At Home He Feels Like A Tourist

London, being an emblem of infinity, always has something new with which to astound me. the beautiful statues at York House being one example, nymphs sprawled up a waterfall in a way you'd expect in Capri more than Twickenham. And then a few minutes further along, the ramshackle Bohemian labyrinth of Eel Pie Island, one of those places which, even with much of it understandably inaccessible (being people's homes and all), is so folded in on itself that it feels like it's larger than the area it covers. Then back to Richmond proper for Toy Story 3. ( not big spoilers, but more than I knew going in )

Oh, and it was preceded by an ad which opens with the line "Your child's mouth is amazing!" Quite.

Also finally got round to watching The Incredible Hulk which, as you might have heard, isn't very good. I am less bothered than ever about Ed Norton not reprising the role of Banner for the Avengers film, because he doesn't do much with it (and I can't be the only person thinking the obvious choice would be Andy Serkis). Liv Tyler, once so luminously lovely, is almost invisible as Betty Ross; Tim Roth is good as Emil Blonsky, but then Tim Roth is always good, so that's no great achievement. Yes, the film references Stark, SHIELD, Dr Reinstein, Leonard Samson and Rick Jones...but so what? We're past the point now where that sort of thing is surprising; as in comics themselves, a cross-reference does not in itself justify an otherwise dull story.

Speaking of comics, I've not posted much about them lately, have I? Mainly, the titles which are always good have continued to be good, but if you're not reading them yet then there's no real point in drawing your attention to Powers or The Walking Dead or Ultimate Spider-Man or the Grant Morrison Batman complex now. And Marvel's new status quo, The Heroic Age, is still a bit too early to call; is it going to be a welcome breath of fresh air after the darkness of the past few years, or simply Silver Age fetishism? But lately, some good new stuff has started filtering through. Consider Paul Cornell's Action Comics, the first DC Universe comic not by Grant Morrison to excite me in a while. Pairing Lex Luthor with a robot Lois Lane (as in his online Doctor Who story where the Doctor was travelling with a robot Master), the first issue suggests this is going to be an entertainingly amoral cosmic romp. Over at Marvel, Kieron Gillen's last arc on Thor finally gets him out from under the fall-out of other people's events and sends the Asgardians off to attack Hell. I said to Kieron last week that it read like a heavy metal album, and this was before I picked up the Manowar album with a track called 'Thor (The Powerhead' at the CD swap. And Daredevil is in entertainingly killy mode in the opening of the new street-level crossover, Shadowland, even if I am irked at the suggestion that it must be possession causing him to do something eminently sensible which he should have done years ago. But the big news is the start of the last new comics project, at least for a while, by the ever-combative Alan Moore. As the title suggests, Neonomicon is riffing on HP Lovecraft. Moore has talked about writing it in a very angry phase, wanting to make something genuinely nasty as against the cheapness of a lot of modern Mythos stories, and he's already referencing 'The Horror at Red Hook', probably Lovecraft's most overtly racist story, in a way that suggests he's going to stick to that. But so far, it's mainly very funny. Hence me sat on the bus opposite a concerned parent and its spawn, face obscured by the comic's wrap cover of great Cthulhu awakening, chuckling to myself at the scene where the protagonist attends a gig by Rats in the Malls: "I want my thing on your doorstep, my haunter in your dark, I'm getting squamous just thinking how you walk".