom won the FA Cup in 1968 (and have never won a trophy since), but that was still in the future when this annual came out. Their latest achievement as at the publication date was losing the 1967 League Cup final to QPR. Tex was probably at Wembley for that historic first single-legged final and his meanness here obviously stems from disappointment at the result.

I'll have to write more about this annual at a later date. Why does the bottom left panel of the Fantastic page say "who" where the American version says "whom", for example? The British version doesn't look like it's been changed. Will I have to track down an original copy of X-Men #3 to check? Or might that just be taking it too far?

A pair of boobies in a bikini

 Tomorrow, the May of doing things will definitely commence. No more work for three days! And even the Boston Utd game is on TNT, which I don't get, and I doubt the local pub will be showing it.

Meanwhile, here's a picture I keep around in case someone wants to see it. Drawn by Julie Thompson, many many years ago.

May is officially here!

 And before I start doing particularly cool things every day in May, one question has arisen today. If someone sends me a message saying "I understand you are the chairman of the 'World Memory Championships' and I'd be interested in chatting with you," should I disillusion him?

Actually, it's probably cooler to be a former World Memory Champion than a chairman, right? A chairman is the kind of person who's rubbish at memory things but organizes competitions for other, more talented people to compete in! Which, yes, IS something I do, but not with any kind of official "chairman" title, so it's still cool, right?

Actually, the person making that enquiry has a Twitter page that makes him seem really cool himself, so I've already replied and told him what I really am. I hope he's also interested in chatting with world memory champions...

New month resolution

 I had a whole lot of things I was intending to do every day in May, but I've been kept late at the office and now I'm not in the mood to do any of them. Also, it was hot and sunny earlier today and then it started pouring with rain. So I'm officially ruling that May starts tomorrow, and I'll be posting something on my blog every single day! Look forward to it!

We are the Desperate Dan appreciation society

Boston United win on penalties! Again! After another 0-0 draw! I probably didn't miss much by not being there. But that's worth a second blog today, and I do have something else to say anyway... 

You know, I feel like I was unreasonably rude to Americans in that last blog post, and elsewhere on this blog. It's not their fault they don't know we use miles. Someone British probably told them all that once, as a cruel joke. And anyway, I think America is a great country, full of lots of really cool people. Polite ones, too - they'd never be so rude about my country as I am about theirs!

So I really should redress the balance and talk about ways we misrepresent America in British comics, but actually there wasn't much of that left in our comics by 1989. I think Baby-Face Finlayson, Little Plum and the Three Bears were all either gone or about to be dropped from the Beano. Desperate Dan was still starring in the Dandy, of course, but he's not such an interesting subject for blogging about.

I do remember being surprised to find two almost identical Oor Wullie comic strips in the every-two-years collections, in which there was an American visitor to Wullie's home who boasted that everything is bigger in the U S of A, only to find that Wullie's appetite was bigger by far! At that time, I hadn't twigged just how few different stories there had been in the fifty years Oor Wullie had already been running by that point. But the everything-is-bigger American is such a British archetype that I think we should apologise for it. I've seen Americans who've watched Fawlty Towers being confused by the American guest who's so rude to Basil in "Waldorf Salad" - confused not just by his extremely strange accent but by lines like "Couldn't find the freeway, had to come in on some back road called the M5." He's not exactly 'being sarcastic', as I've seen it described, he's being a stereotypical American. American viewers don't get that, because real Americans don't actually do that.

So sorry, American readers. I'll leave you with that time in the Transformers annual when Ronald Reagan described Optimus Prime as a 'lorry'.

'Ere you are, your 'ighness

 Nottingham, England. From the depths of a river of fog emerges the blood moon... It's some kind of omen, obviously, betokening a quite horrifying example of what American comics think England is like!

It's Wonder Woman #28, cover-dated March 1989. It's the post-Crisis re-imagining of DC's superheroes. Fans were variously excited or disgusted by it at the time, but I was entirely oblivious. As I documented a few blog posts ago, I wasn't into superheroes at all just yet; that would take a couple of years to happen. But that time was definitely approaching, and this one might have put me off them completely if I'd seen it! It's not really that great, I'm afraid.

George Pérez, who was one of the world's very greatest superhero comic artists, is the writer of this comic. Chris Marrinan, a pretty good artist recently recruited by DC, drew the pictures. I really wanted to claim he was a greater writer than an artist, but I can't really do that. He definitely wrote some of the Nova comics in my collection that I was looking at just recently! But no, he's an artist, and a good one too. Point is, though, he's not George Pérez, and some of the writing on this comic is kind of embarrassing.

We open with several pages of suspense on the fog-shrouded moors. Because England has fog-shrouded moors all over the place, you know. Nottingham is full of them.

You get the idea. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman is living in Boston at this point (the fake Boston in America, not the real one in Lincolnshire, England) and hanging out with a large supporting cast including Hermes the god while she tries to find her stolen magical lasso. It had also been decided to add Wonder Woman to the cast of DC's new "Justice League Europe" comic as a part-time member who would take part in their adventures when the ongoing plot of her own comic permitted. What this meant in practice is that she appears in the first issue of Justice League Europe, it's mentioned in this issue of her own comic, and then someone must have changed their mind about the whole idea, because her membership in the Justice League is never even mentioned again.

But it comes in handy here as a pretext for her to go to Europe (the Justice League were based in Paris, but it's all "Europe", right?) and investigate the mysterious Dr Minerva in her sinister castle in Nottingham, England. She disguises it as a general celebrity royal visit, and of course the "London Star" newspaper is all over it...

The London Star gets sold in Nottingham, apparently. Or maybe they have it specially delivered to the building that's interchangeably referred to as a 'mansion' or a 'castle'. Since it's the only building we see in Nottingham in this comic - one solitary mansion surrounded by foggy moors - the postman probably doesn't have much trouble finding it. Even when bringing a letter addressed to Prof Minerva, [indecipherable squiggle], Nottingham, England.

And of course Wonder Woman finds her way there too. This first panel is the real doozy:

She's come by taxi. From Paris? Well, presumably from the airport. The taxi driver seems to be Dick Van Dyke. The taxi is very American-looking, but the artist and writer have made an effort here - the driver's on the right hand side.The colourist has made everything green, so it's hard to tell if they're meant to be on a road, or what side of it they're on, but Diana doesn't seem to be standing in the middle of a busy street to talk to him, so it's okay.

And of course, that clever writer has used the one and only thing that Americans know (entirely incorrectly) about Britain - that we measure distance in kilometers. "The mansion's close to four kilometers past those moors there," says the cockney chimney-sweep who drives a New York cab.

See, here's the thing, George Pérez (the late, great artist whom I admire enormously) - Nottingham is a CITY. It isn't a castle surrounded by four kilometers of moors. If, like me, you grow up in the Boston area (real Boston, not fake American Boston), then Nottingham is the coolest big city you could ever dream of seeing! Sixty or seventy miles away, so too far for a regular shopping visit (it helped that Grandma lived close by) but a whole lot cooler than the likes of Lincoln or Peterborough. The biggest and coolest city I was familiar with at the time this comic was coming out, by far! (London was remote enough that it didn't really count - the world was a bigger place back then).

I would have been really annoyed by this comic if I'd seen it in 1989. No acknowledgement that the Boston in America isn't the one I'm familiar with? Well, that's just rude. But getting Nottingham so totally wrong? Unforgivable!

Okay, let's be fair. There are, even to this day, people in Britain to whom Nottingham is just the place where Robin Hood lived. And where Forest play. But they probably assume there's a castle like the one we see here (Nottingham Castle doesn't look much like that, really) and wouldn't be so certain it's without a foggy moor or two. And to be honest, when I was young, I assumed they used kilometres in America. Miles seemed like a strictly British kind of thing, and kilometres would be what a modern, flashy country like America used, right? It still feels kind of wrong when I see Americans talking about miles. But, see, I make sure to keep it a secret, and laugh at them if they try to do me a favour and translate it into kilometers!

Chess nuts

 Boston Utd beat Alfreton on penalties last night in the first round of the play-offs! 5-4, with one crucial and impressive save from our goalie and five perfectly scored spot-kicks. And so, like all people who technically support a football team but only remember it when something good happens, I'm all about the Pilgrims right now! Semi-final away at Scunthorpe on Saturday!

Ahh, Scunthorpe. A Lincolnshire derby that can only ever remind me of the time I went there for a memorable match of my own, back in my schooldays. Incidentally, if you want another reason why I so identify with Simon the Chipmunk, there's one great episode that reveals that Simon (as everyone would expect) loves chess and enthusiastically forms a chess club when he gets the opportunity... but actually isn't very good at the game. Jeanette always beats him easily.

Whereupon Simon quickly makes sure to smile, congratulate the winner, calmly pick up the board and go away somewhere private, and have a screaming tantrum about playing such a stupid move.

Incidentally, this episode was clearly written by someone who knows the basics of chess, but animated by a studio that didn't. You can see in the first picture above that the board is the wrong way around. Other scenes have the board correctly oriented, but the king and queen in the wrong place, and black making the first move. It's the basics, people - get it right!

I also have always had a reputation for being good at chess, just because I'm that kind of person, but am actually not terribly good at it. This even goes back to my schooldays, when on the rare occasion anyone outside of our chess-club clique heard that I was on the school chess team, they'd probably just nod and think that made sense, since I was the kind of person who would be. Nobody really knew just how unsuccessful our chess team was, but suffice to say there'd never be an announcement in assembly or anything to say we'd won something.

As an aside, the one person who didn't assume I was good at chess was my dad. He had an annoying unshakeable belief that I was a really terrible player, to the extent of barely knowing how the pieces moved. He'd picked this up from playing me at the age of five or so, and never updated his mental image. I wasn't as bad as he thought, at least.

But our chess-club gang was me, Noddy, Slosh and Jimmy, and we were extremely cool in our own way. There were other people at the school who were actually better chess players, the kind who had won competitions and things, but they had better things to do than play in the chess club by the time of our golden era, so the four-man school chess team, which travelled around to other schools in regular competition was me and Noddy, Slosh if he could make it that night (Jimmy never wanted to), plus one or both of Keith and Damian, two younger kids who were about as good as my dad thought I was. We seldom won a game, but some of our opponents were on about our level, so there were some fun and exciting nights!

And then there was the trip to Scunthorpe. It wasn't part of the regular chess tournament circuit, it was a strange one-off thing. I can't remember any details about why it happened, but we had a team of six for this event. Slosh, Noddy, me, Keith, Damian and a friend of theirs who I don't think knew anything about chess at all. We went to the match, as always, in the school minibus, driven by Dr Chambers. The Doc, who was the only teacher at the school with a doctorate to his name, was the chemistry teacher and in charge of the chess club. If challenged on the point he said he did know how to play chess, but he could never be persuaded to prove it. His participation consisted of being in the general lab at lunchtimes and allowing the chess club to happen there, plus driving the team to and from matches.

Scunthorpe is a whole forty miles from Horncastle, outside of our usual range, and should have been about an hour's drive. We somehow got lost along the way and the journey took more than three hours. We were all comprehensively thrashed in our games - if memory serves, Noddy's was a longer and closer contest, lasting about twenty minutes, and the rest of us were all polished off in nothing flat. Then we went back home again. It was a great night!

So that was my only previous visit to the town you can't say on Facebook because it's got a rude word in it. In honour of that previous triumph, I'm expecting a 6-0 win for someone in the play-off semi-final on Saturday. Hopefully Boston!