Comic Cuts - 19 October 2018

I've had another week where I seem to have achieved about half of what I set out to do. I finished proofing the Forgotten Authors book, but only wrote half an introduction, so I need to sort that out before I can do the layout for the book and compile the index.

I spotted a couple of possible jobs but spent far longer writing covering letters than I thought humanly possible. I find listing my "skills" almost impossible to do... I mean, can I say I can do accounts? I've done my own accounts for the past 30 years without any problems Can I say I can run an office? That's effectively what I've been doing since I started freelancing. These are certainly transferable skills that I could apply to any office work, but it's difficult to show that on a CV. When I spoke to someone last week (another of my skills is not being afraid to seek advice) they told me that I had to really promote myself because the marketplace was brutal. Hence spending most of a day just writing letters that tried to cover a lot while being concise and promote me while not sounding like an ego trip. It's not easy.

The one thing that did go well was my six-monthly check-up at the dentist. They don't need to see me for another six months! Brilliant!

The visit was so short that I decided to race back home and get started on something else I've been meaning to do, which is to list some stuff on Ebay. I haven't really set myself a target, but I desperately need to clear some shelf space because every new book I buy nowadays is just being piled up on the floor or straight away stuffed into a box that is quickly buried under other boxes. While I managed to clear a bit of space, I seem to have hit the limit for free listing almost immediately and now I have to find somewhere to put the pile of books that I've sorted out for sale, having already filled up the gaps on the shelves.

There are some odds and ends that I have in duplicate. The listing is a real mix, some comics, some books, and hopefully there might be something in there that you want. I'm not giving it away, but I'm pricing it to go!

Best bit of the week was seeing Robin Ince on his Chaos of Delight tour, which rolled around to the Colchester Arts Centre on Tuesday night. There was a bit of a panic as a diversion was causing some tailbacks on the road and at one point it looked like we were going to be late. Thankfully the traffic started to flow again and we made it on time, albeit at the back of the church near the mixing desk.

Waterstones had set up a table to help sell Robin's new book, entitled I'm a Joke and So Are You: A Comedian's Take on What Makes Us Human. I can't tall you anything about it because Mel has hidden away my copy until Christmas, but it was well reviewed by The Guardian.

We saw this show a few months ago when Robin was previewing it ahead of Edinburgh, a far shorter version that has now been fleshed out into a full show, Chaos of Delight, with some elements of another show (The Satanic Rites of Robin Ince) thrown in by accident... but probably not by accident... (insert your own tortuous comparison with the disc brakes of a modern car so that you end up with the idea of a controlled accident). A series of images from horror films and horror film posters flash up on the large screen at the back of the stage. Already we've been introduced to the notion of the "chaos of delight" – Darwin's joyous reaction at seeing the varieties of animals, insects, plants and trees of the Brazilian rainforest – and we are quickly drawn into Robin's version: joyous paintings of knitwear, the pleasure of finding out that Vincent Price advertised stew and that Franz Kafka enjoyed weird pornography, the pleasure of seeing Paul Eddington smile...

There are a few genuinely emotional moments relating to Robin's father and his son, both sources of pleasure, snatches of impersonations from Brian Cox to Brian Blessed, and a running commentary as he scrolls through dozens of photos... Peter Cushing... Night of the Lepus... a mouse...

It truly is a chaos of delight, but even tho' he talks at 100 miles an hour but I can't help feeling that we're still only seeing half of what he's prepared. I wonder whether there could ever be a "director's cut" of the show in which Robin talks about all of the photos because you can see in his face that he'd love to, if only there was the time.

This week's new TV show is Condor, based on the movie Three Nights of the Condor, which was itself based on a novel entitled Six Nights of the Condor... I'm thinking that after signing up Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway they could only afford three days rather than the full six. I don't recall ever having a copy of the book, let alone reading it, but the film was a pretty good thriller, directed by Sydney Lumet and co-written by Lorenzo (Batman) Semple Jr. Max von Sydow played the bad guy, which is always the sign of a good movie.

The TV series hasn't strayed far from the movie, although everyone seems much younger, including a highly trained, highly skilled female assassin with tons of experience, who is barely out of her teens. Maybe it's because I'm getting on, but I'd love to see a few more analysts who look like they've spent years on the job, a bit paunchy because of the time they've spent behind a desk, and faces that look lived-in. Redford was ten years older than Condor's Max Irons when he played the same role, and it made him more believable as that character.

That complaint aside, everyone does a good job with the material. The plot has been expanded to fill ten episodes but does not feel baggy in any way. It's a bit of a "greatest hits" album – Middle East terrorists, biological weapon, a false flag operation, the military industrial complex, and so on and so forth. There's comfort in familiar territory and as long as there's nothing glaringly wrong at the conclusion (I'm six episodes in), I'm happy to go along for the man-hunt.

No time this week for our usual random scans but I managed a couple of covers for the header. I'm off for an early night!