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

I've had a couple of serendipitous library finds recently. Having mentioned Seth Fisher a couple of weeks back, I came across the last collection of his work I hadn't read at the weekend. Which meant I had Batman: Snow there to read as the snow whirled down this week. As with his other work, it's only really worth it for the art - who else would ever have given Alfred bunny pyjamas and an expressive combover? JH Williams III is credited as co-plotter, but on this evidence should stick to the artwork too, because I'm still not convinced that Mr Freeze can ever be anything more than DC's second best cold-themed villain.
A couple of weeks earlier, I'd finally found Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, which came out a couple of years back. I've known Rob on and off since school and, unlike some acquaintances whose rise to celebrity status is face-crunchingly irksome (mentioning no names, Rick the Fister) his emergence as a sort of all-weather public intellectual has been as gratifying as it is richly deserved. This wander around Britain in search of wildness - and a definition of what 'wildness' might even mean - was, for me, a much more satisyfing book than his debut, Mountains of the Mind, and I was left wondering why it hadn't been picked up for TV.
So in Saturday's paper, there's Rob explaining how it's been narrowed down to Essex, and filmed, and will be on TV tonight. Which is handy. I also note that immediately afterwards is a show about the different orders of infinity - a concept I can just about handle, except that it's narrated by Steven Berkoff, which seems unduly sadistic.
(The Wild Places was also one of of two consecutive non-fiction books I read to mention Nevil Maskelyne. Not either of the two stage magicians of that name, of whom I am aware through the wartime illusionism and being contemporaries of David Devant, although I can never quite keep them separate in my head - but the Astronomer Royal at the opening of Richard Holmes' Age of Wonder, their presumable ancestor. What a dynasty!)

Also: one of the problems with/interesting side effects of Google Alerts is that you're kept informed of the activities of namesakes. I know an awful lot more than I used to about the fireman Alan Moore, for instance. And today, I learn of a stem cell scientist Alan Moore who is involved with a project called 'Regenesis', also the title of a Swamp Thing collection - albeit not one of Moore's, but the six Veitch issues which immediately followed him.