Atwood's Flood

I recently finished Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and was as captivated by this as I was its speculative fiction predecessor, Oryx and Crake. One of the things I enjoyed about the sequel was spotting the more obvious intersections between the two novels: characters from one book are either referred to or have cameo appearances in the other, the events of both stories take place across shared geographical locations and within a similar timeframe rigidly pivoted by Crake's global plague, the catastrophic upheaval of which drastically alters the life of every surviving character. Atwood's afterword, however, made it clear that I had by no means picked up on every nuance of cross-reference, and being the OCD, pernickety completist that I am, I felt compelled to immediately revisit the first novel with sequel-expanded awareness.

Atwood employs a strikingly unsensational descriptive style in both books, relating in an unsettlingly straightforward way the often harrowing ordeals undergone by her characters. Both novels remind me in particular of the satirical works of sci-fi legend Kurt Vonnegut, who routinely flattens the horrific elements any lesser author might make the glaring focal point, and who maintains the same measured evenness throughout his writing. This detached reportage has the double effect of channelling either a deeply traumatized [Cormac McCarthy] or gently sardonic [Vonnegut, Atwood] voice on the part of the writer, and of making the written word more participatory: the onus is subtly shifted onto the reader to infer from the prose that which is shocking and to react accordingly. It's a strangely persuasive literary technique that seems particularly suited to the dystopian visions of those authors.

The general tone of both novels, too, is very similar, with the tarnished veneer of near-future scientific marvel spread paper-thin over a malevolent substratum of exploitation and violence - the default, brutal human condition that constantly waits at the periphery of the stories. The events of Oryx and Crake are predominantly played out by the scientific elite and their coterie within the artificial comfort and tenuous security of the fortified corporation compounds, and the desperation of the underclasses is only glimpsed from afar - either ignored, irrelevant or used as ephemeral entertainment. Propelled by boredom and seeking illicit thrills, Crake and Jimmy seek out the worst kind of exploitative material - assisted suicides, live executions and child pornography - on dedicated sites with names like nitee-nite.com, brainfrizz.com and HotTotts, and Crake in particular eventually allows his privileged background, natural academic brilliance and general lack of human empathy to evolve into a full-blown god complex.

In The Year of the Flood, Atwood follows a logical imaginative progression to explore life on the other side of the corporate class divide. By contrast to Oryx and Crake's sole, male narrator [Atwood's first, by all accounts], The Year of the Flood is told from two markedly different female points of view. Toby and Ren are 'pleeblanders', the disenfranchised majority who struggle on with their grim, hopeless lives outside the dubious protection of the compounds. Atwood makes it unambiguous from the start that these are the urban badlands, where the corrupt and incompetent private security firms - the CorpSeCorps - turn a blind eye to racketeering, where violent, racially delineated gangs compete for supremacy and where people routinely show up dead, often in one of the garboil dumpsters where refuse is collected before being processed into fuel. Or else they disappear entirely. Atwood's twin protagonists are both exploited in one sense or another by men: Toby, a pragmatic survivor even before Crake's virus, is pursued throughout the book by Blanco, an obscenely-tattooed gangster with a predilection for raping and murdering vulnerable women, while Ren, a much younger and less serious character, has been drawn into a life of high class prostitution by the start of the story. On one hand her easy-going acceptance - indeed, active satisfaction - with her situation could be taken as proof of her comprehensive exploitation by a patriarchal culture, but this is more obviously evidence of the lengths that Ren will go to in order not just to survive but to thrive, in spite of the meagre opportunities on offer outside the compounds. Much like the sanguine points Kurt Vonnegut makes about man's inhumanity to man, Atwood's uniformly muted descriptive style benefits her general feminist stance, effectively rendering any further elaboration superfluous.

Both women are welcomed into the ranks of the God's Gardeners, an environmentally zealous religious cult mentioned several times throughout Oryx and Crake, often relating to the direct action of their more radicalized members. By today's standards they can easily be seen as insufferably worthy, but in the context of The Year of the Flood's profit-led social chasm they are the common sense counterpoint to the corporate new world order and Atwood goes to great pains to ensure they are cast in a sympathetic light. The leaders of the group - all named either Adam or Eve, depending on sex, followed by a number indicating their heirarchical position within the organization - preach humanist common sense and survivalist-level self-sufficiency, and they urge their followers to prepare for the coming 'Waterless Flood' by stockpiling imperishable food and essential items in an 'Ararat', to be relied upon for survival when the inevitable happens. It remains ambiguous as to whether head honcho Adam One is directly aware of Crake's plan to release a "hot bioform" on an unsuspecting world, but there are definite links between the group and MaddAddam, the coalition of rogue scientists that use Oryx and Crake's Extinctathon as a cover for their subversive projects. Adam One is certainly very tolerant of the erratic movements of Zeb, the coarse, larger-than-life Russian that Ren's mother moves in with after they flee the compounds, and it is more than strongly hinted that Zeb is routinely getting his hands dirty on behalf of the God's Gardeners, and that their benevolent façade might be a thoroughly realised and convincing front for more covert pursuits with a very different agenda.

Oryx and Crake's speculative mythos featured a whole raft of high-concept zoological curiosities: the pigoon, the grotesquely enlarged 'pig-balloon' genetically modified to yield human transplant organs, which unexpectedly employs sophisticated tactics while pack-hunting Snowman, suggesting that its higher brain function is rapidly evolving to match our own; the snat, the misbegotten snake/rat hybrid that very probably escaped its sealed laboratory confines following Crake's plague; the rakunk, a raccoon/skunk crossbreed incorporating the least antisocial aspects of both animal and this season's must-have designer pet. Atwood naturally uses The Year of the Flood to expand on these ideas, with yet more ironically bright Newspeak nomenclature - AnooYoo and SecretBurgers - more gene-spliced lab animals gone feral - the Mo'Hair, a genetically tweaked sheep with a luxuriant coat for human hair transplant [that nevertheless retains a distinctly ovine aroma] and the liobam, a lion-lamb fusion specifically commissioned by the Lion-Isiahist religious movement to realize one minor aspect of religious scripture - and the carte blanche terror of the Painball Arena, where society's deadliest criminals are given free rein [and acid-pellet paintball guns] to fight each other to the death for televised entertainment.

The point of Atwood's apparent flights of fancy, in these days of corporate irresponsibility that straddles the line between the legally permissible and the morally reprehensible, of happy slapping attacks posted on YouTube, of fluorescent rabbits or mice with human ears grafted onto their backs, is that to all intents and purpose we are already at the point she describes in these stories. The all-pervasive Cold War fear of Mutually Assured Destruction might be a distant memory, but the Communist/democratic political divide of yesteryear was comparatively clearly defined and easier to comprehend than today's maelstrom of religio-political jihad and fanatical splinter groups plotting [insert deity]-knows-what. If most aspects of Atwood's current enthusiasm for - or possibly creative responsibility towards - musings on the probable course of mankind's development are already in existence, then how long before some crackpot sleeper cell detonates a suitcase bomb or pops a Petri dish of some weaponized virus? It's scary, relevant stuff.

Oryx and Crake tells the story of the man who remade the world, as remembered by his closest friend; The Year of the Flood is about the ordinary, honourably-intentioned, resourceful - but mostly just plain lucky - people who survive that catastrophe. Margaret Atwood has just recently revealed that she is working on an eponymous third novel in what is already being referred to as the MaddAddam trilogy, which would follow the various characters comprising that group, as well - I hope - as detailing exactly what Zeb was up to during his numerous enigmatic absences from the Gardeners.

The environmental hymns that follow Adam One's toned down, cautionary sermons have been set to music by composer Orville Stoeber and are available on old-fashioned Compacted Diskette.

Jason Courtney's impressive Oryx and Crake-inspired illustrations [including - 'ray! - a snat] can be seen here.

Fleas Release Me

Warning: this will almost definitely make you itch.

Getting a cat was my girlfriend's idea [despite being nearly 40, I can't help referring to her as my girlfriend, mostly for want of a more appropriate term - partner is far too modern [and boring], other half is so twee that it actually triggers my gag reflex, while co-mortgagee seems to be selling the relationship somewhat short]. Ostensibly for reasons of hygiene, I was staunchly opposed to letting some primal, instinct-led beast waltz nonchalantly into our relatively clean living space, carpeting the place liberally with its moultings and intermittently causing digestion-related crises. The idea of an accompanying flea infestation filled me with genuine horror, and having just experienced - and finally seen off - a comprehensive incursion of the little bastards, I can only say that I probably ought not to have relented so easily.

Aah, what a kee-yoodie.

That's probably a bit unfair. While the cat was originally a birthday present from her closest friend, I inevitably warmed to the idea of having a cute little kitten lolloping about the place - hey, I'm not made of stone - and in the intervening years I've sort of appropriated her as my own pet. I'm not overly bothered about her getting onto the kitchen surfaces [expect, perhaps, when she's got back-end cleanliness issues], it's not unknown for me to drop unnecessarily generous slices of cooked meat into her bowl and I don't get annoyed when she wakes me up in the middle of the night by purring loudly and hooking her needle-sharp claws into the soft skin of my throat.

But then: the fleas.

Scientists estimate - very broadly, since fossil records are extremely rare - that fleas have been sucking the life blood of terrestrial species since the late Jurassic period, between around 200 million and 160 million years ago. Their development accompanied that of an increasing population of small nocturnal marsupials, whose descendents have been rolling around and scratching frenziedly behind their ears with their hind legs ever since.

A prehistoric mammal yesterday.

There are numerous species of flea, each needing the blood of the specific animal they've evolved to afflict in order to breed, but as long as there's a plentiful supply of the stuff they're good to go. In the course of its lifetime, a female flea will lay about 600 eggs, which cascade from the host onto the surrounding environment. Temperature and humidity permitting, these eggs will hatch within a few days and, like the godless monsters they are, the worm-like larvae instantly shun the light and crawl to the safety of darker recesses - between floorboards or into the deep, luxuriant pile of your expensive carpets. Once they pupate, these wretched abominations can lie dormant for up to two years, until ground vibrations or a rise in carbon dioxide levels - caused by the proximity of a potential host - trigger the emergence of an adult and begin the hideous cycle anew.

Here's a photo I took on my phone.

It's difficult, in some perverse way, not to admire these perfectly evolved pests, whose bodies boast some incredible features. Propelled by strong limbs, and with backward-facing bristles on their bodies for additional traction, their vertically flattened bodies can sail unhindered between the individual hairs of a host's fur [the chinchilla, incidentally, is one mammal with such a dense coat that it's naturally immune to epidermal parasites - they just can't penetrate the fur. On the downside, they enjoy gnawing through all your electric cables, so it's swings and roundabouts, innit?]. An adult flea's armoured carapace is so resilient that simply squashing them with a fingertip against whatever surface they happen to be standing on has no discernible effect: they have to be crushed flat between hard surfaces - both thumbnails are ideal - which elicits a tiny but satisfying popping sound. The chances of getting them to stay still while doing this are minimal, however, as a remarkable internal mechanism constructed of elastic protein will trigger their freakishly long back legs and enable them to jump horizontally up to about 30 cm - some 200 times their body length. They do this with such rapidity that they seem to disappear before your appalled eyes. Rolling them very tightly between finger and thumb will temporarily disable them, I discovered, allowing a brief window in which to administer the merciful killing stroke.

Satisfying though this might be, it should come as no surprise that dispatching them one at a time is not an effective long-term solution. We must have tried every available domestic product over an increasingly nightmarish six-week period: dozens of cans of spray, packets of powder, sticky rollers, lamps suspended over ultra-adhesive discs, flea combs - including an ineffectual electrified contraption apparently designed to function not as a comb but as a unique device that wastes money and squanders hope in equal measure - our house rapidly became a proving ground for all manner of freely available anti-pest measures.

Here's another one I took. It's got some fancy filter on it or something.

Those weeks of intensive trial and error eventually yielded two predominant [and fairly obvious] essentials for ridding one's habitat of unwanted residents:

1] Dose your beast up with some serious poison. This takes the form of a small capsule of liquid that you spot onto the bare skin of a cat's neck, so it can't wash it straight back off again. The poison is absorbed into the bloodstream and kills anything that drinks it. Simples. Secreted somewhere behind the veritable pornographic smorgasbord that the web offers up with such alacrity, however, are numerous interested parties arguing whether or not fleas have developed an immunity to Frontline, the cheapest and most popular product on the market. Frontline say they haven't; Frontline customers say they have. We gave the cat a fresh dose of the stuff just before she became alive with undesirables, so make of that what you will. What I make of it is this: Frontline is absolute rubbish. Two weeks after a second go-round with slightly pricier competitor Stronghold, the fleas had vacated the premises. Advocate and Advantage come similarly recommended.

2] Blitz your living space. While fleas need an uncontaminated [or Frontline-dosed] cat in order to breed, they'll hop around your house merrily enough, and in the absence of a suitable feline beverage they'll give human claret a bloody good go. For a fee, any reputable pest control service will spray the floors of your house with an odourless insecticide that dries to a powder and will allegedly doom any flea that so much as brushes against it. This treatment remains effective for several weeks afterwards, so you should avoid dysoning during this time [this advice proved superfluous in our case].

Yes, my friends, we may have won this one small battle, but make no mistake: the war against fleas is one of attrition and victory can but be pyrrhic. Borne by rats, they were instrumental in spreading the Bubonic Plague, which wiped out a third of the world's population, and they will doubtless be drinking the irradiated blood of mutant mammals long after we've checked out. Never let your guard down for an instant.

And hey, don't have nightmares!

Thousands of fleas were mortally harmed [and badly Photoshopped] in the making of this post.

Sheersy's Top Five: Novels

Finally, a post format I can run and run with.

I love nothing better than making lists [mmm - lovely, lovely lists], and formulating my Top Five in a particular genre is something I just can't help doing. It's perfectly in keeping with my various other OCD tendencies, so I'm not especially concerned about it. Anyway, Nick Hornby got a novel out of it, so back off.

Comics excepted, prose fiction rates higher on my pastime scale than music, film or videogames, but there'll be plenty of time to cover all of those later.

Covers shown are not necessarily the ones I own, just the ones I most covet:

#5 H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds

Wells's hugely influential 'scientific romance' is original steampunk apocalypse of the first order, as Victorian England becomes the bridgehead for invasion by a warlike, technologically superior alien race. Having crash-landed in massive interplanetary cylinders, the Martians mobilize now-iconic armoured tripods and effortlessly decimate the British Army's meagre resistance. Faced with the enormity of the catastrophic events unfolding around him, our unnamed protagonist is powerless to do anything except catalogue his traumatic experiences as he travels the corpse-choked wasteland. Apart from a few brief moments of triumph - a direct hit by artillery on one tripod and HMS Thunder Child's suicidal assault on a further two - hope for survival of the human race looks increasingly bleak. Just when things couldn't look any worse, however, Wells drops a solid platinum plot device bomb - a beautifully simple resolution that gets us off the hook without cheating [I think I'm supposed to say ++++++SPOILERS++++++]: with no immunity to simple earthly bacteria, the Martians all snuffle themselves to death and everyone can get back to the serious business of expanding the bally Empire, what?

Cover designers have been massively over-egging the whole tripod imagery thing for decades, but the 2005 Finnish edition shown here is pretty much spot on.

#4 Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves

Danielewski's debut novel revolves around a fictional documentary called The Navidson Record. This film investigates the Navidson family's new home, which they notice - and corroborate by measuring - is slightly bigger on the inside than the outside. Shortly after this discrepancy is confirmed, the house starts to grow additional hallways and corridors at random, and a door eventually appears that opens onto a vast underground labyrinth of featureless grey stone. The Navidsons call in experienced adventurer Holloway Roberts, who mounts a full-on expedition into the Stygian depths - then things get really weird.

This is a pretty tough book to read. It's a doorstop, for a start, and weaves together the viewpoints of dozens of different characters, each in their own distinct font type. The book is littered with hidden codes, some sentences for instance spelling out additional messages in the first letter of each word. Danielewski also structures the text to reflect the events of the story, so when characters are exploring the dark miles of empty hallway beneath the house the text is crammed into tiny, claustral boxes in the centre of the page; later, when the characters are chased through the labyrinth by an entity - either real or imagined - there are only a few words per page for the duration of the pursuit. Certain sections feature blocks of text embedded within other text, while others have the text printed upside-down, backwards or following spiral patterns around the page. This catalogue of stylistic trickery - an example, apparently, of ergodic literature - adds to the reader's general sense of disorientation and unease. House of Leaves is also notable for its use of detailed, faux-academic footnotes, a literary quirk employed to similar expository effect in both Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman [the footnotes in the latter become more and more absurdly extensive as the novel progresses and eventually overwhelm the actual story].

Despite all of that - and I'm a lazy reader at the best of times - House of Leaves delivers more satisfying, high-concept horror than any of yer Stephen Kings or yer Conrad Williamses.

#3 Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

In the not-too-distant future, the last remaining human - Snowman - struggles to survive in a genetically unrecognizable environment of blank-canvas posthumans and dangerously intelligent wild animals. His story is told in a series of flashbacks, beginning in an unspecified near-future where corporations house their ultra-rich employees in sealed compounds, while the poor languish in abject poverty in the neglected pleeblands outside. In his youth, Snowman was Jimmy, a privileged boy growing up in the compound of a corporation that his father worked for. He becomes friends with Glenn, who goes by the alias Crake throughout the book [the player name he adopts for the computer game Extinctathon - a sort of bleak-minded Pokémon that deals with extinct species]. Jimmy and Crake both obsess over a young Asian girl whose image they find on a child porn site, and when Crake later becomes a brilliant geneticist he hires a woman who may or may not have been that anonymous girl. She takes the name Oryx and acts as tutor to Crake's genetically tweaked humanity - the Crakers - as well as a lover to both men. Catastrophe eventually strikes when Crake's god complex goes into overdrive, and he sets idealistic but unhinged plans in motion for a new world order in which humanity plays no part.

Atwood is no stranger to satiro-dystopian sci fi [or spec fi, as she would prefer us to think of it], having previously penned The Handmaid's Tale, a scathing critique of patriarchal, organized religion, and more recently The Year of the Flood, itself a semi-sequel to Oryx and Crake. Here, she has grim fun concocting bland and simultaneously terrifying corporate entities - HelthWyzer, OrganInc, RejoovenEsence - and consumer products - the quivering, headless, limbless organism lab-designed to yield a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins. Often unfairly criticized for perfunctory characterization in favour of making a point, this presents a brilliantly unsettling vision of a future that's almost upon us.

#2 Cormac McCarthy - The Road

An emaciated father and son trudge the blasted landscape of a world that has been devastated by some unspecified [but probably nuclear] global catastrophe. Ash clouds obscure the sun and nearly all flora and fauna have died out. For the few human survivors, life has become a constant, desperate search for food, taking care to avoid the roving cannibal gangs that lie in wait or patrol the highways. Our protagonists heap essential provisions in a battered shopping cart, with a rear view motorbike mirror fitted to its handle to prevent unexpected attack. The environment they travel is littered with fresh atrocities that display not so much man's inhumanity to man, but the depths to which people will inevitably sink when faced with the dismal choice between survival and starvation. The father is single-minded in his mission to reach the coast in the hope of finding a better existence, and remains immensely suspicious - often with good reason - of other survivors. He can tell from his worsening, wracking cough that his time is short and is intent on instilling in his son both a strong moral code and a dependable survival instinct. By contrast, the boy is idealistic and willing to see the best in those they meet, sometimes putting the pair in danger but more often facilitating their few benevolent encounters.

I make time to scan the Grauniad's books supplement every Saturday and bought The Road on the back of Alan Warner's captivating review. The book is sparsely written and necessarily grim - the pop promo post-punk posturing of Mad Max is nowhere to be seen in The Road's feudal drudgery - but compelling in its depiction of the world that will probably exist in those last terrible moments before mankind's extinction. I'm big enough to admit that I had a good old cry at the end, which is testament to the emotional intensity of this outstanding work.

#1 David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Mitchell's third novel still rates as his most ambitious. Six stories, each written in markedly different popular literary styles, are nested within each other like a Russian doll; only the sixth tale, at the centre of the book, remains intact. The other five stories are interrupted halfway through, some of them mid-sentence [when I came across the first instance of this, I was convinced I'd been sent a duff copy]. The second half of the book then resolves each of the stories in reverse order. The tales span several centuries, from the first story's nineteenth century nautical yarn to the sixth's far future, post-apocalypse [spot a theme yet?] adventure, and Mitchell strongly hints that the later protagonists are direct descendents of the earlier ones, since they all have a unique, comet-shaped birthmark just below their right shoulder blade. During the events of their own story, each protagonist also has cause to read the recorded story of the preceding main character, so that these fictional characters experience the various stories - and their interruptions - simultaneously with the reader.

I was literally knocked sideways when I first read this - it's an absolute blinder. On the strength of Cloud Atlas, I bought Mitchell's previous books - Ghostwritten and number9dream [both excellent] - and immediately jumped on Black Swan Green as soon as it was published. I'll admit to having been somewhat slower on the uptake with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but it's on the list.

Five honourable mentions: Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby; Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; George and Wheedon Grossmith - Diary of a Nobody; DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little; Luther Blissett - Q.

A Moving Experience

We've just recently moved house, which, popular opinion would have it, is one of the most stressful things a civilized, middle class Westerner can hope to endure in their life.

I can confirm that the overall experience was, by turns, tedious, tentatively hopeful, enormously frustrating, preposterously frantic and - finally - liberating, although tinged with despair at the amount of work that now surrounds us like an unavoidable and somehow inhabitable 'To Do' list. Had anyone been documenting my facial expressions throughout the whole sorry process - a Brighton art student, perhaps, or [I flatter myself] a stalker - I might well have ended up resembling that unnaturally gurning brat from the tin plate Fry's Chocolate ads you might see on the platform of a preservation railway station.

I present merely the highlights:

• Our buyers exhibited a tentative grasp of the notion of honour, incrementally nudging the sale price down at every opportunity. I console myself that only now, once they've had time to absorb the scale and extent of the dilapidations - the rising damp, the last-legs double glazing, the unreliable bungaroosh walls - will they have realized precisely who was stitching up whom.

• On the day before we were due to move, the back door of our old house literally fell out of its comprehensively rotted frame. That's Sod's law in action, right there. Luckily my Dad's only decent O-Level was woodwork, so he did a bang-up job of making it look like nothing had ever happened. Thanks Dad!

• The removal company of the house we were moving to let them down at the last minute [allegedly - it's more likely that the dopey losers were out of it on joss sticks and patchouli oil and only realized they were supposed to be moving out when our van rocked up], so we couldn't start unloading anything until the starlings were beginning their final mass congregation of the day.

• Their disorganization meant that the new house was not in the least bit clean and, among other insanitary atrocities, one of our hapless volunteers hauled about a full wigsworth of predominantly human hair out from beneath the kitchen units. We're still fighting an minor insurgency of cat fleas they left as a moving-in present. Thanks a frigging bunch, movey-out people.

• The sofa bed - which I will admit is an awesome piece of equipment, ideal for blocking the main routes in to or out of cities - wouldn't fit either downstairs into the living room or upstairs to any of the bedrooms, so I came back from my final sweep of the old house to find it parked in the garage. We know some fairly open-minded people [which makes it sound like we're swingers - we aren't], but I don't think even the most easy-going among them would take too kindly to being put up right next to the washing machine. As luck would have it, our neighbours a] are accommodating types and b] have already had their lounge banisters removed, so we could just about manoeuvre it through their house, over the garden fence and in through our back door. Thanks Steve and Claire!

Oh well - it's over, we're in and the view really does make it all worthwhile.

100 Things I'd Rather Do Than Watch the World Cup*

1. Read a book
2. Watch a film
3. Listen to some music
4. Cook dinner
5. Make sweet love [with me, baby, it's always sweet]
6. Sleep
7. Partake of one's daily ablutions
8. Sort out the loft
9. Sell stuff on eBay
10. The washing up
11. Hang around a playground while the kid rolls around in a sand pit
12. Hoover up sand from the carpets and furniture
13. Read the kid some stories
14. Encourage the use of so-called 'modelling clay' [in actual fact some kind of weaponized filth that recognizes no terrestrial detergent]
15. Quickly discourage the use of 'modelling clay'
16. Play one of the current favourite games: Dinosaur Emergency or Mountain Crashdown
17. Do a sabre-toothed tiger puzzle [strictly speaking they're cats, not tigers, but the consensus misnomer persists]
18. Wash the car [and maybe valet it, if I'm feeling particularly motivated]
19. Go to work [Jesus, man, we're only up to 19!]
20. Desperately scour the internet and the press [local and national] for another job
21. Look for a house
22. Go shopping
23. Sit on the beach and throw stones into the sea
24. Eat out
25. Go to a pub that doesn't have Sky Sports blaring out the door 24/7
26. Go clubbing
27. Have a post-night out kebab
28. Suffer an epic hangover
29. Go somewhere by train and/or replacement bus service
30. Stroke the cat
31. Expect a superspy
32. Do some gardening
33. Glug a nice Carménère
34. Smoke some fags [I don't smoke, but I still need to bump this up to 100 somehow]
35. Get in long-overdue touch with friends and family
36. Organize a party
37. Test-drive a Hummer
38. Purge my wardrobe Stalin-style
39. Start a scrapbook of entertainingly hyperbolic Daily Mail articles
40. Stream-of-consciousness doodling
41. Arts and crafts
42. Visit a zoo, a museum, or perhaps an ornamental garden
43. Indulge in unapologetic, character-assassinating gossip
44. Sew up holes in my clothes
45. Polish my boots
46. Make a fancy dress costume
47. Clear moss out of the gutters
48. Decorate a room
49. Rearrange the bookshelves in whichever whimsical order grabs me
50. Play reprehensible videogames
51. Lay down some MC Hammer dance moves
52. Make sure all the numbers in my mobile phone are written down somewhere
53. Surf the net
54. Social networking
55. Subscribe to some worthwhile podcasts
56. Try something new in Photoshop
57. Back up my grossly distended iTunes library
58. Defrag the laptop
59. Eat a whole packet of Haribo Tangfastics
60. Walk random streets
61. Indulge in some light iconoclasm
62. Make a rubber band ball
63. Watch a big analogue clock tick the precious seconds of my life away
64. Make a nice cup of tea
65. Hoover out the toolbox
66. Tag a bus shelter
67. Iron a shirt
68. Help an old lady across the road
69. Find the funniest name in the phone book and bombard them with hoax calls
70. Discuss religion or politics with someone whose views violently oppose my own
71. Make flat pack furniture
72. Defrost the fridge
73. Stalk a celebrity
74. Pop a load of bubble wrap
75. Create an army of killer robots and conquer the world AH HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAH!!
76. Grow a luxuriant moustache
77. Fancy pigeons
78. Get abducted by a UFO
79. Experiment with mind-bending hallucinogens
80. Ponder the nature of existence
81. Panic about the lack of real achievement in my life and the dwindling number of years in which to rectify that situation
82. Embark on a journalism course
83. Write a book
84. Make a film
85. Learn how to use the requisite software to be able to make bass-heavy but ultimately pedestrian dance music
86. Learn Japanese
87. Travel the world
88. Train for a triathlon
89. Do a skydive
90. Start horse riding
91. Learn ice sculpture
92. Swim with manta rays
93. Practise mixed-discipline martial arts
94. Buy a restaurant
95. Set myself up as a spiritual guru
96. Scandalize polite society
97. Kick a football around the park
98. Try to write an entertaining blog entry
99. Give up and write this blog entry
100. None of the above

* Especially if England are playing

League of X, where X =

Inspired by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's sublime fictional character mash-up The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [the same could not be said of its big-screen Hollywood reinterpretation - but let's give the venerable Mr. Connery the benefit of the doubt, since he doubtless has bills to pay, the same as any of us mere mortals] -

Cut to -

Connery: Och aye the noo, I have indeed got billsh to pay, the shame ash any of you mere mortalsh.

Aargh, my eyes! I'd forgotten about Zardoz. Shame is about right, Seany boy, shame indeed.

Anyway, inspired by Moore and O'Neill's neat retooling of numerous literary creations, and very probably labouring under the misapprehension that the 'League of...' template could be applied to any area of creative fiction, I give you:

The League of Unpredictable Mentalists

The pitch: Silky-smooth London kingpin and ex-antiques dealer Horatio Lovejoy sends trusted lieutenant Don Logan out to recruit an eclectic selection of classic movie nutjobs in this breezy caper comedy!

Don Logan He's the lovable cockney scamp who just won't take no for an answer!

Tommy DeVito This shoe-shining Italian-American is the life and soul of any New York party!

Tony Montana Thinking of Havana yayo-fuelled mental breakdown? Just keep your hands off his sister - you don't want to meet Tony's 'little friend'!

Travis Bickle The idiosyncratic wheelman outlines his seasonal must-haves - what's hot: mohicans, exercise, firearms. What's not: pimps, hoodlums, scumbags. Travis, chill - that's just your reflection!

And last, but most assuredly not least, Franco Begbie, Glasgow's forthright firecracker philosopher. "Jesus, ah thoat ah wis fucken psychoatic before ah hooked up wi' this loat."

Yes, these adorable rascals prove the breezy spirit of Ealing is alive and well as they tackle that most reliable of crime plot devices - one final job - with hilarious consequences!

Not doing it for you? No problem, let's just reset Sheersy's patented League Randomizer and see what we get...

The League of Infuriating Animated Sidekicks

The pitch: A wave of suspicious heart attacks among US animation studio execs leads to a collective, industry-wide effort to right the wrongs of their terminally misguided predecessors and make a clean sweep of their more questionable marketing decisions.

Together for the first time - Orko! Scrappy Doo! The New Shmoo! Snarf! Uni! Godzooky!

7-Zark-7 tasks a hand-picked, hand-drawn team of plucky cartoon buffoons, whose existence would appear solely to provide comic relief to particularly moronic toddlers, with some unrealistically dangerous mission or other. Infiltrate Castle Grayskull, perhaps, or steal Tiamat's favourite...egg. Whatever.

OK kids, I've given you the League of Loons and the League of Toons entirely free of charge. Now why not give the Randomizer a spin and come up with a few ker-azy congregations of your own?

Disclaimer: Don't blame me - blame Alan Moore!

Sheersy's manifesto

Ding-dong

*pause*

Ding-dong knock knock knock

*long pause*

Ding-dong ding-dong knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knock ah, you are in. I thought I could see you moving about in there, ha ha! Milk no sugar, before you ask.

OK, well, hello, I’m Sheersy and I’m just canvassing the area to see whether you’ll be voting for me in the upcoming – and, let’s face it, highly anticipated – General Election. I’m running on a benevolent Stalinist agenda that prizes fear and confused obedience above all other qualities. That’s not to say that I’ll be an entirely cruel supreme master, er, democratically elected leader, but I’d urge you to concentrate less on the ‘benevolent’ and more on the ‘Stalinist’, if you know what’s good for you. It’s a long-held aim of mine to reimagine the carrot/stick equation and then eat my big orange bat afterwards to dispose of the evidence, that’s all I’m saying.

My most noteworthy policies - the four sturdy pillars of my leadership bid - are as follow:

Pimp all rides Britain’s roads are boring. Just go for a drive – or, hey, even a walk – and see how excited you get. Clue: not very. Silver car, silver car, silver car – oh look, a red car - silver car. Boring. “But it helps hide the dirt.” BOOOOORRIIIIIIINNNG. Now try this: chrome rims, hydraulics, Cherry Bomb exhaust, custom paint job, blown engine, sick sound system. Why you whip be rollin’ on they lame-ass biscuits, dog? Precisely.

Bring back dinosaurs The worldwide annual budget for space exploration is an estimated 35 thousand million pounds. Yikes, that’s some serious money. We should be sending out sleek, hyperdrive-powered starliners like spores from some overactive puffball by now, right? Uh, no. In fact, we’ve only just about been to the moon a grand total of six times in the last 50-odd years. If this were a private company, the shareholders would be asking searching and pertinent questions like “Where’s my jetpack?” This simply isn’t paying the sci-fi dividends we were promised. Enough is enough, it’s time to knock this space bunk on the head and try a different tack. Let’s plough that sweet mountain of cash into questionable, carte blanche genetic projects run by disavowed and quite possibly unhinged scientists on remote tropical islands and see what they come up with.

Give our athletes some ‘pep’ Our fine sportsmen and women have a really tough time navigating the labyrinthine drug laws enforced by such bodies as the planned National Anti-Doping Agency, at the same time as trying to get some kind of product licensing deal [AKA genuine income] off the ground. Aah, poor them. In addition to that, as a group they’re not generally known for their incisive, high-brow appraisal of any given situation. “Coach said those special vitamins would be good for me, but now the unfriendly men want to stick me full of pins and make me wee in a cup.” They’re more like livestock, really. Now watch the over-toned idiots run round and round a track: yawnarama. Let’s scrap all this anti-doping nonsense, pump them full of all sorts of experimental concoctions and watch the fireworks. Eat my dust, Bannister, you four-minute-mile loser! Think of the military applications. It’s win-win, smiles all round.

Ban golf Take that Pringle-sweater-having, tasselled-shoe-wearing, self-important, new money waste of everybody’s time and effort underground and maybe, just maybe, like the London Orbital warehouse raves of the early ‘90s, it might become vaguely interesting. But I doubt it.

It’s a revolutionary approach, I grant you, but hope you’ll see sense and opt for my policies over those of the other [what I like to call ‘lesser’] candidates. Remember: vote Sheersy!

Thanks for the tea - I’ll see myself out.

BBC 6 Music

An email to the BBC Trust - srconsultation@bbc.co.uk - regarding the proposal in the BBC Strategy Review March 2010 that 6 Music should be axed in 2011:


Dear Sir/Madam,

I feel compelled to write to you regarding the frankly devastating news that the BBC is considering closing their digital radio station 6 Music.

When the BBC launched the station in 2002, I'm sure I wasn't alone in thinking it was too good to be true. There I was dutifully paying my licence fee for the odd Attenborough series and, well, not much else, to be quite honest. News? Channel 4. Quality drama? HBO. Comedy? Behave - Two Pints is an absolute travesty, beloved only of unapologetic knuckleheads.

Then along comes a more eclectic, less chart-oriented XFM with no adverts and bingo bango, the BBC's finally putting out something that genuinely appeals to me. Not only sporadically, either, but pretty much all day long. 6 Music has continually attracted talented, erudite and witty broadcasters, including respected, cutting-edge comedians and musicians, to front their shows. The line-up of presenters past and present [with, granted, the notable exception of George Lamb] reads like some kind of wish fulfilment fantasy, and Adam and Joe's Saturday show is honest-to-God gold dust.

The question the BBC should be asking itself is whether it can afford to cut 700,000 fanatical 6 Music listeners loose in order to save 10 times that fathead Moyles's pie allowance, which fantastic sum seems inversely commensurate with the recipient's lack of talent. It's not going to be a case of "Oh well, it was good while it lasted - now let's see what else the BBC's got to offer," because the goodwill of 6 Music's audience will have been squandered and they'll seek similar content elsewhere. The Director-General's Strategy Review would seem to suggest that 6 Music's fan base would naturally gravitate - or else could be gently shepherded - towards Radios 1 and 2, but Radio 1's daytime output is far too moronic for the 6 Music listenership, and Radio 2 seems geared [with apologies to my parents] towards middle-aged nostalgia addicts. Music is one of those things that people are illogically passionate about, and to assume that we'll make do with a vague approximation of our preferences just won't cut it in this digital age of unprecedented choice.

I can't help but feel, too, that this is a disappointing, token gesture of appeasement on the part of the BBC to the well-documented pressure the Tories have recently been placing on the corporation. Government agencies and publicly-funded bodies are tripping over themselves to second-guess the uptight fun-haters everyone seems to think will be in government in but a few short months. It would appear naïve in the extreme, however, for anyone to believe that the proposed cuts will sate those who already have the scent of blood in their nostrils, and that this wouldn't in fact herald the start of an almighty feeding frenzy, to be accompanied by increasingly self-confident cries for further scapegoats.

The BBC offers a broad and unique selection of programmes, the like of which simply isn't on offer amongst its commercial competitors. Streamlining those diverse - and by their very nature often niche - services can surely only result in a general lack of distinction from all the other bland, lowest-common-denominator fare on the market.

Yours faithfully,

Happy Gin Face


P.S. Charlie Brooker for Director-General! Whoop whoop!

Über alles

Just back from a short break in Germany.

I was staying with an old schoolfriend who's been working for the MOD since leaving university and is currently on secondment to NATO at the JHQ Rheindalen military base. He assures me he is but a lowly data analyst, but he's signed the Official Secrets Act and I honestly couldn't begin to guess what he actually does on a day-to-day basis. There's every possibility that he's involved in deniable ops, so just to be on the safe side I'll identify him only as Mr. L [I was going to advertise his PS3 username, but that's probably still enough for him to be contacted through PlayStation Network and "persuaded" by whoever the other side is these days. Blimey, you never can tell in this game, can you?].

JHQ Rheindalen is a truly bizarre place - a vast, town-sized network of semi-detached properties that physically resembles an eerily underpopulated Chatsworth Estate from Shameless and is uniformly rendered in that green-tinged light grey so beloved of Cold War decorators. Featuring such incongruous street names as Queens Avenue and Cumberland Drive, it's a surreally skewed slice of British life planted slap bang in the middle of Europe, with its own shopping arcade, supermarkets and cinema: The Truman Show with added squaddies. Apparently the local town on pay day is a mass brawl waiting to happen, with hordes of both local and military police on patrol just waiting for it to kick off.

Outside the regimented Petri dish of existence on base, German life is noticeably cleaner, more efficient and more polite than its English equivalent. Mr. L's theory is that you're more likely to respect other people when you respect yourself, which, if true, would be a compound rule that draws impetus from all facets of cultural identity. For instance: in marked contrast to our once-competitive industries, German manufacturing is still a force to be reckoned with - a fact that can readily be deduced at the airport drop-off rank, where a steady stream of VWs, Audis, BMWs and Mercedes makes up a conspicuously high percentage of the road-going traffic. German people evidently buy German brands over and above anything else on the market, in the relative certainty that the product has been sourced, forged and marketed domestically. Our home-grown brands, meanwhile, have been brazenly flogged off for a transitory profit. Still, at least we won World War II, eh? And the World Cup in '66. In your face, Germany!

Another point of interest - not unrelated to the above observation - is the fact that Germany's Autobahn features numerous entirely unrestricted stretches: the road sign to the left heralds a section of road where there is literally no speed limit. In a country where every other car is a high-end Merc or Beamer, this means that the general pace on the roads is in an altogether different league. As a perhaps unsurprising consequence of this, German drivers are incredibly aware and will quickly pull over if a more capable vehicle signals its intention to overtake [usually by roaring up behind you and then sitting on your arse until you get out of the way]. Mr. L is a confirmed speed freak and once took the opportunity to fly as a passenger in a BAe Hawk T1(A) - of Red Arrows fame - the unprecedented G-Force of which caused him to yack his NAAFI lasagne up all over the inside of the cockpit. Needless to say, the hands-off approach of the German road system rather appeals to his get-there-quick sensibilities. "We're doing twice the UK speed limit," he said to me at one point, as distant objects in front of his 5l supercharged V8 Jag - I think they might have been other cars - became close objects in improbably short order. I could just about acknowledge this with a strained "Nng," and was about to add that I was sure it was 70mph for a reason, when he decided that we might need to up the ante slightly. Not much, just another 20 miles an hour or so. My facial expression contracted into an entirely involuntary rictus and, had I been able to tear my terrified gaze from the road for long enough, I'm pretty sure I could have located the individual sweat glands in the palms of my hands simply by tracing the gushing rivulets of adrenaline-rich perspiration to their roots.

The unalloyed fear was all worthwhile, however, as I'd traded five years of my life in for a delightful trip to the Mosel Valley, where much of Germany's white wine and Sekt is produced. This is an aesthetically aggreeable region typified by chalet-style architecture, impossibly steep vineyards and at least one imposing hilltop castle, the Reichsurg Cochem, whose gothic spires dominate this picture postcard panorama. We followed this with dinner in the revolving restaurant at the top of Düsseldorf's Fernsehturm and - just to bring me crashing figuratively as well as literally back to Earth - a tour of some of cheesiest late bars I've ever experienced.

Yes, the UK's industrial machine may be in tatters, but at least we've got the clubbing scene sussed. In your face, Germany! Feel the burn!

Dave's new reading list

A friend of mine - let's call him 'Dave' - recently [well, not that recently, but I've done it now so shut up] asked me for some comic and graphic novel recommendations. I've skipped the obvious ones - V For Vendetta, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns - because if you haven't read them, then frankly you haven't done your homework and you should be thoroughly ashamed.

You'll notice that several writers crop up regularly throughout my list. They are 2000AD alumni Alan Moore, Bryan Talbot, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis and Mark Millar. I routinely buy multiple copies of anything illustrated by Frank Quitely, because the man is a demiurge of sequential art.

I've split my recommendations into handy sub-sections: Spandex, Steam, Horror and We3 [curse you, pesky genre-straddling Grant Morrison!]. That way, if you're so not about the capes right now, you can just skip on to the next section. If none of these sub-headings appeals, then you're probably reading the wrong blog.

Dave: this supersedes any and all previous reading lists. If you are in the middle of a book, stop reading it IMMEDIATELY and pick up of one of the following:

SPANDEX

Miracleman [w: Alan Moore a: various] Written for UK's Warrior magazine around the same time as V For Vendetta, this is British legend Alan Moore's final word on real-world superheroics, with the titular hero testing the limits of his powers and responsibilities aided and/or hindered by a colourful supporting cast of allies and enemies. Worth reading if only to experience the third volume - Olympus - which is beautifully illustrated by John Totleben and charts Miracleman's systematic construction of the ideal human society. It also features one of the most horrific superhuman battles in comics history, with London destroyed and millions dead. Miracleman has been subject to protracted legal wrangling over character ownership since the mid-'80s, making the now out-of-print collections largely unobtainable.

The Killing Joke [w: Alan Moore a: Brian Bolland] The Joker escapes from Arkham Asylum and goes after Batman's closest allies in this seminal tale. The compact story is by Alan Moore, who develops the character of the Caped Crusader's pallid, grinning nemesis more credibly in fifty pages than any number of writers had done over the preceding fifty years. The slick, precise linework constitutes rare interior illustration by superstar cover artist Brian Bolland, who was among the many talented 2000AD creators to be harvested by big American firms in the early- to mid-'80s. The Killing Joke was recently recoloured and retouched by Bolland for a 20th anniversary hardback.

Zenith [w: Grant Morrison a: Steve Yeowell] Morrison is one of the biggest writers in the business - in some respects Alan Moore's natural heir, albeit with his own distinct line in psychedelic metafiction. Before he started mucking the hero genre about in earnest, he wrote this straightforward but superior hero series for 2000AD: Zenith is a spoilt, egotistical pop star, the son of two now-missing '60s heroes, who gets dragged against his will into a plot involving Nazi superhumans and evil extradimensional entities. The third volume features cameos from pretty much every British superhero since the '50s [see the International Catalogue of Superheroes' handy Zenith Phase Three Scorecard for further information]. Now out of print and quite tricky to get hold of, due to Morrison having instigated a legal wrangle over creative rights.

Brat Pack [w/a: Rick Veitch] A long-time collaborator of Alan Moore's, Veitch had previously taken over writing Swamp Thing when Moore left the title. His growing disillusionment with the aggressive commercial aspects of the business fuelled a series of satirical takes on costumed heroics, of which this is the first. Brat Pack explores the dubious notion of kid sidekicks, following four raw recruits through their brutal inductions by variously irresponsible and psychopathic 'heroes'. Ugly and nasty, yes, but it's a beautifully crafted labour of simmering resentment, packed with great character design and succinctly iconic imagery.

Flex Mentallo [w: Grant Morrison a: Frank Quitely] Morrison's first collaboration with the sublime Frank Quitely is a perfectly-formed piece of glossy metafiction. Each issue channels the four distinct eras of US comics [Golden Age, Silver Age, Dark Age and Modern Age], all framed within a surreal missing superpersons detective story. Never collected, due to legal wrangling over Mentallo's Charles Atlas-like physical appearance and, more specifically, secret origin [which actually appeared in Doom Patrol #42, fact fans!], although I had my individual issues hardback bound by dpbanks.com. That's right, now you're envious.

The Authority [w: Warren Ellis/Mark Millar a: Bryan Hitch/Frank Quitely/various] This eponymous superteam are answerable to no-one - the heaviest hitters in the Wildstorm Universe, they live aboard a sentient interdimensional spaceship the size of a city and don't hesitate to come down on their enemies like a ton of wet shit. Warren Ellis's incarnation of the team took on supervillains and scaled-up space-borne threats, but for my money Mark Millar's take was their finest hour - a collection of flawed beings with god-like powers, revelling in their celebrity status, indulging in Caligulan parties and setting corrupt terrestrial governments straight with loads of stick and not much carrot.


Well, quite.

If you like this brand of OTT, so-called "real world" superheroics, you'll lap up Cla$$war, The Ultimates, Wanted, Kick-Ass, Black Summer, No Hero, Supergod, Nemesis, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Planetary [w: Warren Ellis a: John Cassaday] I've already written at some length about this title, but in summary this is the cerebral counterpart to the audacious hyperbole of The Authority. A trio of idiosyncratic superhumans heads up the enigmatic and phenomenally wealthy Planetary organization, dedicated to unearthing otherworldly secrets that are all but lost to posterity. Ellis's script ties a host of pop culture references - Godzilla, '50s B-movies, Hong Kong ghosts - into a single continuum, while John Cassaday's character and environment design brings to the proceedings a disquietingly unique aesthetic.

STEAM

From Hell [w: Alan Moore a: Eddie Campbell] This dense speculative history of the Jack the Ripper murders is the size of a phone directory and commensurately ambitious in scope. Campbell's scratchy monochrome inks perfectly suit the gaslit squalor of late 19th-century London, while Moore insinuates his story into more well-documented, historically accurate events, most obviously the five grisly murders perpetrated by the Ripper; his sizeable cast of characters similarly interacts with period figures such as Queen Victoria and Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [w: Alan Moore a: Kevin O'Neill] The neat central premise concerns Victorian oddities from various literary works being recruited for outlandish black bag work by the British government. Moore's scripts tie a dizzying host of fictional works together [in later instalments, for example, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is an early prototype of Knight Rider's KITT], while pretty much every tiny background detail in Kevin O'Neill's illustration alludes to a period character or concept. American writer Jess Nevins has made extensive annotations to accompany each volume, with definitive explanations of even the most obscure reference.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright [w/a: Bryan Talbot] This dense steampunk saga has foppish Royalists using souped-up First World War technology to engage fascistic Roundheads across a host of parallel Earths. With a tip of the hat to Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius, Talbot fleshes out his labyrinthine plot with richly detailed black-and-white illustration and extended, bloody action sequences, painstakingly rendered in Peckinpah-esque bullet-time. The full-colour sequel, Heart of Empire, is also worth picking up.

Scarlet Traces [w: Ian Edginton a: D'Israeli] A steampunk sequel to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, originally serialized as a webcomic. Gentleman adventurer and war hero Major Robert Autumn investigates the brutal murders and disappearances of young women against the backdrop of a Victorian England awash with acquired Martian technology. The same creative team have since adapted Wells' original in the same style, and there's a sequel, The Great Game [so, confusingly, this is the middle episode of a trilogy].

Grandville [w/a: Bryan Talbot] In part an homage to the anthropomorphic illustration of French caricaturist Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, who worked under the pseudonym J.J. Grandville, this is also inspired - according to Talbot - by Conan Doyle, Rupert Bear and Quentin Tarantino. Detective Inspector LeBrock, a rough-and-ready Scotland Yard badger, embarks on a period romp with lashings of old-fashioned fisticuffs. This oversized hardback is one of the most attractive editions ever to have graced my bookshelves.

HORROR

Swamp Thing [w: Alan Moore a: various] DC's third-rate '70s muck monster was reinvented by Alan Moore as a sentient plant-god in this cerebral horror series. Shortly after Moore took the reins, this was the first mainstream US title to completely discard its stamp of approval from the Comics Code Authority - a censorship organization formed in the wake of the creative witch-hunts of the '50s - clearing the way for more considered, adult content aimed at a mature and literate readership. Moore's Swamp Thing is also notable for having introduced roguish magician John Constantine - who's actually a foul-mouthed, blond scouser, not some raven-haired LA woodentop who gives up smoking at the first whiff of sulphur. Keanu Reeves, I'm looking at you.

Uzumaki [w/a: Junji Ito] There's no shortage of top-notch scares in manga and this is one of the creepiest Eastern offerings on the market. Ito's three collections detail the insidious takeover of a small lakeside town by malevolent spiral patterns, beginning on a small-scale with individual obsession and insanity but quickly assuming apocalyptic proportions, with gangs of physically twisted lunatics on the prowl and rampant typhoons decimating everything in their path. Heavily influenced by the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, the overriding atmosphere throughout Uzumaki is one of impossible, alien infection, against which the few remaining sane protagonists are ultimately powerless.

The Walking Dead [w: Robert Kirkman a: Charlie Adlard] Kirkman is on record as saying that he won't be wrapping up his zombie apocalypse opus any time soon, which is great news for fevered deadheads like me. If you've ever wondered what happens after the credits of a zombie movie have rolled, here's your definitive answer. It's an HBO-style, character-driven series that understands the fundamentals of the zombie horror: by all means barricade the windows against the flesh-eating dead, but keep an even closer eye on your fellow survivors. Don't get too attached to any of the characters, either - Kirkman likes nothing better than to continually wrong-foot his readers in the most unexpected ways possible. I've lost count of the number of times I've cursed his sick name while reading this. Also benefits from the solid, gritty black-and-white artwork of Charlie Adlard, one of the new school of 2000AD Brits currently making a Stateside name for themselves.

Girls [w/a: The Luna Brothers] Rather like Stephen King's latest doorstop, The Lunas' high-concept horror has an impenetrable dome suddenly enclosing an all-American town, with increasingly disturbing consequences. Unlike Stephen King's latest breeze block, this particular town is subsequently overrun by attractive naked women. Aggressive towards women and irresistible to men, these blank-minded clones quickly replicate themselves after intercourse [by laying eggs] in order to serve something rather disturbing that has crash-landed out in one of the cornfields... Tensions soon run high inside the dome as realization dawns and the struggle for survival cranks up several notches. Quite harsh. The same creative team are currently halfway through The Sword, an immensely entertaining action fantasy that's also well worth a look.

WE3

We3 [w: Grant Morrison a: Frank Quitely] Gets its own section because I don't really know what it is: near-future dystopian satire, experimental animal rights manifesto or post-Matrix sci-fi action adventure? Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's mini-series is a mere pamphlet compared to some of the dense tomes featured above, but it's a killer example of the medium's potential. The simple plot revolves around three domestic animals - dog, cat and rabbit - who escape, along with their state-of-the-art cybernetic warsuits, from a top secret military program and attempt to make their way back home. Even Morrison's pet-centric emotional manipulation takes a back seat to Quitely's jaw-dropping, time-sliced action sequences and insane levels of razor sharp detail.


Absolutely essential reading for anyone, much less comic fans.

Right, that's your lot - now get your sorry arse off to Amazon.