559555955

 Happy pi day! Which shouldn't really be a thing, because you have to put the month and day the wrong way around to make it 3/14. But waiting for the 31st of April takes longer than you'd expect it to, so we're just stuck with March the 14th, I'm afraid.

When you're memorising pi to fifty thousand places, as I saw fit to do twenty years ago, you come to appreciate the little interesting bits. Like the way, 18,351 digits in, it goes 559555955. I always thought that was very pretty.

One of these days, I'll go back and re-learn all those digits. It's more fun than you might think, I promise!

Observation

 If I had pet lice, I would name them Marvel and Fabu. But I wouldn't be able to own more than two, because those are the only good names, and all the other lice would be jea.

I've changed my mind

 And given the context, I think there's a good chance I've been telepathically "pushed" into changing my mind, possibly from beyond the grave. But never mind, eh? Let's talk about Psi-Force!

A couple of years ago, I lamented that I'd never read a comic I liked that was written by Stephen Perry, even though he'd written some excellent episodes of Thundercats and he did have a handful of comic-writing credits to his name. Before writing that rather sweeping dismissal of his entire literary oeuvre, I did go back and re-read the first issue of Psi-Force, to see if it was as bad as I remembered from my previous encounter with the series, and concluded that it really was dull and uninteresting. Possibly I was just in the wrong frame of mind.

Because as I mentioned recently (and this really is turning into a blog where I just read other, better, blogs and comment on them, so I do apologise for that), Tom Brevoort is working through the New Universe comics of 1986 with analysis, commentary and interesting anecdotes about their creation. And since he's already covered Star Brand and Spitfire, the two I read at least some of, forty years ago, I thought this would be a good time to go back and remind myself what happened in the others. My experience of the New Universe has been very piecemeal over the years, picking up odd comics here and there and generally thinking "What was that supposed to be all about, then?" - which might not have given me the best impression of the line, although it does seem to tally with what most fans say about them...

Psi-Force was created by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, but for some reason they didn't write or draw the comics themselves. Instead, it was drawn by the talented but inexperienced Mark Texeira (he'd drawn He-Man mini-comics and an issue of Transformers before this, so you can tell he was good!) and written by Steve Perry, best known for those few great episodes of the Thundercats cartoon.

So, we've got a team of pre-created characters, handed to people who've done a good job with toy tie-in fiction before now. It should work. And I think my problem with Psi-Force before now is that it's just not that kind of comic at all, and it's harder to get a handle on what kind of comic it is meant to be. But now, reading the first two issues (after which Perry was replaced by Danny Fingeroth), I find they do have a real appeal to them!

The story starts in medias res, with Emmett Proudhawk, known as "Hawk", trying to rescue teenage Anastasia "Stasi" Inyushin from the sinister Russians who say she belongs to them. It's all very dark and gritty. Hawk has telepathic powers, and can make people do what he wants, within limits. Stasi has the power to heal people, although again her powers are limited and difficult for her to use.Hawk has also brought along telekinetic teen Kathy Ling, although she's not at all an action hero, and is horrified to see there are people with actual guns, trying to kill people!

Our heroes get away in the end, though Hawk's been shot repeatedly, and regroup in "Sanctuary", a home for teenage runaways in San Francisco, where we meet the rest of the team.

The art in these comics is actually really good. A lot of small panels on each page, sometimes more than ten, and a lot of text to go with them, you really get your money's worth. Modern American comics have moved a long way away from this kind of thing, which is a great shame. There's more content in this one than in twelve monthly issues of the comics you'll see on the shelves today...

Nobody except Hawk has any kind of superhero name, or costume, and they're all teenagers from around America who Hawk has brought here. All of them had previously tested as having high-level ESP, but all have recently developed much more dramatic psychic powers after the "white event" that enveloped the planet and was the central plotline of the New Universe comics.

Wayne Tucker has telepathic powers like Hawk, and spends the entire first two issues announcing that he doesn't want to be part of the group and is leaving, right now. He never does, and we can't help but wonder if Hawk has been keeping him there. Hawk is very reluctant to use his powers on the kids, but he does do it later in this same issue, sending them out against their will when Stasi runs back to the Russians to try to save the others from danger. Later issues of the series get more explicit about this, but in these first two it's more subtly done.

The others are Tyrone Jessup, token black guy with astral projection powers, and Michael Crawley, little nerd who can make things blow up. All five of the teens are new to their powers and haven't entirely learnt to focus them into anything useful. Which is a good way to start a series - the superhero norm is that people immediately gain full control over their amazing powers, whip up a colourful costume and go out to fight crime, but this one really hits the "more realistic" tone that the New Universe was striving for.

Hawk has had a dream or vision of a hawk protecting five rabbits who combine to form some sort of super-hawk. It's presented as stereotypical "Indian mysticism", but it actually feels a bit more Old Testament than anything from Native American traditions. And like all good dreams, it comes true by the end of the first issue. Hawk is killed by Mindwolf, the Russian head bad guy, and the teens find that they can use his amulet, Captain Planet style, to summon Psi-Hawk, a manifestation of Hawk as a more standard superhero!

(This comic predates Captain Planet, by the way.)

And the second issue is more of the same, and actually a very compelling read - it details at length the kids trying to get back to Sanctuary, carrying Hawk's body, and being chased not by the Russians this time, but by Hawk's old colleagues in the CIA. Who don't yet know that Hawk is dead, and are working on the assumption that he's out there somewhere, so the feds are just after the teenagers to find out where.

It's all very grim and down-to-earth, but the individual personalities of the kids come across pretty well (they're still basically stereotypes, but you feel like we're getting to know them better) and there's a great sense of them being entirely out of their league...

And Psi-Hawk just comes to the rescue in the end, and I'm feeling like this comic would actually work better without that deus ex machina hanging around - especially since both he and Wayne are able to blank out people's memories after every encounter.

So it's certainly not perfect, but reading these two comics again now has really made me like them! I feel like the later issues of the series drift off into more conventional territories, but taking the Perry issues on their own, there's a definite feeling of new, exciting and different, by the standards of 1986 comics.

So, in summary, it turns out there IS a comic by Stephen Perry that I like! Yay! I'm just sorry it took me so long to warm up to it...

What's wrong with this picture?

 Here's a panel from Marvel Two-in-One #33, dated November 1977. The Thing and his girlfriend Alicia are in England, on their way to visit Stonehenge, and somehow confident it won't lead into yet another fight with wizards and demons and things.

They're eight miles away from Stonehenge, according to what seems to be a wooden sign on a stake hammered into the roadside. Travelling from London, you'd think they'd be on the A303 and enjoying the views of Salisbury Plain, but in fact they seem to be taking some kind of dirt track through the Rocky Mountains. And driving on the wrong side of the road. But hey, at least the comic's creators haven't done the usual American thing and believed British road signs are in kilometres!

Will any readers write in to point out the inaccuracies? A thousand of them did, apparently...

Yes, good old Mason M. Aldrich wrote from Florida to say "I always thought the British used kilometers to measure distance!" - and the editor apologises and notes that a whole lot of other readers wrote in to say the exact same thing.

But hey, 1977 was a primitive time. I won't demand Mason be stripped of his no-prize, since he was writing at a time when I was less than a year old and hadn't yet got a blog where I tell the world what's what. But if you're American and reading this, please note that the British use miles to measure distance. Always have done.

(To be fair, I always used to think Americans used kilometres. I mean, America is a hi-tech, modern kind of place, naturally they'd be all up-to-date and metric, right? It's only old-fashioned places like Britain that would use old-fashioned imperial measurements. America wouldn't use anything "imperial", now would they? But now the internet exists and I've been over there a time or two, I understand that they do measure things in miles. We're two nations separated by a common system of measuring the distance to Stonehenge.)

Cambridge International

 Looking it up, I've been going to this othello tournament in Cambridge since 2002 - not every year, but probably more often than not. And I've never looked quite as cool as I do in this picture, taken (unless I'm misattributing the credit, as I often do) by James Brooks:

 That's so awesome, words can't describe it. See, this is why you should wear a big hat!

Also, I did really rather well, finishing fifth and winning seven games out of eleven. And I could have (undeservedly) beaten Mark Plowman if I'd noticed that he played a dramatically losing move right at the very end of our game. But neither of us noticed until analysing the game afterwards, and it wouldn't have been a fair result for me to win, anyway. And I did beat the other three representatives of the Plowman family who came to this one, including a win against patriarch Guy that also probably deserves the "undeservedly" tag. It was a great weekend!

A strange way to end a story

 I thought I'd written about this in my blog before now, but it looks like I didn't. So, with at least 90% certainty I'm not repeating myself, I present this for a wider audience than anyone who's read an email I sent to my brother in 2013.

It begins today, as we could see on page 17 of the 86th issue of the Transformers comic released by Marvel UK, dated 8th Nov.86. I've written before about how this era was a high point of comics history for ten-year-old me, and this is another part of the epic Target: 2006 story that thrilled us all in the autumn of 1986! The backup strip wasn't of any great interest to Transformers fans, but they tried to whip up some enthusiasm on the first page - probably a futile attempt, since the Transformers story before it was eleven glorious pages of Ultra Magnus and Galvatron beating seven bells out of each other, and who could care about some backup strip after that?

Backup strips in Transformers had a simple rule - they could use any filler material they could find in Marvel USA's output, as long as it featured a robot or something that looked like a robot. Spitfire (a suit of armour) fitted the bill perfectly as a replacement for Hercules (the limited series in which he had a robot sidekick). As described here, it was part of the "New Universe" range of comics launched by the American Marvel in 1986, and Tom Brevoort is going to be writing about the spectacularly unsuccessful titles on his always-entertaining blog - so be sure to check it out if you want to see some real writing about comics. Here, though, I'll limit myself to just one page.

Spitfire and the Troubleshooters ran from number 86 to number 98 (31st Jan.87) of the Transformers comic - chopped into five or six pages per issue, that covered the first three issues of the American Spitfire comic. And it came to an end like this...

"Well, I've got the laser disk that might contain evidence against the bad guy Krotze. [strange indecipherable black blots]." THE END.

Okay, that's an unusual way to conclude a story. Reading it at the time, I don't recall even noticing it - I didn't ever pay much attention to Spitfire. Or perhaps I've just blanked out the whole incomprehensible thought bubble - my brother says he was enormously intrigued and confused by it and gave it a lot of deep thought!

Spitfire and the Troubleshooters was, I'm sorry to say, not a good comic. But it probably wasn't abruptly axed from Transformers on quality grounds - at the start of 1987, Hasbro had decided to push Action Force toys in a big way - the American "G.I. Joe" action figures had been available in Britain under the more comprehensible name "Action Force" before, but released by a different company and generally flying under the radar of British kids. But now, Hasbro had taken it back under the wing of their main toy lines, and there was going to be a comic and video releases of the American cartoon (all fascinatingly edited to change "G.I. Joe" to "Action Force" and "A Real American Hero" to "International Heroes" in order to make it make sense to us limeys). And so part of that was giving the Transformers backup slot for four weeks over to an unusually robot-free story from the American G.I. Joe comic, introducing the new characters who appeared in Hasbro's debut range.

And there's a Lew Stringer Robo-Capers about the free sticker that came free with this issue too!

But what happened in that ending to Spitfire? Well, the original American comic actually ended like this...

"That's the plus side..." And then there was one more panel completing the thought, and three-quarters of a page setting up the next storyline, which Transformers readers never got to see:

So what's with the black blots in the Transformers comic? Were they intending to remove the thought bubble entirely? Or rewrite it to make it a bit less open-ended? I suppose we'll never know. I mean, I didn't care about it at the time, but I did at least investigate and buy the American comic in 2013 when I finally noticed it again, so in a sense, this backup strip did generate one more (second-hand) sale for Marvel! The New Universe is a success!

Appreciate the squirrels

 January 21st is Squirrel Appreciation Day, an important event in the calendar founded by some weird American on the internet a few years ago. I think squirrels are great, as I've mentioned many times on this blog.

So I'm rather disappointed to find something called the UK Squirrel Accord, a big bunch of sciurine racists, have claimed the day as "RED Squirrel Appreciation Day", and have a whole website full of articles about how to get rid of horrid invasive species like grey squirrels. Sciurine racists, I tell you. Grey squirrels are great, and I'm going to form them into an army to take down this horrid bunch of horrid people.

T'other Toth

 I see on the BBC news that AFC Bournemouth have signed Alex Toth, who turns out to be a promising young Hungarian midfielder who might fill the gap in the Cherries' ranks left by star player Antoine Semenyo upping and leaving for the higher wages of Manchester City. I just hope it leads to a lot of people searching for details of Alex Toth on the internet and learning all about the great American comic book artist of the same name.

Actually, Alex Toth the artist died in 2006, and Alex Toth the footballer is apparently twenty years old... no, disappointingly, their lives did overlap a little, so it's probably not a case of reincarnation, but it comes pretty close. It's still a good excuse to write a blog about some little-known comics, so let's explore the world of Sierra Smith, Western Detective!

Sierra made his debut in the first issue of Dale Evans Comics, published in June 1948:

If you're wondering who Dale Evans is, you're probably not reading this in the year 1948 - Roy Rogers was a really big name, a mega-celebrity and very much the kind of superstar whose merchandise kids would eagerly spend their post-war pocket money on. A licensed Roy Rogers comic had been published by Dell since 1947, and was selling like hot cakes. DC Comics felt they'd missed the boat quite badly there, in their quest to find something new to replace the increasingly unpopular superheroes that had made them into the leading comics publisher of the early 1940s. So because they couldn't get Roy Rogers (and Trigger the horse presumably demanded too high a fee), they signed the next-best thing - Roy's celebrity wife, Dale Evans, Queen of the Westerns!

This comic was a bi-monthly, and every issue contained three comic adventures of Dale (in which her life as a celebrity movie star was continually interrupted by real-life cowboy adventures involving bank robberies and the like for her to thwart), friendly updates on her life (which, unlike the comic stories, were allowed to mention her husband and family), other filler stuff of the type that filled all anthology comics back then, and one backup strip - our hero, Sierra Smith.

Sierra is a noir detective, who lives in the modern-day wild west. It's written by Joe Millard, and drawn by Alex Toth (the artist, who will at that time have been about the same age that the Bournemouth-bound Hungarian footballer is now). It's a strange mix, but he's very much the character archetype. He's a hard-boiled detective, good with his fists, perpetually cynical, perpetually short of money, perpetually aggravating his secretary and girlfriend Nan, and always getting the job done in the end.

His investigations involve a lot of abandoned gold mines, interspersed with an occasional bank robbery. They follow the standard comic formula of the time - Sierra always uncovers the villain's evil scheme, investigates, gets knocked out and captured, escapes, thwarts the evil-doers and sometimes even gets paid (though he tends to squander the money on solving the crime and Nan complains about how he expects them to eat tonight). They're actually great fun, if you're in the mood!

The first story involves a bit of good old-fashioned cross-dressing, too...

And a year later, in Dale Evans Comics #7, Dale herself encounters the same kind of thing. One can only speculate whether she personally approved of this kind of fun, and whether she and Roy (and Trigger) indulged in the same kind of merriment behind closed doors:

The beauty contest for cowboys, if you were wondering, was organised by a man who wanted to rob the bank, and knew if the cowboys were all wearing long skirts and no guns, they wouldn't be able to stop him. But Dale sorts him out in the end, don't worry.

Millard and Toth only remained on Sierra Smith for the first eleven adventures, but I heartily recommend checking them out! It's one of those lost classics of late-forties American comic history, and I just hope Bournemouth's new midfielder can produce the same kind of entertainment!

Father's day

It's not Father's Day; that happens in June. But I saw someone on Facebook today saying it's Peppermint Patty's birthday and sharing the Peanuts comic first published in an October that says it's her birthday, which got me thinking paternally anyway. Because I've noted before that it does quite often seem that fictional characters I really love have a strong loving relationship with a single father. I don't think that's a requirement for becoming a favourite of mine, but it certainly doesn't hurt. So on this no-particular-occasion, as we're only a couple of months away from the twentieth anniversary of my own father's death, let's take a look at a few great single dads of cartoon history.

Single fathers were surprisingly commonplace in the American cartoons of the 1980s that I grew up with. It was very common to see a kid who just had a dad, and nobody even gave the slightest clue as to whether there had ever been a mother involved in the child's creation at some point. But the likes of Spike Witwicky (Transformers) and Scott Trakker (MASK) never thrilled me all that much, and Defenders of the Earth (four single men, each with a child, and that's not counting Ming the Merciless being a single father too) has never been a particular favourite, although it's got some really great moments. We have to move into more modern times before we get a real favourite of mine who falls into that category, so let's start with the latest and greatest...

I have still got an enormous crush on Simon Seville. The whole series ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks is so wonderfully written, directed and produced and that one character is so completely and totally me in every way, I'm just infatuated (I'm a rather self-absorbed person, if you look at it that way). Let me share with you one amazing moment that I point out to everyone...

If you're not familiar with Alvin and the Chipmunks (even though I've gone on about it at such length in the past), David Seville is the adoptive father of the three chipmunk boys. They often combine to drive him mad, but underneath that is such a mutual love, it pervades everything they do. Simon is the quiet one, but all three really need  and thrive on Dave's care and attention in their own way. In the episode "Writer's Block", they think they've made Dave run away from home, and at the end he has to reassure them. And while he talks to Theodore and Alvin, calming their fears, and Simon just sits silently to the side, keeping his worries to himself, Dave reaches out and pats Simon's head, just giving him that silent reassurance. It's a moment that melts my heart, and I so admire the way it's worked into that scene. Perhaps nobody else even notices it, but it's my all-time most-loved moment in the show.

Now let's move on to The Owl House, and my most-loved character there, Gus. He also just has a dad, and in this case there's never any mention of a mother being involved, in the classic style. And since he's a witch from the Boiling Isles, which have different laws of nature altogether, perhaps he really never had a mother in the first place. But at the end of the final episode, "Watching and Dreaming", they're finally reunited after the horrors of the Collector's reign and the final conflict with Belos...

If you're not familiar with The Owl House, you might not even notice that Gus seems to me to be unusually small in this scene, and I wonder whether it's deliberate, or just a result of inconsistent art and regular confusion over his character design. Gus is (almost uniquely in cartoons) a young teenage boy whose voice actor was a young teenage boy, and Issac Ryan Brown's voice was breaking during production of the first season. As an in-joke, Gus has a big overnight growth spurt as well as a deeper voice when season two begins, which he cheerfully ascribes to 'witch puberty', and his relative size compared to other characters does seem to fluctuate rather from that point on. But it's possible his smallness here is deliberate - he's a very powerful witch specialising in illusion magic, so I can see him unconsciously making himself look little when reunited with Perry. In any case, I love this scene and the attachment the two of them have to each other.

And let's go back to the nineties and hear it for Chuckie in Rugrats, and the love between him and his father Chas. Because that's one of the most wonderful pieces of characterisation in animation history, and always worthy of a mention.

If you're not familiar with Rugrats, the premise is that the babies wander off and have adventures by themselves, unnoticed by their parents who generally look on their offspring as objects to be kept around the place and largely ignored. The exception is Chas, who always has a warm and caring relationship with his son Chuckie, though it's mainly offscreen - Chuckie is perpetually around at Tommy's house while his single father Chas is working. And the episode "Mother's Day" goes into detail about how the situation arose - Chuckie's mother died when he was very young. That clearly wasn't the original intention of the series (a character model for Chuckie's mother exists, and was used in the background of one episode but not identified), but really made the characters make a lot more sense once this episode came along. It's absolutely beautiful, in fact, and you all need to go and watch it.

But let's move back even further in time and look at Peanuts, which started this whole train of thought. If you're not familiar with Peanuts, what's wrong with you? It's perhaps the most famous American newspaper comic of all time, and it's spawned no end of cartoons and films! But if you're still unfamiliar, the thing about parents (and all adults) in Peanuts is that they're never seen and rarely even mentioned. My favourite character there has to be Schroeder, and he follows the trend in never showing any sign of having a father or mother. We assume his parents took him on his vacation to Europe in 1958 (this strip from 16 November), but that's the closest he ever comes. Quite impressive for someone who was a small baby when he first appeared!

But the two characters who come a close second in my personal estimation are also the two who actually do have that father-son bond I appreciate so much. Charlie Brown's father isn't single (the rarely-mentioned Mrs Brown is a housewife, and that's about all we know about her), but he really does love his son, best shown in this strip from June 21, 1964. Violet is fond of boasting about her dad, but Charlie Brown is the one who definitely comes out on top for once.

And the very best father-child relationship in Peanuts comes from my other most-loved character, and the one who started this whole train of thought, Peppermint Patty. She doesn't have a mother (for reasons never explained) and lives with her single father, to whom she's very attached. Their relationship, although of course we never see him, is quite beautiful, and perhaps never more so than in this one, October 4th, 1970.

Yes, let's all celebrate all the fictional fathers out there - they're doing a great job!

Chipmunk Chronological Confusion Corner

 "Theo vs Simon" is a particularly wonderful episode of ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks. But there's something about the sequence of events in it that I find a little strange. Just follow through these scenes from the episode, and see what you think.

Poor little Theodore has come to believe that Simon is better than him at everything, when he discovers that Simon once won a trophy for baking brownies - he makes Simon whip up another batch to see what they're like, and when they turn out to be delicious, Theo runs up to their bedroom, crying.

Just as an aside, reason number 5616581651 why I love this cartoon - the way it depicts crying. Most modern cartoons go with anime-style exaggerated floods of tears, but Chipmunks draws it very realistically, which works much better.

And when they cry is done brilliantly, too, with a consistent and well-thought-out grasp of character. Theo is in tears a lot, because he's the emotional type. Alvin cries much less frequently, and only when the world is genuinely being unfair to him (on those rare occasions when he tells the truth, and finds that people don't believe him!) And Simon only ever cries when both his brothers are already sobbing - which only happens in the subset of episodes when they believe they've lost Dave forever.

But back in "Theo vs Simon", Simon comes up to the room to try to talk to Theodore.

I just want you to know, Theodore, I am so impressed with all that you do!

Oh, shove it! You're just the best! You're the best at everything, okay!

Theodore, look - everybody loves you! You listen to people! And people trust you with their feelings! That's huge!

That doesn't count! That's easy!

I'm sure there's a lot of things that you're better at than me!

Oh yeah? Like what?

Well, you pick! Pick anything!

Okay. Okay, I will!

Theodore stomps out. And the next scene starts with Theo standing by the pool, and Alvin coming out to join him.

How you doing, Theodore?

He's just so good, at so many things!

Why do you keep challenging him, Theodore? Simon's good at a lot of things, but that doesn't mean you're not!

Yeah, but I wanna be better than him at one thing! One important thing! Not just being nice and cuddly!

Oh Theodore, I got it! The drums! It takes years to master!

Did we miss something here? We haven't seen Theodore challenging Simon to things repeatedly yet! Anyway, Alvin arranges a drum-off, and Simon... gets a bit carried away.

At first Simon just tries to concede defeat, but when Theo insists he show what he can do, Simon plays a wonderful drum solo, Theodore screams, kicks his drum kit to pieces and runs back to the bedroom. "Nice going, champ," Brittany tells Simon, who protests "Theodore, that was a fluke! That never happened! Honestly!" and follows him back to the bedroom...

And the dialogue in this scene is another of my all-time favourites.

Theodore, look, let's just do it again. You know, that was a once-in-a lifetime...

Stop! Stop! I... I hate this. And I don't want you to make yourself worse, just so I feel better!

Oh, there, Theodore, you see? You are so emotionally mature! You're the best at that!

Oh, be quiet! They don't give out trophies for that!

Well, yes, but I... (Theodore puts his hand over Simon's mouth) mmpphh mmf...

I, I know it's not emotionally mature, but I need to beat you at something! I'm sorry, it's just really gonna bother me until I do...

And THEN, we cut to the musical number for the episode (a great song, as always) with a montage of Theodore challenging and losing to Simon at running, basketball, Rubik's cube, sandcastle building and finally blowing bubbles by the pool.

It ends with Theo standing by the pool, just where Alvin found him at the start of the earlier scene. The next scene picks up at the start of the next day, as they're going to school, and Simon tells Alvin "It's getting really bad. Last night he challenged me to shove myself into a to-go bag!"

And I just feel like the song montage should have come after the first bedroom scene, not the second! I mean, it does still work in the sequence of events we get here, but it just seems like it makes more sense to put the music before the drum-off. Maybe it's just me. Or maybe the song needed to be placed at a particular time-point in the episode. Or maybe someone just put it after the wrong one of the two very similar Simon/Theo bedroom scenes?

It's probably just that I think too much about these things. But don't worry, there is a happy ending to this episode, and I really recommend that you check it out!

Mar-Might will save the day

 This advert appears in Transformers No.102, dated 28th Feb.87:

Send for your Marmiteers Fun Pack! It seems to be a very short-lived attempt to make children urge their parents to buy lots of Marmite - you had to send away "only 16oz worth of Marmite labels", which is quite a lot. The little jars of Marmite in those days were 4 ounces (the labels said 113g, but they hadn't yet moved to selling them in round numbers of grammes). If the household only bought a little jar at a time, people eager to read the adventures of Jo-Jo, Bruno and Mar-Might must have been really spreading the stuff heavily on their toast!

I don't know of anyone who got the Fun Pack. I must try to find one some day. I don't dislike Marmite, but it just doesn't seem like something you'd try to promote to children in this way, even in the days when the Transformers comic was chock-full of adverts for the Weetabix gang on their latest adventure. I'd still like to know exactly what Marmite-themed fun our heroes had...

Excelsis

 There's a great article here about Diarmuid Early, winner of the Microsoft Excel World Championship and a really nice guy all round!

Can I encourage you to join in next year's competition? I promise you it's a lot of fun! Full details pending, but this is the schedule of days to set aside half an hour for solving puzzles by means of spreadsheet formulas as quickly as possible.

You don't have to be weird to do this, but it helps.

Sic transit gloria mundi

 This meme I saw on the internet is rather sad, really.

I mean, there are a lot of things in here I used every day and to think that they're now museum pieces is downright depressing. I've never had an AOL address, though, so I win there. Mainly because I've had the same yahoo email address for 27 years now, but that doesn't show my age at all, right? And I think I've only ever slept on a waterbed once. And I'm not American, so I've never written in 'cursive' as the writer of this meme understands the word, probably. Does that mean I'm still young? Answers on a postcard.

Ridiculosa!

 The Sparky Book 1978 includes two adventures for "Ma Fia and her Mob". Not a regular strip in the weekly Sparky comic, or as far as I can tell, anywhere else.

I thought they might have been borrowed from somewhere else to fill space in the annual (the Sparky at this time did include The Circus of P. T. Bimbo, imported from America and similarly playing on old American stereotypes), but research on the internet draws a complete blank - a lone website cataloguing the contents of this Sparky Book is all Google turns up. The website in question describes it as "relying on cheap racial stereotyping for humour! Yet another case of scraping the barrels bottom again." - which, yes, is fair, but I always rather liked these two comics and hoped to see more of them!

Is there really no more than this? You could churn out a good few more strips along these lines before you run out of the stock of tired old clichés, and I know I at least would like to see them! Could they have appeared under a different name somewhere? I think Ma is due a revival, anyway.

I did put the second strip into Google's image search to see if anything would turn up, but all I got was Google's AI summarising the story in its own unique style:

No, thank you. Honestly, I can't help thinking they need to work a bit more on the whole AI thing before automatically forcing it on people who use Google to search for things. There are some very stupid people out there, after all, and I worry about what they're going to end up believing. I do like the way it's quite good at interpreting the dialogue, but spectacularly fails to pick up on what's actually happening in the story. It's reassuring to know computers are still so dimwitted, we can thwart their inevitable takeover of the world by asking them to define love.

How old is Johnny?

 A couple of Christmases ago, I went on at great length about the Johnny Ludlow papers written by Mrs Henry Wood, and noted that compiling a definitive chronology of Johnny's life and times is something I'm going to do one of these days. It still is, but it's more a thing to do when I've won the lottery and have nothing better to do with my time for months or years on end.

But as I said in that essay, the lynchpin for establishing Johnny's timeline is the story in which Easter Monday falling on April 24th is an essential part of the plot. Since the whole point of this game is to pretend Johnny is a real person, telling true stories, he can't have been mistaken about the year there, and it must have happened in 1848. Which makes the story "Roger Bevere", featuring a well-established London underground railway, rather problematic. And there's another story which gets anachronistic in the other direction...

"Anne", a three-part story published in the Argosy Magazine from October to December 1876, is a good one for tying all the stories together in one coherent chronology. Johnny tells us it's the year when Jacob Lewis, the old rector of Timberdale, died and was replaced by his stepson Herbert Tanerton (who goes on to appear in many other stories). And Johnny the narrator is even kind enough to remark parenthetically that "This year that I am now telling of was the one that preceded the accident to King Sanker." - so we can set this as early in Johnny's life, and prior to the other stories involving the Sanker family and the people they interact with.

Johnny doesn't tell us how old he is during this story - he's clearly a youngish boy, "years and years" younger than the heroine Anne Lewis, but still able to have mature conversations with her about her problems. Which are, basically, the plot of Cinderella. Mrs Henry Wood loved the Cinderella story and told it over and over in her works, but never more so than in this story. And it's when Anne acquires her wicked stepmother and two ugly sisters that the date of the story comes into question.

"St. Michael's Church stood in a nook under the cathedral walls: it is taken down now. It was there that the wedding took place." says Johnny the narrator. And the unusually-located church was indeed a real place in Worcester. And it was 'taken down' in 1843. A replacement church nearby had been built in 1839, and you wouldn't think the old place was still being used for weddings right up to its demolition. So does this story, and by implication all of Johnny's youthful adventures, take place so far back as 1840 or so?

You wouldn't think it could be. It's ambiguous exactly how old Johnny is here, but we can't really put it five or more years before "Watching on St. Mark's Eve". Let alone twenty years before the London Underground opened, if we're to believe "Roger Bevere".

And speaking of trains, when Anne and her father first come to the (fictional) village of Crabb, they're collected from "the station". All the other stories set in and around North and South Crabb have a very busy train station, Crabb Junction, in South Crabb - it's explained that the little place happens to be on the intersection of multiple train lines, which is reasonable enough, but surely must mean that the station was built during the "railway mania" of the 1840s. Shifting Johnny Ludlow's childhood back early enough to set that wedding in St Michael's throws everything just that little bit askew. It's surprising how "Victorian times" actually encompasses a whole lot of rapid change and development once you start looking at railways.

I think Johnny's getting his churches confused and misremembering. The unfortunate Dr Lewis and the awful Mrs Podd got married in the new church, and all those years later when he comes to write the story for the magazine Johnny thinks it was the old one. This is the kind of thing you have to read into the text if you want to be a chronologist. I'll write that full Johnny Ludlow history one day, and it'll all make sense, you'll see!

Cuphead and his pal Mugman, they like to roll the dice

 Further to my last-but-one blog post, the latest cartoon I've been enjoying is The Cuphead Show. And I'm fascinated to see that seasons 1 and 3 are rated PG, with the warning "Rude humour, threat", while season 2 gets a U certificate but the extended caution "Rude humour, dangerous behaviour, violence, threat". I'm not sure which season is more unsafe to watch, based on this.

It's a good cartoon, though, in an uneven kind of way. But I've only watched the first season so far, and maybe it improves. Anything inspired (via a video game) by Max Fleischer cartoons has to be worth a watch, at least. And the game itself was great-looking and not as great to play as it probably should have been. I'm just too picky, possibly. And rude.

Anton's Syndrome is no laughing matter

 To commemorate its eighteenth anniversary, I would like to provide the answer to the riddle posed by this story. Henry, as the reader can easily deduce from his depiction throughout the text, is the type of person who would ensure the ceilings of his home are a colour that no human being could under any circumstances ever express dissatisfaction with. When the Archbishop of York said he didn't like them, Henry realised that the Archbishop must be blind and not be personally aware of it. So making him believe he'd fed paupers to hungry lions was a simple matter of Henry making the appropriate noises.

I'd intended to include that explanation in the story, but then decided it would be funnier not to.

NUTS2U

 

I've got Netflix as part of my Sky subscription. I wouldn't have Netflix if I had to pay for it, because there's almost nothing on it that anyone would want to watch. The same applies to all telly, actually. I've only got Sky because I don't want people to think I'm too poor to afford television. I've gone without TV for lengthy periods when there wasn't going to be anyone seeing that I haven't got it. I probably shouldn't care so much about what people think, and focus solely on telling people what I think.

Anyway, the only thing any sane person could want to watch (extensively) on Netflix is "ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks". And I'm intrigued by the content warnings applied to each season's box set. They all merit a U certification, but Season 1 follows it with "Language". Seasons 2, 3 and 4 seem to be a little more risqué, because they all warn of "Rude humour, references to crime, violence, threat". And then Season 5 (the best season), tones the warning down to "Rude humour, violence".

I think Chipmunks is minimally rude - there's certainly no 'language' worse than the occasional use of "nuts" to express annoyance in a chipmunky kind of way. And while there are occasional references to crime, I don't think these are reduced in Season 5. People who tremble at the very mention of crime should definitely still avoid it. Theodore steals Miss Croner's cherries in one episode. A criminal from the future steals Simon's invention and threatens to maroon Alvin in dinosaur times in another. Really, references to crime and threat abound in this cartoon, and people should definitely steer clear!

Englishness at 78% and still rising

 Happy Halloween! October is a special month not just because of my birthday, but because of ancestry.co.uk's annual update of their DNA ethnicity estimate! It's become something of an annual tradition - check out my previous blogs on the subject!

In October 2022, I got the results of the sample I'd sent in, and found that it said I'm 69% from "England & Northwestern Europe". A bit on the low side, I thought. And significantly Swedish or Danish on my mother's side too, with a big chunk of Scotland on my father's. Plus 1% of Norway.

In October 2023, Ancestry had improved their estimations, and upgraded me to 76% Englishness, draining away a bit of the Swedishness and Scottishness.

In October 2024, I had inched up to 77% on the Englandometer, with decreasing Danishness and a surprising shift in my father's heritage into the unexplored regions of "Germanic Europe" and the Netherlands. What will this latest year's update bring?

Well, it's the biggest update ever, and England has fractured into at least three independent parts!

Which makes it a little harder to track just how English the Ancestry world thinks I am, but we can just add together the East Midlands, West Midlands and "Southwestern England & Northwestern Europe" to see I've gone up one more percentage point, making 78%! I'm getting ever closer to being the Full English Breakfast!

"East Midlands" seems to include Sheffield, where a big chunk of my father's side come from (his father's family originated in Rutland and moved to Sheffield in the 1800s; the Millership side were longer-established in Sheffield), so it does work. And people who aren't familiar with the precise details of my family tree and can't be bothered to read those old blogs might need to know that my maternal grandfather (who died when my mum was a baby) came from London, so giving me 25% of that doesn't seem unreasonable.

But let's have a look by parent. You have to give Ancestry money to get it to say "mother" and "father", apparently, but we can see from the cheap version that "Parent 1" is my dad and "Parent 2" my mum...

My dad is now twice as Dutch as he used to be, and 2% Irish too! Meanwhile, my Scandinavian side has shrunk sharply, leaving me just 3% of Denmark, with a big part of my mum suddenly having become Scottish or Northern Irish. Parts of me are shifting slowly around Europe, but it's gradually coalescing into making me English. Give it another couple of decades...

My dad did go to Amsterdam once, you know. Among his effects I found an old temporary passport dating to 1976, and I very vaguely remember that there was some kind of anecdote about "the time I went to Amsterdam, before you were born." So maybe he was getting in touch with the distant ancestors.

Happy birthday, Leonard Starr!

 The principal creative force behind perhaps the greatest cartoon series of the 1980s was born 100 years ago today! Thundercats remains a delight to watch, even after all this time, and I've celebrated the centenary by watching the first episodes, on the videotape I recorded them on when they were first shown. It doesn't get old.