Watching TV Again.

I remember when my not having a TV used to amaze people. ‘But what do you talk about?’ someone asked me.   But these days with the internet gradually replacing television as our primary supplier of moving picture entertainment, it’s no longer so strange to be without the multi-channel box.

                But it’s still a bit of shock to the system when, on visits to my parents’ house, I am exposed to traditional, ‘national broadcaster’ TV.  One thing I’ve noticed is how terrifying the BBC News has become.  Their financial clout has never been so obvious as it is now, as camera crews take the viewer to the most woebegone and dangerous places on the planet: villages reduced to rubble where snipers hide in the shadows, makeshift hospitals filled with maimed children. A recent report on heroin production in Mexico showed a local overdosing on the drug – it was astonishing to witness this on a national news programme.

                When you are used to reading about these stories or listening to them on the radio (I rarely watch videos on news websites though I know they are on the rise) the images of carnage and suffering are startling.  It’s all so different from the news programmes from my youth, when there were no pictures of foreign trouble spots, just a photograph of the reporter (usually pictured holding a phone) superimposed on a map of the country where he was posted.

                The other thing that shocks me is how loud studio audiences have become. I can only assume that the volume levels are increased to ‘grating’ in the editing suite or else the audience of such programmes as Graham Norton’s show are drunk almost to the point of belligerence. Why else would they be braying like donkeys at jokes that are often no more than slightly amusing? Have I Got News for You is hard to watch for the same reason and even The Late Late Show’s audience, which used to be a tough crowd of mostly older people who gave many a band or ‘edgy’ comedian a cool reception, is now urged to clap and crow as often as possible. 

It’s a different world from the Youtube accessible interviews conducted by Dick Cavett and Michael Parkinson in the 1960s and 1970s. On walks Muhammed Ali or Marlon Brando or Bette Davis, stars who have already achieved near-mythic status, and there is polite applause and then silence as the interview begins. Funny moments are greeted with realistically gentle laughter and people like Orson Welles are allowed to just talk without interruption. 

                But these are minor objections – what is most noticeable about modern TV is how much like a library it has become. The menu button allows us to search through hundreds of channels as though we were scanning rows of books on shelves and fringe interests are catered for in a way that would have been previously unimaginable. 

This new world suits my parents – in the past, programmes about antiques and heritage used to make up no more than a few hours a week of programming in Britain and Ireland; these days, you can get six or seven hours’ worth a day.  I quite like it too, but I’ll wait until they’ve finally done away with commercial breaks before I return to T.V.     

Songs We Can't Forget

I wonder how David Gray felt when it was revealed that the jailers in Abu Ghraib had used a looped version of his song ‘Babylon’ as a form of aural torture on their inmates. Saddened that his music was being used to inflict pain? Quietly delighted that the warders had picked up on its undeniable earworm quality? Maybe a little of both?

                Perhaps it was chosen for its combination of the cheerful (the merry acoustic guitar riff, the optimistic piano chords of the rolling chorus) and the grating (the way he sounds like a wounded sheep when he sings ‘Baaaa-bylon’). It’s easy to picture people trying to pull their ears off after being subjected to it for hours on end at a mercilessly high volume and I suppose any piece of music on repeat would eventually be unbearable. But some songs do get the skin crawling faster than others. So which other songs could be best used to extract secrets from prisoners in a high security prison? 

                 The first one I would nominate is Crystal Waters’ ‘Gypsy Woman’, a house hit forerunner to Eiffel 65’s maddening ‘Blue’.  Once heard, ‘Gypsy Woman’’s queasily looping ‘La-da-dee-La-dee-dah’ chorus (which the eponymous transient apparently ‘stands there, singing for money’) can never be forgotten. Nearly thirty years later, I only need to see or hear anything related to a woman who is a gypsy to set it off in my head.  If ‘Gypsy Woman’ weren’t available, they could use one of its cousins: They Might Be Giants’ nightmare vortex ‘Birdhouse in your Soul’, Los Del Rio’s Latin Hokey-Cokey ‘Macarena’, Chumbawumba’s exhausting ‘Tubthumping’.     

                As infuriating as the above numbers are, the unbearableness of a song is often related to its unforgettably rubbish words rather than a repeated phrase or chorus.  Desree’s ‘Life’ is usually trundled out as a good example of witless lyrics that lodge themselves in your brain (‘I don’t want to see a ghost / It’s the sight I fear the most/ I’d rather have a piece of toast / Watch the evening news’). But this is a minor offence compared with Joan Osborne sombrely wondering ‘What if God was one of us / Just a slob like one us / Just a stranger on the bus / Just trying to find his way home / Back up to Heaven on his own/ Nobody callin’ on the phone / ‘Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome / While pulling hair out of a comb.’ (I added the last line but I like to think it improves the original.)  

                Of course, defenders of Osborne will say the tune of ‘One Of Us’ is attractive, and it is, but the singing is high in the mix and the ‘thought-provoking’ lyrics, unavoidable – all inmates with a good understanding of English would be spilling their guts in no time.

                Is there a song that combines a melody as unshifteable as ‘Gyspy Woman’’s with lyrics as toe-curling as those of ‘One of Us’?  No doubt in some laboratory deep in the bowels of the earth, some of the world’s top minds are working on the development of such a potentially devastating combination.

                (Apologies to anyone reading who now has any of the above-mentioned songs lodged in their heads.)

Film Review: Lady Macbeth

Set in 1865, Edward Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth transports its source material (Russian novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov) to an austere house in Northumberland, where Catherine (Florence Pugh) is trapped in a loveless arranged marriage to the older Alexander.  Though initially frustrated by the restrictions imposed on her by her husband, when Alexander leaves to attend to an accident at one of the family’s mills, Catherine begins to exert her power over the household and its servants, including shed-dwelling workman Sebastian.

                  Some viewers will be familiar with much of what’s on offer here –  wayward lass, brawny servant, pinched puritanical elders, desolate moorland – but the film puts an intriguing spin on these well-worn elements and Lady Macbeth’s slow pace and beautiful photography has its own unique hypnotic effect. Catherine’s boredom with life within the cold whitewashed walls of the house is brilliantly captured by the lingering shots of Pugh sitting in full wifely attire on a couch, staring directly at the camera.  The stillness of life on the estate is also accentuated by the lack of a music on the soundtrack and the comparative loudness of creaky doors opening and closing and the echo of footsteps in corridors.

                In a film short on dialogue, there are memorable turns by a flinty Christopher Fairbank as Foster’s father and Naomi Ackie as a servant caught between masters, but the magnetic Pugh (last seen in a similarly compelling role in Carol Morley’s The Falling) is the quiet centre of the film, her inscrutable expression at the heart of the mystery of this curious mood piece.        

Rockin'! Gavin Povey and the Fabulous Oke She Moke She Pops live at The Leeson Lounge.

Gavin Povey and the Fabulous Oke She Moke She Pops live at The Leeson Lounge, Fridays, 9pm (throughout May and June)

Now at the Leeson Lounge for a summer residency, on Friday evening the wondefully-monikered Oke She Moke She Pops rattle through a lively set of standards by boogie woogie, jive and r&b greats like Lee Dorsey, Professor Longhair and Smiley Lewis (‘Big Chief’, ‘Iko Iko’, ‘Hook, Line and Sinker’) with an enthusiasm that makes the songs feel as fresh as the day they were recorded.  Ably supported by Shane Atlas on drums and Chris Greene on double-bass, veteran session piano player Povey’s playing is joyfully exuberant and his voice – perhaps the band’s greatest asset - has a smoothness and a clarity that recalls Fats Domino.

 The Leeson Lounge is a cosy venue with an excellent sound system though the floor is a little cluttered with oversized furniture. Most importantly, there is room at the front to dance, which is hard to resist when the music is this good. There is no entrance fee though a hat is passed around during the interval for voluntary contributions.  The audience in Dublin for vintage rhythm and blues is small (though the recent rise in the popularity of swing dancing suggests it is growing) but anyone who wishes to hear a close approximation of the propulsive sounds of old New Orleans should consider checking out the She Pops.     

Enda Kenny

Looking across the water east and west, at the shameless flip-floppery of the formerly Remainer Conservative MPs and the noisy narcissism of Trump, and looking north at the proudly ignorant tribalism of Arlene Foster, it’s hard not to find soon to be-ex Taoiseach Enda Kenny quietly likeable. 

Yes, he was very much an old-school, centre-right FG premier, yes, his promise in 2011 of a ‘democratic revolution’ was complete balderdash (see the housing crisis, the continuing health crisis, the lingering presence of the Catholic Church in the public sphere), and yes, he was for the most part another caretaker leader of another government that did little more than muddle along.  The marriage equality referendum was a notable success but economic stability was achieved at a brutal cost to many and corruption and incompetence are still endemic in most areas of public life.

 But still, at a time when loudmouth antagonism and sham nativism are all the rage among powerful politicians in some jurisdictions, Kenny’s polite and sometimes goofy manner, his reluctance to fling stones (the one fatal exception being his ‘whingers’ remark during the 2011 general election campaign) or fan flames of resentment, are enough to make him seem an admirable leader. And that’s pretty sad. 

Judge Dredd: Mega-City One - set for success?

Rebellion have announced that they are in the process of creating a new Judge Dredd television series, in cooperation with IM Global Television, which will be entitled Judge Dredd: Mega City One.  Previous screen adaptations the future cop have been problematic – the 1995 film was an infamous flop in which Sylvester Stallone removed the helmet and was kissed by Judge Hershey, the 2012 Dredd with its ugly ‘sandpaper for the eyes’ aesthetic stayed closer to the source material but didn’t trouble the box office.

                  The sounds coming out of Rebellion chief Jason Kingsley are encouraging: he wants the new series to capture the humour of the strip, something that the previous adaptations have ignored. The fact that Mega City One is included in the title is promising: the strip has always been more about the city than about Dredd himself, who, like Kermit trying to organise the Muppets, is the straightman trying to impose order on a world full of eccentrics and psychotics.  It will be interesting to see how successful the production team are at translating the wildness of Mega City One to the screen.  Will the skyscape be as incredible as the one dreamed up by Carlos Ezquerra with its curvy skyscrapers connected by roadways, shoots and tunnels? Will it include the crazes (designer ugliness, sky surfing, plastic bubble) subterranean mutants and undead villains for which the strip has become famous? Will it have the biting satire of the strip? The complete lack of sentimentality?

                The recently published Fast Food, the newest volume of Hachette’s Judge Dredd Mega Collection, perfectly encapsulates all that is good about Dredd. It follows the travails of the ‘fatties’, Mega City One’s monstrously obese inhabitants, as they fight for their rights, compete in illegal eating competitions and strive to reach the magical two tons. Writers John Wagner and Alan Grant stuff into these tales as many jokes about corpulence as they can, while the various artists provide some of the most comical and bizarre images you will see in a comic. The most memorable is the Ezquerra’s two-page spread picture of the corpse of a heavyweight victim of an appetite stimulant whose cause of death is ‘bedstead lodged in the abdomen’.

                To present such a situation on a TV programme without losing the comical tone of the original would be an achievement but one factor in the series’ favour is the changing expectations of TV viewers. A product of a culture that was deeply sceptical of authority figures and morbidly fascinated by American excess, Judge Dredd in its comic strip form never took off in the U.S. but in the last twenty years, thanks to morally complex shows such as The Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire, audiences have become accustomed to watching antiheroes and stories laced with cynicism.  If ever the time was right for a Dredd series that was true to the anarchic spirit of the original strip, this is it.          

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume II

While on the run from the golden-skinned Sovereigns, the eponymous space misfits meet Ego (Kurt Russell), a bouffant and bearded charmer with a fabulous home planet. The amiably goofy Quill (Chris Pratt) is impressed, blue-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana) sceptical, but like the other guardians, she is more preoccupied by the vengeful Sovereigns, who are hunting the group following Rocket’s theft of some of their precious ‘batteries’.

                Though not as snappily plotted as its predecessor (there is a rather flabby, navel-gazing middle section), Volume 2 of this series is still miles better than recent products from the same stable – Doctor Strange and Captain America: Civil War –  thanks in part to its many genuinely funny one-liners and a slick seventies pop soundtrack that perfectly complements the sugar rush graphics.  This is a film that refuses to take itself too seriously while also managing to explore themes such as child-parent relationships and sibling rivalry in an affecting manner.  

                Perhaps this series’ greatest strength lies in its characters, a flawed band of outsiders who are by far the most likeable in Marvel’s cinematic universe.  Like Star Wars, it depends on its central band of heroes, but this is a more lovable crew. Quill is a guileless and smarm-free Han Solo, Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) is a musclebound creature whose endearing inability to understand irony provides many comical moments while Gamora is one of those rare female characters who has been granted real wit in addition to steeliness.  It’s easier to care about this bunch of rejects than for Marvel’s better known superpeople, who spend a lot of their time trash-talking one another or agonising over their status as protectors of humanity/destructive vigilantes (though Mark Ruffalo’s sweetly vulnerable Bruce Banner is a notable exception).

                Being a relatively minor part of the Marvel canon, and being set almost entirely in space, gives Guardians of the Galaxy a freedom to experiment that is not available to well-established, and more popular, characters like Spiderman and The Avengers.  It would be hard to shove so much pop  music and so many eighties pop culture references (David Hasslehoff is mentioned several times) into one of the superhero films without raising the ire of the ultra-protective hordes of comic nerd fans.       

 Smarter than the other Marvel movies; more fun than Star Wars.

Misty - The Cult Girls' Comic Comes Back from the Mists.

Misty

Published by Rebellion Developments, 2016

                Rebellion’s revival of British comics from the seventies is not just an exercise in nostalgia.  This edition collects two complete serials from the short-lived girls’ comic Misty (1978-80), both of which deserve re-publication for the quality of their storytelling as well as for their obvious historical interest.  In his foreword, co-creator Pat Mills tells of how the girls’ comic scene had been thriving in the seventies when he proposed a female-friendly equivalent of 2000AD, complete with fictional editor, which focused on the supernatural rather than on science-fiction.  And thus Misty was born.

                The first story in the collection, Moonchild, written by Mills and drawn by John Armstrong, follows the travails of Rosemary, a twelve-year-old victim of school bullies, who discovers she has telekinetic powers. In the second story, The Four Faces of Eve, by Malcolm Shaw and Brian Delaney, the eponymous heroine wakes up in a high-security wing of a hospital, unable to remember anything about her past and suspicious of the couple who claim to be her parents.

                Both tales contain echoes of Carrie and The Prisoner and occasionally lapse into the farcical, but for the most part they are tightly plotted with plausible characters.  Those unfamiliar with girls’ comics (like this writer was) will notice some major differences from the action/adventure style – there is a much stronger element of the psychological,  and facial expressions (often beautifully drawn and close to photo-realistic) take precedence over backgrounds. Some of the panels showing the heroines in deep, and often unvoiced, distress, have a haunting quality, especially as the locations (classrooms, cafes, bedrooms) are so familiar and ordinary.   There is also a greater emphasis on friendship and on deciding on whom one can trust – rarely that important in 2000AD and the other boys’ comics, where scowling bounty hunters and fascist policemen were more concerned with exterminating enemies.

                The Misty stories have dated well - though there are some amusing anachronisms such as when Rosemary’s teacher punishes nasty Norma by getting her to write five hundred times, ‘I am a half-wit – I play silly games with matches’ – and it will be interesting to see if future collections from Rebellion’s recently acquired vault of classic comics will have the same freshness and readability.

A second collection of Misty strips is due for publication in late 2017.      

Bob Dylan at 3 Arena

Thursday 11 May 2017

                I’d imagine most people attend Bob Dylan concerts just to ‘see’ the songwriter whose work is an indelible part of the wallpaper of their lives –  and thanks to my wife’s binoculars, I am able to get a close-up view of the seventy-five-year-old Nobel Prize-winner, looking spry in black shirt with white flower trim, matching pants, cowboy boots and wide-brimmed hat, as he steps out onto yet another stage, yet another time.   

                But this is also a brilliant work-out for a fabulous band and its veteran leader. The tumbling swing sound with steel guitar and thudding drums has been Dylan’s favoured style for over a decade and is used to memorable effect on ‘Duquesne Whistle’ and ‘Long and Wasted Years’ and to perfection for rollicking versions of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (the highlight of the evening). If it wasn’t an all-seater concert, people would be dancing.

                The gig takes an intriguing turn whenever Dylan moves from the piano and takes centre-stage, to sing some of the vintage standards he covered for his last three albums.  Holding the mike stand at an angle, his hand touching his hip, he performs ‘All or Nothing at all’, 'Stormy Weather', ‘Melancholy Mood’ and others, to the spectral backing of the band, crooning agreeably and hitting every note.  As well as injecting variety into the set (the brevity of these ballroom classics is a welcome change from the typically lengthy Bob originals) their inclusion is also a reminder of Dylan’s place in the pantheon of great American songwriters.

                There are some frustrating moments - his complete abandonment of the tune of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ feels perverse, ‘Desolation Row’ with inaudible lyrics, quite pointless – but this is an artist whose career has been defined by his steady refusal to give the audience what they want.  It’s the reason why, over fifty years into his career, every release and concert is the source of eager anticipation.  

                As usual, there is no interaction with the crowd, his playing on piano of the first few bars of ‘Fairytale of New York’ the sole acknowledgement that he is in Ireland, and the gig ends on a downbeat note with a fiery rendition of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. Is this revival of a relic from the ‘hippies versus the straights’ era a comment on the proudly know-nothing current president?  There’s no telling with the ever-enigmatic Dylan who disappears into the darkness as inscrutable and fascinating as ever.    

Green Sleeves: The Irish Printed Record Cover at The National Print Museum

Green Sleeves: The Irish Printed Album Cover

Exhibition at The National Print Museum, Haddington Road, Dublin

Curated by Dr Ciaran Swan and Niall McCormack

           Iconic images are scarce in this collection of album sleeves printed in Ireland – U2’s Boy being perhaps the sole exception – but for anyone with an interest in the social and cultural history of Ireland from the 1950s to the present day, this is an exhibition worth visiting.     

           The sleeves on display can be roughly divided into two eras, from the fifties to the mid-seventies and from the mid-seventies to the present-day. In the first, it’s hard to escape the feeling that these albums are the product of a deeply conservative backwater, with lps featuring pictures of smiling young men and women (The Bachelors, various showbands) in countryside or pub scenes sharing space with those devoted to religious and political affairs. As well as John F Kennedy in Ireland and Pope John Paul II in Ireland, there is an album of Eamon De Valera’s recorded voice; a Hal Roach comedy album rubs shoulders with Ray McAreavy’s The Blood-stained Badge and Frank Mooney’s The Ireland of My Dreams. Appropriately enough, these sleeves are displayed on the walls of a narrow, darkened corridor.

                The sense of stale conformity is broken by the Dubliners’ album Revolution which shows the band scowling from the doorway of a dilapidated Georgian house in the inner city, a precursor to the later post-punk albums that depict bored young men in urban landscapes.  In the context of the first half of the exhibition, the garish gatefold sleeves of Horslips seem heroically different, the stark monotone images of the new wave refreshing, the day-glo garage psychedelia in the mid-eighties (Guru Weirdbrain, The Golden Horde) positively subversive.            

                Like the vast majority of album covers, most of those on display were originally designed to be recognised in a shop, but in the post-vinyl era, in which the format is little more than a cult and a marketing tool, there is much more emphasis on the album cover as beautiful artefact.  When Little Green Cars’ latest opus can be downloaded immediately onto one’s phone, its cumbersome vinyl version needs to have a selling point beyond the music. 

                 While it would be hard to champion any of the sleeves as works of art –  Thin Lizzy’s Johnny the Fox is the stand-out in terms of originality – these covers will no doubt transport many visitors into nostalgic reveries. For rest of us, they are a useful reminder of how much Ireland has changed over the last sixty years.

Green Sleeves: The Irish Printed Album Cover is at The National Print Museum, Haddington Road, Dublin until 1 October

Live Music: Eileen Gogan and The Instructions at Toner's Pub, Baggott St, Dublin.

The Alternative Social Sunday Club, a series of Sunday afternoon gigs in Toner's upstairs room, is a great idea, especially when the sun is blazing through the large windows and the music is the suitably glistening sound of Eileen Gogan and the Instructions.  Gogan, formerly of The WouldBe's and now a regular vocalist with The Drays, has gathered together a group of experienced musicians who play a fast-moving set featuring songs from her sparkling debut (2015's The Spirit of Oberlin) and a handful of new tracks that showcase her knack for clever, hook-laden tunes.

          One of the best singers you will hear,  Gogan's voice (beautifully complemented by Niall McCormack's warm vintage keyboards) is as pure as it is powerful, and the band are not afraid to experiment  - older songs 'Murmuration' and 'Nothing's For Certain' sounded substantially different from previous live performances  Of the new songs, 'More Time', 'I Don't Mind' and 'Malibu Stacey' are the stand-outs but the gig is never less than thoroughly engaging. 

To listen to, and buy, Eileen Gogan and The Instructions' The Spirit of Oberlin, go to bandcamp.

Next Sunday, 13 May, The Alternative Social Sunday Club present The Winters. Doors open at 4pm.

40 Years of 2000AD: A Celebration at Enniskillen Comic Fest

40 Years of 2000AD: A Celebration

Ardhowen Theatre

Enniskillen Comic Fest

2000AD fans were treated to over three hours of witty and insightful recollections from some of the comic's key talents - Judge Dredd creators John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, writers Alan Grant and Alan Hebden, artists Cam Kennedy and Glen Fabry and former editor Steve MacManus - at the Ardhowen theatre last night, as part of Enniskillen's annual Comic Fest.

The host gave the audience some idea of the context of the 1970s comics scene before taking the panel through the first ten years of the comic, stopping to discuss various landmark moments.

There were regular reminders of the groundbreaking nature of the comic. Wagner attributed the initial success of 2000AD to original editor Pat Mills's decision to lenthen the stories from the traditional three-pages to six pages with dyanmic splash pages. 'The stories had room to breathe, the art had room to breathe,' he said, before acknowledged the other advantage of this approach: the double story length also meant double the income for the creators, who were also credited for their work for the first time in a British comic.

Wagner was the most voluble of the wryly laconic panel and he and Ezquerra traded good natured jibes over the course of the evening while Grant and Kennedy elicited much laughter from the audience with their  mocking accounts of meetings with American comics editors Denny O'Neil and Karen Berger. None of this would have surprised anyone accustomed to the gleefully transgressive attitude that has always permeated the comic.   

There was some criticism of 2000AD's editorial staff to leaven the mix: Wagner is still excercised by Mark Miller's version of Robo-Hunter ('He treated my character with contempt') while Grant expressed his annoyance with recent changes to Judge Anderson.  But overall, the event lived up to its billing as a celebration with the creators acknowledging the trailblazing glory of the galaxy's greatest comic.

Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth

Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth

Writers: Pat Mills, John Wagner, Jack Adrian

Artists: Mick MacMahon, Brian Bolland

Rebellion 2016 (First published in 2000AD progs 61-85, 1978).

                The first of many multi-issue epic storylines, The Cursed Earth is the road trip that expanded Dredd’s world beyond Mega City One (and the moon colony Luna-1) into the post-apocalyptic wasteland of what was once middle America.  Dredd and a small crew are tasked with delivering an antidote to the west coast’s plague-ridden Mega City 2 and this loose overarching narrative gives the writers plenty of scope to create a series of mostly stand-alone two-part tales in which the heroes face various foes (vampire robots, flying rats, resurrected dinosaurs, warring bands of mutants, Las Vegans) as they rumble across the continent. Nearly forty years after its original appearance, it contains a lot of features that regular readers will recognise as defining elements of the strip – vicious satire, violence and black humour – and presents, for the first and only time, Dredd from the somewhat different perspective of writer Pat Mills.

                Much of the publicity surrounding the collection’s publication last year centred on the reprinting of four episodes that hadn’t seen the light of day since their original appearance in 1978 – stories involving copywrited figures that had somehow escaped the notice or concern of IPC’s management at the time. In the first of these wickedly funny tales, Dredd and company get caught up in a war between two neighbouring cities ruled by a lunatic version of Ronald McDonald and the ‘Burger King’. Both men are intent upon converting every available space into a burger bar (which feels weirdly prescient for 1978). In one startling panel, Ronald disciplines a worker for his poor hygiene standards by shooting him dead!

                The second story (written by Jack Adrian when Pat Mills couldn’t make a deadline) Dredd almost falls foul of a mad scientist clearly modelled on KFC’s Colonel Saunders who has created his own community of mutants that resemble trademarks such as the Green Giant and the Michelin Man.   A change in U.K. law regarding the satirising of licensed figures paved the way for the re-publication of these stories and they are the clear highlight of the collection and very much in the anarchic spirit of 2000AD.

                As the writer of twenty of the twenty-five episodes, Pat Mills puts his own stamp on Dredd and his world. There are dinosaurs and freakish religious cults (two classic Mills preoccupations) and Dredd himself is a more heroic figure who occasionally strays from his mission to do good, even though he is outside of his jurisdiction. For this Dredd, the law is a force for good whereas for creator John Wagner’s fascist bastard Dredd, the law is an inflexible and often brutal force for maintaining the status quo.

                While the energetic stories lack the sophistication and character development of later tales – Spikes Harvey Rotten is an underused tip of the hat to the punk movement and to the comic’s growing fanbase of older readers – the furry, rock-eating alien Tweak is, in classic 2000AD style, the most sympathetic figure in the epic, a victim of the human race’s greed and compulsion to tamper with, and to destroy, other species (and lifeforms).  Mills’s later Nemesis the Warlock mined similar territory.  

               Perhaps the main attraction of the collection is the glorious artwork. Re-printed in its original black and white with double page colour spreads, there is a startling contrast in styles between Bolland's smooth, ultra-detailed draughtmanship and MacMahons's rough-edged explosion of scratches. Anyone with an interest in the evolution of Dredd should investigate.

Film Review: The Birth of a Nation (1915)

'My people fill the streets. With them I will build a Black Empire and you as a Queen shall sit by my side.'  So says Silas Lynch, the psychopathic mulatto antagonist of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.  You never know what you might find in your local library and this epic from 1915 is a startling example. An adaptation of  Thomas Dixon Jr's novel The Clansman, it was the highest grossing film in the U.S.A until the release of that other civil war behemoth 'Gone with the Wind' in 1939, and while its status as 'entertainment' is now highly questionable, as a historical document, it is priceless.

The film charts the fortunes of two families, the Camerons and the Stonemans, linked by love and friendship but divided by their support for the opposing Union and Confederate sides in the civil war. The first half of the film covers the period just before and during the civil war and contains a lot of stirring and energetic battle scenes featuring literally a cast of thousands.  The second half deals with the reconstruction period after the war, a  account in which the now enfranchised black population of the south are portrayed as savage and threatening and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan is presented as an inevitable and heroic response.

Some will find the very idea of the Klan riding to the rescue and restoring stablility hard to stomach but it's fascinating to see the white hooded figures as avenging angels, the founding clansman as the dashing hero who gets the girl (Lilian Gish, no less). It is also incredible to watch white actors in black make-up dancing wildly, drinking heavily, bullying white actors without black make-up and lusting after the white female stars. White actors play mulattos as diabolical schemers and in crowd scenes, there is a mix of blacked-up white actors and actual black people - it all makes for wonderfully weird watching.

In some regards, it is a dystopian film for white supremacists, as it appears to do away with historical accuracy in its second act and depicts what might happen if black people got the vote and went on to dominate local governance. Among the horrors envisaged are the legalisation of mixed race marriages, black people being allowed to walk on the same footpath as white people and black people laughing freely at whites.

It also contains some of the most inflammatory intertitles of all time: 'The town is given over to crazed negros', 'Helpless whites look on', and 'KKK sympathisers - victims of the black mob'.  

Despite its enormous box office success, over the years, the shine came off 'The Birth of the Nation' especially when it was used as a promotional tool by the revived KKK though Griffith himself was unapologetic and poured scorn on attempts to censor or ban the film.

But it's worth seeing for various reasons, not least for the quality of the silent acting (what amazing faces the lead actors had to have), the fast pace of the narrative and the enormous setpieces. But perhaps the main reason why anyone should investigate The Birth of the Nation is to experience an unabashedly racist film that was obviously loved by many people - an intriguing snapshot of the time in which it was produced.