Update: R.I.P. Oliver, Lazarus and 12 Monkeys

Just thought I'd do an update as it's been a few weeks and I've been a little preoccupied with work and whatnot.

R.I.P. Oliver.

A sad departure was my budgie Oliver who had been in declining health all last year, but worse in the run up to Christmas. Budgies are social creatures by nature and the loss of the female, Snowflake, the year before had hit him hard, plus he was around ten years old, which is about their lifespan.

He was a great budgie and he's missed already. Chez Lemon is very quiet.

Lazarus

On a different tack, I've been reading a copy of Greg Rucka's latest story, Lazarus, from Image comics:

It takes place in a dystopian future where society has descended into technically advanced fiefdoms run by families, each of which has a super soldier, or Lazarus of the title. The stories focus on the Lazarus of the Carlyle family, Forever, but in the second book, a story of a "waste" (a disenfranchised social class) family runs parallel to hers.

So far, there's little in the story which is positive or uplifting, but this is in keeping with Rucka's style (Queen and Country was a little bit like that, with no real winners, just survivors). The art work is also good, so it's all promising, if a bit grim.

12 Monkeys

Continuing on with the dystopian theme, the TV version of the Terry Gilliam film has been made over in the 'States and it looks good.

James Bond Films

With going to the exhibition I've been thinking about Bond films. There's been quite a few by now and  everyone has their opinion, mostly based on which one they saw first, so I thought I'd put mine down.

• Best film: You Only Live Twice. It's based in Japan and it's got lots of helicopters and Little Nellie and Sumo! and it's a Connery film (see below) and it's got spaceships and ninjas and samurai swords and Donald Pleasence as Blofeld and a pool full of piranhas and... It ticks a lot of boxes.




• Runner Up: Difficult. Any Connery (even Diamonds Are Forever at a pinch) apart from Never Say Never Again, or any Brosnan apart from the last.


• Best Bond. Sean Connery. The original and still the best.
• Runner Up: Pierce Brosnan. Not as iconic as Connery, but understood the role better than the others.


• Best Villain: Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), but only just (see below), and he set the mould really. Fröbe couldn't speak very good English, so he was dubbed! Bet you didn't know that.
• Runner Up: Dr. Julius No (Joseph Wiseman). I know Blofeld is a more obvious choice, but he got played out pretty quickly. A more recent alternative would be Electra King (Sophie Marceau), the ultimate bad girlfriend!

Oooo, pop quiz. Which Bond villain was played by Royalty? (see answer below)


• Best Henchman: Oddjob (Harold Sakata), no question. Jaws was just too silly.
• Runner Up: Tee Hee Johnson (Julius Harris), from Live and Let Die, but I thought Richard Stamper (Götz Otto) from Tomorrow Never Dies was good.


• Best Girl: If I had to choose, it would be Solitaire (Jane Seymour) in Live and Let Die, first impressions being the best.
• Runner Up: Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi, but voiced by Barbara Jefford) from From Russia with Love or, more recently, Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) in Quantum of Solace or Colonel Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) in Tomorrow Never Dies. She's got to be a lot more than eye candy.


• First film: Diamonds Are Forever (1971). I was about eight.

Fun Bond fact: "The World is Not Enough" (Orbis non sufficit, in Latin) was actually the family motto of Sir Thomas Bond (ca. 1620–1685), James Bond's supposed ancestor.

I've not been convinced of recent Bond films. Brosnan's era ended with a damp squib (far too self referential) and the last two films have been a bit tame. Maybe it's the Bourne thing, but Daniel Craig doesn't convince either: Bond has style and charm, "a man that shakes the hands that shake the world" (Dean Motter's expression, not mine, sadly), while Craig just looks like a scary nightclub bouncer who's been hit in the face once too often. Maybe third time lucky with Skyfall:



Another reason for my lack of conviction is that I read Greg Rucka's Queen and Country.

His heroine, Tara Chace, makes Bond look like a part-timer. The dialogue's pretty good too. When she and a contact are in a corner, she asks how fast he can run. He replies, "When someones shooting at me, I'm bloody Carl Lewis!"

...and another thing, when Grosse Point Blank has a better two-blokes-trying-to-kill-each-other (John Cusack and Benny Urquidez, the former's kick boxing trainer) fight scene than many a Bond movie, you've got to wonder!



Pop quiz answer: Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big in Live and Let Die was played by Yaphet Kotto, who's father was a Crown Prince of Cameroon.

Top Ten

As some may know, I've been a comic book fan for getting on decades. I've been going through the collection weeding out those that can be donated to the charity shop, having read them and not thought them worthy of keeping, and it occurred to me to set out a list of the best ones (so far).

Concrete, by Paul Chadwick.
I read these stories when I was in my mid-twenties and,  having now collected them in trade paperback (TP) format, they are still excellent. They move comics from the super-hero vs villains format to telling truly human stories.

The Treasury of Murder Series by Rick Geary
This true murder series, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, seem a little bit like CSI, but Rick has turned them into works of art far superior to anything on TV. The books have a truly Gothic feel to them.

100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
The ultimate comic crime series. No super-heroes, no cops, just bad, bad, people trying to stay alive. The first stories were excellent, really hard boiled, making Sin City look like a Doris Day movie. After that, it seemed to get embroiled in a dark conspiracy plot that I just found to be confusing. I've got all the TP's so I'll probably give it another go at some point.

Scalped by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra
My current favourite crime comic at the moment. Think Raymond Chandler on a Native American Reservation.

The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
Okay, if you want a super-hero comic book, I'll give you this one. This will blow your mind. It's what League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should really have been, but funny, rather than just pompous.

BPRD and Hellboy
I've included these together as they represent the work of Mike Mignola, even though he's not having much to do with them these days. Plus the movies weren't bad.

The Losers by Andy Diggle and Jock
The movie was okay, but it came out at the same time as The Expendables and The A-Team and got lumped in with them. Not only was the movie better than the others (oh, yes it was) but the comic books were better than the movie.

Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewicz [pronounced sin-KEV-itch]
A work of true genius, and I don't say that lightly. You know the saying that there is a thin line between genius and madness. Well I think that he must have wandered over the line a few times doing this. The fourth, and last, issue didn't seem to have a proper cover, it was just black, until you tilted it and it caught the light. It was gloss black printed on matte.

DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli
This is an unusual war comic book, about as far removed from Sargent Rock and Major Eazy as you could ever get.

Queen and Country by Greg Rucka
Back in the seventies, there used to be a spy series called The Sandbaggers. Not Bond or even Le Carre. It inspired this series about MI6 operatives.

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Although it tails off a bit at the end, this is Ellis's magnum opus and what a work it is. The first episode is free to download if you can find it.

Okay, eleven, but I had to include the last one. In addition, the following are ones that I think are worth an mention:

Northlander by Brian Wood
A comic book about Vikings, but see his other work above.

Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
What would happen to someone if the stories written about them became real.

The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson
Despite the ultra-violence (which is what happened to spoil Ennis' Preacher) a worthwhile attempt at the anti-super-hero genre.

Cerebus by Dave Sim
This holds the record for being the longest English-language comic book by a single team (Usagi Yojimbo has the overall record). It's also self published, no one having the patience to handle Sim for any length of time. I only managed to keep up as far as Reads, Volume 9, but I got single issues up to Going Home, Volume 13. I liked it mainly because of the art work, which always draws me into a comic and Cerebus is fantastic to look at, the high water mark being Rick's Story, which looks like a modern Book of Kells.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Why this one and not Watchmen or V For Vendetta? It's the notes in the back of the book which make this so good. You don't realise how much research goes into a comic book like this, and this alone made it worth a mention.