'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Miserable bloody day out there, isn't it? Although it's stretching it to call it a day at all when it's this blank - it's more like a gap of non-time. I would call it archetypally Sundayish had yesterday not been cut from the same cloth - although yesterday I probably exacerbated matters by braving the bad bits of Ealing. There are some lovely pubs down the Broadway end, and of course the studios which gave us Ealing comedy, but at the other end of town it's an Ealing tragedy, whether the desolation of Gunnersbury Park or Tudor Row, which true to its name is the most soul-sappingly mock Tudor street I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I'm going to have to leave the house at some point today, but I'm putting it off for as long as possible. Thank heavens for a four-week comics backlog to keep me entertained (on days like this, comics somehow do a better job than prose of lifting the spirits - I would say that maybe it's just all that colour, except that the black-and-white Wasteland seemed to work just as well). Still can't believe that Batman RIP got mainstream press coverage, though - not that I'm dissing Brubaker's Death of Captain America storyline, but that was pretty much what it said on the tin - a story about Cap's death, a story which can be taken as a political comment on our times. Whereas Batman RIP is Morrison musing on Batman through the traditional Morrison obsessions of identity, Eastern mysticism, order and chaos - or alternately, musing on them using Batman as a tool. It's a good read, but it's not going to convert anyone to comics (except maybe a confirmed psychonaut), and I pity any journos hoping to get an op ed out of it.