Cluttered Like My Head

Lots of talk in the past week about the upcoming solar eclipse, and that, although its only a partial one, its the best one in the UK since August 1999, and that the next full eclipse visible from here isn't until 2080, or 2081.  I remember exactly where I was on that last eclipse in 1999, not because I made a big deal out of it, but because I'd been on holiday with a mate, and we were flying back from LA. My memory tells me that it was a Virgin Airlines flight, that they handed out glasses to view the eclipse on the flight, and that it was visible from one side of the plane and they encouraged everybody to go to that side to get a look. Obvs it would have been more effective if you had a window seat on that side, but I do remember getting a quick glimpse, and obviously we weren't as impacted by the low clouds which blighted much of the rest of the UK.  We saw REM at the Greek Theatre on the 9th August, and then flew back to the UK the following day. Ever since, my mate has...

 And so we come to the final issue of The Daredevils. Behind a cover of the Fury clobbering Captain Britain, there's an editorial from Bernie Jaye, revealing both that the title is going to merge with the (recently relaunched) Mighty World of Marvel, and that she is going to be moving on as well. I haven't read any issues of the latter title, but it's clear that a lot of credit for the approach of the Daredevils has to go to the editorial team and the lead they provided to the creatives - it's notable that there's a short Moore / Davis strip wishing her well.  The Captain Britain strip rounds off the story. It's a bit rushed but Alan Moore and Alan Davis perform an effective job of corralling all of our main players together to see of the Fury, with one particularly striking double page sequence by Davis featuring a sequence of full height wordless panels, ending with the Fury buried under tons of rock. The Special Executive take their leave and the story promis...

 The Chicago Conversion is an interesting V book. The first two either cover the original series or run parallel to it. The third one features the TV cast running around in an attempt to capture Diana. This is effectively the first one that falls in that gap between the mini-series and the original series, and chooses to fix any problems with continuity by setting itself in a completely different locale, with a completely different cast.  This has strengths and weaknesses. A strength is obviously that there is less chance of it contradicting the story that we see in other media, but a weakness is that the cast from the TV show is already well defined, and the book has to introduce a cast from scratch. I'm guessing that they were also written at pace, and so we tend to see a selection of common tropes appearing in the books. In this one, for instance, we have a hero called Sam Walker, an athletic Vietnam vet, a bit rough around the edges, a reluctant fighter driven by the loss ...

 We're in the home stretch now - I think it's fair to see that the creators knew the end was coming, as the Captain Britain story is coming close to wrapping up. The Fury meets with our assortment of heroes, and has the upper stakes in the battle that kicks off, ending with a shocking fade to black for the final page. As ever, it's wonderful stuff, Moore and Davis working wonderfully as a team, and with an opening triptych that plays to Davis's strengths. I know I'm forty years after the curve, but I'm glad to have finally got around to reading this,  As an extra this month, we have a strip called The Crusader by Davis and Paul Neary, apparently Davis's first professional work. It's another amusing parody of comic book tropes with our hero having been disturbed by the death of his parents, and deciding to become a superhero to avenge them. II'm not sure how it would have fitted originally in the pages of Rampage but it's an effective filler here,...

From my recall, book 3 of the series, "The Pursuit of Diana" by Allen Wold came out around the same time as the weekly TV show - I could be wrong (Amazon lists a publication date of June 1985) By the time the weekly show made it to the UK, the wheels had pretty clearly fallen off of the wagon, and instead of it being a high profile weekly show, it was shunted to late night on some ITV regions - not all of them even carried it.  But NEL, in the wake of Pinnacle in the US ploughed ahead, with a book showing how Diana was captured at the close of the two mini-series.  Ostensibly, this closes a gap between those series and the weekly show, which opened a year later with Diana on the stand for 'Crimes against Humanity'.  In reality, its really a lot of set pieces where the resistance capture Diana, then they come up against some humans who have been converted, Diana escapes, they capture her again, they end up on a mother ship, they need to fix the mother ship, they fight ...

 The second V book was East Coast Crisis, a chunky title set (as the title says) in New York rather than the Californa locale loved by television production companies at the time.  This one says that it was published in September 1984 in the US (by Pinnacle) and then April 1985 in the UK (by NEL)  A co-write between Ann Crispin and Howard Weinstein, at 300 pages, this is the chunks of the spin-off books, and runs simultaneously with the events of the original two mini-series and thus the original book.  It's fair to say therefore that there's little opportunity for surprise. We see a lot of plot points from the original series repeated, only with a New York twist. The visitors are our friends / they're converting people / what's happening to scientists etc etc.  I think its also true to suggest that the characters in this book probably suffer in comparison with the ones from the TV show - we can all visualise Mike Donovan and Juliet Parrish in our heads because ...