The End of an Era - The Adventures of Doctor McNinja

In 2004, Christopher Hastings began publishing The Adventures of Doctor McNinja online. A few years back, he started getting professional comic-writing gigs from Marvel, and about a year ago announced that he would be winding up the story of Doctor McNinja.

As his name suggests, Doctor McNinja is a doctor from a family of ninjas (specifically, Irish Ninjas(1), although his mother is Jewish by birth,) who, having abandoned the family business of assassination and pursuing memetic fueds with pirates, heals the sick and fights - and also, if we're honest, commits a lot of - crime in the city of Cumberland, Maryland(2). Initially facing an eclectic gaggle of threats such as copyright trolling fast food clown Donald McBonald, 'American Ninja' Frans Rayner, velociraptor-riding palaeontologists, vengeful pirates and Dracula, he eventually found his nemesis in the form of King Radical, a super cool crimelord intent on making the world a more radical place.

After travelling into space and into the future with Cumberland's mayor, astronaut and chrononaut Chuck Goodrich, and thwarting Radical's attempts to merge the world with his own home in the Radical Lands, McNinja entered into a final duel with his enemy as King Radical managed to become President and used the power of his office to exact petty and extravagant revenge on those who had thwarted him over the years(3). It is a fight that will cost McNinja his clone brother, his family and his very identity; and perhaps his life.

Ninjas can't grab you if you're on fire. Tru fax.

The twelve years of The Adventures of Dr McNinja is probably as textbook an example of Cerebus Syndrome as you'll find without having to read past the first couple of volumes of Cerebus itself and into the crazy stuff(4). It runs from a weird little comic about a doctor who is also a ninja to something with a coherent arc plot and goes to some pretty dark places by the end. And yes, it's still about a doctor who is also a ninja, who fights a man who wears a crown and rides a motorbike and dreams of filling the world with dinosaur people and introducing proper, radical tennis, whose secretary is a gorilla named Judy, who studied with a clone of Benjamin Franklin and whose youthful ward has a resplendent moustache. It's been a real blast, and if you haven't done so already, maybe you should check out the archive; it's substantial, yet finite, and that's not something you can say of many webcomics.

Also, he does a team up with Axe Cop.

(1) While the 'Mc' prefix is more commonly associated with Scots names, the two countries share a lot of cultural roots, and 'O'Ninja' just doesn't pop the same way.
(2) By long-standing agreement, the local police won't pursue him for any crime as long as he can reach his office and call 'base'.
(3) Well, this feels ominously prescient now.
(4) Cerebus Syndrome is when a work gets more serious over time, rather then the author having a complete psychological collapse, although that also happened with Cerebus the Aardvark.

The Dark is Rising

For years I thought that circle on
my sister's copy was a stain.

Having recently suffered a self-inflicted viewing of the film known in the States as The Seeker, I decided I owed myself a return to the source: Susan Cooper's 'The Dark is Rising'. I first encountered this in a semi-dramatised reading that I borrowed from Fleet public library on cassette (I would make a joke about how the current generation basically don't know what cassettes are, if I weren't so concerned that the next won't know what a public library is,) and then borrowed the book and the rest of the series from my sister. Consequently, I have always viewed this as the first book in the Dark is Rising sequence, and while this is accurate in terms of neither internal chronology nor publication order, it is kind of true, in that prior to its writing, Cooper had no thought of a sequence, while after she had a complete plan for the other three books and the final page pre-written*.

As he turns 11, Will Stanton learns that he is an Old One, a being not merely human and the inheritor of great power and wisdom. As the last of the Old Ones to be born he completes the circle and is destined to seek the six Signs of the Light, which together hold the power to drive back the rising Dark and preserve the world for a little while longer. As Christmas passes and the cold, dark days take hold, the power of the Dark waxes, and only steadfast courage will carry Will through.

'The Dark is Rising' is the antithesis of more recent YA fantasy. Largely unconcerned with - but not heedless of - the trials of adolescence, it is built upon the lyrical flow of folklore and not on the dynamic beats of adventure fiction. Will's virtues are essentially passive - endurance, courage, and ultimately patience - and much of the story follows a course long set in which Will seems almost incidental, but this is not because he is irrelevant, but because Will and his story are but part of a greater tapestry.

I mean, seriously? Did the prop master get bored of
mandalas?

I love 'The Dark is Rising', both the book and the wider sequence, which is one of the reasons I hated the film so much (the other being that it's rubbish.) I am however grateful to The Seeker for giving me the impetus to go back and re-read an old favourite.

* And all respect due to JK Rowling, it's way better than the epilogue of Harry Potter.

Good Omens

About six months ago I posted a list of ten books that had affected me, one of which was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens. With the recent passing of Sir Terry from this mortal coil to the etheric whisper of internet headers, I decided that I wanted to hit the canon again, and to start with one of my favourites.

At some basic level, Good Omens is a pastiche of The Omen (the original one,) complete with a Satanic conspiracy replacing the son of a US ambassador with the antichrist, filtered through a comedy of errors that is forever hovering one legs akimbo sight gag from a Carry On movie. An angel and a demon, both of whom have gone rather native, strive to save the world, while a moment of distraction leaves the antichrist to grow up as a perfectly normal boy. As the preordained moment approaches, the forces of Heaven and Hell, of England's once-proud Witchfinder Army, and of the well-informed descendants of Cromwellian prophetess Agnes Nutter, descend on the Oxfordshire village of Tadfield to do battle (because anyone who considers themselves to be a force is inevitably looking for a fight.)

Pratchett and Gaiman occasionally talked about a sequel - the title 668: The Neighbour of the Beast was touted sometimes - but in the end it never happened; partly because Gaiman moved full-time to the states, and partly because they never settled on the story. I'm rather glad of that, because Good Omens is something of a perfect storm, uniting two authors who were really just getting started in such as way that I believe it tempered both of their styles and signaled a sea-change in their individual writing, while at the same time producing something priceless.

Seriously; about 70% of all images resulting from a search for
'Good Omens' returns fan art of Aziraphael and Crowley, and
perhaps a quarter of that is explicitly shippy. I'm sure you
wouldn't have to look far to find one of those intertwining wing
and no clothes poses so popular with people who ship winged
humanoids and have any ounce of artistic ability.

Good Omens is a very character-driven apocalyptic narrative, and the characters are rather wonderful, from Adam's small and disorganised 'pack of ringleaders' to the bikers of the Apocalypse, and of course the fandom's favourite ship, Crowley and Aziraphael*. The authors also manage to slip in some social commentary - much of it a little dated now** - and even to get in a dig at people who wear sunglasses when it's dark, which in 1990 was only just starting to be a thing.

It is also unashamedly funny and, and this is important, doesn't pretend not to be or to have been during the big, dramatic denouement. It doesn't go all grimdark, and yet manages to have a sense of peril for characters the reader has grown to like. It may also count as one of the first truly transatlantic novels, its wry footnotes peppered with explanatory notes for the American reader which poke fun at the American and British people in more or less equal part.

In case I'm being too oblique, I love this book: always have done, still do. The only disappointment for me on this reading was the audiobook version I switched too while I was walking. It wasn't bad, but they did a Radio 4 adaptation just before Christmas*** and so I was disappointed to only get the one voice. All in all, I think I'm more of an audio play kind of guy.

* Because nothing gets shippers hot for a couple more than adversity, and what greater adversity can there be than explicitly stating that they are sexless beings? For myself I can see the sense behind the pairing, but they are more of an old married couple, rather than a white hot sexy pairing.
** Similarly, any technical references are pretty antiquated, from the wonder of a car with a phone in to printed manuals, and British fast food has come a long way since 1990.
*** Which is well worth checking out.

Something Rotten

After serving two years as the head of Jurisfiction, Thursday Next feels ready to return to reality and try to have her husband reinstantiated by the treacherous Goliath Corporation. She comes back to Swindon to discover that Britain's most sinister multinational corporate behemoth is in cahoots with fictional fascist politician Yorrick Kaine, and that their bid to seize power while switching to a faith-based business model could have dire implications for the world.

On top of all that, she's got a two year old who only speaks Lorem Ipsum and a certain literary Dane to safeguard though a self-examinatory sabbatical.

The fourth book in the first Thursday Next trilogy was in many ways Jasper fforde's first foray into the dazzling light of superstar publishing. It was also something of a test, with many readers feeling that the madly conceptual The Well of Lost Plots had been a step down from Lost in a Good Book. The result is, for my money, pretty damn good, and certainly holds up to a second reading. It is particularly interesting (if you're me) to look out the changes made since book one. (For example, various chapter headings have referred to the assassination and later attempted assassination of President-for-Life George Formby, who here dies of natural causes.)

Something Rotten brings the story to a fairly natural close, sufficiently so that I was surprised to see Thursday reappear a few years later in First Among Sequels. In many ways it is the conclusion of a trilogy beginning with Lost in a Good Book than a narrative sequel to The Eyre Affair, which comes across as a slightly tentative proof of concept in retrospect, and that is a good trilogy. Once I buy the remaining books on Kindle, I'll give my thoughts on the next Next trilogy (including a first reading of The Woman Who Died A Lot, and perhaps more importantly a second reading of One of Our Thursdays is Missing.)

Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots

Thursday Next is feeling pretty good about herself. Not only has she married the love of her life with a baby on the way, but her career is going pretty well and she has successfully given the finger to the almighty Goliath Corporation. Sadly, Goliath does not take defeat well, and decide to blackmail her, with the very existence of her husband Landen as their bargaining chip. To make matters worse, her revision of the ending of Jane Eyre is coming under scrutiny from Jurisfiction, a police force which exists inside fiction, her memory is under attack, her life is continually imperiled by coincidence and, just to cap off a bad week, all life on Earth is about to be reduced to an unidentifiable goo.

So, yeah, there is a lot going on in Jasper fforde's sequel to The Eyre Affair. Coming back to the series, I'm struck by the fact that while the first book, while not bad, mostly had novelty going for it, Lost in a Good Book is a more assured work which stands better on its merits for a second reading. The eradication of Landen and the insidious threat of Aornis Hades are both genuinely disturbing devices, and despite only a couple of appearances, there is a genuine tragic nobility to the Neanderthals.

Lost in a Good Book also gives us the character of Miss Haversham. Most of the Jurisfiction agents are a delight, but Miss Havisham is the pip. Combining elements of her personality in Great Expectations with a gung ho, no nonsense attitude to policing, fforde creates something altogether wonderful, at the same time faithfully literary and more than the sum of her parts.

This was the last volume to be widely published
in the original cover style (this is not that style),
making it impossible for me to collect a matching
set without rebuying. I'm kind of glad I switched to
Kindle.

Moving swiftly on (thank you Kindle omnibus edition, even if you do make it a little more difficult to crossreference the footnoterphone conversations and scenes,) in The Well of Lost Plots Thursday is on the run from Goliath, and seeks sanctuary in the one place they can't find her: In fiction. Taking a bit part in Jasper fforde's unpublished detective novel Cavendish Heights via the Character Exchange Programme, she is hoping for a quiet life, but soon finds herself drawn into Jurisfiction politics surrounding the launch of UltraWord(TM), an entirely new reading technology. Moreover, she has a parting gift from Aornis to cope with, if she ever wants to see her still-nonexistent husband again.

The Well of Lost Plots is the most solidly bookworldian of the first three Thursday Next books, and develops the high-concept of bookjumping with concepts including the inability of fictionals to detect scent, and unpronouncable words being easily spoken in a world where all sensory input and dialogue is actually text-based. This was my favourite of the three on first reading, and remains so; I am still in love with the concepts as much as anything, and it represents the work of a writer who is both fresh and matured.

The Eyre Affair

I'm sure that car was originally described as being
painted with Escher lizards, but the Kindle version
is just stripey. I wonder if ebook technology has
finally allowed Text Grand Central to issue proper
rolling upgrades (as promised in print editions of
the Thursday Next series.)

In a world almost, but not quite entirely unlike ours, Thursday Next works for SO-27, the specialist branch of the police force that deals with crimes involving literary heritage. A veteran of the ongoing (in 1985) Crimean war, she is called upon to pursue infernal supervillain and former English Lit professor Acheron Hades when he steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and starts bumping off minor characters. When he turns his attention to Jane Eyre, Thursday knows that it is only a matter of time before England's cultural milieu is irreparably damaged. After all, everyone loves Jane Eyre (even if most of them do think it would be better if Jane and Rochester had married at the end.)

I first read The Eyre Affair in print... many years ago, and have since recommended it to various people, to the point of buying copies for two friends whom I thought would enjoy it. Coming back to it in a Kindle edition, I'm less wowed than I was back then. I still enjoyed it and the writing is still witty and pacy, but I suspect that novelty was a big part of its impact. Having moved on to the later books (I bought it in a three pack with Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots,) I find it to be a good start, but ultimately not as strong on its own as it was back then. This saddens me somewhat, although I;m finding the others good enough not to write off the entire canon based on a lukewarm re-reading.

As an aside, it's fascinating to read in ebook format a series which was originally written for purely print media and which postulated the advance of book technology to allow rolling updates and DVD-style special features; in short, something akin to an ebook, but with real pages.

This has been a brief review, I know, but I will probably add some additional thoughts after I wrap up The Well of Lost Plots.

A Meme: Ten books that have affected me

A meme, picked up from Sally Brewer: Ten books that have affected me.

1. The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper
   This is one of the absolute best series I have ever read; I adore it, and despite my calling being to watch shitty movies, I have resisted ever seeing the movie of The Dark is Rising, because seriously, fuck that for a lark.
   The Dark is Rising is built around Arthurian mythology and its own cosmology involving the long war between the Light and the Dark. The servants of the Dark are manipulative, using humans to their own ends... and so do the Old Ones, servants of the Light. It was one of the first series I read in which magical power was not an unalloyed boon, and I think that was what I most took away from it. 
2. The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander
   Another series with its roots in Welsh mythology, The Chronicles of Prydain is high fantasy, rather than the modern fantasy of The Dark is Rising, complete with a giant cat and an oracular pig. It was also made into a movie that I haven't seen, but I hear that one isn't all that bad. The stories involved several instances of sacrifice, and I think that's what I took away from it. 
3. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
   One of the big names of fantasy, and one of my early influences. It's basically the ur-text for heroic fantasy, and one of the notable things about The Chronicles of Prydain was that it wasn't a Rings clone. The influence of Rings built up slowly for me, in part as a result of reading around it. Like Prydain, it's very much about the end of an age and the birth of the time of the ordinary human. A lot of these books are pretty melancholy. 
4. The Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
   I don't include The Amber Spyglass here. I liked that one, but the first two were - to my mind - better. Given that Spyglass doesn't follow the pattern set out in the front of either of the earlier novels, I've always figured that Pullman made a lot of changes to the plan while he was writing, and my feeling is that it could have done with a little more polish. Nonetheless, I like Spyglass and I love the first two.
   What I take from these... Okay, mostly it's the panzerbjorn. Who doesn't love a bear in armour. 
5. Inkheart, by Cornelia Funke
   
   A number of these entries are relatively recent books, and most of them have more or less disappointing movie adaptations.
   Inkheart is a story about storytellers who can read characters to life out of books, and some of the less savoury characters who have escaped from the eponymous novel-within-a-novel as a result. It's weirdly meta, and extremely dark, where the film was... a little murky in places. 
6. Mortal Engines, by Philip Pullman
   This is a book that could make a great film, but is more likely to make a terribly disappointing one. It's another dark fantasy, this one couched in a post-apocalyptic tale of a mobile, predatory London. It's the imagery that got me with this one; the vast, hungry cities and the skeletal, tech-undead Stalkers. 
7. The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones
   I was a latecomer to DWJ, having read and not enjoyed one of her novels as a child (I know, right, but no-one is perfect and it was basically a musing on mortality and lost childhood, which didn't much suit me at 10 or whatever I was). Of the first batch that I read, The Homeward Bounders was the one that really caught at my mind. I think that what makes it stand out is the central idea that hope is a trap. So often, hope is held up as the last light in the darkness, but the Bounders are imprisoned by it, caught in a perpetual struggle and unable to escape because they believe that there is a way out. 
8. Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
   Everyone has their own touchstone in the Pratchett canon, and mine is Wyrd Sisters. I love it; I love the Shakespearean references and the Marx Brothers bits, and the witches and Death at the absolute height of their powers. Love it. 
9. Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
   
   However, this for a long time my absolute favourite work by either Pratchett or Gaiman. I feel that it is the first great work by either of them, because Gaiman moderated Pratchett's early whimsy and Pratchett moderated Gaiman's early pretension, and that as a result they both emerged from the collaboration writing better books going forward. 
10. Whales on Stilts, by M.T. Anderson
    If you don't know why I love this book, I guarantee that you're assuming that the title is symbolic.
    It isn't. 

On reading - Choices

Reading involves choices; has done since long before we passed the point that a single human being could hope to read everything ever written, even in their own language. So, what are the choices that I make when selecting my reading material, and what informs them?

These days, I confess that I shy away from ongoing series, although that used to be a shoe-in for me. Of course, I used to ask essentially one question: Is it on the SF/Fantasy shelf at the Fleet Library. That was how I ended up reading Battlefield Earth, the Atlan saga (featuring a female protagonist whose sole contribution to anything seemed to be to bounce haplessly around the landscape like a rogue billiard ball, putting out for anyone who seized her roughly and then pining about them when they got killed/bored/forgotten by the plot) and just about everything the Davids Eddings and Gemmell ever wrote.

Why have I changed my modus operandi? Well, aside from the evidence above, Robert Jordan has a lot to answer for in that respect; not because he died before he finished The Wheel of Time, but because it was notably the first series in which boredom overtook the completist demands of my egg-hoarding lizard brain and I decided that I just could not be arsed. And yet, I still kinda want to know how it ends; thus my new policy. If I stick to self-contained novels, then if it's shit I can find out what happens without having to slog through three more volumes.

If I do see a promising series, I will usually look for a standalone by the same author to test the waters.

I still focus a lot on SF and Fantasy, because that's my jam, but crime fiction is in the ascendant with me. On the plus side, since most mass market paperbacks go for £5.99, £6.99 or £7.99, regardless of size, fantasy gives you a lot of paper for the price. SF and crime tend towards more modest volumes.

I read a lot of children's and YA fiction, having got into it very much as a teacher. Honestly, I enjoy the absence of the tawdry, pointless sex scenes which seem to be de rigueur in books for grown ups these days (and that's another shift in my tastes since I was a teenager).

Moreover, there is just so much stuff out there that I go more by recommendations than I used to, although I have to be careful with that. My mother recommended Angela's Ashes, and I don't think I've ever completely forgiven her.

I am also a full-on convert to the Kindle, for the simple reason that it's much easier to read on a bus, and with my smartphone my books and music are in the same place. The mobile telecommunications aspect is kind of a fringe benefit.

So, Kindle books, ideally non-series, in the SF, fantasy and crime genres; with some exceptions, naturally.

I also don't read as much as I maybe should, which makes me sad. Perhaps when I am commuting by train I will get more into the rhythm of the thing.

Oblivion

And so it comes to this, the final volume in a series that I started reading some twenty years ago. Back then, I picked up a copy of The Devil's Doorbell in my school library, knowing Anthony Horowitz only from the Diamond Brothers series of comic noir detective stories. The gripping horror novel that followed took me by surprise, and may have been responsible for my interest in horror thereafter (I hadn't much cared for it before).

I devoured the book, and the next two in the Pentagram series: The Night of the Scorpion and The Silver Citadel (which also provided the name for a recurring antagonist for my PCs - Evelyn Carnate). Sadly, the school library never picked up a copy of The Day of the Dragon and the fifth book in the series was never published at all.

I had more or less given up on ever knowing how the story ended, when Anthony Horowitz - better known now for the Alex Rider series of teenage spy novels - published a book called Raven's Gate, which I was asked to review for Write Away, and much to my surprise I found that - with the exception of a few character names, and some extra mobile phones and modern references - what I was reading was The Devil's Doorbell.

Five books later, and with some changes - minor and major - to the original material, we come to the missing conclusion: Oblivion, in which the Five - five children with incredible powers, destined to stand against the Old Ones - must reach the final confrontation in Oblivion, the fortress of the King of the Old Ones, in the frozen wastes of Antarctica.

In a bold move, Horowitz splits up his protagonists and runs four-to-five stories in turn throughout the book, one told in the first person - a major shift for the series - by a new character who, ultimately, is revealed as the overall narrator of the series in their in-universe form as the history of the Five. None of the narratives are pretty, and most are in fact extremely dark, as the Five find themselves jumped forward to a world in the grip of the Old Ones, full of misery and much inflicted by humanity upon itself.

The story winds through adventure, fear, loss and betrayal, and each of the Five is forced to draw on their own strengths to win through, even if the strength that they need is the strength to fall. There is also a good mechanism to motivate the villains without making them seem foolish: Killing one of the Five replaces them at once with an alternative version who is an unknown quantity, thus they seek instead to capture them, with the risks that that entails.

It's a strong ending to a strong series.

My Life in Reviews

So, this page here is a list of the many reviews I wrote for Write Away (now Just Imagine) when I was teaching. I stopped when I stopped teaching; having begun in my first English Lit training class with a copy of Across the Nightingale Floor and another of Shadowmancer, which I never even managed to finish, I think it was too tied up in my mind with being a teacher.

NOTE: Well, apparently Write Away doesn't do reviews anymore, so that link is a dead duck. Ah well; brief was my glory.

Retrolective: From the Ashes

This was, barring a couple of Spider-Man comics I stumbled on as a young boy (I was unimpressed, although largely because anything with Black Cat in is too predicated on the UST between Spidey and not-Catwoman to appeal to a six year old), my first brush with Superhero comics. I was fourteen or fifteen (I know, right, but seriously for years I had literally no idea that either Superman or Batman had been in comics first) and I found it in the library. I wasn't new to comics - I'd been reading Marvel UK's slightly expanded Transformers run for years and read through most of Judge Dredd: Cursed Earth during rehearsals for Oliver! - and I knew of the X-Men in passing from a choose-your-own-adventure book I'd picked up - also in the library - which hadn't been very good, but which had intrigued me enough to check out this comic, or rather trade paperback.

I must have read it cover to cover three or four times in a couple of days.

Having no background with the ongoing series, I had no idea what the Phoenix Force was or who Jean Grey had been, but that was part of what intrigued me; the fact that this seemed to be part of a much larger world. Part of the reason I read and re-read was to pick up on as much detail as I could. It also contained challenging storylines - Madeleine Pryor might just be confusing, but the same volume has the introduction of the Morlocks, including Storm's fight to the death against Callisto, one random mention of Colossus's sister having been kidnapped by demons and, best of all, Rogue's original face turn.

The latter begins with Rogue - short hair, modest green outfit - showing up at the Mansion after absorbing Ms Marvel's powers and conscience, only to get punched out through the roof by Marvel (now called Binary), which is awesome, followed by a clash with Silver Samurai's minions alongside a highly doubtful Wolverine which contained such a critical mass of sparky, antagonistic banter (ending with Rogue testing her newly-gained invulnerability almost to destruction and Wolverine thanking her with a super symbolic kiss to transfer his healing factor to her temporarily) that I've never entirely forgiven either Gambit or Jean Grey for being their official main crushes in the wider narrative.

The conclusion of the main storyline (a wizard did it, or at least a mutant with illusion powers) was actually a bit weak compared to the rest of the book, but this was still the one that got me into superheroes and comics in a big way.

I should probably write something about Transformers at a later date, as that was a big influence, and possibly the X-Men cartoons on My Life as a Doge...