Must Be Thursday 22/7/10

Ooh, you lucky, lucky people, you. It's my weekly round-up of the new comics I'll be purchasing this week – or at least thinking about purchasing – a whole two days early! Shit the bed! The reason for this being, Existential Ennui will be on its summer hols from tomorrow, probably for about a week, maybe longer depending how much I miss blogging (so almost certainly longer then), and I couldn't leave you without my incisive and witty thoughts on the week's slate of new comics. The only problem being I'm working from the unconfirmed list of comics, so things might change by the time Diamond Comic Distributors release their proper official list on Tuesday. But, y'know. Live fucking dangerously for a change, why don'cha?

So, to the comics! And it's a potentially interesting week for the indie publishers, a half-decent week for Marvel, and a rubbish week for DC Comics. Let's look at those indie titles foist:

























Up top there is a new series from the one and only Alan Moore, Neonomicon (Avatar, regular and wraparound cover), which sounds like a convention for crusty dayglo ravers and probably isn't as big news as it maybe should be. It's a sequel to The Courtyard, also published by Avatar, which was a comics adaptation of a Moore prose story, and which I didn't read, chiefly because the comics weren't actually written by Moore himself. So that puts me at a slight disadvantage with Neonomicon. I did, however, read the preview, and that was about a couple of FBI agents who visit a madman who speaks in tongues. I think it's all something to do with Lovecraft, but we shall find out. So helpful, aren't I?

Also on an indie tip, there Jeff 'Bone' Smith's interdimensional action thriller Rasl (Cartoon Books), which has got a bit bogged down in a history lesson about Nikola Tesla of late but, judging by the cover, looks like it might be picking up again; and an anniversary issue for The Walking Dead (Image), #75 to be precise. Happy seventy-fifth birthday, Walking Dead! You don't look a day over, uh... no, can't think of a payoff for that one.

Moving on, here's the only comic being published by DC this week that I'm remotely interested in:













DC Universe Legacies #3 by Len Wein, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dave Gibbons. It kinda speaks volumes about DC's current output (the recently raved-about Action Comics and Grant Morrison's Bat-books aside) that the only DC comic I'm buying was put together by such an old skool collection of creators. And it's not like DC/Vertigo/WildStorm don't have any comics out this week; they do, around twenty-five of the buggers, plus sundry variant editions and graphic novels. It's just all so sodding pedestrian. I mean, who, exactly, is buying Azrael, or Supergirl, or even Justice Society of America these days? Er, says the man intending to buy DC Universe Legacies...

Things are slightly better over at Marvel this week, but only slightly:













That's Avengers #3 and New Avengers #2, both written by Brian Michael Bendis, with art from John Romita Jr. on the former and Stuart Immonen on the latter. Swings and roundabouts on these Avengers relaunch titles thus far; I like the fact that Hulk-of-the-future the Maestro is involved in Avengers (that's him behind Kang on the cover), but conversely I can't for the life of me recall what happened in New Avengers #1 right now, so a little from column A, a little from column B there. Other than those, it's shit like New Mutants and Lady Deadpool over at Marvel this week, but there is, also, this:













Amazing Spider-Man #638, wherein Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada attempts to put right all the stuff he fucked up with that bloody awful 'One More Day' story from a few years ago and the subsequent misguided snoozefest the Spider-Man comics have been ever since. At least, that's what I'm hoping wll happen here, 'cos at this point it'll take a fucking miracle to get me reading Spidey comics again...

And that's yer lot for a wee while. As I say, I'll be back online in about a week, hopefully having read a few books, so maybe I'll waffle on about those 'pon my return. In the meantime, if you're really bored, you might find an old post you haven't read before if you click on the archived posts to the right there. I wouldn't recommend it myself, but takes all sorts. Cheerio.

Westlake Score: Anarchaos by Curt Clark

Here's a Donald E. Westlake curio to rank alongside that paperback biography of Elizabeth Taylor Adam got me for me birthday:













This is the US first edition of Anarchaos, a science fiction novel by Westlake, published under the pseudonym Curt Clark in paperback by Ace in 1967. It's been described elsewhere as 'Parker in space': a tough guy on a mission to the eponymous lawless planet to find the man who killed his brother. OK, not quite like a Parker novel then, and also it's written in the first-person, but there is at least a crime element to it. There are loads of copies of this online, probably because many of the listings don't mention Westlake at all, not having made the connection, but this copy's really nice; the page edges are orange and there's some rubbing on the spine, but other than that it looks unread, with no spine creases at all.

Anarchaos was actually collected along with some of Westlake's short SF stories in Tomorrow's Crimes, so I might try and pick that up too at some point. I like the cover illo on this paperback though; when you get up close to it you can see it's almost abstract – those 'cars' whizzing along the highways and the people at the base of the tower merely dabs of paint, while the spacecraft that's just landed looks like a paper plane. It's credited to "Lynch", about whom, as ever, I know nowt. Classy cover though.

Why Lex Luthor Brings Out the Best in Paul Cornell (and Pete Woods)

Finally got through the pile of comics that's been growing over the past few weeks (I've been swallowed up by Justin Cronin's The Passage, which I've now finished; it's bloody great – read it), and it was a decidedly mixed bunch. Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin was, as ever, top notch, with some lovely artwork from Frazer Irving; Morrison's Batman #701 was also very good, bringing more to the 'untold' tale of what happened to Bruce between the end of Batman RIP and the events of Final Crisis than I figured, and with some surprisingly strong art from Tony Daniel; Garth Ennis' Wormwood was pretty amusing, if a bit slow; Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev's Scarlet was interesting, but not as radical as Bendis seems to believe; everything else was run of the mill.

But there was one comic book that went above and beyond what I was expecting – and it was the one comic book I decided in the end not to buy that week when I went to the comic shop: Action Comics #890, which marks the debut of writer Paul Cornell and artist Pete Woods. Luckily I managed to score a copy of the variant edition on eBay (that's the cover, by David Finch, on the left there), and I'm damn glad I did. Because it's the best-written superhero comic I've read in some time.

The set-up is this: with Superman off traipsing across America in J. Michael Straczyknski's Superman #701 (and disappointingly weepy that was too), he's no longer featuring in Action Comics. Instead, the spotlight falls on Lex Luthor, and his scheme to find and tap into the power of the Black Lantern rings from Blackest Night. That's the plot, but it's really the least interesting thing about this comic. What really makes the issue sing is Cornell's characterization of Luthor, and the sizzling dialogue we get as a result.

There's something about Lex Luthor that brings out the best in certain comics writers. Actually it's broader than that: I think it's villains in general that a lot of comics writers respond to; witness the way Norman Osborn's slow meltdown was often the high point of Marvel's Dark Reign event, or how Mike Carey found his voice with Lucifer. But Lex is a prime example: Brian Azzarrello turned in his best superhero comics work with the Lex Luthor: Man of Steel miniseries; Jeph Loeb, Joe Kelly and others did good things with Luthor during their President Lex storyline in the Superman family of comics; and the likes of Geoff Johns and Gail Simone used Lex effectively in Villains United and during the run up to Infinite Crisis. (And now I come to think of it, DC's President Lex and Villains United really prefigured what Marvel did with Dark Reign to a large extent.)

So there are certainly plenty of precedents for writers responding to villains in general and Lex in particular. And in Action Comics #890 Paul Cornell has upped his game considerably. For those who don't know, Cornell is best known in the UK for his work on Doctor Who, first in Who fandom, then as a writer of tie-in novels, and eventually on telly. The comics he's written prior to this have all been for Marvel, and haven't quite clicked: his Wisdom miniseries was marred by a subpar-Morrisonesque confusion, and his Captain Britain series was decent but unremarkable. On Action Comics, though, he's come into his own.

There's a lot to love about Action Comics #890. It helps that artist Pete Woods, a heretofore talented but undistinguished DC Comics journeyman, invests Cornell's script – which does after all feature extended sequences of people standing around jawing – with an expressive, elegant flow. But there's also the at times sublime dialogue ("Go on, have an adventure outside your skill set"; "So he's genuinely gone on this journey of his. Doubtless to seek more power. In the flyover states, oddly"; "It hasn't even been tested on animals – let alone homeless people"), Lex's arrogance, malevolence and batty quest for power, and a robot Lois Lane.

Above all, though, it's how Cornell writes Lex. There's a great sequence, much of which you can see here, where Lex fires an employee, who promptly attacks Lex, furious that his job's gone just like that when he has mouths to feed. Lex then spends the rest of the day and the evening ruminating on this attack, before contacting a hitman and telling him to kill his former employee. But the real kicker is, the hitman has been positioned on a rooftop across from the ex-employee's apartment the whole time.

It's that kind of insight into how Lex's mind works that provides choice moment after choice moment. Cornell, like Mike Carey, Brian Azzarrello and countless others before him, has finally, whilst writing a villain, discovered his comics mojo, and in the process benefited from a wider truth, one that applies to all fiction: sometimes it take a bad guy to bring out the best in a writer.

I forget

I used to have another blog. In fact, I think I've had four blogs altogether, including this one. There was another Existential Ennui, which was the first blog I kept back in 2006. That was, essentially, a blog about nothing. Or rather, it was a blog about blogging, with a tiresome obsession with stats and views. It was occasionally amusing, but for the most part I think it's safe to say it was probably highly tedious and testing. I deleted it when I started another blog in 2007, called Off Message, again mostly about nothing. And somewhere in there I also started another, very short-lived blog called Move to the Country, which I think consisted of about three entries.

I mention all this because occasionally I get reminded that Off Message is still out there when I receive emails telling me someone has posted a comment on it. Invariably those comments are spam, like this nonsense:

Author : Garrick Curtis (IP: 83.216.184.132 , poo132veradsl.it)
E-mail : Melia13@gmail.com
URL : http://www.superbowljerseys.org
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=83.216.184.132
Comment:
Indeed interesting blog u got here. I¡¯d like to read something more concerning that matter. Thanx for giving this material.

But they serve as unwanted but in a way useful reminders of a former blogging life. Unwanted, because I've moved on and I don't, generally, do much in the way of looking back; useful because it never hurts to be reminded that you – as in I – can be a right div sometimes. And interestingly – to me, anyway – when I visited Off Message again just now, I realised that I didn't, in fact, entirely delete the original Existential Ennui. I copied it all and pasted it into Off Message. So if you go to what is purportedly the first page of Off Message, then scroll down and click on 'Older Entries', it takes you to all those old Existential Ennui posts, right back to my very first blog posts in February 2006. It's all a bit embarrassing really, but as I say, also useful.

Running out of shelf space?

Buying more books than you have room for on your shelves? I feel your pain. Well here's the solution: turn your entire living room into one big bookcase!










Hmm. Only problem is, where to put the telly...?

(Go here for Lucy Mangan's guide to the ultimate bookcase.)

New Arrival: The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour by Peter Mandelson

Something slightly different today:














This is the UK first hardback edition of former Labour spin doctor/minister/now Lord Mandelson's memoirs of his time at the heart of the New Labour operation, The Third Man, published by Harper yesterday. Not the sort of thing I usually showcase here, but actually not as incongruous as it might seem.

For a good many years in the late 1990s and for a large part of the 2000s, I wasn't really reading much fiction (comics aside). Instead, I was reading political biographies, diaries, polemics and so on. I devoured everything from Alan Clark's three-volume Diaries (absolutely brilliant; I have a first edition of the original Diaries) to Andrew Rawnsley's Servants of the People (the definitive account of New Labour's path to power in 1997), biographies of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, Peter Oborne's biography/hack job on Labour spinmeister Alastair Campbell, Nick Cohen's polemical Pretty Straight Guys... anything I could get my hands on really.

This was all the result of a late-flowering interest in politics, fired by Labour forming a government in 1997. I'd always cared about politics, but it was the party I supported getting into power that really made me excited. I'm not gonna get into the rights and wrongs of the Labour government (and particularly not the Iraq War), except to say I believe they did a lot more for the less-well-off in this county than they're often given credit. But of all the New Labour figures, it was Peter Mandelson I found the most fascinating.

The grandson of Herbert Morrison, the noted Labour cabinet minister, Mandelson went to work for Labour in the mid-'80s, running the 1987 general election campaign. He was instrumental in Neil Kinnock's battles with the far left of the party – the Militant Tendency idiots – but it was his friendship with Gordon Brown and then Tony Blair that would form the basis of his political career. He was selected as the candidate for Hartlepool in 1990 and elected to the House of Commons in 1992, from where he helped construct the New Labour project, plotting Labour's 1997 election landslide. Brown famously fell out with Mandelson after Tony Blair's rise to leader of Labour in 1994, but bridges were mended in the last few years when Brown – now PM – brought Mandleson into his government as a Lord. Mandelson himself was twice ejected from cabinet, the first time rather more justifiably than the second, but even in his periods in the wilderness, he never stopped advising Tony Blair and, latterly, when he was EU commissioner, Gordon Brown.

Tony Blair's autobiography is due out soon, and Alastair Campbell's already published his diaries, but this is the book I was most looking forward to. Mandy is a clever, articulate, arch, amusing man; his strategic thinking, understanding of how the media works (he was a producer at London Weekend Television before going into politics) and passion for a fairer, more cosmopilitan, more tolerant Britain helped make Labour electable again. The fact that he's widely loathed by large sections of the British public only makes him more appealing to me; large sections of the British public can be pretty dense at times. And if nothing else, Mandelson can certainly turn an elegant phrase...