Unfinished Business: the Paris Incident

Years ago, in an unwisely-timed exercise, I decided I'd take part in the first 24 Hour Comics Day, and planned to write, draw, and letter a full 24-page comic in 24 hours flat. Frankly, this would have been a hell of a task at the best of times, but it was ludicrously ambitious on a day when I was on call at work. Suffice to say that the first two pages weren't yet finished and the next two barely laid when, less than three hours into my mission, the beeper rang and I found myself spending pretty much the whole day dealing with one of the two worst plumbing crises I ever experienced whilst working in halls.

By the time I had time to myself, the day was nearly over and the moment had -- I felt -- passed. Still, I thought, I'll do it again someday. And then life got in the way, as it does, and things got forgotten, and I've hardly taken up my pen in years, barring the odd Christmas card, say. I've not even done any life drawing in more than a year.

Getting back to the drawing board is something I'm looking forward to doing in a few months. Not just yet, though.

Without giving away the story, in the summer of 1999 I was travelling around Europe as was my wont back then, and on a train between Luxembourg and Frankfurt met a rather lively American girl with whom I wound up staying in Paris some weeks later. This was, frankly, a very foolish thing to have done; as the mother of a friend of mine put it a year later, when my friend and I were planning on going travelling together, 'Oh, I'm glad you're going with Thirsty. He's very responsible. Well, apart from the Paris Incident.'

Names and likenesses may have been changed. I'm just saying.

Just looking at the first page now, I'm mystified as to why I faked the background behind Jeana's head in quite that way in the final panel.That's rubbish, and probably took ages. While the way my speech balloons start wobbly and stabilise as I wake up is quite nice, it's pretty obvious that my lettering could do with serious work. Still, the top-tier sequence isn't bad at showing how the colour leeched from everything that morning. And that was indeed where I sat as the eclipse happened, having taken an overnight train from Barcelona; I had a few photos from that trip in a photo album that was to hand.

And then the water system went berserk.

This is more like it, I think. I'm really pleased with the panel where Jeana walks away -- there's a nicely isolated feel to it, and I think I got the posture and lighting spot on. Actually, I'm a bit suspicious of how good it is, and rather hope I didn't copy it from somewhere. I must have just googled for shots of the train and Frankfurt station, and I'm pretty sure that there are legions of train nerds out there who'd scream at me for having depicted a variety of train that didn't exist at the time, but given that the clock was ticking, and I was well into my second hour at the time I drew it, I don't think I can be faulted too much for that

Anyway, when the slate is finally clear, one thing I want to do is to go to Paris, preferably with a sane female friend, and to wander round the city for a couple of days, visiting all the places I went with Jeana and taking lots and lots of reference shots, so I can try this again. And maybe next time I'll start with a 24-hour comic, and then give some thought to building it up into something more substantial.

It's a good story, after all, as a fair few of my friends can testify. Not a short one, but a good one. I think it might be worth putting down on paper.

Even if Johann Hari said he knew where the bodies were buried...

Would anyone believe him?

I'm afraid I've had no sympathy for Johann Hari over the last few months; indeed, uncharitable though I've surely been to think such a way, I've found it hard to look on his predicament with anything other than a cynical sense of schadenfreude. Yes, I know he's not well now, but that aside, the last few months have simply struck me as a shoddy journalist getting something that's been coming to him for a long time.

We all know the story, of course, of how a couple of bloggers noticed how Hari's interviews, as published, seemed to have been a hybrid of original and previously published material -- the latter being books and interviews conducted by other people, in the main. Then we had Tim Worstall reeling off a litany of Hari's fallacious claims, and the Spectator's Nick Cohen describing some very peculiar experiences on Wikipedia in connection with a ridiculous review by Hari of a book Cohen had written.  David Allen Green, then, began digging further into Wikipedia, exploring the deeds of the peculiarly obscure 'David Rose', who was so keen to promote the brilliance of Hari, and who appeared to have a sideline in underage incest pornography.

Why does one chubby journalist matter?

The dominoes began to fall, as the extent of Hari's behaviour became clear. Smart people pointed out that given Hari's influence as a journalist, real answers and serious action were called for:

'I said before about Hari that I didn’t think he was a cynical liar out for the main chance, but a well-intentioned bullshitter. That’s why I quoted Peter Oborne, whose book is excellent on the subject of Good Cause Corruption, with particular reference to the career of Mr Tony Blair. If you have moral right and a good cause on your side, then surely inconvenient facts are just a distraction. Accuracy is pedantry. This is positively dangerous from politicians, with dodgy dossiers and the like potentially leading to lots of people getting killed. Which is why you need a press that’s honest, accurate, even pedantic. When journalism falls prey to Good Cause Corruption, it just becomes propaganda. Hari himself once said that he viewed his job as being a paid advocate for the causes he believed in, which might indicate some of the issues behind his journalism.'

Hari is a classic example of somebody who thinks facts and accuracy don't matter as long as you believe your cause is just.* He wrote a particularly offensive and inaccurate piece around the time of last year's Papal visit to England and Scotland, a piece which was carried far and wide, going no small way towards creating the poisonous atmosphere that surrounded that trip. As Caroline Farrow put it:

'This article was syndicated everywhere, even the Daily Mail published it, and it was responsible for a surge of criticism. Catholics everywhere were dismayed by Hari’s distortions, his hysteria and his patronising language. Hari’s implications were clear. Catholics were obviously very stupid if kindly and generally benign individuals who didn’t understand their own religion. Hari would condescendingly deign to explain to them what the Gospels really meant, what Jesus would really think and he would have absolutely no problem with them being Catholics, so long as they didn’t agree with a large portion of their Church’s teaching and they attempted to get their leader arrested on his say-so. “Catholics, I implore you” he bleated. If Catholics didn’t agree with him, they were either ignorant, bigots or defenders of child abuse, probably a mixture of all three, but to be despised at any rate.'

Others dismantled the article directly, whereas I used a day sick in bed to write an insanely long Facebook post so any friends of mine who were being fed lies by the likes of Hari, Richard Dawkins, Terry Sanderson, or Peter Tatchell could actually start to look at the facts for themselves.

I wrote a piece about him last February, but never posted it, mainly because I'd wanted to accompany it with an illustration I couldn't find. It strikes me that tonight, in the aftermath of Hari's mealy-mouthed and weasel-worded 'apology', might be a timely opportunity to post it, tweaked ever so slightly...

* * * * * * * * *

Unearthed from the Unused Pile...

I have a friend who once described his politics views as being left-wing, but not to the extent that he's able to read the Independent without occasionally wincing. Granted, the Independent is a mixed bag, and its columnists can be far from progressive in their opinions, and I'm not sure there's a better foreign correspondent out there than Robert Fisk, but I think my friend may have had the likes of Johann Hari in mind.

I'm no fan of Hari. I think he's a bore, and a sloppy one to boot, a journalist with no respect for factual accuracy. I don't think I've ever read a column by him that hasn't had me gritting my teeth in frustration at his claims. A few weeks ago, for instance, in an article which posed a decent question in response to one of Melanie Phillips' screeds, he claimed that:

'In every human society that has ever existed, and ever will, some 3 to 10 percent of the population has wanted to have sex with their own gender.' 

The thing is, of course, that this statement is completely speculative. It's impossible to make such a claim with any degree of historical certainty. We have no statistical evidence for the prevalence of homosexuality in any societies other than, well, our own one for just the last half century or so. Hari's claim might well be right, but it's utterly unprovable.

The same article claims that Christian religious texts mandate bigotry against gay people -- even though there was no concept of 'gay people' or indeed of homosexuality as a distinct phenomenon in Biblical times, and then, in a rhetorical flourish claims those same religious texts that allegedly mandate bigotry against gay people, also laud a god who feeds small children to bears.


Elisha and the Bears
Now,  I'm not for a moment saying that 2 Kings 2:23-24 isn't what a friend of mine has called 'a challenging passage', but it simply doesn't describe God feeding small children to bears.

It describes an episode in which the prophet Elisha, the disciple of Elijah, is accosted by a large gang of youths. The words the King James Bible translates as young children are the Hebrew words nah-ar and yeh-led; the former word means 'boys' and could be used to describe children, servants, soldiers, and even a man such as Isaac in his late twenties; the later means 'young men'. Elisha was being harassed by dozens of these young men. He prays for assistance, and two bears appear, attacking and mauling 42 of the youths; the sense of this is that were more than forty-two youths, and there's nothing in the story that says that the forty-two died.

Like I said, it's not an easy story to ponder, but it's certainly not a case of small children being fed to bears.

I think the great Brian Bolland can be forgiven for getting the details wrong...

Because it's not okay to lie about Mormons either...
It goes on to say that until 1975, when the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, Mormons didn't believe black people had souls. This, of course, is nonsense too: Mormons certainly held that black people couldn't be priests in their church, but they never said they didn't have souls; furthermore, while they did change this policy in the 1970s, but this was in connection with them expanding into other countries and having to face the reality of largely black congregations. I'm not saying they weren't racist, just that they weren't racist in the way Hari claims. How on earth does he believe the American Supreme Court could ever be empowered to rule on the doctrines and beliefs of any religious group anyway? Does he do any research?


Or about Muslims...
Anyway, today he's off on one about the Anglican bishops in the House of Lords, as though this matters, putting the boot into Nick Clegg who he regards as a hypocrite for not getting rid of them, and indeed for considering expanding the numbers of Lords Spiritual by adding rabbis and imams etc.


Or about Anglicans.
I hold no candle for the Anglican Church, but I happen to think removing its bishops from Parliament would be a bad idea. Well, I think it'd be a bad idea for the United Kingdom; I think it might well be the making of the Church of England.

He opens with:

'Here's a Trivial Pursuit question with an answer that isn't at all trivial. Which two nations still reserve places in their parliaments for unelected religious clerics, who then get an automatic say in writing the laws the country's citizens must obey? The answer is Iran... and Britain.'

He means the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, of course, but even so, this is a bit on the disingenuous side, isn't it? Presumably it's meant to make us think that the Iranian parliament is stuffed full of unelected Mullahs, whereas the reality is that there are five seats in the parliament reserved for unelected clerics from the 2% of Iranians who adhere to a religion other than Islam! The Mullahs hold the reins in other respects, of course, but not in Parliament.

As for the UK, sure, 26 out of 786 members of the House of Lords, which at this stage has power only to delay for a year the implementation of laws passed by the Commons, are indeed bishops of the Church of England, but I think a 3% presence in an essentially advisory chamber isn't something to worry about.

Onward he goes, claiming that the 26 Anglican bishops vote on the laws that bind us, whereas they usually just vote on a small number of them, and  proclaiming that they 'use their power to relentlessly fight against equality for women and gay people'. There are many of things of which people can accuse the hierarchy of the Church of England, but putting all their efforts into misogyny and homophobia really isn't one of them.

Onward he burbles:

'But let's step back a moment and look at how all this came to pass. The bishops owe their places in parliament to a serial killer. Henry VIII filled parliament with bishops because they were willing to give a religious seal of approval to him divorcing and murdering his wives – and they have lingered on through the centuries since, bragging about their own moral superiority at every turn.'

Now, I'm no fan of Henry VIII, but to call him a serial killer for having had two people executed seems a bit -- well -- extravagant. But think about the general thesis here: we shouldn't have bishops in Parliament because Henry VIII, who was a nasty man, put them there. Well, look at the events that gave rise to the key features of the British Constitution: the Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution. Should you throw them out because Cromwell was a genocidal nut and because James II was driven from his throne because he wanted to introduce freedom of religion?

And do the bishops really proclaim their moral superiority? Really? I'd like to see some quotes in support of this. Real ones, not ones Johann's just plucked out of his backside.

Speaking of which, he's shameless with his next claim:

'According to Christopher Hitchens, though I haven’t been able to source this quote elsewhere, in 1965, the then Archbishop of Canterbury (Michael Ramsey) scorned the people who were campaigning for nuclear-armed countries to step back from the brink, on the grounds that "a nuclear war would involve nothing more than the transition of many millions of people into the love of God, only a few years before they were going to find it anyway". A previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, is reported to have said something similar a few years earlier and it may be that these sentiments should be attributed to him instead. In 2008 the incumbent Rowan Williams, said it would be helpful if shariah law – with all its vicious misogyny, which says that women are worth half of a man – was integrated into British family courts.'

Look at that. He doesn't even bother to source his quotes. He just throws them out, like a loud teenager in a student bar, confident that if he shouts loud enough nobody will challenge him. And did Rowan Williams really say that it would be helpful if shariah law -- 'with all its vicious misogny' -- were integrated into British family courts? Or did he say that he thought the adoption of certain aspects of it might be helpful and was, in any case, inevitable? In fact, didn't he -- in making those comments -- explicitly speak out against the misogyny of some aspects of Shariah law?

I know, I know, you can prove anything with facts.

I could go on, but it's hard to struggle through the gibberish of a bigot who claims that the Anglican bishops' prime motivation is to deny equality to women and gays, and that their 'second greatest passion is to prevent you from being able to choose to end your suffering if you are dying.'

I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm pretty sure that if you asked them what they care most about they'd talk about Jesus, saving souls, evangelisation, and helping people here on earth. The phrase 'social justice' might come up. It's entirely popular that tea, cake, wine, gin, or football would appear too. 'Opposing euthanasia' probably wouldn't make their top ten, though they might well mention having a belief in the sanctity of human life, such that they believe it's wrong for anybody to end any human life unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

They might say that. I wouldn't put money on it.

* * * * * * * * *

And with that, I left the post to gather dust. I didn't get into how the bishops are chosen, or the fact that they can't vote in parliamentary elections, or what obligations are imposed on local Anglican churches by virtue of being established state churches. As far as I can see, the British State gains far more from having a tame established church than the Church of England gets out of being so established. Of course, I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that even were I drunk as a lord spiritual, I'd not be as wrong as Johann Hari.

*You know, like the Enda Kenny and the rest of the Irish Government, seemingly.

Watchmen: A Very Belated Analysis

With the Zack Snyder film on Channel 4 last night, it was interesting to see Watchmen trending on Twitter. There were legions of derisive tweets scorning the film for being complex, ponderous, nasty, stupid, and dull; equally there were no shortage of people leaping to its defence by sneering at the people who didn't like it and calling them pretentious.

My favourite comments of the evening were one by a friend wondering whether the film's makers made a decision early on that as the film was to be long it should be dull too, one remarking that he'd gone to see it in the cinema when he was sixteen and had been forty-four by the time the film ended, one saying how it was weird to recognise every image from the comic but being retold by an idiot, and one pointing out that the film is not without merit, but is seriously flawed.

I think I'd go along with at least the last two of those two observations. The main problem with the film, as Pádraig Ó Méalóid concluded in reviewing it when it first came out, is that:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work.'

I know, we should judge films on their own merits, and not in comparison with the books they're based on -- even if that weren't common sense, Bill Goldman has proven the point with style in both Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?  --  but that's not to say that we can't analyse a film's strengths and weaknesses in comparison with the source material.

Watchmen is very much a comic about comics, a comic that tries to show just what comics can do, and that aspect of the book is obviously impossible to reproduce on the screen. Take, for example, the book's fourth chapter, where Doctor Manhattan is on Mars. This is an unparalleled instance of what comics can do, as it puts us exactly in the position of Doctor Manhattan himself: just as he exists in the present but simultaneously perceives all manner of points in his past and his future, so too we read the chapter, focusing on one panel at a time but always aware of and even able to see a host of other panels. In reading comics we are almost godlike ourselves, existing outside the universe of the characters in an eternal present but able to perceive all points in the characters' pasts and futures. They exist in a space-time continuum of their own, whereas we, beyond their pages, can see all points in their universe.

There's no way this can be reproduced on the screen. Snyder tries, but I think he fails. His Mars sequence is beautiful, but it doesn't even come close to achieving what the comic does in this chapter, and in some ways actually hurts his story. If the comics' reader is metaphorically divine, the cinema viewer is essentially voyeuristic, and in many ways it's hard to see the film's Doctor Manhattan as other than a standoffish voyeur.

Still, there's not much Snyder could do about that. What of the rest of the film?

Missing the Point

I think a huge part of the problem with the film is that Zack Snyder really doesn't seem to have understood the book. 300's glaring inconsistencies demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Synder's not an intelligent film-maker, and while I don't dispute his visual gifts, a book as relentlessly intelligent as Watchmen deserved to be brought to the screen -- if that had to happen at all -- at the hands of a smarter director.

The first time I saw the film -- on an Imax screen on the morning of the day the film opened, with me not having slept the previous night -- I was almost immediately thrown by how Snyder directed the opening scene where Eddie Blake is assaulted by his mysterious attacker. In the comic this episode is understated -- we see it as a series of flashback panels, interspersed into a dialogue between detectives inspecting the wreckage of Blake's apartment. There are only seven such panels -- we see an eighth later on, revealing the assailant's face -- and as far as we can tell if we assemble them into a sequence, what they show is that Blake was punched once, hurled to the floor where he is kicked once, and then thrown out a window.The episode is retold three times, and we only see these few actions, so I think that's probably all there was to the event.

Anyone who's seen the film won't remember the film's fight as having been quite so straightforward. A glass is thrown, a gun is  fired, knives are hurled, and there are punches, kicks, and blocks aplenty with bodies being smashed into and through things before Blake is dashed through his window. Oh and along the way, Blake punches a colossal lump out of what appears to be a concrete wall...

... and is himself smashed through what must surely be a fairly sturdy counter-top.

When I saw the film in the cinema I assumed the counter-top was marble, and stared in horror, thinking that Snyder seemed to have given genuine superpowers to both the Comedian and his assailant. Even allowing that it's probably meant to be a glass counter, I'm still far from convinced that Snyder doesn't want us to think of these combatants as being preternaturally powerful.

Just as importantly, perhaps, the tone of this was radically different from the tone of the comic. The comic keeps us at a distance, watching the action in a detached way, far enough off to observe and understand what's really going on. We see more of the game that way -- but this fight sought to suck us in, just as all the film's subsequent ones would do. The film tries to involve us in the action, pulling us in so we can't really see what's going on. I'm not saying that's not a reasonable thing to do, but if you want to do that, go and come up with your own story. Watchmen isn't about involvement. It's an autopsy of the whole costumed-hero genre, and like any autopsy needs to be carried out dispassionately.

Or, putting it another way, if you want visceral thrills and excitement, there are plenty of other superhero stories out there. Watchmen's not about that, and the film insults the book by trying to make it into something so radically opposed to what it's meant to be about.

Still, my concerns were almost allayed by the film's superb credit sequence. Indeed, I'd comfortably say that the credits are the best thing about the film. Loaded with jokes, and playing with the iconography of the last half century, its superheroic tableaux offer a potent and sometimes hilarious commentary on how superheroes have developed on the screen -- silver or small -- over the decades. There's only one thing I was troubled by in the sequence, but that aside, the first time I saw the film the credit sequence almost banished my concerns.

What if Superman were Real?

Unfortunately, as the film progressed, and especially thinking about it afterwards, I realised just how massively Snyder has misunderstood the comic. Take, for example, the scene at the end of the film where Ozymandias, Adrian Veidt, explains his apocalyptic scheme to Rorschach and Nite Owl. Rorschach says that they won't let him do that, and Adrian looks at them as though they're idiots.

'Do that, Rorschach?' he says, 'I'm not a comic book villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago.'

Clever, you might think. If only Bond baddies could resist their urges to tell 007 what they're up to, maybe they might just get away with their schemes. But here's the thing. In the comic, Adrian doesn't say that. Rather, he says something which is subtly -- yet crucially -- different.

A Republic Serial villain? Well, of course, nobody nowadays remembers the 1940s and 1950s movie serials, where the likes of the Phantom or Zorro would confront all manner of nefarious characters and thwart their diabolic schemes, so it makes sense for Snyder to change things. Everyone nowadays knows how the Penguin, Lex Luthor, Magneto, Loki, and so forth have a tendency to give the game away to their heroic antagonists, so why not mention comics villains?

Except that this misses the point of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen to an astonishing degree. Just as Watchmen is, in terms of its form, a comic about comics, so in terms of its content it is a superhero comic about superhero comics. One of the things it considers and tries to answer in a sincere and intelligent way is what a world would be like if there were costumed heroes in it, especially if any of them had actual superpowers. An important parallel to the story in the original book is a comic-within-a-comic, this being a horrific pirate story. It seems there are no shortage of comics in the world of Watchmen, but they're not about superheroes. Superheroes exist in the real world, and so escapist fiction has to look elsewhere for its source material, rooting its stories instead on the high seas of the eighteenth century.

'I'm not a comic book villain?' Of course he's not. He's not a pirate.

Indeed, Snyder doesn't seemed to have perceived in any meaningful way the extent to which Moore and Gibbons grappled with how the existence of a godlike superhero like Doctor Manhattan would change the world. The Watchmen of the film is, like the book, set in an alternative 1985, but the texture of that world doesn't seem all that different from ours. It should be, however. The book has a scene in early 1962, where Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, learns just how world-changing Doctor Manhattan really is.

There's not a hint of an electric car in the film until pretty much the final shot, and neither are there any electric hydrants to power them with. This makes sense in some ways, of course, as the modified plot of the film in fact involves the eventual replacement of oil, other fossil fuels, and nuclear power with a form of energy based on Doctor Manhattan's own powers. That's fair enough, you might think, so what's this sign doing outside Hollis Mason's garage?

'Obsolete Models A Speciality,' it says. In the comic this is a reference to the whole automobile industry having been transformed, as well as being a metaphor for both Nite Owls being past their sell-by dates, but I'm not sure what it's doing here in the film. Sure, you might argue that I'm quibbling here, and that this might just mean that Mason fixes old-fashioned cars, but I don't buy that. Moore and Gibbons put an enormous amount of effort into building a real and consistent world, with its own distinct yet coherent texture, and that sign was a very deliberate part of that, a specific foreshadowing of just how thoroughly Doctor Manhattan's existence had changed the world; it seems to have little relevance here. It's just here, as far as I can see, because Snyder saw it in the comic and thought it should be there. I don't believe he considered why it was in the comic.

And yes, this is a small point, but it's these kind of details that reveal the depth of Snyder's incomprehension.

Missing the Magic between Panels

One thing Scott McCloud talks about at some length in his stunning Understanding Comics is that much of what makes comics work is what goes on between the panels -- the gaps in time that we fill with our own imagination. Cinema's brilliantly capable of doing this too, of course -- we need only think of the shower scene in Psycho, in which we see the knife being raised but never actually see Janet Leigh being stabbed to death.

Unfortunately, Zack Snyder's anything but a subtle director. He doesn't like to leave things to our imagination. I suppose the film's opening fight scene pretty much made that clear, but still, take, for a more gruesome example, the episode where a gang of 'Top-Knots' attack Dan and Laurie in  an alleyway. It happens in the third chapter of the book and fills just a few panels over five pages -- indeed, there are only five panels showing any fighting at all, and it can hardly be said that these panels shirk the violent reality of what's happening. Here are the first two panels, juxtaposed to make a point.

In the first panel Laurie breaks one mugger's arm with her knee and elbow; if you've any doubt of that, note the commentary from the TV interview with which this sequence is crosscut -- 'make it snappy,' says the interviewer, talking about something else entirely, but as part of this panel serving as a counterpoint to the image. The agony on the mugger's face is obvious. You can see him wailing on the ground in the second panel, as Laurie turns to a second assailant -- a third panel shows him clutching his broken arm. Dan, meanwhile, has grabbed another mugger's jacket with his right hand in the first panel, and in the second slams his left hand upwards, breaking the mugger's nose in a manner that is, as the interviewer's commentary tells us, 'quite sudden and quite painful'.

But how does Snyder render this? Well, he has Dan breaking an arm too. Like this.

Gory, eh? I'd say unnecessarily so. That's the mugger's forearm being graphically snapped, such that his radius -- and quite possibly his ulna too -- rips through his flesh, with blood spurting everywhere. This same sequence will also feature a neck being broken with a horrendous crunch, and Laurie driving a knife into the neck of another mugger. For all that the fight in the comic is violent, it's nothing like this. Gibbons' art was matter-of-fact, realistic without being showy, whereas Snyder, as in 300, glorifies in violence. Frankly, I think this is -- at least by James Joyce's definition -- pornographic.

And that, of course, brings us to perhaps the film's most gratuitous episode, a cringeworthy minute-and-a-half long sex scene, moodily lit and acrobatically performed such as to put the puppets in Team America to shame, and all conducted to the exultant strains of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, with the volume turned up to eleven. Perhaps you'd like to see how it appeared in the comic?

And then, following that little Hitchcockian gag, reminiscent of North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, we had to turn the page to see...

Well, not a whole lot, actually. And doesn't that work better? Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying I've got issues with Malin Akerman's pretty face, comely form, or shiny black boots. I'm just saying that there's no need for this scene in the film. The comic merely implies it, and allows us to fill in the gaps in as tasteful or tasteless a way as we see fit. The film, on the understand, reduces us to the status of voyeurs, watching an absurd sequence as devoid of necessity as it is of art.

Issues with Women

I've heard it argued that Moore has issues with women, and that this really comes out in his work, but having been weaned on Roxy in Skizz and especially The Ballad of Halo Jones, I just don't accept this. Horrible things sometimes happen to women in Moore's work, certainly, but horrible things happen to men too, and I think it's telling that he dedicated From Hell to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie Jeanette Kelly, all five of them victims of Jack the Ripper, saying, 'You and your demise: of these things alone are we certain. Goodnight, ladies.'

There's an attempted rape in Watchmen, and this has enormous consequences to the story of both the book and the film, but the way it's handled in the film differs from that in the book, in such as way as to somehow be both trite and offensive. Snyder at times charts a course that differs from Moore's, in such a way as to hurt the work. And in the credits sequence, he does this:

Is that in the book? No. No, not really. The book details the death of the Silhouette in a text section -- an extract from Hollis Mason's autobiography -- as follows:

'After that, things deteriorated. In 1946, the papers revealed that the Silhouette was living with another woman in a lesbian relationship. Schnexnayder persuaded us to expel her from the group, and six weeks later she was murdered, along with her lover, by one of her former enemies. Dollar Bill was shot dead, and in 1947 the group was dealt its most serious blow when Sally quit crimefighting to marry her agent.'

Dollar Bill's death is also shown in the credit sequence, with him sitting dead with his cloak caught in a bank's revolving door, as mentioned elsewhere in the story. That tallies with the story. But this image? Sure, the book says nothing of how the Silhouette and her lover were murdered, so some imagination is needed here, but was it necessary for them to have been killed in bed, in underwear and suspender belts, with the words 'lesbian whores' scrawled across the wall in their blood? This seems an image designed to titillate and horrify in equal measure, and seems a classic example of how profoundly different Snyder's vision of Watchmen is from that shared by Moore and Gibbons.

And then there's Rorschach...
I really think Snyder gets the characters wrong in this. There's no way that Snyder's Dan Dreiberg could be deemed a 'flabby failure who sits whimpering in his basement,' as the book's Rorschach dismisses him, and his Doctor Manhattan is more an softly-spoken voyeur than an aloof god who's almost paralysed by his near-omniscience. The film's Ozymandias, as played by Matthew Goode, looks so effete that the phenomenal strength he displays in the movie is wholly inexplicable unless we assume he has superpowers. And as for Rorschach himself? Well, I think Snyder almost gets him right, but in cutting the most self-revelatory lines the comic Rorschach utters, he deprives Rorschach of the paradox that makes him breathe.

In the book there's a horrific sequence where Rorschach executes a child murderer after having realised the child's fate; it's a flashback scene, with Rorschach telling a psychiatrist how he became who he is. The film features the same episode, but even more graphically, and with some liberties taken in the action, and then has Rorschach say:

'Whatever was left of Walter Kovacs died that night with that little girl. From then on there was only Rorschach. You see Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her. Destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew. God doesn't make the world this way. We do.'

That's not bad, but the book has him saying something far more bleak, far more nihilistic, and far more determined than that:

Look at that. The Rorschach of the book doesn't merely say that if God's up there he obviously doesn't care; he says that there is no God, and indeed that there's no purpose to life, and no objective meaning to anything other than that we choose to impose on it. Rorschach sees this the world as a world of brute facts, without meaning or purpose or pattern save what we imagine. In a universe consisting purely of 'is', it's impossible to construe an imperative 'ought', and yet Rorschach does it anyway. What meaning does he chose to impose on his universe, and does he ultimately chose to die for? In both book and film, he answers that question in his diary:

'Millions will perish in sickness and misery. Why does one death matter against so many? Because there is good and evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of armageddon...I will not compromise in this.'

Why must evil be punished? There's no meaning or purpose to life, after all, so why bother? The answer, ultimately, is simply that Rorschach is certain that this is true: this is the design he is determined to scrawl on this morally blank world.

In the film, if you want to, you can read Rorschach's disagreement with Veidt as a Kantian refusing to accept the views of an utilitarian, scorning the idea that evil can be done for the sake of a later and greater good, and then ultimately sacrificing himself, hoping that good will prevail but unable to countenance having not tried with every fibre of his broken being to overcome evil. But in the book, Rorschach's morality is his own.

Evil must be punished, he says, and in this he will not compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon. But what is evil and what is good? Rorschach believes the world is, in itself, morally blank. Strictly speaking, he doesn't believe in good or evil, save as what he chooses to call good and what he chooses to call evil. And yet at the end, he realises that one man cannot have a personal morality, as distinct from and as superior to everyone else's. Either all moralities are equally valid -- Veidt's and Dreiberg's and Laurie's and Manhattan's as much as his -- or else there's a higher one, that transcends our own.

Either way, Rorschach, who has lived his life without nuance, having battled so hard and so long with monsters that he has become a monster, gazes so deeply into the abyss that he sees the abyss gazing into him, and realising  his own inadequacy removes his mask, so that at the end, facing death, he stands again as a battered and broken Walter Kovacs.


You'll notice I've not taken issue with the film's climax, which is significantly different from that of the book. To be frank, I didn't mind it. I thought that was an imaginative rethinking, and I'm not hung up on the film being a carbon-copy of the book. What I have issues with is films adapting books or comics or whatever and not even attempting to recreate the feel of the source material. If you just throw out the tone and theme of whatever it is you're trying to adapt, why bother at all? Surely the essence of the source should be the one thing that's sacrosanct?

Dredd: Once Bitten, Twice Hopeful...

I don't know how many of you remember 1995's Sylvester Stallone take on perhaps the most famous character in modern British comics? Judge Dredd, in most people's memories, was an absolute disaster: the plot was a overloaded hodge-podge of stories, the comic relief was risible -- and not in a good way, the film lacked any of the depth and satirical wit of the strip, and it got the hero fundamentally wrong. And yet, oddly enough, it was still better than Batman Forever, which the critics of that year somehow neglected to pan, leading to them being surprised when the absurdity that was Batman and Robin came along.

I am the Luuuuuuhhhhh!!!!!

Truth be told, the 1995 Dredd wasn't all bad. Diane Lane was very watchable, and even at his hammiest Max von Sydow brightened the screen, and in terms of design I really liked it: Mega-City 1 looked good, and both Mean Machine and the misplaced Hammerstein were spot-on, and things like the bikes and the prison ship were great. But then there were the judge's uniforms.

I've seen a hell of a lot of people sneering online at them, dismissing them as leotards with gleaming pads, and drawing special attention to Stallone's mighty codpiece, but the thing is, stuff that can look great in comics just looks implausible on the screen. Why do you think the cinematic versions of the Batman and the X-Men shun spandex for body armour and leather? That's why, at least in terms of design, I'm looking forward to next year's sally at Mega-City One's finest, with Karl Urban in the title role.

Until this week we'd not had much to go on in terms of what the new judge's uniform would look like -- a distant blurry shot of a judge on a none-too-promising bike, a very murky headshot of Dredd, and the above picture of the film's eponymous hero pointing his Lawgiver at -- well, who knows?

But then, this week, Empire featured a host of shots from the film and some enterprising soul decided to scan them and post them online for the whole world to see. They're encouraging, I think. For starters, we can see that Urban's Dredd isn't a pumped up ogre. This is as it should be. I'll always remember David Bishop explaining to an aspiring artist at the UK Comic Art Convention back in the day that Dredd isn't meant to be a musclebound giant -- he's more of a lean, mean, fighting machine. And indeed, early Ezquerra and Bolland drawings of Dredd were anything but overmuscled, while such artists as Mike McMahon and Brendan McCarthy did wonderfully skinny Dredds.

Perhaps more encouraging still is the fact that the uniform's been changed to look more practical, more gritty. The shoulder, elbow, and knee pads, which have grown to proportions as impractical as they are impressive in the comics, have been reduced to a far more plausible size, not unlike those from the strip's earliest days. The tight leather-esque suits have been ditched too, in favour of something that looks like a natural development from modern riot gear. It looks genuinely futuristic, but rooted in the present; it suggests a future with a past.

The one concern, I feel, lies with the helmet. I've already seen people grumbling, saying that it looks silly, as though it's too big for the judges' heads. I don't blame them, really, but I think they should hold their fire. The simple fact of the matter is that the judges' helmets are very difficult to get right. For all that some people didn't like the helmet Stallone wore -- though they liked things less when he removed it -- it represented a decent stab at handling some serious design problems with the helmet of the comics. 

There are at least two big problems with Dredd's helmet, as we see it in 2000AD. 

In the first place, it only looks good if we presume Dredd's head -- and indeed the judges' heads in general -- is very small. And I mean very small. Even the most realistic takes on Dredd's helmet presuppose that he has an astonishingly tiny head. Dredd wasn't the only character so afflicted in 2000AD. After all, one look at Torquemada's helmet in 'Nemesis the Warlock' should have got you wondering what kind of abnormal had a head that could fit into that thing. For all that Bryan Talbot is a comic genius, I never really bought his Torquemada, because he was clearly a normal man wearing an impossible hat; Kev O'Neill, on the other hand, just drew freaks, and so could get away with it. 

Linked with this is the whole issue of the back of the helmet; if the helmet protects the nape of the neck adequately,  it bars the wearer from looking up or from shooting when lying down, such that the only helmets that could really be plausible in this respect are ones that are flared out at the back.

Those are simple issues of ergonomics, but I think there's another issue too, and that's vision. Dredd's helmet is almost always drawn such that he must be squinting at the world through a narrow slit; certainly, he'd have had no peripheral vision, and you'd rather think that's something he'd want. Stallone's helmet didn't skimp in that respect, ensuring the visor was very wide, and effectively removing the nose-guard. 

Having loved comics and gotten my school magazine banned through my strips when a schoolboy, I used to go to comics conventions back in my late teens, speaking to artists and editors in the hope of getting advice and maybe -- eventually -- becoming a comics artist myself. I got encouragement, too, especially from Bryan Talbot and Steve Pugh, with both of them saying I'd definitely make it if I just practised more -- and my finals soon put paid to that, with life taking a different course soon afterwards. Looking through my portfolio, Steve Pugh was very impressed by my take on Dredd, commending my design work on the helmet in particular. I think it was obvious that I'd spent a lot of time trying to resolve the issues of vision and mobility.

As it happens, I think the vision issue's not a big deal; we can just assume there's kind of an lcd display running across the inside of the helmet, effectively giving the judges a far greater field of view that the visor itself would allow. But that still leaves the fact that the helmet needs to fit on the head, needs to allow the head to move, and needs some padding inside it to cushion any impacts.

Unless you've lots of hair for padding anyway. In which case you'll probably ditch the helmet.

All round, I think the new uniform looks great. I just hope the script, directing, and acting are as good -- and given that Alex Garland penned 28 Days Later, there must, at least, be some slight grounds for hope.

When Funny Comics Aren't Good Comics

Just something light today, I think, as the last couple of posts have been about as serious as can be.  I've never got Dilbert, I'm afraid. I've no shortage of friends who love it, but while I see why they like it, I just don't think it's a very good cartoon strip.

Don't get me wrong: I think it's both funny and clever. I just don't think it works as a comic should. I've long subscribed to Scott McCloud's definition of comics as 'Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer,' and I think that Dilbert nearly always misses the point. 

That Dilbert is a comic is indisputable. Whether Dilbert is a good comic, however, is a different matter, and to me it's significant that the pictures contribute hardly anything to most Dilbert strips. Scott Adams' words are good and clever, but I don't think they ever really gain from being linked with pictures. In Dilbert, as far as I can see, the pictures don't complement the words, or add to the words, or lead one to wonder whether there might be more going on than is simply revealed in the words. All they do is identify the speakers, and literature isn't lacking in devices that do likewise. Most Dilbert strips could be one-paragraph gags, and probably would be, were it not for the fact that we're not used to newspapers running such things. In Dilbert, as far as I can see, the pictures are there not to add an extra dimension of meaning to words, so much as to give the words an excuse to be there at all.

I enjoyed the strip from last week I've posted above. It's funny. It made me laugh. And it's made other laugh more when I've told them the words. It doesn't need pictures. You couldn't say that of Peanuts. Or Calvin and Hobbes. Or Red Meat. Or even Garfield...

Bone, revisited, or why I need to read Moby Dick

I realise it's only been a few days since I talked about Jeff Smith's Bone, but it's something I've thought about with unusual frequency in recent weeks. Partly this has been because I've been considering what comics it's be worth introducing to my housemate or other potential comics readers, having already decided that The Tale of One Bad Rat would be perfect for that; partly it's that I gave a friend the first two volumes of Bone just after Christmas in what may have been a futile attempt at cheering her up; and partly because I keep thinking it's about time I read Moby Dick.

Sometimes it bothers me that I have too many books, and I often wonder whether I'm better off reading the books I've yet to read, or rereading ones I know I'd get more from now than I once did.  Take The Lord of the Rings, for instance. I've read it twice, once as a child and once as a teenager, and I've no doubt that if I read it now it'd be a different book to the one I remember. I'd not read any epic poetry back then, for instance, I'd never read a line of the Icelandic sagas and Beowulf, and I knew next to nothing of Tolkien's life or the events and books that formed him. I certainly had no idea of how one could make a credible case for The Lord of the Rings being one of the sacramental pinnacles of the twentieth-century Catholic imagination. So I want to read it again. I've changed, and I think it'll have changed too, to being a deeper, darker, richer book than the one I read so long ago.

Unfortunately, I keep wondering whether my reading time might better be spent on other books, sitting unread and awaiting my attention, most especially Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, and Moby Dick. I've had them sitting on shelves for far too long -- the latter in a lovely Everyman edition -- all neglected as I fear their enormity, the commitment to reading that each one will take, and the fact that they're too big to be lugged about in pockets.

Moby Dick in particular has drawn me for a long time, though, certainly since I first read Bone, with Fone Bone boring everyone unconscious whenever he read from it. It's Jeff Smith's favourite book, so he at any rate, clearly doesn't find it that dull. A huge fan of its structure, it's pretty obvious that he shares Fone Bone's opinion of it, rather than that of his cousin Smiley...

... or, for that matter, the stupid, stupid Rat Creatures, who Smiley attempts to ward off by subjecting them to Melville's words...

To be fair to Herman Melville, though, it may well be that the problem may not lie in his words but in Fone's reading voice. Certainly, that's what most haunts the Rat Creatures when they groggily wake from their nautical nightmare.

Jeff Smith's Bone, or more lessons in reading comics

I was talking the other day about how tricky it can be to teach the comics-illiterate how to read comics, and how Bryan Talbot deliberately created The Tale of One Bad Rat with such people in mind. The storytelling is straightforward, the art naturalistic, the dialogue kept to a minimum, and the panels devoid of the comics-specific conventions that have grown up as a form of narrative shorthand over the decades. That's not to say it's crudely simple; on the contrary, it's both subtle and sophisticated. It is, frankly, about as good an introduction to what comics can be as one could hope to find.

And it says important stuff, too.

Among the handful of other comics I like to show friends who are sceptical about what comics can do is Jeff Smith's Bone, which could hardly be more different from One Bad Rat. Here's a page from it, as a taster:

And if you think that's simple, you should take a look at the analysis of Smith's storytelling over here. You'll also see what happens next.

Clear and perfectly-paced, owing a lot to animation but not shackled by it, inspired in its look by the comics of Carl Barks and -- especially -- Walt Kelly, Bone is a hilarious and thrilling hybrid of Tolkien and Disney at its best. It tells the story of the three Bone cousins -- greedy Phoney, goofy Smiley, and everyman Fone, all of whom Smith had first drawn when he was a child -- who, having been run out of their own town after one of Phoney's corrupt scams goes wrong, get lost and find themselves in a lush and idyllic fantasy valley, complete with talking animals, burly barmen, grouchy old ladies, and a pretty redhead. It swiftly becomes clear that things in the valley aren't as rosy as they might appear, and that it has a dark past waiting to rear its head, and thus begins a story that as Time magazine said, is 'as sweeping as The Lord of the Rings cycle, but much funnier.'

Comparisons with The Lord of the Rings really aren't all that silly, given that Bone is a classic fantasy and is, indisputably, a very big book. As Neil Gaiman said of the collected edition back in the day, 'It's the height of a trade paperback, and over 1300 pages long. It looks rather intimidating in that format -- it looks like the epic fantasy novel that it is. A perfect gift, too.' Originally published in black and white, it's recently been coloured, which makes for a novel reading experience. I'm not sure that I think the colour's an improvement,* but it certainly does no harm, and adds an extra level to the storytelling, one that'll surely be picked up in the oft-promised film.

_____________________________________________________

* Is it even possible to improve on this? This is, surely, up there with the greatest panels ever.

Holy Hookers and Historical Myths...

I first  heard about Sacred Prostutution a few months before I started university, in an episode of Neil Gaiman and Jill Thompson's 'Brief Lives' storyline in Sandman. The episode, touching on themes that Gaiman would later explore far more fully in American Gods, was at least in part about happens to gods when people stop believing in them. In this case, the Babylonian goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, has been reduced to working in an American strip club, soaking up the 'worship' offered her by her drooling clients.

Temple Prostitution is first attested in the pages of Herodotus, and at the time I first heard of it, I didn't know quite how delightfully unreliable Herodotus is. I happen to like him a lot, and work with him constantly, but one needs to sample him with the saltshaker at the ready. Herodotus talks about sacred prostitution as part of a discursus on Babylon in the first book of his Histories, where he says:

'There is one custom among these people which is wholly shameful: every woman who is a native of the country must once her life go and sit in the temple of Aphrodite and there give himself to a strange man.* Many of the rich women, who are too proud to mix the rest, drive to the temple in covered carriages with a whole host of servants following behind, and there wait; most, however, sit in the precinct of the temple with a band of plaited string round their heads -- and a great crowd they are, what with some sitting there, others arriving, others going away -- and through them all gangways are marked off running in every direction for the men to pass along and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed to go home until a man has thrown a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lie with her. As he throws the coin, the man has to say, 'In the name of the goddess Mylitta' -- that being the Assyrian name for Aphrodite. The value of the coin is of no consequence; once thrown it becomes sacred, and the law forbids that it should ever be refused. The woman has no privilege of choice -- she must go with the first man who throws her the money. When she has lain with him, her duty to the goddess is discharged and she may go home, after which it will be impossible to seduce her by any offer, however large. Tall, handsome women soon manage to get home again, but the ugly ones stay a long time before they can fulfil the condition which the law demands, some of them, indeed, as much as three or four years.'

I was thinking about this recently when I yet again came across someone on the Internet warbling about temple prostitution in ancient Corinth. This is, I'm afraid, a common trope in lazy Christian preaching, and someday I'll get round to tracking down why it's so popular. The guts of the issue is this: Saint Paul, in chapters five to seven of his First Letter to the Corinthians, has a lot to say about sexual immorality in Corinth, and so all too often when people talk about this they wheel out cliches about how Corinth was particularly notorious in the ancient world as a centre of sexual vice, and how the huge temple of Aphrodite had thousands of sacred prostitutes and was the corrupt heart of Corinth's decadence. Sometimes you'll even hear rubbish about how Paul's comments at I Corinthians 11 about women covering their hair were driven by his desire that long-haired Christian women not be confused with long-haired prostitutes from the Temple. 

This, frankly, is poppycock, and one of those things that set my teeth on edge. Sure, there's a lot of argument about what means what in ancient history, but you don't need to dig into the real research to find out how ridiculous it is that anyone should be holding that first-century Corinth was a bastion of cult prostitution. The whole idea is a modern myth, based on a spectacularly stupid and lazy reading of the following passage from Strabo's Geography, in which Strabo talks of how fabulously wealthy and powerful Corinth used to be, and after talking of Corinth's famously rich eighth- and seventh-century rulers, says:

'Again, Demaratus, one of the men who had been in power at Corinth, fleeing from the seditions there, carried with him so much wealth from his home to Tyrrhenia that not only he himself became the ruler of the city that admitted him, but his son was made king of the Romans. And the temple of Aphrodite was so rich that it owned more than a thousand temple slaves, courtesans, whom both men and women had dedicated to the goddess. And therefore it was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money, and hence the proverb, "Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth."'

The son in question, for what it's worth, was Tarquinius Priscus, reputedly Rome's king between 616 and 579 BC, so what Strabo should be understood as saying here is that Corinth had been incredibly wealthy six hundred years before he wrote, and that back then the temple of Aphrodite was so rich it had a thousand temple prostitutes. That things were rather different in Strabo's own day are immediately apparent to anyone who bothers to read the next paragraph, in which Strabo comments at some length on how the former grandeur of the city is apparent when one looks at its ruined defensive walls and the remains of a building so badly ruined that he cannot tell whether it was a great palace or temple. He specifically says that the city of his own day is a new city, rebuilt by the Romans.

This, of course, would hardly be surprising to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of ancient history or archaeology. Corinth had been destroyed by the Romans under Lucius Mummius in 146 BC, and was only reestablished as a city in 44 BC when Julius Caesar, shortly before his assassination, ordered it be rebuilt as a Roman colony. Over the following century, during which it became the capital of the new Roman province of Achaea, Corinth grew in size and once again became a thriving port city, albeit a Roman one, very different from the Greek one of centuries earlier. Like any other port, prostitution was common there, but we've no evidence whatsoever that suggests it was vastly more common in Corinth than in Massilia, Ostia, Alexandria, Brundisium, Piraeus, or any other first-century Mediterranean port.

Given how easy it is to find this out, I've got to a point where I have no patience with people who trot out this kind of rubbish. It's one thing for people in the pews to believe it; it's another for preachers in the pulpits to propound it. All teachers, of whatever sort, have an obligation to honesty and lazily repeating this kind of claptrap shows at best a cavalier attitude to historical reality. Temple Prostitution didn't exist in the Corinth of Saint Paul. It's as simple as that.

To be honest, whatever about the arguments that sacred prostitution never existed in the Mediterranean world, I'm very sceptical that Corinth at any rate was ever a centre for such a practice. A trip to the site should start one wondering, to begin with, not least because the ruins of the temple of Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth don't look like they could have been associated with a hundred temple prostitutes, let alone a thousand. Herodotus, talking about how disgraceful Babylonian temple prostitution is, and saying that a similar practice prevails in Cyprus, doesn't make any mention of Corinth; indeed, if cult prostitution was common in any major Greek city,  Herodotus would hardly have thought Babylonian temple prostitution so remarkable. It seems that the absolute most that could be said about Corinthian prostitution, even in the city's heyday, was that as a city with two ports, Corinth was a city with no shortage of prostitutes, and that all of Corinth's prostitutes were protected by the goddess Aphrodite, to whom they paid honour, but that in no way were their sexual relations associated with -- let alone performed in -- the temple.

* That's an unfamiliar man, not one who was notably strange, whether in appearance, manner, or way of life. Just, you know, in case you wondering.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, or, thoughts on teaching adults to read comics

 I was talking to my housemate last night about Watchmen, raving about it as I tend to do, and following Pádraig Ó Méalóid in scorning the Zach Snyder film based on the book. I'd not say the film is a travesty, but I think Pádraig was almost exactly right to have said:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work. Alan Moore said it was unfilmable, and I have seen that he was completely right.'

Anyway, I wittered away about why I felt the film didn't work -- how it had fundamentally missed the point of the book, misunderstood the nature of the book's characters as created by Moore, seemed oblivious in all but the most cosmetic of ways to the how the fabric of the world of Watchmen differs from that of our own world, and been unable to play to the book's strength. It has strengths, to be fair -- the credit sequence was funny and clever, the casting was excellent, and every so often the sets were spot-on, but in the main I thought it missed the point and substituted brashness, gore, and gratuitous violence and nudity where Moore and Gibbons had been elegant, subtle, and often just matter-of-fact. 

At this my housemate pulled me up, as someone who had liked the film and never read the book, saying that he'd liked it and didn't agree with me, so I went and got the book and tried as best I could in a hasty way to point out how the book works, panel by panel. I wished I'd Gibbons and Kidd's Watching the Watchmen to hand, but I did my best.

My housemate's intrigued now, and is tempted to buy the book for himself, but I'm a bit wary of him reading it just yet. Watchmen, to be frank, isn't a book to start a new comic-reader on. It's too complex, too sophisticated, to dependent on familiarity with the form and its grammar. 

Years ago I went to a talk by Bryan Talbot, back when he'd just written The Tale of One Bad Rat, where he talked of how he'd been amazed in the aftermath of his avant-garde The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to learn that there were people who couldn't read comics, who found them complex and hard to follow. How does one read a page? How does one read a panel? What do you read first -- the picture or the speech balloons or the captions or the thought bubbles or a combination of them all? It was with this in mind that he wrote and drew The Tale of One Bad Rat the way he did.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is about as legible, and sad, as beautiful, and as hopeful a comic as one could ever hope to read, and it's become one of a handful of comics I like to show people who don't read comics if I want to show them how good work can be done in the medium, work as valid as anything in film or prose. Originally intending the book as a story of a girl obsessed with Beatrix Potter who runs away to the Lake District, Talbot needed to explain why she ran away, came up with the idea that she'd been abused, and then decided that if he was going to involve child abuse in the story then he'd better do it properly.

He did the work, and the result is a masterpiece, utterly nailing the distrust, the difficulty in forming relationships, the hatred of being touched, and the obsessional imagery that can so often haunt abuse survivors, while nonetheless showing paths to healing and being a beautiful and gentle ode to Beatrix Potter, the Lake District, art, and rats.

As a primer in what comics can be and what comics can do, it has very few rivals. I rather wish I had my copy here. It's something I'd like to show people so they can understand.