Part 1 (of 2)

 “Hi, my name’s Gary. Look, I was just an ordinary Joe Schmoe working as a wage-slave, just like you. My wife Mary-Sue and I never went out, I drove a ten year-old shit-mobile and my kids dressed in hand-me-downs. And I worked damned hard, I can tell you, until the day I got fired. Looking back, it was the best thing my boss ever did for me; although at the time I didn’t think so. Because back then I hadn’t even heard of the amazing ACME SYSTEM. Today I’m my own boss, I usually work less than an hour a day, and I make over $100 000 a year. Now, I can tell you’re skeptical, just like I would be in your shoes…”

And so it begins. That paragraph, or something like it, is the entry point to an entirely ignored subset of fantasy literature. Unlike the stuff with dwarves and dragons in, dream-lit rakes in the cash. And (the best bit) it’s all done through self-publishing! People at the top of the tree in this particular genre do make a lot of money. And you don’t have to be Shakespeare to do it, either. Like all fantasy subgenres, the Literature of Dreams has a very specific audience. It is by tapping in to what that audience wants and expects that you make your money. A certain type of reader would want to read on, would want to partake in the dream being sold. So, where’s Gary going with this?

Edgar Rice Burrows, making money from his writing.

“… And before I heard of the ACME SYSTEM I would have been the world’s greatest skeptic, in fact I still am. A man with my kind of wealth gets all kinds of proposals to invest their money by all kinds of folks. Believe me, I can tell a get-rich-quick fraudster, a pyramid selling scam and a Ponzi scheme within seconds. And the ACME SYSTEM would be just the same to me – if it wasn’t for one thing: IT WORKS!!!!”

Now, Gary’s audience don’t usually consider themselves fantasy readers. Although, in reality, these are people who have swallowed a whopping one hook, line and sinker. The fantasy they cling onto is that they can find fabulous riches by buying something or doing what they’re told; that there is a system out there for acquiring vast sums of money with little effort (in fact there is, it’s called Free Market Economics and it ensures that the people with vast amounts of unearned/stolen wealth get to keep it). So, after a few paragraphs like the one above, they might be willing to take a punt on the ACME SYSTEM. Look at the paragraph above and you’ll see that it’s doing two things. First, it reassures the reader that the system isn’t a con. Second, it shows the benefits of the system to its user (he is wealthy, people are trying to scam him). Time for a bit of back-story, get some tension into the narrative.

“I learned the hard way that real wealth don’t come from work and dedication. I used to work in a tool-shop making drill-bits. I did as much overtime as I could get my hands on and I still couldn’t make the bills at the end of the month. One day the boss came over. I had finished for the day and was cleaning up the machine. It wasn’t my job to do it, but I like to keep things clean and orderly to help out the night-shift guys. I guess that’s the kind of guy I am. The boss came up to me and called me into his office.

“How long have you worked for us Gary?”

The question surprised me, “Eleven years,” I said.

The boss sat back and laughed at me, the son of a bitch. “Eleven years working the machines! How can you stand it?”

And I couldn’t. That was the truth of it, Right there and then I quit. As I walked out I felt a great weight lifted off my shoulders. But almost immediately, another thought entered my head. What was I going to tell Mary-Sue? And more importantly, how were we going to live without my salary?”

 So that’s Gary goose cooked: poor, jobless, down in the dumps. How does he get out of that? Read on, dear readers, read on, for Gary finds his Aladdin’s lamp in the next post in this exciting series: The Literature of Dreams!

CU refers to the practice of manufacturing victimhood. This is done most commonly by groups who wish to gain social cachet or importance by giving the impression that they are hard done by and receive unfair treatment and/or criticism from society at large. For example: religion A wants to give the impression that it is getting a rough deal, particularly in relation with the treatment of religion B. Proponents of A will therefore look for any instances of unfavourable treatment to themselves and positive stories about that pesky B religion as ‘evidence’ for their griping.

So, a Christian finds out their local council is letting the local Hindus organise a celebration for the Diwali festival, in fact they might even make a contribution towards such a festivity. CU thus kicks in: ‘why are they allowed to celebrate when we are not?’, says the shit-stirring Christian, ‘why is the council spending MILLIONS on Diwali lights and NOTHING on Christmas lights?’ etc. You get the picture. None of the questions posed have to have a factual basis, CU can operate quite independently of facts. The trick is to make the accusations time and time again, a constant drip of propaganda snippets to give the more gullible the impression that your particular group is under attack. Over time, it is a very effective technique.

CU is therefore a powerful tool in creating divisions between people and communities, fostering distrust and souring relations between people who hold different views. Atheists are offended when Cee-Lo reinterprets a song by John Lennon, Euro-skeptics roar that attempts by the German government to shore up the Euro is the harbinger of a Nazi fourth Reich, Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed are interpreted by a number of troublemakers as ‘evidence’ that the West hates Islam. I could go on, but I think you see what I mean.

This creation of victimhood is a great way to exploit people, to get them to focus on external enemies and maintain loyalty within members of the group. It is easy then to manufacture a narrative that paints your particular tribe as plucky underdogs struggling against injustice; if your football team have a player sent off, it’s a conspiracy by referees and FIFA, if you get fined for speeding, its because the government hates motorists, if Science Fiction and Fantasy novels never make it onto the Booker longlist… (actually, that last one may be true!).

'OMG, they're all against me!'

One of the worse things that happens when Competitive Umbrage takes hold is that perspective is lost. Yes, many people in this world suffer unfair and discriminatory treatment: the poor, many ethnic minorities, people under dictatorships, women in many societies around the world. So be careful when making comparisons of your own circumstances with groups that have a genuine case. We at Floppybootstomp chalets may moan about a lot of things, particularly our government, economic system, the lousy thieving bankers, etc, but are aware that we’re not facing the Apartheid regime or Syrian tanks. Our problems, thankfully, remain far more mundane and unremarkable.

So that’s Competitive Umbrage, another entry for your thesaurus. Part of me hopes that the term takes off, a saner part that it disappears altogether so that people who compare their own petty problems and insecurities to the horrors of Nazi Germany will someday grow a cerebral cortex and a sense of shame.

Happy New Year.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Obviously signing the contract is just the first step in a process that could take many months. Still have to make adjustments to the manuscript before the final draft is approved, then a decision has to be made as to when to publish. All this could take a while. Still, I do hope it will be worth the wait.

The principal editor (and boss) of Onmnium Gatherum, Kate Jonez, has already helped me to improve the manuscript through the submission process. One of the issues she highlighted was the use of the passive voice, particularly in the opening sentence of a novel (which is why the title of this post is what it is – and has been expunged from the novel!).

Preparing a manuscript – particularly this one – has involved a lot of people who have helped me get it to the stage it is now. To give you some idea, I finished the first draft towards the end of 2009. I submitted it to an agent for comment at the Writing Industries Conference early in 2010 and gave it to my initial set of readers (Keith Morley, Keith Large and Maria Smith) in the same year. Their comments really helped the book come together. Later, I submitted the new version of the manuscript to my fellow writers in The Speculators writers group. Thanks to all of them, particularly Jim Worrad and Damien Walter for their efforts. The old canard of needing a village to raise a child is certainly true of Vampsov. I’m particularly grateful to Writing East Midlands, The Phoenix Writers and The Speculators writers group for their help. Without you guys, I’d never have got this far. I owe you big time.

So let me wish all my readers a happy festive season. I hope that one year soon you find a copy of a novel in your Xmas stocking that tells of the adventures of Soviet vampire hunters on the eve of WWII. The two V’s of the one-word title, creepily elongated into fangs… I’ll be working my *&^$ off to make that scenario a possibility rather than just a dream.

Merry Christmas!

Eduardo Del Rio is a legendary Mexican cartoonist who has been publishing books, comics and press cartoons for over fifty years. His professional trajectory is unique in that he has concentrated his efforts on non-fiction works, specifically educational comic books. This tendency begins to manifest in the 1960s with his two seminal comic books Los Agachados (the stooped ones) and later, Los Supermachos (the super machos). Both these comic books are set in fictional Mexican villages and use stock characters to explain the political and economic reality of life. Apart from a political conscience-raising, he used these comic-books to promote vegetarianism, Buddhism, family planning and the joys of stamp collecting.

Rius is perhaps the first cartoonist to seriously consider the balance needed in order to make educational comics work, to include enough action, rounded characters and humour to draw in readers and keep them turning the pages. He is credited with helping to educate a whole generation of Mexicans as they followed the adventures of the laid-back electric-blanket wearing Indian Calzonzin and his tussles with the village PRI party boss, Don Perpetuo Del Rosal.

The context of Mexican political realities and a comic book industry that saw itself as a part of the entertainment industry, made Rius’s comics unique. As a trenchant critic of the government (from a radical left-wing position), he often faced official displeasure and harassment. At one point, he was even kidnapped by the Mexican secret police.

Cuba For Beginners (Cuba Para Principiantes) is an attempt to counter the anti-revolutionary propaganda that arose after the triumph of the Castro regime. Both the US and the Mexican media took a hostile view of the Revolution. Rius’s book does an excellent job of explaining the long view of Cuban history and the reasons why the Revolution occurred, the positive aspects of the regime change and to remind the Mexicans that they too had needed a Revolution to establish their sovereignty. The book became a best-seller, and together with another Rius book ‘Marxism For Beginners’ (a primer on Marxist theory), were translated into many languages and became international best-sellers.

And these two books also gave rise to the publishing phenomenon of For Beginners books. Naturally the world’s publishers simply ripped off the format (because international copyright law only applies to American comics. Funny that…). Today you can find these ‘For beginners’ type comics in bookshops all over the world. Rius, therefore, has had a major role to play in educational publishing. In style, nearly all these books ape the Rius formula. The images are complemented with cut-outs (like Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cut and paste animations) and take an ingenue through the subject tackled in a step-by-step fashion, breaking off at least once per page for a joke. Rius avoids the over-worded talking-heads format of many of his less deft imitators, because, well, the guy’s a genius and most other ‘for beginners’ books are just cheap knock-offs.

The master himself, Eduardo delRio (Rius)

 Cuba For Beginners, however, remains a joy. Not only a great introduction to the Cuban Revolution but also Cuban history as a whole. Later (1990s) Rius published a further volume criticizing the Castro Revolution and how it had betrayed its own ideals.

 Rius still publishes uncompromising books that irritate the powers that be. His recent books have included critiques of Bullfighting, the Bible and an alternative history of Comic Books. Given his penchant for contrariness, his is a profoundly democratic standpoint.

 The best illustration of this was the decision by Rius and his fellow cartoonists to suspend the publishing of the satirical magazine, El Chamuco in the year 2000. The reason? The left-wing cartoonists decided that the fall of the PRI government in that year’s election (after over 60 years in power), required that some breathing-space be given to the new government to help smooth the transition to democracy. They did this even though the new president (Fox Quezada) was from the right-wing PAN party, and the fact that El Chamuco was, at the time, the most influential satire magazine in the country (the closure must have also cost them financially). Cartoonists have long memories and they remembered how the ‘free press’ had lambasted president Madero after the Revolution and how that criticism had contributed to justifying the Huertista coup d’etat. Probably the only episode in history where a part of the mass media has done something for the good of people other than themselves. Relax, Rupert, it would never happen here.

But nostalgia ain’t all that. When you had 3 channels, half the programming was taken up with crap like NationWide, The Cannon and Ball Show or the snooker. You couldn’t escape that by switching channels because… well, because there were so few to choose from. And although most of what’s on now is dross and repeats, some gems do pop up from time to time. You just have to know where and when to look. So here’s three of my current faves, showing you just how I waste most of my days and evenings. Bon appetit.

1) Diners, Drive-ins and Dives (Food Network)

We denizens of the old continent often puzzle over the girth and weight of Americans and their ability to pile on the kilos. No more. This prog shows exactly how that happens. The food presented on this show is jaw-dropping in its crudity and lack of… well… taste. Everything here is huge, covered in mountains of processed cheese, stuffed with pounds of fried meat, drenched in sauce. It’s how I imagine that orcs would cook. Disgusting. 3D is pure car-crash television; bound to send you reaching for a salad and to rip up any take-away menus in the house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61FIh8glN4&feature=related

2) The Keiser Report (Russia Today)

Ostensibly this show is about exposing the lies and corruption of the world financial markets (except the Russian ones). The star of the show is Max Keiser, a front-man who is part shock-jock, part economic guru. Ably assisted by his assistant Stacey Herbert, he lays into the criminals, fraudsters, zombies and liars ripping us off on the financial markets and in government. JP Morgan, The Koch Brothers, Goldman Sachs, financial regulators, governments… every one of the authors of our economic misfortunes gets monstered on this show. You also pick up all kinds of tasty tidbits about how the financial world works (or how it doesn’t) from watching. Quite compelling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrSWpmtm0kY

3) Mongrels (BBC Three)

There was, not long back, a campaign to shut down BBC3. The argument was that the network didn’t have a clear vision and that the programmes it produced were terrible. Closing the station would save the licence-fee payer squillions and blah, blah, blah. And then this comes along. A puppet show about animals living round the back of a pub in Millwall. There’s Marion, a feral cat with a Greek/Turkish accent; Kali, a West Indian pigeon; Vince, a sweary c*** of a fox; Nelson, a metrosexual, middle-class fox and Destiny, an Afghan-hound princess owned by the pub landlord, Gary. It’s so much fun you could even call it satire. Love it to bits. Series 2 is now showing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I139XVV-UaY&feature=relmfu

Post Ends. Please Disperse.

The underground comix movement in 1960s America threw up a number of great comic book virtuosos: Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Vaughn Bode, even Harvey Kurtzman and Mad magazine can be attributed to this abandonment of mainstream comics by the brightest and best new artists and writers. Towards the end of that period, Richard Corben begins to make his mark as an artist in the underground press.

 His first successes came in fanzines including Grim Wit, Slow Death and Fantagor. Soon he moved to the more established Warren Publishing where he contributed to horror and fantasy titles (Creepy, Eerie, 1984 and Vampirella). In the mid 70s he approached the editors of French magazine Metal Hurlant [see Comic Book Classics #13]. There he developed his very distinctive style. The culmination of this new direction is his adult fantasy series Den.

Den is the tale of a nerd who finds a gateway to a new dimension; Neverwhere. Once there the nerdy kid is transformed into an over-endowed muscleman hero and goes on a series of violent and erotic adventures. A strong vein of humour runs through the series, something that runs through the rest of his oeuvre. Den soon proved an extremely popular series and featured prominently (ahem) in the Heavy Metal film.

Further Corben works include collaborations with Harlan Ellison, artwork for The Punisher, the adapting of classic tales by Robert E Howard, HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe and artwork for album covers. From 1986 to 1994 he ran his own publishing imprint, Fantagor Press. In addition, he has also developed further solo projects (Rowlf, Jeremy Brood, further volumes of Den etc.)

Comic Books have an odd habit of projecting distorted mirror images of the societies that spawned them. America, where ¾ of the population are obese, poor and treated like shit, has given the world the superhero. Additionally the Japanese,who enjoy the highest average age of any nation of earth, produce manga; a form where every single character – regardless of age or gender – has the face of a seven year old girl. When contemplating Richard Corben’s work you are often drawn to such psychoanalytical explanations because… well, look at this:

Discuss!

His depiction of exaggerated physical /sexual characteristics has certainly sparked controversy . Anyway, putting aside the shock value of the subject matter his artwork certainly deserves plaudits. The realism of his work (he pioneered the use of airbrush illustration) offers up landscapes that are almost photographic in quality. The fantasy worlds he creates are similarly rich, detailed and filled with exotic plants, animals, people and monsters. He also has a nifty ear for dialogue and brings a light humourous touch to his stories and characters. His ability to make such imagined worlds real makes his work truly great.

Everyone considered him the champion of the Sky-Bid

He never said one single time that monopoly was wrong

His momma called him David but folks just called him useless

Something always told me he was a good Bullingdon boy

In office for ten minutes and he bottles the decision

Because Rupe’s a friend to Tories and they both got along

I still recall the final words that Murdoch said to Cameron:

‘The News of the World is history but my Sky-Bid must go on’

Promise me Dave not to leave my work undone

Remember all my favours if you can

The Sun comes out each day I can make our friendship pay

I hope your phone’s encrypted if you can’t

Sometimes your wallet needs an extra grand

There is someone for everyone and Dave obeyed Rebekah

With her lies he didn’t have to serve the common man

One day when he was working the Guardian boys came calling

They exposed Rebekah and the nasty Murdoch press

Dave opened up the door and saw Rebekah hiding

Her perjured heart, her shredded files was more than he could stand

He reached above the fireplace to take down Rupert’s picture

As he thought of legal loopholes he heard those words again

Promise me Dave not to leave my work undone

Remember all my favours if you can

The Times comes out each day I can make our friendship pay

I hope your phone’s encrypted if you can’t

Sometimes your wallet needs an extra grand

The house of commons laughed at him as he walked into the chamber

Or that idiot weasel Milliband? I really can’t be sure

He said he’d not refer the bid to the monopolies commission

but you could have heard a pin drop when he u-turned and ran away

20 years of crawling were bottled up inside him

But he knew that for the Murdochs he would crawl for 20 more

If Rupe got what he wanted he would finally be somebody

And if he didn’t get it, the Daily Mail would step in

And I heard him say:

Promise me Rupe not to drop me in the soup

Remember all my favours if you can

The Sun comes out each day I’ll do anything you say

Lat me stick my tongue up your behind

I’m the bestest little toady you will find

Everyone considered him the champion of the Sky-Bid

 # Starbase Leicester is now 6 years old and has moved from reception class to Big School. They had a party and cake and stuff. At the last minute I had to cancel my attendance, which was annoying. Still, happy birthday, SBLites.

 # Will Ellwood sold a story to Flurb! If you don’t know what Flurb is, I’ll tell you. It’s an online magazine of Speculative fiction run by Rudy Rucker and held in extremely high esteem by the SF world. In the same issue as Will, little known author Bruce Sterling also had a story.

 # The Grassroutes project has been launched! Your esteemed self is the list of authors and is pleased as punch to be there.

 # Saw the production of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls at the new Curve. Nice to see such a great play put on again. Thought the acting was top notch but the staging seemed a bit odd. Particularly as a lot of the action seemed to take place in a dolls house. Still, the production won me over as it did reference a lot of the Soviet ideology that inspired the play (first performed in Moscow, dontcha know…)

 # My extra-curricular activities are boundless. Went to see Leicester play Barnsley in the league with my amigo Miguel and his dad. Met my mate Wayne Exley there before the match for a few pints. Can’t remember much about the game, apart from the fact that I got sun-burnt. In fact I’m probably the only person ever to catch sunburn at Oakwell on consecutive years.

 # Phoenix Writers have been busy. We hosted Bead Roberts as a guest on September the 17^th and held an open day on October the 1^st. Five new faces joined us for a writing session and as many again have dropped in since. It seems that the whole thing is starting to take off.

 # Still at the Phoenix, a short film festival with over 20 local films packed out the building in September 24^th. I attended the event with Maria Smith and Keith Large, who had written and produced two of the films ‘The Ticket Collector’ and ‘Refrigerator’. Both were very well received. A big shout out too to Big Society, a cracking little satire I’ve embedded below:

 # Three days before that (Saturday 20^th) I trolled up to Waterstones to a book signing by local fantasy writer Mark Chadburn. A great guy who I knew from Twitter (i.e. we were complete strangers), but we had a great little chat. Also met up there with assorted speculators (Catherine Digman, Jenny Walklate, Damien Walter and the aforementioned Will Ellwood). The highlight of the visit was the GodCake provided by Adele Wearing. Yum. Yuuummm… Oh, yeah, where was I, right, OK, Mark Chadbourn. Bought a copy of his Elizabethan fantasy adventure The Scar-Crow Men. A great read that introduced me to a whole new universe of great books.

# Get Leicester Reading, the festival of all things literary, gets better every year. A highlight this time was the appearance of writers writing in Waterstone’s window. Maria Smith gives the lowdown on Keith Large’s appearance here. Will, Damien. Keith Morley and others also took their turn as window displays.

# Still on Get Leicester Reading, a highlight of the whole thing was the ‘Science vs Science Fiction’ debate between Peter F Hamilton and Professor George Fraser, director of Space Research at Leicester Uni. A great and thought provoking debate and only the 2^nd time I’d been in the new library since it moved venues.

# Jim Worrad has returned to England following his sojourn in San Diego on the Clarion workshop. He continues to amaze and astound. He did miss out on the Speculators lock-in with Kasabian at the Dos Hermanos bar last week though, bad luck, Jim.

Kasabian. They stick to session bitters because a tummy upset is just not worth it.

Blimey! What a lot of news there is… Haven’t got time to wish you all a happy Halloween and Bonfire Night and Solstice and Day of The Dead have I? Thought not.

 My first encounter with Sonny Liew’s work came as a result of a four day stopover in Kuala Lumpur. There I spent my time seeing the sights, taking in the atmosphere and dodging the heat. And that’s the overriding memory I have of Malaysia, it’s blood-boilingly hot. The only way I survived the whole thing was skipping from one air-conditioned shopping mall to another. In one of these malls I found a newspapers shop and on one of the shelves I found some comics. Most were your normal hegemonically extruded blandathons: superheroes, manga and the like, but there was other stuff too. Stuff that I bought from the surprised vendor. He looked surprised because the comics I bought were written in Malay and I looked and sounded like the kind of dumbass foreigner who doesn’t speak the local lingo. He was right.

The comics were kids stuff, really. One called Apo? aimed at young teenagers and another called Anna Muslim, supposedly for little girls. Armed with these two examples of local comic book art, I took my first steps into the world of Asian cartoons. As I couldn’t read a word, it was quite a small step too.

I soon forgot about these comics, but something in my back-brain must have kept some residual affinity for Malaysian comic books. A year or so later I first encountered Sonny Liew’s work from the fantastic Liquid City anthologies that showcase the work of Asia’s best cartoonists (which he edits). This godsend of a publication allows us ignorant anglophones to share the talent coming from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, The Philippines and elsewhere. If you haven’t yet, check out the links on the site to Lat, Leong Wan Kok and Gerry Alanghan.

Liew has travelled a convoluted career path that included a time as a philosophy student at Cambridge and spells working for the Marvel/DC evil duopoly. Born and brought up in Malaysia, he now lives in Singapore. His most widely recognised work is the illustrations for a DC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and, wit Tommy Kovac, Wonderland (a riff on Lewis Carrol’s fantasy world). His own original creation, Malenky Robot, is a hit even in France (where it is published as a BD; an outlet that suits the artwork; a rich almost pastel-like colour palate, beautiful illustrations and quirky stories).

My favourite thing about Liew’s work is his ability to adapt his style in new and exciting ways. Even his superheroes are interpreted in a new and idiosyncratic style. The guy has elan, panache and chutzpah in his drawing arm. Long may he prosper.