End of an Era - Bad Machinery

Once upon a time there was a comic named Bobbins, which followed the adventures of a group of friends working at a local listings magazine in the West Yorkshire city of Tackleford. It was… 

End of an era, take 1.

Okay, honestly, it was probably a miracle of the internet that Bobbins got off the ground and a testament to writer-illustrator John Allison's perseverance that it made it through the difficult early period when the illustrator part of his job title was more a function of necessity than of ability. Like many webcomics it took a while for the strip to get its art style in hand, and Allison has bounced back and forth between hand drawn, computer drawn and something inbetween pretty much ever since, with Bad Machinery perhaps his first comic to adopt a consistent style from beginning to end. 

Bobbins ran from late 1998 to early 2002. Leading character Holly West vanished in the Himalayas and returned an unrepentant bitch queen to run the City Limits magazine into the ground. The magazine folded, the cast were laid off and they stepped aside to allow minor characters Tessa Davies and Rachel Montford-Dukakis, journalism students on a course run by former City Limits editor Len Pickering, to shine in their own spin off, Scary Go Round from June 2002.

You could be forgiven for expecting
the comic to be about these characters.

By October, however, Tessa and Rachel were sharing the limelight with Bobbins veterans Shelley Winters, Amy Chilton and Tim Jones. Admittedly, Shelley was dead and revived as a zombie, but you can't keep a good ginger down and she was soon sporting a sassy new pulse; and not the only member of the cast to whom this would happen. Tessa and Rachel disappeared for a while, returning as worshippers of a satanic figure until one of them went mad with power and the other allowed the cult they had formed to burn her in a wicker vole or something. Reminiscing about Scary Go Round is like what I imagine remembering a drug-fuelled wilderness period might be like; you're never entirely sure what really happened. Bobbins-born slacker Ryan died and came back, Amy and Shelley travelled back in time via teapot and gazumped Lennon and McCartney's songwriting credits, and supersexy, semi-competent superspy Fallon Young was definitely there, battling international crime with a sassy look and a Chinese burn.

End of an era, take 2.

We met younger characters via Shelley's sister Erin, including Dark Esther – later the star of Allison's actually published as a comic comic Giant Days – and the Boy (son of the Mother and the Father, despite 'the Boy' being confirmed as a nickname; apparently the Family is hella supportive.) Thanks to Jekyll and Hyde potions and an attempt to sell a difficult class to the devil to help pad the school coffee budget (I was teaching at the time; I'm not sure sticking the 'what goes on teacher training day stays on teacher training day' comic up in the staff room went down so well,) Erin sort of ended up as the Queen of Hell. An exchange trip went perilous when the Boy thwarted an attempt by a Wendigo to terrorise France in the guise of an Easter Bunny with the help of the briefly-retired Easter Bell (you see what I mean, right?)

The even younger characters Shauna Wickle and Lottie de Groote featured in a late comic. They were girl detectives, but were pipped to the post in solving a school mystery by boy detectives Linton, Sonny and Jack, despite the boys not appearing in most of the story. Scary Go Round wrapped in September 2009 and new comic Bad Machinery took up the mantle ten days later, following the feud of these intrepid young mystery solvers as they navigated the perils of big school (with some indirect assistance from reformed slacker-turned-inspirational teacher Ryan Beckwith.)

Again, you could be forgiven to thinking that Jack was going
to be the lead.

And now, in April 2017, Bad Machinery has finally wrapped. There were mystery beasts and giant flying walnuts; occult shenanigans and human douchebaggery; love and rivalry; mods and rockers; an inner city grammar school with at least two Selkies in simultaneous attendance; and an attempt to get banned from every municipal swimming pool in the UK by performing all of the prohibited acts on the pool safety poster in a single swimming session. The comic has been brightening my weekdays for more than seven years – with intermittent breaks for Scary Go Round and Bobbins revivals, the original Giant Days strips, and the story of how Erin came back from Hell at least twice and the Boy (now going by his actual name, Eustace) joined Tackleford's exclusive club for those who have actually died and come back by one means or another – but the adventures of the Mystery Solvers are over.

Well, that is to say that they will no longer be front and centre. In 2002 we thought we were losing Shelley and co. and they couldn't stay away for six months. Against pretty much all expectation, Ryan turned out to have trained as a teacher and was in Bad Machinery almost from the off, and even more unexpectedly, Amy turned out to have married him, and later gave Shauna a job. Erin Winters returned from Hell the first time before Bad Machinery kicked off and has been a thorn in the Mystery Girls' side (and source of befuddled admiration for the Mystery Boys) since.

What this means for the future is that I would be most surprised if this is the last we ever heard of Shauna and Lottie, or Mildred, or the Mystery Boys, or Little Claire never turned up again as we march forward into a bold new era of All-New Scary Go Round.

End of an era.

Reading Roundup - March 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

Once more I've hit my two book target, so I'm a steady one book behind. I may rethink the Big French Summer idea. In March I wrapped up Gothic with White is for Witching and began Mad People with The Bell Jar, which proved to fall alarmingly within my existing headspace. Still no poetry.

I kicked off Audible's Definitive Sherlock Holmes collection, written of course by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and all excellently read and foreworded by national treasure and fellow Old Queen(1), Stephen Fry. It’s fascinating coming back to the Holmes canon as an adult, steeped in the various western traditions of detective fiction, because as detective fiction they are actually a little unsatisfying. It’s the character who is fascinating; his deductions appear more in the manner of a parlour trick, or perhaps the half-technobabbled reasonings of a CSI CSI. A substantial chunk of many of the narratives – especially the first two novels – is given over to the criminal’s own account of their life, and in this too the stories are notable: That a good half of the perpetrators are as sympathetic as their victims, if not more so.

Naturally, the collection begins with A Study in Scarlet, the first of the Holmes novels. This initial foray into the world of the great detective serves to highlight some of the limitations of the formula, especially when it comes to the longer stories, with almost half of the narrative given over to Jefferson Hope's story, and a number of Holmes' deductions based on information not made available to the reader (a complaint which Doyle later owns, with Holmes making the same criticism to Watson, albeit from his perspective of wishing a clear elucidation of his methods.) The story also hinges on a perception of the Mormon faith which buys into pretty much every ill its early detractors thought of it.

A Study in Scarlet is followed by The Sign of the Four, which wraps up the story of Holmes and Watson with the latter going off to get married after what is very clearly only their second case together, whatever later entries may say. Conan Doyle is on firmer ground with the Indian mutiny than the founding of Salt Lake City, but while his Indian characters are very well-drawn for the time, dear lord but the Andaman pygmy Tonga is something else entirely, a near-bestial creature with the same alien ugliness Conan Doyle ascribed to dinosaurs in The Lost World.

This is followed by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first of the short story collections, including such classics as 'A Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' and 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches'. Even at this stage in the proceedings, a certain repetition was apparent in the stories. The Speckled Band and 'A Case of Identity' both feature women grievously misused by stepfathers to control their fortunes, with the latter featuring one of the cruellest devices in the canon, while 'The Five Orange Pips' is notable for featuring the Ku Klux Klan in much the same role as the Mormons in A Study in Scarlet, as a ruthless secret society employing mysterious, inescapable assassins to punish deserters.

'The Boscombe Valley Mystery' is one of the stories in which the conceit of the narrative most conflicts with the narrative itself. It refers to events which Holmes conspired to conceal, as the guilty party was dying and the innocent not at threat, which feels odd given that Watson is apparently publishing this well within the lifetime of most of those involved. It is especially noteworthy as on several other occasions he refers to matters that he cannot discuss, and the untimely death of Helen Stoner freeing him to speak of the events of the Speckled Band.

'The Man with the Twisted Lip', 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' and 'The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor' are lighter affairs, with no murder involved in any of the cases. 'The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb' is the first of a number of stories in which Holmes addresses a problem before ever visiting the scene (arguably; he never leaves London in 'The Five Orange Pips' either, but he had planned to.) It is also referred to as one of only two which Watson brought to his attention, although this is soon overturned in the next collection, and features a gang of villains who get away while Holmes is rallying the official force. This is another feature we will see again.

Finally, 'The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet' is notable for having a female villain (‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ has a female member of the gang, but she breaks ranks to aid the victim.) As is often the case with such characters in the Holmes canon, she gets away scot free, but with predictions of future unhappiness as her comeuppance.

I also managed to clear up The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes this month, which means everything up to the death of Sherlock Holmes is covered. As The Adventures begins with the unequivocal classic ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and “the Woman”, so The Memoirs opens with ‘Silver Blaze’; perhaps a less known story overall, but featuring the original curious incident of the dog in the night time. ‘The Yellow Face’ has a similar deal to ‘The Noble Bachelor’, with a young widow and a second marriage, although here it is a half-black child whose appearance disrupts the happy routine, and I can’t believe that it wasn’t pretty progressive that not only Holmes and Watson but the husband in the case accept the child completely. Similarly, ‘The Stock-Broker’s Clerk’ treads similar, but not identical, ground to ‘The Red-Headed League’, with a gang providing a too-good-to-be-true job as a means of getting someone out of the way for a time.

‘The “Gloria Scott”’ and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ treat of early cases. The first is notable for the solution being entirely provided by the written narrative of the victim rather than by any deduction of Holmes’, while the latter once more features a female villain who vanishes into the distance to a presumed life of doubt and fear. ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire’ pits Holmes against the country set, while another classic, ‘The Crooked Man’ returns to familiar territory with an old offence from India leading to a tragic ending. ‘The Resident Patient’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter’ each feature a puzzle that Holmes successfully solves, but too late to save a life, and the lack of sympathy for the dead man in the latter story is quite shocking. In both cases, the criminal gang involved vanishes into the wind; by this point it is clear that Conan Doyle has a limited interest in arrest and trial scenes.

‘The Naval Treaty’ sees Holmes act for the good of Queen and Country, and his client, and features one of the strongest puzzles in the canon to this point, with pretty much every step of the deduction available for the reader to follow. Finally, in this collection, Fry brings the vital catch in the voice to the closing lines of ‘The Final Problem’, as Holmes gives his life – or so it seems – to end the career of the Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty. Given that it recounts the crowning glory of his career as a detective, ‘The Final Problem’ is notable for not giving any details of the chain of reasoning which led Holmes to his nemesis.

In between chapters of Holmes, I caught a couple of short stories by Neil Gaiman which follow the protagonist of American Gods, Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon. ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ sees our hero in Scotland on a roundabout return route from Norway, walking the walks and seeing the sights, when he is offered a lucrative job acting as bouncer for a bunch of posh folks from England having a party in a local manse. The locals are an odd bunch and Shadow is having weird dreams, but he chooses to take the job, against the advice of the enigmatic barmaid Jenny and finds himself caught up in an ancient struggle between men and monsters, with no-one to say truly which is worse. Then ‘Black Dog’ brings him to England, and a rural couple with a secret to keep.

The two shorts have many similarities: The rural settings, the old traditions, and of course Shadow’s relentless bad luck with women. Critically, Gaiman captures the difference of feeling between Britain and America. Assuming by its popularity there that his depiction of the roadside faith of America is accurate, he does the same for British folk beliefs, especially those in ‘Black Dog’, practiced slightly furtively by unassuming folk, almost more as habit than anything else. As always, Gaiman as author and reader is an excellent storyteller and the stories are easy to listen to several times over.

The last book for this month is Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which is one I’d been meaning to read for a while. This was the audiobook, but it’ read by Peter S. Beagle himself. As in the Rankin Bass adaptation, it tells the story of a nameless, ageless unicorn who realises that she is the only one of her kind left in the world. She goes in search of the others and learns that a cruel king has imprisoned them all with the aid of a supernatural bull, and with the assistance of an erratic wizard, a cynical romantic and a larval hero she clashes with the King for the fate of magic and her people. In fact, one of the things that really strikes me about the book is just how faithful the animated adaptation (screenwritten by Beagle) actually was. The main difference is Beagle’s cheerfully anachronistic narrative language. Reminiscent of TH White, it takes the novel’s setting from mediaeval fantasy to the same sort of timeless Neverland as The Once and Future King.

Within this Neverland, the story of The Last Unicorn is one of a world of failing wonder. The disappearance of the unicorns leaves a world that, for all its dragons and ogres and heroes, lacks a certain sparkle. Heroing is a job; the tropes of romance are performed in a perfunctory fashion. It’s fantasy as mundanity, and beautifully done; the book is a classic for a reason.

(1) I maintain that this is the correct term for an alumnus of Queens' College.