Smallville: Thirst

Professor Milton Fine lectures on the Roman Empire, comparing it to Luthorcorp. He reveals, to the viewers, some of his alien aspect and agenda. Cooperation between Clark and Lex is not finished yet. Lex is concerned about Clark's friendship with Fine since the latter is accessing confidential Luthorcorp documents.

Vampirism is not supernatural but meteor- and Luthorcorp experiment-related. Chloe gets a part time job at the Planet. The pre-White Managing Editor, played by Carrie Fisher, has the same surname as a former DC Comics Publisher.

Since Clark attends University not in Metropolis but in Kansas, he commutes from the farm so, to that extent, the series is still set in Smallville, not in Metropolis yet. Is an American degree course three years in length? Is that how many seasons there are about Clark, Lana and Chloe in higher education?

Plenty of close-ups of the gorgeous Chloe but I thought that the Sorority deserved an image as well.

Smallville: Aqua

I am watching Smallville Season 5 but no longer posting about individual episodes. It is all one long, confusing narrative.

Jor-El speaks through Lionel Luthor.
Resurrections should not be so quick and easy.
Why should someone Clark loves die because he was resurrected?
Why are more people not more surprised about Clark's resurrection?
Clark thinks that he can be with Lana and keep his secret from her?
Or even that he should?
He accuses Lex Luthor of lying?
Gabriel wants to stop meteor freaks by destroying Smallville? (Makes sense in terms of comic book villains' logic.)

Episode 4 neatly introduces Arthur Curry and Brainiac. Arthur ("AC") once addresses CK as "Super Boy" and later suggests that they form a Junior Lifeguards Association. CK spells out the initials just in case we don't get the message. AC and CK sabotage a Luthorcorp weapon. Perfect. CK starts investigative work for Fine's book on Luthorcorp. But Fine is also hiding something. This is better than all the meteor stuff in the opening episodes.

Modesty Blaise And Batman

In I, Lucifer by Peter O'Donnell, Modesty Blaise's right hand man, Willie Garvin, watches Batman on television. Thus, a novel about characters who originated in a British newspaper comic strip refers to a TV series about a character who originated in an American comic book.

Three media:

prose fiction;
sequential art;
screen drama.

Two kinds of sequential art:

serial episodes of a few black and while panels in a daily newspaper;
full stories in colored panels in a monthly comic book.

Modesty Blaise: The Gabriel Set-Up

I have finally read the first Modesty Blaise comic strip. As expected, the continuity is different from the novels but the characters and the general scenario are identical. It is fascinating to see how Peter O'Donnell writes the same characters, the Intelligence duo, Modesty and her sidekick, in the two different media.

I do not agree with Mike Paterson in his introduction that there is a "sexual tension" between Modesty and Willie. Completely unexpected and welcome was the second introduction by Peter O'Donnell, describing his World War II encounter with the original of Modesty. It would be good if the unnamed girl had survived and read the comic strip.

Modesty Blaise: Sabre-Tooth II

Modesty Blaise has a much better attitude to men she has had sex with than James Bond has to women he has had sex with.

Sabre-Tooth shows us how much work would be involved in assembling a secret army. The conspirators can recruit mercenaries and can train and prepare them at a secret hideout in the hills but they cannot conceal from Intelligence organizations that large numbers of cutthroat boys have gone out of circulation.

Lucille, the girl adopted by Modesty's partner, Willie, is introduced in this novel. Modesty, Willie and the reader should have foreseen that Modesty and Willie would be blackmailed through her. Was Lucille introduced as a character just for this purpose?

Peter O'Donnell equals or excels Fleming and Forsythe for apparently authentic technical and background details.

Modesty Blaise: Sabre-Tooth

The first collected volume of Modesty Blaise comic strips waits faithfully for me to pay for it at First Age Comics, Lancaster. Meanwhile, I have collected the second Modesty Blaise novel, Sabre-Tooth, from Waterstones Bookshop. I have a common problem with both books: big and awkward sizes. The collection has large format pages to accommodate quantities of newspaper comic strips. This print-on-order edition of the novel is large print.

In the novel, Modesty must prevent an invasion of Kuwait: highly topical. This book does not seem to retain the villain of the first novel, Gabriel. I discuss the novels on this blog because they are based on the comic strips and written by the same author, Peter O'Donnell.

Alice: The Acrostic

Since the republic of letters, and of pictures, is one, let us discuss poetry on Comics Appreciation: "...the acrostic poem that concludes Through The Looking Glass" is beautifully reproduced on the graphically illustrated page 64 of Bryan Talbot's Alice In Sunderland: An Entertainment (London, 2007).

The poem is about nostalgia:

"A boat beneath a sunny sky,
"Lingering onward dreamily
"In an evening of July -"

and the passage of time:

"Long has paled that sunny sky:
"Echoes fade and memories die:
"Autumn frosts have slain July."

But something endures, in memory:

"Still she haunts me..."

- and in imagination:

                              "...phantomwise,
"Alice moving under skies
"Never seen by waking eyes."

- and in future generations:

"Children yet, the tale to hear..."

Each generation experiences the summer:

"Dreaming as the days go by..."

 - and successive summers:

"Dreaming as the summers die..."

- and always remembers:

"Ever drifting down the stream -
"Lingering in the golden gleam -"

In the third last line and despite the theme of transience, the word "Ever..." is used. Finally, life ends:

"Life, what is it but a dream?"

To Lewis Carroll, a clergyman, life was a dream from which we wake whereas many of us think that it is followed by a dreamless sleep. (Plato in the Phaedo: "Eternity is a single night.") Carroll reversed the metaphor in another Alice poem:

"We are but older children, dear,
"Who fret to find our bedtime near."