Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 23 - 1989

When choosing things for the top spot in these posts, I desperately want to avoid the obvious choices (although some do creep into "honourable mentions") - plus other items are excluded because I plan longer posts on them once this is all over. In the end I went with a series of books which a lot of people will never have heard of, but which were far better than their beginnings might suggest...

1989:

The trivia:

• Scuba diver William Lamm was swimming in eight feet of water in Florida when he was accidentally sucked into the intake pipe for Hutchinson Island's nuclear power plant. Carried at speed through over 1,600 feet of pipeline, he was eventually dumped into the cooling pond surrounding the reactor. Thankfully he survived with barely a bruise.
• An amateur collector of 18th century maps bought an old tattered painting of a country scene for US$ 4.00 at a Pennsylvania bargain sale - purely because he liked the frame. When he took the frame apart, he discovered a copy of the US Declaration of Independence hidden inside. Thinking it nothing more than a curiosity, he just put it to one side until a friend convinced him to contact an expert. It turned out to be one of only 200 "John Dunlap broadsides" printed on the evening of 4th July 1776 and sold two years later for US$ 2.4 million.
• A MiG-23 pilot mistakenly ejected on take off from a Polish airfield.The aircraft continued to fly over 500 miles on autopilot only to eventually crash into a house in Belgium, sadly killing a teenager living there.

The memory:

The Cineverse Cycle by Craig Shaw Gardner

In the wake of the success of Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" novels, publishers realised that comic fantasy could be big business. The truth is that a more light-hearted take on the standard fantasy tropes had been around for a long time, but it had never captured the general public's imagination. in quite the same way until now - so suddenly there was a plethora of new authors to choose from in the UK. During regular trips to Forbidden Planet I started to pick up a number of these books - John DeChancie's "Castle Perilous" series, Simon Hawke's "The Wizard of Fourth Street", Christopher Statsheff's "Warlock" sequence (although he had actually been writing for many years beforehand).and Alan Dean Fosters "Spellsinger". In addition I continued to collect the ongoing "Xanth" adventures from Piers Anthony. I bought a *lot* of books.

Amongst the dozens of new titles on the shelves, one author particularly stood out - but what attracted me to his name was not the blurb on the back, but the cover. You see, in a canny move, the publishers decided to get Discworld artist Josh Kirby to also produce the covers for the books by American writer Craig Shaw Gardner. I guess they felt that readers who already strongly associated Kirby's instantly recognisable work with the quality of Pratchett's books, would make the same leap and feel that they were being told "this is more of the same kind of stuff". Well guess what - it worked on me!

Gardner released "A Malady of Magicks" in 1986, but I think it was some time later when it, and the other two volumes in this first trilogy ("A Multitude of Monsters" and "A Night in the Netherhells")  reached UK shores with their Kirby covers. In a nutshell, the main plot is fairly simple - Ebenezum is a possibly the greatest wizard of the age. After an altercation with a demon, causes him to be cursed to be allergic to magic,  he and his hapless apprentice Wuntvor must journey to the City of Forbidden Delights in search of a cure, all the while avoiding death, disaster and perils such as tap-dancing dragons, enchanted chickens, etc, etc. It's your typical episodic quest narrative and very reminiscent in places of "The Colour of Magic" and "The Light Fantastic" with its send-up of standard fantasy. It's light, whimsical and occasionally funny - good enough to while away the time on a train journey but certainly nothing mind-blowingly original. Nonetheless I enjoyed the books enough to pick up the sequel "Wuntvor" trilogy, which ventures into fairy tale territory as the helper becomes the hero and has to save the world with help from (amongst others) an amorous unicorn, a ferret and a cowardly sword.

I've written before how I took one of these books to a Terry signing and he wrote inside "nice cover.,...". But these Pratchett-pastiches are not the core of this particular memory. Craig Shaw Gardner's next series was far more in tune with my love for all things from the worlds of movies, pulp serials and comic books....

Billed as the first volume in the Cineverse Cycle", "Slaves of the Volcano God" concerns public relations worker Roger, an average guy who discovers that his girlfriend Delores is actually from the Cineverse, where each world is based on a B-movie genre. Roger can travel between worlds using his trust Captain Crusader Decoder Ring (found inside a cereal packet). The key to the Cineverse is that "Movie Magic" always applies - so in the Wild West, cowboys never run out of ammo, if you enter the "Musical Comedies" you may never escape as everyone bursts into song at inopportune moments, and good guys always win (except in 1970s gritty dramas). On his quest to rescue Delores from the villainous Doctor Dread, Roger also has to figures out what caused "The Change" (the reason why movies are just not as good as they used to be) and exactly who or what is the Plotmaster... The story continues in "Bride of the Slime Monster" and concludes in "Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies".

I think what appealed to me most about the Cineverse is that it's obvious that Gardner has a deep abiding love for the B-movie genre and it's conventions. His story is peppered with allusions to classics of the past and each of his worlds has been designed to operate within its own rule-sets and contain appropriate challenges. Along with this there is a feel of those black and white Republic serials with their weekly cliffhangers, dastardly villains and bizarre science. My own childhood was one of growing up with a film-loving family and weekends and school holidays filled with the likes of "Flash Gordon", "King of the Rocketmen", "Them!", "Godzilla" or "It Came From Beneath The Sea", The more you know about the movies, the more you will enjoy these books. It's a far more original work that the humorous fantasies of Ebenezum and Wuntvor - satirical rather than trying to be "funny" and all the better for it. It also helps that there is a rollicking good plot inside the pages.

Long out of print, the "Cineverse Cycle" is a lost pearl amongst a sea of parodies and Pratchett copycats. Not every book has to be epic or life changing or worthy of the Man Booker prize. Sometimes you just need a series that is damn good fun.

Honourable mentions:

• Batman - He could never better the late great Adam West, but Michael Keaton made a pretty good Dark Knight and an even better Bruce Wayne. The costume is excellent, the Batmobile looks suitably cool and Gotham feels like somewhere that the bizarre rogues gallery could come from (even if it does look like a movie set a little too much at times). Keaton certainly shut down the haters who lambasted his casting when his name was first attached. I'm not so enamoured with Jack Nicholson's Joker. Yes the Clown Prince of Crime is meant to be over the top, but Nicholson went too far in the wrong direction for my personal tastes - but I guess superhero movies were a big gamble back then and they needed a "name" actor to anchor things for cinema goers. Despite this, I still loved the film when it first came out and even though I wasn't the greatest Prince fan, bought both soundtrack albums. The less said about Vicki Vale the better though...

• Truckers by Terry Prachett - So after I headlined one of his 'imitators', here comes PTerry himself with the first in the "Nome / Bromeliad" trilogy. It was the first non-Discworld book of his that I read, and I instantly became enamoured with the tiny characters and their journey to find where they came from and how to get back there - especially this first novels central concept of an entire tribe of Nomes living under the floorboards of a department store. "Truckers" showed the world that Pratchett was capable of more than just tales of witches and wizards and luggage with legs and the trilogy as a whole is as good as any of the best Discworld stories. Animation experts Cosgrove Hall of "Danger Mouse " fame did an excellent stop-motion adaptation in 1992.

• Doom Patrol - I can't really be called a Grant Morrison fan. Much of the time (especially in recent years) he feels like a bargain basement Alan Moore tribute act, revelling in trying to be clever for clevers sake, but occasionally he does have real flashes of originality and brilliance. His reinvention of this 1960s DC super-team of freaks and rejects with artist Richard Case is one such occurrence. I was fascinated by the bizarre storylines and creations he came up with, such as the Brotherhood of Dada, the Scissormen and Danny The Street. It's all so absurd and abstract and a little bit pretentious that you can't help being swept away by the insanity.

• London Boys - The Twelve Commandments of Dance - It's cheesy Europop synth dance music and to be honest it's pretty awful. Why is it even on the list then? Well apart from the fact that the songs were never off the radio in the summer of 1989, it's here because it was an album I bought and tried to like to impress a girl I was genuinely infatuated with. Listening now instantly transports me back to a time and place when I was young, naive and a little bit too keen. No wonder the lady in question tolerated my friendship and nothing further...

• Metropolis :The Musical - With, let's be fair, only a couple of really good tunes, this stage version of the Fritz Lang classic needed something else to make it stand out. Thankfully it had the UK debut of future star Judy Kuhn as Maria / Futura and the deep voice and magnetic presence of the one and only Brian Blessed - and actor Jonathan Adams in a great supporting role. In addition there was the huge metallic moving set with it's rising platforms and cradles coming from the ceiling. That, plus my love for the original film was enough to get me to the theatre three times in quick succession. Which was just as well as "Metropolis" only lasted 214 performances before being consigned to a footnote in musical history. "The machines are beautiful..."

• Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children - The first series from DC's alternative imprint Piranha Press was not really a comic book at all, more a series of text stories with accompanying illustrations. But what stories they were. Forget the brightly coloured pantheon of superheroes, this was a monochromatic world of unsettling, twisted and creepy fables with titles such as "A Cotton Candy Autopsy", "Die Ranbow Die" and The Santas of Demotion Street" . Written by Dave Loupre and drawn by Dan Sweetman,whose scratchy yet beautiful penmanship offered a distorted view of the world, these tales were full of dark humour, unsympathetic characters and unhappy endings. It was thirty issues of brilliance. 

• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - The best film ever about time travel in a phone box (well at least until a proper "Doctor Who" movies gets made). Every viewing (and there have been many) is a wonderful joyous experience. It's damn near perfect and incredibly the sequel is even better. What else can I say except...

Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 21 - 1987

By my early twenties I was fully immersed in the comics industry - both as a reader and as a retailer. But an encounter with one of my customers lead to the discovery of a different kind of super-heroics...

1987:

The trivia:

• By 1987, due to poaching, lead poisoning and destruction of their natural habitat, there were only 27 California Condors left on the planet. All of the huge birds, with their 3 metre wide wingspan, were captured and placed in the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo to help preserve the species. Thankfully due to a successful breeding program there are now over four hundred - many living wild.
• Chicago businessman Steve Rothstein purchased an unlimited first class American Airlines ticket for US$ 233,509. During the more than 10 years he owned it, he travelled in excess of 10 million miles, made over 500 trips to England and apparently cost the airline US$ 21 million. The pass was terminated in 2008 due to "fradulent behaviour".
• 19-year old German amateur aviator Matthias Rust managed to fly his small Cessna aircraft all the way from Helsinki to Moscow and land illegally near Red Square. Despite being tracked several times by Soviet air defence, he was never shot down. Although originally sentenced to four years in prison he only served a few months and the incident allowed progressive Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to dismiss many of his harshest military opponents.

Okay so I guess before I start with the memory proper, I should provide a bit more context to that comment at the top of the page about being a comics "retailer". This might take a while...

By the mid-1980s I was getting my regular comics from specialist shops rather than newsagents. It started with all those trips to "Forbidden Planet" in London, but as I left school and (after a brief period in market research) started working in Southend-on-Sea, I switched to getting my weekly fix from the local independent book shop in the Victoria Circus Shoping Centre - known rather generically as "The New Bookshop" (I never did discover where the "Old" one was).

The two rather mature gentlemen who ran the shop were always friendly and I became a regular customer. Their shelves were crammed full of all the latest Marvel, DC and independent titles. Each week I would pick up the current releases (almost everything to be honest) which they had put by in a hi-tech filing system of brown paper bags with your name written in marker pen. Thanks to these lovely fellows I discovered comics from First, Comico, Capital, Eclipse and a vast range of other titles. More and more of my meagre wages was being spent on four-colour adventures (well I was still living at home and couldn't drive, so had very little outgoings). I reunited with some old friends in the shop as we all started to hang out there and met some new ones along the way - including a very young Warren Ellis.

Then to my delight, a proper specialist comic book store opened on the ground floor of the shopping centre. "Collector's Dream" was run by run by local writer, artist, musician and sometime shoe salesman Gary Spencer Millidge. Gary would become well known in comic circles in later years for his seminal series "Strangehaven", but when I first got to know him, he was focused on the new shop and associated mail order subscription service. "Collector's Dream" became the new place for us comics fans to hang out, and it was in Gary's shop that we saw him work on the famine relief title that became 1985's "Food For Thought" (way before Marvel and DC produced their own titles). I was there when he unboxed the first issues of "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns". My younger brother even worked there for a while when he first left school. Those were great times.

But at some point not long after this (and here my memory gets slightly hazy), Gary decided that he needed to down-size and move the shop to smaller premises. I really wanted to get into the industry in some way and convinced my brother and a friend that we should buy the "Collector's Dream" mail order service and run it ourselves. With a cash loan from my father, we did just that and from my bedroom we somehow managed to run a small business on a complete shoestring.

Typing up the monthly order catalogues on a Commodore 64 computer, printing them out and pasting them together to then be photocopied, we wrote semi-humourous editorials to accompany the listings. We started with the customer list we had purchased from Gary and then expanded it by handing out flyers at the Westminster Comic Mart's - which looked great thanks to a custom piece of Alan Davis artwork we had got with the business purchase,  Deliveries from Titan Distributors became a weekly occurrence along with regular trips to the warehouse itself in Mile End for single issues (the minimum pre-order was two copies). All of our spare time was spent wrapping parcels, collating orders, banking cheques and keeping things afloat - all this while holding down regular jobs. It was hard work but hugely exciting. We made lot's of contacts, learnt a huge deal and of course bought a *lot* of comics for ourselves at trade prices!

One of our regular overseas customers was a young guy called Philip Chee who lived in Hong Kong and he often sent us long letters with his large order, chatting about his love of science fiction and fantasy and comics. Over time we corresponded back and forth and developed a good relationship with this fellow fan who was half a world away. Then one month Philip mentioned that he was going to be in London visiting family - did we want to meet up with him for lunch or something?

Arranging to meet outside Tottenham Court Road tube station in the West End, the three of us waited somewhat nervously until approached by a young dark haired gentleman in glasses. Yes, this was Philip and after a few minutes we found ourselves getting on really well, even if he did come across as very excitable and a definite comic book expert. We made a tour of all the London comic shops within walking distance (Philip wanted to stock up on back issues) and ended up at the flagship "Forbidden Planet" store, which as well as comics had the best selection of SF and fantasy novels that we knew of.

Perusing the lengthy low shelves for anything new, Philip picked up a US import book with a somewhat lurid purple-ish cover and a shining logo.. "The secret history of our times revealed" it claimed. "Had I heard of "Wild Cards" before?" Philip asked. I shook my head and he thrust the book into my hands. "You should try this series, it's really good" he replied (or words to that effect). Not wanting to appear rude - and to be honest open for something new to read - I took a look at the blurb on the back. What I saw was enough for me to plonk down my cash - and a nearly thirty year love affair was about to begin...

The memory:

Wild Cards

This was a world parallel to our own - a history in which an alien virus struck the Earth in the aftermath of World War II. Thousands were killed, but a handful of survivors were endowed with strange superhuman powers. Some were called 'Aces', gifted with extraordinary mental and physical abilities. Others were 'Jokers', cursed with bizarre mental or physical disfigurements Some turned their talents to the service of humanity, some used them for evil - and the Wild Cards 'shared' universe was born.

So this might have sounded like your typical Marvel or DC super-hero universe in prose form. But the difference was that these were "mosaic" novels (although the first book was more district short stories). Each unique character was created and written separately by a leading science fiction author, but formed part of a jigsaw whole, shepherded and edited by some guy I'd never heard of called George R.R. Martin. These weren't your traditional throwaway stories either. Following the 80s trend towards more realistic portrayals of super-heroes, these characters were fully three dimensional. They changed and adapted and faded in out out of the narrative like real people and even died, sometimes in violent pointless ways. The authors involved include Walter John Williams, Roger Zelazny, Melinda, M. Snodgrass, Stephen Leigh and Daniel Abraham. Even "X-Men" scribe Chris Claremont had an entry, but there are many many others.

The first volume chronicled the events from World War II to the present day and showed the emergence of the Aces and Jokers and the effect they had on world events. In addition there were many allusions to real-life celebrities being affected by the virus. Mick Jagger was a werewolf. Jim Morrison really *was* the Lizard King, etc, etc Most importantly we were introduced to many key players in the Wild Cards series as the decades passed:

• Doctor Tachyon -  a flamboyant Takesian who tried to prevent the detonation of his races virus bomb and now attempts to atone for their mistake by staying on Earth.
• Croyd Crenson "The Sleeper" - cursed to fall into a coma and wake up in a new body every few months. Sometimes an Ace and sometimes a Joker, he never knows what will happen when he falls asleep.
• The Great and Powerful Turtle - possessed of the world most powerful mental abilities, he hides inside a metal shall constructed from an old VW Beetle
• Fortunato - the supreme sorcerer on the planet who recharges his powers via tantric sex.
• Captain Trips - a burned out hippy biochemist who can call forth five different super-powered persona through the use of drugs
• Puppetman - a politician able to control the minds of anyone he touches and feed off their negative emotions? How could that  not be a bad thing...

I loved the first book and immediately went back and brought the following two. Set in the then current late 80s, each one dealt with a particular threat but sub-plots and continuing threads were interwoven and carried across between the novels, although generally each three books formed a loose trilogy. Between 1987 and 1993 there were twelve books published and "Wild Cards" straddled a host of different genres from political thriller to detective mystery to space opera. A  universe of different heroes and villains were introduced and like the best comic multi-part stories, sometimes it took several volumes for good to triumph over evil - and sometimes the bad guys won and people died. I couldn't get enough. This was my comics world though an adult lens. It was violent, sexy, horrific, thought provoking and overall brilliant.

Around about book six, a UK publisher (I think it was Titan) caught onto the "Wild Cards" phenomenon and they re-issued the books with new Brian Bolland covers, US publisher Bartam Spectra responded with their own new covers by "Grimjack" artist Timothy Truman, who continued with the new releases, and it's those that adorn my copies of books seven to twelve.

With a new trilogy starting in volume 13 came a new publisher - Baen replacing Bantam Spectra - and Barclay Shaw took over from Tim Truman as cover artist. Released a mere month after book 12, "Card Sharks" was subtitled 'Book 1 of a New Cycle'. A conspiracy tale involving a deadly "antidote" to the Wild Card virus known as the "Black Trump", the set of three also brought a number of character arcs to a conclusion and wrapped up things pretty neatly for the series as a whole. It would be seven years before I would get to read a new story set in this universe.

2002 brought "Deuces Down". Published by iBooks, the long-awaited sixteenth volume in the series was almost a companion piece to the first, as the reader was presented with an anthology of individual tales spanning four decades from 1968. However this time it was viewed from the sidelines as the focus was on those less well known members of the Wild Card saga, the 'Deuces' - those whose powers were almost negligible and often more trouble than they're worth. It's an interesting book but I wanted things to move forward in the main timeline.

Four years later I got my wish in "Death Draws Five", a novel written solely by John J. Miller. An apocalyptic thriller with religious overtones it featured the welcome return of favourite characters such as Carnifex, Mr. Nobody and Fortunato plus new female bad-ass Midnight Angel. But iBooks were about to go into bankruptcy and a new publisher was needed yet again. 

Enter Tor Books, who have released a further six new novels so far, with more to come - plus reprints of the originals, some with extra stories added. There have been many new characters, many new writers brought into the "Wild Cards Trust" and many new Jokers, Aces, Deuces and villains. 

Turning things almost full circle, there have been two comics versions (Epic did four issues in 1990 and the Dabel Brothers  / Dynamite six in 2008), plus role playing games, audio books, online short stories and translations into several different languages. There (predictably) is even a live action TV show in development. 

Why do I love the books so much? Certainly regular superhero comics have caught up with some of the storytelling techniques used ("Astro City" springs to mind) but I think it really comes down to two reasons. Firstly it's that things really do change within the in-novel universe - unlike the transitory illusion of change with mainstream comics (at least from the big two publishers). "Wild Cards" has been running for thirty years with nary a reboot or reality altering event in sight. Secondly it's that there is a real weight to the characters (probably because they are always written by their creators) which means you care about what happens to them. The "Wild Cards" universe looks certain to continue for many years to come and I for one can't wait to get each new release.


Honourable mentions:

• Filthy, Rich and Catflap - At a mere six episodes, this series was kind of the bridge between the anarchy of the "The Young Ones" and the sheer slapstick brilliance of "Bottom" that was to come. Rik Mayall played Richie Rich, a talentless out of work actor, Nigel Planer his sponging agent Ralph Filthy and Adrian Edmonson was Edward Didgeridoo Catflap, Richie's violent drunken minder. Treating the Fourth Wall as if it just didn't exist and frequently taking the piss out of Z-list celebrities and their huge egos, I found the show not quite as enjoyable as it's predecessor but still worth tuning in for the relentlessly manic performances.

• Green Arrow The Longbow Hunters - After "The Dark Knight Returns", this was DC's second "prestige" format mini series and for my money one of the finest Green Arrow stories ever told. I was already a fan of writer / artist Mike Grell from his time on "Jon Sable, Freelance" but the quality of his work here is on a whole other level and succeeded in getting me seriously invested in a character which I had never really been that bothered about before. By stripping away the trick arrows and bombastic villains, acknowledging his age and grounding things in a more realistic environment, Grell turned Oliver Queen into an urban hunter and these three issues paved the way for a fantastic seven year run as writer and occasional artist. I still don't think Green Arrow has been written better.

• Weaveworld by Clive Barker - I never got into the"Books of Blood" or the "Hellraiser" movies. Horror stories are not really my thing and certainly thirty years ago I had read only a mere handful of genre novels. However I picked up "Weaveworld" because of the more fantasy-orientated premise - and boy was I glad I did. The book revolves around the secret existence of a race of magical beings known as the "Seerkind" and their struggles to remain hidden from the non-magical world inside "The Fugue" - a separate dimension woven into the strands of a carpet. The Seerkind have to face multiple dangers from human and non-human antagonists, plus the mysterious "Scourge" which seeks to destroy all magic. Full of religious allusions and themes, a multi-facted plot and truly evil and horrific threats, the novel was several worlds away from the more traditional fantasies I had consumed up to that point and even now remains one of the best books I have ever read. I quickly became a Barker devotee as he published one excellent novel after another over the next ten years. Any attempt to turn "Weaveworld" into a film or TV series can only be doomed to fail in my eyes, as it would be practically impossible to match the imagination and power of Barker's prose.

• The New Statesman - It's Rik Mayall in a razor sharp political comedy. What's not to love? As M.P. Alan B'Stard he was selfish, devious, lecherous and out only for himself. Heaven help anyone who got in his way, and whatever schemes, crises or scandals surrounded him, B'Stard always came up as top dog. It was a role tailor made for Mayall and proved that he was not only a brilliant comedian but also a tremendous actor. I may have been  biased of course (since I already considered Rik to be my comedy god), but as well as being very funny the show was savagely cruel and irreverent to all it's targets from any corner of the political spectrum. Four series, two specials, a couple of stage shows and many newspaper columns - B'stard was a force of nature and hugely popular. Any resemblance to real politicians either living or dead was completely deliberate.

• Star Trek Next Generation - We actually didn't get to see this show in the UK until September 1990, when it started airing in its regular early evening slot on BBC2 (and then subsequently on Sky One), but I've included it here as it was first broadcast in the USA in 1987. That first viewing came at the right time for me as "Doctor Who" had finished the previous December. I quickly took to the adventures of the Enterprise D crew, and thanks to some 4 hour tapes and my trust Panasonic VHS video, I recorded up to eight episodes on one cassette in 'long play'. In later years this meant that my first wife and I (also a fan) would occasionally start watching an episode in bed, fall asleep and wake up the next morning to find that Captain Picard was still boldly going.. For a while I was obsessed with all things "Trek" and amassed a large collection of books, comics, fact files and assorted ephemera. Looking back, even if that obsession has faded and even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of "Deep Space Nine" in terms of dramatic arcs and long-form storytelling, "TNG" still has a cast of characters that I love to spend time with, and it's one of those shows where despite having seen each episode so many times that I probably know the plots off by heart, when one comes on the TV I still stop changing channels and start watching.

Marshal Law - First published by Epic Comics as a six-issue mini, before sporadically hopping around a number of different publishers and formats in the subsequent years, Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill's savage satire of the superhero genre is a classic that deserves a much wider audience. Set in the future city of San Futuro, Law's job was to take down rogue heroes, which he did with maximum force and extreme pleasure. He hated all costumed heroes - including himself - and Mills parodied pretty much all the major characters over the course of the various storylines. It's violent, funny and packed with a wide disregard for the meaningless tales of the larger than life costumed do-gooders. Match that with O'Neill's unique spiky artwork and you have something really rather special. Later odd cross-overs with characters such as The Mask and even Hellraiser's Pinhead are less acerbic but still interesting. There is a big deluxe 480 page collection available which deserves to be on your Christmas present list.

Max Headroom - The world's first computer generated TV star (sort of), it's hard to describe to people that weren't there exactly how popular Max was in the mid-80s. Star of a one-off near-future TV drama, host of a video jukebox / interview chat show, the spokesman for "New Coke" and even part of a pop song along with the Art of Noise, Matt Frewer's creation and his staccato voice was everywhere. I enjoyed all of these appearances, but it's the US TV series which is my favourite. Set in a dystopian near future (aren't they all?) where television networks rule the world, it was full of inventive imagery and storylines - at least for the time. Nowadays many of the things it predicted have sort of come true, which is kind of worrying...

By the way, there are a lot of other fantastic comics I could mention here, but I'm saving them for longer pieces further down the line. There is also this little series called "Star Cops" that deserves a *lot* of love and attention...

Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 15 - 1981

A series of SF novels is the focus this time - ones which captivated me as a young teenager and deserve to be up there with the best of the genre...

1981:

The trivia:

• The town of Huéscar in Grenada, Spain declared war on Denmark in 1809. It was completely forgotten about until 1981, when a formal peace treaty was signed. During the 172 years not a single shot was fired and nobody was killed or injured.
• Roger Fischer, a professor of law at Harvard suggested a unique idea to deter the use of nuclear weapons - put the codes in a capsule and implant it next to the heart of a willing volunteer, who would always carry a large knife. In order to use the codes, the President would have to kill the individual with his own hands. Needless to say the Pentagon didn't go for it, citing that it would "distort the President's judgement"...
• Stiff Records in the UK released an LP entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan". Despite it being completely silent on both sides, it still sold more than 30,000 copies.

The memory:

The Saga of the Exiles by Julian May

After a brief dalliance with a couple of SF stories in the early 1950s, Julian May became  a prolific non-fiction writer, penning thousands of science encyclopedia entries and over 250 books for children. So effectively she was a brand new author when I came across "The Many-Coloured Land", the first in the "Saga of the Exiles" in my local bookshop. The unusual cover and the premise of a group of time travellers going back to ancient Earth only to find that it was already occupied by aliens intrigued me enough to buy the book. What I never expected was that the story would be much more complicated, thoughtful and wide ranging, would expand to cover a further four volumes beyond the original quartet and would become one of my favourite SF series of all time.

By the late 21st  / early 22nd century, three hugely important things have happened to the human race and society on the planet:

• Time travel has been discovered. However the time gate only works in one French location and back to one time -  six million years to the Pliocene era. It's also just one way - any attempt to travel back ages the traveller or organic object instantly to death.
• Various individuals have emerged  as "metapsychics" - possessed of mental powers strong enough to manipulate energy or objects, coerce others to do their bidding, communicate telepathically and heal mental illnesses. 
• After being under surveillance for centuries, Earth has had an "Intervention" which introduced it to the wider galactic community and a number of equally psychic exotic alien races which are together striving for mental "unity". A faction of humans opposed to this idea and with a view to making humans supreme, fermented a "Metapsychic Rebellion", which resulted in a horrendous loss of life across the galaxy but was narrowly defeated.

Despite the advances of humanity and the expansion into the galaxy, there are still those who want to escape the modern world. A steady number of misfits and outcasts use the time gateway to try to start over in the simplistic world of the Pliocene. All technology that will not decompose after a hundred years is banned from being carried back and all females are sterilised to prevent the contamination of the past.

The saga begins as a fresh group of "exiles" prepare to travel through the gate to a new life. However the Pliocene world that awaits them is not the pastoral utopia they expected. Instead it is already inhabited by two evolutionary branches of a metapsychic alien race - the beautiful, tall Tanu and the short, ugly Firvulag - who are engaged in a centuries old war. Having fled their own galaxy, they were marooned on Earth when their living spaceship crash landed. The Tanu have enslaved most of the previous human settlers through the use of various metal torcs around their necks and use them as workers, battle troops and breeding stock (female sterilisation is reversed) and to assist in their constant battles with the Firvulag - which culminate each year in the "Grand Combat". The torcs also enhance any latent metapsychic powers of the wearer.

What follows is an epic science fiction meets fantasy meets super-powers series when the exiled humans begin to vastly influence and change the dynamic of the aliens endless conflict. Via the power of the Golden Torc, various individuals find themselves in possession of enormous mental abilities. Some like trickster Aiken Drum want to take over , while others like the unstable Felice are driven mad and seek to destroy the society the Tanu have built over the centuries since their arrival.

In the third book ("The Non Born King"), May introduces the survivors of the Metapsychic Rebellion who fled into the Pliocene, and the efforts of their leader and the Galactic Milieu's strongest mind, Marc Remillard, to escape his prehistoric prison. Marc's family don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with him on all his plans and this conflict adds another layer into an already large cast of characters.

The clash between the various factions of "exiles" mounts to a crescendo in the final volume when allies, friends and families turn against each other and the fate of both the ancient and futuristic worlds hang in the balance. I'm incredibly reluctant to reveal too much detail about the plot as experiencing it fresh for the first time is really the best way. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of twists and turns before all the players reach their final destinations. May also offers tantalising glimpses of background characters and past (or is that future) events, fleshing out the societies and races involved.

Like George R.R. Martin,she is hugely adept at mixing multiple points of view, political infighting, human relationships, huge battle scenes, intricate plotting and life changing events. Although much of the world building has its roots in Celtic mythology and religious symbolism, it never feels anything less than fresh and exciting and there is a real cross-genre feel, which meant the storyline appealed to all of my interests.  I remember impatiently waiting for each book to come out, and along with "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant", this was a series which I read and re-read in my teenage years, each time getting something new out of it. Part of me thinks that it would make a great multi-season TV series, but then again perhaps it's best that these characters live vividly in my imagination instead of watered down on the screen.

After the end of book four ("The Adversary"), May released "A Pliocene Companion" - a reference guide to the world she created, along with maps, author interviews and discussions on the sources that provided inspiration. It's certainly not essential to read it to enjoy the books, but it does offer some interesting background details for real fans.

May than followed up her epic with a further four book story that although more pure SF in flavour is still both prequel and sequel to the original saga. The massive single volume "Intervention" details the history of the Remillard family and the events that lead up to the Great Intervention where the alien races inhabiting the galaxy reveal themselves to the population of Earth. The subsequent "Galactic Milieu" trilogy - "Jack the Bodiless", "Diamond Mask" and "Magnificat"" moves forward forty years and tells the story of the Metapsychic Rebellion, fills in much of the backstory only hinted at in the original quartet, reveals many secrets, and in the end loops everything back very neatly to the events of the Pliocene Exile (just look at the mirror image in that final cover).

I really would consider Julian May to be one of the great science fiction or fantasy authors and as a complete eight book sequence (or ten books if you count the "Companion" and split "Intervention" in two as some versions have) it's an incredible inventive and enjoyable piece of work that must have taken meticulous planning across more than a decade of writing. It's amazing how things referenced in the last novel tie back to those in the first and vice versa.

Sadly May seems to have been largely forgotten about in the modern era, but she is well overdue discovery by a new generation of readers. Although it's been quite a while since I last re-read it - and I wonder if my much older self would get quite the same thrill now as I did back then - the "Saga of the Exiles"  still remains one of those series which expanded my horizons on what could be accomplished in a genre novel.

Honourable mentions:

• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - The TV series rather than the LPs, novels, stage show, video game, etc, etc...  I'd been a fan of the original radio episodes since the previous year when BBC Radio 4 had transmitted all twelve in one go, but it was the television production which really cemented "Hitchhikers" in my long term memory. Okay so Zaphod's second head was a bit crap and Marvin The Paranoid Android's design may look dated now, but otherwise the casting and effects were near on perfect. My real love though was The Book.  The hand drawn animation along with the voice of Peter Jones was exactly how I had imagined it and no amount of 21st century CGI will convince me otherwise.

• Shock Treatment - "Rocky Horror"'s often neglected semi-sequel movie is just as much fun as the original and I love some of the songs even more. The wordplay in "Bitchin' in the Kitchen" and the sheer exuberance of "Little Black Dress" always make me sing along. I wrote more about the film and how I was lucky enough to see the stage production during it's limited run in London in 2015, here.

• An American Werewolf in London - One of the first films that I can remember renting on VHS from our local video shop. I also remember not being scared of the werewolf or the gruesome killings, but curiously being creeped out by the ever more decomposing body of David's dead friend Jack. It also gets on this list for containing a cameo from the legend that is Rik Mayall.

• Raiders of the Lost Ark - How could I not love a film that harkened back to the black and white cliffhanger serials of my school holidays, had a WWII setting, contained stuff about fantasy / the supernatural and featured a globe trotting hero? I was hooked from the famous temple opening sequence.

• The Antipope - The first novel by humourist and "father of far-fetched fiction" Robert Rankin. Part of the increasingly mis-numbered "Brentford Trilogy", it sees anti-heroes Jim Pooley and John O'Mally drinking and womanising their way through a surreal adventure against Pope Alexander VI, last of the Borgia's, and his attempt to take over the world (or Brentford at least). I was lent the book by a friend originally and although I found it interesting enough, it wasn't until the early 90s when Rankin's career really took off that I truly appreciated what a fun book it is. Much like early Terry Pratchett, the seeds of the great writer to come are all present here but the running jokes, old traditions or charters and talking the toot are still to come. There really is no one like Rankin out there and It's a damn shame his output has decreased in recent years.

• Ka-Zar The Savage - Another of my early Marvel comics titles and one of the first to go down the "direct market" route of distribution in speciality comics shops. The Tarzan analogue with his trusty pet Zabu the sabre-toothed tiger and girlfriend Shanna the She-Devil was a completely unknown character to me until the new series was released -  but the combination of writing from Bruce Jones and fantastic art from Brent Anderson soon put it to the top of my reading list. The first dozen or so issues are the best, dealing with the discovery of the hidden land of Pangea, the descent into a version of Dante's Hell and the battle against the demon lord Belasco. I lapped this up and to be honest I don't think the character has been handled as well since.

Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories Part 13 - 1979

By now, everything is starting to collide in a heady mix of novels, television, film and comics. A book by possibly the worlds's most famous science fiction author gets the top spot - but partly because of a very special place in the South Indian ocean...

1979:

The trivia:

• On 2nd December 1979, Elvita Adams tried to kill herself by jumping off of the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. A freak gust of wind blew her back onto a ledge on the 85th floor and she suffered only a broken hip.
• Anna Williams received a bizarre poem lamenting the fact that she was not at home on the night of  28th April 1979. It turned out to be from the notorious "BTK" serial killer, Dennis Radar, who had been hiding in her bedroom wardrobe.
• Voyager I reached Jupiter and took some amazing photographs of the giant planet and it's surrounding moons. It also discovered for the first time that Jupiter has a ring system similar to Saturn or Uranus, and that the moon Io is covered in active volcano's.

The memory:

Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

In the 22nd century, structural engineer Vannevar Morgan dreams of building the world's first "space elevator" - a giant tower rising from Earth and tethered via a 'hyperfilament' cable to a structure in geostationary orbit 22,000 miles above the surface. Vehicles will be able to "climb" the cable to take payloads to orbit without the need for expensive rockets - greatly speeding up the colonisation of space. The only problem is, the one suitable point for the base station of the elevator is at the top of Sri Kanda - a mountain on the equatorial island of Taprobane, which is home to an ancient order of Buddhist monks. They are one of the few holy orders left on the planet, after contact with an robotic alien probe known as "Starglider" several decades ago shook the foundations of all religious faith - and they do *not* want to move.

Morgan's struggles with the engineering, political and religious obstacles to his 'Orbital Tower' are contrasted with the story of Taprobane's ancient monarch, Kalidasa. Two thousand years ago the king built his immense palace on the nearby mountain of Yakkagala. Setting himself up as a god he adorned the peak with beautiful images and constructed a vast garden full of fountains - feats that were centuries ahead of their time. The monks of Sri Kanda were vehemently opposed to Kalidasa's works, seeing them as an affront to their philosophy - and they have the same strong outrage towards Morgan and his project. Both men were / are trying to "challenge the gods".

To demonstrate that his technology works, Morgan attempts to run a thin cable from orbit down to ground level on Taprobane , but the test is disrupted by one of the monks (the Venerable Parakarma) , who hijacks a weather-control satellite to create an artificial hurricane in the area. Unfortunately although the sabotage succeeds, it also has the side effect of sweeping huge numbers of butterflies to the top of the mountain - thus fulfilling an ancient Buddhist prophecy - and the monks have no choice but to abandon their monastery. 

The novel then subsequently deals with the construction of the base tower on Sri Panda and the initial trials of the space elevator, which proceed well until an accident strands a group several hundred miles up. Despite failing health, Morgan makes a one man trip up the cable to provide emergency supplies and oxygen until they can be rescued. On the way back down he has a vision of a series of interconnected orbital stations all serviced by elevators - with Earth as the hub of a gigantic "wheel" in space. But before he can return to Earth and tell others of his ideas and guarantee his place in the history of space engineering, Morgan suffers a heart attack and dies.

Far in the future the builders of "Starglider" arrive at Earth and admire the construction of the artificial wheel surrounding the planet. Morgan's vision has come to pass - but in a twist of fate he is not the one immortalised, but his engineering antecedent - the marvel of the space elevator is known as "Kalidasa's Tower "...

That's the cover of my copy of the book up there  - a fabulously moody shot of the entrance to Kalidasa's palace by Chris Moore. From the first page I was fascinated by it's contents. Not only because of the all too real idea of the space elevator (as with much of Clarke's work, the science is often based on plausible and achievable concepts), but also because of the parallel tale of the ancient king of Taprobane.  The novel is part scientific journal, part adventure story and part historical fiction. However, the thing that really grabbed my attention was the author's note at the back.

You see, many of the places that Clarke describes in his book are real. Taprobane really exists - it's the historical name for his beloved Sri Lanka (albeit the island's position has been moved for story purposes). King Kalidasa? Well the name may be taken from a 5th Century Sanskrit writer, but the monarch himself ruled between 477 and 495 A.D. as Kashyapa I of Anuradhapura. His fabulous frescoed palace full of painted maidens on a mountain surrounded by gardens and fountains? Yes that's also a genuine locale - and halfway up he built a grand entrance in the shape of a lion - just like the one in the cover above. The mountain is not named "Yakkagala" though. In the island language of Sinhalese its called "Sigiriya" - literally "Lion Rock"...

As for the Buddhist temple on the mountain of "Sri Kanda" - you guessed it - Clarke also drew on what he knew about the holy sites of his adopted home. In central Sri Lanka lies "Sri Pada", the 'Butterfly Mountain' which has long been considered a very important religious region, mainly due to the monastery halfway up and most importantly the shrine near the summit which contains a large rock formation. This is held to be the footprint of Buddha (or the Hindu god Shiva or the Islamic / Christian "first man" Adam). It is therefore also known as "Adam's Peak".

The existence of all these locations outside the fictional construct of the novel blew my mind. For several years afterwards I dreamt of travelling to Sri Lanka and climbing Adam's Peak to see the sunrise from the top and gaze upon the footprint. Of walking up the steps of Sigirya through the lion's mouth. Of stepping through history but at the same time imagining myself in the future...

But as with many dreams, it fell by the wayside as everyday life took hold. School work, exams, work, relationships, getting married, children, divorce - the time went by in a virtual blur and before I knew it twenty-odd years had passed - and dreams of visiting a teardrop-shaped island more than 5,000 miles away were a distant memory.

Then in the early years of the 21st Century, I found myself in a new relationship and engaged to be married for the second time. Talking to my bride-to be about our honeymoon plans, I asked her where on the globe she would like to go. "Well, there was always one place I wanted to visit, after reading about it in a book by Arthur C. Clarke..." she said. Fate really had dealt in my favour! Here was possibly one of the few other people in the world who shared that dream of going to Sri Lanka. It was meant to be ! 

So that's how in early September of 2004 we found ourselves flying across the oceans for eleven hours and then on a ten day tour around the most fascinating parts of the island in a minibus. There were two other couples and a single guy on his own with us, plus the tour guide Dharmin, the driver and a young man acting as general "Passepartout". 

Starting and ending in the capital Colombo (no sign of dear Arthur C. sadly), we travelled over 1,000 kilometres (620+ miles) through some of the most beautiful scenery known to man. Along the way we fed baby elephants at a special orphanage in Pinnawala, gazed in awe at 2,700 year old painting in the Golden Temple caves of Dhambulla, experienced fire walking and the temple of the sacred tooth of Buddha in Kandy, drank tea in the mountainous plantations of Nuwara Eliya, came face to face with a leopard in the Yala National park - I could write a whole series of posts about the tour and the numerous wonderful parts of a very special holiday.

But of course the highlight was a visit to Sigiriya - the "Lion Rock".

As you approach the site and walk through the endless series of lush gardens with their still working fountains, the rock starts to loom larger and larger. It looks impressive, but it's not until you get much closer that you realise the sheer size of this outcrop and the manpower that would have been needed to build the Sky Palace on the summit.

Approaching the foot of the mountain, we reached the Bolder Gardens, where the steps were relatively easy to climb. Vast shapes may look like they are falling together, but were used carefully to create spaces for contemplation.

Then things started to become more difficult. The stairs through the Terraced Gardens were wide, but as we began to climb the grand zig-zag up to the next level, the going became much steeper. Hugging the side of the cliff face, we reached the Mirror Wall. Once this had been painted a glowing white, so polished that you could see your reflection. Now it was a glorious orange, the surface pitted and marked with the graffiti of travellers from millennia ago.

From here we ascended a very narrow spiral staircase to a sheltered indentation in the rock. Here are the only surviving examples of the painted frescoes that once covered the face of Sigiriya. The graffiti on the Mirror Wall suggests that there may have been over five hundred at one point. Bare breasted with golden skin and elaborate headpieces, our guide told us that they may have been members of the harem of Kashyapa and were painted to show the opulence and grandeur of the home of the god-king.

Descending back down the spiral to the Mirror Wall we continued our trek. The marble stairs at this point were very steep and it took a good 20 minutes before we reached the first half-way plateau - and the part I had been looking forward to the most. This was the start of the Lion Staircase!

At one point there *was* a colossal gatehouse here in the form of a crouching lion, which you had to pass through to gain access to the private sanctum of the king. Unlike that memorable image on the front cover of "The Fountains of Paradise", the stairs did not go through the mouth of the beast, but via a hidden set of doors in the chest, which then went back and forth inside the head before emerging at the back.

The ravages of time have not been kind to the once magnificent beast however, and all that remain are the paws and the staircase. As you can see from the picture below (and yes, that is me standing at the foot of the steps), the giant feet give you an idea of the scale of what was once there. It must truly have been magnificent. At last, years after I had read about it, there I was walking in the footsteps of the real King Kashyapa - and the fictional  King Kalidasa  upon his mountain of Yakkagala. It was a spine-tingling moment

The final climb to the ruins of the Sky Palace was via a set of vertiginous narrow metal walkways that grip onto the side of the rock face. The original steps had long since vanished, but I could see the grooves carved into the rock surface where the builders had set the foundations. We had to wait for a few tense minutes before starting, because there was a large hornets next fixed to the wall and our guide had to determine if it was safe to creep past. This was definitely not an ascent to make if you were scared of heights!

At last we reached the top and the remains of the Sky Palace were all around us. It was thankfully quite cool after the hard climb and the view across the countryside and down to the Fountains of Paradise in the garden far below was spectacular. It was a journey which I will never forget.

But what about that other important location from Arthur C. Clarke' novel - the holy mountain of "Sri Pada" or "Adam's Peak"? Well sadly as wide ranging as our tour was, it didn't go close enough for us to visit the site, let alone make the pilgrimage to the top. In reality it is over 100 miles from Sigiriya, and the closest we got was a view from the distance while on the road to Ratnapura. Apparently you have to start at 2 am to get to the temple in time for the sunrise. It was a shame that we couldn't do it, but I at least fully intend to go back to Sri Lanka again, so one day...

It's incredible to think that a mere two hundred-odd page science fiction story led to me visiting one of the most amazing countries in the world. Who knows where the next book I read will take me?

Honourable mentions:

• Not The Nine O'Clock News - The first comedy show that I really got into, having missed the whole thing about "Monty Python" (I didn't really discover *that* until several years later). I loved the satirical solo pieces, the fake news reports, the anarchic sarcasm and of course the songs and sketches. Who can forget "Gerald the Gorilla", "Constable Savage", "The Ayatollah Song ", the "TV closedown" sketch, "Nice Video Shame About The Song", the drunk darts players, "I Like Trucking", etc, etc. etc. I had all the BBC LP compilations, so I could recite the sketches verbatim and Rowan Atkinson was my first comedy hero. 

• Tornado - Another short lived companion comic to 2000 AD, most memorable for artist Dave Gibbons posing as superhero editor "Big E". In terms of ongoing serials, only retooled Nubian slave turned alien gladiator "Blackhawk" and teenager with psi-powers "Wolfie Smith" made the transition when it too was cancelled after 22 issues. I do have fond memories of "The Angry Planet" however, with art from the always brilliant Massimo Bellardinelli.

• Sapphire And Steel -  The adventures of the inter-dimensional agents who battled strange occurrences throughout time (which itself was a malignant force) was one of the best SF / fantasy TV shows of the era. I avidly watched each week, even if I didn't always understand what was going on. It didn't help that an industrial strike caused ITV to go off air for several weeks mid-way through the second story. Oddly I missed the final story with the infamous cliffhanger and didn't get to see it until years later when I bought the box set on DVD.

• Rom: Spaceknight - Along with "Micronauts" my favourite of the early Marvel titles that I began to pick up around now. They only get a brief mention here because I fully intend to write *much* more at a later date. 

Random Ravings 11 - The House of Wellibob

Time for more short randomness...

Pax Britannia  - The Gods Of Manhattan - by Al Ewing

Yes I'm still continuing with this series, in e-book form at least. If you recall, I wasn't that impressed with the last Ulysses Quicksilver volume I read back here, but this is the second in Al Ewing's "El Sombra" trilogy. I thoroughly enjoyed the first one and Mr Ewing hasn't let me down with any of his novel or comics writing, so this seemed like a pretty safe bet.

Half-naked and all-crazy sword-wielding Mexican vigilante El Sombra is back, this time stalking the streets of Manhattan in search of those further up the chain in the Ultimate Reich hierarchy (in this world Hitler is still alive  - well his brain is, housed in a gigantic robot body). However the tale of El Sombra's vengeance takes a back seat to that of New York's very own hero - the near superhuman, Doc Thunder.

Thunder is obviously a parallel to the classic Doc Savage character that I wrote about just a few weeks ago, blended with the original less powerful version of the Man of Steel. Possessing extraordinary strength, able to heal from virtually any wound and leap tall buildings at a single bound, he is America's greatest hero. Involved in a scandalous three-way relationship with the immortal Maya, queen of the Leopard Men of Zor-Ek-Narr and his best friend the apelike Monk, Doc puts the world to rights and stands up for decent folk everywhere.

If Doc is the light, then the Blood Spider is the dark, The vicious alter-ego of rich socialite Parker Crane, he's a cross between Batman and The Shadow (double pistols included) with the violence and fractured personality turned up to eleven. Aided by a cadre of informants who are terrified of him and with a steely blonde as his driver, the Blood Spider guns down anyone who gets in his way.

The plot kick starts when Heinrich Donner, the former head of the Nazi-fronted "Untergang" is killed (for the second time) and Doc's lover Monk is violently attacked and hospitalised. As the different worlds of these three men clash in spectacular fashion, mysteries are unravelled and long held secrets revealed - and not everyone will emerge unscathed.

So this is possibly be one of the most enjoyable retro-steam-punky homage to the authors favourite characters novels I've read in a good few years. Heroes and villains ply their trade in a alternative United Socialist States of America where Joe McCarthy started a second Civil War. New York is a steam-powered city where psychedelia rubs shoulders with punk and mad science collides with superheroes.

Ewing displays his influences loud and proud (Doc's nemesis is called Lars Lomax after all), but rather than being a poor mans rip-off, we ends up with a rip-roaring adventure featuring the archetypes of pulp fiction and comics history. It's Philip Jose Farmer's 'Wold Newton' universe via Alan Moore's "Tom Strong" but with an awful lot more violence.

It proves once again that Ewing is capable of taking what might seem to be a well-trodden or dull old idea and breathing new life into it. This is a novel packed with imagination and brimming with confidence. The characters might be familiar but the world-building here is just excellent. To be honest you could remove the "Pax Britannia" strapline and let this world stand on it's own. I'd compare it to the best of the George R.R. Martin edited "Wild Card" novels, which for me is high praise indeed.

Jonathan Green might be happy extolling the moribund adventures of Britain's most cliched super-spy, but Al Ewing is forging ahead with the best kind of alternate-world novel - one that takes existing tropes but still tells an exciting original story. I can't wait for book three, "Pax Omega". Highly recommended !

Golden Sunsets - 50 Years Of Memories - Part 9 - 1975

Bear with me. It's going to be quite a time-twisting, decades-hopping path before we get to the memory in question this time...

1975:

The trivia:

• In July of 1975, Neville Ebbin from Hamilton, Bermuda was hit by a car and killed whilst riding his bicycle. It was exactly one year after his brother Erskin was also killed - riding the same bike, at the same junction, by the same taxi driver, who was carrying the same passenger.
• During an episode of "The Goodies" comedy television show called "Kung Fu Kapers", a Scotsman battled a master of the Lancastrian martial art known as "Ecky-Thump" - which involved wielding a black pudding as a weapon. Viewer Alex Mitchell laughed so much that he died of a heart attack.
• When Agatha Christie killed off Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in the novel "Curtain", he  receive a front-page obituary in the New York Times.

The memory:

Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

Doc Savage first appeared in his own magazine in March 1933, following on from the success of "The Shadow". Although often classed as the world's first superhero, he actually had no powers. Instead Clark Savage Jnr had been trained almost from birth by a team of scientists assembled by his father. This punishing regime honed his mind and body, giving him huge strength, agility and fighting skills, a photographic memory and a vast knowledge of science. Main writer Lester Dent envisioned him as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan, coupled with an innate sensed of goodness.

Headquartered on the 86th floor of Manhattan's tallest skyscraper (implied to be the Empire State Building), Doc also possessed a large array of vehicles, futuristic gadgets and weaponry, including the "mercy bullet" which only put its victim to sleep. His fortune came from a hidden South American gold mine that was bequeathed to him after his very first adventure. He also had a secret retreat in the Arctic wastelands known as the 'Fortress of Solitude' (Superman stole that idea) where he could carry out experiments, meditate and get away from the stresses of everyday life.

Possessed of distinctive bronze skin and hair and golden eyes (traits shared by his cousin Patricia) and accompanied by his five friends who were all experts in their fields - Ham, Monk, Renny, Long Tom and Johnny - Doc punished evildoers and solved mysteries across 181 'super-sagas' all the way thorough to 1949. Controversially, Doc also sometimes operated on the brains of the criminals he subdued, curing them of their evil ways.

I'd first come across Doc and his friends in my mid-teens via some very battered Bantam paperbacks that my friend Matt showed to me at a London comic-mart. Bantam had been reprinting the stories since the 1960s, many featuring the now classic James Bama cover images of a titan of a man with a sharp widows peak hairline and a tattered shirt showing off his huge muscles. The artwork on the front was certainly intriguing enough but at the time I was more interested in comics and modern science fiction and fantasy novels than pulp stories from the 1930s, so I dismissed them as a relic of the a bygone era...

-----

Back in the days before it was a countrywide chain of hugely successful multi media pop culture stores, there were only two shops called "Forbidden Planet" in London. In St Giles High Street you had "FP2", which was the film and television hub. This was less than two minutes walk from the flagship store in Denmark Street - and in the 1980s that was the absolute mecca for fans of science fiction, fantasy and comic books.

(From the comics in the window this picture was taken in mid-1987...)

I absolutely *loved* Forbidden Planet. Even now, decades after they moved premises, I just have to walk past the old shop front and the memories come flooding back from the myriad times I visited over the years from around 1980 onward. I even went weekly when I started working in the big city. There was no CCTV back then, so after spending five minutes gawping at the current weeks comics displayed in the window, you had to hand any bags you had into the guy sat on the stairs as you walked in through the narrow doorway off the street. In return he would hand you half a playing card and clip the other half to your possessions with a clothes peg. Thus identified and secure, you were then allowed through the door on the left into the shop itself.

It was a long narrow space with dozens of  low shelves of novels at the front and racks of comics at the back - with everything else crammed in between. Back issues, posters, artwork, models - it was an absolute cornucopia of stuff, suffused with that old comic book smell which you just don't get in today's pristine mega-stores.  I still have a T-shirt with one of the Brian Bolland promotional images on it (although I'm far too large to fit into it now). I attended signings, made new friends and purchased hundreds of new comics and novels - all thanks to this magical place.

This is all very interesting you might think, but how does this relate to the "Man of Bronze"? Well, Forbidden Planet was where I rediscovered this classic Golden Age character...

-----

On one of my regular visits to the shop in the summer of 1988, I was doing my usual trawl through the bookshelves in search of something new to read when I came across a deep blue cover showing the figure of a burly man in a ripped shirt in front of a bolt of lightning. "Doc Savage Omnibus  #5" it proclaimed "Five Doc adventure classics in one giant volume!". Vaguely remembering a similar image from many years ago I took a look at the back cover and inside blurb. Hmmm... these stories sounding quite interesting.

You see, in the intervening years I'd learned a new appreciation for the characters from prior decades and those that had been the antecedents of the superheroes that I loved. There was a vast wealth of history out there, both prose and pictorial and now being in my early twenties  - and only very recently having read the bombastic update of "The Shadow" by Howard Chaykin, I was just in the right frame of mind to explore the world of the pulp heroes of the past. Forgoing my usual insistence to only buy a new book series from the first volume (#1-4 not being present on the shelves at the time), I took the omnibus to the friendly guy behind the counter and paid my £5.99.

It's worth mentioning here that it wasn't until much, much later that I discovered that not only was this not the first omnibus in the series, but the stories collected each each book were not even necessarily in chronological order. As I mentioned earlier, Bantam had been reprinting Doc Savage since 1964, but as the tales got shorter they combined them first into double novels and then these multi-story omnibuses. Volume five reprinted "super-saga's" 170-174, but such a sequence was unusual and other books had adventures seemingly at random from across the decades.

At the time though I didn't known any of this, so as I worked my way through "No Light To Die By" and the subsequent stories, I lost myself in a world of 1930s mystery and intrigue with ex-Nazi's, a rented gorilla suit, a female poisoner and a sunken ship. Sure the plots were a bit creaky and obviously of their time, but I found them very enjoyable. This first quintet only featured, Doc, Ham, Monk and a guest appearance from cousin Pat, but mentioned other characters that were "off on their own adventures" or "busy". I wanted to know more, so a few weeks later I went back to Forbidden Planet and found Omnibus # 6. That was it - I was hooked...

Over the coming months and years I would buy all of the Omnibuses and through second hand book-shops and similar places also purchase quite a few of the older Bantam reprints. I never did amass a complete collection of all 181 stories (I have since through the wonders of e-books), but that was okay. In 1991 Bantam began printing *new* Doc Savage novels, beginning with "Escape From Loki" by long-time Savage aficionado Philip Jose Farmer (remember him from back in 1971?) and I got all those too, right through until 1993 when the series was first cancelled.

As an aside, Farmer also wrote a 1973 biography of  Doc from the viewpoint that he was a real person and that "Kenneth Robeson" was just recording fictionalised versions of the Savage memoirs. Farmer also linked Savage to dozens of other fictional characters in the "Wold Newton Family". Alan Moore has commented that this concept was a significant influence on his work on the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" comic book and its various sequels. It's a fascinating idea, and one that I may come back to at a later date.

So, we have established that I developed a love of the Doc Savage stories from the 1930s, which I rediscovered in the 1980s and that I read the books well into the 1990s - so how does all this fit into a memory of something from 1975 ? The answer involves Tarzan...

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When I was much younger I loved the "Tarzan" TV series. Although it was originally transmitted between 1966 and 1968, the British TV channel "ITV" showed the series on what seemed like a continuous loop on Saturday mornings in the 1970s. Like the Adam West "Batman" show, it became imprinted on the memories of most children of that decade. I was already familiar with the character from the black and white Johnny Weissmuller movies that my dad liked to watch, but this was a more educated ape-man, returning to the jungle after becoming tired of living amongst "civilised" men. With high production values, action packed storylines and filming in real jungles (admittedly Brazil rather than deepest Africa) it was a technicolour feast for the eyes. Accompanies by local boy Jai and ever-present chimpanzee Cheetah, Tarzan was one of my favourite TV heroes.

The real reason for the show's success was of course the amazing Ron Ely in the title role. An impressive well-built figure who could act, swim, fight and interact with animals - and do all his own stunts - he had a real screen presence and embodied the the role of the Lord of The Apes for a generation.  I've never forgotten him.

Which brings us, at last, to the point of this long rambling piece. One Saturday somewhere around 1989, I was flicking through the TV channels and paused to watch the end of a TV show (the name of which I can't remember). After the credits rolled, there was an announcement of the following programme, something along the lines of "Up next it's the afternoon film. Ron Ely is Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze".

What !?  WHAT !? There was a Doc Savage movie? How had I missed this? Somehow in the year since I'd started reading the books I'd not come across this fact. Quickly I took a look on the "Teletext" pages for the channel (this is pre-internet remember. Oh and if you don't know when Teletext is, I recommend you look at the pages here. Hours of fun.) Ah, this film was made in 1975 -  that might explain why I had missed it. That plus it probably wasn't shown that often. Or when it was shown the name didn't ring any bells. Who knows. The point was it was on now! This was too good an opportunity to miss. Quickly I grabbed a blank videocassette, put it in my machine and pressed record just as the sonorous voice over and the patriotic strains of John Philip Sousa's "The Thunderer" march began...

Adapting the basic plot of the first novel, "Doc Savage: Man Of Bronze" sees our fearless hero investigating the death of his father. Vowing to solve the murder, Doc and the "Fabulous Five" attempt to travel to the republic of Hidalgo, but are opposed at every turn by a stream of tribal natives, relentless assassins and supernatural creatures - plus the ruthless and maniacal Captain Seas - who wants the riches of Hidalgo for himself.

Many of the core elements of the character are present - the 1930s setting, the 86th floor headquarters, Doc's daily exercise regime, the Fortress of Solitude, the strange "trilling noise" that Doc makes during times of mental stress or excitement and the various eccentricities or habits exhibited by his faithful companions. Even Monk's pet pig Habeus Corpus gets a look in. There are also plenty of bronze coloured retro gadgets and vehicles.

 But if you are expecting a straight-laced action / adventure story in the mold of "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which faithfully adapts the usual serious tone of the novels, well this is not the film for you. If however you enjoy the kind of tongue in cheek, camp, self-aware, winking at the audience kind of thing that the "Batman" TV series did so well and can go with the flow then you will "get" it. It's very very silly in places  - for example the cartoonish villain's henchman sleeps in a giant baby crib and the final fight sequence (with subtitles) has to be seen to be believed, The production values are great but there is some cheap looking animation and the acting is sometimes so far over the top, it comes back down the other side. But the truth is that all of that can be forgiven because it's just so much damn fun and outrageously entertaining - I adored the film that first time I watched it and I still do. This is the kind of film that the words "cult classic" were invented for.

Ron Ely was perfectly cast as Doc. Benevolent, intelligent, always three steps ahead of the bad guys he exuded charisma and inhabits the role as if it was made for him. Like Adam West before him, Ely plays it absolutely straight even in the oddest of situations. Likewise the look of Johnny, Long Tom, Ham, Monk and Renny may not be exactly true to the books, but they are close enough that you can recognise the characters that Lester Dent created.

Apparently not everyone could see the fun side of having a humourous Doc Savage movie. "Purists" absolutely hated it. I can kind of see their point. They had probably been waiting years for a faithful adaptation of their favourite pulp franchise - and this certainly was not it. Maybe because I had come late to reading the books and only discovered the film fourteen years after its initial release I was able to enjoy it more on it's own merits rather than weighing it down with decades of expectation. It seems that the musical choices (the Sousa marches, etc,) came in for particular scorn. If you want that all removed and some of the effects updated, there is a fan-edited "Detarnished Edition" out there on the interweb. I do have a copy and while it turns the film into something more akin to a colour version of the old Republic cliffhanger serials, it also loses some of the charm.

There's one other thing that I want to mention about "Man of Bronze" and that's Doc Savage's car. It's a now extremely rare bronze Cord Model 810 convertible with modified running boards (for Clark Savage Jnr to stand on) and it is just absolutely stunning. I have always appreciated cars from the early decades of the 20th century and for me this one is just at the top of the pile. I. Want. That. Car. Sadly unless I win the lottery and can have one custom adapted to look just like that picture below I think I'm out of luck..

In conclusion - nearly thirty years after reading my first Savage story I still enjoy Doc's adventures in novel and comic book form and I'm looking forward to the Dwayne Johnson movie in a few years. But - and I know I may be in the minority here - despite it's flaws, watching "Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze" just makes me smile. It's not a guilty pleasure at all.

Time for some music...

Honourable mentions:

• Jaws - Probably my favourite film of all time and certainly the one I have purchased in more different versions than any other. Just about everything is perfect and forty-odd years later it's as powerful and scary and dramatic as ever.  The USS Indianapolis scene is an acting masterclass from Robert Shaw which sends shivers down my spine every single damn time.  I'll never tire of watching this film. 

• The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Back when my Rocky Horror enthusiasm was at it's height  I must have been watching this on a weekly basis. Richard O'Brien was my idol. I went to every live stage show and film screening I could find dressed as Brad in his white lab coat and underwear. I personally didn't have the figure for the full basque and fishnets as Frank N Furter - but that didn't stop my short tubby friend Matt -  though his full beard was a bit incongruous.

• Space:1999 - Gerry Anderson's finest live action series (in my opinion), which also had one of the best theme's in the history of SF television (up there with the original "Battlestar Galactica"). Martin Landau was never less than brooding magnificence and Barbara Bain was worthy if a little dull. My favourite however was the wonderful Barry Morse as Professor Victor Bergman. A shame he only lasted the one series. Oh and yes, like every school boy I had a massive crush on Catherine Schell as Maya...