Come Armageddon, Come

The title of today's blog comes from a song I've been listening to on repeat recently: Everyday Is Like Sunday by Morrissey.  There's a great video on YouTube here - a strange juxtaposition of the song with footage of ultra-violent video game, Grand Theft Auto 4.  (Which reminds me again of my favourite quote about video games:  Charlie Brooker once described Call of Duty as "the Citizen Kane of shooting people in the face", but that's another story...)

That song always reminds me of Cleveleys, a town not far from me which many local people like to think of as a picturesque and traditional seaside resort.   I like to think of it as the arsehole of the north-west, although to be fair there's probably a lot of worse places I have yet to discover.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that I've just finished reading BPRD: Plague of Frogs, a graphic novel with strong overtones of The End of The World, Doomsday and all of that nasty stuff on the horizon.  Those of you with normal social lives who do not read comics will probably recognize the character Hellboy from Guillermo del Toro's film adaptations.  Well, the BPRD is sort of a spin-off comic from Hellboy.  In the books, Hellboy starts off as a member of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence until he gets tired of the administration's interfering and strikes out on his own leaving the team to soldier on without him.  Think X-files, if Mulder and Scully each had a supernatural ability of their own.  The BPRD are a rag-tag bunch of misfits who investigate paranormal activities and crimes.

Plague of Frogs is an omnibus edition of the first 3 BPRD graphic novels (The Hollow Earth, The Soul of Venice & other stories and Plague of Frogs.  In other words, it's a real brick of a book.  Now the Hellboy series is notable for two big reasons: the intricate mixture of folklore, myths and legends to create a truly twisted world - and secondly Mike Mignola's crisp art and uncanny ability for drawing nasty monsters.  BPRD plays to the strengths of its parent title and the first storyline, The Hollow Earth, is fantastic.  By the time of the second volume, Mignola was hard at work on both the monthly Hellboy title and the Hollywood film adaptation.  He took a risk and let other teams of writers and artists take on the BPRD for a series of short stories.  As a result these tales are choppy - some brilliant, some no more than brief diversions that just serve to emphasize how strong the first story arc was.

By the last third of the book however, the BPRD have found their groove.  At this point, Mignola is back writing and Guy Davis does the artwork (Dave Stewart colours the pages).  The final story in the omnibus is the titular Plague of Frogs, a story that sets up plot-lines for years to come by introducing the frog-monsters.  And if you feel your eyes rolling around in your head at the mention of the word "frog-monsters", you're not alone.  Believe me, I was very cynical about the notion of a race of mutated frog creatures as the main baddies.  I don't really associate frogs with anything scary or supernatural, but Mignola manages to make even a innocent frog in the background of a panel really unnerving.  And by the time the frog-monsters appear, there's nothing funny about them at all.

Just to recap:

Good Frog

Bad Frog

If there's one writer that's influenced Mignola with these stories, it's H.P. Lovecraft.  Plague of Frogs is rife with cults, conspiracies and acolytes.  The crazed servants of the Ancient Gods walk among us and work tirelessly to prepare the way for their arcane masters, who will awaken before we know it.

And then we're all for it.

Mignola walks the same path as Lovecraft, albeit with less casual racism.  And that's a match made in Heaven Hell.

The Girl With The Midas Touch

I recently finished reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, (2005, first translated into English in 2008).  It's the first book of the best-selling Millenium Trilogy, but the series was originally planned as a series of 10 books featuring the financial journalist Mikhael Blomkvist and his unlikely aide Lisbeth Salander, the be-inked character that gives the book its title.  The novel has been everywhere recently and the Hollywood adaptation has just been released.  So it's fair to say this novel has been on my radar for a while.



I'm pleased to say that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo completely lives up to the hype.  On paper, it  shouldn't work: a thriller about a disgraced journalist on a sabbatical who attempts to solve a 30-year old family mystery sounds dull and dreary.  But Larsson is a master of drawing the reader into the story and it doesn't take long to get hooked.  In Lisbeth Salander, Larsson has created an instantly classic character.  Surprisingly, Salander doesn't play a huge part in this first book (although I think it's safe to guess that she steps into centre-stage later on, as the next two books are also named after her).

Another reason I've finally gotten around to reading this one is that Vertigo comics have just announced their adaptation of the book coming out in November.  If you can't wait that long, then a special preview is going to be published in time for Free Comic Book Day 2012 (May 5th this year, put in your diary now, fellow nerds!).  Vertigo have had mixed success recently with their line of stand-alone crime graphic novels, so it should be interesting to see how this one works out.  It's a major coup for them to get the rights to the novel.  Denise Mina is an interesting choice for a writer (a successful crime novellist, but a less-than-successful comics writer) but I'm more excited about Leonardo Manco's artwork.  Manco's pairing with Mike Carey on Hellblazer is probably one of my favourite comicbooks of all time.

Leonardo Manco's John Constantine, Hellblazer

Here's the cover to Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, coming this Winter:

And - quelle surprise! - they've gone for the sex angle.  In fact if you view the covers of the novels, you can almost see the progression from the original Swedish covers to the slightly sex-ed up but still demure British ones - culminating in the above monstrosity.  Lee Bermejo is one of my favourite cover artists and the above image is great: I just don't feel like it's right for this book.  The original title of the book roughly translates as "Men who hate women" and the book deals unflinchingly with sexual violence.  So, to me at least, it's wrong to play on the sex-angle too much to attract attention to the books.  Interestingly enough, the movie promo images are quite subdued - I expected the American screens to turn Salander into a blonde bomb-shell.  Salander is portrayed by Larsson as a severely damaged individual: not conventionally attractive and it appears the film has stayed true to the character.



The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've been making an effort to update this here blog more regularly.  I'm doing my best at the moment and I'm never short of stuff to ramble on about so, if you're still reading, thank you.  I'm doing my best to redesign this site too (with precious little proper techie knowledge) and make it a bit more attractive and accessible.  To this end, I've also listed this page with Technorati, the techno blog. As part of this, I'm obliged to published the following token code to register this blog: Y27T625J3PQ8.  There we go, all done.

I've also realised that this is a bit of a one-way conversation at the moment, so I thought I'd ask what are you reading right now?  I've altered my blog settings so that anyone can add comments and you no longer have to sign up for a Google or a Blogger profile, so feel free to leave a message.  I might have to revise that when the Viagra adverts start rolling in...

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention:  happy birthday Charles!  You'd have to have been living under a rock for the past year not to have noticed that this year is a special one for Charles Dickens: he was born 200 years ago today.  The BBC have been making sure no-one forgets, with their Dickens series of programmes and today Google have jumped on board.

Walking With Zombies

And now back to our scheduled viewing.  I may have mentioned once or twice how much I love The Walking Dead (Image Comics).  Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard have created a modern classic with their ongoing story of survival in the wake of a zombie apocalypse.  On the surface, the story seems trite and cliched: "something bad" has happened - nobody knows what! - which has left the world overrun with perambulatory carnivorous cadavers and the few humans who remain must fight for their existence.

All horror fans know how that story goes: usually badly, ending with a fade-out to the credits as the zombies finally break through the shopping mall.  After 90 minutes or so of struggle and strife, the characters we've come to know and love inevitably meet their sticky ends in an all-you-can-eat zombie buffet.  Right?

Not so in The Walking Dead.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of the tried-and-tested plotpoints are present here, but this series has been running for 90+ issues.  At a rate of 1 issue a month, that means this story has been unraveling for nearly 8 years.  And it's still being published today.

Playing cowboys and Indians for real: Carl in The Walking Dead

Kirkman's elevator pitch for The Walking Dead was a "zombie movie that doesn't end" and that's what he and his co-creators have produced.  This is a story about the constant pressure of survival and how living through a zombie apocalypse affects the characters in the long-term.  It's about the cumulative psychological traumas and tragedies the main players have endured, the tough choices they've been forced to make and how it all affects them, every day.

Oh, and it's also about how the real threat to survival is other human beings, not the flesh-munching zombies of horror movie fame.

But you already knew that, right?