Current Obsessions: Part 2 - Comics

Surprisingly for me, I was a late entrant into the wonderful world of comics, and their brothers in bondage, graphic novels. I think I must have been in my late 20s, when I gradually became aware of the very popular Sandman comic. I had heard whispers of the qualities of this series, and how cool its writer was. This didn't connect with me until I went to a signing in Kingston's original Waterstones, where the extremely popular comedy writer, Terry Pratchett was signing his new book. Except that he had actually co-written the book with a pleasant man in black called Neil Gaiman, who sounded familiar. There was a massive queue of people ready to chat to Terry (who is one of the nicest writers I have ever had the pleasure of meeting), but nobody seemed to be conversing with Neil Gaiman, sitting right next to him. Feeling sorry for him, I made light conversation about the book "Good Omens". During this, I remembered that he was the writer of Sandman, so I told him how cool Sandman, despite having never read it.

This lingered with me, and I felt a little bad about this little white lie. I read Good Omens, and thought it was utterly brilliant, and maybe this Gaiman fellow was worth taking a punt with. I got the original "Sandman" graphic novel, which was actually issues 8-16, and found it riveting. I loved not just Gaiman's flowing narrative and love of stories, but I also thought the art was excellent. As each graphic novel got released, I eagerly picked them up. Through the name of Gaiman, I got into Books of Magic; from this I learnt about the English Magus, John Constantine; then I found out about the amazing Alan Moore run of Swamp Thing. At this point, I discovered the comics department of Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street, and I found that there was a whole world out there that I had never heard of. I picked up the Sword of Azrael graphic novel, because it looked so cool, and started buying the ongoing series through the NoMans Land storyline. When Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker were brought in as the new regular writers (and the covers were redesigned as "New Gotham"), I jumped on board, and became a fan of the Batman family of titles. From here, there was no going back. I had become a superhero fan, and there was no saving me from the shared universe concept. To be fair, I also briefly flirted with Grant Morrison's "New X-Men", and Greg Rucka's excellent Queen and Country series. However, to this day I remain a DC Fanboy, and there's no escape.

The REAL Wall

My fantastic partner Julie, who works at Roehampton University, came back a few days ago talking about a really nice guy she works with, Andy Hoang, who had been having a lot of hassles - thanks to his blog, of all things. His REAL wall is a replacement for the unreal Wall on his previous Facebook account, now abandoned (you can never really delete the bugger - just blank out all your fields). I hate, loathe and despise Facebook, so he was already winning in my book. His idea is for people to send him postcards and letters by REAL mail, and he regularly photographs the current REAL wall and posts it on the blog. I love this idea: it ends up being far more personal than any number of so-called social networking sites, and feels far more authentic, probably because it is ever so slightly messy.

Now all this is great: he gets hundreds of pieces of mail regularly sent to him, and everybody's happy. Everybody, except Hammersmith and Fulham council, who spookily find out (somehow) that he has been sent all this mail, and bizarrely conclude from this that he is running some sort of business from Goldhawk Road. The next thing he knows, he has received a £5000 bill from the council to pay for the disposal of his dangerous festering piles of card and paper.

This is all very silly, and I just can't believe that with the fuss and reaction to this already, they won't back down. However, it's just worth being sure. I would ask anybody who thinks that this is bleeding outrageous to help out and send a postcard, or even a sanely written letter for Andy to pass on to the council.

Current Obsessions: Part 1 - Boardgames

In the last ten or so years, I have become aware of the large number of very good boardgames out there which have been released, but which are seen nowhere except in a small number of niche shops which specialise in them. Like many people, I had been through the classics, such as Monopoly and Cluedo. However, I was lucky that my father's family had been keen boardgamers, and had less well known games, such as Careers, Totopoly and Taxi. My father seemed to have gone through a phase where he had bought such games as Othello, Campaign and even the notorious Diplomacy, although I suspect he has never played the latter. All of these were played aside the kind of games you normally find in toy shops.

I went through a phase when I got into role playing games, and board games were something which I wouldn't have afforded, even though Talisman looked exceptionally cool. It wasn't until I discovered the web site which I am linking to throughout this article, The Boardgame Geek (http://www.boardgamegeek.com), and became introduced to a new world of games that I never knew existed. These range from the beautiful simple railway game Ticket to Ride and the tile landscape generating Carcassonne, through the simple in concept - more complicated in play Settlers of Catan, up to highly dice-free tilefests like Caylus.

The main problem with all this is finding the time to play them. The main problem is to get people together in a room long enough to finish one of them. Yesterday, I got the chance to play the rather exciting Battlestar Galactica Boardgame. This is based on the excellent recent SciFi Channel (don't get me started about their stupid name change) drama, reimagined from the tired mediocre offering from the late 70s.

Sadly, only my two friends Paul and Katy were available for the initial play, but we quickly got sucked into the game. The game cleverly replicates the paranoia in the original program, because nobody can be absolutely sure whether a player is a Cylon, working against humanity. At the beginning, everyone maybe intent on saving humanity from annihilation, but by the end a sleeper Cylon could be activated. Maybe the last crisis occurred because of bad luck. Maybe it was someone else on the table causing it; maybe it was you.

As it happened, I played Admiral Adama, only be stripped of my rank by my ungrateful son, Apollo. Whilst I believed I was human, halfway through the game, everyone's suspicions were confirmed when I thought it would be a jolly good idea to stage a coup d'etat. I failed miserably, but when Apollo was out fighting the Cylon Raiders, and Starbuck was happy in the dual role of President and Admiral on Colonial One, I revealed my inner Cyclon, and sent Starbuck into the brig, and went onto wreck havoc on the human fleet leaving them cold in space, with no fuel left. Tragically for them, they were two turns from jumping to the safety of Kobol.

All great fun.

Tomorrow: another obsession (TBA)