Gad, Sir! Comics!

So far as I know, the only connection that the writer George MacDonald Fraser, who died last week aged 82, ever had with comics was that he co-wrote the script for the 1985 movie adaptation of Red Sonja. Not his finest hour, though he never disowned the film.

The notices of Fraser’s death (such as this one in The Daily Telegraph) have largely concentrated on his Flashman novels, in which he placed the villain of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, still a cowardly bully, but now also a lecherous cowardly bully, at the scene of numerous events of the nineteenth century. They are well worth reading – the sort of fiction that doesn’t require you to use your brain much, but also doesn’t require you to have it removed from your head and locked in a cupboard in another room in case it protests while you’re reading.

Although Fraser became a full-throated reactionary in later life, the Flashman books started as very much a product of late-1960s sensibilities, exposing the self-serving hypocrisy of earlier generations, with added sex and a wardrobe that customers of “I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet” would kill for. Or, at least, run away red-faced and pretend to have killed for. But if Flashman was a cousin of Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, Fraser’s work was also a clear descendent of Sir Walter Scott’s. Ivanhoe, too, presented a cracking new adventure story as being the product of recently uncovered historical papers, and mixed established fictional characters with new creations and actual historical people and situations. Fraser may have had less impact on the world than Scott, but at least he got his history straighter.

Entertaining though the Flashman stories are, my favourite books by Fraser are not part of any series.

Quartered Safe Out Here is Fraser’s book of war memoirs. They are unusual in that they reflect the life of a private soldier in front-line service, but one who was also a fine professional writer. They also deal with a relatively unfamiliar front of the Second World War: Britain’s campaign against Japan in Burma (reconquering the British Empire is not as popular a subject as, say, defending western civilisation against its own worst monstrosities).

The Hollywood History of the World is a lavishly illustrated account of what the American film industry, and its British tributary, has collectively got right and wrong in its portrayals of world history from One Million Years BC to Full Metal Jacket. While he has a lot of fun with mistakes and distortions, Fraser’s basic position is that, “There is a popular belief that where history is concerned, Hollywood always gets it wrong – and sometimes it does. What is overlooked is the astonishing amount of history Hollywood has got right, and the immense unacknowledged debt which we owe to the commercial cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind.”

The Pyrates is a vastly silly romp, which throws together every imaginable cliché of pirate stories, with copious anachronisms and a narrator who likes to point out the conventions of stories like these as he goes along. This is Fraser’s funniest book. He tried to repeat the trick with what is, presumably, his last novel, The Reavers, which is set in Anglo-Scottish border country in the Elizabethan era, and draws upon the research that Fraser, a native of Carlisle, undertook for his non-fiction book The Steel Bonnets and his earlier, more serious, novel The Candlemass Road. The glaring flaw is that there aren’t any clichés and conventions to border reiver stories, because the subject matter is neither clichéd nor conventional; so The Reavers doesn’t really measure up to The Pyrates.

By the way, that’s the pirate queen Sheba on the cover, described by Fraser as looking “like something out of Marvel Comic”. Singular. Not really his field, then. Did Flashy ever read Comic Cuts, I wonder?

Pictures
Brigitte Nielsen in Red Sonja (directed by Richard Fleischer, 1985)

Cover illustration by John Rose to the 1984 Pan Books edition of The Pyrates by George MacDonald Fraser

I learned of the death of Verity Lambert, best known as the first producer of Doctor Who, from Tim Chapman’s comment on my post celebrating that programme’s anniversary; and I considered taking the post down as a mark of respect, especially given the lettering on the cake in the illustration. But no: that picture exists because of the pleasure that Verity Lambert’s work gave, and continues to give, to millions of people around the world, and that is what should be remembered.

And it wasn’t just Doctor Who. After leaving that series, she helped to bring us, in one capacity or another, programmes such as Adam Adamant Lives!, The Naked Civil Servant, Rock Follies, Minder, Widows, Rumpole of the Bailey, GBH and Jonathan Creek (and also Eldorado, but de mortuis nihil nisi bonum and all that).

Much is said these days about how diverse and inclusive the new Doctor Who is. But when Verity Lambert started the show in 1963, it was quite the breakthrough for a young woman to become the producer of a BBC drama series – and she followed it up by appointing a young Asian man, Waris Hussein, to direct the first story. Lambert’s subsequent career shows how valuable that breakthrough was.

There’s an obituary here. Read it, raise a glass, and go and watch an episode of your favourite Verity Lambert production. It’s “An Unearthly Child” for me.

No sooner do I pontificate about mainstream book reviewers being interested in theme, plot and character, not technique, than John Mullan posts an article for The Guardian about how Alasdair Gray’s cover and illustrations for his own novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books illuminate his work (in more senses than one). A whipped dog, I shall growl only that it has taken twenty-six years since publication for the press to notice.


Curiously, my copy of Lanark, a 1987 Paladin paperback edition, has a completely different cover, also by Gray, and taken from the title page to Chapter 4. Perhaps the nude lady was too much for Paladin's editors. It obviously draws on the imagery of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, but it has been too long since I read the book for me to comment otherwise.

Here is probably the best known cartoon of the Great War. (Click to enlarge.)


Here is its less well-known sequel, first published between the Armistice, 89 years ago today, and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.


Less well-known; less funny; more desirable a reflection of reality.


Pictures
Fragments from France by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, reprinted in The Best of Fragments from France, compiled and edited by Tonie & Valmai Holt, Phin Publishing, 1978
(Apologies for the slightly blurred second cartoon: a few pages in my copy of this book are printed off-register)

Thanks to a flurry of evening meetings for work, I’m a bit behind with matters blog-related, so I only just read this entry on Blog@Newsarama:

"Law & Order creator Dick Wolf and Disturbia director D.J. Caruso are teaming up to adapt Max Allan Collins’ Johnny Dynamite for television.

Variety reports that the series will employ the same green-screen technology used for the movie 300 — a first for network television, should the show be picked up."

A first for US television, perhaps, but Brits with long memories may recall the BBC’s 1982 adaptation of the Daily Mirror comic strip Jane, a comedy about a woman who continually loses her clothes while foiling German spies in World War Two.


Green-screen – or Blue-screen, or Chromakey, or Colour Separation Overlay (CSO), call it what you will – had been used by the BBC ever since they adopted colour video cameras. It was used to insert pictures behind newsreaders, and it was used for special effects on series such as The Goodies and Doctor Who. The results were not always impressive. In 1978, about a third of the Doctor Who serial “Underworld” was recorded by inserting live actors into model caves, reputedly because the set designer had blown his entire budget on a single spaceship control room. Bits of the actors disappeared in the process, and they all had yellowish lines surrounding them.

By the early 1980s, the problem of successfully isolating the foreground image from the flat coloured background had been solved. But there was still no way of creating realistic imaginary backdrops cheaply. Matte painting was an elaborate and slow process, modelwork always looked like modelwork, and the modern standby of computer-generated imagery was not yet available.

Jane solved this problem by embracing it. The backdrops, and even some of the props, were high-contrast line black and white drawings, with a little added spot colour. The action was framed as if taking place within comic-strip panels: sometimes with two or more panels onscreen at once. Common devices from comic strips, such as sometimes putting figures in plain black silhouette (originally intended to lend some variety to a three-or-four panel tier) are replicated. Batman-style written sound effects were eschewed, but thought balloons were used to show us how Jane’s pet dachshund, Fritz, reacted to events.

Jane was made in five episodes of ten minutes each. Ideal for YouTube, you might think, and, indeed, you can find the first series starting here. Although that’s a QuickTime-sized image of an off-air VHS recording with Danish subtitles, it does give a reasonable idea of how the programme looked on-screen.

Unless you have a particular fetish for mid-twentieth-century ladies’ underwear (or for lead actress Glynis Barber, who shot this in-between her roles in Blakes 7 and Dempsey and Makepeace), you’ll also find that, even in ten minute chunks, the serial gets dull rather quickly. It is probably one of the most faithful strip-to-screen adaptations ever, being an amalgam of two wartime stories from the Daily Mirror, “Hush-Hush House” (January-April 1940) and “Jane’s Rival” (October 1940 – May 1941), but what had seemed funny and racey to readers in the 1940s appeared rather quaint in the 1980s. Given the artificiality of both the plot and the way it was presented on screen, it is hard even to get too worked up about the series’ blatantly sexist and exploitative premise.


Even so, the series seems to have struck a chord. At the time it was made, the comic strip had not appeared in the Daily Mirror in decades. But over the next few years, there was a second TV serial (sometimes called “Jane in the Desert”), a theatrical movie, Jane and the Lost City, which was filmed on conventional locations and was, generally speaking, as complete a waste of celluloid as could be imagined, and, in 1985, a revival of the comic strip itself, apparently at the insistence of the Mirror’s new owner, the well-known crook and bully Robert Maxwell.

The combination of live-action and line-drawing backgrounds wasn’t repeated, so far as I can recall, outside of children’s programmes such as Jackanory. But it was a worthwhile experiment, and, taken on its own terms, produced an effect rather more charming, and rather less bumptious and overwhelming, than its present-day CGI successors.

(The title of this post, by the way, comes from the theme tune to Jane, written by Neil Innes, late of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the Rutles. He rhymes it with “You’re adorable”.)

Pictures
Glynis Barber in Jane, BBC, 1982

Jane “Jane’s Rival”, script by Don Freeman, art by Norman Pett, Daily Mirror, February 1941, reprinted in Jane At War, Wolfe Publishing, 1976

It isn’t comics, but I couldn’t let mention of the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834 go by without bringing in JMW Turner. Probably the greatest of all English artists (admittedly not a crowded field, unless you adopt Wildstorm’s definition of “fine art”), Turner watched the fire from a boat in the Thames, and made four paintings of it.







Pictures
JMW Turner The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, oils, 1835, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Scan from Webmuseum Paris

JMW Turner Burning of the Houses of Parliament, oils, 1835, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Scan from Magellan’s Log

JMW Turner Burning of the Houses of Parliament, watercolour, 1834 or 1835, scan taken from In Defence of Marxism

JMW Turner The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, watercolour, 1834 or 1835, now in the Tate Museum, whence this scan

V for Vendetta Chapter 1, “The Villain" by Alan Moore (script) and David Lloyd (art), Warrior issue 1, Quality Communications, March 1982

... for possibly the most remarkable statement ever issued on behalf of the British Army:

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area."
Major Mike Shearer, Basra

Nothing at all to do with comics, of course. At least, not yet. Perhaps we'll see a story inspired by it in Commando Picture Library one day.

(Not Comics)

My, but Steven Moffat can write a good script. I may even have to watch his Jekyll, even if does star the ever-irritating James Nesbitt.

Anyhow, today’s episode of Doctor Who was the third in a row based on ancillary fiction. “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood” were adapted by Paul Cornell from his novel for Virgin Books’ Doctor Who: New Adventures series, Human Nature, while Moffat reworked parts of “Blink” from his short story “What I Did on My Christmas Holidays, by Sally Sparrow” from the Doctor Who Annual 2006, published by Panini Books. Sally was 12 in that version, which was illustrated by long-time Doctor Who comic strip artist Martin Geraghty, there were no Weeping Angels, and the Doctor was “a man with a leather jacket and enormous ears”, but it was still the best thing in the book.


Good results so far, but let’s hope they stop before adapting “Menace on Metalupiter”.