Posts by Kracklite
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Aha! Graham Green! The Comedians
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Rorschach is the Question,
The abyss is the answer. Ha hah hah. … ehh, sorry.Many a true word said by accident. That's what the Surrealists thought.
Mind you, I have often thought that the Comedian was a sort of cross between Captain America and the Joker - even more so after seeing The Dark Night . There's probably a large helping of John Wayne in The Green Berets and Rambo as well... and probably Samuel Johnson.
I mean when he said that "Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels."
You know there's Pythonesque potential there - literary action figures. "Dodgson, Charles D-D-Dodgson."
Oh no, hang on, I'm not being as stupid as I thought: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ...
I'll get my coat.
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Who was The Comedian based on, btw?
Not sure. May be in the Lower Devonian strata of my files. Dave Gibbons has put out a beautiful book called Watching the Watchmen (of course) that details the creation of the comic, so no doubt it's in there. I'm thinking of buying it, but the price is just a little out of my reach at the moment.
I don't think the studio ever had the guts to go with the pretty black joke at the heart of it all.
A friend of mine assistant edited at a British sf magazine and got to know a lot of writers who also worked on Dredd. They largely hated him and tried to write stories that showed what a bastard he was... but found that they just made the character stronger.
One of my favourite lines was his attempt to talk a would-be suicide out of jumping off a ledge:
"Littering is an OFFENCE!"
Regarding Starship Troopers , or Paul Verhoeven, that's a very European sense of humour on show there. I did hear a story that he had wanted to make a Dredd movie, but ran into some copyright issues. Now that would have worked...
Certainly what I've seen of the early costume designs for Robocop show a link - some of the helmet designs are almost identical.
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5 AM!
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Now that is something I'd like to see, even - perhaps even more so - after Tideland (OK, call me mad).
Excellent.
If I disappear and someone called DSCH turns up, you'll know who it is...
You know, the third movement of the Eighth Symphony at 6 AM is great revenge on noisy neighbours.
I seem to be prone to comparison with fictitious characters. I've had students compare me to Hannibal Lecter, Tony Soprano and the Joker (Heath Ledger's interpretation) and in each case they meant it as praise. Make of that what you will.
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It is Brian Dennehy as Stourley Kracklite in Peter Greenaway's film, The Belly Of an Architect . For reasons I've alluded too (legal issues with former employer, confidentiality, blah blah, but I still want to say what utter bastards they are and if there's such a thing as karma, they'll come back as tapeworms, you might think that but I couldn't possibly comment etc etc), I prefer to use a pseudonym. People who know me in real life have said that they know who I am online, so I suppose that's OK...
Kracklite's just a character I empathise with, warts and all. Fortunately, these days I'm slimmer.
In actual fact I look a lot like Dmitri Shostakovich with longer hair.
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Nuh-uh. The perennial nerd question is "are you a real girl?"
Well, I never hear that one.
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I think that DC barring Moore and Gibbons from using old, already existing characters turned out in the end to be an advantage. Captain Atom, I gather (I've never been a heavy comics reader), was just another superhero, but Doctor Manhattan really gave M & G an opportunity to examine people's reactions to a 'real' demigod - and that being's own development.
The perennial nerd question is "who would win in a fight between X and Y?" In this case, Superman would win by default because Doctor Manhattan wouldn't bother to turn up.
Never thought of Ozymandias that way, but yeah, definitely...
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Pedestrian artwork (Ozymandias / Adrian Veidt is a bloody awful design)
Have to say that this was deliberate, Joe. Dave Gibbons' artwork was an evocation of the artwork of 'silver age' comics, as the characters themselves were based on characters of that time. Rorschach is the Question, Nite Owl is the Blue Beetle (not Batman as most people think), Doctor Manhattan is Captain Atom and so forth. Moore did intend to use these characters, but DC was planning to revive them itself and blocked his use of them, forcing him and Gibbons to create their own.
The artwork is itself as subversive as the story, with urban squalor depicted in a style that was originally used to show clean shiny cities and people.
Moore choses his collaborators carefully - Eddie Campbell's work for From Hell was based on the styles of Victorian popular graphics - not Tenniel, but the street-level work read by the sort of people who lived in the East End at the time.
And just to round out the nerdery, I watched the Battlestar Galactica pilot again the other night and that was a distinctly weird experience. Thinks: he's dead, he's dead, they're dead... shit, he led a mutiny and was shot, he's a cylon, she's a cylon too, shit, he ended up poisoning... and then he turned out to be...
Made me realise just how profoundly effective a real plot can be, with definite irreversible changes and momentum towards a definite conclusion. I'm totally spoiled for the endless series dramas with the reset button at the end now.
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This is a wonderful trip down memory lane. I was wondering when The Trigan Empire would get a mention. I only remember it from the Look and Learn period, but managed to learn about it's earlier incarnation and intentions...
Now I don't know about you, but Alan Moore reminds me a lot of Michael Moorcock, and I have to say among my favourite titles on my bookshelves is an almost complete run of the quarterly editions of New Worlds that ran (mostly) under his editorship. Unsigned alas.
Sad to think that of the young Turks who publised their early stories there, Barrington Bayley's dead, J. G. Ballard's dying and Brian Aldiss is an octagenerian with a pacemaker and an OBE.
Hmm, think I'll reread the Jerry Cornelius stories again soon, I feel the urge...