How to become a superhero comic fan

 It can be a long and surprisingly circuitous process, you know. I haven't always been into superheroes. I can date the time I became a 'real' superhero comic fan quite exactly, in fact, having recently come into possession of some important historical artifacts [by way of having my brother's stuff in my spare room]. They're the brief DC interlude in my Marvel comics fandom, and I really never give them enough credit.

It's the summer of 1990, I'm thirteen going on fourteen, and my comics experience up to this point has consisted mostly of the Beano and similar titles, plus the Transformers comic from Marvel. Transformers had been going since autumn 1984, it had been really fantastic, but by 1990 it was past its peak and declining steadily. I needed another comic to get excited about.

And I came across this one (or maybe one from a month or two earlier) in WHSmith in Boston. Now, I'd read superhero comics here and there before - backup strips in Transformers, occasional other Marvel summer specials and annuals, but nothing regularly. I'm not sure what induced me to buy Superman Monthly - monthly comics still hadn't really caught on in Britain, though I'd been very excited by the short-lived Dragon's Claws from Marvel in 1988/89, and read a few others during Marvel's attempt to sell American-size monthly comics to British readers. That era was well and truly dead by 1990.

Superman, though, was in the larger British comic size, and I think I must have just picked it up in Smiths and liked it. It wasn't just Superman, you see, it also featured the Justice League International, and that was really the selling point...

Millennium is here! This, in fact, was a problem. The death knell for the British tradition of reprinting American superhero comics (which had thrived for the previous couple of decades, although I'd ignored it almost entirely). See, when American comics were self-contained, it was easy to reprint them in Britain like this without causing confusion. But after the success of "Crisis on Infinite Earths", DC and also Marvel had started to do regular 'events' like Millennium, in which lots of different comics would tie into a wider storyline. The publishers of Superman Monthly found themselves with months of side stories to a bigger epic (published in different comics, most of which British readers would never get to see) and had to run lengthy text features explaining what was going on.

I didn't really mind that - the Superman stories (John Byrne's rebooting of Superman) were all right. I didn't really appreciate that it was the first ever total rebooting of the character after fifty years of publication, because I didn't know the history. The Justice League, though, I found really intriguing, even though it was almost always referring to and crossing over with other comics that only existed on the other side of the Atlantic. I particularly liked the story with the Suicide Squad, which ran through late 1990.

This launched a very brief era of my life in which I would have told you that DC's superhero comics were much better than Marvel's, because DC had lots and lots of different superheroes, whereas Marvel only had a small handful of them.

I don't know why I thought that. I'd read Spider-Man comics with guest stars and references to multiple heroes. I'd read the Secret Wars sticker album, back in 1986 - lots of heroes in that, easily as many as in the Justice League and Suicide Squad. But I was just left under the impression that DC was a bigger and better universe than Marvel. Maybe I'd have continued thinking that for years, if I hadn't wandered into the book department at the back of Smiths one day...

This book has been read to pieces over the years, as you can see. Actually, that fateful day in Smiths they had two Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe - volumes one and four. It was number four that I picked up, read, and was fascinated by. But having spent a long time poring over its contents, I decided to buy volume one, and then come back and get the later volumes at a later date.

The first part of the plan was executed; I never saw another volume on sale anywhere, ever again. Even volume four disappeared from the Smiths shelves by the next time I went in there.

But that was okay - I read this book extensively, and became an expert on all Marvel's characters from A to Circus of Crime! Superman and the Justice League were forgotten, and I was a dedicated Marvel fan for years and years to come!

 As I said, I'd read summer specials and things with Marvel heroes in them before. Way back in 1985* there had been this one, with a second story (reprinted from Marvel Team-Up #145 in America, though I didn't know that at the time) that blew my mind and expanded my perception of what a superhero comic could be. It was written by Tony Isabella, drawn by Greg LaRocque, and featured the supervillain Blacklash going through a very bad time.

So it was a real delight to see that Blacklash had his own two-page entry in the Official Handbook, documenting that story and others!

*Can I just point out that I have SCOURED the internet today, trying to confirm that this was the summer special of 1985. I've gone through my comic collection to find ads, and eventually been able to definitively rule out any other publication date it might have been. It definitely couldn't have been 1984, despite what the Spider-Fan website says; that was when the reprinted stories were originally published in America. This was a very very important comic for me, and it's outrageous that the internet contains only scattered, vague and inaccurate documentation of it!

Okay, rant over. Let's read all about poor Blacklash.

But the one that really intrigued me, somehow, was Alpha Flight. I'm not sure what it was - the Avengers were in the Handbook too, there are more of them, and I'd heard of them before. But Alpha Flight caught my imagination. They do look very cool in these headshots, don't they?

And so in the summer of 1991, when I explored the world of imported American comics by mail order - I'd seen classified ads for comic shops ever since the mid-eighties, but only now decided to send off for a catalogue from one - it was the latest Alpha Flight that I bought. Starting with #100, I became a regular reader, although to be fair that era wasn't much good. It did prompt me to find back issues in an attempt to find the lineup from the handbook (five or six years out of date by this point), which led to me discovering the glorious Bill Mantlo days of the title. From that point onwards, I was hooked on superhero comics, and dread to think how much money and time I've dedicated to finding and reading them ever since!

And it might have been different if those Official Handbooks hadn't been on sale in Smiths in Boston. Without them, I might have become a DC fan and dismissed Marvel for years! Or I might have given up on superheroes altogether, because let's face it, those Superman and Justice League comics were mediocre at best. Maybe I would have found another hobby to waste my life on...

Weak links

 As I've mentioned before, I like to see in Blogger's stats that someone has been looking at old blog posts of mine that I hadn't thought about for years - such as this one in which I start by mentioning The Weakest Link and move on to apologising for insulting the creator of Mullein Fields, a webcomic that has long since disappeared from the internet.

This is why the Wayback Machine is the most important thing in the world. When you see an old blog post that links to a disappeared page with the cryptic comment "this is me and my brother when we were that age", you can usually still rediscover exactly what it was talking about just by researching the web archive. Here it is:

Actually, seeing that old post again was a timely reminder that this is very much still me and my brother now - I did, after all, just post a blog last week in which I tell him I love him by writing an extensive essay about Alvin and the Chipmunks, insulting him subtly and slipping a message of affection in at the end. I mean, he was in the next room at the time I was writing it...

So thanks to the person or robot who went and had a look at that 2005 post of mine, because it shows you're keeping up very impressively with my current and past preoccupations! And can I repeat the request made in that post for more blog comments here, please? Say hello if you're out there! Stay in touch! I'm going to write about Excel and Superman and lots of other things in the near future!

Mathematical games!

 Remember the Logic and Mathematical Games that I went to last year, having found out that such a thing existed the day before? Well, now I can give you all advance notice about the next one! May 25th, in Coventry! I recommend everybody go along and give it a go - it's great fun!

(I probably can't go myself, though - remember that puppet show? There's a clash.)

We hope this message finds you well, and radiating with the same enthusiasm you brought to the Mathematical and Logical Games last year.

We are thrilled to announce the return of the challenge: the British Finals 2024 will again be held at Coventry University.

With this e-mail we are extending to you our personal invitation to dive back into the world of puzzles, problem-solving, and the pure joy of mathematics.

Please find enclosed a poster with all the details. If you know someone who shares your passion for mathematics and puzzles, or who is just curious, please invite them to join our community.

Thank you, and looking forward to seeing you at the Games (and our fun training sessions).

 

https://bfmg.maths.coventry.domains/

 

To participate, and for further information, just drop an email to info@bfmg.maths.coventry.domains with your name, surname, town, date of birth, and category.

 

With warmest regards,

The Organizing Committee

Bromance

I mentioned previously how surprisingly great I find the new "ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks" cartoon, and it has to be said that a large part of why I like it so much is the way it portrays the everyday home lives of the Seville siblings - particularly Simon. There are multiple episodes that really make me feel for Simon, just because I recognise myself in him so strongly, and the episode I'm going to spotlight for you all today is one of the very best of these. It has its moments of sympathy for all three chipmunks, in fact, and really presents a believable and accurate family dynamic. I can see my own childhood in these stories perfectly represented!

Incidentally, fans of the various Chipmunk incarnations over the years should know that in this latest world Simon is the oldest, Alvin the middle child and Theodore the youngest, and there's an unspecified age gap between each of them. In the eighties series they were explicitly triplets and Alvin mentions in one episode that he's the oldest (by five minutes), while back in the sixties Alvin is the smallest and probably youngest of them. It can get a bit confusing.

As I prepare to bid a fond farewell to my brother, who's moving back to China after an impressive four-year covid-related exile, I think there's no better episode to focus on than "Bromance", written by chief chipmunk of the Bagdasarian family, Janice Karman.

We open in the living room at home, and a typical family moment. The computer animation in this new series does have its serious limitations, but the well-written and well-directed stories get around them very nicely for the most part. And the things it does well, like facial expressions, are absolutely wonderful! So is the dialogue, which is always snappy, funny and (impressively when you consider it's chipmunk-speech) very well delivered by the actors!

Oh, oh, can I play?

Sorry, Theodore - Alvin and I are at the final level against the grand general of the undead army, and, well, if all goes well today we'll beat them!

That's what you said yesterday. And the day before. And the...

I know, I know, but today, I...

FLYING SQUIRREL ATTACK!!!

AAAAAAH!

Gotcha!

Alvin, remember I said no more Flying Squirrel Attacks! I told you, I hate when you jump out of nowhere like that!

That's the point! What fun would it be if you saw me coming? "Oh, there you are, Alvin," "Yep, yep, here I come, look out," "Oh, gee, that's really scary..."

Whatever. Now take a seat, my compadre, and get your game face on! Today, we have an army to defeat!

Ooh. No can do, Simon. I've got a basketball game in ten minutes.

No, no, no, no! You're flaking on me again? This is like the tenth time!

Don't hate me because I'm popular... (departs)

Well, here you go, Theodore. I'll just work on my science project. (leaves)

Yeah, well... thanks for asking me to help with your army! Cause... I didn't want to anyway!

The relationship between Alvin and Simon is at the core of this episode, but the way they both neglect and ignore Theodore throughout is a fascinating subplot, and does feel very true to life. I only had the one younger brother, who was (and still is) always the Alvin to my Simon, but what would it have been like if we'd had a Theodore in the family too? It really makes me think...

Next day at school, Alvin gets lumbered with showing a new kid around, and quickly hands over the nerdy Jamie to Simon, who shows him his International Space Station model. 

The two of them hit it off right away and now when Alvin has a moment in his busy calendar for video games, Simon is texting Jamie and not interested. 

As seen in the obligatory musical montage, the two of them stay up all night exchanging funny text messages, play video games together, spend all their time hanging out and even develop their own cool science-gang handshake. It's really awesome.

But then Jamie notices that Simon's brother is one of the cool kids and starts suggesting "Hey, maybe your brother would like to come too?" Now, some people say (well, one person says) that I go on about this a lot, but I don't think I'm being unreasonably melodramatic at all when I say that my primary school days were characterised by being repeatedly ditched by my best friends in favour of my more charismatic younger brother. It's amazing that I grew up into such a well-rounded human being despite this traumatic experience. And if even to this day I avoid introducing my friends to him because I know they'll inevitably like him more than me, well, that's just normal common sense, isn't it?

Simon even cheerfully tells Dave Jamie is the best friend he's ever had. It's heartbreaking! It ends up with Simon and Jamie signing up for a dance class, Jamie getting out of it and inviting Alvin to the cinema. Jamie ducks around a corner to avoid Simon and then runs after Alvin... 

Alvin, to be fair to him, isn't at all interested in spending time with Jamie and is hugely reluctant when Jamie invites himself around for a sleepover. But Simon misinterprets the text Alvin sends, thinking that Alvin wants Simon to do his chores while he goes to Simon's best friend's house, and texts back to say that he's going for a really cool sleepover with someone else. 

Which is a problem when Alvin and Jamie show up at the Seville house and Simon has to hide! Alvin and Jamie play together, not really having much fun all round, and Theodore has to keep distracting them from finding Simon's hiding place - Theo really is the heart and soul of that family, isn't he? 

But eventually Alvin's going to open the wardrobe, and Simon gets out of it with a stroke of genius - Flying Squirrel Attack! The absolute delight of Alvin's reaction really makes you feel a little sorry for him, too, it has to be said. What he really wants is someone who will play Flying Squirrel Attack with him, and he doesn't get that from his siblings. But they all get along together in the end, as shown in the brilliant final scene.

(In which, it has to be said, they discuss their issues with possibly a little more maturity than I ever did...)

My point is, you deserve a better friend than Jamie. He's a jerk!

I can't blame him for wanting to spend more time with you.

He just liked me because he thought I was one of the cool kids!

But... you are more fun.

Simon. The only one having fun with me is me! I'm selfish, obnoxious, reckless, insensitive! Need I go on?

Er, please, no.

Good, cause I was kind of hurting my own feelings. Anyway, if Jamie doesn't get how cool you are, then he's the wrong kind of friend!

Yeah!

Thanks, guys. You know, I feel a little better. Goodnight.

Goodnight, Simon. (turns out light) FLYING SQUIRREL ATTACK!!!!

I really love this show. And, for that matter, my excessively cool younger brother, who I will greatly miss while he's so far away. I'd still like to meet our hypothetical Theodore, too...

The Young New Mexican Puppeteer

 People who have been eagerly checking my blog to see what I decided to do last weekend can now be put out of their misery - I went to London to see the puppet show people. And much to my astonishment, I got the part of one of the central characters! I only signed up to audition because I fell in love with him in the 2012 show and wanted the opportunity to actually handle the puppet myself, but now I'm part of a great legacy! It's like becoming the new Doctor Who, only much better, because it involves puppeteering too!

Obviously, my timing wasn't perfect here, because my puppet-phobic brother is staying with me this week, so I'm just having to keep the puppet I brought home safely packed away, but between now and the May bank holiday, I'm going to be working hard on getting to grips with my favourite character and really doing him justice in my performance!

On the road (to Las Vegas) again

 The Microsoft Excel World Championship has kicked off its new season of monthly fun Excel challenges. Ten battles this year, with five people qualifying from each one for the finals, and it's fair to say I didn't really get off to a flying start...

But hey, 49th out of 282 (including the ones with no score at all who might have forgotten they entered in the first place) is a start, and if we get another one that I unexpectedly do well at in the next nine months, we're all set for qualification again! Everyone else should join in, even if by doing so you reduce my chances even further!

Action and satisfaction

 NickToons is showing "ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks" all day every day at the moment, and I've changed my mind about the series. I'd assumed, since modern versions of classic cartoons are invariably rubbish, and the movies really really looked like they were rubbish, this modern cartoon would be terrible.

Well, I was entirely wrong. The episodes are of variable quality, but the best ones are just perfectly done! I think the classic mix of personalities embodied by Alvin, Simon and Theodore is always going to lend itself to entertaining stories, even in these terrible modern days, and I would urge everyone to go out and watch it!

(Simon's the best, by the way)

Meanwhile, I'm torn between two choices of activity on the 10th-11th of February. I could go to Cambridge for the Cambridge International Othello Tournament, like I invariably do at this time of year, or I could go to London to meet with people organising a puppet show for the May bank holiday weekend. Which I haven't done before but might have fun doing. Although the puppet people I mostly don't know all that well or at all and I've fallen in with them by way of mutual friends, so it might all be weird all round.

This could be the plot of a Chipmunks episode, actually. Simon would prefer the othello, and so would Theodore (although more because he fears change), but I might have to side with Alvin and do the puppet show this time.

Where man once stood supreme

 Do you remember when I said I'd run out of Thundercats writers with early comics work I could blog about for the benefit of my few-if-any readers who might find that kind of thing interesting? Do you also remember when I said that 47th issues of Marvel comics tend not to be anything to write home about? Both of these assertions might be contradicted in this blog post.

Thundercats, if you weren't paying attention, starts with four world-building episodes by head writer Leonard Starr, then five more episodes before the rest of the main team of writers (Peter Lawrence, Stephen Perry, William Overgard, Bob Haney) took over. Those five early episodes include one more by Starr, and four by Jules Bass under the pen-name Julian P. Gardner - one on which he gets sole credit, one with Barney Cohen, and the other two sharing the credit with Ron Goulart.

Goulart and Bass both died in 2022, so I'm rather late to pay tribute to their contribution to the whole universe of Thundercats. But Ron Goulart was well known as a writer of science-fiction and fantasy novels, and probably seemed like a good person to go to for story ideas in the future-Earth fantasy-style setting of Thundercats. But he didn't stick around after these two stories.

Among the other things Ron had dabbled in was a brief stint at Marvel comics in the early seventies, adapting classic fiction by Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft into comic form for Marvel's brief revival of "Journey Into Mystery". I can only assume that led to him being around the office one day when they needed a writer for the latest issue of Warlock, because it's a bit of a digression from what he usually did...

Adam Warlock at this point in time was a character who hadn't really caught on. Like the new Journey Into Mystery, this comic was axed pretty quickly - but then it came back a couple of years later, written and drawn by Jim Starlin, and that was when Warlock became extremely cool! But back in 1972, it was drawn competently enough by Gil Kane, and after a first issue written by Roy Thomas the writing duties had been taken over by Mike Friedrich. And then for some reason, #5 was handed over to Ron Goulart to continue the story of Adam Warlock's adventures on Counter-Earth, just for one month. The next issue was scripted by Friedrich again, but with a credit to Goulart for the plot, "from an idea by Roy Thomas". Mike Friedrich was the writer of the two subsequent issues before it was cancelled.

And in 1975, Marvel UK picked it up to fill some space as a backup strip behind the popular movie and TV-inspired Planet of the Apes comic. And since the cool comic shop in Birmingham had a pile of those for sale, I thought it would be appropriate to buy the 47th and 48th issues, which reprinted the American Warlock #5 and admire the sole superhero-comic work of Ron Goulart!

Now, to be fair, I was only talking about 47th issues of American Marvel comics that time. The 47th issue of the UK Transformers comic was the first part of Dinobot Hunt, which was just wonderful. And the 47th issue of Planet of the Apes, ten years earlier, doesn't seem any better or worse than the usual standard of that comic. Especially if you're interested in seeing how Ron Goulart writes superheroes!

Apart from the front and back covers, the comic is entirely monochrome, but that works fine for Planet of the Apes - the American original version was also black and white, a magazine in more the style of British comics, with text features and things related to the TV show. The British comic gives us eight pages of apes, 11 pages of Captain Marvel and 11 pages of Warlock, because they had to ration the amount of available ape-material and pad the comic out with something else.

The Apes story, reprinted from the American Planet of the Apes #12, is rather good, actually. The art by Tom Sutton is very nice, benefitting from the black-and-white approach and telling a nice story by Doug Moench about a floating island city which in a previous uprising had been split into two communities, the previously ruling class of orangutans on one side, and the rebel gorillas on the other, with chimps as the working classes serving both. A masked saboteur is provoking a new war between the two sides. Those eight pages are worth the 8p price of the comic by themselves.

Which is probably for the best, because the Captain Marvel story, from the second issue of his series way back in 1968, is basically filler stuff. And the Warlock story that follows isn't, in all fairness, much good either.

So here's Adam Warlock! This one, of course, was originally in colour - the credit for the colourist (it was George Roussos) has been removed from the bottom of the page, meaning that letterer Artie Simek gets a bigger box than everyone else all to himself. And the title, The Day of the Death Birds, is a bit strange for this first half of the American comic - there's no mention of Death Birds until the final panel of the British reprint this issue.

But this reprint takes an interesting approach to colouring. Adam Warlock is 'golden-skinned', which with the limitations of American comic colouring meant that he was orange. Marvel UK in this issue makes Adam stand out by shading him grey in every panel.

Adam is currently on Counter-Earth, an exact duplicate of Earth on the opposite side of the sun, created by The High Evolutionary. Adam went off on his own at the end of the previous issue after the death of one of his young human friends, so Ron Goulart basically has a clean slate to work from. He wakes up from a cocoon the High Evolutionary had put him into for a rest and finds himself at the site of a planned underground atom bomb test right next to the San Andreas Fault. The Counter-Earth version of Doctor Doom, a noble scientist, warns the President that this will be a bad thing all round, but the evil President (who subsequently turns out to be Warlock's foe the Man-Beast in disguise, naturally) insists it has to go ahead.

So Adam Warlock spends this issue fighting the natural disasters caused by the explosion. The art isn't all that impressive, and it rather suffers from the loss of the colours. And then it turns out there's a stockpile of anti-personnel missiles, nicknamed Deathbirds, in a cave nearby, and of course they're set loose. Which will be continued next issue...

The inside back cover gives us a Warlock pin-up to stick on our walls if we really want to. I don't imagine many readers bothered with it.

And the back cover, telling us it's Midsummer Madness even though it's mid-September, promises that all of Marvel's comics next week will have a free mask on the back! And what's more, the inside back cover won't contain story pages! This was a regular complaint all through British comics of the eighties, so it's impressive to see that Marvel were able to do something about it as early as 1975! I'm certainly inspired to get the next issue!

The cover of this one is nothing to do with the story inside it, which doesn't feature any humans. It continues the orangutan/gorilla war story; ten pages of it this time. It's still good stuff.

This is followed by the letters page, in which one letter tells readers about the existence of an American Planet of the Apes fan club which the British readers can join, and the other tells readers about Planet of the Apes books that British readers can find in the shops. This is the kind of thing that happened in the world before the internet; people didn't know these things unless weekly magazines told them about it.

The fan club letter is from a "Miss Jackie Dunham", who had been told about it by her American pen pal. Miss Jackie really likes America. She goes on to say that Captain America is her favourite character in the Avengers and that "We have a kind of restaurant in Norwich called 'Captain America' and in it you get all American type food, e.g. Hamburgers etc." This is the kind of thing that happened in the days before McDonald's invaded British shores.

Warlock is promoted to the middle spot of this issue. Impressively, Marvel UK create a new splash page for this reprint of the second half of the story, using the cover of the American comic. It looks good! Adam Warlock and Professor von Doom are able to destroy the Deathbirds, and Adam finds the crowd of innocent bystanders worshipping him.

But then the evil President makes a TV broadcast to the nation announcing that the whole thing was Adam Warlock's fault! Which gives us a cliffhanger leading into the next issue. Whether what happens there is close to what Ron Goulart was intending is impossible to say, but this is the end of his sole contribution to the adventures of Adam Warlock, and indeed any comic not revolving around Cthulhu or William Shatner's TekWar (for which Goulart wrote the comic adaptation in the nineties, having also secretly been the ghost-writer of the original book).

And then we find out why they printed Miss Jackie Dunham's letter about the American fan club...

The attempt at a British fan club, which had been announced with some fanfare previously, has had to be abandoned because James Naughton and Ron Harper aren't answering their phones. Then comes a bit more of Captain Marvel battling the Super-Skrull, which to be fair is pretty good really. And the inside back cover, as promised, is devoted to an ad for an Airfix model kit. And the model in question, which British kids should have felt no compunction about cutting up a picture of, is Rommel's 'Greif' Half-Track. But on the other side is the promised mask!

Now you can go around looking like an ape, if you really want to!

So that's Ron Goulart's contribution to the world of British comics! It's a good job we've got those two rather good episodes of Thundercats to remember him by!

That was... BRILLIANT!

 How did they manage that? Bringing back Gladiators was a real flop the last time they tried it, but the new BBC series does it absolutely perfectly, capturing the excitement and sheer coolness of the original that got us all worked up back in... 1992. Wow. That was a long, long time ago when you look at it like that.

But the new range of gladiators show some real character - Legend had some great one-liners, he's definitely my favourite. I feel like I'm sixteen again and need to get practicing with my pugil-stick!

And what's more, we should TOTALLY do this with memory sports! Young memorisers today are always calling me 'the legend' - get some of us old-timers dressed up in fancy costumes and cool noms-de-guerre and have us go up against contenders in memory-themed challenges! It could be the next generation of memory competitions!

Who's up for it? What's your Memory Gladiator name?

Predicting the future

 Apparently someone looked at this old post that I'd forgotten about, but I still think is a fun comparison of cool sports with the coolest sport (memory).

And it was a sequel to this one-day-older post in which I express a hope that "the 2010s will be the decade when the World Memory Championships has a consistent set of rules from one year to the next, and nobody complains!" - which, well, memory sports didn't quite achieve, but never mind.

And Boris speculated "Will there be an mental athlete in every town in 2100, who can memorize a deck of cards in 30s?" - and I think we've pretty much reached that point now in 2024, so we're well ahead of schedule. I miss the days when I was the only one who could do that.

[There really was a brief period when I was the only one who had demonstrated the ability to memorize a deck of cards in under thirty seconds in universally-acknowledged controlled conditions, so shush, you pedants.]

They never are chess. Chess with no clothes on! Chess in their birthday suits! That kind of chess. Chess men!

 One thing I do spend quite a lot of time doing on the internet is playing chess. I discovered chess.com last year, and play five- and ten-minute games when I have a spare moment. I aim to keep my rating over 1000 in the former and 1200 in the latter; I'm realistic about my skills as a chess player. The site provides a year-in-review summary that suggests I've fallen infuriatingly short of breaking even in games played in 2023, and I know if I try to fix it by playing a lot more games, my ratio will inevitably get worse, so perhaps I should leave it at that.

Anyway, the site is trumpeting a 2024 "daily chess championship", and I was wondering if I should enter it. Time control of "one day per move", which is apparently challenging to the players who take online chess seriously. There are prizes for best blogs and best video analyses of it, and maybe I could become some kind of chess-blogger. It would be different, anyway.

Thing is, I've never really played a proper game of chess, the kind where you think about your moves for a long period of time. Even the ten-minute games on chess.com seem very relaxed to me, even accounting for my brain slowing down in my old age. At school, Noddy and I would find a quiet corner on a twenty-minute break and play about twenty games, all while having an extensive and enlightening conversation about comics or TV or how great we are in general, or singing extremely cool songs.

This kind of tournament doesn't sound like all that much fun - "Opening databases and opening books are permitted in Daily Chess, but the use of engines and tablebases is never permitted," says the rules. I only really play one opening; I'd get lost if I was keeping track of some other standard opening, even before we get to the point where the players are supposed to be using their own brains. I'd turn to the wrong page of the opening book and do something ridiculous with my queen.

But on the other hand, I do play othello on eothello.com all the time nowadays, and you get a long time to play your moves there. And apparently lots of people sign up for and drop out of these big tournaments on chess.com, so maybe I'll win the entire championship by default. Or else my opponents will be caught cheating - three times on chess.com I've had a message saying some dastardly opponent was using unfair means to beat me, and I got my rating bumped up by a few points. I don't know how they catch cheaters - are they watching me right now?

A ten-pound-fifty pig

 Among the Christmas presents I got from my generous brother this year was the Dennis the Menace Book 1976!

We used to have this book, long ago, second-hand (it came out about a year before I was born; British annuals are always released the autumn before the year on the cover) and it always felt a bit strange to anyone used to Dennis as he looked in the 1980s. 

Even back in 1975, it must have seemed a bit off to new readers - at that time, Dennis had been the full-colour cover feature of the Beano since September 1974 (shunting Biffo the Bear to the back pages) and had probably attracted a new audience keen to see a book full of Dennis and Gnasher to supplement their weekly dose!

But inside the full-colour hardback book with the modern-looking Dennis on the cover, readers could only find Gnasher in the various text stories, pin-ups and other features. All the comic strip adventures were reprints from old Beanos of the days before Gnasher's 1968 introduction, when Dennis was in duotone red-black-and-white single-page strips, and drawn rather differently from the way he appeared in the seventies.

The dialogue had to be updated here and there whenever someone mentions money - decimalisation had happened in 1971, and the young readers being given this book for Christmas were the first generation to grow up without shillings, tanners, threepenny bits and the other stock currency-phrases of comics from the old days!

This particular strip, though, causes more problems than that...

Not only does Dennis say "We don't have a dog, Dad!", the whole punchline relies on pre-decimal currency!

The speech bubble has been dutifully corrected - "two shillings" becomes "ten pence", "eight shillings" becomes "forty pence", but they can't really change "ten guineas" and have to leave it as it is. Well, grown-ups even in 1975 would still probably have said that kind of thing if it was funny, and they could always explain it to the kids, so there's no harm done.

Except to Dennis's backside, of course - this was the era when every comic story had to end with the protagonist getting a ferocious whacking, and it's always nice to see an innovative implement being used instead of the slipper for a change! That's what people really read these things for, isn't it?

What has Roger really been up to?

 Something I'm going to do if I ever have the time to devote to such a major task is compile a definitive chronology of the Johnny Ludlow stories written by Mrs Henry Wood. Originally published anonymously in Argosy magazine (which Mrs Wood edited and wrote a lot of the content of), "Johnny Ludlow's papers" are entertaining supposedly-autobiographical stories of things Johnny did in his younger days. They aren't written in chronological order, dotting about between different periods in his life at random, and he often doesn't specify when they happened, leaving the reader to make an educated guess as to whether we're reading a story about a young boy or a grown man.

Exactly when the stories take place is also vague, but we can pin them down for the most part - it's clear that Johnny is somewhat younger than Mrs Wood (some people suggested he's based on her son, but by all accounts Charles Wood was much more of a wuss than even the wimpy 'muff' Johnny Ludlow and never had an interesting adventure in his life). The key chronological marker on which the sequence of events can be hung is the fourth published story, "Watching on St. Mark's Eve", from April 1868.

A key plot point of that story is that St. Mark's Eve, April 24th, falls on Easter Monday. The only time that happened in the 19th century was 1848, so we can fix that one (in which Johnny is somewhere around sixteen years old) in the calendar and place the other stories around it. It works surprisingly well, in fact - all through the twenty years these papers were being written, the historical references all fit very neatly with the right years of the 1840s and 1850s without needing to be stretched in any kind of implausible way... except just once.

One of the last series of stories (sadly, the later ones do decline in quality a little) to appear in the Argosy is the three-part "Roger Bevere" saga (January-March 1884). With this one we return to the eventful trip to London Johnny made around the time of his twenty-first birthday, and pick up on his previous passing mentions to the black sheep of Johnny's guardian Mr Brandon's family, his nephew Roger.

Roger is a medical student in London, and London as seen through the eyes of Johnny Ludlow and Mrs Henry Wood is a terrible place for a young man to be. Temptation was everywhere. Sin was lurking around every corner. Mrs Wood was from Worcestershire, and had a deep distrust of the big city, which comes out more and more strongly in her writings as she gets older.

Johnny finally tracks down Roger in a part of London known as "the Bell-and-Clapper", named after a very noisy church of not at all the type that Johnny approves of. It's also next to an underground railway station, and its refreshment-room full of enticing bottles and staffed by women with strong-minded manners and "monstrous heads of hair". And it turns out Roger Bevere has been ensnared by the terrible attractions of this place in a way beyond Johnny's wildest fears! The respectable young man has MARRIED a loud, vulgar woman named Lizzie, whom he met when she was working at the refreshment-room bar!

But there's a problem with this, from the point of view of a chronologist. The Bell-and Clapper is fictitious, but Roger has been travelling from there to St Bartholomew's Hospital on the underground railway, and that's a real place - it's right by Farringdon station, the terminus of the first underground line... which opened in 1863.

The underground isn't even presented as a new thing in this story - it's well-established and has clearly been around for a good long while. The whole setting, in fact, doesn't feel at all like the London of the 1850s (which it should be when Johnny Ludlow is 21, unless all the other stories are wrong), but feels very like the bustling, modern London of 1884.

Lizzie is a very modern young lady. She drinks, laughs, disregards her husband's orders, makes a lot of noise and horrifies respectable people like Roger Bevere, who thoroughly regrets what he's done and desperately wants to keep it a secret from his family. A discussion between Johnny and Dr Pitt (who first appeared in the Johnny Ludlow stories as an outright villain, but subsequently turned out not to be responsible for the worst of it after all, and to have since stopped drinking and become a more decent person) digresses into great detail about how these underground railway refreshment rooms lead good young men into the devil's clutches and are responsible for corrupting good young women too.

I feel I should point out that this extensive moralising is balanced by a lot of wonderful humour, creativity and even occasional radical tendencies in Mrs Henry Wood's writings - please don't be put off trying them by reading a passage like this one!

And perhaps this is the reason for the chronological confusion. I think Johnny is editorialising - he's unhappy with the modern profusion of drinking places and loose women, and is taking this story as an opportunity to write about their evils at length! It also allows him to justify Roger Bevere's terrible marriage, giving his sort-of-relative an excuse that perhaps he didn't have in reality!

Because there's something else strange about this marriage. The reason for a marriage between someone like Roger and a woman in Lizzie's station of life was usually a baby, let's be honest here. But there's no mention of that (apart from a couple of coy hints from narrator Johnny that sometimes something else might happen in this kind of morally deficient place). Roger and Lizzie have been married for some eighteen months when Johnny catches up with him, but they seem to be sleeping in separate rooms and to all appearances have always done so.

 There's surely something Johnny is too discreet to tell us here (not that illegitimate births are unheard-of in Johnny Ludlow's papers, even in decent rural Worcestershire, but remember that Roger is Mr Brandon's nephew!). I think poor Roger Bevere was a worse man than Johnny wants to admit. He fell into bad ways before there was a supply of alcohol and attractive women at every underground station, got some loose woman in a scrape, got married and had to keep it a secret.

If we look at how the situation resolves itself, we can see where Johnny's sympathies lie. Two and a half years later, Johnny and Mr Brandon go for Christmas to Roger's mother (and Mr Brandon's sister) Lady Bevere and the rest of the family. Roger is more miserable than ever, still keeping his marriage a secret, and living apart from Lizzie, who's not been a day sober for the last two years. It emerges, funnily enough, that Lizzie is the sister of one of Lady Bevere's servants, unknown to any of them (Lizzie is under the impression that her surname is written as it's pronounced, 'Bevary', and has only seen 'Bevere' written down in a letter from her sister and thought it a different name entirely, pronounced 'Beveer') and Lizzie has come down to Essex to see her, not knowing that Roger is there.

Everything is sure to come out, and Roger and Johnny are waiting in terror for her to arrive and make the situation known. The suspense nearly kills Roger, but it turns into a happy ending after all - Lizzie gets lost walking in the snow, with a bottle of brandy, and dies in a ditch. Roger never has to tell anyone his dark secret, and can now "pull up" from his bad ways and become a decent member of society again. He does have the decency to secretly pay for Lizzie's burial expenses, at least. The ending sums up the relief the reader is expected to feel for the poor man:

I think a modern reader is less touched by Roger's narrow escape from the horrors of 'exposure' and more inclined to wonder just how dark the skeleton in Mr Brandon's closet really was. Merry Christmas to one and all!