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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 12:00:57 GMT
i'd say you can't have a sub as a sending -off is the same whether before, after, or during a game. certainly, it counts the same for suspensions, and so you'd have to play the second half with ten men.
put me out of my misery, dem, am i right?
also can't get over the phrase 'hinest terry venners' - unlikely if you're acquainted with the life and works of the real El Veg.
i saw some of these comics lurking in the basement of 'any amount of books' last time i was there, but passed. it may have been a mistake...
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 11:56:43 GMT
british comics don't seem to change much with the years? bloody hell, rog, they're all gone with the exception of the dandy and beano, and 2000AD.
there's a bit about the steel claw on the old board. i'd direct anyone to find the titan book of the first three, ken bulmer written, strips. there's also a spider collection which has some of jerry siegal's UK work in it, i believe. Titan also have a thunderbolt jaxon title which is a 'reimagining' of the character (ugh, horrible term), and an Albion precursor title which collects some Kelly's Eye, Cursitor Doom, and Janus Stark scripts.
the odd thing for me about the Steel Claw (which also ran in Valiant before that was merged with Lion - or was it then other way round?) is that the Bulmer stuff isn't as good as the Tom Tully stuff - there's a great series from the early 70's - the first Return Of The Claw strip - which mixes some quatermass and village of the damned themes with a disillusioned Louis Crandall alking away from the government and only returning because his own idealism is reawoken - strong stuff in a strip aimed at ten year old boys, and all the more odd for coming from a bloke who usually wrote sports strips and is best remembered as the longest running Roy Of The Rovers writer!
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 11:49:18 GMT
er, shouldn't that be '92, dem?
well, jerry ewing and malcolm dome can be found plying their trade at Classic Rock these days, amongst other places. and bernard doe - well, the man who took Metal Forces from fanzine to Smiths, and a champion of extreme metal and guiitar music at a time when kerrang! was obsessed with guns&wankers and hair metal. without him, no terrorizer, etc. what is he doing now?
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 11:46:21 GMT
as it goes, the pedestrian one may have been a john harvey. he was bloody awful at westerns, though his crime stuff is excellent. i don't have a list to hand, but the LJ piece in Paperback Fanatic should clue you in.
and bear in mind that LJ was, at one point in the mid-late seventies, writing virtually a paperback a month in at least four or five different series. quality is bound to be a little erratic under such circumstances. also, speaking as some one who's had to produce under some very trying circumstances this year, real life does get in the way, and contracts make no allowances for this. GNS has the same problem at some points. any prolific writer does, as they are at the mercy of editors rather than some spurious idea of art. and editors - trust me - are not merciful creatures...
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 11:39:56 GMT
a wonderful black comedy, and actually a better movie in total than the phibes films, the success of which presumably prompted it. there's a wonderful robert morley piece in one of his collected punch articles about filming the scene where the funeral carriage is let loose. i can't remember which one of the books it is - i have four of them in paperback - but i'll have a look later and see if i can locate it.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 11:37:10 GMT
can i add a vote for The Flesh And Blood Show? sleazy down at heel atmosphere, a decent script from Alfred Shaughnessy (he turned Barbara Shelley into a cat and wrote for Upstairs Downstairs - class!), and a good cast. grubby and nasty, if not particularly graphic.
cool it carol is an odd one - the only one of his sex films i've seen, and it was - um - well, i was told it was a comedy and so couldn't get it first time around as i was waiting for the laughs. but it's actually a tawdry drama, and rather good on that score as i discovered second viewing. askwith, again, is rather good (as in F&B Show) and could actually act before mugging became second nature (though to be fair, it was what was asked of him later).
that's a great comment, mr 'wick - walker is like argento in that he has a great eye (accidental if you believe some of his colleagues) for the visual, but is bollocks on story, generally. i like david mcgillivray, but did the fact that he often banged 'em out and had to rewrite on the hoof does show in the 'classic' walkers as regards narrative.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 11:29:29 GMT
yes, it's crud, but it's fun! i like frank finlay, as few can overplay as well as him. and ron wood! looking just as raddled as now! and it was 42 years ago! i actually tapes this just for the birds, thinking it'd be awful, but really enjoyed it. i've read bloch dissing it, and i can see what he means, but really - he should have known better, he'd worked with subotsky before. writers can't moan after the first time a producer has gypped them - they must surely have to go in with their eyes open.
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Post by pulphack on Sept 10, 2008 11:24:48 GMT
absolutely. shops tended to take about half of a published price, which would be ok if not for the fact that they were getting a lot of stuff on sale or return. so when the net book went down, so reps started to do deals - 'take x of new title by unknown author and we give you huge discount on y famous author - and a free dump bin', which was soon followed by 'if you want x freebie copies of this book then you won't have shelf-space for these copies of a book rom a smaller rival...' and so the number of titles went down.
some shops went against this trend, and they're the ones still around now. my local one is thriving, helped by the fact that it does book search for old and new, actively promotes ordering and prompt delivery of titles not in stock, and is at least a bus ride from the nearest competitor, chain or otherwise.
publishers are also to blame. the huge advances that weren't recouped or took ages to come back that were give in the late eighties/early nineties caused less chances on new books, and the disappearance of the mid-list - slow, steady sellers that didn't stay on catalogue long and were good for turnover - which is where most pulp appeared.
one unnamed publisher, talking of an unnamed fantasy author, said to me last month 'i mean, x doesn't need to write another book ever again as his back catalogue sells. in fact, i hope he doesn't 'cause we'll be obliged to give him half a million quid and that comes off my budget!'
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Post by pulphack on Aug 22, 2008 15:17:12 GMT
a fair point about wiki - i'm very dubious about the whole concept as regards accuracy, to be honest, but in this instance i'm inclined to take them at face value as whoever compiled the entry seems to have everything else right as far we know it.
anyway, my lunch hour stretched to two today...
ANGER AT WORLDS END (Fleetway, Jan 1963) Desmond Reid (aka John Lymington)
Right from the first page it has all the Lymington riffs you'd expect. Heat, oppressive atmopshere reflected by and reflective of this factor, and rising heat as a metaphor for growing tension. One man stands against the mass, knowing what's really going on (in this case Blake), and the alien influence echoes the ways of old religions and the occult while remaining steadfastly unknown and unknowable - a thing mr L shares with Nigel Kneale, giving the expositionary text in this a feel of '...The Pit'.
Apart from a few brief appearances of Craille the secret service chief (the deus ex machina who propels Blake into this) and some of Blake's staff (Tinker pops up in the action at the end but is almost immediately sidelined, paving the way for a typical Lymington ending - anti-climactic, yet strangely beleiveable because of that), this is about Blake alone. And as sole protagonist, you get the idea that Lymington had written this, needed a quick cheque, and then changed the hero's name before inserting a couple of incongruous chapters.
Sounds like I didn't like it? No, I loved it. It has the slow build of tension and atmosphere that explodes into a frenziedly paced final third that is typical of Lymington's sci-fi. Very much in Night of the Big Heat mould, this concerns a scientist who has trapped the malignant energy of a distant star, sending powerful magnetic and radioactive waves that turn men to savages. It takes over and warps minds, and is compared to satanic energies (prefiguring Kneal again, for the fourth Quatermass). Only Blake's strength of will keeps him relatively sane, and even he has problems. Freewill is all that saves mankind (...The Pit again), which is strangely downbeat about humanity in the way that most of his sci-fi is...
Located in the Bredon Hills, it has lots of atmospheric forest pursuit, lots of darkness and night to contrast with the heat (which of course we associate with the sun), and some nice set pieces where ther villagers run amok. Some sexual undercurrents that are not the usual pulp bodice ripper, either.
A fine and enjoyable piece of work that sits well with Lymington's other sci-fi books - more so than with the Blake canon for this era, in truth.
Having said that, he shows enough empathy with the Blake characters and traditions to be John Drummond in a previous life, and Baker was often keen to bring back old hands, as his welcoming of Rex Hardinge (a pre-war Blake feted writer) a few years prior to this show. Worth exploring when there's more time.
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Post by pulphack on Aug 22, 2008 10:33:32 GMT
Good heavens! The man was far more prolific than I realised! Thanks for the wiki link, Dem! So he was John Drummond, eh? I shall have to check and see which of those are in the SBL archive, then work my way through them... eventually!
I picked up the Desmond Reid title a couple of miuntes ago when on a break, and the first bloody page... not only is it hot, we have a heavily sweating bobby commenting on such! Lymington signatures from the off!
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Post by pulphack on Aug 22, 2008 7:52:29 GMT
of course, announcing an almost-daily frequency was bound to be the kiss of death. those few readers may have noticed nothing for the last fortnight. this will continue for the next two weeks. a brief brush with poor health has meant that i've had to drop everything and concentrate on finishing my current contract, which has two weeks left to run. once that's delivered, i can relax a bit and then go back to varneyjack. which is, frankly, more fun to write these days. but that might just be because it's not a long-haul with a deadline that's looming!
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Post by pulphack on Aug 22, 2008 7:48:04 GMT
Lymington aka John Newton Chance a Blake writer? That had passed me by! So I got out my Library index and couldn't find him - then, thanks to Steve Holland's "Desmond Reid" index I discovered he wrote one novel - Anger At World's End - that was published under the Reid name. It's near the end of the 4th series, and was probably untouched for half money, hence it being the only one!
I've never read any of his crime novels as Chance, but Vault regulars will recall a fondness I have for his sci-fi novels which are in that Wyndhamesque stiff upper lip vein, and are always obsessed with HEAT.
Dug out my copy of Anger..., and guess what: it's sci-fi oriented and looks like it may contain HEAT. Hopefully read it soon and then report back.
Any of those short stories particuarly HOT, then? I can't see him doing shorts, as his forte is the gradual build up of tension. Doesn't sound like they work too well.
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Post by pulphack on Aug 22, 2008 7:40:08 GMT
Funk - a man whose taste and tact are legend. Good to see that he's fighting back to fitness at speed. Dem putting up some of his old GNS work is a reminder of why he's invaluable here, let alone to family and friends. Here's to a swift and safe recovery.
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Post by pulphack on Aug 12, 2008 12:09:11 GMT
what a fool that man is - as i'm sure you and i will agree, john, there is little to cinematically best Gonks Go Beat. no, dem, stop laughing, i'm serious - it's a great movie! anything that has terry scott, kenneth connor, lulu, gonks, the graham bond organisation and that bloke who plays charlie in casualty singing sappy songs with his sister when he was a kid HAS to be a great film.
my personal best bit of Incense has to be Edward Woodward explaining about vampires while wandering about in a bit of the natural history museum. he doesn't look like a man about to get burned alive by mad scots islanders...
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Post by pulphack on Aug 12, 2008 12:04:07 GMT
Commando is quite amazing really - four a month, regularly and without a break for over forty years now. the odd thing is that they were still around but you only evedr saw them in a few places until recently - now that Carlton are making a fortune from reprints, it seems that the new titles have picked up on the back of that. which maybe proves that there is a market for this sort of thing if people are reminded it's there.
i've lost count of how many volumes of commando Carlton have published, and they've also done at least one from fleetway's battle library. they've also done some old schoolfriend girls anthologies, and several jackie's (incidentally named after superstar kid's writer jacqueline wilson when she was a dc thompson office junior, for those of you who missed comics britannia!). i think i saw a look-in one as well, recently. it's proving a fertile field for them, so who knows what we may get next, dragged from the vaults of dct or fleetway!
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