How to stay slim the Middle Earth Way

Right, so this evening I saw The Return of the King for a second time. It's definitely a film that improves with repeat viewings. The multiple endings weren't nearly as annoying this time, and I was able to appreciate the film much more without constantly wondering how Jackson was going to adapt certain things.

I also, unfortunately, noticed a couple of glitches, notably near the end when the remnants of the Fellowship ride out on front of the Black Gates of Mordor. There was one shot there, with Aragorn in sharp focus and Gandalf and Pippin blurred behind him, where it was blatantly obvious that Pippin was not actually played by Billy Boyd, but by a tiny Thai girl.

But that's not important. No, far more significant is the real secret agenda behind the film.

Have you noticed the fact that Sam is a bit, shall we say, plump? Indeed Gollum constantly refers to him as 'the fat hobbitses'. Well, how is this? After all, he treks hundreds of miles and doesn't appear to lose an ounce. He's as generously upholstered after walking across the world as he was back when he used to potter in Frodo's garden. And what does he live on? Bread. Nothing but Lembas bread. You know, the stuff that appears to be toast camoflaged to resemble dolmades. Magic elf toast, I call it, to the annoyance of my more devout friends.

Bear with me on this. There is a point.

Who's the skinniest person in the films? Gollum, of course. And what does Gollum eat? Fish. He's a meat eater, without a doubt, but in practice just eats fish. Well, you know the flashback scene at the start of Return of the King, where we see Gollum five centuries earlier, when he was known as Smeagol? Smeagol was definitely a lot, well, more robust than Gollum. What happened to him? Well, that's very clear. Smeagol killed his friend, stole the ring, and was scorned by his people; he fled into the mountains and 'forgot the taste of bread'.

Think about it. Sam eats Lembas and is fat. Smeagol ate bread, and was robust, but gave up all those carbs for a diet of pure protein and fat, and became the supremely slim Gollum.

Yes, the Jackson films are a cunningly disguised advert for the Atkins diet. Jackson clearly discerned something in Tolkien's work that generations of fans and academics had failed to pick up.

Gollum even smells funny. That's probably bad breath from the ketones he's been producing for centuries.

Cake or Death?

I went to Church this evening with some friends. Not to the usual church, which is the Catholic Church of the Holy Name on Oxford Road.*

This evening I went along to Holy Trinity Platt, an evangelical Anglican church where my friends usually go. I went along with Marlisa, Ben, and Sarah as my friend Eddie was due to be preaching this evening. I haven't mentioned Eddie here in a while. He was a tutor in my hall, who actually introduced me to my room when I first arrived here, lonely and mildly the worse for wear; he left just over a year ago, to live in York and work on his PhD thesis, which despite all evidence to the contrary, was not about potatoes. He says.

The service was odd. Nice, but odd. I couldn't help but be struck by the absence of structure, of that clear shape whereby there's a liturgy of the Word and a liturgy of the Eucharist, each part featuring elements of consecration and of communion. What's more, I found myself eyeing the prayers and hymns like a hawk -- not that hawks sings hymns, but if birds of prey actually prayed, that's what they'd do -- to ensure I wasn't saying something doctrinally very dodgy.

Eddie's sermon, on Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians, 2.17-3.13, was interesting, though I've a couple of things I'll want to take up with him at some point.

One thing about it appalled me. As we took our seats and sat down at the start of the service I noticed a large screen behind the pulpit, with a black blue screen projected upon it. "Oh no," I muttered, "If there's going to be a PowerPoint presentation, I'm going home." Marlisa reassured me that that would probably be to project the words to hymns upon. "Hmmm." I replied, unconvinced and wary.

Well, she was right. It was indeed to project the words to hymns on; I can see the value in that. Just about. Unfortunately, it didn't stop there. I was right too. Eddie clambered up onto the pulpit and as he spoke those cursed bullet points appeared. Really.

Afterwards, as we were leaving, I shook my head as I shook Eddie's hand. "Powerpoint!" I snorted, and then grinned, and said I'd liked his talk.

I wasn't being mean, I just hate PowerPoint, and have only ever seen it used well once. It's really just a tool, but tends to become a substitute for thought, or even for delivering a well-crafted speech. After all, how many of history greatest speeches would really have worked if they were delivered as PowerPoint presentations?

Let's put it another way. Would Christianity have taken off had Jesus delivered The PowerPoint Presentation on the Mount and Paul lashed off his First E-Mail to the Thessalonians?

(To be fair to Eddie, who popped round with Hannah for a cup of tea later -- which was a lovely surprise, he had just wanted to speak and hadn't wanted to do the presentation; that had been urged upon him. Why do people think this is a good thing?)

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* Um, when I say 'my usual church', I do so in a blushing and guilty sense, as I go far less often than I should. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman describe this attitude rather well in Good Omens: 

"Not that he was a, you know, left-footer or anything like that. No, when he came to avoiding going to church, the church he stolidly avoided going to was Cecil and All Angels, no-nonsense C of E, and he wouldn't have dreamed of avoiding going to any other. All the others had the wrong smell -- floor polish for the Low, somewhat suspicious incense for the High. Deep in the leather armchair of his soul, Mr Young knew that God got embarrassed at that sort of thing."

Censored at Fourteen

I mentioned a couple of days ago how in my teens I had drawn a few stories for my school magazine, generally fairly rudimentary things. The first thing I drew for it was a bad caricature of my English teacher, the magazine's editor; it was a feeble thing, but generally approved of my classmates as being instantly recognisable. That wasn't hard, to be fair; all I had to do was ensure there was a scarf and glasses in there somewhere.

The following year I attempted my first ever comic strip, a clumsily drawn and awkwardly told tale throwing my school into the future into a silly Judge Dredd-type world. Moyle Park 2000, for so it was embarassingly called, showed a map of a post-nuclear holocaust Dublin with only a few islands of civilization, and simply narrated a day in the life of 'Judge Conway', who was basically my science teacher in a judge's uniform. Yeah, I know, utter rubbish. Give me a break. I was thirteen.

A year later, I attempted a rather more ambitious tale, another two-page piece, this time called Doctor Jekyll and Mr H. The premise of this absurdity was that a mad scientist would take a potion that turned him into the even more terrifying entity that was my history teacher. To be fair, the teacher in question was quite brilliant, and is a really likeable person, but when I was twelve he struck terror into me as nobody has ever done since. (I must admit that at one point I modelled my own teaching style on him.) The story was silent until the last panel, where I finally showed the supposedly more terrifying visage of 'Mr H', as he turned to the class and asked his standard interrogatory 'Do you know this?'

My drawing style had improved immensely since the previous year, but the last panel's joke relied on my having acquired a photograph of said teacher... I drew the body and background and pasted on the head. Understandably he wasn't too happy about this, or else somebody saw sense and decided to remove said photograph and simply draw a large question mark.

Fair enough. A good decision there, in retrospect. And it did feel rather cool to be censored at fourteen.

The following year I topped that. As well as pencilling all the illustrations to accompany the text in the magazine -- am astonishingly gifted friend inked them and made me look good -- I acquired a whole batch of photographs of teachers and drew a bad three page story called The Final Frontier: Where No Teacher Has Gone Before. I blush to think how bad this was. It was a Star Trek pastiche but featuring a ganseyload of teachers from my school, with my maths teacher captaining the ship and with a few other teachers making cameo appearances. One teacher in particular was mercilessly parodied with his speech patterns being replicated in a particularly offensive manner.

I was in Germany on a school tour when the magazine came out; it was available for just a few hours before being pulled. The teacher who I had viciously lampooned in the strip wasn't responsible; he was in Germany leading the tour. No, as Albert Reynolds would say, 'it's the little things that can trip you up'. One teacher* has been cast as the villain - somebody had to be -- and in the story he was melodramatically described as 'the most vicious, merciless, evil space pirate in the galaxy!' For some reason the teacher in question took offence at that. I can't imagine why. Um. Sorry.

Having been censored one year and banned the next, it probably wasn't surprising that the rather longer - eight page - story I came up with in final year was rejected outright. I'm not sure it would have been blocked had the magazine not turned into a glossy yearbook that year; the story really wasn't the kind of thing they had in mind. Fair enough. A sequel to my 1989 travesty Moyle Park 2000, I give you Judge Conway in all its glory.

For all its flaws - and there are more than a few - in some ways I'm still quite pleased with this. I showed some photographs of the story to a couple of comic writers who were in Dublin one year and Mark Miller seemed really impressed, noting that I had a 'really interesting' narrative style; he handed the snaps to Grant Morrison, who agreed.

It's odd to look at it now, packed as it is with so many injokes. The 'villain' of the story, who's rather cool really, is my old geography teacher; his full-length coat and occasional Clint references made him a natural choice for a 'Man with no name' type bad guy; almost all his sentences are direct quotations from the man himself.

I could go through it panel by panel to explain what's what, and even who's who in the crowd and pub scenes, and what the graphitti and shop names refer to, but life, I feel, is too short. Having said that, if you're interested and the comments work feel free to ask!

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* Also a nice man, but one who, to be fair, terrified me at the time. 

A Personal Journey in the World of Comics - II

So, as I said, I basically stopped drawing after UKCAC 1995. Not entirely; I did the odd poster or birthday card - sometimes even toying with drawing on the computer - and of course did all the drawings in my book. Not the cover, of course, but everything inside. Aside from that, though, I hardly picked up a pencil save to doodle.

Why? Well, a large part of my stopping was simply due to the fact that my studies were taking more time; I did well in my finals, and carried on into a master's degree, and since into a doctorate, and all the time drawing seemed to become less and less important. Looking back now, this seems very odd; as far as I was concerned back when I left school, I was going to college in order to have something to fall back on if drawing comics didn't work out. What was it that John Lennon said about life being what happens while you're making other plans?

That wasn't all, though. The desire to draw comics shouldn't have dampened in the way; distractions alone wouldn't have achieved that. No, it seemed more that there was no point.

It wasn't the issue of employability that bothered me, even in an industry which was about to undergo a rather tight contraction. It was the fact that something in me found the idea of spending long hours slaving over a drawing board to illustrate somebody else's stories to be, well, insane. That's not to insult any working comic creators; there are plenty of people who tell the sort of stories I'd love to draw, but the odds are that if I was lucky I'd wind up illustrating The Interminable Adventures of Henman! or some such guff.

Some people would love to do that, which is fair enough; hell, if they like that kind of stuff that'd be wonderful. But for me, no.

I think my sensibilities regarding storytelling in general and comics in particular were changing. My cinemagoing and constant viewing of classic films on video and television were accompanied by my ransacking the film section of UCD library, so I'd thought more and more about how stories could and should be told. In doing so, I'd read and seen more and more stories that couldn't be classed as genre fiction; even those that could were usually excellent examples of genre work.

Watchmen is a perfect example of this. It's undoubtedly one of the finest comics ever created, and one of a handful that can credibly be held forth as an example of great 'art'. It's genre fiction, there's no doubt about that, but genre fiction being used to dissect that very genre. Extraordinarily clever, Watchmen analyses almost every convention of the superhero genre whilst demonstrating what comics are capable of; the comic folds in on itself like an origami labyrinth with panels evoking other panels, comics within comics that illuminate the overall tale, and symbolism run riot.

It's a comic that's open to endless interpretation and yet is not merely a comic about comics and a techical masterpiece; it also a damn good piece of genre fiction - several genres, in fact, as it's not merely a superhero story but a thriller, a detective story, and a work of science fiction - which is well told and built around characters who are often far from loveable, yet who we learn to love nevertheless. Nobody, after all, is ugly on the inside.

One of the most graceful features of the comic, which I think could never be achieved so elegantly or effectively in any other medium, is the recurring patterns that punctuate the text. Most panels in the comic are the same size, each page being built around a straightforward nine-panel grid. This allows Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons to design panels that echo previous ones, allowing us to see the patterns that underly the tale they tell.

Rorschach, the least savoury of the comic's heroes, at one point makes a grim observation that might seem to deny this.

'Looked at the sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion, bear children, hellbound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for two long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us.'

Is Rorschach's bleak worldview plausible? Certainly not in the world he lives in. Images and patterns occur and reoccur too frequently to be accidental. Rorschach's world has a God and his name is Alan Moore. The cover of the first issue of Watchmen is an extremely close-up drawing of a small badge; the yellow badge bears a smiley face with a splash of blood across the right eye. The first page of the comic begins with a shot of the same badge but from slightly higher up; the seven panels of that page draw higher and higher until the puddle of blood in which lies the badge is a mere dot viewed from the penthouse suite of a skyscraper.

That image, first seen on the cover of the comic's first issue, recurrs constantly throughout the series, though rarely appears directly; rather the basic iconic pattern is evoked. We cannot help but see the Comedian's badge whenever the elements conspire to evoke it. Just as every child responds naturally to an image of two dots and a line, seeing it as a face, so do we, faced with a curve and two dots, one blemished in some way, see the bloodied badge of the Comedian.

It's not the only such pattern, however. The image, first seen in silhouette, of two bodies pressed against each other, is at least as frequent as the Comedian's badge. First noticed by Rorschach, who comments on a spray painting on an alley wall as being evocative of the charred images at Hirsoshima, the image constantly recurs, whether in dreams, or in memories, or in reality, even ultimately on the ever shifting blots that distinguish Rorschach's mask.

This is something that could hardly be done in another medium - if it were tried at all it would either be imperceptibly subtle or blatantly obvious. In Watchmen, however, it is just subtle enough that on a first reading you might notice some recurring imagery, but each time you reread this astonishing book you'll see more and more. Despite what Rorschach believes, the patterns are there; it's not that we imagine them.

That's one of the real delights of Watchmen; like Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan more than a decade later, it absolutely revels in the fact that it is a comic, and makes a point of demonstrating how good comics can be. No attempt is made to hide the fact that when you read it, you're reading a comic. Almost like Citizen Kane, it's an energetic box of tricks that shows just what comics can do, and it does so while discarding some of the more embarrassing comic conventions - there's not a thought bubble to be found here, and not a Kapow! or Kerrrash! in sight.

It's worth looking at Moore's earlier work to see where his techniques are coming from: V for Vendetta is similarly devoid of soundwords and thought bubbles, while The Killing Joke, written before Watchmen though published later, is a useful primer for Moore's mirroring of images and use of template patterns.

Watchmen dazzled me, and frankly as time went on it troubled me more and more. What would be the point in illustrating American comics after that? The vast majority of American comics, the only ones where there was any money, were superhero books, and Moore and Gibbons had dismantled the genre. As Moore put it, if Frank Miller's exhuberant and epic The Dark Knight Returns had been the brass band funeral for the superhero genre, Watchmen had been the autopsy.

So What Are You Going To Do About It?

Granted, there were some people out there who told the kind of stories I'd like to narrate myself, but with a few honorable exceptions such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Garth Ennis, they were almost all writer-artists, people who really created their whole comics, writing and drawing them.

I've never believed that art can only be created when it's the vision of just one individual -- after all, medieval cathedrals were effectively built by committee -- but it struck me that most of the best work in the medium of comics had been the brainchild of a single creator... George Herriman, Winsor McKay, Will Eisner, Walt Kelly, Karl Barks, Herge, Osamu Tezuka, Moebius, Gilbert Hernandez, Jamie Hernandez, Hayao Miyazaki, Chris Ware, Jason Lutes, Dave Sim, Scott McCloud, Jack Kirby when working on his Fourth World stuff, Art Speigelman, Eddie Campbell, Daniel Clowes, Lorenzo Mattotti, Frank Miller, Hermann, Joe Sacco, Hal Foster, Hugo Pratt, Dave Mazzuchelli, Seth, Bryan Talbot, Dave McKean, Charles Schulz, Jules Feiffer and so many more...

Well that was all very well, but they obviously had stories to tell. I had nothing to say. So I just kept reading, and thinking, and admiring other people's work. Sometimes I was really stunned by it. There's a sequence in Jason Lutes's Berlin, for instance,  that delighted me. In itself it might be seen as nothing too impressive; a man shouts through a window at a dining couple. But Lutes attempts to capture the difference in volume as the sound travels through the glass, with the pane itself becoming the gutter between panels. Bold print for the shouting outside the window; regular print for what the couples hear within.

You can think about the meaning of that in the context of the comic as much as you like, but what fascinated me was that here was Lutes experimenting all the time in tiny ways, constantly nudging the medium in new directions. Pick up Jar of Fools or Berlin, or even, if you can get a hold of it, The Fall, and watch as he gracefully does things with comics that nobody has dared do before.

The thing was that Lutes and others like him obviously had stories to tell and things to say; it struck me that there really wasn't any point in adding to the pile of crap out there if I didn't have something to say. That's not to say that all good comics left me feeling so impotent, just that they rarely hinted at the kind of stories that I might like to tell.

One that did make a difference, however, was Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's marvellous Violent Cases. The story is a strange one, as a Gaimanesque narrator remembers -- or tries to -- a period in his youth when he broke his arm and had to go to an osteopath who had worked on Al Capone. It's an odd story, made all the more wonderful and evocative by McKean's beautiful artwork and how Gaiman uses the tale as a meditation on memory.

The page above is one of the finest pages I've ever read in any comic, as the narrator stumbles in the middle of his story, and realises that for whatever reason his mental picture of the osteopath has changed radically; where previously he looked like some strange hybrid of Einstein and an Native American chief, now he looks like Sam Spade's partner in the opening scenes of The Maltese Falcon. It's a beautiful page, and something that I doubt would be anywhere near as effective in any medium other than comics.

What does this have to do with me? Well, in Violent Cases Gaiman purports to be telling a story of his youth; it may not actually be factual, but it rings true; it has a genuinely autobiographical tone. What's more, the narrator is unreliable, not in the sense of being dishonest, but purely in the sense that in some respects he is puzzled by his own story; he believes it's true, but has difficulty understanding why.

Take a look at my story of the dam made from lard, or my musings about how we remember our youths. Look at the story I relate about what supposedly happened at Dublin Zoo a couple of years ago, or what apparently happened in Sitia and in Winnipeg some years earlier. Hell, even take a glance at what I say about Herodotus. I like strange stories that are supposedly true. I particularly like strange stories where the narrator isn't sure whether things are true, or why, or how things happened, and where the narrator will digress at the drop of a hat.

I was wrong to think that I have no stories to tell. Until a few years ago I had been convinced that was the case, but in Greece in the summer of 2000 I realised that wasn't true at all. I don't know whether it was the night Andrea, Josh, and myself were lying in our Stymphalian tent and the others were begging me for a new story, or the day I was sitting on a milk crate in front of the tent telling story after story to a group of people who had sat in a circle to listen that I realised that I actually do have a bit of a talent for this.

I have stories to tell. Many are slight things, but that's no shame; much the same thing could be said of the 1001 Nights! And they almost all come from somebody else; either a tale I've heard or an incident I've read about, but then Chaucer would have said exactly the same thing. As Holly has remarked, my anecdotes are endless. But some... some are pretty substantial, and some actually happened to me, rather than to friends, or to friends of friends. The Paris Incident has been on my mind for the last couple of years, and I really think it would make a marvellous comic.

I'll have to get my skates on.

A Personal Journey in the World of Comics - I

Most children like comics; most of those stop reading them. I've never really understood why. After all, people don't grow out of novels or films or television, do they? Why should one medium be so scorned? Is there something intrinsically juvenile about telling stories through a sequence of juxtaposed pictures, or about combining words and pictures?

I don't think there is, and if you read Scott McCloud's marvellous Understanding Comics I'm sure you won't either. If McCloud's attempt to establish what comics are, how they work, and what they can be is intriguing to you, take a look at some decent comics.

You need to be careful here; Sturgeon's Law* is particularly applicable to the comics industry, if not the actual medium. For some hints I'd suggest you peruse the list of 60 Comics I drew up back in July to show what I'd use if I wanted to set up a basic comics library.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, Why I Hate Saturn, Maus, Ghostworld, and Mr Punch would all be excellent starting points.

That'd be my advice for an adult coming to comics with no experience in the medium. I have no real idea what I'd suggest for children, I'm afraid, though I'd be tempted to point them in the direction of Tintin, Asterix, Bone, and The Batman Adventures. Would I be allowed to hint at The Day I Swapped my Dad for two Goldfish?

The first comics I remember reading were old annuals and comics belonging to my older brother and sisters - Bunty and Mandy annuals were rather incongruously read alongside Battle, Action, Valiant, and Warlord. That was definitely an eclectic mix; I'm sure than can be few children who would read tales of female Oliver Twists or aspiring figure-skaters, and then turn to such delights as Charley's War and Johnny Red.

Other, very different, comics were to be read in friends' houses. I became acquainted with Buster through Derek Mealiff, a Canadian lad who lived in the area for a year, and I will never forget reading about 'The Numbskulls' in Diarmait's house - was that in Whizzer and Chips? I really don't know. The Beano and the Dandy were, of course, ubiquitous.

Superhero comics were a rarity. Dave had a reprint of an early X-Men comic -- the one that introduced the Blob -- and I managed to pick up one about Professor Xavier being in a coma, and a comic that reprinted the first part of the legendary 'Days of Future Past'.

Other than that? I remember a friend having a comic with some Marvel heroines in -- most notably She-Hulk and Valkyrie who I guess must have been a sidekick of Thor's and who may well have engendered my lifelong approval of plaits. My sister acquired a small black-and-white tome that reprinted several Silver Surfer tales, and when Spiderman and Zoids was available I was able to read much of the now classic 'Death of Jean DeWolfe' saga, written by Peter David at the start of his comics career. Curiously, the 'Zoids' stories in those comics were written by an inexperienced Scot named Grant Morrison, who has since gone on to much greater things.

There was also a Batman or Superman annual or two. I remember little about such, barring one story where Batman and Robin travelled to an alternative universe to save the parents of that dimension's Bruce Wayne.

Anything else? Well, there was Absalom Daak, Dalek Killer, but I can't even remember whether that stood alone, or was part of another book. It was good though. Early Steve Dillon art; wonderful stuff. And I'd occasionally borrow some issues of Transformers from Ed; 'Target 2006' and stuff like that, set in what seemed a very distant future!

The Galaxy's Greatest

I suppose that I would have drifted away from comics like almost every other child were it not for one thing. When I was about eight, a friend's older brother began buying 2000 AD, which back then was absolutely marvellous.

Strangely, the comic's leading man, Judge Dredd, hardly impressed me at all, but I adored the other stories: the weird, frightening, fantastic, terrifyingly intolerant world of 'Nemesis the Warlock'; the hopeless heroism of Johnny Alpha, a mutant bounty hunter policing the galaxy to keep it safe for people who hated him and all his type; the anarchic ultra-violent comedy of 'D.R. and Quinch', so much else, so much of which is literally in my blood now. John Wagner, Alan Grant, Pat Mills, Gerry Finley Day, and Alan Moore burned their stories and ideas into my mind. 

I wasn't particularly enamoured with 'The Ballad of Halo Jones', which is almost certainly the finest thing ever published in 2000 AD, but things change; it was probably a bit advanced for a boy of nine or ten. Racial prejudice and rampant violence I could comprehend; girls going shopping or working as hostesses, well, that wasn't quite so appealling.

I'm afraid that for four years I simply read the comic in Dave's house, only ever buying it myself two or three times. Just before I turned twelve though, as I was about to leave primary school, I bought prog 520 of the comic, which was the beginning of the comic having high quality colour, and, it must be said, low quality writing and editing, though the decline wasn't to become obvious for a while. I began buying 2000 AD just as it had peaked. Be that as it may, there was still plenty of good stuff being published in the comic.

I'd been buying it but three months when 'Revolution' was run. This was a 'Judge Dredd' story, the sequel to the heartbreaking 'Letter from a Democrat'. That story had dealt with what was effectively a suicide attack on a TV studio by a group of democratic 'extremists', determined to make their case to the people of Mega City One that they ought to be allowed some measure of control over their lives; the democrats' own lives were rapidly cut short by Dredd and his fellow judges who brutally stormed the studio.

What had made that story particularly poignant, rather than just thoughtful, was its format; it had a 'voiceover', a letter carried by one of the dead democrats to her husband, explaining why she had felt compelled to take part in this doomed attack to try to make a better world for her children. 'Revolution' was set a couple of years later, with the dead Hester Hyman as a martyr to the democratic movement and an enormous march being organised to demand democracy from the judges; the march was a catastrophe, owing to it having been sabotaged in numerous ways by Dredd and his fellow judges. This dark and sophisticated theme ran through the Dredd strip for years after this, which is just one more reason why you should try to blank from your memories any trace of the muddled simplistic Sylvester Stallone rendering of Dredd.

Within two months of that the first phase of Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's 'Zenith' drew to a close. Aside from having such wonderful characters as Zenith himself, a 1980s Rick Astley-esque pop brat with superpowers, and Peter St John, a superpowered hippy turned Tory Secretary of Defence, that tale featured the first sequence in any comic that left me gawping at the page.

The sequence where Siadwell Rhys, the Red Dragon, was slain by the villain, astounded me. Have a look:

I had never seen a comic move so fast. The panels appeared to shoot by. To this day I have remained in awe of Steve Yeowell for that feat; this was the first time I ever really thought about comics as narratives, rather than as a sequence of nice pictures, the first time I thought of comic artists as storytellers rather than illustrators.

A year or so later 2000 AD did something else that amazed me. I know plenty of people who've cried when watching films or television, or when reading books, or listening to music. Well, when Johnny Alpha died I shed a tear or two. Johnny had been, along with the Arthurian knights, the real hero of my childhood; one picture of him so impressed me that I must have copied it dozens of times and now have a scanned version of it on my computer's desktop. Johnny died, as his sidekick Wulf had died a few years earlier. And like Wulf, and unlike so many American comic heroes, Johnny stayed dead.

Around that time, 2000 AD branched out and started a sister comic, the ill-fated Crisis. I loved Crisis at the time, though I'm not sure what I'd think of it now. A lot of my early thoughts about politics were formed by Pat Mills's painfully worthy 'Third World War', but if Crisis had any real impact on what I thought of comics, it lay with the fact that Crisis #15 featured the first part of Garth Ennis's 'Troubled Souls'.

'Troubled Souls' was a political thriller set in Northern Ireland; it was fully painted, which was groundbreaking from my limited experience of comics, and had gentle sequences set in the countryside, funny scenes in the pub or in people's houses, a genuine political viewpoint, and of course revolved around terrorism.

For all its faults, and apparently Garth hates to look at it now, it was a hell of an entrance into the world of comics, and what's more, was about the real world. Yes, it was still genre fiction and was set in a world I had no knowledge of, but it was a world without spaceships, robots, laser guns, mutants, time travel, demons, Celtic warriors, superheroes, or women with impossibly large breasts.

The significance of 'Troubled Souls' to me was not limited to its subject matter. I was amazed when I met Garth Ennis at his first signing in Dublin to find that he was really only a few years older than me. So was John McCrea, the artist who had illustrated the strip. And they were both from Belfast. Barely twenty years old, Irish, and making comics for a living. How could this be?

I Have A Dream...

I'd long been interested in how comics were actually created. 2000 AD annuals would usually have sections where they'd interview writers or artists, or would show what a comic script looked like, or how a story would actually be drawn. Ian Gibson once had a fine section in, I think, the 1985 2000 AD annual where he demonstrated step-by-step how he drew that annual's 'Judge Dredd' story, and old interviews with Massimo Belardinelli and Brian Bolland have long stayed with me.

Well, I began to get a bit of an obsession with becoming a comic artist. Small stories for my school magazine, each showing a definite improvement in technique and storytelling, were censored, banned, or rejected outright; nevertheless, my English teacher encouraged me in my dream. I backed down from the idea of doing art for my Leaving Cert, but kept on drawing.

I began a degree in Commerce, and stopped after half a year, and kept drawing, and just before I began studying for my Arts degree, went to London to attend the UK Comic Art Convention, carting along my portfolio. It was utterly scorned (rightly) by one editor, but John Higgins, who had drawn 'Letter from a Democrat' and 'Revolution' all those years before, gave me a lot of useful advice, and I went home happy, all set to learn about the Gracchi, Homer, Socrates, and the Parthenon, and to keep on drawing.

A year later I returned to London, this time knowing well that I wasn't ready, but keen on getting advice. Steve Pugh, who had continued drawing the stories of Johnny Alpha's sidekicks, gave me some vital encouragement and complemented my storytelling, and Bryan Talbot, the astoundingly gifted creator of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and The Tale of One Bad Rat, gave me usefully frank criticism about anatomy and storytelling.

Like the great Will Eisner, who I met once in Dublin, Talbot really pushed the importance of life-drawing as a way of learning about anatomy, and also suggested that I study cinema carefully to see how directors composed their shots. That started another obsession, and I headed back to Dublin, clutching two pages of original artwork from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, and determined to draw even more and to watch and study all sorts of films.

The following year I headed back to Bedford Way, once more to tout my work, but more to enjoy the convention. I knew I wasn't good enough to be published, but the advice I got was useful, it was nice to meet people whose work I admired, and there were always interesting events; I still have a soft spot for Bryan Talbot's slideshow on how he created The Tale of One Bad Rat and for the talk Scott McCloud gave in Ladbrook Grove on the future of comics. This time the only professional I approached for advice was Steve Pugh, who was particularly taken with a fantasy strip I'd drawn, and how my rendering had come on. I was definitely going to make it, he said. I'd need more practice, but I was definitely going to make it.

And then I returned to Dublin and entered the final year of my degree. I've hardly drawn since.
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* 90 per cent of everything is crud.

The Fellowship of the Drones

All this talk of valets has got me thinking. I know, I've not mentioned them online, but I've been wittering about them a lot lately, mainly with reference to my hatred of packing. A gentleman's gentleman would be just the thing, I feel.

Anyway, I can't help thinking that the Lord of the Rings films would have been greatly improved had Sam and Frodo been played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie respectively, and had the script been modified to allow that whole Jeeves and Wooster dynamic free rein.

'Oh Gandalf, you're not worrying about Sauron again?'
'Well, of course I am. Wouldn't you be?'
'No, I blasted well wouldn't. Can't you take a day off once in a while?'

Naturally, with Gandalf off the scene Frodo would take the opportunity to concentrate on sartorial matters, and what the 'Well-Dressed Hobbit about Middle Earth' is wearing this season:

'What ho, Sam, old chap! These cloaks Galadriel gave us are rather splendid, what?'
'Indeed, sir.'
'I think they'll go rather well with that mithril coat Uncle Bilbo gave me, don't you?'
'I think not, sir.'

Of course, it wouldn't be long until the two of them had to cope on their own:

'Sam, that wound I got on Weathertop still hurts.'
'Indeed, sir?'
'I don't like it, Sam.'
'A very understandable prejudice, sir. Might I enquire if it itches?'

And then there'd be meals to think of...

'Would you prefer breakfast on luncheon, sir, when you're dressed?'
'Oh... breakfast I think, Sam. And then second breakfast. No need to let standards drop.'

After which It'd be time to compliment the chef.

'That lembas bread, Sam. Very good. Very tasty.'
'Yes, sir?'
'Made, no doubt, by contented elves. And wrapped to perfection. Nor must I omit to give a word of praise to the fish. Old Gollum did a fine job catching it, what? I think Gandalf may have had him wrong all along!'
'Respectfully, sir, I must disagree. He is, I feel, not to be trusted.'

I can just see our heroes staggering up Mount Doom:

'I say, Sam, do you think we shall ever see the Shire again?'
'The contingency is remote, Sir.'

Sorry. I'll stop now. Tea is needed.

Christmas Crackers: My Finest Moment

In which the Thirsty Gargoyle makes good on a recent threat, and posts the bulk of the bad jokes he had sent Lucy and Dara, two beloved friends, for their festive nuptial crackers!

Q: What did the balloon teacher say to the balloon student in the balloon school?
A: You’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let the whole school down.

That one's courtesy of a good friend whose also my superior at work, and a man with an impressive track record of sauntering around Manchester in his birthday suit.

Q: What goes ‘ooo’?
A: A cow with no lips.

One of Ed's, I fear.

Q: Have you seen the dog bowl?
A: No, but he’s good at batting.

1st sheep: Baaa.
2nd sheep: Baaa.
3rd sheep: Moo.
1st sheep: I beg your pardon?
2nd sheep: Why did you say that?
3rd sheep: Oh, I’m learning a foreign language.

Two goldfish in a tank. One of them says: ‘Do you know how to drive this?’

Q: What do you do if you see a blue frog?
A: Stop and cheer it up.

A polar bear goes into the bar and sits at the counter. The barman says ‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘Yeah, sure, I’d like a pint of . . . . . Guinness, please.’
‘Certainly. Why the big pause?’

Yes, that is a joke. Say it out loud.

Six golf clubs go into a bar. Five of them sit down round a table, and one goes up to the counter. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ asks the barman.
‘Em, yeah, give us five pints of Guinness for the lads, and, em, a Britvic orange.’
‘Are you not having a pint yourself?’
‘Ah no. I’m driving.’

My brother Liam is wholly responsible for that; he made it up while cycling across America; the previous one is merely one he related to me.

Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw a herd of elephants coming over the hill?
A: ‘Here comes a herd of elephants coming over the hill.’
Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw a herd of elephants with sunglasses and raincoats coming over the hill?
A: Nothing. He didn’t recognise them.

I have Brendan McGrath to thank for those.

Two parrots are standing on a perch. One of them says: ‘Can you smell fish?’

I've known this for years, but this is distinctive as the only joke my friend Jenny actually knows.

Two cannibals are eating their dinner, and one of them says ‘I hate to say it, but I really don’t think much of your girlfriend.’
‘Well, just eat your chips, so.’

And thank you, Chris O'Reilly, wherever you are...

‘Doctor, I keep having alternating dreams. First I’m a wigwam, then I’m a teepee. Then I’m a wigwam, then I’m a teepee. What’s going on?’
‘You’re clearly too tense.’

Q: What do you call a clever blonde?
A: A Labrador.

Q: What goes clop, clop, clop, bang, bang, clop, clop, clop?
A: An Amish drive-by shooting.

I don't think any of those last three were used. Rightly, I feel.

Q: What do you do when you see a spaceman?
A: Park, man.

Still Alison's favourite joke.

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: A fish.

‘Doctor, I’ve got a bit of a problem. I can’t stop singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home.’
‘Oh, that’s nothing to worry about. You’ve probably just got Tom Jones syndrome.’
‘Is that common?’
‘Well, it’s not unusual.’

I have no idea where I first came across that. I remember telling it to the girls in Bilbao back in August 1999, though. In a bad Welsh accent.

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you do criticize that person, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

Sorry, that's blatantly one that's been floating around the wb for ages, and keeps being attributed to Peter Kay.

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A bonus bad joke, generated by my Calgarian buddy Josh, but thoroughly unsuitable for weddings would be:

Q: What’s the difference between a Rolling Stone and a Scotsman?
A: One sings ‘Hey you get off my cloud’ and the other shouts ‘Hey. McLeod, get aff my ewe!’

Give me a ring some time…

One gag I rather liked in Padraig’s best man speech at the wedding the other day was his thanking of Peter Jackson for releasing The Return of the King, which made it a particularly fashionable time to be a ringbearer.

 

My little brother gave me The Two Towers on DVD as a Christmas present, so having watched it as a bit of revision, I went to see the final part of The Lord of the Rings on Tuesday. I was impressed, but want to see it again before I make my mind up. I’ll not give anything away, in case any of you haven’t seen it yet, but I’m not sure it’s as good as the previous two parts.

 

Why? Well, it wasn’t for lack of spectacle, and it certainly wasn’t for a lack of dizzyingly vertiginous shots down cliffs and mountainsides. I’ll have to see it again, as I’ve said, but I wasn’t wholly sold on the ending. I guess I’d never realised quite how important the ‘Scouring of the Shire’ really was.

 

For those who haven’t read the book, the final section of the trilogy is given over to the cleansing of the Shire, which has become corrupted by Saruman in the heroes’ absence. It’s been obvious since the first film that this wouldn’t be included in the final film; it’s slightly anticlimactic, it’s not crucial to the plot, and it only really works if you’ve had a good hard look at the Shire in its prime, rather than the glimpse we saw at the start of the Fellowship. I’ve been long accustomed to the idea of it being ditched from the final film, but somehow found the film a little unsatisfying without it.

 

If The Lord of the Rings is really about anything, it’s about how in the eternal war between good and evil the ultimate battleground is always the human soul. Jackson brings this out quite well in the film, in minor characters such as Boromir and Faramir, and above all in the central trio of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. The focus on those three in the final film is laudable, as a lesser director might well have been tempted away from them by the more glamorous battle scenes. Jackson skilfully cuts between the great scenes of obvious heroism in battle and the quieter, more anguished, and ultimately more important scenes of the trio trekking towards Mount Doom.

 

And yet… while this serves to show how dangerous the Ring is, and sharply focuses on the struggles within Frodo, Gollum, and Sam, I think that their quest is made almost too important by the absence of Tolkien’s finale.

 

Why? Well, when you read the Shire sections that bookend Tolkien’s tale, one thing that becomes clear is the cheapness of evil; yes, the struggle with Sauron is a great and epic tale against a terrible evil force outside us, and the Ring is perhaps the most dangerous thing in the world, capable of corrupting anybody. But the Shire sequences make it quite clear that evil can be far more banal than that and that the struggle against it is an ongoing fight; evil is not something to be banished with one tremendous victory; rather, it is something within us against which we must constantly fight.

 

By leaving out the ‘Scouring of the Shire’, the films seem to suggest that evil only exists outside us; that, I’m sure, is something with which Tolkien would never have agreed.

 

Reasons not to study military history…
A friend recently e-mailed me to say how he recently finished hacking his way through my book and how this has forced him to look at battle scenes in films with newly critical eyes; he was concerned by the battle scenes in The Return of the King and wondered what I thought.

 

Strangely, I was quite pleased with them, though I had been scathing towards the battle sequences in The Two Towers; the main battle scene at Helm’s Deep is utterly ludicrous.

 

I think Peter Jackson was impressively inventive with his attempts to film this battle, so sketchily rendered by Tolkien, but having watched it three or four times now, can’t help but shake my head in dismay.

 

Theoden is supposedly an experienced commander, who has fought many wars. Now, I’m not sure who he’s meant to have fought against, but whoever his foes were, they were clearly tactically inept; they must have been for him to beat them.

 

No burning pitch to be poured on attackers? Silly, Theoden, very silly. And not guarding that drainhole at the base of the wall? Very careless. But as for listening to Aragorn? Madness.

 

At one point Saruman’s orks break through the fortress’s walls, and Aragorn is holding the gap with a force of Elven archers. Now, the elves are clearly outnumbered, but it’s a confined space, so there numerical inferiority doesn’t count for much. Besides which, they’ve all got bows and arrows; these elves are not merely crack marksmen, they’re fast too. They can lash off arrows with an astounding speed. What does Aragorn do? He lets them fire one volley and then has them charge the bigger, stronger orks, all of whom are wielding huge heavy hacking weapons. The elves don’t stand a chance.

 

Later on, just as the fortress is clearly doomed, he persuades the King to ride out against the orks. Ride out? In a confined space? Is he entirely mad? Horses would be less manoeuvrable than orks on foot, making their riders easy targets. This wouldn’t merely be a suicide ride; it’d be a bloody embarrassing one.Yes, I know the orks get beaten off by the riders, but that’s cinematic license. There is no way that would have happened.

 

And then, of course, there’s that truly surreal moment where hundreds of horses charge down what appears to be a cliff covered with scree against a waiting army of pike-bearing orks. Where do we start here? Having horses running down a cliff is an impressively absurd cock-up; all it would take would be one stumble – and let’s be fair, it’d be an achievement for one not to – and the whole lot would come down in a giant bloodied horseball.

 

And then there are those waiting orks, with their spears sticking out. Gandalf may blind them, but while some may drop their spears, and others may raise them, none seem to run away. So in effect what you have is hundreds of horses crashing into a prickly wall of flesh; dozens of horses would have been hideously skewered, and then hundreds more horses would have collided into them from behind, turning the edge of the battlefield into a long dyke of mangled corpses, horses, men, and orks all mingled in a bloodied mass.

 

All it would have taken to make that work would be to have the slope be gentler and the orks to have broken and ran. There’s a battle scene in The Return of the King where Jackson gets that exactly right; the Rohirrim charge in and seeing them the orks panic and turn; this opens gaps between them allowing the horses to ride among the orks, the riders slashing to left and right.

 

Oh well. I’ve enjoyed all the films, I have to admit. A lot, in fact. I reckon there’ll be more DVD purchases to be made.