Comic Cuts - 25 October 2019

After complaining last week that I wasn't writing much, I decided to take the bull by the horns, put Ebay on hold, and just write something that I wanted to write. I had been dipping into the story of a guy who wrote fiction and non-fiction as "E.7" or "East Seven" and claimed to be a former spy. I managed to confirm his name and dropped a note to a mate who, it turns out, had beaten me to it by a couple of years through different sources.

Still, we didn't know much about him and John Herrington (for it was he!) connected the name to a film company and a director named Stephen Navarre. That's where I took a side-step and started looking into Navarre, discovering that it was a fake name and that he was, in fact, a former film director named  Sydney Northcote, although on further investigation that turned out not to be quite the name he was born with.

He has, perhaps, one claim to fame: that he directed the first ever original, full-length drama, Saved By Fire, in 1912. There had been adaptations of novels before but this was what a contemporary film magazine described as "the first serious attempt to produce an entirely English three-reel subject and the result has in every way justified the effort, for the story is a magnificent tribute to the work of the English producer." Sadly, the film does not exist any more. (Our column header is a tinkered-with still from the one movie of Northcote's that has survived.)

I had the weekend to myself (Mel was away helping at a convention) and powered through a ton of notes that I'd slowly been gathering for the past week. I finished it off on Monday, the final version clocking in at 7,200 words. Not bad for a long weekend. The question is, what to do with it. It doesn't fit in with my Forgotten Authors series as Northcote never wrote a book. I must admit, I'm tempted to send it in to one of my favourite podcasts and see if they can do something with it.

I'll also have to write up the notes I've compiled for E.7 at some point as it turns out he had an interesting career. Whether he was a spy or not I've yet to nail down any evidence for, but what I've found so far would make an interesting story.

Spoilers ahead, so leap to the end of the column if you hate that kind of thing. For everyone else, here are a few thoughts on season three of Preacher (yes, we're that late!).

With so much good TV available at the moment, we have been playing catch-up with quite a few shows. Preacher is one of them, not through a lack of enthusiasm for watching it, but a desire to vary what we watch. Until about six months ago, we were watching a lot of crime drama, which, since the huge success of The Killing, has become quite bloody and quite bleak. Fine on occasion but it became a fixture of British TV and everything—from Broadchurch to The Missing to Hinterland to pretty much every crime/cop show from the last few years—has been downbeat and depressing, and featured dour police officers investigating grim murders.

Back in the day, we have Poirot and Marple and other murder-mystery shows that we could alternate with the darker stuff. Sadly, they seem to have disappeared. Even the Rowan Atkinson Maigret series was curtailed after only four episodes, leaving us with reruns of Inspector Montalbano and, for a few weeks in January, Death in Paradise. The only other lighthearted cop drama I can think of is No Offence, which seems to turn up with a half-dozen episodes every eighteen months.

We've been looking further afield and discovered a couple of Australian shows, namely My Life Is Murder, starring former-Xena, Lucy Lawless, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, both set in Melbourne, although at different times. We've only watched one episode of the latter, so I'll wait until we're a few episodes in before I form an opinion.

I'm getting away from the point. I try to maintain a bit of variety in our TV viewing, and while I've been  watching American Gods and The Boys, Preacher has been rather pushed back in our schedule. It is bloody but so over the top that it becomes funny, whether it is a plain old shoot 'em in the head gun battle, the fiery ending of vampires burning in sunlight or a power so holy it explodes bodies that cannot contain it. If I tell you that at one point Jesse Custer's soul drips slowly out of an exploded rectum and you don't laugh, Preacher might not be for you.

Season three sees Jesse Custer (the Preacher of the title) return home with his dead girlfriend Tulip and his dead vampire friend Cassidy. At Angelville he seeks out his grand'ma, Madame L'Angelle, a voodoo witch, who has the power to revive Tulip. Grand'ma wants to keep Jesse with her as he has kept her in souls (which she drinks to keep herself alive) in the past. While Tulip and Cassidy want to escape, Jesse is more interested in getting his soul back, and reaches an agreement with Herr Starr and The Grail.

Without giving too much away, there are some stand-out moments in the show: Tulip threatening to kick the ass of a bike-riding, dog-costumed God; Jesse's attempt to ship Cassidy out of Angelville in a parcel; Herr Starr's attempts to convert other religions into believers in the second coming; and Cassidy meeting the Children of Blood, a group of wannabe vampires.

Cassidy's intervention in the activities of the vampires shows that he has a heart, perhaps the (non-)beating heart of the third season, although Tulip gets to kick some ass when she, along with Hitler and Assface, is trapped on a bus ride to hell. Herr Starr and his hapless sidekicks in The Grail keep things light even while they're carrying out the work demanded of them by the Allfather—or Pope Creosote as we nicknamed him. You'll understand why if you watch the show.

If you've seen it before, you'll know what to expect. Personally, I think Preacher works better when they're on the road, but there's nothing to criticize about this trip to Angelville except that we're ten episodes closer to the show coming to an end.