While you’ve been looking at a static, un-updated blog, I’ve been filling my hard drive with unuseable posts.
There were several attempts to review recent comics (such as the Hibernia reprint of The Thirteenth Floor, written by John Wagner and Alan Grant and drawn by José Ortiz, above), but there wasn’t really anything interesting or amusing that I wanted to say about them.
There was my attempt, sparked by a remark by John Sutherland to the effect that the price of hardback novels had remained constant as a share of average income throughout the twentieth century, to see if the same was true of The Dandy over its seventy-year life. But while my rough calculations suggested that 2d (old pence – 240 of them to the pound) in 1937 was indeed about the same proportion of weekly GDP per head as £1.99 is now, that post fell apart when I realised that The Dandy now only comes out every two weeks, and is, for the first time, a different price from The Beano (95p), so I wasn't comparing like for like. In any case, I was unsure about the figures I was using for GDP, as national accounts data only began to be collected the way they are now after World War Two, and for population, as neither 1937 nor 2007 was a census year. And I couldn’t find the exact quotation from John Sutherland, either. Fell at three successive fences, that one.
And there was the humorous post, attempting to link this poll, showing that a quarter of Britons could not name Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace, with Cat Sullivan’s “Merry Xmas, Jesus” strip in the new issue of Viz (no 171, Christmas 2007, below). Maybe include some sarky remark about how “don’t know” was actually the most accurate answer, given that the whole Bethlehem story is such an obvious and clumsy ret-con. But I couldn’t make it sing.
And then there was the self-pitying post about how I couldn’t write any good posts this last week. Just be thankful I spared you that one.
Oh … Right.
Anyway, a review of Tamara Drewe should be along shortly. I’ve got things to say about it. Interesting or amusing things? You’ll have to be the judge.
