read today
Is this the only Langridge comic with a spine on it? Isn't that a crime? It's only 72 pages or something, too.
stolen from the ever-irregular Rocking Vicar
MISHEARD A&Radd your name to the parish register of the Rocking Vicar
Parishioner Richard Wootton: "I have always understood that when A&M signed British country rocker Albert Lee they had actually thought they were signing ALVIN Lee from Ten Years After. This was in the late '70s and I think both were based in LA at the time. Albert duly made an album for the label, I think it was called Hiding and on the sleeve he was peeping out from behind a doorway."Parishioner Steve Mainwaring: "I remember Ralph McTell explaining that he'd been unable to think of a good title for his then latest album and had dithered for some time. His record company phoned up to ask if he had one yet, he said "Not 'til tomorrow", and that was how it was released. I suspect similar explanations lie behind the tracks Call It Anything by Miles Davis on the Isle of Wight Festival album and Call It Something Nice by the Small Faces, originally on The Autumn Stone.”
Parishioner Cyberlizard: “When ELO released their first LP, the record company in the States phoned up to see what the title was. Apparently the secretary couldn't get through, so she just wrote down ‘No Answer’ on her notepad. Her boss took this as the title of the LP, and it was released under that name.”
Sister Louise Pepper: “Having read the whole Richard Branson Motorhead/Radiohead shenanigans [last week’s Vicar] I was reminded of the time I was working for a small digital entertainment channel. Every now and again our buffoon of a boss would stroll out, pretend he knew something about popular culture and return to his office where he would set about right royally f**king the channel up. One day he came over to my desk and said to me and the head of music ‘We need to get more Cold Feet on the channel. I've looked at the running orders and the website and it's nowhere.’ We looked puzzled, wondering why he was so keen on the James Nesbitt/Helen Baxendale series and why he was telling the music dept. It was sometime we figured he was referring to Coldplay, to whom we had just dedicated a whole day's programming. Small wonder the channel was closed down a few months later.”
A Radio One mole writes: “John Walters celebrated one of the great faux pas of long-serving R1 producer Chris Lycett in a speech at his leaving do. Lycett had insisted his presenter at the time (Kid Jensen I think) play the hip and happening sounds of the fast-rising MAN GUE (which he effortlessly pronounced Mangway, assuming the great man to be of Spanish origin). The gatefold sleeve of his album was quietly unfolded to reveal his full name: HUMAN LEAGUE.”
PARISHIONER DRESSED AS RABBIT
Parishioner Mary Ingoldby: "One of many abiding spectacles at this year's Glastonbury Festival was parishioner John Harris onstage with the Flaming Lips dressed as, I think, a rabbit, along with some girl from Radio One as a reindeer, Zoe Ball as a chicken and, I'm pretty sure, John Peel as a panda. God alone knows how they kept dancing all that time, in that heat, in those furry animal outfits, but perhaps our boy could give the parish the full story? And didn’t Peel once appear with The Faces dressed as a bagpiper?”
.. AND THE RETURN OF RAT-TAIL
Parishioner Andy Townsend: “I used to run the door of the Vertigo Club at the Falcon in Camden for a while back in ‘92/’93 and can recall Jim Rat-Tail’s attendance at most shows by 'buzz' bands including Blur and Suede. Short, skinny and indie-pale, his name back then was Geekboy. The rat tail was a later development, a dirty blond ponytail that has been plaited that by now he must be able to tuck into his boots. Always alone he'd pay his £4 and spend all night sipping one bottle of Becks. Never spoke to anyone. I did try to engage him in conversation on a couple of occasions but to no avail. A funny little feller that never really seemed to age. I always imagined him living in a bedsit in Leyton surrounded by piles of music filed by genre (Riot Grrll a sizeable section I reckon) and posters of Liz Phair and Shonen Knife. I'd be heartened to hear that he’s still out and about.”Parishioner Kate Hodges: “Re: Jim Rattail aka "Side Ponytail Man" aka "The Perv". I've spotted him at scores upon scores of shows in London over the last ten years. In fact if there's a girl in your band and he's not at the front of your gig, consider yourself a failure. I've seen him sporting a jaunty mortar board, and on several special occasions, a leather tail. His painstaking archive of pictures of bands resides here - where he not only presents pictures of the thousands of shows he's been to, but scores them according to his unique rating system. It's blunt and brutal, namely *** Good ** OK * Boring (eat THAT, Rolling Stone). You'll notice that bands with girls in tend to score more highly. A quick google also reveals a fansite for the legendary, pinched face gig-goer. God bless him, he must have poured thousands into the coffers of toilet venues across the capital. He remains impervious to friendly attempts at conversation, mute even when given assistance while being beaten up. An enigma.”
“Jim Rat-Tail is still very much alive and in force. He even has his own website [as above] including an ever popular section of photos he takes covertly of random girls he fancies in clubs, quite scarily. Although generally frowned upon, you know you're someone if you've been unwittingly photographed and appeared on his site.” (Matthew Lancashire)
A man named "Coop" mocks cartoonists with affectations
"I also like how Seth and Jason Little seem to be involved in some kind of competition to see who can be the most affected and foppish. It's just a matter of time until we see Seth in knickerbocker pants, using a stick to roll a barrel hoop down the aisles at SPX, only to be upstaged by Jason Little as he rides in on one of those old-timey bicycles with a gigantic front wheel. Then Seth will break out his cotton gin,followed by Jason Little building a steam engine, etc. Where will it all end? I guess one will show up riding a dinosaur and the other will have to admit defeat."Roger Langridge explains why superheroes are silly
"...for me anyway, it's not the idea that somebody would dedicate their lives to doing good works that I have a problem with; it's the idea that wearing a bag on your head and jumping off buildings is the best way to do it that I find difficult to suspend my disbelief over. For me, it only really works when the world in which they operate is even more ridiculous; when Superman's best friend is a turtle-boy transvestite and his girlfriend keeps hiding kryptonite in his lunchbox and jumping off buildings on the off-chance he might be flying past, Superman's choice of crime-fighting technique suddenly seems entirely credible; he's clearly the most sensible person in the entire strip."
Evan Dorkin answers
There are many issues that could prevent digital comics from growing, such as piracy. Also, and even novelists ran into that wall, it seems to be hard to get paid, even with systems such as PayPal. Subscription, advertisement, micro-payments: what do you think is the best option to be paid on the web for digital creations?
the Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore
The third of a recent eruption of cash-in-on-Alan-Moore books to crowd the market, this one I was most trepidatious about purchasing. Portrait Of An Extraordinary Gentleman was cheap, had enough decent material (most notably a long reminiscence from Steve Bissette) to offset the preponderance of “spooky” drawings of Rorshach by confused Italians, and gave one the warm glow of knowing the money was going to charidee. Jess Nevins’ Heroes & Monsters was a straightforward, well-researched annotation of the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, and I wasn’t arsed about getting it.
Meanwhile, this one had the drawcards of a pile of never-reprinted strips, a remastered In Pictopia, new comics by Gaiman, Veitch, Bolland &al., a long biographical interview with Moore, who’s always entertaining on the topic of himself… but it’s by George Khoury, who was responsible for the appallingly inaccurately-subtitled Kimota! – The Miracleman Companion. This collection of badly-transcribed and naively-conducted interviews failed completely to clarify (or even successfully describe) the tangle of IP rights that mire the property, or offer any analysis of the work that rose above trite and simplistic. More recently, he contributed an essay to the America’s Best Comics issue of Comic Book Artist that was so embarrassing I barely had a reprieve from cringing in five pages, as he told the story of going to England for the weekend to visit Alan Moore’s house and leaving some cheques for his mummy who he lives with to cash if anything happened to him on the dangerous voyage and how it’s weird that they drive on the wrong side of the road over there and you know how everyone says all British food is really bad well it’s true because me and my friend ate: a hamburger in a supermarket and: a fried breakfast in a motel and guess what they were not very good at all. Plus eight metric tonnes of ringpiece-polishing.
So I didn’t order it, and never saw it in the comic shop, but when I ran across a shelf of them at Kinokuniya: good stuff in it, interview will be mostly Moore, hmm…
Uh-huh. By the second page of the interview, on the train home, I was so on edge that I decided I’d never get through the book without an outlet to vent. Therefore, over the next few days, stay tuned for running commentary on The Extraordinary Wanks of TwoMorrows Publishing.
Extraordinary Wanks 1
The cover is very nice. An unpublished piece from 1989 or so by Dave McKean, recently updated - my teenage self was a big liker of McKeans illustrative style at the time, and it’s lovely to see another artefact of it now. The typeface fits in tolerably with the art, though the authorial credit seems odd: “George Khoury and friends.” If you’re not going to use the contributor’s names to sell the book, why say anything? It’s not like “no-name’s mates” is a drawcard to anyone.
indicia: “written and edited by George Khoury.” Uh-oh.
Page 3 has a comic strip by Khoury and Hilary Barta, introducing the book. George appears much more slender here than in his photographs in that CBA, but let’s give the benefit of the doubt: maybe he’s been rendered svelte through exercise in the real world, or Barta hasn’t seen him. It’s always a pleasure to see Barta’s slick linework and expressive cartooning, but the content is a waste of space. Two editorial footnote jokes in two panels?
“He’s neither immortal, immoral nor paranormal. I’ve met him. He’s flesh and blood!The fuck? So he hasn’t written all those comics, fought those battles for creators rights, lived the fascinating life that he says he has? Then why would I want to read this book?And all those things you’ve heard about him…lies!”
The contents spread has a nice repro of the preliminary of an Alex Ross piece from Wizard magazine. The pencils show Ross’ talent for anatomy and composition without the obfuscating sheen that his paintings often have, and it’s fascinating to see so many characters from Moore’s oeuvre rendered in a consistent style. Unfortunately, Morrow has failed to account for the bleed, and a large portion of the drawing is lost in the binding
A sidenote talks about the cover, “…which McKean retouched with new momentos.” Do you think he’s trying to describe the momentous occasion of the retouching, or that McKean used small fruit-flavoured lollies in the collage?
Another sidenote observes of the page before “This hilarious prelude strip was written by George Khoury and illustrated by Hilary Barta.” First of all? Have some fucking humility. Secondly: if it was meant to be hilarious, shouldn’t you have put some humour in it? Unless the OTT arselicks (sample: “What is true is that you will never find a better man than Alan Moore.”) are meant to be jokes. I could be misunderstanding that.
Pages 6 and 7 contain a remembrance by Leah Moore of how her father’s career and parenting intersected. It’s very good, balancing historical recollection, cheeky disrespect and honest praise in a witty and entertaining style. Also features the curiosity of a photo of Leah playing guitar onstage with Alan (no details of the nature of the performance). One quibble only:
“…I distinctly remember Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes scaring the sh*t out of us both.”
HELLO TWOMORROWS. I AM A GROWN-UP WHO HAS JUST PAID FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS FOR THIS BOOK. I CAN HANDLE READING THE ACTUAL WORDS THAT YOU HAVE COMMISSIONED PEOPLE TO WRITE. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
The next two pages have a strip by Gaiman and Buckingham, entitled True Things. It is, of course, a small collection of almost-complete lies about Alan Moore and his daily life. Cute, but very slight.
The first interview chapter kicks off over the page – each of these opens with a full-page Jose Villarubia portrait of a stoned-looking Moore hanging about his house and garden – all taken from the same session in the last year or so, apparently. It might have been less embarrassing to source an appropriate image of Moore from the actual time-period discussed in the chapter, but I guess this was cheaper. Thankfully, this is the only one to also feature superimposed commentary from Khoury:
”It all started so innocently, without a loud universal bang or some colossal thump…You usually expect the entire universe to explode when a talented person is born.
in fact everything was relatively quaintI think he means “quiet.”
on that autumn day in 1953 when a wandering star touched down upon Northampton. To his parents he was without a doubt special, being their firstborn, but could even theyEven they, these magnificent geniuses and seers, hailed far and wide!
have foreseen that the words he would writeLet’s guess “no.”
would take him far beyond his native England and create a bliss for massesOr, you know, 10-20,000 people a month.
on this world and others?Name them, George.
To call this free spirit the best writer in the history of comic books is an understatementOr, if you want to actually look at the words, unsupported hyperbole.
for he is one of the most influential wordsmithsDoes anyone outside of comics fan-writing ever use the term “wordsmith”? Serious question.
of our generation and generations to come.Number them, George!
And for over twenty years, this maverick has done things his own way, and walked the roads that others wouldn’t dare.This’d be the road of writing adventure fiction under work-for-hire contracts for a large corporation, or the road to the pub?
This man goes by the name Alan Moore,Mainly because it’s his name.
and this is his story.Okay. Can you please wipe that off when you’re finished?
Thankfully, on the next page we start getting thousands of words of Moore extemporising for every brief one-sentence question of Khoury’s, as Chapter 1: Once Upon A Time kicks off properly. There are also the entertaining treats of family photographs, amusingly captioned by Alan. Unfortunately, not all of his thousands of words are allowed to make it to the page in a sensible form.
On the second page, while discussing the history of Northampton from Neolithic times to the present, Moore touches on the story of Boedicea. Now, there is an accepted alternative spelling for the name of this queen: Boudicca. Our pal George, however, decides that bothering to ask Alan, or cracking open an encyclopaedia, or even typing “British queen Roman occupation” into Google is unnecessary, and that this is obviously the etymological source of “bodacious”. And so, we get Bodacia referred to by name a teeth-grinding twelve times in two paragraphs. Towards the end of the second one, Moore’s discourse on geography happens to mention a moor, which George takes to be something the family was named for and renders as “moore” (Alan also notes that the moor was referred to in the Domesday Book, which gets turned into Doomsday). By the next page, Moore is talking about a part of Northampton called The Boroughs – and even spells out that it isn’t b-u-r-r-o-w-s – but Khoury the editor fails to point out to Khoury the writer that he’s consistently typed out Burroughs in his text. I suppose it’s likely that William S. did have poor people inside him on several occasions, but not whole communities taking up residence.
It was at this point that I decided I couldn’t take anymore, and put the book aside in order to make this commentary. Since it’s taken an hour and a half of typing to cover five minutes of reading, this could be a long process…
saw Identity yesterday arvo
Shouldn't the key she digs out of the ground at the end have been number 2? After that, the whole ending just felt like a cheap horror flick, rather than the entertaining thriller it had been up until the earlier big reveal.Extraordinary Wanks 2
Over the next two pages, Moore bangs on about class and reverse gentrification and the educations system, which is as entertaining as always. Here’s an odd thing, though: on the left page, there’s a photograph captioned: “The Moore home might have been similar to the one pictured.” [And then again, it might not! Who can say?] “…©2003 Respective holder.” Er, okay, I’m sure Mr Holder appreciates the credit. But then, on the facing page, there’s another family snap with a Moore-written caption, that includes a line from Shoplifters Of The World Unite – set off in quote marks – but no copyright notice for Warner-Tamerlane. Huh.
