I is for I read Comics!

I know, but we're all allowed a guilty pleasure! I mentioned the other day, I visited Forbidden Planet on my last visit to London, and while it always depresses me (I remember when it was 90% second-hand comics out of corrugated-card cartons, off bare floorboards round the corner, now, it's all shiny Kidult crap! But I managed to find three tomes this time - the last few visits I've left empty-handed!

 

I love these, I got the first volume of Legends of the Guard, as a Library sell-off a few years ago, so I was very pleased to find the second, on a yellow ticket (all three of these were in the 'bargain bin' shelves). To describe this is not easy, but if you imagine an illustrated Silmarillion, but written by mice, about an ancient mouse civilisation, you'd get the picture . . . s!

 

The original/core series (set as if in the present day of the mice) are written by David Petersen, but the various stories in Legends, are from the past of the mouse lands, and are told as tall-tales 'down the pub', with different artists invited to draw, 'ink' and/or letter the stories, which are just absolutely charming, and unlike a lot of my graphic-novel library, are as suitable for kid's as they are appealing to adult readers. If you haven't discovered the Mouse Guard yet, I recommend you do so!

 

This was a bit of fun, as it's a modern 'treatment' of the old movie, using all-new artwork based on the film, rather than the original cells or screen-shots, it was dirt cheap and took about 20 minutes to read from end to end, but the whole point of this kind of thing is the visuals, and they are sumptuous in this, capturing the original, perfectly. "Blue Meanies, Blue Meanies!"

 

I don't know if you are familiar with the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, but this has a close connection to the previous, in that the Den segment of the 1981 Canadian animated movie Heavy Metal, was directed by a Yellow Submarine veteran, Jack Stokes!

 

I first encountered Den in Heavy Metal, the magazine, not the movie, and it's best to say the visuals beat a very confusing series of story arcs, and it helps if you read each story as a stand alone with some similarities to that which has come before, Den being the late Corben's 'Star Wars', going back to his early years, but with less control on timelines or character development!

 

This is the third in a series of [relatively] new collections of all the Den'i'verse, and I'm now looking for the others!

A is for And so to London - Forbidden Planet

After I'd visited Peter's workplace, which was an absolute Aladin's cave, but which I didn't think to photograph, I made my way back to Central London by ♫♪ London Transport, diesel-engined, ninety-seven horsepower omnibus! ♪♫, alighting at the top of Tottenham Court Road, to walk down into Charring Cross with a diversion off to the side to visit Forbidden Planet  in Shaftesbury Ave' on my way eventually - over the River.

Of course the first thing you see as a pedestrian in that part of the world is the famous/infamous (not a point of view; it is, and has been both, to most!) Centerpoint tower, the top of which is described by Old Bailey of Gaiman's Neverwhere as the one place in Central London where you don't have to look at it! But with the early autumn (second week of September), afternoon sun on it and a recent revamp, it was worth an arty shot!

And so to Forbidden Planet, which, to be frank - and you know I'm not backward at being forward - was a bit fucking shit!

I used to love Forbidden Planet; I discovered it decades ago, when it was round the corner in New Tottenham Court Road, a wood-floored warren of rooms and piles of boxes, mostly in the basement, run by a band of enthusiastic, aficionados (who probably took half their pay in musty tomes), with tens of thousands of old comics stacked tight in long, tatty cardboard boxed, imported graphic novels and sci-fi paperbacks in a mix of old 'brown-furniture' antique bookcases or splintery, pine warehouse shelving, with cartons, cages or flick-racks of posters, comic-art originals and other ephemera at the ends/corners of every isle/stack.

It was, not to put too fine a point on it; a nerdy bookworm's heaven and an early issue of Heavy Metal was a quid, or less, and I've watched it, slowly, over those decades turn into a monument to Mammon, supplying needy, pretentious Kidults with over-priced polymer shite of formulaic virtue, for signalling lifestyle choice to their acquaintances!

Gone are the old comics, gone are the old books; there's no paper on the top floor and in their place mountains of plastic most of which I wouldn't give house-room to if I was a millionaire! While downnstairs it's all new-issue and tame Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Titan.

The staff are friendly enough, and very helpful (I dealt with two), but they didn't have a clue what Heavy Metal was (it's not stocked anymore, despite still going), or it's role in ensuring they would still - or 'even' - have a job in 2022, and if I'd said Métal Hurlant, they would have assumed "The old geezer downstairs is having a seizure"! They are just employees, on shit money, with no emotional investment in the business they work for.

And, to add insult to injury, they didn't have Brian Heiler's Toy Ventures either; the wankers! Anyway, I took a few shots for Brian's Faceplant group, but realised the images were a bit shit too, some of them are a tad fuzzy or blurry, so I'm forcing them on you instead, with  few pithy remarks!

The only real bright spot was a couple of shelves of pop-culture books, among which were these three, I think I have the Tashen somewhere, and while I didn't buy either of the others, I will look for them going cheap on Amazon in about five years time, I bet I pick them up for less than six-quid each in a few years!

Pretty innocuous I suppose!

New generation of 'Micro Machine' stuff, now Hasbro
The only other bright spark!
I haven't got any for a while, I must check Basingrad - They'll be cheaper!

 

35 quid for plastic model kits? Madness!

26 fucking quid for a rubber fucking monkey!

You're 'avin' a laugh pal!

None of it's in-scale!

Urrruuh! Bleurgh! Ga-ga-ga-Wuurrrrp!

Take yer' Funko-pops and shove 'em where the sun don't shine!

Blind bags, blind boxes, blind packs, it's not fun, it's tedious and annoying and there's no central swap-hub, at least if you collect china shite you have the 'Bradford Plate Exchange' to help organise your over-priced idiocy and to get rid of it when the truth dawns!

 

Now, I can rant like a curmudgeon all I like, the fact is the core-customers (and - seemingly - the staff) love the place, and those of my generation who didn't 'put away childish things' are thin on the ground, and time moves on, one of the worst things about ageing is seeing your world disappear, first through cultural things like this, then the parents joining the grandparents in the hereafter, and eventually friends start dropping-off about the place, carelessly, it's the great tragedy of human existence - the inevitability of that existence ceasing to exist!

But come-on Forbidden Planet, you can carry Heavy Metal for fucks sake! And teach your staff what it means to the 'Hobby'!