John Mortell’s blog

Nearly as convincing trying to explain for going into Iraq;

This is so going on my buy list..

”You know I got an adultery case last year? You know what the husband turned out to be doing at night? He had formed a sex cult that broke into an ostrich farm at midnight three times a week. You know what it’s like, finding eight middle aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?”

Is not really a comic book. Hell I doubt it even counts as a short story in comic book terms. I’ve read 3 panel gag strips that have more content than this issue, and that’s being kind to this comic. I’m having trouble expressing why I’m so disappointed but I’ll try.

Firstly there’s the fact that I thought by getting this one-shot I would have my collection complete (granted, its a collection of the books from different publishers – two from Dark Horse and one a Penguin books edition of all things…) but I just discovered that there were other one-shots and short stories that I don’t have, so after forking out 3.90€ on this comic, the completist in me is going to want to buy the (supposedly) forthcoming ‘Life and Times of Martha Washington’ book thats due…

Secondly, and more importantly, theres the content. This is a 17 page comic with 7 pages of additional material. Now thats OK when the like of Warren Ellis or Matt Fraction do it with their ‘Fell’ or ‘Casanova’ books which are full of story (and also a dollar-fifty less), but in this comic there are no less than 4 full-page spreads (as in just the one panel in the page) and 8 pages given over to two-page spreads (again, one image in two pages). This means that 12 of the pages of this comic (out of the 17) are given over to 8 images. That is just not acceptable. The comic can now be read in less than ten minutes. Which isn’t worth your money. But even the poor use of the panels would be forgivable if there was you know, a story.

There isn’t a story. The last time we saw Martha she’s heading into space. When we next meet her – well, she’s a hundred years old, has a granddaughter and is a sort of a prophet. Oh, and the world has to hell against an unseen enemy. She makes some various statements (some of which are the content of my next paragraph), dies and then is taken into the sky by forces unknown. And thats it. From a comic where there was a fairly-well realised world (if a somewhat exaggerated one) and the development of Martha was a big element, this is a comic whose story ends with a whimper rather than a bang. Nothing is ever said about what happened to Martha in space, how she got back and what political crisis caused the world to be somewhat like the world of Mad Max.

Well, actually there is some sort of an explanation. It Muslims. Seriously. You see, the thing about Frank Miller in the last few years is that, well… He seems to have gone crazy. I’ve mentioned this before that Miller is a writer who’s best days seem well behind him and is slowly but surely becoming a parody of himself. Strangely enough, I see that my complaint that Miller overuses splash pages also was in that other post so there does seem to be a pattern emerging. But as to my ‘Muslim theory’ – here’s my evidence.

”The lonely toll of a Church bell. A sound we once found familiar. Back when there were Churches. Back before the Barbarians won their awful victory…

Maybe I’m being paranoid. But this is how the issue ends

And now the Barbarians sing their chants and set off their bombs and pray for the Armageddon we’ll never let them have

Those emphasis’ were in the comic itself BTW, nothing to do with me. Now, maybe I am just reading into what Miller has said in public a bit too much, or maybe in these days I’m confusing ‘general armageddon group that’s a staple of genre fiction’ with reality a bit too much … But nah, I don’t really think so.

If you have heard of Martha Washington and are curious about a comic character that was once quite interesting, look at some of the earlier books. As an introduction or a send-off to this piece of comic history this issue isn’t even worth mentioning… Except perhaps as another example of how low Frank Miller has sunk. Back to ‘Sin City’, ’300′ or anything predating 2000 for me it is….

One of the best ‘special feature’s’ I ever saw on a DVD was this video – but preceding it was a disclaimer that went something along the lines of

‘the producers of this film will not be held responsible for and instances of injury, madness or death that result from the watching of this video’. Proceed?

Hehe….

Right. Well in order; my music player seems to be on the fritz, firefox is dead to me with this google toolbar shite (and I can’t seem to find a version without it anywhere) and my internet connection never lasts more than five minutes with the replacement box that was meant to stop me being knocked offline every TEN minutes. Fuck this, I’m having many bottles of beer and watching a Danish horror movie. Once this shit is sorted, I’ll try start posting properly again.

Just turned it on. It wouldn’t work so I closed it. Reopen it and all my settings/bookmarks and so on and so forth are gone. Grrrr… I should be able to recover most of them – its just the annoyance…. Screw this though, weathers good so I’m going outside….

Update: Call me suspicious, but I suspect that its the Google Toolbar – when things went weird yesterday that had appeared. I put it off and yet it came back when I just restarted the computer now… And all my information is gone again.

Came across a dvd of this and wasn’t too sure how many of the episodes I’d seen so I decided to borrow it for a bit. Turns out the only episode I hadn’t seen was ‘The Mad Scientist’ – for some reason the collection I have consists of all the Flischer Studios episodes except the first. But considering that I paid about 5€ 6 or 7 years ago for it I’m not that bothered.

Still though, these are astonishingly good – while the plotting is frankly a bit weak you can hardly make that a major complaint. More annoying is the fact that the story doesn’t follow its own internal logic – especially relating to Superman’s exact powers. I mean can he fly or not? Because he seems to move from ‘Being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!’ to being able to maneuverer in mid-air or keep on an upward trajectory despite being hit by a laser beam… One that no-one seems to be able to guess where its coming from – would following the trajectory not give you some clue? But regardless these are true classics of animation in every sense of the word, so for your enjoyment here’s ‘The Mad Scientist’ in all its oddly-plotted glory….

Interesting article here from the BBC website by Sci-fi author Charles Stross – in it he suggests that ‘history has only just begun’ because while we can guess at the ‘wide stuff’ the day to day minute of peoples lives are largely unknown.

His idea? As I can figure it its that with modern technology being what it is future history students may use my blog, facebook and bebo accounts to reconstruct my life (or at least a significant portion of it anyway). Its an interesting idea but I’m not sure if its totally convincing….

My lack of belief lies mainly on the grounds of whether the technology he talks about will ever become fully available and even if it does finding the time to figure it all out would be ridiculous. I mean, in some ways I’m reminded of an issue of Warren Ellis’ future set ‘Transmetropolitan’ comic where the lead character points out that even big business or government groups hardly even bother to hide information becuase the sheer amount of information they release by themselves is nearly impossible to follow and that’s without contextualisation – so even if it Stross’ idea is the right one it may be a case of ‘drought to a flood’…

From ‘Psychology Today’ supposed truths about human nature that you won’t hear said too often owing to their un-pc nature. Some of them ring fairly true or at least as being somewhat correct – why men are better off in monogamous societies or why men like thin blonds;

Men prefer young women in part because they tend to be healthier than older women. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness; another is hair. Healthy women have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. Because hair grows slowly, shoulder-length hair reveals several years of a woman’s health status.
Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio. They are healthier and more fertile than other women; they have an easier time conceiving a child and do so at earlier ages because they have larger amounts of essential reproductive hormones. Thus men are unconsciously seeking healthier and more fertile women when they seek women with small waists.

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But not all of them ring as true – the claim that ‘men sexually harass women because they are not sexist’ is one that I just can’t follow (whether its just a case of me needing to reread it a few times or whether its a case of it being rubbish I’ll leave you to decide) or the part about what Bill Gates and criminals have in common for example which ends with this paragraph

Women often say no to men. Men have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them. Men have built (and destroyed) civilization in order to impress women, so that they might say yes.

which to be honest I don’t fully accept. I do know the logic of it is good, but at the same time I know there’s something wrong with that argument – perhaps its just a feeling that the example is a bit too OTT?Still though, its worth a look.

Watching this you could understand why the matches between these two are still talked about. From 1982 in Japan I think. Interesting to note how they manage to have elements of a technical, high-flying and hardcore (see the parts where they’re outside the ring) in this match but most modern wrestlers are hard pressed to do one at a time…