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

I've cut down on how many comics I get lately - the obvious financial reasons don't intersect well with rising comics prices, and even beyond that there's a bit of a lull underway in the artform/industry anyway these past few months. But yesterday I picked up four weeks' worth, as well as having this week dropped in on a couple of libraries I've not visited in ages and found a stack of collections*. Not all superheroes, there are some crime ones and a goth sitcom thing, but mostly. And I've realised something - third-rate superhero comics are my celebrity mags. I can read a collection in twenty minutes or so, and if it doesn't improve my life in any meaningful way, I find it soothing nonetheless. And if it doesn't stand up by itself, it feeds into that vast tapestry that is a shared universe, just like the exclusive nightclubs of London and LA form a shared universe for a Heat reader; this would explain also why I can't continue reading a book or watching a TV show which I don't think is very good, but can carry on with a comic, so long as no expenditure is involved beyond time ie it's from the library. And fundamentally, you can't tell me Green Lantern is any more unreal than Lady Gaga.
Clearly I'm not talking about something like All-Star Superman, say, which is at once a truly first-class work of fiction and a holy book far preferable to any of the currently popular choices. A Watchmen or Enigma stands deservedly amongst the great literature of the past few decades, and even at the level below them you have stuff coming out at the moment like The Boys, Ultimate Spider-Man or Batman and Robin which, if not quite great art, are nonetheless so well-crafted as to justify themselves without embarrassment and outclass anything on this (or most) year's Booker shortlist.
Conversely, I'm not talking about the worst of the worst. Some of those I'll read when I get home from the pub, for the car-crash fascination of it. A little above them are the only things I won't touch at all, the ones which aren't atrocious beyond all reckoning but simply dull and miserable and confused - ie, the majority of DC's recent output. But between that and the good stuff there's a vast range of workmanlike, competent material - words I would use as an insult if applied to any other medium, pop especially, but which in comics, I find scratches an itch.
In summary: just because Facebook tells you I've read a comic, don't necessarily take that as a recommendation. I'm an addict.

*Plus a few actual books, I should add (Wodehouse, Arthur C Clarke, Anais Nin), but broadly speaking I still own literally hundreds of books I've not read, and almost no comics I haven't.

So we're sending two Nazis to Europe. On the plus side, at least the christians don't have any seats - though aren't there some still to declare? That would put the sour cherry on the carrot cake and no mistake. And I see this news just after reading the Captain Britain and MI13 annual. This being the best new superhero comic in years, one which took a character even Alan Moore couldn't make sing, and made him into the national icon he always should have been, our own Captain America as opposed to a cheap knock-off. The series hit around the same time as Garth Ennis' Dan Dare reboot, and they shared an attempt to build a sense of a British patriotism which was strong and unashamed, but which gave no quarter to the racist scum who profane the flag and the history they so tattily invoke. And the annual? Well, that's the first issue to come out since the news that Captain Britain and MI13 is cancelled. There's just not enough of a market for it. And as above, so below. It's not that I feel any shame over how this will make us look in Europe's eyes, you understand - enough other countries are sending their own fascists, and as per last century, I'm confident that ours are hardly the biggest threat of the bunch. Besides which, the European Parliament is a bad joke in the first place. I'm more embarrassed over how this makes us look to ourselves, how much it exacerbates the national mood of bemused decline. Hopefully, it'll at least be enough of a wake-up call to improve matters, but it could as easily be another step down that sorry road. In the meantime, yesterday's jokes about "ask David to bring The Final Solution" (which worked better verbally, italics and capitals being silent) and the unicorn lynching seem slightly less amusing.

Othergates:
I don't normally mind waits at the doctor's; in accord with Sarll's First Rule, I always have plenty to read about my person. Except my surgery has now installed a TV broadcasting inane health programming, noisily. Desist!
Unusually old-school Stay Beautiful this weekend, both in terms of those attending, and in not having a live act. "This is how we used to do it in the olden days!", I tell bemused youngsters for whom the night has only ever been at the Purple Turtle. The playlist is less old-school, which is a shame as such a direction might have saved me from accidentally dancing to La Roux.
Two Grant Morrison comics out last week, and while Batman & Robin was a great, straightforward superhero story with art by the ever-impressive Frank Quitely, it wasn't a patch on the glorious, tragic, yearning final issue of Seaguy's second act. Guess which one sells about ten times as much as the other?

On last night's Mad Men, did I mishear or were Peggy's nephews called Gerard and Mikey? Never thought I'd catch a My Chemical Romance reference in Don Draper's sixties.

Bionic eye! And apparently one good enough to sort socks, something I only attempt by natural light. Then again, my socks are mainly tiny variations on the theme of 'black'.

I've seen the guy who walks his ferret in Finsbury Park itself a few times, but on Monday, shortly before heading off to explore Tottenham (whatever the view from Harringay station bridge might do to seduce you into thinking otherwise, I can report that it really isn't a whole other London of wonderment hidden away to the side), I saw a woman outside Tesco with an...albino stoat? A mink? It definitely had red eyes as well as white fur, so not just a winter coat on the usual one, and it was very fluffy - you could see how a Cruella type would look at it and see a stole.

Sad news from CMU:
SELECTADISC IN NOTTINGHAM TO GO
More doom and gloom. Nottingham independent record store Selectadisc is to close later this month, after its owner, Phil Barton, decided he can't pump any more money into the company. He told Music Week: "Everyone here has crawled across the field of broken glass to keep this open, but in the end it didn't work. I think it is one of the top three independent stores in Britain. But that doesn't stop it being uneconomic. Everyone here is aware of tough things have been for the last two years". High overheads, declining record sales and the credit crunch have all contributed to Selectadisc's position.
As previously reported, a recent Entertainment Retailers Association report said that there were now just 300 odd independent record stores left in the UK, compared to 408 at the start of last year, and 1064 ten years ago.
Back in the days before London, before the internet, Selectadisc - or back then, the three Selectadiscs spread along Market Street - were my shops. Derby eventually got in on the act with Reveal, but really, you wanted Nottingham - with those three, Wayahead and Arcade you'd always find at least one thing of which you'd vaguely heard, or which just looked intriguing, and which was cheap enough to take a punt on. OK, the staff in the singles shop were surly dance snobs, but that was forgivable when you'd find all the singles that had been raved about in Melody Maker two weeks previously marked down to a quid each.

Contrary to previous reports, apparently Grant Morrison's Authority is still happening: "It'll come when it comes. He's working on it." But no word on his WildCATS which, as of that last interview, was the one which was still happening. I'll believe them when I see them solicited. Maybe not even then, given what happened to The Boys and Micah Wright's Stormwatch, both also at Wildstorm.

Granted, the last few times we were in the Noble we moaned, only partly in jest, that there were people drinking there, sitting in our seats, and generally lowering the tone. But if nothing else, shouldn't they have secured its future, meant it wouldn't have to be up for sale again, leave it in a position where one person's illness doesn't force us to resort to a nearby 'pub' no longer even fit to be named in this journal lest by doing so I pollute the servers and screens?
That's the thing about dark times - they're dark on every level. You can do your best to ignore the geopolitics, and heavens know it's tempting, but then you find your local's deserted you, your supermarket's discontinued your favourites, your shoelaces just won't stay tied. Once the entropy takes hold, it's as above, so below.
And then, of course, there's a reversal of fortunes in the war in heaven. And suddenly you see a pug acting the fool and a terrier with the yawns, and the moon's impossibly big and watching over Stoke Newington, and the setting sun lights the clouds behind the Gothic revival water tower like Camelot never fell.

I've finally finished a manga! Libraries have a nasty habit of getting enough volumes to hook me, and then never buying the rest - or in the case of Koike & Kojima books going one worse and, as sadistic as the stories, getting in the first couple - and then a random smattering of later volumes, just to tempt me. But well done Westminster, for completing their Death Note collection, even getting in the fairly superfluous companion and offcuts collection How to Read. Even leaving that aside, I can't deny there's some fat could be trimmed from the 12 volumes of the story proper, and that it never entirely gets to grip with the questions its central premise raises (vigilante killings of criminals by means of a magic notebook - I'm in favour, myself, but there's an emotional weight to the question which never quite makes the page). It does, however, manage some real moments of shock as it twists and turns, and one of those curious little tropes I always love is the ridiculously convoluted fight scene between incredibly smart antagonists, each of them revealing that they've anticipated the other's anticipation of their anticipation of...and so on. Consider the Seventh Doctor at his most Machiavellian, or Vandal Savage versus Resurrection Man in DC One Million, or Iron Man versus Black Panther in Enemy of the State II. Consider even, as comic incarnation of the type, the time-travelling fight scene in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey - Death Note is fit to stand among them.

Meanwhile in Western comics vigilante news, Garth Ennis' epic Punisher run has concluded. Now there's a comic prepared to address its moral issues, albeit one which never collapses into the pathetic hand-wringing which has often haunted the series when other writers were doing it wrong. The problem was that the Punisher - who is sensible, and shoots criminals in the head - was co-existing with allegedly more admirable heroes who beat criminals up, and then leave them alive to escape from gaol and kill again once another writer wants to use the same villain. By shifting him ever so slightly out of that context, Ennis could cut loose - without going too far the other way and turning it into a puerile celebration of violence for violence's sake. There's a very good scene in Warren Ellis' new issue of Astonishing X-Men in which Cyclops takes a similar clear-sighted line on how, in the superhero's line of work, sometimes killing is the only sensible thing to do. Contrast this with this week's editions of Secret Invasion and Captain Britain - they're both good comics, but in both heroes who normally make a big deal of the Heroic Code and how they Never Kill show no compunction whatsoever about killing invading Skrulls. So implicitly, even the life of an intractably evil human is sacrosanct, but those green alien mofos? Waste 'em. Leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, doesn't it?
Startlingly, DC also managed to put out a good comic this week - Grant Morrison's latest Batman RIP reassures me that, the evidence of Final Crisis aside, he hasn't been totally subsumed by Levitzseid's Anti-Fun Equation just yet.

'Silence in the Library' was a Moffat Who story, so obviously it was brilliant. Yes, in some ways he's repeating himself, but so what? They're good tropes. Give them another airing. ( Spoilers! )

When the last night of drinking on the Tube was announced as a possible Event by an associate, I was keen, not least because it intended a keynote of civility. Not even as a protest per se (I see the ban as a regrettable necessity - one of those blunt instrument laws like the age of consent which undoubtedly leads to injustices, but which remains a least worst option while we have neither the social nor technological maturity to enjoin and enforce what should be the one immutable law: Don't Be A Dick). But once other people had the same idea - people for whose character I could not vouch, and whose agendas were not quite the same - I paused. And once it was on the front of both freesheets, that was me out: carnage was inevitable and I didn't want to end up as part of the statistics proving the wrong point. So when I went into town in the afternoon, I had a tot of absinthe* from my hipflask on the bus in, another on the Piccadilly Line home, and said my own quiet farewell. With the bonus that I realised it was so discreet, it could probably still be managed post-ban.

For reasons I can't entirely explain, my usual practice is to build up a big list of potentially interesting acts to check out on Myspace, and then go through them en masse. Maybe it's like heats, to limit how many will get chance to win me over? So anyway, I had one of these runs and lots of them, as usual, were weak. The best thing was probably a rather epic, Iain Sinclair-style new Madness track, but by now you should all know whether or not you like Madness (though if you don't, you've maybe just not heard the right bits). That aside, the highlight was 'Stuck on Repeat' by Little Boots. Which I ought to find as generic as I do much modern electropop by hot girls (this one's ex-Dead Disco), yet somehow I don't. Maybe I'm giving her a pass for naming herself after Caligula? Maybe Hot Chip production helped? Maybe sometimes a song just stands out from its crowd.
(Best Myspace, though, was the new Swimmer One side project. The music did nothing for me, but I love the bio and the name: Sparklegash.

A Grant Morrison first issue is usually a big deal. The first Seven Sisters I read on a bus, spellbound, then went right back to the beginning and started all over again. The first All-Star Superman, I think that was three times. The first Final Crisis I read, shrugged, then read New Avengers 41 which is hardly the best Secret Invasion issue yet, but still made more impression on me. Then nipped in to the British Museum to reacquaint myself with the gods**, then came home reading the penultimate Dan Dare (real Single Manly Tear stuff) and the first issue of Millar's 1985, which is exactly the sort of supers-invade-our-poor-heroless-world stuff Morrison usually does so well. ( Those Final Crisis complaints in spoilerific detail ) It could yet improve. I really hope it does.
Grant's latest Batman issue, on the other hand, is brilliant.

France really doesn't make them like this anymore, does it? Why not?

*It was the only hipflask-suitable drink I had in the house. But beyond that, it seemed apt.
**I never formally decided, even to myself, that I wasn't going in while the terracotta army was there. I just somehow never found myself wanting to go in there during that period of time, and I don't really believe in coincidence.

So this whole LJ Paedogeddon business, with loads of fandom communities and the like getting suspended for having illegally wrongcocked interests listed? I'm puzzled. OK, so no concerned citizens objected to my journal having interests such as 'acquiring WMD', 'world domination' and 'international jewel theft' listed - because hey, we know that protecting the dear little children is far more important than enforcing any other silly old laws, right? But this being the case, how come none of this lot seem to have been in trouble?

Will Self on Nick Cave.

My Rubbish Gaydar, season 17 episode 3: I genuinely never suspected David Hyde Pierce aka Niles Crane from Frasier, is gay.

Slightly disappointed by the return of Garth Ennis' too-hot-for-DC superhero satire The Boys. The first six issues were scabrous, but they had real substance to them. The new one, the first from new home Dynamite...it's not very well-produced, it has one really glaring typo, but above all it feels as cheap artistically as physically. It was always puerile in places, but this issue was *just* puerile - rude words for rude words' sake, over and over. It has become like Ennis' lame 'The Pro', a risk this series always ran but previously escaped.

Disappointed also to learn that I'd misheard the lyrics to the Shins' 'Kissing The Lipless'. It's "and secretly I want to bury in the yard the grey remains of a friendship scarred." I'd always taken it to be ""and secretly I want you buried in the yard/the grey remains of a friendship scarred." Much more passionate.

Between the weather, pies, tiredness and the general lull which afflicts every club one month or another, a bit of a subdued Poptimism - but still good to see everyone after what seemed like far longer than it can actually have been. On the way there, I wondered how a station as demographically promising as Pimlico (nearest the Tate, for heavens' sake) can be so unpromising to advertisers as still to have advance posters for season 2 of Green Wing in pride of place. Whilst there, I wondered if there had ever been a J-pop cover of 'Turning Japanese', and if not, why not? And on the way home, I wondered whether I had a) stuck it to Tescopoly with my antics or b) made a drunken exhibition of myself in the supermarket.
This new regime reminds me of when I first got online; the internet was somewhere between home and out, a way to rev up or cycle down.

Was I the only person who didn't realise Garth Ennis' John Woo's 7 Brothers was a miniseries until the penultimate issue? And even then I expected two more issues, rather than one. Which is not to do down the ending, or indeed the story as a whole, which I think got Virgin Comics off to a fine start. I'm just surprised, that's all. Well, surprised and looking for an excuse to use Ronald's big line.

Oh look, the government's sticking it to the BBC again. Tossers. (edit: Actually it was the Met applied for the injunction. Ooops) Speaking of tossers, there's a longer piece on censorship percolating, preaching to the converted though it may be. But it needs a bit more work. Baited breath? I bet.

As is usually my habit I am posting this before reading my friendslist, but I'm guessing that at least half of it will be either Snow! :) or Snow! :(, so in deference to your jaded sensibilities I shall avoid the topic.

I've always known there was something bothering me about Klaxons, beyond the praise they were accumulating for fairly mediocre records. Then I read that they wanted to go R&B, 'Ghetto Fabulous' started playing in my head and everything slotted into place. Three post-indie kids who've done dance, done pop and have their eye on R&B? Klaxons are the rubbish Baxendale! And is is so often the case, they're snaffling all the plaudits and sales which eluded their vastly superior predecessor.

The Boys is back in town.

Further to yesterday, it seems I spoke too soon about the Lords: "A Church of England spokesman said: "We...acknowledge that in a house with reduced numbers consideration needs to be given to the appropriate number of Lords Spiritual. We also welcome and agree the recommendation that the wider religious make-up of the UK be reflected by the appointed element of a reformed House". Now, if they meant ensuring that representatives from the National Secular Society, pagan, Satanist and Jedi bodies got seats, fair enough. But why do I suspect that's not going to be the case?

Virgin was full of posh schoolgirls this evening. The world does enjoy its little puns.