Shiny shiny,

shiny new book, purchased today:













I'd sort of forgotten how much I loved the original Hitchhikers books. I read them when I were a lad (apart from the later ones, which I read as a young man). I probably borrowed them from the local library, a place I practically lived in for a number of years during boyhood and then a later period post-polytechnic when I was on the dole. Gawd knows how many books I borrowed from there. I had a habit of devouring series or particular writers, starting with Doctor Who novelisations when I was very young, then moving onto yer James Herberts and Stephen Kings and Richard Laymons, by way of the Fletch novels or the Beiderbeck books. And then, for quite a long time, I forgot I'd read so many books. Successive interests – music, comics, politics, wanking – largely kept me away from reading much in the way of novels, and my passion for them – and history with them – vanished.

But now the books are back, and with them my particular past, and now there's a new Hitchhikers novel, almost as a celebration of my return to the fold, although in truth merely a coincidence. How very Douglas Adams.

After a few weeks

of austerity at the comic shop, this week I splurged slightly:

Astonishing X-Men #31 (Travis Charest Variant Cover)
Batman And Robin #5
Chronicles Of Wormwood Last Battle #1
Criminal The Sinners #1
Crossed #7 (of 9
Irredeemable #7
Mighty #9
Planetary #27
Torch #2 (of 8)

That's actually a nice list of (hopefully) well-written and -drawn comics I'll (again, hopefully) enjoy.

Whut You Reading For?

Getting back into novels has been a revelatory experience. I'd clean forgotten how rich and deep novels are in comparison to comics. Sure, there are some comics that manage a similar depth – Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp being a recent example – but in general, comics, or at least American adventure comics, provide a much pulpier, shallower reading experience.

I'm continuing to work my way through Patricia Highsmith's backlist, and I've got a few more Kingsley Amises lined up. I'm also currently midway through my first Bond novel, From Russia, With Love, and it's terrific. Why haven't I read any Fleming before? (I think we know the answer to that one – too busy poring over daft comic books.) I also picked up a Pan paperback of a Gavin Lyall book, The Most Dangerous Game. Kinglsey Amis was apparently a fan of Lyall, a writer I'd never come across before, so I'll give it a go.

I once

wrote a comics script.

Actually, that's not strictly true.

Once upon a time, in my callow youth, I both wrote and drew a number of comics, few of which I ever finished. They ranged from 'zany' comedy comics with titles like Invasion of the Killer Lampposts to supposedly more realistic stories about, er, alien invasions and Monty Python-style weights falling from the upper atmosphere onto my family's terraced suburban home (don't ask). A couple of them even saw print, after a fashion: the first part of a series called Invasion (I think) appeared in a friend of mine's horror fanzine when I was maybe sixteen; and for a time at college in Manchester I had a regular strip called Nothing Man running in the polytechnic magazine, Pulp. It was, I believe, universally loathed. Christ knows why they continued to run it. Presumably they couldn't think of anything else to fill the space with.

And then I stopped making comics. I carried on writing, but as a music journalist, not a writer of fiction. Later I moved into editorial, and that's where I've been ever since, editing genre magazines, and then books. A few years ago, however, my friend Martin was looking for contributors for an anthology issue of his superhero soap opera The O Men, and foolishly agreed to let me write a short strip for it. As it turned out the anthology never saw print, but I've just noticed Mart has put the script online.

And here it is.

Incidentally, little of my writing about music or genre stuff can be found online; I was freelancing before the internet became what it is today. There is one feature I wrote for Mixmag that's lurking online though, and it's also one of my better ones, on a subject that sent me off on a thrilling tangent in my life and which changed the way I thought about all sorts of things. Here it is.

I've got a brand new combine harvester,

and I'll give you the key.

I don't know why The Wurzels were in my head just then, but they were, fleetingly, and they made me think of Chas & Dave for some reason. Who, shockingly, have split up. So now they're just Chas and Dave. No ampersand. Just two entirely separate blokes, one called Chas, one called Dave.

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In other news, a number of Marvel comics didn't get distributed in the UK this week, including New Avengers and Uncanny X-Men, which I've been collecting up to this point. Time was this would be cause for much concern, even consternation, on my part, but in fact I barely raised an eyebrow when I read about it, and it's given me an excuse to not buy Uncanny whenever it eventually makes an appearance (I'll still get New Avengers, mind). So thank you, Diamond Comic Distributors. You've saved me a bit of money there.

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So, as this week nears its end, two things to look forward to next week. On Monday FlashForward starts on Five (formerly Channel 5). Looks kind of interesting. And of course we have the Labour Party conference. Will there be another attempt on Gordon Brown's leadership? Exciting stuff.

So,

the Marvel and DC solicits are up. The Marvel listings talk about a big Hulk event for next year. The DC listings talk about a big Superman event for next year. I'm starting to doubt whether I'll even be reading comics next year.