Posts tagged comics
The Ood Cast
Jan 11th
Let me put this bluntly. There’s no way to sugar coat it, I’m a geek. A card carrying, statistic spouting, pedant spluttering member of the cultural elite. In fact I’m not just one kind of geek, I’m legion. I’m a computer geek and a theatre geek and a movie buff geek and a comics geek but more than anything else, oh so very much more, I’m a Doctor Who geek.
Yes, from 1989 onwards I’ve been in the thrall of the timelord and I can’t think of a programme that’s had a more positive effect on my life. While other young boys had heroes who kicked balls into far off nets or slaughtered hundreds of enemy soldiers with a belt-fed machine gun, my hero defeated evil with little more than a bag of jelly babies and an off the wall sense of humour. No behind the sofa for me, I had my face pressed up against the screen.
This may sound silly but I can actually remember making the decision to be more like the Doctor, to clown around and let people underestimate me, to attack any new situation with a mixture of childish enthusiasm and deep thought. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say that the man I am today owes a lot to the values instilled in me then. I still abhor violence, I still love traveling and meeting people, I even sometimes still walk with my hands clasped behind my back (although admittedly this did look very odd when I was 9 years old, I kept overbalancing and falling on my head).
I mention this because myself and a couple of equally eccentric pals will shortly be unleashing a new Dr Who podcast on the world, hosted from this very website. We’ve called it ‘The Ood Cast‘ – see what we did there? The first series of six episodes will consist of an introductory show followed by a programme on each of the five 2009 specials, up to and including the end of David Tennant’s 10th Doctor.
So … exciting for everyone who likes either a) Dr Who, b) my podcasts or c) both.
Extremely dull for everyone else. But then I guess we can’t all like the same things …
‘I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations – terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls. And then there’s unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty. We all have a world of our own terrors to face.’ – The Doctor
PS – Check out the Ood Cast Blog while you’re waiting for the audio adventures to begin.
The Stairwell Recommends: Misfits
Jan 6th
The golden age of British television is well and truly over. Anything with even the tiniest, weakest spark of creativity and originality has long since been extinguished – drowned in the murky swamp water of what passes for modern television listings. It’s a simple mathematical formula, so straight forward that even the current specimens of pond life masquerading as TV executives can understand it without getting their crayons out to write it down.
Reality television and lifestyle shows cost next to nothing to make and pull in millions in ratings. All you need to do is commission another vacuous mess starring either a washed up celebrity or ordinary members of the public with ’special’ talents (ie. being more irritating than scabies) and then sit back and watch the cash roll in. Why hire actors with screen presence and charisma? Why avail yourself of directors with vision or writers with a story to tell? You’re not going to make any more money off of it so why bother?
It’s not a problem unique to the UK, American television (historically laughably weak compared to its British counterpart) also suffers from the same blight. The difference is they have the money to support both the tat and the sublime ideas that come along every once in a while and make the whole thing worthwhile. And that’s why they’re currently wiping the floor with us when it comes to quality drama. If you haven’t seen these series then I suggest you stop reading the blog right now and go out and buy some box sets. They are, in order of jaw-dropping-disbelief-if-you-haven’t-seeniness, the following:
The West Wing, Firefly, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Dollhouse (actually anything by Joss Whedon – Buffy, Dr Horrible, even Angel in later series), The Sopranos, Arrested Development … I could go on but this has already turned into a rant and I haven’t even got to the point yet.
*Deep cleansing breath*
The fact is that even with the current British system, good shows do slip through occasionally, normally sitcoms like Outnumbered or Pulling – modest shows that hide their radical hearts behind genre tropes – wolves in sheep’s clothing. There are also some shows with massive ambition and creativity that are successful despite it all and against the odds – but that’s just basically Dr Who (and I’ll devote a whole series of podcast to that soon).
Finally there are aberrations, new shows from channels that are ironically also the main culprits when it comes to pumping excrement into the schedules – the BBC3s and ITV2s of this world, full to the brim with Top 100 shows and programmes about other programmes hosted by foetuses in designer clothing. The worst of these is E4, which is like T4 but all the time and just as unwatchable.
However every now and then E4 will have a go at original programming and surprise itself. Skins is awesome. The Inbetweeners is laugh out loud funny.
And now there’s Misfits, a show which you can guarantee started with an executive walking into his editors office and saying something like “Alright, hear me out, it’s X-Men for the Skins generation.”
And that’s exactly what it is but despite all that it’s pretty damn good. The characters are interesting, it’s actually fairly funny and the concept is great – young offenders get hit by lightning and get superpowers themed around their deepest desires. A disgraced athlete with the ability to turn back time, an awkward recluse who can turn invisible – that sort of thing. The powers are well handled, the actors range from fine to quietly impressive and the whole concept is milked for every last joke, twist and scare it can provide. I’d take a hundred episodes of it over anything Big Brother, X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing have ever produced.
It’s hugely derivative of course (Marvel’s Runaways, the aforementioned Skins, Buffy, it even nicks some stylistic and thematic tricks from quality BBC fare like Life on Mars and Being Human) and it’s not always as funny or as clever as it thinks it is but what it does have is a rough, brash confidence that allows the viewer to overlook these failings and concentrate on what it does well. Which is deliver twisted, memorable stories a cut above most things currently on British TV.
Consider this the first Stairwell recommendation of the new year.
Monkeys, Ninjas & Great Escapes
Sep 12th
I’ve always loved comics. For me they combine the strongest elements of cinema and literature into a brilliant hybrid-medium. The very best comics can have all the immediacy and scale of a film. The visual storytelling and pacing that cinema enjoys can be reproduced shot for shot – splash pages, close ups, juxtapositions of words and images – while still retaining the emotional complexity and depth that are the hallmarks of great literature. We get to explore characters’ inner lives, the serialised nature of many comics allowing for an epic tale that leaves no character beat or situation unexplored.
So the only real problem is that there aren’t that many great comics. Alan Moore, one of the titans of the industry, once explained that any emerging medium is seen first and foremost as something for the kids. When cinema began, everything was a western, even today you could stick a ten gallon hat on all the male protagonists of many films and create a credible western. Reservoir Dogs – Western, The Italian Job – multi-coloured horses riding across the rooftops of Turin, The Matrix – lots of leather and hails of bullets, No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood etc etc. Comics then, have found it even more difficult to break free from their defining genre, everything is about super heroes. In cinema terms it would be like 95% of all films were still Westerns – from Rom-Coms to pornos. What a waste of an art form.
Except things are changing. The best comic series ever written is, of course, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman but hot on it’s heels is a series I’ve only just finished today. It’s called Y: The Last Man and I think it’s about the funniest, most literate, heartbreaking work of genius I’ve had the pleasure to experience in a long time. And not a pair of tights or cape in sight. Everything about this book is just about perfect, the structure, the characters – it’s as light of touch and pacey as Speilberg at the top of his game and as complex and self-referential, unpredictable and earthy as anything by authors like Douglas Coupland and Ian Banks.
And it’s funny. Did I mention how funny it is?
What’s it about? Well I don’t want to spoil the surprises but essentially every mammal with a Y chromosome dies simultaneously in a global gendercide except for one failed escapologist and his monkey. But that’s just the jumping off point …
Please, please – whatever your view of comics, the three colour funnies and the earnest politicising of grown up ‘graphic novels’, you owe it to yourself to at least read the first book.
You won’t regret it.
At least until it ends, then you feel kind of empty inside and need to write a long blog post about it.
The Haiku Review w/e 040909
Sep 4th
Reviews don’t really mean anything, do they? We’re all wired so differently that a film or a song or a risotto is going to have a wildly different effect on me than it’s going to have on you. And yet we love to quantify, categorise and clarify. We live to put stuff in boxes and then mark them good or bad with thick black unequivocal lines. The Haiku Review is different. It recognises that reviewing stuff is pretty much meaningless and as such it only spends 17 syllables doing it. It doesn’t differentiate between media and it’s structured from best to worst, enabling you my lucky readers to make direct comparisons between, say, my new shoes and stand-up comedian Jimmy Carr. Be here every Friday for more Ancient Japanese-themed review fun.
#1
Weddings (traditional ceremony) Today you joined hands/ and ran headlong into your/ future. Never stop Y: The Last Man (comic) It makes me weep that/ something so funny and smart/ exists in this world Greenbelt (festival) We shall do well here/ people seem genuinely/ happy together Chocolate Chai Tea (drink) It tastes like a bar/ of chocolate exploded in/ a spice factory Hoopla Impro Workshop (workshop) Your entertainment/ for the evening is coming/ out of your own head Leeds (city) It is cold up here/ fearless girls bare their flesh and/ don’t even goose bump inFamous (game ps3) Like Grand Theft Auto/ but I can shoot lightning and/ throw cars around. Nice! Alton Towers (theme park) Sensations that are/ otherwise reserved for those/ ending their own lives Funny People (film) Long, self-indulgent/ movie that is nonetheless/ revelatory The Host (book) Clumsy, obvious/ broad-brushed and naive and yet/ fitfully brilliant Pizza Express (restaurant) Tasty, generic/ food served in disturbingly/ identical rooms The Time Traveler’s Wife (film) Although you have a/ kind of warmth. It is mostly/ reflected glory G-Force (film) Shit in 3D is/ still shit. It’s just shit with a/ greater depth of field
