Spidey in Black or Red and Blue

 In late June 1985, when I was a few months away from nine years old, a very important comic was published - the Spider-Man Summer Special!

One pound twenty was an exorbitant price to pay for a comic in those days! Sure, this is a special kind of comic - 48 full-colour pages inside cardboard covers (the interior pages are numbered 3 to 50), as opposed to the standard Marvel UK comics of the time, which were 32 pages including covers, half of them monochrome and the other half in colour. But those standard comics cost 27p in 1985, a more reasonable kind of price for children with a couple of 20p coins in their pockets¹. A volume like this, costing £1.20, was something you'd only get as a special treat.

I, or maybe my brother², got this when we went to Butlin's that summer, probably. Superhero comics weren't something I was interested in at the time, and Marvel UK seemed in a big way to share my view. In earlier years, they had reprinted the American comics in a variety of British titles, but those had been dropped by this point. The long-running British Spider-Man comic was still going, but Marvel UK had emphatically retooled it to be aimed at "younger readers" - the stories inside were Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, plus some very kiddy backup strips. It was probably because British superhero fans were increasingly able to buy the American full-colour originals, and no longer purchased the UK monochrome reprints when they came out months later. I assume the "for younger readers" approach was an attempt to build up a new generation of superhero fans over here, giving up on the previous ones and leaving them to mail-order their American titles instead.

This comic was the "debut" appearance of Spider-Man's black costume! This is a good example of the lag between America and Britain in those days. By summer 1985, the black costume was old news in America! It first appeared in Spider-Man's own comic in January 1984, along with a promise that readers would learn where it came from in the all-new Secret Wars limited series, the first of the twelve issues of which went on sale at the same time. The black costume doesn't show up until the eighth issue of Secret Wars, on sale at the end of August, by which time readers of the various comics Spidey appeared in had already had months to get used to it, had learned in July that it was an alien symbiote and now were fiercely arguing about whether it was a good or bad idea to go back to the classic look.

Readers of Marvel UK's comics didn't know anything about these recent developments in the superhero world, except as revealed in the UK's Secret Wars comic, which launched at the end of April 1985, reprinting the more-than-a-year-old American title. And even then, it needed lots of editorial text pages explaining who the more recently-created superheroes in it were, and what had changed about the other ones since Marvel UK stopped reprinting their adventures. The introductory page above catches up readers of the Summer Special on what they need to know, and an ad on the back page tells them where they can read more of Spidey's adventures...

I was very confused by that picture. You really have to study it to see it's meant to be a large Spider-Man head behind a coat-hanger on which his two costumes are hanging.

It would be a while before readers of Secret Wars in Britain could "see the first appearance of Spidey's great new black costume" - the comic didn't catch up to that point until October. In June, apart from Secret Wars, Marvel UK's diminished range of titles went like this. No American reprinted superheroes except the Spider-Man comic you might want to treat your younger brother or sister to³.

We⁴ only got two of these comics - the fortnightly Transformers, and Return of the Jedi in the weeks when Transformers didn't come out. Jedi was basically unreadable rubbish, bought only because one had to buy a comic, but Transformers was something very special!

Transformers toys made their sensational appearance in Britain in 1984. Unlike a lot of American toys in those days, which wouldn't reach these shores until a year or more after their stateside release, we got Transformers at the same time as the Americans! And they were MASSIVE. Sensationally popular, and so Marvel UK naturally rushed out a comic, which kids at the time snapped up. It reprinted the brand-new American Transformers comic almost immediately after its US publication, which caused a bit of a problem when the American "four issue limited series" came to an end. Obviously, Transformers were still so hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic that the series had to continue, but the US branch of Marvel were able to wait a couple of months to create some more material before launching it as an ongoing series.

Marvel UK didn't want to do that. The Transformers comic was selling like hot cakes. So they took the step of creating their own stories, and they were brilliant! We snapped it up, even when the actual Transformer content of the comic was a bit on the minimal side - number 19, advertised in the checklist above, is a classic example. It contains five pages of Transformers comic, seven of Machine Man, seven of Planet Terry, a four page comic telling "the true story" of the Battle of Hastings, two pages of the Chromobots, and a lot of padding to fill its 32 pages. And we loved it!

But back in October 1984, when the American comic was still being reprinted in the British pages, Spider-Man made a guest appearance, complete with black costume! So for fans of the Transformers comic, like me, the black costume was already familiar!

But let's return to the 1985 Summer Special. The Spider-Man stories in it weren't the first I'd ever seen - that honour might go to the Spider-Man Annual published in 1980, which had been around Grandma's house since time immemorial.⁵ That annual contains one particularly wonderful story, reprinted from Spectacular Spider-Man #21, written by Bill Mantlo and exploring very much the same kind of themes I'm going to be talking about at length when I finally start talking about the Summer Special, but perhaps I was just too young at the time to really appreciate it. There had been other stories here and there, I'm sure, but I'd never read the comics with any kind of regularity or even interest. Spidey was, of course, a part of popular culture who everyone knew about, and I'm sure I was more than familiar with him by osmosis even before the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoon appeared on TV in 1983. But my idea of what Spider-Man, and general superhero, comics were like was only very vague. I certainly didn't think of them as being as mature or intelligent as the kind of real literature you might find in the Transformers comic or an actual book!

And then came this Summer Special. And my mind was blown like never before. The first story, with Spider-Man facing Jack O'Lantern (from the American Spider-Man comic #254), was all right. It didn't make much impact on me, but it was pretty cool. But the second story, which originated in Marvel Team-Up #145, was something else. It wasn't a superhero story.

It was written by Tony Isabella, who I always list among the comic creators I admire the most, solely because of this story and the effect it had on my eight-year-old self. Perhaps it was just the right place and the right time, and I didn't really get into superhero comics until years later, but it might very possibly never have happened at all if I hadn't always had this example in mind. It does things that I had no idea you could do with the medium of costumed hero stories! Seriously, it blew my mind, like I've said before.

Tony Isabella, like all the best people, has a long-running Blogspot blog⁶. The artist, meanwhile, was Greg LaRocque, who again I don't particularly know outside this one important comic, but in those days Marvel had a healthy stable of very good artists who could deliver the right kind of action adventure in the house style. And of course we start with Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York, because that kind of splash page is essential in a Spidey story. But the narrative captions make it clear that this isn't a superhero story...

It is, of course, an issue of "Marvel Team-Up", which means it's required to contain both Spider-Man and one other superhero. In this case, the co-star is Iron Man. And this is the problem with the whole Marvel Team-Up arrangement - it tended to feel a bit contrived. If Spidey's in New York, happens to meet one of the many other superheroes who hang around there, and they solve a problem together, that's okay. When the plot requires Spider-Man, Iron Man and Blacklash all to go to Cleveland for separate reasons, it's a bit less plausible. Especially since Iron Man was based in California at this point, and the story was clearly written in the belief he was still living in NY. The writer or editor slip a bit of dialogue into this page to justify his boarding a plane in New York.

This was almost certainly my first encounter with Iron Man (maybe a passing reference here and there in other comics I'd seen, but nothing more), and it's from the period when Jim Rhodes was wearing the Iron Man armour. Not knowing any of the back story, I just assumed Iron Man had always been Jim Rhodes, accompanied by his sidekick Morley Erwin. The multiple lines in this comic implying otherwise entirely passed me by. I was very confused and baffled when what felt like years later (but could actually only have been a few months - when you're 8/9 years old, you pack a lot of life experience into that period) I saw an episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends in which Iron Man is a different guy called Tony Stark. It didn't make any sense to me. How can a superhero be two different people? Boy, I hope someone got fired for that blunder. Luckily, in January 1986, the Marvel UK Transformers comic reprinted an Iron Man story ("Night of the Octopus") with Tony as the hero and included a potted history of Iron Man, explaining the difference between Tony Stark, Jim Rhodes, and Arno Stark, who had just appeared in the Machine Man backup strip as the man who would become Iron Man in the far-flung distant future world of the year 2020. My bewilderment was finally at an end. But back in summer 1985, Jim Rhodes was the only Iron Man I knew, and I still think he's the best to this day!

But this comic isn't about him, either. It's about the super-villain.

Spider-Man and Iron Man have both come to an electronics convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Tony Isabella lived in Cleveland, as did Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster back in 1938. It's an important town for superheroes! And, as it turns out, villains too. Because Mark Scarlotti, the super-villain Blacklash, is a Cleveland native. He's come to the convention hoping to get some leads to a job in engineering, but nobody will give him the time of day. He really is a scientific genius, but after his previous defeats by Iron Man, his identity as Blacklash has become public knowledge, and he can't get even people who don't know him to talk to him about work, perhaps because he just comes across as a little strange.

Which is the thing that's so great about this story. It's very clear and explicit that Mark is mentally ill. He's manic-depressive⁷ and suffers from violent mood-swings. We follow his thought bubbles as a brief burst of anger is enough even to set off Peter Parker's spider-sense - quite an impressive feat - before he lapses back into despondency. Seeing Iron Man at the convention, he thinks about attacking and defeating him to get back in the good books of his former bosses in the Maggia (Marvel's unsubtle Mafia equivalent), but then gives up on the whole idea and gets the bus home.

He goes to see his mother, who tells him to just leave because his father wants nothing to do with him, and then goes for a drink to try to calm down. Which doesn't work out very well. These next two pages have an interesting side-story to themselves...

That's followed by an ad for the 1985 summer special line-up...

...And then we're back into the action, and a transition from the previous story page that always felt a little abrupt to me.

And that's because there's a page missing from the story as presented by the Summer Special! Despite the claim on the first page that it contains "two lengthy and spectacular complete tales", this second one is incomplete! Between Mark leaving the bar and bursting back in, the original comic has this page:

It doesn't look like Marvel UK had to cut a page out to fit the story into the special. There are two pages of puzzles in the middle of the comic that are obviously just there to take up space. I think it must just be that this page has Mark contemplating suicide, and someone decided that goes too far for a kids' comic. But taking out the whole page seems excessive - it's phrased very euphemistically in the original and could have been made even more vague and acceptable by just rewriting a few words. After all, they did have to rewrite the dialogue in the bottom panel of the previous page to paper over the cracks - in the original version of the story, it went like this:

(Both versions come back together with "...THIS!" as Blacklash smashes the counter to pieces with his electric nunchakas)

But Blacklash has got a job from the Maggia (who needed someone on the spot quickly and their first choice was unavailable) to kill a scientist at the convention, and his mood is now on a big upswing! He's back at the convention, all fired up, but still comes close to giving it up before revealing himself when he sees his friend Rusty is on guard there. But he's drawn into action when another security guard spots him, and it all leads to the big super-hero dust-up!

Our hero (villain) acquits himself very impressively. I always loved this manoeuvre (note the UK publication has altered the spelling into British English) against Spidey. It's a clever action sequence, and the art really makes it work!

But it's still two against one, or even three, because Morley is able to spot that Blacklash's gauntlets are giving off sparks (earlier in the story, Mark contemplated checking that his costume and equipment were all in order, but decided not to bother) and Iron Man is able to overload the suit. The scientist has got away, and Spidey strips off Mark's costume, which is enough to make him break down completely. The superheroes only need to wait around until the authorities come to take him away.

And THAT is why I love superhero comics. This is what made me realise you can tell any kind of story - genuine quality, intelligent literature - wrapped up in the genre conventions. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it blew my mind. Opened up whole new worlds. And all thanks to Tony Isabella and the Spectacular All-Colour Summer Special!⁸

¹ Remember when 20p coins were new and exciting? The novelty still hadn't worn off in 1985.

² We shared our comics and toys and things perfectly amicably, the question of ownership never came up, but it was nonetheless important to keep mental track of whom they had been bought for. I feel bad about not remebering "whose" comic this one was. He'll remember, no doubt.

³ I never treated my younger brother to a comic in those days. To be fair, our parents just bought the things for us. And I'm giving him this Summer Special as a birthday present now I've acquired a copy of it, so it's okay.

⁴ My brother owned these comics. I got the Beano. This fact is mildly embarrassing in these modern times.

⁵ Immemorial unless you've got some kind of super memory like I haven't, anyway. It maybe came from the boy who lived next door to Grandma after he'd got bored with it. His name was Elliot, apparently, which must have been a bit annoying in the days when ET was the new big thing.

⁶ I thought I was the only one! This is so cool!

⁷ It had already been renamed bipolar disorder by 1984, but only very recently, and you can forgive this story using the older term that readers would recognise.

⁸ I'm glad I didn't see this story under its original American cover, or read the original solicitation text, both of which are sadly lacking the subtlety of the story itself...

"Blacklash is back! He's the most dangerous psychotic ever to undertake a life of crime! Fighting sane villains is bad enough — how can Spider-Man and Iron Man defeat a totally unpredictable super-powered madman? They better find a way — or die!"

... That's just bad writing. British readers had a lucky escape!

RIP Adelaide Carpenter

 Everyone in the British and international Othello world is sad to have lost Adelaide, a central part of the whole community since forever. It really won't be the same without her around. She was also a leading world authority in the field of fruit-fly genetics, and the Cambridge University tribute to her ends with "She will be sorely missed in the Department and in the world wide fly community" which is such a cool way to be remembered. I just hope I merit that kind of epitaph when I go...

Let's be gay, let's make some whoopee

 In honour of pride month, let's celebrate a great superhero of the past!

He's not gay in THAT sense, of course. This was 1941, and the first issue of Sensation Comics, from DC. The headline star of that comic was a controversial and radical piece of diversity and inclusion - Wonder Woman, the FEMALE superhero! DC probably would never have dreamed of allowing that kind of thing as a lead feature without the insistence of the illustrious Dr William Moulton Marston that it was a good and acceptable thing to do. They printed endorsements from heavyweight boxers Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey in the first two issues of Sensation, just to show how it's okay and manly to read Wonder Woman.

The Gay Ghost was one of the five backup features who filled out the monthly anthology comic - another was The Black Pirate, who of course wasn't black in THAT sense. It was decades before DC, always slow to move with the times, dared to introduce an African-American superhero, and even more decades after that before they finally gave us a homosexual one! Little Boy Blue wasn't blue, either, and nor was Wildcat a cat. Mister Terrific was the only other hero of Sensation who came close to living up to his adjective, and some have suggested Mister Mediocre would make a better description of his adventures (I've always liked him myself...)

But that adjective has really hurt The Gay Ghost over the years. In the eighties, DC's Who's Who wanted to include him, but saw fit to rename him The Grim Ghost to avoid all the giggling and innuendo. It's a ridiculous thing to call him - the Ghost was entirely gay, in the sense the creators understood it at the time, and not at all grim!

His love interest, Debbie Wallace, has to win the title of 'stupidest superhero girlfriend', though. The Gay Ghost's setup is that when playboy Charles Collins was killed, the ghost of Keith Everett took over his body and identity (and girlfriend, without her noticing). To go into action against crooks and fifth-columnists, the ghost leaves Charles's body, which drops down dead, and flies into action as a spirit. Debbie thinks it strange that Charles has suddenly started acting completely differently and displaying ignorance of any technological developments since 1700, and is surprised by his new habit of 'falling asleep' on the spot at any moment when the Gay Ghost arrives to save the day, but never makes the connection in her mind. Mr Terrific, meanwhile, has a girlfriend Wanda Wilson who breaks all the superhero rules and immediately recognises Terry Sloane in superhero costume, even though he wears a mask over the top half of his face! Lois Lane could learn a lesson or two from her!

So go out and enjoy life! Be gay!

Performing Arts

I'm an actor now, you know. The puppet show on the bank holiday went very well, in fact! I'm not sure my acting and puppeteering skills were first-class, but I think I achieved "almost acceptable", or "not totally disastrous" at any rate. And I had fun doing it, which is the important thing! Indeed, the director observed that the soundtrack consisted mainly of me giggling into the mic, but that's clearly the fault of the writers for making it so funny.

"Oh look, it's a Housepets reference!" See, I would share video footage of the show, but it's kind of 'special interest' - not in the way you might be thinking a puppet show at a furry convention might be, but just because it's aimed at an audience who would naturally say that line when they see someone with a paper bag on their head.

Although to be fair the majority of the script was a combination of classical references to Greek mythology and excessively nerdy technological jokes, so perhaps it's more exclusive to geeks rather than furries...

Anyway, the point is, Blogger just reminded me of this old post in which I talk about performing in front of a live studio audience for the first time (and a really great trip to Dublin that I'd almost entirely forgotten). I've appeared in front of an audience other times since then, but it's never been something I've done regularly or been particularly good at. I've probably got better at ignoring whether or not they laugh at my jokes since then, but it's still hard to forget they're there. This time, though, I was performing a script written by someone else, and it was a lot of fun to see which lines got a big reaction!

I need to find more acting gigs. It needs to be my new thing.

Hidden depths!

Okay, I know Sonic the Hedgehog is full of secrets. I mean, I've been playing the game since 1992. Or even the year before, if you count a couple of times I got to play it before I owned a copy myself. But I'm really impressed to discover something brand new about the game in this video! Six minutes in, we get an astonishing revelation about the Scrap Brain Zone!

Yes, it's possible, with some VERY careful play, to have 50 rings or more when you enter one particular teleporter. And if you do, it takes you to a different, higher level! I never knew that! I did know the rest of the stuff in this video, although I admit it took the advent of the internet before I learned about the Labyrinth Zone secret route, but this new knowledge absolutely delights me!

It's not some kind of modern cheat, either - this video uses modern-day emulations rather than a real Mega Drive, so I thought it might be, but no, I checked on that 1992 cartridge that's been in my possession all these years, and it DOES work! Took me about a dozen tries to get past all those traps with fifty rings intact, and I don't think I've ever actually done that in all my years of playing the game before. They really don't make games like that any more, and I think it's a terrible shame.

I can take comfort in knowing that I knew all about the bonus for finishing a level in exactly 9:59 on Sonic 3 before everyone on the internet was talking about it - I discovered it myself inadvertently one day all those decades ago. And I know that the orbinauts/uni-uni/things-with-spiky-balls in Star Light Zone turn yellow and fire their spiky balls at you if you create them with debug mode, which nobody on the internet seems to be talking about anywhere. I should make a YouTube video of it. Sonic's the best, isn't he?

Rat race

I'm a bit late with the anniversary, but I've just seen a thing on the internet saying it's thirty years since the death of Ayrton Senna. I was a Senna fan in 1994 (despite having been a fervent supporter of Prost in the classic season of 1988), and it wasn't a very popular side to be on in those days. The rest of the gang at school delighted in jeering Senna's lack of success in the early races of the season, and were downright triumphant when I came into the sixth-form common room on the Monday after his death. Which is a little unkind, since I was genuinely upset by it...

But the death of the famous world champion completely eclipsed the death the previous day of a driver very few people had even heard of - and again, I was one of the rare people who kept an eye on Roland Ratzenberger and hoped he'd do well. He was new to Formula 1, but he'd been around a long time before getting there (so long, indeed, that he apparently lied about his age so as not to seem so old), and I well remembered the name from his classic appearance with a coincidentally similarly-named TV superstar, many years earlier.

Two tragic losses. Maybe three if you count the decline of Roland Rat's TV career. Give Kevin the Gerbil his own series, someone!

Wheels within wheels

 Here's a thing about the Junior Justice Society secret code wheel. If you've decided to use the Greek alphabet and add two more symbols to bring the number of letters up to 26, you'd add the extra symbols to the end of the list, wouldn't you? Not in this case - it looks like they added them to the start, before the alpha!

How can you tell with a circular wheel thing? This is the order of the thirteen superhero codes - it starts with Hawkman (chairman of the Justice Society), then the seven other regular members, then the five honorary members (who had their own comics, and were too cool to be ordinary JSA members). They wouldn't have started the list with Johnny Thunder and had Hawkman at the end. Or maybe the JSA were just trying to make sure the notoriously dimwitted Johnny had the easiest code?

Into the Chipmultiverse

 It's Janice Karman's 70th birthday next week, and it was arguably Ross Bagdasarian Jr's 75th a week and a bit ago (a cursory internet search gives me two completely different birthdays for him). So I'm sure you'll forgive me going on about Alvin and the Chipmunks one more time, in celebration!

I'm pretty sure they and their family are going to continue the epic and diverse history of chipmunk media for ever more, so before the next incarnation comes along I just want to introduce my blog-readers to a couple of the more obscure outer reaches of the multiverse I've recently acquired. Come and see alternate worlds where Theodore wants the hula-hoop and gophers can get inside your brain!

We'll start with A Little Golden Book - "The Chipmunks' Merry Christmas". Now, I stand by what I said about that Dell Four-Color Comic being the first real work of Chipmunk literature (this book's copyright date is 1959, and I assume from the Christmas theme it was released later than the probable August publication of the comic), but I admit there's some wiggle room here. And while the comic was inspired by the boys' second hit single "Alvin's Harmonica", this book is based on the first, "The Chipmunk Song". So it's quite possibly the first real Chipmunk literature to be written, if not published!

And can I also say that if you're wanting to buy books like this, Thrift Books is awesome! Great prices, for the books and for the international postage! Super fast, too! I'm really impressed!

The first thing you notice about "The Chipmunks' Merry Christmas" is that there's no Dave! Instead, as you can see on the cover, his traditional role is taken by Mr Owl!

The second thing you might notice is when you turn to the credits page - the book was written by one David Corwin, and illustrated by Richard Scarry. The famous Richard Scarry! Now there's another illustrious name to be associated with early Chipmunks!

(I'd just like to reiterate my apology for not recognising the name of John Stanley, who may or may not have been involved in that comic, because ever since that point I've been seeing his name everywhere, in places I've seen it many times before without it registering, like in this tribute to the indisputably great Sheldon Mayer...)

But let's turn to the story!

Where can little Alvin be? Alvin is played as the 'little' one in this book, apparently the youngest of them. 

And what's he looking for? That's the great mystery of this book...

Stop being silly, you silly, silly chipmunk. Thedore's giggling shows his characterisation in the early records has caught on with the writer of this book, at least. And Mr Owl steals Dave's dialogue!

Theodore wants the hula hoop! This really is a bizarre alternate universe!

And in this world, the chipmunks aren't making a record - their singing is, as it turns out, for the purpose of letting Santa know what they want for Christmas. It's a slightly strange idea that this is how you convey your requests for presents, but it all seems to make sense in the internal logic of the story!

But Alvin is continuously running away, and not singing! Mr Owl is concerned, and so are... Mr and Mrs Chipmunk!

The chipmunks have parents! In all the myriad worlds of Alvin and the Chipmunks, this might be the only time they have both a mother and a father! And, fascinatingly, Theodore (later to be voiced by Janice Karman) takes after the mother, while Simon and Alvin (Ross Bagdasarian) have their father's fur colour!

But after a lot more running around, things work out all right in the end, of course!

Isn't that nice? This non-materialistic Alvin is a delight to experience!

And now, from the ancient times of 1959, let's move on to the modern world of 2003. The last glimmer of the long-running cartoon series (Alvin and the Chipmunks meet the Wolfman) has been and gone, the CGI movies are still to come, but in between them there was this one oddity...

Little Alvin and the Mini-Munks! A direct-to-DVD movie adventure for the Chipmunks and Chipettes! As puppets! As preschoolers!

This seems to have been intended as a backdoor pilot for a "Chipmunk Babies" type of TV series (Baby Looney Tunes had been a big hit the previous year) which didn't take off, maybe just because the movies came along instead. But with the movies, the Bagdasarians seem to have lost a certain amount of control over their chipmunks, which is a shame - this one, on the other hand, is all about Janice Karman's personal vision! And while I'm not sure it's entirely a success, it's growing on me. I was going to be more scathing about the whole thing when I first watched it, but now I come to look back at it a second time... yes, I'm starting to like it.

So let me get one complaint out of the way now. There's not enough Simon! I've mentioned a few times that Simon is my favourite. He's me! In so many ways! Especially in modern-day episodes written by Janice Karman! And in this film, he's the least prominent of the six chipmunks, which doesn't sit well with me. Everyone else here gets a solo scene or two in the spotlight, learns an important lesson, sings a song... Simon is just a supporting character. I want more Simon in my chipmunk media.

Our story begins at the house of Lalu (Janice Karman). She's hanging up a banner saying "Welcome Chipmunks", and a passing butterfly helps her pin it in place. Lalu shares her home with Gilda, a pompous cockatoo puppet who disapproves of noisy children, and PC (short for Prince Charming), a laid-back frog who talks in a surfer-dude kind of way. Also hanging around the place are two gophers, who talk to the viewers in the style of American news reporters and have the ability to go inside people's minds and analyse their feelings with the aid of symbolic imagery.

This is the kind of thing I don't really get. Or rather, I don't believe the target audience of small children really get. It's very much in the Sesame Street tradition, I suppose, but I can only see the kid viewers being confused and outright disturbed by these scenes. Anyway, the chipmunks have arrived, brought by Dave (Ross Bagdasarian Jr) to spend a few days with Lalu while he's away working!

The chipmunks wear versions of their classic costumes (Alvin's shirt has a lower-case 'a'), with Theodore sporting an unusual pair of blue denim dungarees over his usual green ensemble. I admit, as usual, to paying much much more attention to the boys than the girls in this whole movie. I really need to get over this ingrained prejudice against girls!

The relative ages of the chipmunks in different fictional realities is endlessly fascinating. Here, Eleanor is a particularly young baby who needs to be taken care of. The others are more general preschool/toddler age, although Theodore comes across as a younger brother to Alvin and Simon (who form a double-act when Alvin's not doing something on his own). But on the other hand, it's Alvin who feels his place in Lalu's affections has been supplanted by new baby Eleanor, and in a rather lovely scene when she uses candles to illustrate the qualities of love, Lalu seems to suggest she first met Simon and Theodore, then Brittany and Jeanette, then Alvin, and then Eleanor. It's all a bit ambiguous, but maybe the chronology goes Simon-Alvin-Theodore as per the most recent series.

Brittany's speech is less developed, while Simon and especially Jeanette are very advanced, but that seems to be a deliberate and well-written representation of the different speeds at which children acquire language skills. And they all switch to adult fluency when it comes to singing songs about their feelings!

Of course, songs are a central part of any Chipmunk production, and I was originally going to say the songs in this one are nothing special. But again... they grow on you. And quite frankly, Theodore's "Why Can't We Play?" is a thing of beauty! So yes, great musical productions on display here!

And lessons to be learned by everyone (except Simon, who's obviously mature enough not to need it). Even Lalu - there's a definite continuing thread here of teaching the grown-ups how to take care of kids, as much as teaching kids how to deal with emotions. But everyone deals with issues such as missing Dave, being left out of games, getting in trouble for doing something bad, not getting enough attention, and so on. It's good stuff, really! The whole thing can be watched on Vimeo (nobody's copyright-blocked it in my country, anyway) if you want to give it a try. I love the insightful comment someone provided - "Movie sucks since they chipmunks are puppets Madagascar is way better"

Or if you can't spare the time for an hour and a quarter of baby chipmunks learning life-lessons (shame on you), at least listen to this track! "But you don't want to fly with me, so I am feeling blue, cause I still want to fly away with you..." Honestly, anyone without a tear in their eye at hearing that is some kind of monster.

   

Anyway, I'm going to rehearsals in Reading for my own puppet performance this weekend. And then, I've got the week off work before the big show the weekend following! I booked the days off just because I'm going out of my mind with stress at work and life in general lately, and want to follow the example of Simon (in the excellent episode "Back to Basics") and go and live in a tree for a few days to clear my mind. So I'll see you around!

Translation

 I knew it! I KNEW I had at least one friend who would go to the trouble of decoding yesterday's post! Simon Orton, we all already knew you were the coolest, but this just proves it! Thank you for confirming my faith in humanity! I just hope it was a nice distraction from all the hassle caused by Memory League competitions - and by the way, all the rest of you blog-readers out there should tune in to the Pan American Open this weekend! I'm at a puppet rehearsal myself, which goes to show what kind of memory man I am these days, but I HAVE been playing Memory League every day for the last couple of weeks, and I'm slowly getting back into the groove, in time for league season 21!

Anyway, for those who were less dedicated to figuring out what I was saying yesterday, it was this:

I'm sorry I haven't blogged for a while, but to make up for it, here's an important message in Junior Justice Society code, which appeared in DC comics in the early nineteen forties. It was used to convey messages to society members about not walking in puddles or collecting scrap metal. Anybody who has bothered to translate this message is very cool. You win a prize. The prize is me telling you how cool I think you are. Buy war stamps!

Once again, Simon, you're the coolest.

This is why the Junior Justice Society of America was so great - it's a shame the secret messages that appeared in the comics were just brief war-propaganda messages, repeated many times over in different codes, but I'm sure many kids of the time did have fun with these secret code wheels - definitely harder to crack than the Superman club's codes if you don't know Greek letters.

The one in this picture is set to Spectre code - readers of More Fun Comics #89 could eagerly read this thrilling message from the ghostly hero:

Set your code wheel to Superman

 Ε'Ι ΟΛΞΞΦ Ε ΔΨΣΑΚ'Π ΩΘΛΓΓΑ♀ ΒΛΞ Ψ ΤΔΕΘΑ, ΩΡΠ ΠΛ ΙΨΗΑ ΡΜ ΒΛΞ ΕΠ, ΔΑΞΑ'Ο ΨΚ ΕΙΜΛΞΠΨΚΠ   ΙΑΟΟΨΓΑ ΕΚ ΖΡΚΕΛΞ ΖΡΟΠΕ♂Α ΟΛ♂ΕΑΠΦ ♂Λ♀Α, ΤΔΕ♂Δ ΨΜΜΑΨΞΑ♀ ΕΚ ♀♂ ♂ΛΙΕ♂Ο ΕΚ ΠΔΑ ΑΨΞΘΦ ΚΕΚΑΠΑΑΚ ΒΛΞΠΕΑΟ. ΕΠ ΤΨΟ ΡΟΑ♀ ΠΛ ♂ΛΚΣΑΦ ΙΑΟΟΨΓΑΟ ΠΛ ΟΛ♂ΕΑΠΦ ΙΑΙΩΑΞΟ ΨΩΛΡΠ ΚΛΠ ΤΨΘΗΕΚΓ ΕΚ ΜΡ♀♀ΘΑΟ ΛΞ ♂ΛΘΘΑ♂ΠΕΚΓ Ο♂ΞΨΜ  ΙΑΠΨΘ. ΨΚΦΩΛ♀Φ ΤΔΛ ΔΨΟ ΩΛΠΔΑΞΑ♀ ΠΛ ΠΞΨΚΟΘΨΠΑ ΠΔΕΟ ΙΑΟΟΨΓΑ ΕΟ ΣΑΞΦ ♂ΛΛΘ. ΦΛΡ    ΤΕΚ Ψ ΜΞΕΧΑ. ΠΔΑ ΜΞΕΧΑ ΕΟ ΙΑΠ ΑΘΘΕΚΓ ΦΛΡ ΔΛΤ♂ΛΛΘ Ε ΠΔΕΚΗ ΦΛΡ ΨΞΑ. ΩΡΦ ΤΨΞ ΟΠΨΙΜΟ!

I'm going to my memory palace

 I don't like that phrase. I didn't hear "memory palace" until I'd already been doing memory stuff for quite a while, so it doesn't sound authentic to me. That's perhaps what you get for only reading two chapters of one memory book instead of immersing yourself in the literature. But nowadays apparently Sherlock Holmes talks on TV about going into his memory palace, in a very unrealistic way. Pah. He should stick to detective stuff and cocaine.

But I just say 'journeys', and I'm going to create some new journeys for the first time in many, many years! I want some specially reserved for this mind-reading magic act, and don't want to cannibalise my existing ones. They need to be permanently engraved with long-term memory things, you see. It will be fun - I've discovered many new places since I last prepared journeys! Redditch and the surrounding areas are about to be immortalised in my brain!

Fat bottomed girls, they'll be riding today

It's been sunny and warm all through this bank holiday weekend! Well, it's pouring with rain right now, but that's okay because it's Monday night. So I've been cycling around all weekend - I have the idea that it does more good than harm to my knees, which is probably wrong, but it's fun anyway. Saturday I had a good long bike in two easy stages... 

Runkeeper is still a great app. This is just the free version, too, not something you have to pay actual money for! It's useful for seeing just how big the hills are along the way, if I want to plan to avoid them next time. There are flatter ways to get to Stratford...

The cycle route to Bromsgrove is fun, taking you really through the middle of nowhere...

And going to Barnt Green is basically uphill all the way. That's the problem with going anywhere towards Birmingham from Redditch - it's a great journey once you get past the hilly bits, but starting out is always bumpy.

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!