I’ve loved stories from all the Panini volumes of collected DWM comics and remember the sunny days when I actually sent in an application to work in Tunbridge Wells as the assistant editor of DWM! How cool would that have been? Oh well, I’m sure I wasn’t qualified. Anyway, The Betrothal of Sontar covers 2006, David Tennant’s first year on the job and Billie Piper’s second. John Thomlinson and Nick Abadzis acknowledge that all they really knew of the Tenth Doctor when they wrote the title story were the Children in Need special of 2005 and the teeth line from “Parting of the Ways.” There is a sort of stiffness to this Doctor, but on the whole, I love the title story. Surely, only Ten would mention that losing a bet with Oliver Reed required him to swim the English Channel naked. That make me laugh. Ten and Four might equally bring up Stockholm Syndrome while being placed in the stocks in Sontaran base headquarters. Both writers love the Sontarans and saw fit to bring them back a good 2 years before the TV series attempted it. I like the insights their writing brings to the idea of clones bred for different functions. In setting, the title story presages the Shackleton story with Ten and Martha from 2007—all barren Hoth-like wasteland. There are Sontarans with facial hair (!), and the art from Mike Collins is lovely.
Betrothal of Sontar has two superb stories (so good they would go on my best Doctor Who comics of all time list), and they both involve Mickey! Considering Noel Clarke just won the Orange Rising Star Award, I find that very apt. Anyway, the first is “The Lodger” by the inimitable Gareth Roberts. In tone, it’s a bit like Winner Takes All by Jacqueline Rayner, set entirely on Catford Estate—er, Powell Estate. Unlike Winner Takes All, however, Ten manages to win at video games by not killing the other characters—whereas Rose had to lift an eyebrow when Nine mentioned he was good at video game violence. Sigh, I expect Ten is even good at Guitar Hero. Not only did Ten take Rose away, he’s so affable he even steals Mickey’s best mates—to top it all off, he convinces Gina, the girl Mickey is about to cheat on Rose with, that she needs to be doing stuff with her life. It’s comical and sweet, like all the best Mickey stories are.
“F.A.Q.” by Tony Lee and Mike Collins is big, bold, and true to the scope of the New Adventures—too much for TV. For some reason it reminds me of The Day After Tomorrow; perhaps a more apt corollary is “Silence in the Library.” On the same page the Doctor drives an ice cream truck/lorry and expresses a love of comics. It’s “The Invisible Enemy” meets Christmas Carol in one section where the Doctor shows the troubled young Craig—the same sort of character as the protagonist of Dalek, I Love You on BBC7—several different futures, one as a homeless drug addict, one as a geek stuck in a deadend corporate job, dead before 30, a rock star, as a family man, etc.
That Mike Collins is a talented bloke, as he contributes the wonderfully plotted “Futurists,” which sees a collision between 1930s pre-Fascist Italy and the Roman Empire in Britain (Caerlon, to be exact). (In fact, it seems, that every story in this collection presages series 4 somehow. Hmm.) Fun chance for Rose to wear flapper clothes, and Collins to draw and write the Silurians (as in a tribe of Britons) as a cross between King Arthur and Astérix and Obélix. Lovely stuff, and very funny. Rose enacts a slave rebellion of women with Somerset accents (no doubt) using the psychic paper. The alien bad guys look like the ones I had in mind for St Valentine’s Day. This is a fun one, and I love how smushing the two historical periods creates something entirely new. Collins did his research as well, so it’s not just a pastiche.
“Interstellar Overdrive” feels very Jonathan Morris somehow—it’s even got chronic hysterosis in it, so the deaths of band members get replayed several times, including the reanimated soul of a very dead guitarist (who saves Rose’s life). Also from Morris, this time drawn by the great Martin Geraghty, is “Opera of Doom.” This cute little tale reminds me of one of my favorite Sixth Doctor comics, I’m sure you remember, it was “The Gift,” for the part music plays in it.
Roger Langridge’s drawing style hasn’t always been my favorite, but it’s perfect for the absolutely hilarious “Green-Eyed Monster” by Nev Fountain. We laugh and poke fun at Ten, Rose, Jackie, Mickey, Jeremy Kyle, etc, but as Fountain makes clear, he’s also poking fun at critics of the first and second series who were offended by Rose’s family’s “chav-ness,” and possibly were just offended by Rose’s family in general! It probably also pokes fun at Rose/Doctor shippers and more specifically readers who might fancy Ten anyway (me on both counts, then). If you can’t take some good-natured elbow jabs, you’re not a real fan as far as I’m considered, and Rose has the mickey taken out of her here—as the Doctor snogs Jackie, Rose prevents a bunch of Amazons from taking the Doctor into the TARDIS sauna room, and one of the Amazons getting great pleasure out of licking Mickey’s ear!
Geraghty back at the helm, with Alan Barnes, for the so-good “Warkeeper’s Crown,” which sees the return of the Brigadier quite a bit before his adventures with Sarah Jane. The highly Tolkien-esque backdrop of Harpies and constant war pales before the glory of the Brig and Ten working together; the Brig, having bypassed Nine altogether, sees in Ten the effect of the Time War, and it’s a bit of common ground for them. There’s the very funny appearance of Mike Yates (not that Mike Yates!), and the Brig gets some wonderful moments, like when hundreds of his clones take on the evil forces and save the Doctor (“Splendid chaps, all of him!” comments the Doctor).
A really excellent volume, and in color too!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
on the tube 2009.1
Boy, the first few weeks of 2009 were slow TV-wise, even in Britain. It’s only now that things are starting to pick up speed, and I finally have enough shows to talk about! This will be roughly chronological.
I’d caught bits and pieces of Jonathan Creek on TV over the years, but had never watched an entire episode. This changed on New Year’s Day, and despite the fact I was still finishing up a game of Who-no, I did manage to catch most of it. Yes, foofy Alan Davies hair for all. I was actually somewhat interested because I’d been hearing Sheridan Smith as the Eighth Doctor’s audio companion Lucie on Big Finish all autumn, and she played roughly the same character in JC. (And got entirely nekkid! Ye gods!) I liked the story—it involved magicians, ectoplasm, and a really diabolical plot to kill perfectly innocent people—but at the end, it felt a bit slight. Jonathan himself seemed a bit clueless, and as Radio Times averred, the subplot with his seedy mentor was yawn-inducing and crass. Still, someday I will go back and watch the first series of this Verity Lambert-produced series with the title theme by Sans-Saëns . . .
I gave Demons a great, big, whopping chance, seeing as how the folks at Staggering Stories were much more positive than I expected them to be. Maybe because I never followed Buffy, I was the only person not to make Buffy allusions. I never watched Life on Mars, either (except for one episode), so I don’t know what I was expecting out of Philip Glenister, other than something good. I have no idea why they kept the character American—the accent is not his forte. He talks about “smiting” a lot and tells the hero, the last surviving Van Helsing, that there’s no life in demon-hunting but he’s required to do it anyway. The entire show was a long collage of someone’s favorite iTunes. Luke Van Helsing is a bobble-head and his friend Ruby pretty annoying. On the other hand, I kept watching for some reason. Perhaps some vestige of me liked seeing m’hearties Mackenzie Crook and Kevin McNally camping it up as villains, and Mina Harker (yes, the same one from Dracula) was vaguely interesting. Mostly it was Dracula 2000 without Gerard Butler. Indeed, worse than Primeval but better than Merlin, hahahaha.
I should like Lark Rise to Candleford more than I do. I think I avoided it because of the title, and the reviews in Radio Times are always so full of sugar and simpering. Which is basically what the show is full of. Nevertheless, it exudes a strange kind of charm. It’s difficult for me to think of England possessing any kind of Wild West town like the one depicted here (they’re perpetually stuck in the mid-1890s, as the show’s creator avowed) but the characters are funny and decently likeable, and we go into the suitably bourgeois postmistress’ house as often as we do into the cottages of the working folk with Somerset accents (curiously the guy who played Higgins in North and South plays a very similar character here). Perhaps it appeals to me because I watched so much Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman.
Above Suspicion was a two-part drama on ITV written by Lynda LaPlante (based on one of her books) starring a new female detective who wasn’t exactly the antithesis of DCI Jane Tennison (the formidable Dame Helen Mirren), but she was young and inexperienced, a pen-pusher at her first autopsy (see Whitechapel); Ciarán Hinds was her slightly lecherous boss. I found the acting and writing to be above average, the story gruesome, but strangely absorbing.
I didn’t have a lot to do my first week back, so I happened to catch Daleks—Invasion Earth 2150 AD. I had never seen any of the Peter Cushing Doctor Whos, so this was certainly an interesting experience. The companions were really strange—a Wonderbra-clad woman of indefinite age, a prepubescent Susan, and—easily the most entertaining element—Bernard Cribbins as a policeman. I loved that the movie opened with the policeman trying to get into the TARDIS for legitimate police business! Other than that, it was basically a replay of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth.” Peter Cushing was surprisingly good as “Dr Who” but couldn’t hold a candle to William Hartnell. It’s just as well we don’t consider this canon!
What the Victorians Did For Us is not new, it was made in 2001 but is being reshown on BBC2. But it’s great to find someone with the same sense of enjoyment and excitement over all things Victorian as Adam Hart-Davis. The programme is divided into several segments; unfortunately I missed one or two. Current highlights include Hart-Davis reproducing the famous photographic experiment of whether a horse’s legs ever all leave the ground; putting up a scale-size copy of a corner of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park where it originally stood; trying to figure out humidity from a bunch of leeches in glass tubes. Like Matthew Sweet, he’s quick to point out in what ways we benefited from the Victorians. I was quite impressed when Hart-Davis got on a tricycle/shower for some good clean fun. Thank you, Victorians, for inventing the shower!
QI is something I’ve watched a bit of before, but I was really trying to follow it this season (‘cause, obviously, Alan Davies rawks my world). Unfortunately the TV decides to malfunction on Friday nights so I miss a lot of the best jokes. I wouldn’t say this is as funny as Mock the Week but funnier than Have I Got News for You?
It was followed in the lineup by classic Vicar of Dibley (still almost unwatcheable because of the TV hiccups). I never really watched Vicar of Dibley in the US even when it was on; I’m not really sure why. To be honest, I didn’t get to be a fan until I watched the 2006 Christmas Special (in quick succession on YouTube; Armitage-obsession at its worst) and thought it was the funniest, most heart-warming thing I had seen in a really long time. I was a bit deceived, though; one of my US friends told me ages ago that Alice got married in a wedding dress that had pictures of each of the Doctors in hearts on it. That wasn’t so. She threatened to.
I guess because of Victorian Farm (which I somehow seem to miss every week!) there’s a ton of Victorian stuff on TV right now (or maybe there always is). I found Queen Victoria’s Men, while slightly sensational, to be fascinating. Several years ago I wrote an article on history’s sexiest women, and I dared to put Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria on the list. Victoria was a passionate princess, and no one can claim she didn’t love Albert. Albert, of course, took up the bulk of the screentime (partially it was interviews with historians, writers, etc, but partially reenactments. Victoria didn’t look particularly like Victoria, but she and Albert could speak impassioned German!). All of the interviewees contended that the young Victoria liked sex, and who can argue, really, considering some of the letters they read aloud, as well as all the kids she and Albert had? She also had hero-worship romances with her early Prime Ministers, such as Gladstone and Melbourne, to less of an extent with Disraeli, though she found him charming. I had forgotten what a real scandal her relationship with loyal John Brown was, and I found out she befriended a young Indian in her later years to the extent she scandalized again. To my surprise, I find young Victoria will be a film soon, with lovely Paul Bettany as Melbourne.
Almost Famous 2 showed a glimpse of a young Sheryl Cole and proved beyond all doubt that David Tennant’s freckles were more pronounced when he was younger. Wales This Week really disappointed me. They were interviewing Matthew Rhys[1] in his new home in LA, I assumed because of his role as Dylan Thomas, but it wasn’t about that, and he came off sounding really quite stupid. Oh well.
I keep missing Being Human, with Russell T Davies’ biggest crush Russell Tovey in it, and written by Who luminary Toby Whithouse. Once I’ve been able to catch up on iPlayer properly, I’ll get back to you.
Rupert Everett seemed a curious choice to present on Sir Richard Francis Burton, Victorian Sex Explorer (see! constantly with the sex and the Victorians!). Nevertheless I suppose there was some logic, considering Burton may or may not have joined in homosexual orgies while he was reporting on them for the British Army (as Casanova may or may not have done in Constantinople). Mostly I was grateful to this programme for shedding some light on Burton, a fascinating character and an anomaly for his anti-Imperialist attitudes. I remember seeing first editions of Burton’s translations of The Arabic Nights when I worked in the Center for Southwest Research, and Joseph Fiennes played him in the wonderful radio play Prayer Mask (which explored his egress into the Hajj). For sensational purposes, Everett highlighted Burton’s sexual experiences in India, meeting with prostitutes, and getting a questionable massage in Egypt.
Bill Bryson is one of my heroes, as you know, and I always love to tell people I’ve met Mark Lawson, so you get to hear it again as I describe Mark Lawson Talks to Bill Bryson. This could have been on radio; it was basically an interview, plain and simple. But it was wonderful to hear the naturally funny, but totally unassuming Bryson (as Lawson pointed out, the cantankerous persona Bryson puts on in his books is rather unlike his gentle personality in real life).
I had to make a choice on the biggest Monday, TV-wise, of the year so far. Whitechapel, on ITV, Moses Jones on BBC2, or a new series of Who Do You Think You Are? I chose Whitechapel, even though Matt Smith was making his first post-Doctor-announcement appearance in Moses Jones, because I suppose I am a Ripperologist at heart. Rupert Penry-Jones, Steve Pemberton, and Phil Davis are all making smashing starts, and the writers have certainly done their research (they’d have to, or get thrown to the dogs). The programme is managing to convey the horror and the mystery of a killer re-enacting the Ripper murders (though the newbie seeing his first autopsy seemed eerily similar to the scene in Above Suspicion). We’ll see how it goes, and I will report to you on the others.
I just heard a wonderful radio play based on one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (in which David Tennant plays a blind rat!), and it’s made me wonder why I never got into Discworld before. I wondered that again when watching Terry Pratchett: Living with Alzheimers. I found out that this famous author has one keyboard and six screens (which would rather bedevil me!) and can’t tie his own tie now. It’s an interesting and sad programme.
That’s all for now, more to come.
[1] Whose parents I met at the Dylan Thomas Centre.
I’d caught bits and pieces of Jonathan Creek on TV over the years, but had never watched an entire episode. This changed on New Year’s Day, and despite the fact I was still finishing up a game of Who-no, I did manage to catch most of it. Yes, foofy Alan Davies hair for all. I was actually somewhat interested because I’d been hearing Sheridan Smith as the Eighth Doctor’s audio companion Lucie on Big Finish all autumn, and she played roughly the same character in JC. (And got entirely nekkid! Ye gods!) I liked the story—it involved magicians, ectoplasm, and a really diabolical plot to kill perfectly innocent people—but at the end, it felt a bit slight. Jonathan himself seemed a bit clueless, and as Radio Times averred, the subplot with his seedy mentor was yawn-inducing and crass. Still, someday I will go back and watch the first series of this Verity Lambert-produced series with the title theme by Sans-Saëns . . .
I gave Demons a great, big, whopping chance, seeing as how the folks at Staggering Stories were much more positive than I expected them to be. Maybe because I never followed Buffy, I was the only person not to make Buffy allusions. I never watched Life on Mars, either (except for one episode), so I don’t know what I was expecting out of Philip Glenister, other than something good. I have no idea why they kept the character American—the accent is not his forte. He talks about “smiting” a lot and tells the hero, the last surviving Van Helsing, that there’s no life in demon-hunting but he’s required to do it anyway. The entire show was a long collage of someone’s favorite iTunes. Luke Van Helsing is a bobble-head and his friend Ruby pretty annoying. On the other hand, I kept watching for some reason. Perhaps some vestige of me liked seeing m’hearties Mackenzie Crook and Kevin McNally camping it up as villains, and Mina Harker (yes, the same one from Dracula) was vaguely interesting. Mostly it was Dracula 2000 without Gerard Butler. Indeed, worse than Primeval but better than Merlin, hahahaha.
I should like Lark Rise to Candleford more than I do. I think I avoided it because of the title, and the reviews in Radio Times are always so full of sugar and simpering. Which is basically what the show is full of. Nevertheless, it exudes a strange kind of charm. It’s difficult for me to think of England possessing any kind of Wild West town like the one depicted here (they’re perpetually stuck in the mid-1890s, as the show’s creator avowed) but the characters are funny and decently likeable, and we go into the suitably bourgeois postmistress’ house as often as we do into the cottages of the working folk with Somerset accents (curiously the guy who played Higgins in North and South plays a very similar character here). Perhaps it appeals to me because I watched so much Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman.
Above Suspicion was a two-part drama on ITV written by Lynda LaPlante (based on one of her books) starring a new female detective who wasn’t exactly the antithesis of DCI Jane Tennison (the formidable Dame Helen Mirren), but she was young and inexperienced, a pen-pusher at her first autopsy (see Whitechapel); Ciarán Hinds was her slightly lecherous boss. I found the acting and writing to be above average, the story gruesome, but strangely absorbing.
I didn’t have a lot to do my first week back, so I happened to catch Daleks—Invasion Earth 2150 AD. I had never seen any of the Peter Cushing Doctor Whos, so this was certainly an interesting experience. The companions were really strange—a Wonderbra-clad woman of indefinite age, a prepubescent Susan, and—easily the most entertaining element—Bernard Cribbins as a policeman. I loved that the movie opened with the policeman trying to get into the TARDIS for legitimate police business! Other than that, it was basically a replay of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth.” Peter Cushing was surprisingly good as “Dr Who” but couldn’t hold a candle to William Hartnell. It’s just as well we don’t consider this canon!
What the Victorians Did For Us is not new, it was made in 2001 but is being reshown on BBC2. But it’s great to find someone with the same sense of enjoyment and excitement over all things Victorian as Adam Hart-Davis. The programme is divided into several segments; unfortunately I missed one or two. Current highlights include Hart-Davis reproducing the famous photographic experiment of whether a horse’s legs ever all leave the ground; putting up a scale-size copy of a corner of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park where it originally stood; trying to figure out humidity from a bunch of leeches in glass tubes. Like Matthew Sweet, he’s quick to point out in what ways we benefited from the Victorians. I was quite impressed when Hart-Davis got on a tricycle/shower for some good clean fun. Thank you, Victorians, for inventing the shower!
QI is something I’ve watched a bit of before, but I was really trying to follow it this season (‘cause, obviously, Alan Davies rawks my world). Unfortunately the TV decides to malfunction on Friday nights so I miss a lot of the best jokes. I wouldn’t say this is as funny as Mock the Week but funnier than Have I Got News for You?
It was followed in the lineup by classic Vicar of Dibley (still almost unwatcheable because of the TV hiccups). I never really watched Vicar of Dibley in the US even when it was on; I’m not really sure why. To be honest, I didn’t get to be a fan until I watched the 2006 Christmas Special (in quick succession on YouTube; Armitage-obsession at its worst) and thought it was the funniest, most heart-warming thing I had seen in a really long time. I was a bit deceived, though; one of my US friends told me ages ago that Alice got married in a wedding dress that had pictures of each of the Doctors in hearts on it. That wasn’t so. She threatened to.
I guess because of Victorian Farm (which I somehow seem to miss every week!) there’s a ton of Victorian stuff on TV right now (or maybe there always is). I found Queen Victoria’s Men, while slightly sensational, to be fascinating. Several years ago I wrote an article on history’s sexiest women, and I dared to put Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria on the list. Victoria was a passionate princess, and no one can claim she didn’t love Albert. Albert, of course, took up the bulk of the screentime (partially it was interviews with historians, writers, etc, but partially reenactments. Victoria didn’t look particularly like Victoria, but she and Albert could speak impassioned German!). All of the interviewees contended that the young Victoria liked sex, and who can argue, really, considering some of the letters they read aloud, as well as all the kids she and Albert had? She also had hero-worship romances with her early Prime Ministers, such as Gladstone and Melbourne, to less of an extent with Disraeli, though she found him charming. I had forgotten what a real scandal her relationship with loyal John Brown was, and I found out she befriended a young Indian in her later years to the extent she scandalized again. To my surprise, I find young Victoria will be a film soon, with lovely Paul Bettany as Melbourne.
Almost Famous 2 showed a glimpse of a young Sheryl Cole and proved beyond all doubt that David Tennant’s freckles were more pronounced when he was younger. Wales This Week really disappointed me. They were interviewing Matthew Rhys[1] in his new home in LA, I assumed because of his role as Dylan Thomas, but it wasn’t about that, and he came off sounding really quite stupid. Oh well.
I keep missing Being Human, with Russell T Davies’ biggest crush Russell Tovey in it, and written by Who luminary Toby Whithouse. Once I’ve been able to catch up on iPlayer properly, I’ll get back to you.
Rupert Everett seemed a curious choice to present on Sir Richard Francis Burton, Victorian Sex Explorer (see! constantly with the sex and the Victorians!). Nevertheless I suppose there was some logic, considering Burton may or may not have joined in homosexual orgies while he was reporting on them for the British Army (as Casanova may or may not have done in Constantinople). Mostly I was grateful to this programme for shedding some light on Burton, a fascinating character and an anomaly for his anti-Imperialist attitudes. I remember seeing first editions of Burton’s translations of The Arabic Nights when I worked in the Center for Southwest Research, and Joseph Fiennes played him in the wonderful radio play Prayer Mask (which explored his egress into the Hajj). For sensational purposes, Everett highlighted Burton’s sexual experiences in India, meeting with prostitutes, and getting a questionable massage in Egypt.
Bill Bryson is one of my heroes, as you know, and I always love to tell people I’ve met Mark Lawson, so you get to hear it again as I describe Mark Lawson Talks to Bill Bryson. This could have been on radio; it was basically an interview, plain and simple. But it was wonderful to hear the naturally funny, but totally unassuming Bryson (as Lawson pointed out, the cantankerous persona Bryson puts on in his books is rather unlike his gentle personality in real life).
I had to make a choice on the biggest Monday, TV-wise, of the year so far. Whitechapel, on ITV, Moses Jones on BBC2, or a new series of Who Do You Think You Are? I chose Whitechapel, even though Matt Smith was making his first post-Doctor-announcement appearance in Moses Jones, because I suppose I am a Ripperologist at heart. Rupert Penry-Jones, Steve Pemberton, and Phil Davis are all making smashing starts, and the writers have certainly done their research (they’d have to, or get thrown to the dogs). The programme is managing to convey the horror and the mystery of a killer re-enacting the Ripper murders (though the newbie seeing his first autopsy seemed eerily similar to the scene in Above Suspicion). We’ll see how it goes, and I will report to you on the others.
I just heard a wonderful radio play based on one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (in which David Tennant plays a blind rat!), and it’s made me wonder why I never got into Discworld before. I wondered that again when watching Terry Pratchett: Living with Alzheimers. I found out that this famous author has one keyboard and six screens (which would rather bedevil me!) and can’t tie his own tie now. It’s an interesting and sad programme.
That’s all for now, more to come.
[1] Whose parents I met at the Dylan Thomas Centre.
roses and cognac
The most peculiar things seem to grow out of my throwaway lines. “1896” from “1996,” “1900” from “1896,” and now “An Evening with Edgar” from “The 1969 Diaries.” From my experience studying and teaching Poe in Gothic Horror, I thought I knew his story pretty well (plus I listened to all the Radio 3 Essays on Loving the Raven during Poe’s birthday week—bicentenary—in January). I read The Portable Edgar Allan Poe edited by J. Gerald Kennedy to prepare for writing “An Evening with Edgar” and thought I got him pretty well for the purposes of that short story. Reading it now, having listened to Peter Ackroyd’s unabridged Poe: A Life Cut Short (on 6 discs), I think I did a good job distilling him at that point in his life. However, the sad part is that in reality Poe probably would not have given Martha the time of day, as he was a southern slave-owner and no proponent of abolitionism. This facet of his character, along with many others that were uncovered by the Ackroyd book, have somewhat diminished him in my opinion. Nevertheless, what I had always known—and what the biography made achingly clear—was the intense and unrelenting sadness of his life.
How would Poe’s life have been different if his mother hadn’t died of consumption when he was very young? She was an English actress abandoned by his father; Poe’s sister may have only been his half-sister. One wonders how much of Poe’s life of desperation and deprivation might have been prevented by nurture; his mother was married very young to his father, a real waster (and a drunk). And yet perhaps the decisive pull of drink (his “ashes” as Poe called it in later life) was imbedded in his DNA. It’s impossible to tell. Ackroyd suggests that Poe may have encountered “malnourishment in the womb” because of his mother’s emaciation (a motif he returned to so many times in his fiction, it almost makes even this fan weary of it!). And I can’t squarely place the blame of Poe’s rupture with his foster family, the Allans, either with Mr Allan, a Scottish merchant and his indulgent wife Fanny, or with Poe himself.
I’ve never read “William Wilson,” the autobiographical tale of Poe’s school years as a boy in 1820s London (and treated well and expenses paid for), but at least two modern-day authors were inspired by it. Another series of fascinating what-ifs: what if Mr Allan’s fortunes hadn’t changed, and Poe had stayed in England longer acquiring an education? He was neither extremely happy nor distraught during those years. In later adolescence, egged on a bit perhaps by Allan’s refusal to have Poe’s childhood poems published, Poe did what all teenagers do—he rebelled. He was snarky. Unfortunately, and not without reason, Allan was really ticked off that this orphan into whom he had pumped so much of his money and time was acting ungrateful. Poe went to university, slacked off, begged for money, beginning the unfortunate pattern of the rest of his life. You have to wonder, after this happens a million times in the course of A Life Cut Short, whether he had some kind of diagnosable problem, and yet I’ve seen this self-destructive attitude in a lot of my fellow writers.
Poe joined the Army, and the regiment of discipline really suited him. Eventually he tired of this, too, though he never tired of telling his fellow cadets tall tales and satires, “changing his birth year on a whim,” as Ackroyd reports. Out of the Army, he decided (and with all apparent seriousness) to attend West Point, the US premiere military academy. Allan even helped him to get accepted. Unfortunately, following the usual pattern, he was court-martialed for dereliction of duty and lost his place in Allan’s affections forever. Next followed years and years of drifting from Richmond, VA, to New York, to Boston (the city of his birth), to Providence, RI, and back again, seeking work, whether it was in publishing stories or editing literary journals. At first I found his letters seeking monetary help extremely affecting. Then, after five hours of hearing them, I realized he must have been hell to live with. No wonder he wrecked his own relationships and drove away his friends. He had a wild, melodramatic streak infected with pathos (“he seemed to believe everything he wrote somehow became true”) and was a bitter, raging drunk. When sober, people found him gentlemanly, intellectual, and interesting, but a true satirist and a sarcastic wit. Ackroyd doesn’t believe he was an alcoholic, because he could stop drinking for long periods. He did, however, go on binges that lasted days.
About the only people who could put up with him were his aunt Maria Clemm (“Muddy”) and his cousin Virginia, later his wife (he married her when she was 15, not strictly illegal, but they did lie about her age to the officiating pastor). Muddy managed to keep the three of them fed, it seems, and somehow stayed loyal to “poor Eddy” to the end. They were desperately, utterly poor most of the time. “They were forced to live on bread and molasses for weeks on end” (yet never seemed to run out of writing materials). Virginia was consumptive from basically the beginning, and Poe spent most of their married life agonizing over her. When she finally died, he seems to have lost all self-control and tottered to the grave not long after. Yet, if you look at his correspondence and his writing, I think all he wanted of women was their protection and to be able to use them as muses. Even the preternatural Ligeia is no vampire in the sensual sense of Stoker or LeFanu. Basically, then, I don’t think anything improper went on between him and Virginia at all. It would have been interesting to hear her side of the story, though perhaps that would have been too completely miserable to contemplate.
Though Poe’s life is a map of near-misses in the literary world and shooting himself in the foot with critics and potential friends alike, he wasn’t completely ignored in his lifetime. His first big hit, “M.S. in a Bottle,” won a short story prize competition head and shoulders above the rest. By the mid-1840s, literary critics in most major US cities singled him out for praise for such short stories as “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “Masque of the Red Death.” He became a celebrity because of “The Raven,” though Ackroyd suggests he wrote the poem with a calculated audience appeal. This is yet another contradiction of Poe’s, whose personal life was such a shambles, whose writing rambled on full of the phantasmagoric, and yet his writing process was precise and exacting. Unfortunately, when he should have been using his fame to establish a foothold, he lashed out and had “spells” of drunken behavior. “His disappointment with the world was his disappointment with himself.” And don’t get me started on the four or five women with whom he had correspondences and literary amours before, after, and during his marriage!
I have trouble understanding why I can be such a champion for someone who certainly deserves pity, but fascination? Yet I suppose I have been exposed to the genius of his writing for so long, noted its uniqueness, and felt a certain resonance not unlike the French Romantics a few years after his death. Johanna once quoted his poem “Alone” to me on a decorated envelope, and it’s stayed with me since. There is still a mystique in Poe, not least because of the confused circumstances of his death, the mysterious identity of the Poe Toaster, and somewhere (in me at least) an appeal for a “defiantly southern writer.” I’ll never forget the day I photographed a black cat on the rue Edgar Allan Poe in Paris (I was staying in the street parallel to it, rue Rémy-Gourmont, another writer). Unfortunately, all of Poe’s misery at this present stage has made me a bit miserable, too, and the weather, and my circumstances, aren’t helping.
How would Poe’s life have been different if his mother hadn’t died of consumption when he was very young? She was an English actress abandoned by his father; Poe’s sister may have only been his half-sister. One wonders how much of Poe’s life of desperation and deprivation might have been prevented by nurture; his mother was married very young to his father, a real waster (and a drunk). And yet perhaps the decisive pull of drink (his “ashes” as Poe called it in later life) was imbedded in his DNA. It’s impossible to tell. Ackroyd suggests that Poe may have encountered “malnourishment in the womb” because of his mother’s emaciation (a motif he returned to so many times in his fiction, it almost makes even this fan weary of it!). And I can’t squarely place the blame of Poe’s rupture with his foster family, the Allans, either with Mr Allan, a Scottish merchant and his indulgent wife Fanny, or with Poe himself.
I’ve never read “William Wilson,” the autobiographical tale of Poe’s school years as a boy in 1820s London (and treated well and expenses paid for), but at least two modern-day authors were inspired by it. Another series of fascinating what-ifs: what if Mr Allan’s fortunes hadn’t changed, and Poe had stayed in England longer acquiring an education? He was neither extremely happy nor distraught during those years. In later adolescence, egged on a bit perhaps by Allan’s refusal to have Poe’s childhood poems published, Poe did what all teenagers do—he rebelled. He was snarky. Unfortunately, and not without reason, Allan was really ticked off that this orphan into whom he had pumped so much of his money and time was acting ungrateful. Poe went to university, slacked off, begged for money, beginning the unfortunate pattern of the rest of his life. You have to wonder, after this happens a million times in the course of A Life Cut Short, whether he had some kind of diagnosable problem, and yet I’ve seen this self-destructive attitude in a lot of my fellow writers.
Poe joined the Army, and the regiment of discipline really suited him. Eventually he tired of this, too, though he never tired of telling his fellow cadets tall tales and satires, “changing his birth year on a whim,” as Ackroyd reports. Out of the Army, he decided (and with all apparent seriousness) to attend West Point, the US premiere military academy. Allan even helped him to get accepted. Unfortunately, following the usual pattern, he was court-martialed for dereliction of duty and lost his place in Allan’s affections forever. Next followed years and years of drifting from Richmond, VA, to New York, to Boston (the city of his birth), to Providence, RI, and back again, seeking work, whether it was in publishing stories or editing literary journals. At first I found his letters seeking monetary help extremely affecting. Then, after five hours of hearing them, I realized he must have been hell to live with. No wonder he wrecked his own relationships and drove away his friends. He had a wild, melodramatic streak infected with pathos (“he seemed to believe everything he wrote somehow became true”) and was a bitter, raging drunk. When sober, people found him gentlemanly, intellectual, and interesting, but a true satirist and a sarcastic wit. Ackroyd doesn’t believe he was an alcoholic, because he could stop drinking for long periods. He did, however, go on binges that lasted days.
About the only people who could put up with him were his aunt Maria Clemm (“Muddy”) and his cousin Virginia, later his wife (he married her when she was 15, not strictly illegal, but they did lie about her age to the officiating pastor). Muddy managed to keep the three of them fed, it seems, and somehow stayed loyal to “poor Eddy” to the end. They were desperately, utterly poor most of the time. “They were forced to live on bread and molasses for weeks on end” (yet never seemed to run out of writing materials). Virginia was consumptive from basically the beginning, and Poe spent most of their married life agonizing over her. When she finally died, he seems to have lost all self-control and tottered to the grave not long after. Yet, if you look at his correspondence and his writing, I think all he wanted of women was their protection and to be able to use them as muses. Even the preternatural Ligeia is no vampire in the sensual sense of Stoker or LeFanu. Basically, then, I don’t think anything improper went on between him and Virginia at all. It would have been interesting to hear her side of the story, though perhaps that would have been too completely miserable to contemplate.
Though Poe’s life is a map of near-misses in the literary world and shooting himself in the foot with critics and potential friends alike, he wasn’t completely ignored in his lifetime. His first big hit, “M.S. in a Bottle,” won a short story prize competition head and shoulders above the rest. By the mid-1840s, literary critics in most major US cities singled him out for praise for such short stories as “Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “Masque of the Red Death.” He became a celebrity because of “The Raven,” though Ackroyd suggests he wrote the poem with a calculated audience appeal. This is yet another contradiction of Poe’s, whose personal life was such a shambles, whose writing rambled on full of the phantasmagoric, and yet his writing process was precise and exacting. Unfortunately, when he should have been using his fame to establish a foothold, he lashed out and had “spells” of drunken behavior. “His disappointment with the world was his disappointment with himself.” And don’t get me started on the four or five women with whom he had correspondences and literary amours before, after, and during his marriage!
I have trouble understanding why I can be such a champion for someone who certainly deserves pity, but fascination? Yet I suppose I have been exposed to the genius of his writing for so long, noted its uniqueness, and felt a certain resonance not unlike the French Romantics a few years after his death. Johanna once quoted his poem “Alone” to me on a decorated envelope, and it’s stayed with me since. There is still a mystique in Poe, not least because of the confused circumstances of his death, the mysterious identity of the Poe Toaster, and somewhere (in me at least) an appeal for a “defiantly southern writer.” I’ll never forget the day I photographed a black cat on the rue Edgar Allan Poe in Paris (I was staying in the street parallel to it, rue Rémy-Gourmont, another writer). Unfortunately, all of Poe’s misery at this present stage has made me a bit miserable, too, and the weather, and my circumstances, aren’t helping.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
on the couch with captain jack
Anything Goes: John Barrowman
The first time I heard the name John Barrowman must have been in 1999, when I became a Phantom phan and acquired as many of the musical’s cast albums as I could, including one with Ethan Freeman as the Phantom, Claire Moore as Christine, and John Barrowman as Raoul (at the time, I thought he was pretty cute and sang a very good Raoul). The next time was whenever the Hey, Mr. Producer concert of Cameron Mackintosh-produced shows was shown on PBS—he was there singing something from The Fix. Next it was in 2004, when I learned he was going to be playing a part in the new Doctor Who. (When I found out Doctor Who was coming back, I stayed as much out of the loop as possible. I knew the US wouldn’t get it for a long time, so it was better not to spoil myself and get too excited if I had to wait a long time—which I did. It was a strategy that paid off, but I had to keep pestering my friend Sarah as series 1 was airing, “When is Captain Jack going to show up?”) Then I went to Wales, where I was in time to see the first season of Torchwood, go to Cardiff to “the Hub” and where “Boom Town” had been filmed, etc. Then I saw the man himself in Jack and the Beanstalk in Cardiff—more on that later—and then he was plastered all over TV, radio, he was ubiquitous! (The coda is that I had a job interview in September in the Splott area of Cardiff—I was scared to walk there, but the interview basically consisted of me telling the interviewer how much of a fan of Doctor Who and Torchwood I was and him telling me that Burn Gorman’s son was his son’s friend and that they filmed Torchwood in that area and that the mixing studio was the building next door, etc. I didn’t get the job, but the interview was memorable!)
In any case, despite being a fan—I’m on the BarrowmanOnline listserv—I didn’t exactly jump out and buy his autobiography. Part of it, I guess, is a lingering distrust of not only “celebrity” biographies, but autobiographies of anyone under the age of 60. I was really surprised, though. John (and yes, I’m going to call him John) admits that he is foremost an entertainer, and the book is above all entertaining. It’s well-written, well-paced, very funny, covers a ton of ground without being confusing or dead boring, and most of all, his very passionate personality screams out of each page. It’s co-written with his sister Carole, and who can tell who had the bigger part of making this a very readable book—she’s the English professor, he’s the gregarious, outrageous personality. The first three or so chapters had me glued to the page. While the rest of the book tapered back a bit for me, I must say I found the structure very impressive[1]. John’s not had a harrowing life by any stretch of the imagination, nor does he spend as much time as you might think on his adventures with the rich and famous. It’s mostly about his family life and experiences in musical theatre. It’s not a book I would recommend to the easily shocked, either—John’s a potty mouth and notoriously open about his (and everyone else’s) sexuality. He describes the book as you’ll feel as if you and I are lounging in our pyjamas on the couch in my Cardiff living room, sharing a bottle of champagne or a pot of tea[2], and it really does.
I write many reviews, regardless of whether people read them. I’ve had three courses in memoir writing/creative nonfiction/writing the self, quite different in tone and lesson plans, and though I’ve churned out the memoirs and personal essays, it’s not a form I’ve had particular success with. (In high school I had to write an autobiography, which made me sputter, but in the end I titled it “The Lifetime of God” because my boyfriend at the time told me it would take the lifetime of God to tell my beauty. See, I was loved once …) Structuring memoir is, in my opinion, difficult. Do you do it chronologically? If so, how do you keep it from being boring? If you do it topically, how do you keep the reader from going insane? Either John or his sister Carole has a lot of finesse in this department. Each of the chapters in Anything Goes are titled after songs, the first one being “I Hope I Get It.” It’s a superb starting point, as it describes the moment when John found out he’d gotten the role of Captain Jack. He was in a revival of Anything Goes in Covent Garden with his niece Clare, and it’s a perfect nexus of much of essence of John: the musical theatre bit, the importance of his family, the role that would make him famous, his humor and joie de vivre. Camera cuts quickly to our leading man jumping off the ground, punching the air with his fists and letting out a rebel yell. Actually, what I screamed was, ‘I’m going to be in the TARDIS!’ The first chapter also lets you know that John is Glaswegian by birth, his childhood connection to Doctor Who (he was a Star Wars freak first and foremost)[3] , describes his audition for the part of Jack, that his favorite companion is Sarah Jane, his favorite villain Davros and his favorite episode “Terror of the Autons.” (All important things to know!) It ends spectacularly with his scene dancing with Billie Piper on the top of that Chula warship: I danced to my own tune, to my own steps, the way I’ve been dancing for most of my life.
From that moment, the autobiography seizes you[4] and doesn’t let you go. The second and third chapters are about his earliest years in the Glasgow suburb of Mount Vernon, and as a chapter it’s suffused with warmth, humor, and moves effortlessly back and forth through time with virtuoso references that come out of nowhere but never make the reader scratch her head. For example, he uses a Bosch painting he and his partner Scott saw in Madrid to tell us he was the baby from hell. He was a prankster like his dad, the victim of his older siblings’ friendly wrath; we’re introduced to his beloved Murn (grandmother on his mother’s side), who fed sweeties to “Wee John.” There’s a wonderfully atmospheric, nostalgic look back at Christmases and Hogmanys both in Scotland and in Illinois, where the family moved in 1976. He got his voice from his mother, who has her own spectacular story which involves preemies and ovens!
John knows this memoir isn’t a dark one. I suppose it would be easy to see this experience as having some kind of symbolic signifance in my life. . . . it was my first manifestation of the Barrowman risk-taking gene. He describes how he inherited this gene from his father and uncles and how it helped him in TV shows like Dancing on Ice[5], How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?[6] and on a plane ride with Shirley Bassey, as well as when he flew in the RAF Tattoo in 2007. Very entertainingly, he quotes Oscar Wilde; the flying experience was “Defying Gravity” (and less scary than Janice Dickinson on Jonathan Ross[7]). Chapter four follows him to America (Aurora, then Joliet, Illinois), and he somehow finds time to make fun of Cardiff-ers who have never been in the Castle! Due to teasing, Wee John not only learned how to swim, but reveals his phobia of having his face or neck touched! (Apparently not his lips!) He was a flautist before he was a singer, and I think my sister might have a cow if I told her he was a high school drum major. He spent his American summers in the pool. During one of these summers he realized he was gay, though he didn’t tell his family until 1992 when he was playing Raoul (need I say more??). They, of course, were supportive—‘John . . . I have to say that we’re hurt you’d think that because you’re gay we’d not want to be part of your life anymore.’
High school is when John began performing, acting, and singing, though he experienced “the Dues and Don’t Syndrome,” which even I, in my brief theatre tenure, am familiar with. When I got John’s self-titled album for Christmas this year, I saw that his accompanist for several pieces was Bev Holt, who turns out to be his high school drama teacher. John’s Forensic Competition must be what Academic Bowl was to Johanna and English Expo was to me, though his description of bluffing his way through a scene from The Lion in Winter (and winning awards) is much funnier than anything I ever did. (This is also the chapter he offers us the following advice, . . . sings songs like ‘Dip Your Cock in Vodka’ (readers, please don’t)!) John and Bev Holt also tried to give back to schools like his once he became successful with the Dreamers Workshop before lack of funding and support killed it.
Somehow, I never knew before that John performed in Opryland in Nashville over his summers after an unsuccessful run at the University of Iowa. You find this out in a chapter called “The First Man You Remember,” which gives you a full dose of John’s potty mouth, potty humor, mania for shopping, self-confidence, and of course, his first gay kiss (it was very romantic). He also gives you his two cents on nature vs. nurture in the debate on homosexuality (which you already know if you saw his very manic programme on it on the Beeb last year). This was followed by education at the United States International University in San Diego, which came with more exposure to Dues and Don’t—Peter cross[ed] the line from professional rivalry to personal wankerdom—before John got his first big break in Anything Goes[9] in 1989, a true fluke as he went from only in London on a semester’s study of Shakespeare to leading man in the West End. Wow! Somehow I also completely missed that John was in the film of The Producers playing the Nazi lead tenor. His conclusion about this whole experience could sum up his life, ‘Barrowman is happy and gay!’ (set to the tune of “Springtime for Hitler,” of course.)
Only chapter nine, about John’s friend’s Midge’s depression and suicide, feels slightly out of place, though he ties it together by titling the chapter, “No One Is Alone.” Were there more chapters like “High Flying Adored,” which describes John’s relationship with Valentino (!), John’s life would be a very different one. Only John could have worked the Donner Party[10] into a chapter about meeting the love of his life, Scott Gill. In fact, it was only after the terrifying experience of nearly running out of petrol/gas in Yosemite that made John want to participate in the civil ceremony with Scott (in Cardiff Bay, by the way; I remember when it happened). “Anything Goes” gives some outrageous stories of life on the superstitious stage (Andrew [Lloyd Webber] wrote, ‘Your penis may not upstage my music’). I hadn’t realized John’s repertoire was quite so impressive: Sunset Boulevard, Beauty and the Beast[11], Phantom, Godspell, Putting It Together, Miss Saigon, Company, Evita, some British kids’ shows, the film De-Lovely, and the short-lived American TV shows Titans and Central Park West[12] (and, good man, he’s tried on several occasions to get RTD to write a musical episode of Doctor Who or Torchwood—I can so see it as a Christmas or Children in Need special, can’t you?).
A chapter is devoted to John’s relationships with his nephews and nieces (should he ever want to father children, Suranne Jones of all people will be the surrogate mother!). His nephew Turner had this to say, ‘You know, Uncle John, I’m straight, and if you think about all the times when I was a kid that I’ve been dressed up in women’s clothing and made to sing and dance, I’ve got to be proof that you can’t turn someone gay.’ He describes his fear of flying, insane adventures with Cameron Mackintosh, filming Shark Attack 3 (no, he’s not exactly proud of it), and advice from Sondheim.
If you[13] were expecting to find out a lot about John’s experiences in Torchwood and Doctor Who, you might be a bit disappointed. He mentions things throughout the book, but focuses on the shows only really during the first and penultimate chapters. Maybe he feels his audiences know enough about that part of his life already, or maybe he doesn’t want to say too much too soon (he describes Eccleston as “angsty”). Fortunately for me, what John does have to say about Doctor Who involves filming “Utopia”! He mentions the birthdays he had on set while filming Doctor Who, the story about the manky chips in “The Sound of Drums,” nearly killing Gareth Lloyd-Jones in the Brecon Beacons with an antique brass bell, and Eve Myles’ thong. That’s probably enough for most people[14]. The end of the autobiography praises RTD and announces this is only intermission. My ending’s not written yet, my show’s not over.
John Barrowman has been very lucky. He had a family who, despite their quirks, loved him unconditionally and let him follow his dream. He has dual citizenship and got to attend (or not attend) the educational institutions of his choice. But he also works hard, clearly loves what he does, doesn’t take crap from the detractors, is good to his fans, and is—honestly—very talented. I’ve told this story before, but it bears mentioning: the first time I went to see John’s panto in Cardiff, he was ill with a chest infection and was gone. I was seeing it with a fan from BarrowmanOnline who’d come down from Manchester several times already to see the show. She convinced me to buy another ticket and see the panto again. This time, John was performing despite still being sick. His poor understudy did his best, but John literally lit up the stage. He was just a joy to watch, his voice was great despite being ill, he was gorgeous, and I just grinned the whole way through.
It goes without saying that Anything Goes has a plethora of entertaining, priceless photos. A couple of the most memorable are John, nephew, and niece in drag for Hogmanay; in a dance belt that looks like a nappy/diaper backstage at Phantom; showing his bum in a kilt; looking like an action figure on the set of “Bad Wolf.” But my personal favorite is John watching Torchwood with his mates Naoko Mori, Burn Gorman, Eve Myles, and David Tennant. (Watch this space, I’ll try to scan this one.) All I can say is: can I marry David Tennant yet? Please? Please?![15]
I think writing autobiography is challenging. I never expected John Barrowman’s to be one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever read.
[1] He (or Carole) had the chutzpah to use footnotes, and to very good effect, I might add!
[2] Certain readers will note I am fond of both.
[3] He informs us by footnote you can’t get jelly babies in the US, which is true.
[4] Or just me?
[5] I didn’t know he was in it.
[6] Somehow failed to watch it when it was on.
[7] THAT I did see. I’ve seen John do some strange things on TV—marrying two dogs on Loose Women comes to mind—but this particularly episode of the Friday night talk show really took the cake.
[9] With Bernard Cribbins.
[10] I had no idea he was such a fan of nineteenth-century American history. He should persuade someone in charge of Torchwood to write an episode set there.
[11] I would have expected him to play Gaston, but he played the Beast (and quite well judging from the “If I Can’t Love Her” track on the album I got).
[12] No, I didn’t see them either.
[13] *Cough*
[14] Poor Freema. I don’t think I could deal with standing around in the TARDIS with my two co-stars carrying on a farting competition. Grow up, boys, grow up!
[15] If he tries any farting competitions, I would naturally punch him hard in one of his scrawny biceps. Problem solved.
The first time I heard the name John Barrowman must have been in 1999, when I became a Phantom phan and acquired as many of the musical’s cast albums as I could, including one with Ethan Freeman as the Phantom, Claire Moore as Christine, and John Barrowman as Raoul (at the time, I thought he was pretty cute and sang a very good Raoul). The next time was whenever the Hey, Mr. Producer concert of Cameron Mackintosh-produced shows was shown on PBS—he was there singing something from The Fix. Next it was in 2004, when I learned he was going to be playing a part in the new Doctor Who. (When I found out Doctor Who was coming back, I stayed as much out of the loop as possible. I knew the US wouldn’t get it for a long time, so it was better not to spoil myself and get too excited if I had to wait a long time—which I did. It was a strategy that paid off, but I had to keep pestering my friend Sarah as series 1 was airing, “When is Captain Jack going to show up?”) Then I went to Wales, where I was in time to see the first season of Torchwood, go to Cardiff to “the Hub” and where “Boom Town” had been filmed, etc. Then I saw the man himself in Jack and the Beanstalk in Cardiff—more on that later—and then he was plastered all over TV, radio, he was ubiquitous! (The coda is that I had a job interview in September in the Splott area of Cardiff—I was scared to walk there, but the interview basically consisted of me telling the interviewer how much of a fan of Doctor Who and Torchwood I was and him telling me that Burn Gorman’s son was his son’s friend and that they filmed Torchwood in that area and that the mixing studio was the building next door, etc. I didn’t get the job, but the interview was memorable!)
In any case, despite being a fan—I’m on the BarrowmanOnline listserv—I didn’t exactly jump out and buy his autobiography. Part of it, I guess, is a lingering distrust of not only “celebrity” biographies, but autobiographies of anyone under the age of 60. I was really surprised, though. John (and yes, I’m going to call him John) admits that he is foremost an entertainer, and the book is above all entertaining. It’s well-written, well-paced, very funny, covers a ton of ground without being confusing or dead boring, and most of all, his very passionate personality screams out of each page. It’s co-written with his sister Carole, and who can tell who had the bigger part of making this a very readable book—she’s the English professor, he’s the gregarious, outrageous personality. The first three or so chapters had me glued to the page. While the rest of the book tapered back a bit for me, I must say I found the structure very impressive[1]. John’s not had a harrowing life by any stretch of the imagination, nor does he spend as much time as you might think on his adventures with the rich and famous. It’s mostly about his family life and experiences in musical theatre. It’s not a book I would recommend to the easily shocked, either—John’s a potty mouth and notoriously open about his (and everyone else’s) sexuality. He describes the book as you’ll feel as if you and I are lounging in our pyjamas on the couch in my Cardiff living room, sharing a bottle of champagne or a pot of tea[2], and it really does.
I write many reviews, regardless of whether people read them. I’ve had three courses in memoir writing/creative nonfiction/writing the self, quite different in tone and lesson plans, and though I’ve churned out the memoirs and personal essays, it’s not a form I’ve had particular success with. (In high school I had to write an autobiography, which made me sputter, but in the end I titled it “The Lifetime of God” because my boyfriend at the time told me it would take the lifetime of God to tell my beauty. See, I was loved once …) Structuring memoir is, in my opinion, difficult. Do you do it chronologically? If so, how do you keep it from being boring? If you do it topically, how do you keep the reader from going insane? Either John or his sister Carole has a lot of finesse in this department. Each of the chapters in Anything Goes are titled after songs, the first one being “I Hope I Get It.” It’s a superb starting point, as it describes the moment when John found out he’d gotten the role of Captain Jack. He was in a revival of Anything Goes in Covent Garden with his niece Clare, and it’s a perfect nexus of much of essence of John: the musical theatre bit, the importance of his family, the role that would make him famous, his humor and joie de vivre. Camera cuts quickly to our leading man jumping off the ground, punching the air with his fists and letting out a rebel yell. Actually, what I screamed was, ‘I’m going to be in the TARDIS!’ The first chapter also lets you know that John is Glaswegian by birth, his childhood connection to Doctor Who (he was a Star Wars freak first and foremost)[3] , describes his audition for the part of Jack, that his favorite companion is Sarah Jane, his favorite villain Davros and his favorite episode “Terror of the Autons.” (All important things to know!) It ends spectacularly with his scene dancing with Billie Piper on the top of that Chula warship: I danced to my own tune, to my own steps, the way I’ve been dancing for most of my life.
From that moment, the autobiography seizes you[4] and doesn’t let you go. The second and third chapters are about his earliest years in the Glasgow suburb of Mount Vernon, and as a chapter it’s suffused with warmth, humor, and moves effortlessly back and forth through time with virtuoso references that come out of nowhere but never make the reader scratch her head. For example, he uses a Bosch painting he and his partner Scott saw in Madrid to tell us he was the baby from hell. He was a prankster like his dad, the victim of his older siblings’ friendly wrath; we’re introduced to his beloved Murn (grandmother on his mother’s side), who fed sweeties to “Wee John.” There’s a wonderfully atmospheric, nostalgic look back at Christmases and Hogmanys both in Scotland and in Illinois, where the family moved in 1976. He got his voice from his mother, who has her own spectacular story which involves preemies and ovens!
John knows this memoir isn’t a dark one. I suppose it would be easy to see this experience as having some kind of symbolic signifance in my life. . . . it was my first manifestation of the Barrowman risk-taking gene. He describes how he inherited this gene from his father and uncles and how it helped him in TV shows like Dancing on Ice[5], How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?[6] and on a plane ride with Shirley Bassey, as well as when he flew in the RAF Tattoo in 2007. Very entertainingly, he quotes Oscar Wilde; the flying experience was “Defying Gravity” (and less scary than Janice Dickinson on Jonathan Ross[7]). Chapter four follows him to America (Aurora, then Joliet, Illinois), and he somehow finds time to make fun of Cardiff-ers who have never been in the Castle! Due to teasing, Wee John not only learned how to swim, but reveals his phobia of having his face or neck touched! (Apparently not his lips!) He was a flautist before he was a singer, and I think my sister might have a cow if I told her he was a high school drum major. He spent his American summers in the pool. During one of these summers he realized he was gay, though he didn’t tell his family until 1992 when he was playing Raoul (need I say more??). They, of course, were supportive—‘John . . . I have to say that we’re hurt you’d think that because you’re gay we’d not want to be part of your life anymore.’
High school is when John began performing, acting, and singing, though he experienced “the Dues and Don’t Syndrome,” which even I, in my brief theatre tenure, am familiar with. When I got John’s self-titled album for Christmas this year, I saw that his accompanist for several pieces was Bev Holt, who turns out to be his high school drama teacher. John’s Forensic Competition must be what Academic Bowl was to Johanna and English Expo was to me, though his description of bluffing his way through a scene from The Lion in Winter (and winning awards) is much funnier than anything I ever did. (This is also the chapter he offers us the following advice, . . . sings songs like ‘Dip Your Cock in Vodka’ (readers, please don’t)!) John and Bev Holt also tried to give back to schools like his once he became successful with the Dreamers Workshop before lack of funding and support killed it.
Somehow, I never knew before that John performed in Opryland in Nashville over his summers after an unsuccessful run at the University of Iowa. You find this out in a chapter called “The First Man You Remember,” which gives you a full dose of John’s potty mouth, potty humor, mania for shopping, self-confidence, and of course, his first gay kiss (it was very romantic). He also gives you his two cents on nature vs. nurture in the debate on homosexuality (which you already know if you saw his very manic programme on it on the Beeb last year). This was followed by education at the United States International University in San Diego, which came with more exposure to Dues and Don’t—Peter cross[ed] the line from professional rivalry to personal wankerdom—before John got his first big break in Anything Goes[9] in 1989, a true fluke as he went from only in London on a semester’s study of Shakespeare to leading man in the West End. Wow! Somehow I also completely missed that John was in the film of The Producers playing the Nazi lead tenor. His conclusion about this whole experience could sum up his life, ‘Barrowman is happy and gay!’ (set to the tune of “Springtime for Hitler,” of course.)
Only chapter nine, about John’s friend’s Midge’s depression and suicide, feels slightly out of place, though he ties it together by titling the chapter, “No One Is Alone.” Were there more chapters like “High Flying Adored,” which describes John’s relationship with Valentino (!), John’s life would be a very different one. Only John could have worked the Donner Party[10] into a chapter about meeting the love of his life, Scott Gill. In fact, it was only after the terrifying experience of nearly running out of petrol/gas in Yosemite that made John want to participate in the civil ceremony with Scott (in Cardiff Bay, by the way; I remember when it happened). “Anything Goes” gives some outrageous stories of life on the superstitious stage (Andrew [Lloyd Webber] wrote, ‘Your penis may not upstage my music’). I hadn’t realized John’s repertoire was quite so impressive: Sunset Boulevard, Beauty and the Beast[11], Phantom, Godspell, Putting It Together, Miss Saigon, Company, Evita, some British kids’ shows, the film De-Lovely, and the short-lived American TV shows Titans and Central Park West[12] (and, good man, he’s tried on several occasions to get RTD to write a musical episode of Doctor Who or Torchwood—I can so see it as a Christmas or Children in Need special, can’t you?).
A chapter is devoted to John’s relationships with his nephews and nieces (should he ever want to father children, Suranne Jones of all people will be the surrogate mother!). His nephew Turner had this to say, ‘You know, Uncle John, I’m straight, and if you think about all the times when I was a kid that I’ve been dressed up in women’s clothing and made to sing and dance, I’ve got to be proof that you can’t turn someone gay.’ He describes his fear of flying, insane adventures with Cameron Mackintosh, filming Shark Attack 3 (no, he’s not exactly proud of it), and advice from Sondheim.
If you[13] were expecting to find out a lot about John’s experiences in Torchwood and Doctor Who, you might be a bit disappointed. He mentions things throughout the book, but focuses on the shows only really during the first and penultimate chapters. Maybe he feels his audiences know enough about that part of his life already, or maybe he doesn’t want to say too much too soon (he describes Eccleston as “angsty”). Fortunately for me, what John does have to say about Doctor Who involves filming “Utopia”! He mentions the birthdays he had on set while filming Doctor Who, the story about the manky chips in “The Sound of Drums,” nearly killing Gareth Lloyd-Jones in the Brecon Beacons with an antique brass bell, and Eve Myles’ thong. That’s probably enough for most people[14]. The end of the autobiography praises RTD and announces this is only intermission. My ending’s not written yet, my show’s not over.
John Barrowman has been very lucky. He had a family who, despite their quirks, loved him unconditionally and let him follow his dream. He has dual citizenship and got to attend (or not attend) the educational institutions of his choice. But he also works hard, clearly loves what he does, doesn’t take crap from the detractors, is good to his fans, and is—honestly—very talented. I’ve told this story before, but it bears mentioning: the first time I went to see John’s panto in Cardiff, he was ill with a chest infection and was gone. I was seeing it with a fan from BarrowmanOnline who’d come down from Manchester several times already to see the show. She convinced me to buy another ticket and see the panto again. This time, John was performing despite still being sick. His poor understudy did his best, but John literally lit up the stage. He was just a joy to watch, his voice was great despite being ill, he was gorgeous, and I just grinned the whole way through.
It goes without saying that Anything Goes has a plethora of entertaining, priceless photos. A couple of the most memorable are John, nephew, and niece in drag for Hogmanay; in a dance belt that looks like a nappy/diaper backstage at Phantom; showing his bum in a kilt; looking like an action figure on the set of “Bad Wolf.” But my personal favorite is John watching Torchwood with his mates Naoko Mori, Burn Gorman, Eve Myles, and David Tennant. (Watch this space, I’ll try to scan this one.) All I can say is: can I marry David Tennant yet? Please? Please?![15]
I think writing autobiography is challenging. I never expected John Barrowman’s to be one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever read.
[1] He (or Carole) had the chutzpah to use footnotes, and to very good effect, I might add!
[2] Certain readers will note I am fond of both.
[3] He informs us by footnote you can’t get jelly babies in the US, which is true.
[4] Or just me?
[5] I didn’t know he was in it.
[6] Somehow failed to watch it when it was on.
[7] THAT I did see. I’ve seen John do some strange things on TV—marrying two dogs on Loose Women comes to mind—but this particularly episode of the Friday night talk show really took the cake.
[9] With Bernard Cribbins.
[10] I had no idea he was such a fan of nineteenth-century American history. He should persuade someone in charge of Torchwood to write an episode set there.
[11] I would have expected him to play Gaston, but he played the Beast (and quite well judging from the “If I Can’t Love Her” track on the album I got).
[12] No, I didn’t see them either.
[13] *Cough*
[14] Poor Freema. I don’t think I could deal with standing around in the TARDIS with my two co-stars carrying on a farting competition. Grow up, boys, grow up!
[15] If he tries any farting competitions, I would naturally punch him hard in one of his scrawny biceps. Problem solved.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
mike tucker avenged!
Snowglobe 7 was an okay Doctor Who book, as I said before—high concept, somewhat bland characters. By contrast, Mike Tucker’s first book for the new series, The Nightmare of Black Island, is one of the best I’ve read of the BBC books. I’d definitely rank it with my favorites from last year, The Many Hands, Sting of the Zygons, The Pirate Loop and Only Human. It just does everything right, which is difficult enough to do with a normal book, not to mention a Doctor Who book!
You know the teaser that sets up nearly every on-screen Doctor Who? We meet a hapless person who is eaten by a monster, or possessed by a monster, or in danger from something, and we know the Doctor will be on the scene soon to save the day. Despite the fact it starts with such a cliché, I find Nightmare manages to make me care about poor Carl Jenkins and scare the heck of me (fishing hooks?!?) at the same time. Plus there’s a funny quip about Wales: Paying the toll [over the Severn Bridge] was like putting coins into a laundrette washing machine: no sooner had they clunked into the slot the water started to pour. Oh yes, this is possibly the first story since “Boom Town” that’s set in Wales, and I find it neither snarky nor condescending.
Tucker can easily conjure up Ten’s manic, silly moments, but also his anger and doom-pronouncement. ‘Gonna take orders from a commander who can’t even count, hmm? From someone who thinks that she’s such a clever clogs because she found a way of using the local kids as resource but didn’t make sure she had all the facts. You’ve made a lovely big monster with huge pointy teeth, but it’s not got all its marbles, has it? You missed a bit, thicko!’ Tucker not only writes Ten with perfect conviction, he writes Rose like she was his creation, and what’s even more impressive, he writes their relationship with a consummate ease that I haven’t seen since The Stone Rose. Their scenes together are absolute fun from beginning to end. I may have reservations about season 2 as a whole, but Tucker takes the best aspects of that era and brings them superbly to life. Intriguingly, when we meet the Doctor and Rose, she’s dreaming. The unspoken tenderness is a subtext in this book, neither ignored as some male writers tend to do, nor highlighted as much as in Jac Rayner’s books (you know I love her writing, though). Our two intrepid adventurers will need their absolute trust, as they meet the monsters early on. And they’re much scarier than werewolves, Clockwork Robots, Daleks, Cybermen, Slitheen. To be honest, the mechanism of the monsters is so close to being repeated in Martin Day’s Wooden Heart, I’m surprised they let that latter novel fly.
I can’t say that all of Tucker’s secondary characters are that much of an improvement on the ones from Snowglobe 7, but I do feel proud to have been the second person to give the Doctor a companion named Bronwyn. Plus, though bad child actors can be just as annoying as badly written children, I find Tucker gets the many kids in Nightmare just right—not too cutesy, not to scamp-like. Though it’s also a cliché for the Doctor and companion to separate (either by accident or design), I think Tucker makes the most of it when he has the Doctor and Bronwyn take a boat to Ynys Du (Black Island) to look at the lighthouse, while Rose takes a secret tunnel with Ali the feisty little girl to investigate sinister goings-on at the rectory. You can see already that this story has prestigious roots: “Terror of the Zygons,” “The Empty Child,” “Horror of Fang Rock,” of which Tucker is no doubt aware. His intent is to take the best of those, I believe, and scare us all. Which he does. Some crawled on squat legs, others writhed on tentacles. Spider shapes and dinosaur shapes mixed with strange combinations of scales, feathers and fur.
At the heart of it, though, is not just another boring monsters-want-take-over-the-Earth story. The human villain has real motivation this time, and in a much less obvious way than most do—it’s a horrific, considered bit of character development that’s more akin to “Human Nature” or “Adrift.” It also takes that witty line from “The Girl in the Fireplace,” about the Doctor being the nightmare, and twists in a subtle and grimly smart way. Rose has an encounter with a rather indefinable presence of evil but, in contrast to a similar entity in Wooden Heart that I really couldn’t understand, Tucker allows Rose’s sheer horror to be felt by the readers. The Doctor, meanwhile, ends up having to mildly inconvenience children—in a way fans of “Blink” will understand—in order to save the day. In addition to the somewhat Dortmun-like Nathaniel Morton, the alien menaces—that is to say, separate from the monsters—are religious warrior-zealots, a subtle jab at modern religious crusaders of all creeds.
Mike Tucker has worked on the show itself with effects, so he should know his monster stuff. But in his acknowledgments, he includes a wonderfully heartfelt: [to] Christopher, David and Billie (for bringing it back for a new generation). Though it could be argued that few who write for Who aren’t fans, Tucker is perhaps more a fan than most, yet he’s created the very opposite of fan wank in The Nightmare of Black Island (and I even like the title).
You know the teaser that sets up nearly every on-screen Doctor Who? We meet a hapless person who is eaten by a monster, or possessed by a monster, or in danger from something, and we know the Doctor will be on the scene soon to save the day. Despite the fact it starts with such a cliché, I find Nightmare manages to make me care about poor Carl Jenkins and scare the heck of me (fishing hooks?!?) at the same time. Plus there’s a funny quip about Wales: Paying the toll [over the Severn Bridge] was like putting coins into a laundrette washing machine: no sooner had they clunked into the slot the water started to pour. Oh yes, this is possibly the first story since “Boom Town” that’s set in Wales, and I find it neither snarky nor condescending.
Tucker can easily conjure up Ten’s manic, silly moments, but also his anger and doom-pronouncement. ‘Gonna take orders from a commander who can’t even count, hmm? From someone who thinks that she’s such a clever clogs because she found a way of using the local kids as resource but didn’t make sure she had all the facts. You’ve made a lovely big monster with huge pointy teeth, but it’s not got all its marbles, has it? You missed a bit, thicko!’ Tucker not only writes Ten with perfect conviction, he writes Rose like she was his creation, and what’s even more impressive, he writes their relationship with a consummate ease that I haven’t seen since The Stone Rose. Their scenes together are absolute fun from beginning to end. I may have reservations about season 2 as a whole, but Tucker takes the best aspects of that era and brings them superbly to life. Intriguingly, when we meet the Doctor and Rose, she’s dreaming. The unspoken tenderness is a subtext in this book, neither ignored as some male writers tend to do, nor highlighted as much as in Jac Rayner’s books (you know I love her writing, though). Our two intrepid adventurers will need their absolute trust, as they meet the monsters early on. And they’re much scarier than werewolves, Clockwork Robots, Daleks, Cybermen, Slitheen. To be honest, the mechanism of the monsters is so close to being repeated in Martin Day’s Wooden Heart, I’m surprised they let that latter novel fly.
I can’t say that all of Tucker’s secondary characters are that much of an improvement on the ones from Snowglobe 7, but I do feel proud to have been the second person to give the Doctor a companion named Bronwyn. Plus, though bad child actors can be just as annoying as badly written children, I find Tucker gets the many kids in Nightmare just right—not too cutesy, not to scamp-like. Though it’s also a cliché for the Doctor and companion to separate (either by accident or design), I think Tucker makes the most of it when he has the Doctor and Bronwyn take a boat to Ynys Du (Black Island) to look at the lighthouse, while Rose takes a secret tunnel with Ali the feisty little girl to investigate sinister goings-on at the rectory. You can see already that this story has prestigious roots: “Terror of the Zygons,” “The Empty Child,” “Horror of Fang Rock,” of which Tucker is no doubt aware. His intent is to take the best of those, I believe, and scare us all. Which he does. Some crawled on squat legs, others writhed on tentacles. Spider shapes and dinosaur shapes mixed with strange combinations of scales, feathers and fur.
At the heart of it, though, is not just another boring monsters-want-take-over-the-Earth story. The human villain has real motivation this time, and in a much less obvious way than most do—it’s a horrific, considered bit of character development that’s more akin to “Human Nature” or “Adrift.” It also takes that witty line from “The Girl in the Fireplace,” about the Doctor being the nightmare, and twists in a subtle and grimly smart way. Rose has an encounter with a rather indefinable presence of evil but, in contrast to a similar entity in Wooden Heart that I really couldn’t understand, Tucker allows Rose’s sheer horror to be felt by the readers. The Doctor, meanwhile, ends up having to mildly inconvenience children—in a way fans of “Blink” will understand—in order to save the day. In addition to the somewhat Dortmun-like Nathaniel Morton, the alien menaces—that is to say, separate from the monsters—are religious warrior-zealots, a subtle jab at modern religious crusaders of all creeds.
Mike Tucker has worked on the show itself with effects, so he should know his monster stuff. But in his acknowledgments, he includes a wonderfully heartfelt: [to] Christopher, David and Billie (for bringing it back for a new generation). Though it could be argued that few who write for Who aren’t fans, Tucker is perhaps more a fan than most, yet he’s created the very opposite of fan wank in The Nightmare of Black Island (and I even like the title).
batman and the mad monk
You have to admire Matt Wagner’s chutzpah, to write and draw his own comics. Sadly, the comic as a whole hasn’t made much of an impression. Mad Monk owes a lot to the Gothic tradition, with its subject of vampirism, and the title itself hearkens to the land of Matthew Lewis and Charles Maturin. The story has all the suitably Gothic trappings—a nemesis named Niccolai Tepes, a Brotherhood straight from “Masque of the Mandragora,” silver batarangs, Goth/punk clubbers who are easily related to my own tragic Luc, wolves, Iron Maidens straight from Madame Tussaud’s—but it feels off-balance somehow. Neither the bloodsucking Mad Monk, nor his henchwoman Dala, nor Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend Julie Madison, nor her tycoon father, exhibit any signs of compelling character.
This seems to be set roughly between Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween, though keeping track of chronology is a losing battle for me. The opening—a brilliant and seductive visit from Catwoman—is only the second time the two have met. The Joker has yet to materialize, as such, though Batman expresses regret over “that poor wretch in the red cape and hood.” He also wonders, “Have I inadvertedly given license to every crook with a flair for the dramatic?” Though Wagner has a good sense of composition and light and dark, his close-ups of figures are a bit like mine—serviceable, but not superb. I actually thought Julie Madison was a washed up hooker from the way she was drawn. Gordon is still rising to the top of the crooked Gotham police force—his cigarette habit winds him—and they haven’t even invented the Bat Signal yet. Harvey Dent still fights the good fight. In some ways it certainly feels a post-Batman Begins story—the Mad Monk’s lair looks a bit like the Nolan Batcave.
I found the narrative confusing on a few points, like Julie and Bruce’s first meeting. Batman has a suitably action-packed run in with wolves—to his credit, he tries not to kill the blood-maddened animals—ending in an escape from an Indiana Jones-like trap of spirited walls. I was disappointed that, though the Monk’s “demise” by lightning was suitably open-ended, we didn’t learn what possible biological explanation could be given for an ordinary human being able to suck blood. I know there have been historical cases of serial killers who chewed and bit people’s necks—Elisabeth Bathory was my time-traveling vampire villainess in the original version of Doctor Who and the Pen Store Adventure—but not to the extent that they’re “as empty as a flat tire.”
Julie discovers Bruce’s real identity but conveniently goes away to Africa. Her father runs afoul of the Mob—his whole character seemed wholly unmotivated to me, but maybe I needed to read Batman and the Monster Men to get it. Anyway, the Graysons feature in the last panel . . .
This seems to be set roughly between Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween, though keeping track of chronology is a losing battle for me. The opening—a brilliant and seductive visit from Catwoman—is only the second time the two have met. The Joker has yet to materialize, as such, though Batman expresses regret over “that poor wretch in the red cape and hood.” He also wonders, “Have I inadvertedly given license to every crook with a flair for the dramatic?” Though Wagner has a good sense of composition and light and dark, his close-ups of figures are a bit like mine—serviceable, but not superb. I actually thought Julie Madison was a washed up hooker from the way she was drawn. Gordon is still rising to the top of the crooked Gotham police force—his cigarette habit winds him—and they haven’t even invented the Bat Signal yet. Harvey Dent still fights the good fight. In some ways it certainly feels a post-Batman Begins story—the Mad Monk’s lair looks a bit like the Nolan Batcave.
I found the narrative confusing on a few points, like Julie and Bruce’s first meeting. Batman has a suitably action-packed run in with wolves—to his credit, he tries not to kill the blood-maddened animals—ending in an escape from an Indiana Jones-like trap of spirited walls. I was disappointed that, though the Monk’s “demise” by lightning was suitably open-ended, we didn’t learn what possible biological explanation could be given for an ordinary human being able to suck blood. I know there have been historical cases of serial killers who chewed and bit people’s necks—Elisabeth Bathory was my time-traveling vampire villainess in the original version of Doctor Who and the Pen Store Adventure—but not to the extent that they’re “as empty as a flat tire.”
Julie discovers Bruce’s real identity but conveniently goes away to Africa. Her father runs afoul of the Mob—his whole character seemed wholly unmotivated to me, but maybe I needed to read Batman and the Monster Men to get it. Anyway, the Graysons feature in the last panel . . .
Friday, January 16, 2009
the joker: the greatest stories ever told
You’d think I would have read this before now, but it never came up in my holds list at the library.
So, like the volumes of other villain collections (Batman vs. Two Face, Scarecrow Tales) this is a good survey of the field—the very first Joker story in 1940 to Paul Dini and Don Kramer’s modern masterpiece “Slayride” (which I already reviewed). The first story is called, appropriately enough, “Batman vs the Joker,” and is of course by those legends Bob Kane and Bill Finger. I was surprised—I thought the very first story was going to give us an explanation akin to Red Hood for how the Joker got his pasty white skin and green hair. Instead, like the other nutters in 1940s Gotham, he just evilly appears on the scene, another mad perpetrator of crimes (for profit, revenge, and fun). From the beginning, he appears in his purple suit with a handful of playing cards, looking more like Bela Lugosi than the Jack Nicholson-like figure on the cover of this volume. It’s a bit hilarious that all of Gotham has sat down on a 1940 night to get their kicks listening to the radio, but attention hog that he is, the Joker uses that medium to broadcast his crimes. Plus ça change.
“The Joker’s Comedy of Errors” from 1951, written by Bill Finger and drawn by Lew Schwartz, suffers from untranslatable slang—ie, slang from 1951 that means something totally different now. When the comic is talking about “boners,” it means “blunders.” But it’s hard not to read this comic with a constant snicker, especially when the Joker rants, “So! They laugh at my boner, will they?!” . . . aaaaaand I’m not even going to finish that sentence. The crimes he masterminds certainly resemble those in Batman: The Animated Series, showing the subtle shift from the violent (by comparison) ‘40s to the comics that had begun to be censored.
“Joker’s Utility Belt” from 1952 also belongs in this vein, though I have to admit I’m pretty impressed with the first page/cover of the comic, by David V. Reed and Dick Sprang. The reasoning in this one is that since Batman’s utility belt has defeated the Joker on so many previous occasions, the Joker decides to fight back with his own utility belt. “Crime of the Month Club” is from 1957, drawn by Dick Sprang and written by Dave Wood. Still the same tone, the same gags, inventive crimes, a foreshadowing of Holiday in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween. A continuation on this theme with “The Joker’s Last Laugh” from 1964 by John Broome and Sheldon Moldoff, though there are some outrageous sections. Using laughing gas (supposedly some pollen compound of “the plant known as loco weed”) to outwit people (again, something B:tAS picked up on), the Joker presents a dizzying amount of practical jokes before locking Batman and Robin up, intent on dynamiting the phony police station prison in which they are incarcerated. They get away, of course.
We jump ahead by more than ten years in “The Laughing Fish” by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers. The art has been given a tremendous shot of modernization—gone are the linear panels, replaced by the huge, sweeping, cinematic pages we know today. The coloring palate has ditched those garish colors of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, and though this is one of the strangest stories in the collection, it’s also much more ambitious than the capers we’ve just read. The subplot has to do with Silver St. Cloud, Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend who has just found out his real identity. The plot proper sees all the fish on the Eastern seaboard “contaminated with that lunatic grin” and the Joker marching to the patent office so he can make a fortune off his “Joker-fish.” The best part of this comic is that the Joker of the late ‘70s is not only a bit more stylish, but honest-to-God funny, even as he’s terrorizing people (which is, sadly, the point!). “Good Lord!” cries the patent office director. “Where?” asks the Joker. “Oh, hahahahaha, I see! It was just an expression—of endearment.” When the poor patent office director tells him it’s not on, “But the fish share my unique face! If Colonel What’s-his-name can have chickens, when they don’t even have mustaches--!” The plot from then on is similar to “Batman vs. the Joker,” and the narrator proves he won’t be bested by his witty antagonist: “A man that mad is worth more space . . . but we have other men to meet before dawn!” The Joker ends this particularly adventure electrocuted, but somehow survives. As he always does.
“Have a Dreadful Birthday, Mr. Joker” from 1980 by Len Wein and Walter Simonson hearkens artistically back to the ‘60s, but the story is easily at home in B:tAS. It begins with Commissioner Gordon being invited to the Joker’s birthday party: “black tie optional, funny hats mandatory.” Selina Kyle is an invitee, as well, despite the fact she and the Joker have never gotten along (not that they have any reason to!)—only he would give her a bouquet of roses with a boxing glove inside it. (A bit like the London Monster concealing sharp knives in nosegays!) Another invitee is Robin—“You’re out of your mind, Joker!” “Gloriously so! Isn’t it wonderful?” The other guests are lured to the party because of the promise of something for nothing, and the Joker promises them pieces of cake, when the giant cake blows up, with all of the invitees strapped to dynamite.
“Laughter After Midnight” is by that dream team that gave us B:tAS, written during the time when the show was on the air: Dini, Timm, Burchett. It’s drawn with gorgeous, glossy detail. Dini’s story is simple and very humorous, though more violent than the kids’ show could ever be. In one of the reviews for “Butcher, Baker, Tailor” someone remarked that even simple social interactions like having coffee were beyond the Joker; this comic explores what the Joker does when he’s not “Joker-izing.” This includes going for donuts and calling up Harley Quinn for a ride (she’s been detained by the police, so it’s a no-go). Even though everything the Joker does here conjures up Mark Hamill’s version, you can easily imagine the Joker of TDK laughing over injuries—“Ow! That’s going to hurt in the morning”—as this one does. I’m still waiting to get my hands on The Long Halloween, but here’s a tantalizing sneak peek from that talented pair of Loeb and Sale: “New Year’s Eve.” It involves the Joker “chartering” a biplane with the intent of crashing it into Gotham Square at midnight. “Up, up, and away! Or whatever the hell the expression is . . .” I never claimed to like how Sale drew the Joker, and still don’t, but I love this exchange (makes me think of TDK): JOKER: “When the clock strikes twelve—do I get a little kiss? . . . Eurrk. I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”
I loved Batman: Black and White vol. 1, and vol. 2 is surely just as good if “Case Study” by Paul Dini and Alex Ross is any indication. The art is photorealistic, the story quite at home in “Spirit and Liberty.” Truly—the art is superb. Nothing I can say will convey to you the appropriate measure of awe I feel for the art. If you don’t know the Red Hood story you might be a little lost, but then again, you may be learning all this for the first time. It proves, through a case study compiled by Dr. Harleen Quinzel (before she went mad and became Harley Quinn), that the Joker brutally orchestrated his rise to the top of a criminal organization long before he ever fell into the chemical vat and went “crazy.” The volume was published in 2002, smack dab between Tim Burton’s and Christopher Nolan’s visions of the Joker, so he looks suitably Nicholson-like. “He had a new mission now, bon out of a personal trauma possibly akin to whatever dark circumstances shaped the Batman’s life.”
The last two stories in this volume are from Hush vol. 2, which I’ve just reviewed, and “Slayride” by Dini and Kramer. You know that I think both of these stories are fab.
So, like the volumes of other villain collections (Batman vs. Two Face, Scarecrow Tales) this is a good survey of the field—the very first Joker story in 1940 to Paul Dini and Don Kramer’s modern masterpiece “Slayride” (which I already reviewed). The first story is called, appropriately enough, “Batman vs the Joker,” and is of course by those legends Bob Kane and Bill Finger. I was surprised—I thought the very first story was going to give us an explanation akin to Red Hood for how the Joker got his pasty white skin and green hair. Instead, like the other nutters in 1940s Gotham, he just evilly appears on the scene, another mad perpetrator of crimes (for profit, revenge, and fun). From the beginning, he appears in his purple suit with a handful of playing cards, looking more like Bela Lugosi than the Jack Nicholson-like figure on the cover of this volume. It’s a bit hilarious that all of Gotham has sat down on a 1940 night to get their kicks listening to the radio, but attention hog that he is, the Joker uses that medium to broadcast his crimes. Plus ça change.
“The Joker’s Comedy of Errors” from 1951, written by Bill Finger and drawn by Lew Schwartz, suffers from untranslatable slang—ie, slang from 1951 that means something totally different now. When the comic is talking about “boners,” it means “blunders.” But it’s hard not to read this comic with a constant snicker, especially when the Joker rants, “So! They laugh at my boner, will they?!” . . . aaaaaand I’m not even going to finish that sentence. The crimes he masterminds certainly resemble those in Batman: The Animated Series, showing the subtle shift from the violent (by comparison) ‘40s to the comics that had begun to be censored.
“Joker’s Utility Belt” from 1952 also belongs in this vein, though I have to admit I’m pretty impressed with the first page/cover of the comic, by David V. Reed and Dick Sprang. The reasoning in this one is that since Batman’s utility belt has defeated the Joker on so many previous occasions, the Joker decides to fight back with his own utility belt. “Crime of the Month Club” is from 1957, drawn by Dick Sprang and written by Dave Wood. Still the same tone, the same gags, inventive crimes, a foreshadowing of Holiday in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween. A continuation on this theme with “The Joker’s Last Laugh” from 1964 by John Broome and Sheldon Moldoff, though there are some outrageous sections. Using laughing gas (supposedly some pollen compound of “the plant known as loco weed”) to outwit people (again, something B:tAS picked up on), the Joker presents a dizzying amount of practical jokes before locking Batman and Robin up, intent on dynamiting the phony police station prison in which they are incarcerated. They get away, of course.
We jump ahead by more than ten years in “The Laughing Fish” by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers. The art has been given a tremendous shot of modernization—gone are the linear panels, replaced by the huge, sweeping, cinematic pages we know today. The coloring palate has ditched those garish colors of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, and though this is one of the strangest stories in the collection, it’s also much more ambitious than the capers we’ve just read. The subplot has to do with Silver St. Cloud, Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend who has just found out his real identity. The plot proper sees all the fish on the Eastern seaboard “contaminated with that lunatic grin” and the Joker marching to the patent office so he can make a fortune off his “Joker-fish.” The best part of this comic is that the Joker of the late ‘70s is not only a bit more stylish, but honest-to-God funny, even as he’s terrorizing people (which is, sadly, the point!). “Good Lord!” cries the patent office director. “Where?” asks the Joker. “Oh, hahahahaha, I see! It was just an expression—of endearment.” When the poor patent office director tells him it’s not on, “But the fish share my unique face! If Colonel What’s-his-name can have chickens, when they don’t even have mustaches--!” The plot from then on is similar to “Batman vs. the Joker,” and the narrator proves he won’t be bested by his witty antagonist: “A man that mad is worth more space . . . but we have other men to meet before dawn!” The Joker ends this particularly adventure electrocuted, but somehow survives. As he always does.
“Have a Dreadful Birthday, Mr. Joker” from 1980 by Len Wein and Walter Simonson hearkens artistically back to the ‘60s, but the story is easily at home in B:tAS. It begins with Commissioner Gordon being invited to the Joker’s birthday party: “black tie optional, funny hats mandatory.” Selina Kyle is an invitee, as well, despite the fact she and the Joker have never gotten along (not that they have any reason to!)—only he would give her a bouquet of roses with a boxing glove inside it. (A bit like the London Monster concealing sharp knives in nosegays!) Another invitee is Robin—“You’re out of your mind, Joker!” “Gloriously so! Isn’t it wonderful?” The other guests are lured to the party because of the promise of something for nothing, and the Joker promises them pieces of cake, when the giant cake blows up, with all of the invitees strapped to dynamite.
“Laughter After Midnight” is by that dream team that gave us B:tAS, written during the time when the show was on the air: Dini, Timm, Burchett. It’s drawn with gorgeous, glossy detail. Dini’s story is simple and very humorous, though more violent than the kids’ show could ever be. In one of the reviews for “Butcher, Baker, Tailor” someone remarked that even simple social interactions like having coffee were beyond the Joker; this comic explores what the Joker does when he’s not “Joker-izing.” This includes going for donuts and calling up Harley Quinn for a ride (she’s been detained by the police, so it’s a no-go). Even though everything the Joker does here conjures up Mark Hamill’s version, you can easily imagine the Joker of TDK laughing over injuries—“Ow! That’s going to hurt in the morning”—as this one does. I’m still waiting to get my hands on The Long Halloween, but here’s a tantalizing sneak peek from that talented pair of Loeb and Sale: “New Year’s Eve.” It involves the Joker “chartering” a biplane with the intent of crashing it into Gotham Square at midnight. “Up, up, and away! Or whatever the hell the expression is . . .” I never claimed to like how Sale drew the Joker, and still don’t, but I love this exchange (makes me think of TDK): JOKER: “When the clock strikes twelve—do I get a little kiss? . . . Eurrk. I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”
I loved Batman: Black and White vol. 1, and vol. 2 is surely just as good if “Case Study” by Paul Dini and Alex Ross is any indication. The art is photorealistic, the story quite at home in “Spirit and Liberty.” Truly—the art is superb. Nothing I can say will convey to you the appropriate measure of awe I feel for the art. If you don’t know the Red Hood story you might be a little lost, but then again, you may be learning all this for the first time. It proves, through a case study compiled by Dr. Harleen Quinzel (before she went mad and became Harley Quinn), that the Joker brutally orchestrated his rise to the top of a criminal organization long before he ever fell into the chemical vat and went “crazy.” The volume was published in 2002, smack dab between Tim Burton’s and Christopher Nolan’s visions of the Joker, so he looks suitably Nicholson-like. “He had a new mission now, bon out of a personal trauma possibly akin to whatever dark circumstances shaped the Batman’s life.”
The last two stories in this volume are from Hush vol. 2, which I’ve just reviewed, and “Slayride” by Dini and Kramer. You know that I think both of these stories are fab.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)