To The Last Page

Dylan Dog is a comic series - a fumetto  in Italian - that has been running in Italy since 1986. Originally created by Tiziano Sclavi, it is still published monthly with additional specials, collections and colour editions. With each book running to almost 100 pages, some double that length, there are evidently different artist and writer teams needed which helps keeps the character and the series fresh with ideas and approaches. Published in digest format - a little like the Commando books that I used to read as a child - if not for Dark Horse publishing a few selected books in this and the Martin Mystery series in the same format in the 90s, Dylan Dog would probably remain largely unknown outside of Italy and some European countries where some of the books are translated. Those US translations featured new covers by Mike Mignola, appropriately since Dylan Dog is an investigator of the paranormal, or rather one who seems to attract all manner of horrors. Dylan Dog indeed descr...

The variety of his work that I have read so far should have been a clue, but it took a long time nonetheless to get a handle on where Nick Harkaway was coming from - or the direction he was taking - with Tigerman . It seemed partly an exotic adventure, partly a fun exploration of writing employing modern youth terminology and pop culture references, but a political element couldn't be discounted either considering the status of the main character as a representative or semi-Consul for a former British Territory. The island of Mancreu may be fictional and its location vague - it appears to be a former British Territory in the Arabian Sea ocean, V-shaped somewhat like the Chagos Islands. although for some reason I pictured Sri Lanka as I was reading it - but while that plays a part, it turns out not to be the main purpose of the book either. If you want to pin it down, you would perhaps have to think bigger and more universal. Which is difficult, because the novel invites us to into ...

The Sweet Ride, 1968 It's not all fun and games being a handsome 30 year old private detective who is hit with the hot tomatoes. There is a ripe one Anjarene waiting on a promising date but Shell has been called away for an urgent assignment. Even Sheldon Scott has to pay the bills. It's even better though when you get paid and don't have to do any work. Mind you, when you get hired on a case of utmost urgency and corruption in high political office by the mayor, travel to the other end of the state and then find that "actually we don't need your services, it's all been a mistake", Shell isn't just going to let it go without asking a few questions around town. When a truck heads towards him and runs him off the road, maybe he wishes he had taken the money and quietly gone back for that date with Anjarene…. Than again, it's not as if Newton doesn't have it's share of attractive women, most of them wearing little or no clothing, all dangerous...

It's interesting to come back to some of J.G. Ballard's early novels some 40 years after I first read them, and wonder whether as novels reportedly being possible worlds set five minutes in the future, they still stand up to the changes that have happened in the modern world in the meantime. My initial impression on returning to The Drought is that Ballard's writing style doesn't hold up well - it's difficult to visualise the world or feel any connection with the people he is describing - but his ideas, his originality and his vision are still very much intact and relevant. Anyone who has read Empire of the Sun - or seen the Spielberg movie adaptation - will know where Ballard's preoccupation of a small English community struggling for survival against a man made or natural disaster comes from. His own experience in a prison camp in Shanghai runs deep throughout his work, never more so - other than in his short stories - than in his early trilogy of disaster n...