The opening storyline was ludicrous, too. It starts with Yoshitsune telling his famous girlfriend that it is too dangerous for her to accompany him, as at this point he and his small band are on the run from a pursuing army. She refuses to leave him, so he ties her to a tree at the edge of the road down which the pursuing army are chasing him. Yes, that is how best to ensure her safety… The last sentence of the synopsis offered online proves this isn’t just an opening aberration: “A group of comical priests enter with the intention of capturing Yoshitsune, but the fox defeats them with his supernatural powers and joyfully flies off with the drum.”

The acting style is very strange, and covers a large range. It comes with all sorts of funny voices and bizarre poses: I was thinking at times that it almost looked like voguing. The fight scenes are even weirder – it makes the posturing in West Side Story look brutal and gritty. There’s almost no physical contact at all. I had no problem with the female roles being played by men: for the main one, I wouldn’t have been sure without the programme. Women are allowed in kabuki these days, but this classic, traditional troupe was all men.

This may all sound negative, and I don’t mean it to be: I like new experiences, and this was a fascinating melange of many such. I laughed at parts, with no idea whether this was an acceptable reaction, and I enjoyed a lot of the movement, but it took until the third and final big scene before I fell in love with the show.

Ebizo Ichikawa XI (young star of a line stretching back to the 17th Century) starred in three roles: a faithful warrior following Japan’s most loved tragic hero Yoshitsune (a real historical figure from the late 12th C); a mystical duplicate of same, who is on-stage the most; and the underlying magical fox who impersonated him. He switches between the three roles in the final scene, sometimes changing costumes and character at lightning speed, switching body language and manner and voice as swiftly as clothes. At one point the fake-warrior vanishes down a trapdoor, and after about a second charges out of a flap as the fox spirit. The most spectacular moment is when the fox leaps out of a flap about twelve feet above the stage, and turns the landing into a knee-slide to the front of the stage. His athleticism and dancing were absolutely extraordinary, and genuinely thrilling at the best moments.

It took me until this scene to decide that it was more useful to think of kabuki as a dance performance than a play. This isn’t to dismiss the worth of the play aspects, but the memes and styles of kabuki will take some getting used to; or that of the musical side, but it’s too alien for me to appreciate, so far. I loved a lot of the movement, posing and dancing, and it’s those things that would make me go again, though I imagine it will be a few years before another opportunity arises.

So I didn’t care about whether any reviews said Date Night was good or not. An hour and a half where I could reasonably expect Fey on screen most of the time => I wanna see it. Frankly knowing more might have put me off a little: the idea of an ordinary couple getting drawn into big-league mob violence sounds like a ’70s movie version of a British sitcom, The Terry and June Movie or some such. And do I really want a big car chase starring Fey and Steve Carell?

The plot is ludicrous: mistaken identity, killer cops, mob bigwigs, corrupt politicians, and our heroes battling to survive them. It is hardly plausible, but in the way that Bringing Up Baby was barely plausible, so that was fine with me. None of it is impossible, and Tina Fey’s triumphant moment in the climax, the silliest and most contrived moment of it all, made me very happy.

There are some good pieces – the couple’s hopeless faux-seductive pole dance is very funny, and the car chase is extremely original and inventive - and some good gags and so on along the way, but it’s not those that made me love it. The stars play an ordinary couple: tax lawyer and realtor, house in the suburbs, two kids. One night out a week, date night, where they go to the same restaurant and eat the same food, and when they come home, that’s their night for sex, unless they feel a bit tired or something. Talking to two divorcing friends, they both want a bit more glamour and excitement, and head to the city for a fancier night out.

This is of course where it all starts going wrong for them, but what is never lost is that background, that taking-it-for-granted comfortable but unexciting relationship. From the early routine scenes to the most dramatic and life-threatening parts, this is never lost. The writing (which I had thought was Fey, but is in fact Josh Klausner) and the stars’ playing are pitch-perfect, full of precise nuances of this ordinary relationship, of how they feel about each other. There are strains and reinforcements during this terrible night, and every moment is visible on their faces, expressed in their words and voices. Even that absurd climactic moment entirely depends on their relationship, their deep history, a conversation earlier in the night about her not trusting him and what they saw between another couple.

I’ve insisted here before that the general notion of what constitutes great screen acting is hopelessly limited (for instance when discussing Jet Li). This is comedy-drama, and I don’t for a moment imagine that Fey or Carell will get near any Oscar nominations, but I’ll be surprised if I am as impressed with many movie performances this year. Of course Cary Grant famously never won an Oscar either.

He joined the army in 1939 and his first St Trinian’s cartoon was published in 1941. The following year he was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and remained in their hands for the next three and a half years, much of it working on the so-called Death Railway in Burma. His great period was the 1950s, when the bulk of his St Trinian’s and Molesworth (this with Geoffrey Willans) material was published.

It’s easy to forget that most of his work has not been cartoon school humour: as well as countless other cartoons, he published his war drawings, and did a lot of other reportage and general illustration for Punch, Life, the New Yorker, plus some work in animation, sculpting commemorative coins, film design and credits, and many other areas.

In fact the only people who might be at all disappointed in the excellent exhibition would be those who are only interested in the St Trinian’s and Molesworth material, as there are only a few early samples of those on show. Personally, I am very familiar with all of that, so I was happy to see such a range of other material – 140 works covering the gamut of his career.

My first reaction was being struck by just how fantastic a draughtsman he is – I suspect the blown-up images at the entrance will impress others who are most used to little cartoons in paperbacks the same way: the compositional sense, the ability to draw anything well, the judgement in use of line and occasionally tone or colour are all masterful. Every line seems to have its impact, and an image of a crowded, gaudy LA is almost overwhelming.

This isn’t to imply that most of the works are serious – some are, some even grim, but so many benefit from his gift of making almost anything look funny. There’s a particularly good pig with what I think is a conjuror, and a wonderful dog buying a balloon. The exhibition as a whole is a delight to view.

There are bonuses too – a section devoted to satirical cartooning through the ages, with the usual suspects from Hogarth on, and a bunch of Searle tribute pieces by Scarfe, Steadman, Bell and a particularly charming piece by Posy Simmonds. Upstairs is the usual British comic art collection, featuring examples of the greatest comic book cartoonists the country has produced – Leo Baxendale, Ken Reid, Davy Law, Dudley watkins – and much else, including a couple of really beautiful painted pages by veteran John M. Burns.

But the Japanese comic market is completely different, and there I have found a few good comics aimed squarely at girls – and one masterpiece, actually aimed at young women rather than girls, which is what has prompted me to add to my series a year and a half later.

Ai Yazawa’s Nana is perhaps my favourite comic ever now, and I thank my friend Cis for pointing me at it. It’s about two young women who move to Tokyo for a new life, both called Nana. Nana K is sweet and rather naive – the punky Nana O calls her, in an exasperated temper, “puppy-dog-like”, and Nana K gets the happiest expression ever. Nana O is a singer, and it’s her band and that of her ex that provide most of the other characters, and the two bands are central to the developing story, which so far runs to 19 translated volumes of around 200 pages each.

I love everything about it: I could happily read another 10,000 pages about any of the major characters, and I feel for them very deeply, their joys and pains. This is partly because she creates them so superbly, with depth and multiple facets and unmistakeable feelings, capturing their speech beautifully, sometimes capturing them breathtakingly precisely with one line. She also develops their stories carefully, giving them good and bad times mostly from what they do rather than anything external happening to them, and including unusual techniques such as increasing use of flashforward sequences. I have particularly strong feelings about the relationship between the Nanas: it breaks my heart when Yazawa keeps them apart for long (sometimes she separates them for hundreds of pages), and I feel as if I could happily watch them together in their flat, at the table in the bay window, forever.

Besides the intelligence, sensitivity, maturity and honesty of the story, what turns this from a superbly written comic into an all-round masterpiece is her art. She switches styles from one panel to another: one might be gorgeously stylish, which comes partly from her fashion illustration background, and sometimes looks like Jaime Hernandez’s work with a touch of Guido Crepax; then the next might be broadly cartoony, somewhere between Osamu Tezuka and Charles Schulz. In nearly 4,000 pages, I don’t recall once thinking that she chose the wrong mode for a panel. I also don’t think any two pages have the same layout of panels: in this, she makes even Crepax look predictable. Every page seems as if it has been designed without preconceptions, to fit the needs of the story at that moment, and she never seems to put a foot wrong.

I can’t think of another comic I have ever read that is so strong in every area: character, story, dialogue, drawing, layout. It’s formally original and masterful, and a joy to read, very funny and immensely moving. I don’t think comic books get any better than this. I’ll also note that it is a huge hit in Japan: the latest book collection broke records by selling almost 800,000 copies in its first week there.

I’ll also mention the other series of hers available in English: Paradise Kiss is a 5-book story of a schoolgirl getting involved with some fashion students. It has a lot of the same qualities, though you do feel you are reading a single story rather than a serial starring some characters, and I think she has got much better in the later Nana.

I’m not very good at writing about pubs – my excuse is that I tend to care a hundred times more about the company than the place. Nonetheless, this was a regular haunt of mine for many years before I even moved to London. For no particular reason that I know about, it became the standard gathering place for my old friends, and still is. As it happens, when I moved here I ended up working five minutes’ walk away, so it’s still my most regular pub.

It’s a Sam Smiths, so it gets points for cheapness, and I always find their bitter okay. The food’s pretty decent too, if you can find a place to sit to eat it. It does tend to get full at times, but often less so than a lot of Central London pubs. It gets a lot of postal workers just after work hours.

Its level of comfort varies a lot. There’s more space upstairs than down, and some very comfy seating there, in something like a very old-fashioned gentleman’s club style – but that is not infrequently booked for private parties. When that’s unavailable, downstairs can get crowded, and there isn’t much comfy seating there, but there are plenty of stools and high tables and ledges, and it rarely gets hideously packed for long. It used to show football on a projection screen downstairs, but that seems to have ended.

I’ve had some good times there, which is the main reason I like it. With old friends and newer ones, and my first date after my marriage ended was there (it went very well, thanks for asking). It’s also the pub I have most often unexpectedly bumped into someone else I know. These social aspects are what make it a favourite of mine.

It’s also the place that a large and very goth woman started talking to me: she was there for a meeting of her vampire club that evening. She also wrote poetry, she told me (“Yes, it is mostly about vampires”), and she considered herself to be the modern answer to Byron and Shelley. Despite being obviously too talented to be compared to just one of those predecessors, I neglected to ask her to recite any. My friends thought she was a friend of mine when they showed up…

Young Pirates 2 Real Madrid (not that Real Madrid) 26

Namaqua Stars 50 Kakamus Cosmos 0

Extraordinarily, the South African FA is suspicious, and is investigating. They’ve already suspended all the match officials. My favourite bit, from this story from Kick Off, is from the spokesman for Namaqua Stars: “It’s quite possible to get 50 goals in one match. I wasn’t at the match, but the score at half-time was around 25-0. It is a genuine result, not fake, but we are concerned because how can Real Madrid score 26 times against such a good side as Pirates?”

Yes, 25-0 at half-time explains it all.

His most famous novel is Solaris, made into a great film (the Tarkovsky version is my favourite science fiction movie) and later a decent one. It concerns a first contact with aliens: the distinct idea behind most of Lem’s several approaches to this standard SF trope is that Lem believed communication with an alien mind, or comprehension of it, would be all but impossible. (I imagine Tarkovsky felt the same, as he also adapted the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic as Stalker, and that expressed a similar position.)

Lem was also, extraordinarily in this genre, something of a luddite: he regarded many scientific advances, real ones and those portrayed in his fiction, as a bad thing, as a move away from and enemy of the better human traits. He wrote little SF later in his life, instead pronouncing on technology and the future – he was very against the internet, for example.

This all makes him sound grim and po-faced, and some of these works are indeed among the most demanding SF ever written. However, he also wrote some extremely funny stories, generally about a robot civilization. The Cyberiad is hugely imaginative and varied, and often hilarious. There’s a brilliant story about a poetry machine that must have been one of the hardest things ever to translate, this side of Georges Perec.

There is other work worth reading too: collections of reviews of or introductions to nonexistent books, for instance. His essays on SF and science are very astute too – he was writing about the human implications of things like virtual reality and nanotechnology over 50 years ago.

He’s well worth trying, but you might want to choose carefully, as I suspect different works will appeal to different readers.

You may have seen one or two films of his work: The Grifters was a fine adaptation of one of his last really strong works (his great years run from the start of the ’50s to the mid-’60s), whereas both versions of The Getaway graft on a lame happy ending. The actual ending is the most scary and depressing piece of writing I’ve ever read, creating a caged existence of constant terror.

I think he was the first crime writer to regularly use unreliable narrators. The sheriff in the brilliant The Killer Inside Me gradually reveals himself as an extraordinary character completely at odds to his presentation and a reader’s early impression. In other books, he reflects characters’ growing madness in the writing, for example splitting the book into chapters based on the narrator’s fantasy, again utterly different from the reality we are seeing.

He’s worth reading for the pulpy thrill-power of the stories, his terrifying grasp and representation of psychopaths and other monsters, and the daring in his approach to writing. The work isn’t often easily found, and like most writers for markets where speed and schedule was valued more than excellence, the quality is uneven. Frankly, given how hard the best stuff can be to find, the chances of coming across the sloppier works is remote. I particularly recommend The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway, but almost all of them need a strong stomach.

A good example of the early SF might be Babel-17 (1966), a novel where the threat from alien invaders is not in any sense physical: it’s their language. It changes the minds of anyone that it touches. We get spacecrafts and their crews, but these are not at all military or heroic in style – the characters are outsiders and poets and the like. The effect of the language embodies the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistics, that language affects our perception and interpretation of the world, and a reaction against Chomsky’s ideas (much the more favoured at this time) that language is functional and natural. This approach to SF was new.

Some years later (1975) he wrote a book called Dhalgren, which has long been my favourite novel. It is sort of SF: a guy with memory loss wanders into a city that has been largely abandoned since some undefined ecological disaster left it blanketed in fog. He wanders around a bit and hangs out with people and stuff. It’s almost 900 pages, and parts are highly experimental, fragmented and unsequenced. I’ve read quite a few books twice, one three times, and this seven times.

His most interesting SF or fantasy, more or less, since then is the four Neveryon books, containing eleven stories of widely varying length. These are set in some fictional past word undergoing many transitions at once: the coming of writing, money instead of barter, rural to town living. It’s about language and narrative – the first story, over 70 pages long, is repeated as the last story, and of course by that point it reads very differently and carries new meanings.

Since then he has written some extreme hardcore literary porn: avoid most of this unless you have an extraordinarily strong stomach, though the early Tides of Lust, sort of a porn response to Ulysses, is far less unpalatable. I am not joking about avoiding these. Unless you want to read about disabled children being raped and lots of eating shit, these are not sexy.

I do recommend everything else (if you want straightish SF, as well as Babel-17 I recommend The Einstein Intersection and Nova, and any of the SF story collections), and his first book of autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, is wonderful. As well as his polymath brilliance, his experience of being a black man who has at times ‘passed’ as white, and a mostly-gay man who has lived as straight (he was married for a while) give him a rare perspective on prejudice.

Matthew Scudder (16 novels) is a private eye in NYC, whose best friend is a hardened criminal. The novels vary in tone and story, some tough to the point of brutality, but morality is always complex, and Scudder being a recovering alcoholic plays a big part. These are worth reading in order, mostly, because the character does develop (including getting married, eventually).

Bernie Rhodenbarr (10 novels) is a professional burglar who also runs a bookshop. There is a formula here: Bernie commits a burglary in his usual skilled and careful manner, but finds himself prime suspect in a murder. The rest of the novel sees him evading the police while trying to solve the crime, ending with a traditional “I expect you’re wondering why I’ve called you here today” scene. The pattern means I wouldn’t recommend reading a bunch close together, but they are always highly entertaining.

Evan Tanner (8 novels) is an outrageous character, a kind of freelance international spy and adventurer. He never sleeps (shrapnel in the brain from Korea) and uses his time to write doctoral theses on any subject commissioned, and to support any and every bonkers lost-cause society. An interesting twist was when Block revived Tanner (from suspended animation!) 20 years later, to find that many of the apparently hopeless European independence movements had finally won through. These books are wildly over the top in what Tanner achieves, and may not be to everyone’s tastes.

Chip Harrison (4 novels): these start as coming-of-age novels, then Chip becomes the assistant of an eccentric but brilliant detective who never leaves his home (an homage to Nero Wolfe). These are the only ones that absolutely need to be read in order, as a tetralogy.

Keller (4 books): these are less novels than collections of episodes in the life of this professional hitman, often given complicated jobs, more often complicating them himself by identifying with his targets and their lives.

There are others: I particularly like Martin Ehrengraf (a bunch of short stories), a lawyer with a perfect record of getting off those accused of murder. It’s never stated outright, but it’s unmistakeable that his main technique is committing more murders with an identical M.O. or to frame someone else – the most casually immoral protagonist I’ve ever seen in a series.

There are of course also non-series books and stories. I’ve never read a poor Block (I’ve read over 50), perhaps because he is a consummate craftsman, whether being hardboiled or funny. He’s written I believe four books on writing. I recommend him very highly – I’d suggest starting with a Scudder, unless one of those other descriptions especially appeal.

There are two points to make about this. Firstly, unlike almost any other writer before the New wave, Sturgeon’s interest is in mind, in how we think, rather than in futuristic tech and aliens and so on – this is what made him a key figure to the New Wave, why we get a blurb on the back cover by Samuel Delany saying his work “is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date”.

But beyond that, his approach is different. Chapters tracking the angry bum first infected by the alien consciousness, his moves towards conquering the world, are interleaved with chapters that seem like little vignettes centring on a wide variety of humans – these are a little like reading some kind of anthology of modern short stories, perhaps Carver-influenced Dirty Realism, even. The characters in these play their part in the climax, when the entity succeeds in “re”uniting the human mind, but they stand alone as small character pieces, and many have only the tiniest role beyond this.

One of my early and surviving favourite novels within SF was his More Than Human, which has a fair amount in common with The Cosmic Rape: in MTH, a bunch of humans come together to form what is a kind of gestalt consciousness. I really felt that it opened up new conceptual vistas in my teenage understanding of the mind, science fictional as the story is, and I am still moved by his compassion and breadth of thought. This is also on show in many of his superb short stories, addressing sometimes difficult issues in smart and open-minded ways. ‘If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?’ talks about incest, while the inspired ‘Mr Costello, Hero’, is a brilliant attack on McCarthyism.

I respect some writers more than I love them – someone like Cormac McCarthy is a great and powerful novelist, but too aggressively demanding to really be fond of. I wouldn’t wish to imply that Sturgeon doesn’t deserve plenty of respect for his originality, craft and willingness to think beyond easy answers for a lot of fascinating and important questions, but really he has a special place in my heart for the heart he shows, the passionate interest in a diverse humanity, in a genre dominated by lovers of machinery.

Particularly recommended: More Than Human, The Dreaming Jewels and any short story collection.

He’s best known for his 87th Precinct stories, 57 books spanning almost 50 years, though Detective Steve Carella and his fellow detectives in an analogue of NYC don’t age at that pace. These defined the police procedural, and are the model for most modern police TV shows, to one degree or another. They are short on heroics and car chases and genius detectives, long on professional cops doing their jobs, interviewing and following up leads. They are elevated well above the routine by his superb use of and descriptions of weather, and crackling and convincing dialogue, vital in the long interviews. He also reproduces documentation regularly.

His other lengthy series centres on Florida lawyer Matthew Hope: there are thirteen of these. To be honest, they are pretty much private eye novels, as there is very little in the way of courtroom action and legal manoeuvring. I like these a little less, though I have still read, I think, all of them.

His Evan Hunter books are often more mainline fiction – The Blackboard Jungle is the most famous. Since they generally aren’t crime books, they are rather outside this. I recommend the McBains, and I’d say start with an early 87th Precinct or two – the later ones, from the ’80s or so, get longer, and there isn’t always the extra content to justify that; he also starts including more sex, and I don’t care for how he handles that. It seems sort of sleazy and unpleasant. The early novels are very easy reading and consistently entertaining, and I think most readers develop a quick attachment to them and the characters.

1. Almost all of the planets so far discovered around other stars are gas giants, though they are sure they have detected signs of a few rocky planets very recently. Applying Earth models for the appearance of life and evolution is meaningless in these totally different environments.

2. We don’t understand the origins of life anything like well enough to guess how typical our pace was – though complexity theory offers hugely promising models for this investigation.

3. We only have any comprehension of the pace of evolution on this planet. There is no reason whatsoever to think Earth is any sense typical or average of rocky planets – certainly the other three in this system are not at all similar.

4. We have almost no idea of how intelligence evolved, beyond the basic requirements for survival, as seen in many animals. This makes it pointless assigning figures to how likely it is to evolve.

As far as I can tell these people have taken guesses based on the tiniest sliver of evidence as to how common rocky planets are, and then said something that amounts to “if lots of them are like Earth, lots of them will be like Earth => hurrah, intelligent life abounds!”

By the way, if you don’t think the BBC article is dumb enough on its own, read the comments below it.

The Scar is a high-seas adventure, with a climactic battle in which the world’s greatest martial artist with his quantum sword joins the pirates against vampires and sea monsters. The combination of dazzling imagination, terrific writing by any standard and really exciting plotting makes him, for me, one of the greatest new talents of recent decades, and I am not restricting that to SF, or genre writing more generally.

Don’t bother with his first, but the third, The Iron Council, also set in that world, is very good too and highly political, though it does build on the first two rather than add a lot to his creation; and there is a collection of short stories, most of it more reflecting his earliest work, but some of it is tremendous.

The ending has the usual Grant Morrison weakness, I suppose, the tendency towards an “Ooh, here’s an Ultimate Nullifier” resolution, but this time it did centre on a device that already existed in the DC Universe. The ending also features an unparallelled line up of heroes – the angelic armies of Heaven, a bunch of Green Lanterns, the new Forever People, Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew (!), Captain Marvel, the fifty parallel Supermen of every other universe, and, centrally, Superman himself – not only spectacular in itself, but also a wonderful contrast to Batman facing off to Darkseid.

I don’t know what the fallout will be from this, whether the Batman we know will stay dead much beyond the story of the rivalry to take his mantle (there is a last-page suggestion that he won’t), whether someone will ressurect the Martian Manhunter or Orion, whether those that were enslaved by Darkseid will be affected by that, whether we will ever see the Super Young Team again, what will be made of the parallel universes or the return of the Barry Allen Flash. I don’t know if writers will be able to resist playing in what I take to be a version of the Watchmen world, for instance. I don’t know if the word ‘Final’ in the title will stop DC having another multiverse-threatening Crisis mega-event in five years. I don’t suppose I will know the answers to most of these, as Grant’s comics are the only DC ones I have bought in a while.

I also don’t know what the fallout for Grant’s career will be. He’s been given great license here, to write their biggest flagship event in years in his own way. I have no expert information, but I am told sales have fallen through the run. He’d been handed a privileged position at DC, creating concepts and redefining characters for others to run with, and I have no idea how any of those have gone (the only one I’ve noticed was the Metal Men, and I tried just one issue of that). I’m told we have another Seaguy mini-series to look forward to, but I have no idea beyond that what he is going to be doing. I hope he continues to get the top titles, as well as doing his own thing on his own creations, as his JLA, X-Men and Superman runs, and parts of the Batman run, have been among the best-written superhero comics I’ve ever read. I think by now he may be my favourite comic writer ever.

So there are realist elements of the grimmest sort, but the good guys edge towards the superheroic – it’s no wonder he tried his hand at a Batman novel. Burke’s best friend is the world’s greatest martial artist, a huge mute Tibetan, Silent Max; there’s also the Mole, a Jewish scientific genius living beneath a junkyard surrounded by a pack of vicious dogs, constantly working to catch or punish Nazis; and Prof, the midget who schooled Burke in his days in prison. We get exciting and dramatic adventure, and lots of strong characters, but he rarely neglects to give us villains we can really hate – almost too much to bear, at times.

The Burke series is fantastic, if tending to the repetitive if you read too many too quickly, but his short stories are often astonishingly biting, sharp and intense, especially some of the very, very short ones. He takes you inside the types of mind you don’t even want to know exist, let alone experience. He’s not an easy read, but he’s also like almost no one else I’ve read – I guess if I had to draw parallels, there is a little James Lee Burke in the scariness of some of his bad guys, some of Jim Thompson’s beyond-bleak view of humanity (he’s on my series list too), something of the reckless brutality of Pahlaniuk at his least civilised or TV prison drama Oz. Not someone you can read a lot of the time, and I understand if some wouldn’t even fancy sampling him, but I love him.

Dick’s a contender to be my favourite writer ever, the only one who has remained somewhere in there since my mid-teens. I found him mind-blowing then, and still do. Oddly, the closest comparison, for me, is with comic book great Jack Kirby: the two best examples of what I think of as the genius hack. Like Kirby, Dick was immensely productive, albeit for a far shorter time – for a while he was turning out four novels and lots of short stories a year. Their brilliance and concern for their own themes shines through even in many of their most routine works. In Dick’s case, these concerns centred around the nature of reality and humanity, the idea that the consensus was not reliable, not as simple as it seemed. I guess a man who lived for years next to Disneyland while taking tons of hallucinogenic drugs would end up with an interesting slant on reality. Many of his books explode the assumptions around the ‘real world’, and he often combines this with questioning the meaning of being human. How do we tell we are not robots programmed with our memories, indeed our whole reality? This might be a slightly pointless thought experiment, but it can make a terrific story. In addition, I find him one of the most compelling writers of interior monologues I’ve ever read, particularly good on switches of mood and views.

You’ll know a number of his works from such films as Minority Report, Total Recall, Bladerunner and A Scanner Darkly. The success of these is varied – the first (like the lower profile Screamers) was based on one of my favourite short stories, but both piss away two of the best twists I’ve ever read. The second departs completely from its source after 20 minutes. The third has many great qualities, but it does leave out some important meanings from the novel. I liked the fourth very much, but that is one of his druggy late works, and not wholly characteristic.

I’ll also note that he wrote around ten mainstream literary novels. He couldn’t get them published for decades, until finally one came out just before his death – the rest appeared soon after, to considerable mainstream praise. This is a common fate for a genre writer, consigned to the pigeonhole for a long time, whatever the quality of their work.

Recommended: I think there are loads of great ones. A Scanner Darkly is the best of the mad late SF. The first literary novel, Confessions Of A Crap Artist, is wonderful. Some great prime period novels: Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man In The High Castle, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. The short stories ‘Minority Report’ and ‘Second Variety’ are particularly brilliant too, and I assure you that the films don’t at all spoil the shocks.

If I were looking to recommend one contemporary crime writer to someone who was only interested in mainstream literary values, I’d go for James Lee Burke. His descriptive prose is of the highest order – especially on the swamplands around New Orleans, the plants and water and animals and weather. He leans rather towards the pathetic fallacy at times, but that’s fine with me. He’s also one of the most serious crime writers ever in thematic terms: lots of unflinching and honest examination of good and evil, race, sex, money, power, politics, crime, law and so on. His sense of evil is particularly powerful, virtually Biblical in conception at times – he reminds me more of Cormac McCarthy than any other writer. Indeed, McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men has much in common with Burke’s novels, not least for the scariness of the central villain.

You don’t get great whodunnits and clever mysteries with Burke – the stories are much more about how the good guys are going to stop the bad ones, rather than who did what, and anyway a lot of the movers behind the killings or whatever get away with it by virtue of wealth and political connections. I suspect this means that there are swathes of genre fans who find him uninteresting, but for a more general reader, I think he is the most powerful novelist ever to specialise in crime.

Recommended: any of his Dave Robicheaux novels, set in and around New Orleans – and there is some gain in reading them in order, as the character and his relationships do go through long-term changes, though this doesn’t mean they can’t stand up well in isolation. His other books are as good, but it’s the bayou descriptions that elevate these, for me.

This is a reasonably representative Westlake novel – it’s one of his stories of John Dortmunder, a criminal planner of considerable flair and not much luck. In this case, a psycho old cellmate is released after three decades in jail to find his large stash of stolen money is now under a reservoir. He comes to John with the plan to blow up the dam and recover his cash, not giving a damn about killing hundreds in the process. That isn’t John’s kind of crime, so he feels compelled to come up with another plan – or, as it transpires, other plans, as he doesn’t get much success. Westlake adds various tricky complications and outside factors in what I think is his longest Dortmunder novel. We get the traditional riffs: the crew’s driver explaining every route he takes, idiot drunks in the bar where the team meet, and so on. It’s very entertaining, and tense because of the ongoing threat of extreme violence from the motor of the story, both in that blowing up the dam is always his fallback and in that we know that if they do get that money, he will try to betray them.

Westlake is always hugely entertaining, a genuinely funny writer and a very clever plotter. My favourite Dortmunder is probably Bank Shot, which starts with John telling his regular crew that he wants to steal a bank. His most regular pseudonym was Richard Stark, under which he wrote a series of novels about a character in a similar profession, except these are not comedy but ultrahardboiled crime thrillers – you may know the films Point Blank and The Outfit, based on these novels. Some of them are very exciting books. The one other pseudonym I’ve sampled is the PI novels published as by Tucker Coe – these are kind of routine, but still worth reading.

Really I just wrote this to say rest in peace for a writer who has given me more pleasure than almost any other.

Mark Millar’s previous run on Wolverine, collected as ‘Enemy of the State’, was fantastic, but this current run may be even better, and the latest issue was one of the best I’ve read in years. The setup: it’s set in a future 50 years after just about every Marvel villain somehow got it together to team up and massacre all the superheroes and take over the world. Wolverine hasn’t fought anyone or popped his claws since then. He’s lived instead as a farmer in Sacramento. The West Coast is now run by the Hulk Gang, descendants of Bruce Banner, and they are leaning on him and his family for overdue rent. Cue the aged Hawkeye, now blind, with some important mission, asking Wolverine to drive across country with him as his minder. This means crossing the territories as divided up by the top villains – segments owned by the Kingpin, Dr Doom and others. It’s a wonderful setup rife with possibilities, and Millar exploits them well. This is the fifth issue, and Logan finally explains why he won’t fight (they have stumbled as far as the Midwest, entering Dr Doom territory, by luck and Hawkeye’s skills), what happened on that day 50 years ago. Plenty of action, as Wolverine recounts the desperate battle with a host of major supervillains (including Dr Octopus, the Green Goblin, the Absorbing Man, Sabretooth, Bullseye) – and this ends with a really devastating twist, featuring a very surprising villain and the fate of the rest of the X-Men, and a full explanation of his withdrawal since that day. This is one of the best and strongest twists I’ve ever read in a superhero comic, and I’ve read tens of thousands of the things. If that emotional charge wasn’t enough, he ends the issue in the future narrative, with a panel providing a scary upgrade for an already major villain – I won’t give it away, but it’s a terrific moment, packed with real thrill power, and once more it leave me looking forward to the next one.

I’m neglecting the artist here because I want to extol the surviving art of the single comic, and the artist has the same job however the story is broken down. Having said that, Steve McNiven does a good job, drawing action and conversation with skill and mostly sound decision-making. The inking is good too – I particularly like Logan’s stubble and wrinkles.

Couture, I soon found out, is the top man: the only five-time world champ, already in their Hall of Fame and so on. He has legitimate claims to be the greatest ever. But it was always clear, in the WWE, that Lesnar was an impressive athlete: big and very strong, extraordinarily athletic and quick for someone his size, and skillful too – he’d been a champion amateur wrestler. Then again, UFC fighting, it became clear when watching the rest of the card, does not resemble either amateur or professional wrestling. There is some grappling, and the occasional submission (never with as fancy a move as the WWE stars offer), but mostly when you get someone on the floor the purpose is to get in position to punch or elbow him in the head repeatedly. A lot of it is done standing up, more like boxing – Couture was some kind of martial arts champion, so that was his speciality. Also, Lesnar had had a total of three fights in the UFC before this big title match.

Their match was scheduled for five five-minute rounds. The first featured lots of wrestling, Lesnar on top, looking for openings, not finding any. He’d have won them on points, but no one was damaged. The opinion was that Lesnar, carrying something like 50 pounds more weight, would tire quickly as the match continued. The second round was quite different, a boxing match. After a couple of minutes, Lesnar landed a heavy punch to the side of Couture’s head, Couture went down, Lesnar climbed on and started hammering fists into his head and the ref stopped it.

It was barely a contest – Lesnar never looked in any kind of trouble at all, and it didn’t last a third of the scheduled time. I was pleased, in that this severely damages the “they wouldn’t last five minutes…” line, and it confirms my repeated claims that many (though certainly not all) of the biggest WWE stars are genuinely great athletes.

The comic always featured our Earth too, thanks to dimensional travel and Zot getting friendly with an Earth girl named Jenny. Her and her friends and family grew in importance, and while there were some awkward and leaden moments of ‘wow, on THIS Earth…’, it wasn’t long before his depiction of this world became more and more thoughtful and artistically honest. Eventually, after 27 issues where the centre of attention was Zot’s glittering Earth, he was stranded on this one. No supervillains, almost no ‘action’ as superhero comics understand it, just the people, focussing on sometimes apparently negligible members of the supporting cast. The surprising thing was how much better the comic became. A good friend of mine, Nigel Fletcher, cites #33 as a contender for his favourite comic ever, and he is totally right, a very beautiful and moving tale about being different in school – and with an inspired and wholly original formal trick at its end, intelligently preserved in this collection. My friend is right in describing it as a masterpiece (see The Slings and Arrows Comic Guide for his full review). A few of the other issues in this nine-issue run on Earth are nearly as good.

I’ve always been a huge admirer of people who can do different styles so well (Hawks or Wilder in movies, Tezuka or Kirby or Kurtzman in comics, for instance), but it’s rare for someone to change tone so completely in a comic book, from superhero SF adventure and fun to human drama – and not just for one issue between fight scenes, but for a lengthy run. To do this with a wonderful and delightful title is even more extraordinary, and to do it and produce far better comics from it is amazing. This is a great series, and I highly recommend it.

Footnote: McCloud is returning to fictional comics, after all those big comics about comics, plus the recent online comic accompanying Google’s new browser. I’m very much looking forward to this, but it is hard to imagine him topping Zot!

* By the way, Tezuka provided a key moment when I interviewed McCloud many years ago (1990 or ’91, I think). He was very guarded at first, and clearly trying to work out how much of his attention I was worth. When I realised his mention of Jack Kirby was testing my knowledge, it gave some idea of the kind of comic fans he must have talked to; he tried Spiegelman next, and I knew who he was too; then he tried Osamu Tezuka, and when I said I was an admirer and had written an obituary for him not so long before, I was in, and he was an enthusiastic participant in the interview from then on.