Glove Puppet Gender Identity

As some of you may know, Herself is a physiotherapist. Sometimes she has patients (she hates it when I call them 'wellness customers') that can strain a PT's ability to cajole them into doing their allotted exercises. In a giggly fit of foolishness a few months ago, the two of us imagined using a glove puppet assistant on the ward, pour encouragez les patients. Said puppet would have a cutesy Sesame Street voice and be sad (cue down-turned hand) when exercises were not complied with, and happy (cue joyous jiggling and cries of 'Yayyy!') when they were. Much like the emotional blackmail of the Bad Idea Bears in Avenue Q.

Fast forward a couple of months to Herself's birthday and and I present her with Petey Pig the physio's pal, outfitted in a proper wee tunic by the talented Ada Infinity.

Petey, geddit? Like Beattie in the British Telecom ads. Oh, please yourself.

This week, Petey's assistance with a recalcitrant younger patient was requested by one of Herself's colleagues, and he was duly paraded through the ward to the amusement of all. Yesterday I asked how Petey Pig was doing, and I learnt that that she is now called Physio Pig by the therapists on the ward.

She?

At first I was annoyed; how dare these people not only rename, but regender our pig? How dare they inflict their notions of identity on our porcine pal? He doesn't want to be female! Clearly he's a boy - he's called Petey! Do you see?

But then I thought, waitaminute. Wait a root-grubbing minute. Wasn't that exactly what I was doing in the first place? Imposing my choice of identity on him/her/hir based on a cute pun? I'm just as guilty. Who knows what damage I've been doing with my narrow notions of glove puppet gender?

Better by far to let Petey/Physio/TBC Pig choose their own role, whether it be male, female, somewhere in between or something else entirely. So tonight we're just going to have to sit down together and explain that it's OK to be whoever you choose, and not to let other people decide for you, even if they created you, clothed you and provided you with rudimentary animation and a squeaky voice.

Then tomorrow we'll have to discuss the physical challenges of only having two fuzzy fore-trotters and no back legs, not mention having a big hand up your bottom.

Day of The Locas

Note to readers in a hurry: scroll down past all this rubbish about libraries and skip straight to the review section. Go on. See if I care.

In our ongoing quest to read every single comic ever, my partner-in-comics Dr Foot and I have - for the past ten or so years - been steadily working our way through the collected graphic novel sections of every branch of the county library system. This has proved to be not so monumental a task as one might first assume, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, each branch of the library has more or less the same set of comics on offer, presumably so as to make the same general set of what they consider to be a reasonable spread of titles available to all library members across the county. So, no matter which one you walk into, there'll be the same old Ultimate Spider-Man vol. 3, Persepolis, Marvel Zombies vol. 5, Mega City Justice, Alan Moore DC collection, 100 Bullets, The Boys vol. 8, Clone Wars vol. 9, Powers vol. 2, Walking Dead vol 12 and so on. So having started out by cherry picking the titles we fancied the most, we're now taking out whatever's left on the shelf that we haven't yet read. I've resisted the comic version of Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter that stares impudently out at me from the library shelf thus far, but it's only a matter of time before I succumb and take it out in desperation; like eating a packet of stale oatcakes at the back of a near-empty cupboard.

Secondly, I've noticed the graphic novel section in my local library has been steadily shrinking over the years. It used to warrant an entire book case. Now, it's barely two shelves, and that includes the 'librarian's choice' book that have been turned face-forward to pad out more shelf space. This make me sad. Probably cutbacks. Or someone's just chucking out all the rubbish Transformers collections that nobody reads.

Poor old library - it's free to take stuff out, and given the price of comics in the shops these days (£2.65 for Rocket Raccoon #1 this month! Blimus) why would you choose to buy over borrow? I suppose it's the collector mentality in your average comic buyer, as I'm well aware, glancing over at the several-thousand-comics stack of comics just to my left.

But all the same, it feels like the county library's missing a trick here - instead of duplicating the same darn set of 50 graphic novels in every branch, why not have one big set with a much wider range and just circulate them periodically around the branches? If the library's online search and ordering system was better, folks could just reserve comics from wherever in the county, leave it a few days for it to arrive at their local branch, and hey presto. But the online interface sucketh to high Asgard, with an individual title in a series - say Ex Machina volume 6: Power Down - being catalogued under the individual volume title Power Down, or under the artist Tony Harris instead of the writer Brian K Vaughn, while other titles in the series may simply crop up as Ex Machina or Ex Machina vol 3. Rubbish.

Why on earth am I waffling on about libraries and comics and stuff? OK, since you ask so nicely, I was leading up to explaining that there's a bunch of old comics that I'm only now getting around to reading, on account of Dr Foot and I having worked our way down to them eventually. They may not always be my preferred read (very few of them for example have the Avengers dog-piling the mad god Thanos), but many of them have merit, either as a piece of art that's still worth reading, or as a historical milestone in the development of comics as we know them today.

That all sounds kinda pretentious. What I mean is: here's my review of an old comic, and why you might like to read it.

Today's subject is a graphic novel collecting some comics from the 1980s. Ideally I would have written this review in about 1990, but I didn't (as I was too busy completing the Days of Future Present storyline collected across Marvel's FF and X-Men titles and hunting down back issues of Rom: Spaceknight), so please print out the section below and paste it into an old issue of Starburst or SFX from the 90s for the appropriate historical context.

The GIRL from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.
a Love and Rockets book
by Jaime Hernandez

Also called Locas Book 2, this whopping 280-pager is a collection of stories from the American alternate comic series Love and Rockets, spanning material from 1985-1989. So-called 'alternate' because it was neither a mainstream superhero comic nor an underground Robert Crumb type comic, though their influences can be felt. I recall that during the comics explosion during the late 80s and early 90s, Love and Rockets was often cited on TV series like Comics: The Ninth Art as one of the trendy titles out there that didn't involve capes or webshooters. Though its heyday was some thirty years ago now, the series is still being published and republished to this day.

Great wide-screen opening shot from the eponymous tale of  character's demise

Love and Rockets was created by Californian brothers Hernandez - Gilbert, Jaime and Mario (I'm not sure what Mario did - he strikes me as the Zeppo of the family, possibly unfairly. Sorry Mario.) collectively known as Los Bros Hernandez. There's a lot of Spanish in the comic naturally, some of which is explained in teeny tiny footnotes. Gilbert largely wrote stories set in a Mexican village called Palomar, whilst Jaime set his in Los Angeles (kinda; there are also spaceships, but try to ignore them). Both involve a wide cast of characters who are largely normal folks going about their day, with the emotional ups and downs of families and relationships being the general themes.

Locas refers to two of the central characters in Jaime's LA stories - Maggie and Hopey, which I guess just translates as 'crazy girls' or some such.

What's Good About It
Jaime Hernandez' artwork. Clear, clean black inkwork. He's rarely off form. Look at this lovely crisp little shot of Maggie's punky hair and dark lips.
He draws people simply but (on the whole) not cartoony. You can see that they're real people, with real bodies.

Some of it reads like cool storyboards for a movie or dialogue-free black and white montaged stills.

Doyle can't get no sleep.

Sometimes, very occasionally, it's downright eerie. Check out this scene of Satan talking to a depressed Izzy from a crack in the wall.

Satan lives in a crack in your wall. Brr.

In a lot of ways, the low-fi, indie, black and white storytelling reminds me of Kevin Smith's Clerks. There's a lot of time spent on people just hanging out, talking about friends and lovers, fretting about their relationships and getting hung up on neighbourhood dramas. I bet Kevin Smith would have done a great Love and Rockets movie. Or even better, directed an animation based on Jaime's artwork.

What's Not So Good About It
One downside of the uncluttered art style and relatively simple palette is that it can sometimes be hard to tell characters apart, like when a bunch of unnamed boys with short dark hair are all lounging against a wall calling out to the girls. Apart from the odd character like the non-Mexican Doyle with his blond hair, your dumb reviewer got Ray, Joey and Speedy mixed up a lot, as well as Izzy, Penny, Maggie and Hopey. Changing their hair styles is cool, but it plays merry hell with character identification. I could have done with a Who's Who before every chapter.

Above: Hopey, Magg- no. Terry, Hopey, Izzy, Hopey again? No, that's Maggie at the end. Or Penny. Or possibly Rogue from the X-Men.

The stories hop back and forth in time with little indication of when they're set or what age the characters are at this point in their lives. Again a cool device, but it does add to the confusion of who's who. Scenes and stories seem to shift abruptly halfway to another setting with little indication that we've gone to a flashback or skipped to some folks across the country. Stories can sometimes end oddly too, often it seems with a shot of one character getting booted up the ass by another, as if Hernandez ran out of page and had to end quickly with a bit of slapstick.

On the other hand, the examples above suggest Hernandez would be pretty good at pithy 3-panel newspapers strips.

The style occasionally drops into a more mangaesque look, especially when it comes to rendering people's outraged faces, at which point they exhibit massive round gobs full of cartoon shark teeth, which one might find a bit jarring.

A frustrated Ray morphs into a character from Dominion Tank Police

The facial depictions of some of the black characters (mainly Danita to be honest) are arguably just a little unfortunate. Having sort of spaceships and monsters in the early stories just doesn't fit, and they were eventually phased out. And the rich guy's horns are silly.

HR Costigan and his icky finger-horns

On the whole, it feels like the editor just left Hernandez get on with it and didn't bother to check the storytelling to make sure readers could follow it. One poignant story ends with a character committing suicide; I thought he'd been murdered until I later read a plot summary online. If you're looking for an easy jumping-on point with Love and Rockets, there ain't none, except to start right at the beginning with all the odd spaceship stuff and plough on through.

What's Different About It
It's a soap. Or rather several soaps. Which was pretty different at the time though that approach has slowly seeped into mainstream comics over the decades, for example in the work of people like Brian K Vaughn, Brian Michael Bendis and Kieron Gillen. There are no superheroes (unless you count the masked Mexican wrestlers and Penny Century's inexplicable superhero outfit).

He also ages his characters and moves their lives along. They grow up, move away, get back together, change their hair. Just like in real life.

It has well realized, central female characters in the likes of Maggie and Hopey, and strong support in the form of Izzy, Rena, Danita and others. The male characters also get their screentime, and whilst the individuals may be sexist or sexy, I never get that impression from Hernandez himself. Sure's Maggie's got a big behind and she sometimes mopes about being overweight, but this is neither Big Booty Monthly nor Bridget Jones: The Comic Book (though that would be cool).

Predating the Dove soap ad campaign by some decades.

There are lots of references to music, often playing in the background in the form of sound effects. Quite possibly some or all of it is taken from real bands, which would mean more to people familiar with the Southern Californian post-punk scene of the 80s than your humble reviewer. But it's nice to think that there's a possible playlist to go with Locas.

It's quite gay. Without being about gayness. Hopey and Maggie are kinda gay. Probably bisexual. But it's rarely the central theme. They just fancy girls and boys, which is cool.

How You Should Read it
Find a who's who of Love and Rockets. It'll help keep all the black-haired women straight (or not-so straight). I'd recommend the images page of the ComicVine entries for L and R characters, like this one:
http://www.comicvine.com/hopey-glass/4005-51621/images/

A chronology would also help. I recommend this one:
http://www.zompist.com/loveroc1.html

Keep your Spanish phrasebook handy - I went for ages thinking that one of the characters was called Tia Vicki, before realising that 'tia' just means aunt.

Why You Should Read It
This is a series mainly about women, without impossible bodies or superpowers. It rambles and jumps around but has a lot of life in it, whether it's the perils of hanging on to your wrestling title, your girlfriend or a hopeless drunk that you knew in school.

But mainly read it for the art.

Broken Arrow

A lot of people use their blog or Facetwit account to pass judgement on TV shows and films and the like, talking all big and clever about what’s wrong with this series or that sequel as if they’re a proper grown-up critic. Like Gary Bushell or Paul Ross. Not me. I wouldn’t pretend to speak with any such authority on so lazy a topic. Not me. Oh no. No no no no no no no. Nooooo.

But just this once I feel I have to make an exception. Because the subject matter is so very close to my heart, and something that touches us all.

I am of course talking about what’s wrong with the disappointing superhero TV series Arrow and how I would fix it.

Disclaimer time: I’ve only seen the second series, or season if we’re going to be all American about it, so my impression of its disappointingness may – may – stem from having missed a load of cool stuff in the first season, which would have given the second season a lot more emotional impact. Possibly. But man, if an entire 22 episode season can’t stand on its own two feet and welcome new viewers in with a manly hug, then it has no business clogging up my Thursday nights (repeated Fridays).

To start with, the title. Arrow. Not Green Arrow, like in the comic. No, that would've been faaar too cheesy, apparently. Just Arrow, which is – in the show – Oliver Queen’s not-so secret identity (I mean, really; how many people know this guy’s secret? By the end of the season it’s practically everyone in the cast apart from his fantastically unobservant sister). And it’s not like everyone in the show uses the name Arrow when talking about ‘that guy with the bow who runs around talking with a gruff voice’ anyway. No, most of them refer to him as ‘the Vigilante’. Which I kinda get, if the intention is to play the long game here and create the classic comic character in season-long increments – season one he learns not to kill, season two he learns to be hero, season three he puts on the cute little Robin Hood hat from the comics and grows a funky chinbeard. I can but hope.

Hurrah for Neal Adams.

The reason it’s just called Arrow is because the producers are too darn embarrassed to come out of the super-closet with a dude called Green Arrow who shoots boxing glove projectiles, more’s the pity. The show is generally far too shame-faced to go the whole hog and be a balls-out supershow. I swear I’ve seen episodes where he doesn’t once don the Green Hoody of Justice, and just bimbles around in a tux whining about his mommy and his widdle pal Tommy. This isn’t a big effects-heavy character, people! He shoots arrows, in a costume. They’re not constrained by the budget for that surely? This isn’t Superman we’re talking about, or the old Incredible Hulk show, where they were limited to two meagre 5-minute segments of Lou Ferrigno in green bodypaint each episode.

But y’know, I could forgive Arrow its coyness about masks and capes if the central characters, and the actors behind them, could hold down the story without the costumed heroics. But honestly, just picture Arrow without even the existing low-rent spandexed action. What you’re left with is this: a family of rich dullards argue a lot whilst a family of cops and lawyers argue a lot, whilst a forgettable dweeb runs for mayor and two nonthreatening friends sit and worry about the unshaven rich kid. What we have here is a very standard soap from the 80s with flashbacks to the island from Lost and a bit of archery every now and again.

Honestly, it took me about 6 episodes to work out which 25-year old female character was which – Dumb Sister, Lawyer Ex or Speccy Techie. I think they have names but apart from the excellent Felicity Smoak, I truly cannot remember.

And as for the rest of the supporting cast in this season, they are little better in the making the most of their screen time. There’s Harry Dresden as concerned Cop Dad, who seems to have fractured his dentures in the last two episodes, making him sound like a dodgy Bogart impersonator. Then there’s Slade ‘You killed Shado’ Wilson – a character who’s a cool white haired killer in the comics with genuine charm and personality, but in the TV show he’s a grumpy Aussie beefcake who lacks believable menace.

Which brings us to John Diggle, a role embodying the unfortunately overused cliché of Reliable Black Buddy. The character not only reinforces an unfortunate white hero / black sidekick trend, but is just so predictable and boring, not least because the character of Diggle is so terribly correct and devoid of depth.

I do wonder who the show is aimed at. There’s death and destruction a-plenty to be sure – one series regular does indeed properly die toward the end of the second season – but there’s no blood and gore and most of the action seems strangely unthrilling. There’s drama, but it really is of the soapy variety, plucking out tried and trusted threads like ‘losing control of the family business’, ‘love triangle’ and ‘your real father is actually…’ from the Dallas bargain bin. The language is, as I recall, pretty inoffensive (though you must remember that I have a dreadfully foul vocabulary so I tend to miss all but the most DerekandClivish of cusswords), so again, it’s aiming presumably for a fairly familyish audience, even if there is the odd impaled-by-a-katana moment, but surely we’re all inured to such sights by now.

So taking all that into consideration, my perception is that Arrow is aimed at a younger, familier, possibly femaler audience than one may have expected from a show about a bow-wielding vigilante. I’m just surprised it wasn’t on at 6:30 on a Saturday afternoon.

Insert sound effect of arrow hitting tree here.

Okay enough rambling. Let’s pick on just a specific few elements of Arrow that contribute to make it the mediocre experience it is:

Main guy. DULL. I don’t know his name. It’s probably Josh Something. I suppose he got the role of Oliver Queen because of his impressive physique and that cool thing he does with the gym equipment and the climbing bar. But really, you need more personality from the show’s lead than what Josh Something can offer. Oliver Queen in the comics has been portrayed as an outraged anti-establishment radical, a sassy derring-doer and a world-weary middle-aged loner. A youthful fuzzface with one expression – grim-jawed determination - appeals not to me.

It's called a salmon ladder. Who knew?

Island Flashbacks. BORING. Long-haired Oliver and Canarygirl sit in a wrecked aircraft in the dark or a big ship in the dark or a submarine in the dark. A lot of scruffy people get picked off one by one. We all know he’s going to get off the island. We all know he’s going to stick an arrow in Slade’s eye. The only thing we don’t know is why every bloody episode is padded out with 10-15 minutes of this wheel-spinning tedium.

Every Single Character. FAR TOO EARNEST. Where’s the lightness? The dead-pan snarker? The sexiness, even? Every character in it is so darned dour. Maybe it’s the dialogue. I think there was a hint of a giggling Harley Quinn in one episode, but they clearly got too scared to put a proper balls-out psycho in the show and decided to stick with a bunch of conflicted I’m-A-Killer-But-I-Have-Issues characters instead.

Skinny attractive young Amanda Walker. WRONG. Amanda Walker is a well-stuffed middle-aged woman in the comics, which at the time of her introduction made her stand out amongst all the forgettably fit characters. Roll on twenty years to the TV show and… it’s supermodel Amanda! Gaaah. She should have been played by CCH Pounder as all right thinking people know. She could even reuse her outfits from Warehouse 13.

Hurrah for John Byrne.

Oliver Queen, master archer. REALLY? Let’s see some cool arrow skills, for Hood’s sake. Some one in a million shots and really impressive camerawork. Sure, he does the archery thing a lot, but you get the impression he’s no better than anyone else who can afford a funky recurve. In fact by the end of the season there are several hooded dudes and ninjas running round with bows who seem no better or worse than Ollie himself. Show that he’s the World’s Greatest Archer or just give him a pugil stick from Gladiators and have done with it.

So here, eventually, is my recipe for improving Arrow in the future.

Recast everyone. Fast forward five years to justify the recast. Or hell, I dunno, move it all to Earth-2. Grab a bunch of decent actors from one of the sweary HBO series or just admit defeat and only use British actors. Get people who are going to chew the scenery a little, like the evil queen in Once Upon A Time or indeed Robert Carlyle from the same. Anyone that is, apart from Mark (A.) Sheppard, the one-note character actor who infests the green lawn of my viewing habits like a mole with an Equity card. I swear if he pops up in one more sci-fi show doing exactly the same character, why I’ll…

Flash Fact: Sheppard's real-live dad Morgan played the older version of this character in Dr Who.

Crowley in Supernatural

Forgettable Asshole in Warehouse 13

Romo Lampkin - Battlestar's Oirish shyster 

Badger. Firefly's shameful future for the British

Drop the flashbacks for flashbacks’ sake. They make me yawn. We know Ollie survives all the flashbacks, so apart from introducing new characters and subplots that he’s conveniently forgotten up until now, they serve no purpose.

Less soap, more drama. Lose the family crap and the business rubbish. This guy’s supposed to be a hero – a superhero – not Bobby Ewing with a stubble. There are decades of comic plot to plunder before you should have to re-imagine Dynasty with arrows.

No-one ever says ‘You let Shado die’ ever again. So done with that.

This. Is. Acting.

Not A Weeping Gorilla Moment

First off, I want to make it clear that this is not a rant.

It’s all too easy to label any speech or article longer than a couple of paragraphs about the more negative aspects of someone’s outlook on life as a rant. And let’s face it, the medium of the blog is an ideal platform for shouting incoherently and at great length: there’s no space limit, no time limit, no editor, and the audience is safely tucked away on the other side of the screen rather than staring in aghast shock across the dinner table as you inadvisably launch into the third act of your ‘political bias in Radio 4 comedy panel shows’ monologue. Now that, that was a rant.

That’s not to say I don’t like a good rant myself. Long-time readers may well have cause to agree. But I like to think that however long-winded and impassioned I get, there is at least the illusion of coherency and perhaps on occasion the odd chuckle too. Those  Grumpy Old Men and Women rant. So does Charlie Brooker and half the columnists in the Sunday newspapers. Bill Hicks ranted, in E-Minor at that, so I'm in good company.

So this isn't a rant. It’s not that impassioned.

It may well be a diatribe, but I'm too pig-ignorant to know and too lazy to look it up.

Or possibly a harangue. Is that a noun? A haranguing? Harangitude? Whatever.

Nor is it a Weeping Gorilla moment. It’s not that depressing.

What do you mean, ‘What’s a Weeping Gorilla?’

Tch. Honestly. As any fule kno, the Weeping Gorilla was a secondary character in Alan Moore’s splendid comic series Promethea, cropping up on billboards and posters in the background as a perennially downhearted ape expressing a series of mid-life disappointments in brief, passive-aggressive thought bubbles:

GO ON, ASK ME ABOUT MY MARRIAGE.

I MEAN, “FORTY” IT’S JUST A NUMBER AFTER ALL…

WHY DO PETS HAVE TO DIE?

Poor old Weeping Gorilla. Cheer up, you miserable bugger.

So no, this isn't a Weeping Gorilla moment either. It’s a… I dunno, a minor rubbish moan. Probably a First World Problem.

(scurries off to look up First World Problems)

Yeah, it’s definitely one of them.

So here’s my problem. I've just had a slightly disappointing experience reading a hardback collection of the comic series Scarlet.

For goodness’ sake – ‘hardback collection of the comic series’. What am I like? Why did I use such a roundabout way of describing it? Isn't it just a comic? Well yes, I spose. But it’s like really mature with swearing and everything.  Doesn't that make it a graphic novel then? Well, not exactly, because it’s just the first few issues of a monthly series collected together in a posh hardback – not a complete story. In retrospect I probably should have just called it Scarlet Book 1 in the first place and let you work out that it’s a comic. Of course it’s a comic – this is me. So let’s just skip over this entire paragraph and speak no more of the tedious matter of definition.

I was reading the story. It was quite entertaining. It was written by the prolific Brian Michael Bendis, so I knew straight away that it would a) be dialogue heavy, and b) contain numerous double pages that I wouldn't be sure if you’re supposed to read all the way across as a two-page spread or up and down like a normal pair of pages. Curse you, Bendis. Curse you for writing several issues of The Avengers where Earth’s Mightiest Heroes do little more than sit around a kitchen table in their civvies and flap their lips about baby-sitters.

Sorry, I got distracted by Bendis. This isn't about him, though he does annoy me. The problem I had was this: I’d read most of the book, and was kind of enjoying it. I’d budgeted a certain amount of time this morning to read the book before getting on with my day; doing the washing up, arranging the pile of scrap paper by the telephone, that sort of thing. I’d read most of it, but I could see there was still a couple of chapters left to go. I turned the page and

SCARLET COVER GALLERY

Oh great. A cover gallery. No more story. The rest of the book was padding: Covers. Variant covers by different artists. The same covers but in black and white. A script of issue #1 with scribble on it. 43 pages of padding. I’d peaked too soon, well before my estimated Time To Complete Reading.

If this was a DVD I’d probably be quite pleased by this so-called ‘added content’. But if this was a DVD, it’d be like expecting there to be thirty minutes of the movie left and then discovering that the last half an hour is actually a bunch of trailers for the movie you've just (partially) seen.

Grrr, I say. Grrr and INSERT FACE OF BASIL FAWLTY’S IMPOTENT RAGE HERE.

Harangitude over. I’ll try to be briefer next time.

The Rupert Affair

WARNING! CONTAINS SHOCKINGLY FRANK TRUE-LIFE CONFESSION OF FORBIDDEN LOVE

Living in an apartment block can be an oddly isolating business. Despite having neighbours above, below and to either side of us, we rarely see them. It’s odd to think that your bedroom must be within 30 feet of at least 4 other bedrooms full of other people sleeping - and doing other stuff - but you could go days or weeks without seeing those people. And if you live in a modern - by which I mean ‘tissue-thin walled’- apartment, you might hear your neighbours but you won’t often see them. The dull distorted bass of a TV next door, the patter of a toddler’s feet above, the slam of the front door a few floors below, might well be the extent of their impact on your life.

Good, you might say. The last thing you want is to be aware of your neighbours’ comings and goings. Their late-night rows during summer when the windows are open, their horrible boiled cabbage cooking seeping up through the extractor fans, their nasty chain-smoking out on the balcony just below your busy lizzies. This is true; those are all unpleasant aspects of living cheek by jowl, but it can be just as weird when you just don’t see your neighbours at all.

You know they’re there. Cars appear and disappear outside. Apartment doors open and close. Washing machines vibrate and drains gurgle. But you never meet, you rarely even see your fellow rezzies. Oh, maybe a fleeting nod of acknowledged existence as you pass in the car park, but that’s practically it. Without front gardens and drives, there’s no common area; no reason to linger or potter. We all trot smartly from our cars to the front door, up the stairs and into our hermetically-sealed broadbanned habivirons every evening, only to reverse the process in the morning on our way back out into the world.

The only folks with a reason to bump into other people are the dog-walkers. A couple of times I've tried to join in on one of their impromptu gatherings in the car park, idly passing the time as their respective pooches get down to some serious mutual bum-sniffing. But it always feels weird if you haven’t got a dog yourself, like being the only single person at a dinner party or some kind of pervy dog-hag. I have honestly considered walking around the estate with a realistic toy dog on a lead just to give me the excuse to hang out with all the cool dog people.

* * *

But all that changed about a year ago, when this new guy moved in upstairs, and we just started sort of seeing each other.

At first Herself and I didn't know his name. We just called him 24, after the number of his apartment. He moved in with some other folks, but he doesn't seem to be that close to them, spending a fair bit of time out in the hallways and stairwells, just hanging around. But not in a threatening way. He just has that kind of look, you know? Like he just enjoys his own space. After a while we learnt that his name’s Rupert.

He’s often coming in as we’re going out, or vice versa, so it was just natural that we've got to know each other. To start with we wouldn't really talk as such, just say hello as we went about our days. But that was enough, at first. Just that simple contact with someone else.

Of course it didn't stop there. It couldn't. He’s come into our place a couple of times now, curious I guess to see how it compares to his own apartment on the floor above. Would you believe the first thing he did was run into the bedroom for a look round? Amazing. He seems to have no concept of privacy, but for some reason he gets away with it. He has that kind of a face, I suppose.

What’s grown over this last year is an odd, episodic sort of relationship – sometimes just him and me, sometimes him and Herself, sometimes all three of us. Whatever; it all feels fine, comfortable with each other. Just a few minutes of brief contact out in the corridor, rarely speaking. A few minutes of physical contact, perhaps a few nibbles or some simple stroking and nuzzling. That’s enough for all of us, and then we get on with our respective lives. You might say that sounds cold, mechanical, almost business-like, but it’s really not. Just uncomplicated. Wonderfully uncomplicated.

And so this strange affair with Rupert carries on to this day. The only dark shadow in our little world is his family upstairs. They don’t know about us, about what we have together. I don’t think they’d like it if they knew. It’s been close a couple of times, the sound of their apartment door suddenly opening above, giving us just seconds to break off and scamper back inside our own flat before they come down and see us in the hallway with those tasty fish-flavoured Dreamies ™ in our guilty, guilty hands. Rupert probably wouldn't care though. He’d probably just give us all a look and start licking his back leg, like he always does. The little scamp.

Don't judge our love

A Trader Among Us

Spring is here, and for me at least that also means the start of the show season, after my long winter’s nap. I was at my first wargame show of the year only last weekend. Perhaps you were there too and we chatted, but quite possibly not, as I fall into that peculiar category of Non-Male Gamer.

To spare blushes all round, let’s call this particular show Fracas ’14, following the tried and trusted formula of ‘something fighty + the year’ (which raises the dire spectre of a show called Combat 18 in four years’ time). If there really is a Fracas wargames show somewhere in the world, please let me apologise now. At any rate, this show took place in a school or sports centre somewhere in the UK, and I was there in my official capacity of ‘trader’s hanger-on’. This means I get the tea and bacon sandwiches, bang on endlessly about Doctor Who, and occasionally hand small metal figures over to customers in return for money. My time as anything remotely resembling a booth babe are sadly several years, and pounds, behind me.

The first thing that happens as I walk into the show hall is that the folks on the entrance table won’t let me pay. It’s under a fiver, but they tell me women and children go free. Try as I might, the ticket chaps won’t take my money and just wave me inside. Why complain about that, you may well ask? You just got in free – surely that’s a result. Yes, true, but I really would like to pay my way. I’m not in financial difficulty and I don’t need ‘ladies night’ style inducements to come into this predominantly male domain. I know about pillboxes and tanks, for goodness’ sake! I know sculptors and painters and scenery designers. I’ve written combat rules and can measure the blast radius of a mortar attack in inches at a glance. I’ve even read Anthony Beevor’s phone book-sized Stalingrad from cover to cover and only very occasionally nodded off.

What I’m trying to say - with possibly a hint of stereotypical hysterics - is that it is conceivably possible for persons of the female persuasion to actually want to come to a games show. Not all women are there simply to be dragged around a hall full of demo games and trade stands on a Sunday afternoon by their husband/boyfriend/sons, helpfully carrying a large bag full of recently-purchased polystyrene scenery while their menfolk root around the bring and buy for an old box of Descent On Crete. Some, like me, might want to be there in their own right.

But here’s the really funny thing about going to a show that I’ve noticed. Women develop the super-power of invisibility the moment they walk into the hall. Other women can see each other - they wave hello from behind trade stands to familiar faces in a ‘fancy seeing you here again isn’t it a bit chilly’ sort of way. But for many men, women are evidently invisible or see-through or, I don’t know, cloaked like the Predator. I know this is true because I’ve experienced it on countless occasions myself.

I’ll be stood there behind the trade stand with my male chum, playing the delicate cat-and-mouse game of customer engagement: say hello too briskly and you may spook them off, say nothing and they may drift away unloved and unenhanced by our fine products. It’s like fishing for skittish human beings. One or two chaps are loitering around the stand, eyeing the goods in a potentially purchasey manner. One of them is already talking to my chum, possibly asking him when we’re bringing out a heavy weapons crew for our range or asking for a rules clarification. And I’ll be stood there right next him, trying to catch the eye of one of the other guys on the other side of the table, giving the half-smile and raised eyebrows of the time-honoured non-verbal ‘can I help you’ opening.

But do they notice? Do they make eye contact? Do we chat about release schedules and rule supplements and ranged attacks? No, not very often, to be honest. I’m knocking on six foot tall and  wearing my ‘hello my name is Helena please talk to me’ t-shirt, which I got specially made as an ice-breaker, so by all rights, they should be able to see me. But apparently not. They would rather mill around waiting for their chance to talk to the chap next to me, so I can only conclude that my mysterious invisibility powers - which would be frankly awesome if they worked at any other time - have kicked in once again.

Now, I’ve exaggerated for comic effect of course. But not by much. Some guys will quite happily come over and engage with me. Some will converse about the agony of dry-brushing Skaven fur or the relative merits of the Liberator vs Scorpio. Some offer me fudge. And a few have been hilariously unable to raise their gaze from a point approximately twelve inches below my eyes. But hey, at least they can see me, or at least a part of me.

This sounds like a big long whine, but it’s really not intended as such. I’m just saying: do come over if you see me behind the stand. I’m the tall strangely-shaped one. Do not be afraid. Talk to me. I will talk back to you. Perhaps you will buy something from me and we will emerge from our brief encounter satisfied (you) and enriched (me). At the very least I will know that I’m no longer invisible.

But you know the best bit about being a woman at a games show? The loos. They’re always empty! I was talking to another woman after Colours at Newbury racecourse last year and we realised that we practically had the ladies to ourselves for the entire weekend. She had all the ones on the left, I had all the ones on the right. Luxury.

An edited version of this article first appeared in Miniature Wargames #372, March 2014

The Night My Parents Came To Kill Me

Here’s something I wrote for a creative course a few years ago. The assignment’s brief was something that deeply affected me. Do read on.

* * *

I did try to think of some nice incidents in my life to talk about, honest I did. It’s not that there haven’t been any beautiful moments; there have. But I think I’m a bit embarrassed when it comes to the mushy stuff. Now, funny, embarrassing and/or terrifying moments from my personal history, those I can do. So this is about the night my parents came to kill me.

It must have been sometime around 1982, which would have made me twelve or thirteen years old. I was at the age where my parents had begun to let me stay up quite late to watch television. My brother, two years younger, would have been packed off to bed an hour or two before me, so I was able to enjoy one of those great privileges of being the older child. I could watch things he couldn’t, and then tell him about them in the morning, mainly to show off. I loved it.

Sometimes I saw some real gems of the early 80’s, like Soap, which spoofed American daytime dramas I had never seen. It was this funny programme about two feuding families, but here’s the weird thing, and just goes to show how the age of the viewer totally affects how they experience something. For about four episodes, Soap terrified me. It was a subplot about a baby being possessed by the Devil. It boiled down to this one scene: a lavish child’s bedroom, with a cot in the centre. The child itself is unseen, the crib facing away from the audience. The lights in the bedroom flash on and off spastically, the windows at the back blow in from a sudden gale, and all the toys start to fly about. The worst bit by far was the baby’s voice. This deep man’s voice laughing like the Devil. Now, more than two decades on, I can laugh at the silly voice and talk about how it’s just a spoof of Rosemary’s Baby. But at my tender pre-teen age, it scared the life out of me.

I must have hidden my fear well though, because my parents continued to let me stay up late and watch all sorts of things that, in retrospect, were quite unsuitable. I think I saw more horror films before the age of thirteen than anyone else at my school. My dad was a bit of a horror film fan, and had often regaled us all with his renditions of masterpieces like Les Diaboliques, Onibaba and Das Totenschiff. Looking back on that list now, I think it’s just as likely that he was into foreign films, some of which inevitably happened to be horror. But it was the spooky stuff he told us about, and infected us with. He certainly never let me stay up late to watch Jules et Jim.

So horror films were a fixture in my young life. I loved those nights when I was getting ready for bed just as something good was starting on the TV. In my mind, I see myself looking intently at the screen over my shoulder as I take my sweet time getting up off the sofa and inching towards the stairs, hoping that Mum or Dad would get the message and let me stay.

On this one particular night, there was a new film on BBC1. It was Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I’d heard of it already, because there was had been an advert for the film on the back of the American comics I collected. The picture hadn’t given much away, but the fact that it had been advertised on the back of an issue of the Fantastic Four and was now here on British telly was good enough for me. I had to see it. This was the 1979 version of the film, by the way, not the black and white original with, crucially, the slightly upbeat ending tagged on. This was the bleak remake with Donald Sutherland. If you’ve not seen it, look away now, because I’m about to spoil the end scene.

Previously, a handful of men and women have discovered that people are being replaced by alien pod-creatures as soon as they fall asleep, and so are forced to spend a terrifying night on the run from the increasing numbers of body snatchers as they are gradually whittled down one by one. In the last scene it is finally dawn and one of the survivors, a woman, stumbles down a city street trying not to betray herself to the emotionless clone-people walking by her. She sees a fellow survivor, played by Donald Sutherland, and staggers over to him, gratefully blurting out her story. He stares back at her impassively, then raising an accusing finger, lets out the trademark howl of the body snatchers, alerting his fellow pod people to her presence. And that’s the end of the movie. The pod creatures take over the world and everybody dies.

Hell of an ending.

I was shaking in my pyjamas. This was much worse than Forbidden Planet or any of the Hammerish horror films I’d seen, even the one about the zombies on the trans-Siberian express. As the man from the BBC announced closedown and the national anthem started to roll, Mum sent me upstairs to brush my teeth and go to bed. And this is where it gets really scary.

We lived in a big detached house in the woods. A great place in daytime, with a massive garden to play in and a tree house down the bottom. But at night, it felt different. There were no street lights outside. The other houses were hidden from view by screens of trees and thick sprawling rhododendrons. Inside was little better. My parents, ever conscious of the electric bill, insisted on lighting being kept to a minimum at night. So there would be one 40-watt bulb for the upstairs hallway, just enough to get you from your bedroom at one end to the bathroom at the other. And there was another problem; there was another floor above ours. The stairs leading up there were curtained off by a thick blanket, mainly to keep the heat in, but it also meant that there was this concealing but all-too flimsy screen that I would have to navigate past if I was to make it to the bathroom and back.

So that was the situation: gone midnight, post-Body Snatchers, I was stood at the top of the stairs, the reassuring lights of the living room below terminating at my feet. Ahead was the dimly lit hallway, with the spooky blanket hanging down halfway along. At the end was the bathroom, and beyond, my parents’ bedroom. They were still downstairs, doing all the ritual locking-up tasks my dad insisted on every night. My brother was already safely asleep in his bedroom at my back. If the body snatchers got him now, he’d never know about it.

I trotted quickly to the bathroom, the left side of my body tingling in anticipation of something jumping out from behind the blanket. It hadn’t happened so far, but every night the danger was there. Having reached the bathroom, all I had to do was brush my teeth and I’d be halfway done. I stood at the sink, one eye on the mirror so I could see the open doorway behind me. The fact that this precaution would be no good against a vampire was ever present in my mind. And still is, if I’m honest, every time I look in the rear-view mirror of my car at night. I hadn’t closed the door; the reasoning being that I preferred to see monsters coming, rather than opening the door and having them right there in my face. I suppose I feared surprises just a little bit more than any actual creature.

Unmolested by vampires, I finished my teeth and stood at the bathroom doorway, one hand on the light switch, as it was forbidden to leave extra lights on. All that was left now was to get back down the hallway and jump into bed, where I had my own bedside light and a massive torch from Tandy’s that doubled as a deadly club. It was at this point that my parents came up the stairs to kill me.

Just like in a classic horror film, I first saw the elongated shadows coming up the stairs, accompanied by a dreadful creaking beneath their feet. I was frozen at the bathroom door as my mum and dad marched slowly upstairs and turned woodenly toward me. And then I saw what they were carrying. It was a pod. One of the long green marrow type things that the body snatchers used to shrivel you up and grow an alien replacement that would howl. They stepped toward me.

Almost exactly like this. But in colour.

I think I slammed and locked the bathroom door on them. Thank God that this was the only room upstairs with a lock, ever since my second cousin Marcus had come to visit and been funny about using a toilet you couldn’t lock. I backed away from the door as far as I could. Not like in those films where they put their face right up against the door so the monster could just stick its clawed fist straight through and rip their face off. My body had gone all hot and cold at the same time, and the skin on my shoulders, neck and head felt funny. This was it. In the time it had taken for me to brush my teeth, my parents had been taken over by the body snatchers and now they’d come for me. I would eventually fall asleep in the bath and be shrivelled up.

It probably took my mum about ten minutes to convince me it was all a joke. I think I looked through the keyhole to make sure, which is when I saw that the ‘pod’ was in fact my brother’s toy marrow, a big plastic vegetable with a friendly smiley face and antennae. They didn’t sound all that emotionless, so I eventually relented and unlocked the bathroom door, wiping snot and tears with my sleeve, and trying to make out that of course I wasn’t scared. I thought they were burglars; that’s what it was. Not body snatchers, that was stupid.

They did then start to feel a bit bad. Possibly they saw through my façade of coolness and suspected that perhaps I was still a bit too young for that sort of film, or at least too young for a practical joke about them being taken over by alien pod people and then coming for me. I think that was the last horror film they let me watch for a while.

* * *