TimC

Hasn't everything by Lapham since he came to Marvel and DC been a waste of his talent?

I liked 'Young Liars' a lot.

Not read 'Stray Bullets' though, so can't compare. Was it ever finished?

It's a kind of fly that's found in coffins.

There are about 4,000 different types of coffin flies. Though known for their ability to be the only insect that can penetrate six feet of dirt, a sealed coffin, and the lack of oxygen underground to get to their "food source" (human remains), they can also be found in homes, drain pipes, and decaying plant matter. Not only are they carnivorous, but they enjoy eating dead plants, fungi, and dung. If it's dead (and hard to get to!) they are there.

[...]

Even more important is the coffin fly's contribution to ridding the world of pests like the fire ant. In the 1930s, fire ants were introduced to the US (accidentally). There are 110 species that enjoy decapitating fire ants and leaving them to wander aimlessly for up to two weeks without a head, only to starve to death. The coffin fly then lays her eggs in the ant's head, which is enzyme rich and provides an excellent source of nutrition for her young. The coffin fly is so well known for it's ant beheadings that the coffin fly's tendency for chewing off ant heads is better researched than their appetite for rotting flesh!

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-coffin-flies-environmental-contribution

No worse than basing your superhero identity on a bat or a spider, I suppose...

Apparently there is a sort-of sequel in the works, featuring further adventures of the Golden Nugget characters.

Personally, I'd like to see a little more of Ramona.

Interviewed Shaky

 

http://www.theouthousers.com/index.php/features/face-to-greg/12169-getting-bulletproof-with-shaky-kane.html

Good interview, thanks. Do I see one of my mate Matt's photos there?

Highland Laddie is still crap, though. Do we need six issues to reveal the drug dealer is Hughie's dad?

Well, it didn't go there. It's still a heavy possibility, of course.

Cracking little side-story, I thought. The final issue got several 'heheh's, one 'ooh!', and a manly muffled sob out of me.

It must be another of those transatlantic differences that 'stopping caring about' appears to mean 'banging on about' in American English.

If Aaron really wants to hit back at Moore for some imagined slight, couldn't he just write an egregiously poor comic abusing one of Moore's signature characters? Oh, wait...

Name and headline of the newspaper in the first panel. I'm guessing it reads in full:

'Millionaire Guy Grand gives away fortune'

as per Southern's 'The Magic Christian'.

The 'Daily Brute' was one of the newspapers in Waugh's 'Scoop', of course.

Yeah, I give Jess Nevins tips every now and then.

Silly walks in panel 4?

I'm more taken with the combined Terry Southern and Evelyn Waugh gag.

How about Terry Moore? Strangers In Paradise lasted a while, and I think his current series is coming up to forty issues.

Echo's in the late 20s at the moment, and will end at 30. Strangers in Paradise went on a little too long, to be honest.

I've been trying to catch up with 'Love & Rockets' recently - now, that's long-run creator-owned comics.

Sparked by a mention of Nikola Tesla in the comics thread, I got to thinking! (don't laugh, it happens)

Are there any good books featuring Tesla in an alternate history setting?

'The Prestige' by Christopher Priest.

There's a lot of less good books as well.

It's not gonna go away, either. Coupling demonstrated (to advantage) the writer's fondness for structural cleverness in his plots, and now he has time travel to play with as well; you can understand why he's going to town with it.

Moffat's basic problem, I think, is that his fondness for structural cleverness isn't matched by his actual cleverness. His plots are often elaborately constructred, but just don't hold up all that well once you start prodding them.

Obviously any Whoer is well used to overlooking or explaining away plot holes or gaping failures of story logic (finding explanations for story holes is one of the basic pleasures of fandom), but it seems harder to forgive them in a writer whose work is so rooted in formal tricksiness - you can't pretend that the viewer shouldn't be paying that much attention when you have things like the 'Flesh and Stone' appearance of the future Doctor, for instance.

Good one-liners, though.

I enjoyed it enough while it was on, in the usual xmas-afternoon haze, which is the main thing. Can't imagine wanting to rewatch it all that soon, nor consider it worth discussing much. Same lack of feeling I got from most of last season, really - for whatever reason, it just doesn't engage me all that much.

I'm more excited by the DVD of 'Frontier in Space' I got as a present, to be honest, if only for the South Bank location filming.

Excellent work! It all seems to fit together, which is quite remarkable, considering.

Growing up fast between 1965-67 doesn't seem too strange if you were born in '53 - it's called puberty.

The 'Shade' appearance will fit in without any problem - JC is swept back in time from the night of Thatcher's first election win (3 May 1979), while on temporary leave from Ravenscar. As noted elsewhere, he doesn't much resemble the 1979 twatpunk Constantine in the current Milligan/Bisley run.

The early-noughties timeline reminds me that I remember very little of Carey's run. It didn't make much of an impression in the first place.

Has Neonomicon 3 come out yet? Or has the release schedule moved onto that deathless Alan Moore Time (AMT)?

Thanks to anyone who voted for me in the Who Fix photo competition. You're welcome to come round and watch the 'Masque of Mandragora' DVD what I won.

Is that outside the exhibition they used to have in Blackpool?

That's the one. Circa 1983 or thereabouts.

That's a fine photograph. I shall go and vote for it immediately. I should have realised that it was you when I first saw it, 'cos I know you're a BtS commenter.

Thank you sir! That DVD of my choice shall be mine, oh yes.

Why are you wearing those ridiculous silver gloves?

To stop me chewing my nails. I was a nervous child.

In related news, the rather fun Who Fix website is having a competition for best Who-related photo from one's childhood.

You can vote for me if you like.

Or just take the piss. I don't care.

In honour of Jerry Brown being re-elected as California governor (at the grand age of 72), I'll be spending the day whistling the Dead Kennedys. Who's with me?

I suspect that most people at the Nativity would actually have been Jewish.

What it reminds me most strongly of, in fact, would be Grant Morrison's approach to 'hypercompression' in some of his more recent work - telling a complex story with as little extraneous detail as possible - and a lot of the valid criticisms which have been made of the likes of Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis apply equally-well to 'Ghost Light', if not moreso.

Funnily enough, it reminded me of Grant Morrison when it was first broadcast (I recall wondering if he'd written it under a pseudonym for some reason). It's a favourite, though I've not watched it for a long time.

'Curse of Fenric' was a favourite as well, but I watched it again a few years ago (after the first series of new Who, I think), and it didn't seem to have aged well at all.

The big long long-lost 'Fossil Angels' essay from the BHA on the state of magic has just appeared online -

http://glycon.livejournal.com/13888.html

Regard the world of magic. A scattering of occult orders which, when not attempting to disprove each other’s provenance, are either cryogenically suspended in their ritual rut, their game of Aiwaz Says, or else seem lost in some Dungeons & Dragons sprawl of channelled spam, off mapping some unfalsifiable and thus completely valueless new universe before they’ve demonstrated that they have so much as a black-lacquered fingernail’s grip on the old one. Self-consciously weird transmissions from Tourette’s-afflicted entities, from glossolalic Hammer horrors. Fritzed-out scrying bowls somehow receiving trailers from the Sci-Fi channel. Far too many secret chiefs, and, for that matter, far too many secret indians.

Beyond this, past the creaking gates of the illustrious societies, dilapidated fifty-year-old follies where they start out with the plans for a celestial palace but inevitably end up with the Bates Motel, outside this there extends the mob. The psyche pikeys. Incoherent roar of our hermetic home-crowd, the Akashic anoraks, the would-be wiccans and Temple uv Psychic Forty-Somethings queuing up with pre-teens for the latest franchised fairyland, realm of the irretrievably hobbituated. Pottersville.

Some background -

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/10/20/unearthing-alan-moores-fossil-angels/

Maybe the giggly 'We are not amused' gag, or Queenie's closing speech - 'I shall create a new Institute to defend the Earth! I shall call it Torchwood! Coming soon on BBC3!'

By my reckoning, RTD's only real deus ex machina was in 'Boomtown'. No one complains that that episode was ruined by the ending.

I would. Regardless of whether you summarise it in a paragraph or actually watch it, it was a cracker. And that's even with RTD's usual miraculous resolution pulled out of nowhere.

Eh? The diamond death ray thingy was signposted almost from the start. 'Tooth and Claw' is one of my favourites as well.

Rusty never had an out-the-arse magic resolution as bad as the last season finale.

Yesterday's SJA was certainly the best kid's programme I've ever seen to feature both sentient concrete and Collaterly Sisters.