Tagging Attempted While Pasta Awaited
Feb. 6th, 2007 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexsarllThe Girls Aloud Vs Sugababes version of 'Walk This Way' for Comic Relief, yes? It's hardly essential, but then neither band has ever been at their best on cover versions. The video is pleasing enough to the eye, as one would expect given the cast. But it isn't remotely funny. There are a few mugging comics towards the end of the video, but they come across as a total afterthought (and in the olden days, the vid would have been faded out by then). This may be for the best given how badly most Comic Relief records have aged, but it still seems slightly inappropriate.
Anybody who would still draw a definite line between 'fan fiction' and 'literature' should read Michael Chabon's The Final Solution without delay. The name refers to the Holocaust, of course, and it's not the first time Chabon has written at a tangent to that subject (as all those who've read his deservedly Pullitzer-winning Kavalier & Clay will know) nor the last (his next book is set in an Alaskan Jewish homeland, apparently a serious proposal at one point) - but it is also the perfect title for a story about the latter days of Sherlock Holmes, a last fitful effort by one of the world's great minds as it fades. I'm no Holmesian, so I'm not sure how much of this Conan Doyle laid out (he said that Holmes retired to keep bees, but did he ever explain why that made perfect sense in quite the inarguable terms Chabon does?) - nor any real expert on stories about age, Dunsany and Cabell aside. But for me, this could hardly be better in either direction, nor tie the two threads more naturally together.
While it's true that Garth Ennis is one of the comics writers currently producing extremely good work on a regular basis, I disagree with the reviews which are hailing his new series Wormwood as one of his better efforts. Based on the first issue it's an entertaining little piece of fluff (premise: the Antichrist doesn't want to bring about Armageddon, so instead lives in New York with a talking rabbit and runs HBO), but nothing Ennis hasn't done better and before. The scatologically brutal application of superpowers? Preacher. The Second Coming as a dreadlocked black kid who falls foul of American riot police? Hellblazer Special, more than a decade ago. And that had one beautiful detail this omits, even though the years have only made it more resonant - "a man named Geldof will kiss him on the cheek." Yes, it's true that The Boys and The Punisher have little to say about the real world, but who cares? Within the worlds they delineate, everything is perfectly pitched. Whereas here, though it's more recognisable as our world, though the story is more 'relevant', there are clumsinesses I thought Ennis had long since outgrown - in particular, a televised debate on the proposed regulation of cable TV is so rah-rah-rah heroically one-sided that it could almost have been shat out by The West Wing.
Charlie Brooker facts I never knew: Charlie is short for Charlton (which explains some of the bitterness), and he began by writing for Oink! So I was, as ever, way ahead of the curve there. Wonder which strips he did?
Garth Marenghi on
Oxford Street, not Darkplace; still
has that stern face, though.
Anybody who would still draw a definite line between 'fan fiction' and 'literature' should read Michael Chabon's The Final Solution without delay. The name refers to the Holocaust, of course, and it's not the first time Chabon has written at a tangent to that subject (as all those who've read his deservedly Pullitzer-winning Kavalier & Clay will know) nor the last (his next book is set in an Alaskan Jewish homeland, apparently a serious proposal at one point) - but it is also the perfect title for a story about the latter days of Sherlock Holmes, a last fitful effort by one of the world's great minds as it fades. I'm no Holmesian, so I'm not sure how much of this Conan Doyle laid out (he said that Holmes retired to keep bees, but did he ever explain why that made perfect sense in quite the inarguable terms Chabon does?) - nor any real expert on stories about age, Dunsany and Cabell aside. But for me, this could hardly be better in either direction, nor tie the two threads more naturally together.
While it's true that Garth Ennis is one of the comics writers currently producing extremely good work on a regular basis, I disagree with the reviews which are hailing his new series Wormwood as one of his better efforts. Based on the first issue it's an entertaining little piece of fluff (premise: the Antichrist doesn't want to bring about Armageddon, so instead lives in New York with a talking rabbit and runs HBO), but nothing Ennis hasn't done better and before. The scatologically brutal application of superpowers? Preacher. The Second Coming as a dreadlocked black kid who falls foul of American riot police? Hellblazer Special, more than a decade ago. And that had one beautiful detail this omits, even though the years have only made it more resonant - "a man named Geldof will kiss him on the cheek." Yes, it's true that The Boys and The Punisher have little to say about the real world, but who cares? Within the worlds they delineate, everything is perfectly pitched. Whereas here, though it's more recognisable as our world, though the story is more 'relevant', there are clumsinesses I thought Ennis had long since outgrown - in particular, a televised debate on the proposed regulation of cable TV is so rah-rah-rah heroically one-sided that it could almost have been shat out by The West Wing.
Charlie Brooker facts I never knew: Charlie is short for Charlton (which explains some of the bitterness), and he began by writing for Oink! So I was, as ever, way ahead of the curve there. Wonder which strips he did?
Garth Marenghi on
Oxford Street, not Darkplace; still
has that stern face, though.
