Monday, September 17, 2012

But in the meantime:

Lawrence Miles has written the best thing that has ever been written about Doctor Who, starting here. I only mildly want to kill him because it is quite close to and better than a thing I have been wanting to do for a while. It is wrong in many particulars, but criticism doesn't have to be right, only interesting.

The sad, inspiring, infuriating tale of Cerebus the Aardvark has taken so many twists and turns in the last month that I start to wonder if Dave is actually a person at all, but rather a sort of virtual construct in a meta-novel. The series of on-line interviews starting here  make fascinating depressing reading. Mostly sane, though, as if we've got Old Dave back. ("I'm a very orthodox religious person, although I wouldn't be in the eyes of most religious people". That word; you use it all the time. I don't think it means what you think it means.)

Very shortly, I will still be a game designer again. 

For all those waiting for some feedback on Doctor Who, you should be warned than an elderly American man has just released a gramophone record with some songs on it. If you are interested in finding out what I would be like if I was brief, some of my stuff is on the Sci-Fi Now website.  (I believe that you can get it on your I-Tablet-Thing if that's you thing.) 

I've been enjoying Gerard Jones book on the origins of comic books. Very perceptive on the difference between Superman and Bat-Man. And he uncovers a genuinely jaw-dropping biographical fact about Jerry Siegel. (At least, I hadn't heard it before.) 

3 comments:

Mike Taylor said...

I enjoyed Lawrence Miles's sequence of articles, but I am confident that I'd find yours much more thought-provoking.

Just saying: don't not do it because he just did.

Justin Mohareb said...

I enjoyed Jones book; what was the shocking secret on Siegel? It was a couple years ago for me.

Andrew Stevens said...

Presumably the death of Siegel's father. I believe that, according to Jones, Siegel's father was shot and killed during a robbery. Supposedly, this led Siegel to create a hero who was immune to harm.

This isn't quite true, though. Somebody dug up the coroner's report and Siegel's father did die during a robbery, but actually he had a heart attack and fainted and this led to his death. (It's not clear to me whether the heart attack or the fall killed him.) It is unclear whether Jerry Siegel was told the heart attack story or the gunshot story, though, since Jones didn't make up the gunshot story. Some people did believe that was what happened. Siegel himself seems never to have discussed his father's death in interviews, so we'll probably never know what Jerry Siegel believed when he created Superman.