Categories
comics

My favourite Batman books

Continuing on the theme of Batman…

I have been thinking of getting out my old Batman comics and re-reading them. And then I thought, no, why not buy some new ones?

Thing is, I don’t think the seminal 1980s/90s Batman graphic novels have been bettered.

Lookit: here’s my list of the top 5.


1. Batman: the Killing Joke by Alan Moore, art by Brian Bolland

The great Alan Moore takes on Bruce Wayne and the Joker. It’s short, violent, disturbing and the best Joker origin story ever. The Joker as a struggling comedian who gets into petty crime for his girl? Woo. It was the first time I’d ever read anything remotely sympathetic about the Joker. The climactic scenes where Joker menaces Commissioner Gordon’s daughter in an abandoned fairground stunned me with their violence and realism.

This was my introduction to graphic novels. Some of the images are still with me now, even though I haven’t read it for over 10 years.


2. Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, art by Dave Mazzuchelli

Between them, Frank Miller and Alan Moore just about reinvented the tired superhero genre in the 1990s. Miller tackled Batman and Daredevil; Moore did Swamp Thing, Miracleman and CK himself – Superman.

Miller took Batman back beyond the camp 1960s TV show which gloried in the daftness of costumed vigilantes, and took Batman closer to Bob Kane’s original vision which was more film noir and pulpish. I’m also a big fan of The Shadow and The Spirit, both had their heydays in the 1940s and featured crime fighters who operated in the claustrophic world of the high-rise metropolis.

Batman Year One has been the inspiration for the latest movie visualization of Batman. Bruce Wayne is a difficult character to understand. He’s so multifaceted – playboy, businessman, vigilante, technophile. And as badly as we might want him to pair up with a girl, it’s fitting that he’s single. No man can do all that and also have time for a proper love life.


3. The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

The thing you need to know about this book is that strictly it exists outside of the Batman canon; i.e. it takes place long after the Batman most of us know and love. Batman is in his 50s and ostensibly, retired. Something bad has happened to the latest Robin (and this was pre-A Death In The Family) – something that prompted Bruce’s retirement.

But of course, One Last Thing drags him back into the costume. And that is the Joker – of course, Batman’s greatest enemy.

The artwork here begins to depart from the very literalistic interpretations we’ve seen in Batman up to now, becoming more filmic and manga-influenced.

Apart from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, this may be the single most influential comic book in the last 25 years.


4. Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison, art by Dave McKean

A typically multilayered and somewhat crazy narrative conveys the world of Arkham’s most disturbing institution – the asylum where inevitably, most of Batman’s enemies wind up.

After an era in which most Batman books concluded with the unrepentant criminal – the Joker, Two-Face, Harley Quinn, Penguin etc heading for the imposing gates of Arkham Asylum, Morrison asks the question that’s on all our lips: how close is Brucie to being in there with these guys?

Cos lets face it – he isn’t normal. Not what you and I would call normal. Think about it for a minute. Brucie’s life is way, way out there on the scale of most caped crusaders. Spiderman and Daredevil for example, are ordinary guys – a photographer, a lawyer – with extraordinary abilities. They live in small apartments; they worry about paying the rent.

Bruce Wayne is an extraordinary guy with nothing but cash and the will to power – power that in his case manifests as his one-man anti-crime spree.

Arkham Asylum explores the whole sanity thing in the context of Batman’s world. And Dave McKean’s artwork is outstanding.


5. Mad Love by Paul Dini, art by Bruce Timm

Now this choice may be controversial, because I’m putting this higher than most Batman fans would, above such (in my opinion) over-rated books as The Cult. I choose it because of the humour – which is always going to score big with me. Dark humour and a crazy love story as psychiatrist-turned-psycho, Harley Quinn takes on Batman in order to win the heart of her former patient, the Joker. Not many Batman books make me laugh out loud, which is why this is a stand-out for me.

Categories
comics mexico nostalgia

From Mexican masked wrestlers to Batman


On the left: my sister (in the pretty dress) and I (in the Batman costume) dine out with clowns at Mexico City’s Mauna Loa restaurant. I’m probably 7 years old here.

On the right: our six-year old daughter as Mistico, the masked wrestler, taken a few weeks ago by new friend via Flickr, Alejandro.

Our six-year old daughter has a thing for Mexican masked wrestlers. I’ve seen it all before and I know where it leads.

I became fascinated with Batman via a fascination with the masked wrestlers who were and are still such big heroes in Mexico. When I was little it was Blue Demon and El Santo. These days there are others, like Mistico.

Truthfully I had no idea that the costumes I saw being sold all over gaudy stalls in Mexico’s Chapultepec park were anything to do with wrestling. I thought they were caped crusaders. And that was cool. So when our little daughter begged us to buy her a Mistico mask in Playa del Carmen recently, I knew just how she felt.

Somehow that fascination turned into a full-on obsession with Batman (that I’m not really over to be honest…). My Uncle Johny, a childhood pal of my father’s was always crazy for comic books and ‘pulps’. So naturally his boy, my cousin Juan Fernando, had the best batman suit money could buy. How I envied Juan Fernando that suit. I coveted it something rotten, so when Juan grew out of it, my uncle and aunt kindly gave it to me. The true owner! Only I truly loved that suit.

I wore it everywhere and all the time. I wore it to the university where my grandfather worked and the students would ask ‘Hey Batman, where’s Robin?’ until I actually got fed up.

There wasn’t always a Robin, yanno…

I wore it to restaurants. There was no point arguing with me on this. Thank goodness there were no family weddings or christenings that summer or I’d have worn it to them too.

My Uncle Johny had a library that was to me, basically like a temple. It was full of book shelves and cases of precious sci-fi books, adventure stories, comic books and collectibles. He used to lend me his Ellery Queen books and his Batman paperback versions of the comics. It was in Johny’s library that I first read the Batman origin story, the most impressive one, I believe, for any caped crusader. A rich, privileged boy sees his beloved parents murdered in an alleyway by some thug, all for a string of pearls. And that’s it: over. His life of privilege and all his riches can never replace what he loses right there – his childhood. Bruce Wayne spends his whole life trying to put back something that can never be fixed. And he’s never content – how can he be? No bereavement counselling for Bruce – just a premonition in a bat cave and a life of violence and vendetta against the breed of scumbag who destroyed his life.

Gosh it’s cool.

Categories
raves writing

Italo Calvino was a genius

This is the first of four posts about my favourite writers. About my four favourite writers. Seria A, you might say. Seria B has more than four.

I don’t write anything like any of my favourite writers; for one thing, it would be completely inappropriate for the people I write for i.e. children and young adults. But also because they are inimitable; true, blazing originals. They have influenced me though. I know exactly what little devices I borrow from them all.

How I was introduced to Italo Calvino’s writing 

Calvino was an Italian writer who died in 1985. That’s when I first heard about him as an undergraduate; I became dimly aware of people discussing his novel ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler’.

But only dimly aware because as a biochemistry student I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to the literary world. One day I saw the book in a shop, remembered the enticing title and picked it up. The cover was unusual in that it consisted solely of text from the opening page. I was curious about Italian writers, but even more curious about postmodernism then because I’d been reading Umberto Eco’s essays in ‘Travels In Hyperreality’. So I bought it.

The novel was the most unusual book I’d ever read. I couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or dazzled. 

Here’s the opening:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice–they won’t hear you otherwise–“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

It’s about a Reader (‘you’) who starts reading a book in a shop, gets into the story, only to discover that because of a printing error the story stops after one chapter. So You-the-Reader starts hunting down the rest of the story, and so begins a quest for this story. On the quest there are fellow travelers; other readers, academics, writers, who become involved with the Reader. Reader begins a series of novels which never fail to intrigue but which can never be continued – always for a different and perfectly good reason.

Essentially ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler’ is a novel about the 20th century novel. Not a novel about a writer (there are so many of those, how dreary they are), but a novel which puts the construction – and especially the opening – of novels at it’s very core. Characters are thinly drawn and serve mainly as literary devices. They feel real but it’s clear from the outset that this is all a game; a game the Reader is in on.

For me as a scientist the analytical, almost clinical approach to the construction of the novel was utterly fascinating. Unlike most writers I’ve met (and by now I’ve met a few), I didn’t study literature even to ‘A’ level, so I didn’t know about this stuff first-hand. Living with a mother who was writing a doctorate about Spanish and German Romanticism, however, I couldn’t help but be aware of some of the techniques of literary criticism. But this postmodern approach – fragmenting everything and looking at the granularity – was something I hadn’t come across. And for a while it really captivated me.

I bought the book for many friends, only to have most admit to me that they didn’t like it. Some found it pretentious or frustrating, others simply didn’t see the point. I admit that reading it now is quite diffcult. Now that I’ve got over my POMO kick, I want a proper story, with characters that evolve.

Calvino’s inventiveness and brilliance, however, cannot be denied. But his strength, I believe lies in his short stories.

(The truth is that I think short stories are the essence of writing. The novel is a very strange beast to me, and I say that as one who tries most days to write one. It defies natural story-telling; a story, surely, is something told by one person to another (0r others) at one sitting. But a novel goes on and on, beyond what is natural in oral storytelling, demanding an intense relationship between the reader and the characters.)

Calvino also wrote other experimental novels such as ‘Invisible Cities’ (yes, that’s the inspiration for the title of Joshua book 1) and ‘The Castle Of Crossed Destinies’. Those books make me tremble with admiration. But I love Calvino more for his often sublime stories in books like‘ Marcovaldo’, ‘Adam, One Afternoon’ and my very favourite collection, ‘Numbers In The Dark’.

(I don’t approve of his forays into science fiction – t-zero and Cosmicomics…Asimov did this stuff better in ‘The Gods Themselves’.)

When I was writing fan fiction about ten years ago it struck me that the world of fan fiction was itself a fascinating little world which might be explored using Calvino’s device from ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler’. So I did just that; I wrote a whole novel about the world of Blake’s 7 fan fiction in that same style. It was a terrific learning experience as a writer, I have to say. And my fellow Blake’s 7 fans seemed to enjoy it…

I re-read two or three Calvino books every year and I always learn something new.

A good source of Calvino stuff on the Web is Outside the town of Malbork.

Categories
raves videos

Me, I kill you!

Up late last night talking to my cousin Oscar Raul on MSN and trading Youtube links, he showed me this very funny ventriloquist ‘bit’ – Achmed the Dead Terrorist performed by Jeff Dunham.

I laughed and laughed and laughed. Oscar and I love the joke that plays at around 7 minutes.

Categories
raves switzerland

Things I Learned in Switzerland


Tree opposite my brother’s Swiss chalet.

I’m back. It was an awesome week in which I got to swap being a mother/wife for being sister/aunt.

My nieces and nephews are so cute it hurts. I miss them already. My brother and his wife’s twin babies are still at that adorable little baby phase where they make cute little sounds and curl up against you to burp, and stare into your eyes as you rock them to sleep.

Broodiness alert…beware of spending a week with small ultra-cute babies!

My sister’s kids are also fabulous. I hadn’t seen my 22-month old nephew since he was 4 months old. Now he’s racing around, but occasionally stops asking to ‘Cuddle’ or ‘Kiss you’. And my ten-year old niece/goddaughter listened to me read out my new opening chapter of ‘Jaguar’s Realm’, and spent quality time with my sister and me down at Charly’s Tea Room.

But I’m back now, full of useful information for fellow travelers. Such as:

1. A winter’s supply of wood for a wood-burning stove costs around £45 and takes 4 hours to carry up stairs and stack in neat little piles near the door. In my brother’s Swiss mountain village, all houses have a lovely pile of wood outside the door. It’s probably an offence to stack it wrongly. Neatness is very high on the agenda in Switzerland.

2. Charly’s Tea Room will make any cake you like to order for a reasonable price and deliver it. After scouring the bakeries my sister-in-law was about to resort to baking her babies’ christening cake herself, until her older sister told her this useful bit of information. The chef at Charly’s loves to make imaginative cakes. He did wonders with a request for lemon sponge and white glaze icing. He’s quite some pastry chef, his mille-feuille is to die for.

3. The older version of the Catholic Rite of Baptism includes a mini exorcism, just in case the Devil’s already starting to get ideas…A few grains of salt in the mouth of the babes and a few exorcising prayers (which are best said in Latin) go a very long way with innocents. Fr. Julian of the London Oratory flew out to perform the ceremony and explained all the way through a very full-on christening service. My nephew and niece were good and baptised!

4. You can leave Gstaad at 3pm and take a train, plane and then bus to Oxford without waiting more than a few minutes for anything, except for the long airport check-in.

5. Even though the official ski season starts in December, an early dump of snow on the mountains will prompt the efficient Swiss to start preparing pistes and running the ski lifts. My brother and sister-in-law managed to get some skiing in on the Wispile, before the early gift of snow melted away.

6. You should eat a mille-feuille (vanilla slice) by first knocking it over and then tackling it side on, using the tines of the fork to snap the delicate layers of crunchy pastry, mixing in enough creme patissiere and jam to make each mouthful a little slice of heaven. If you don’t have jam on your mille feuille it is substandard; you have been ripped off.

7. Skiing is for people with strong legs. I learned that one a few years ago. Don’t ski unless you are fit and strong!

See, this is the kind of thing you won’t hear from Taki – a famous resident of Gstaad – in his Spectator column. With him it’s all about the Eagle Club and the Palace Hotel…