"Hi hi hi" to Ed from me and my pal Meg!

Meg says she misses you lots and she will be home soon. But in the meantime, we're havin' lotsa fun here, so don't be too sad, Ed!

Now can we go out for pizza an' ice cream, Meg?

Bee Arr Bee

Bully Says: Comics Oughta Be Fun now takes a brief hiatus for your little stuffed truly to attend sales conference with my pal John, which is always fun. I get to learn about new books and how to sell them. I hope there are books about pirates this year! There are never enough.

It's a brief time away from blogging, however: I'll be back at my tiny keyboard this Saturday will all the usual weekend features. Have a wonderful week and be good to yourselves and others.

And, as always...

A Wodehouse a Week #29: A Few Quick Ones

'Gesundheit,' said a Draught Ale.

'I wasn't sneezing, I was snorting,' said the Whisky-and-Splash. Disgustedly, he added, 'Why do they publish these things?'

'What things would that be?'

'These stories, illustrated in glorious technicolor, where the fellow meets the girl on the beach, and they start kidding back and forth, and twenty minutes after they've seen each other for the first time, they're engaged to be married.'

Mr Mulliner took a sip from his Scotch and lemon.

'You find that unconvincing?'

'Yes, I do. I am a married man, and it took me two years and more boxes of chocolates than I care to think of to persuade the lady who is now my wife to sign on the dotted line. And though it is not for me to say so, I was a pretty fascinating chap in those days. Ask anybody.'

Mr Mulliner nodded.

'Your point is well taken. But you must make allowances for the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He lives in a world of his own, and really does think that two complete strangers can meet in bathing suits on the beach and conclude their initial conversation by becoming betrothed....'
—from "The Right Approach" in A Few Quick Ones


Every year on December 25th Father Christmas brings me all sorts of goodies, but one of the gifts I love best is the annual Whitman's Sampler box of chocolate. Last year I got the big Mega-Sampler with 365 pieces of chocolate, which I guess the idea of is to eat a piece of candy each and every day and by the time you get to the bottom of the you'll be unwrapping a new one under the festive tree. That's in theory. Of course, around about the afternoon of December 28th when I was sifting through the empty wrapped and upending the box with a frenzied shake to try and find one last piece, it doesn't always work that way. But I 'specially love the patented unique feature of the Whitman's Sampler: the candy-coded chart inside every box that tells you what you're biting into, whether it's a smooth silky Caramel Creme, a frosty Peppermint Patty, or a surprising Crunchy Frog.

Aside from the mention of boxes of chocolates in the excerpt above, what's all that got to do with P. G. Wodehouse, you ask? Well, it's because this week I'm reading A Few Quick Ones (1959), an omnibus of short stories featuring all his greatest characters. No, that's not "omnibus" as in a big red vehicle driven around by London Transport (altho' those are loads of fun, too) but an anthology collection of stories which, like a big box of lovely chockies, makes the perfect companion to snuggling up in your favorite armchair on a rainy afternoon. And there isn't a lemon crème among them.

Befitting the title, I'll make this review a quick one (as I'm on my way out the door heading for sales conference, where I will pay close attention and take lots of notes on exciting books) and basically give A Few Quick Ones two hooves up as one of the delightfully well-mixed authorized anthologies that were published during Wodehouse's lifetime, consisting of stories originally published in a wide variety of magazines in both the US and UK. How wide a variety? Well, The Saturday Evening Post (poking a bit of fun at himself and his stories in the excerpt above) and The Strand should come as no surprise—Wodehouse published regularly in both. A Jeeves and Wooster heist story originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. There's stories here from the famous Punch and Collier's and the wonderfully titled John Bull magazine. There's even a couple that originally appeared in Playboy, which is a magazine a little stuffed bull is not allowed to look at, even though from that name it must be full of all sorts of playground and outdoors fun and japes for the active boy.

Name a famous Wodehouse creation and he's probably in here: Bertie and Jeeves of course (Aunt Dahlia has Bertie steal a painting, chaos ensues), Bertie's pal Bingo Little (Bingo tries to make a bit of ready money without his wife finding out, chaos ensues), Drones member Oofy Prosser (Oofy indulges in get-rich-quick schemes, chaos ensues), The Oldest Member and Mr. Mulliner (tales are told about hapless golfers and Mulliner family members, chaos etc. etc.), and, depending on which edition of the book you have in your own hooves (because it isn't in some of the earlier US printings), Ukridge (oh, nothing ever goes right for him). Even Lord Emsworth pops up in one of his rare non-Blandings appearances, kind-heartedly selling richly-bound encyclopedias of sport and unknowingly blackmailing rogue George Spenlow into purchasing a gross of the things. As Emsworth's is the only story in this collection where the desired scheme comes off without a hitch (although not in precisely the way he intended), one might presume the moral of the story is "be vaguely unaware about what you're doing and you shall succeed."

Wodehouse, of course, is fully aware of what he's doing here: these nine short stories are tight and intricately plotted with hardly a misplaced word or description: this is the well-polished Wodehouse of the post-War period, and one of the things that impresses me when comparing short stories and full-length novels featuring the same characters is that Wodehouse doesn't simply compress a novel to make a short story (or vice-versa)—he has very different approaches and, I might imagine, even internal rules about which plots work as stories and which as novels. The Jeeves story comes closest to following the pattern of its big novel brothers: Bertie's invited to a country house and reluctantly persuaded by Aunt Dahlia to steal a hideous painting. Of course he accidentally steals the wrong one in the dead of night—and, at Dahlia's instructions, destroys it:

With the three of us sparing no effort, we soon completely the work in hand. I had scarcely got through my first whisky and s. and was beginning on another, when all that was left of the Venus, not counting the ashes, was the little bit at the south-east end which Jeeves was holding. He was regarding it with what seemed to me a rather thoughtful eye.

'Excuse me, madam,' he said. 'Did I understand you to say that Mr Fothergill senior's name was Edward?'

'That's right. Think of him as Eddie, if you wish. Why?'

'It is merely that the picture we have with us appears to be signed "Everard Fothergill", madam. I thought I should mention it.'

To say that aunt and nephew did not take this big would be paltering with the truth. We skipped like the high hills....

...'Bertie,' said Aunt Dahlia, speaking in a voice of the kind which I believe is usually called strangled and directing at me the sort of look which in the days when she used to hunt with the Quorn and occasionally the Pytchley she would have given a hound engaged in chasing a rabbit, 'Bertie, you cursed of the civilised world if you've burned the wrong picture...'

But he has and he did. In a Jeeves novel this would probably be a mid-point of the adventure«maybe about three-quarters of the way through, following an intricate ballet of all cast members roaming the manse at midnight. In a short story, however, Wodehouse paces this revelation a couple pages from the end, giving him time to throw in another twist (turns out everyone wanted the painting destroyed for one reason or another) and wrapping it up with a pithy word from Jeeves. The different between the short story and a similar novel is more than just compression or characters—both are perfectly paced for their length but the climaxes ride on different points of importance. (The painting revelation would have been one minor point in a novel rather than the turning point in the short story.) I'll leave it to more knowledgeable literary scholars to map out the exact rise and fall of plots and action and compare their sine waves to each other, but a short story for Wodehouse is more than simply a shorter roller-coaster ride: it's a whole other attraction but just as spellbinding.

The shortened length of a story, however, does not mean he doesn't get to display his usual wonderful turns of phrases and prose:

His gloom was not lightened by the sight of the cold collation which leered at him on his return to the house. There was the tray of which Freddie has spoken, and on it a plate which, like corpses after a battle, lay a slice of vermilion ham, a slice of sepia corned beef, a circle of mauve liverwurst and, of all revolting things, a large green pickle. It seemed to Lord Emsworth that Freddie's domestic staff was temperamentally incapable of distinguishing between the needs of an old gentleman who had to be careful of what he ate and those of a flock of buzzards taking pot luck in the Florida Everglades.

...or this lovely paragraph detailing the quick rise and fall from fortune of Mister Bingo Little:

Now, though at the moment when he made this fine gesture Bingo actually had ten quid in his possession, having touched Purkiss for an advance on his salary, one would have expected him, thinking things over in the cold grey light of the morning after, to kick himself soundly for having been such an ass as to utter those unguarded words, committing himself as they did to a course of conduct which would strip him of his last bean. But such was not the case. Still mellowed by a father's love, all he thought next day was that as a gift to a superchild like Algernon Aubrey a tenner was a bit on the cheese-paring side. Surely twenty would be far more suitable. And he could pick that up by slapping his ten on Hot Potato in the two-thirty at Haydock Park. At dinner the previous night he had burned his mouth by incautiously placing in it a fried spud about ninety degrees Fahrenheit warmer than he had supposed it to be, and he is always far too inclined to accept omens like this as stable information. He made the investment, accordingly, and at two-forty-five was informed by the club tape that he was now penniless.

...or, the courting ritual of two avid golfers:

'Old blighter,' he said tenderly, 'let's get married right away, before there can be any more misunderstandings and rifts and what not. How about Tuesday?'

'Can't Tuesday. Mixed foursomes.'

'Wednesday?'

'Can't Wednesday. Bogey competition.'

'And Thursday I'm playing in the invitation tournament at Squashy Heath,' said Sidney McMurdo. 'Oh, well, I daresay we shall manage to find a day when we're both free.'

So, in "short" (tee hee) A Few Quick Ones is a Whitman's Sampler with all the coconut pieces pre-removed. But It's not as easy to find as a Whitman's Sampler, I'm afraid: it's out of print in the US and UK (my own sole edition is a Coronet mass market paperback from the late 1980s). While I'm sure sooner or later Overlook will get around to publishing this great assortment chock-full-o-laffs in their Complete Wodehouse hardcover edition, for the moment you'll have to look for cheap used copies or haunt your local library. Just remember to lick your chocolately fingers clean before handling the pages.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

Ten of a Kind: Wanna see my picture on the cover/Gonna buy five copies for my mother

(More Ten of a Kind here.)

Separated at Birth: "Wow."

L: The Big All-American Comic Book #1 (1944), art by Sheldon Mayer, Howard Purcell, E. E. Hibbard, Martin Naydel, and others
R: 9-11 #2 (2002), art by Alex Ross
(Click picture to hero-size)

Saturday Morning Cartoon: The Rutles "Cheese and Onions"

"Cheese and Onions" by The Rutles from The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978), song written by Neil Innes

Veterans Day: Friday Night Fights: The Real Fighters

We're comic book fans. We like our heroes strong-hearted, our adventures high-spirited, and our fights big, bold, and bombastic:


And there's nothing wrong with that.

But tonight I want to focus on a different kind of fighter. A different kind of fight. A different breed of hero. The real ones.


from Up Front by Bill Mauldin (1945)
Sunday is Veterans Day (observed this year on Monday, November 12). Not just a holiday off or a day the banks and post offices are closed. It's a day to remember, honor, and salute America's fighting men and women who have protected and battled...and many have died...for our rights and lives, in our World Wars and other conflicts.


Much as we'd like to picture it, Captain America and the Invaders didn't win wars. Nor was it muscled-ripped, gung-ho Sergeants Rock or Fury. It was the fighting forces of America and her allies, soldiers like Bill Mauldin's war-weary, unshaven Willie and Joe...the quintessential WWII G. I. Joes. The Real American Heroes.


In the best traditional of editorial cartooning, Mauldin's "tell it like it is" cartoon reporting straight from the frontline infuriated General George Patton for daring to portray the troops as anything but clean-shaven, well-turned-out, battle-professional soldiers. Mauldin had his champion in Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower, however, who overruled Patton. The cartoons—and Mauldin—were great favorites of the military men and women for portraying the battlefield as it happens to be: grim, muddy, unglamorous, and black-humored.


Salute and honor these men and women, veterans not just WWII but of all America's wars, on Monday—and every day. They never fought Darkseid or Doctor Doom. They never teamed up with Captain America or the Justice Society. But they fought the good fight.


Bahlactus's Friday Night Fights.

A Wodehouse a Week #28: Uneasy Money

Ah, yes, at last. Thanks for being patient. Here it is:


One thing I've discovered as I've been working my way through A Wodehouse a Week is that Wodehouse's generally excellent book titles are often somewhat generic. You can often scratch your head trying to remember which title belongs to which book before you pick up the volume, flip over to the back or flap, and exclaim "Ah ha!" Sure, there's a few whose titles instantly betray their contents, but for every Do Butlers Burgle Banks? about a bank-burgling butler, there's three or four Summer Lightnings or Very Good, Jeeves, and even if you are clued in that Pigs Have Wings is about the Empress of Blandings, it might take you a moment's thought or a flip through the book to remember that this is the one where there are imposters at Blandings Castle and then someone tries to steal the Empress, upsetting Clarence. Take Uneasy Money (1917), for instance. It's easy enough to confuse this title alone with Money for Nothing or Big Money or Money in the Bank, all of which must be choice monthly selections of the Uncle Scrooge McDuck Book Club. Well, here's a handy hint that you can use to remember what Uneasy Money is about and how to tell it apart from the other Wodehouse books—namely, Uneasy Money is the only Wodehouse book that features a dead monkey.


A monkey is surprising enough in a Wodehouse comedy-romance; a dead monkey doubly so. There's very little death at all in the canon—you might get an aged relative or benefactor shuffling off the mortal coil before the book begins, leaving millions to a hapless but go-to-it young man, but that's about it.

Actually, that's exactly how Uneasy Money begins, with little or no sign at first that this will be Wodehouse's sole simian-slaying saga. William (call him Bill), Lord Dawlish, man about London town, is happy enough with his club and his friends and his golf game and his four hundred pound a year salary (not all Lords are rich; some quite the contrary, Wodehouse points out). His fiancé Claire, however, is not. She wants Bill to get up and make something of himself—more to the point, to make more money, as she won't marry him if she doesn't. Bill hits upon the idea of traveling to New York to make his fortune, and, advised by a friend to travel incognito under the nom d' emploi Bill Chalmers (no one will hire a Lord for a job, he's advised), he's about to board a steamer when he discovers that he's been left five million dollars by the late eccentric millionaire Ira Nutcombe. Why? Because Bill once helped Nutcombe with his golf swing.

Money in the bank (wait, that would make a great Wodehouse title!) for Bill, of course, and problem solved on page 28 of the novel. Bill, of course, being a better man than that (and Wodehouse, of course, being a better writer than that) has more to the story. Distraught that Nutcombe's own family was cut out of the will to give him the inheritance, Bill continues his trip to New York to find the niece and nephew of the dead millionaire and offer them half the inheritance. Why? It's the sporting thing to do.

Wodehouse's usual coincidences are at work here: through a series of mishaps and machinations, Claire is also on her way to New York, and becomes disenchanted with Bill when she spies him dancing (unbeknownst to her, against his will) with a woman at a dance club that Nutcombe's nephew "Nutty" drags him to:

Bill should not have danced. He was an estimable young man, honest, amiable, with high ideals. He had played an excellent game of football at the university; his golf handicap was plus two; and he was no mean performer with the gloves. But we all of us have our limitations, and Bill had his. He was not a good dancer. He was energetic, but he required more elbow room than the ordinary dancing floor provides. As a dancer, in fact, he closely resembled a Newfoundland puppy trying to run across a field.

Hold your quibbling over that wild coincidence. As he always does, Wodehouse is a master of pacing and genial misdirection and makes the acts of characters from three thousand miles away running into each other in the same nightclub a perfectly normal and reasonable thing. All the better, of course, for Bill and Claire to wind up staying at separate houses just down the road from each other in Long Island: Claire with an old friend, Bill with Nutty and his sister, the lovely Elizabeth, who don't realize he's the hated Lord Dawlish who supposedly has stolen all their inheritance money away.

Even though she doesn't realize he's Dawlish, Elizabeth takes a quick disliking to Bill merely as a guest of the dipsomaniacal Nutty, and she attempts to frighten him off by making him help her with her beehives, taking every chance to trick him into being stung:

Elizabeth was feeling annoyed with her bees. They resolutely declined to sting this young man. Bees flew past him, bees flew into him, bees settled upon his coat, bees paused questioningly in front of him, as who should say, 'What have we here?' but not a single bee molested him. Yet when Nutty, poor darling, went within a dozen yards of the hives he never failed to suffer for it. In her heart Elizabeth knew perfectly well that this was because Nutty, when in the presence of the bees, lost his head completely and behaved like an exaggerated version of Lady Wetherby's Dream of Psyche, whereas Bill maintained an easy calm; but at the moment she put the phenomenon down to that inexplicable cussedness which does so much to exasperate the human race, and it fed her annoyance with her unbidden guest.

Her clever trick is neatly undone at the end of the scene when Bill reveals in good humor that he raised bees himself when younger and knows how to handle them without being stung. This is, as they say, the proverbial ice-breaker:

And then her mood changed in a flash. Nature has decreed that there are certain things in life which shall act as hoops of steel, grappling the souls of the elect together. Golf is one of these; a mutual love of horseflesh another; but the greatest of all is bees. Between two beekeepers there can be no strife. Not even a tepid hostility can mar their perfect communion.

The petty enmities which life raises to be barriers between man and man and between man and woman vanish once it is revealed to them that they are linked by this great bond. Envy, malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness disappear, and they look into each other's eyes and say 'My brother!'

The effect of Bill's words on Elizabeth was revolutionary. They crashed through her dislike, scattering it like an explosive shell. She had resented this golden young man's presence at the farm. She had thought him in the way. She had objected to his becoming aware that she did such prosaic tasks as cooking and washing-up. But now her whole attitude toward him was changed. She reflected that he was there. He could stay there as long as he liked, the longer the better.

I love that scene; it's romantic and cinematic (There's another even lovelier one at the end; I'll get to that in a bit, after the dead monkey). Uneasy Money would make a wonderful motion picture. Well, what do you know: there was a movie version of the book—a silent film in 1918 (apparently featuring ZaSu Pitts as Claire's friend, as far as I can find out). Hey look, it was screened in Manhattan sometime in the not-too-distant past. And I missed it! I must read my Time Out New York more carefully.

I wonder if they put the dead monkey in the picture. Ah yes, the dead monkey. Let me put him in context, shall I? (An uncontexted monkey, dead or alive, is always a bother.) Claire's staying with her old friend Polly Davis (Lady Wetherby), a showgirl married a British Earl. Pity it's Algie, Lord Wetherby, the only Earl in England poorer than Bill himself. But don't weep for our married couple: Polly makes big money (hey, that would make a great Wodehouse title, too) with her exotic (i.e., barefoot) dancing at a New York nightclub and restaurant (the same one at which Claire and Bill bumped into each other) and are able to support a Long Island country home lifestyle. Lady Wetherby's press agent, the gung-ho publicist with the wonderful American name of Roscoe Sherriff, has convinced Polly to populate her home with exotic animals to make her gossip-worthy, including a snake named Clarence and a monkey (ah ha!) named Eustace, against Algie's objections. Eustace is high-spirited and has taken refuge in the kitchen, tossing eggs at the cook and butler:

Lady Wetherby led the way to the kitchen. She was wroth with Eustace. This was just the sort of thing out of which Algie would be able to make unlimited capital. It weakened her position with Algie. There was only one thing to do—she must hush it up.

Her first glance, however, at the actual theatre of war gave her the impression that matters had advanced beyond the hushing-up stage. A yellow desolation brooded over the kitchen. It was not so much a kitchen as an omelette. There were eggs everywhere, from floor to ceiling. She crunched her way in on a carpet of oozing shells.

To explain in detail what happens after would require many more paragraphs that wouldn't do the tragic and yet comic events justice. Suffice it to say that Eustace escapes, at the same time Claire's new fianceé millionaire he-man Dudley Pickering, sets off with his gun in search of a mysterious prowler about the estate (Bill mooning over Claire). Mishaps happen, events occur, triggers are accidentally pulled, and...

'Good Lord!'

The match went out.

'What is it? What has happened?'

Bill was fumbling for another match.

'There's something on the floor. It looks like—I thought for a minute—' The small flame shot out of the gloom, flickered, then burned with a steady glow. Bill stooped, bending over something on the ground. The match burned down.

Bill's voice came out of the darkness:

'I say, you were right about that noise. It was a shot. The poor little chap's down there on the floor with a hole in him the size of my fist.'

Please remove your hat and let's have a moment of silence for Eustace the monkey, shot dead on page 127—the only monkey murder in the P. G. Wodehouse canon.






Thank you.

Still, you can't help but giggle a bit and feel ashamed of yourself for doing so when Bill and Elizabeth, taking the ex-monkey away to bring his body back to Lady Wetherby, suddenly discover their feelings for each other and embrace and kiss.

'Bill, are you really fond of me?'

'Fond of you!'

She gave a sigh. 'You're so splendid!'

Bill was staggered. These were strange words. He had never thought much of himself. He had always looked on himself as rather a chump--well-meaning, perhaps, but an awful ass. It seemed incredible that any one--and Elizabeth of all people--could look on him as splendid.

And yet the very fact that she had said it gave it a plausible sort of sound. It shook his convictions. Splendid! Was he? By Jove, perhaps he was, what? Rum idea, but it grew on a chap. Filled with a novel feeling of exaltation, he kissed Elizabeth eleven times in rapid succession....

...A sense of something incongruous jarred upon Bill. Something seemed to be interfering with the supreme romance of that golden moment. It baffled him at first. Then he realized that he was still holding Eustace by the tail.

Try doing that in the movies, Hugh Grant.

I've quoted liberally from the text of Uneasy Money because for an early-ish work of Wodehouse, it really is one of his more romantic novels; certainly the most romantic of the books that I've read so far. There's a tearful parting of Elizabeth and Bill just about when you think the book is ready to end; so sad I had to set the novel down for a few minutes and sniffle into my hanky. She loves him but refuses to marry him because he's offered her the inheritance; she's afraid she might be in love with him because he's the solution to her money troubles, and so sends him away. Minutes later (as is wont to happen in Wodehouse books), when news arrives that Elizabeth is the true heir after all, there's a last-minute chase to the Long Island Rail Road train station to catch up with Bill before he choo-choos out of her life forever. All is forgiven; both are in love, and Bill has no trouble at all with his wife being the rich one in the family—money for nothing (hey!) was never at his comfort level. And as the two snuggle in their train seats on the way to a Manhattan justice of the peace, the book ends with this wonderfully sweet and romantic concluding paragraph:

'...Bill, listen. Come closer and tell me all sorts of nice things about myself till we get to Jamaica, and then I'll tell you what I think of you. We've just passed Islip, so you've plenty of time.'

Awwwwwwww. As a frequent rider of the LIRR myself, that's the nicest thing that has ever happened on those trains. And that includes the time I found a dime under the seats.

Oh, any by the way, just to reassure you: no monkeys were harmed in the making of this Wodehouse a Week post:


I'm rather charmed at how so many different editions of Uneasy Money have completely different scenes depicted on their covers. The old jacketed edition in the banner heading of this post depicts Bill and Elizabeth in that lyrical final scene on the train. My trusty Penguin 1980s paperback reprint portrays, painted by Wodehouse favorite Ionicus, a scene that doesn't actually happen in the book itself and is only referred to in flashback: the golf game where Bill impressed Lord Nutcombe so much he was left the five million. The Everyman/Overlook hardcover reprint had Bill and Elizabeth at the beehive (you can pick this edition up by clicking the Amazon link to the right), and I recently won on eBay a lovely older Penguin edition with a cartoon drawing of Eustace the monkey raising heck and tossing eggs in the country house kitchen. So I thank all the publishers and designers of all these editions for their excellent sense of book design and for resisting the impulse to put a dead monkey on the cover. That sort of thing belongs on an Irvine Welsh novel, not P. G. Wodehouse.

A Wodehouse a Week Index.

I pity the fool who don't know it's clobberin' time

As Jack Benny used to say "We're a little late, so good night, folks." In other words...Wodehouse tomorrow. (I picked a slightly longer book this week by chance!) It's been a long day, so I'll leave you with just one brief but fun image...

The Thing as Mr. T, in a drawing submitted by fan Anthony Hochrein (now a pro illustrator) to the "Fantastic Four Fan Page" letter column in FF #261 (December 1983):

Johnny Storm is a Dumbass, Exhibit A

To paraphrase Pseudolus: "Wodehouse tomorrow, Johnny Storm tonight!"

Okay, let's do a little roleplaying here, shall we? Get yourself for a moment in the head of Mister Johnny Storm, a.k.a. The Human Torch, won't you? Okay, you set? All comfy in there? Wait...stop thinking about Angelina Jolie...okay, shove Beyoncé over to the side of your mind...okay, now clear your head of this and this...you all set?

Okay, you're Johnny Storm. First, step away from the drapes. Next...imagine that you're alone in the Baxter Building when suddenly...Dr. Doom attacks! Awwww, he's always doin' that. And he's brought some kind of sophisticated battle robot that's just meant for clobberin' time, but which is impervious to flame. Now, think about this: in the middle of the pitched battle, you've got a moment to leave a warning message for the rest of the FF, or perhaps your beloved sister. You're gonna be quick and succinct, right? A few fast words to outline the situation, huh? What would you write? What would you write?

Well, maybe you could write "DOOM & ROBOT ATTACKED" or "FIGHTING DOOM + ROBOT" or even "BEWARE DOOM." Something fast. Something quick. Something that'll let your teammates know the terrors facing them without taking too much time about it, right? You'd think you'd write four, maybe five words, huh?

Panel from Fantastic Four #34, written by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby and Chic Stone, lettering by Artie Simek

I mean...at least...at least abbreviate it as "Dr.".

To sum up: Johnny Storm: dumbass.

Ten of a Kind: Army of Me

Special Bonus Buncha Bullys!:

(More Ten of a Kind here.)

Separated at Birth: And over the rooftops when the stars prickle the skies/London is sleeping

L: Excalibur #1 (October 1988), art by Alan Davis and Paul Neary
M: Excalibur #21 (April 1990), art by Chris Wozniak and Al Milgrom
R: X-Men: Die by the Sword #1 (December 2007), art by Jelena Kevic-Djurdevic
(Click picture to Big Ben-size)

Saturday Morning Cartoon: Doctor Who: The Infinite Quest

"Doctor Who: The Infinite Quest" (2007), written by Alan Barnes and directed by Gary Russell
Featuring the voices of David Tennant and Freema Agyeman

Watch the rest:
Episode 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 & 13

Friday Night Fights: The Female of the Species is More Punchy Than the Male

The next time those bullies bad teenagers down at the playground tell me that I hit like a girl...






...I'm going to say to them, Why thank you very much!

You can find this and many more pummeling presentations of punching with pulchritude by "One Punch Goldberg" in the ultra-wonderful Biff-Bam-Pow! #1 (2007) by Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, on sale this week at your local comic book store. Don't miss it; it's one of the most fun comics of the year!

When he puts out the call for fight night, Bahlactus ain't monkeyin' around.

Another thing I don't get about the Star Wars Universe

Why is everybody always acting like it's a big surprise that Darth is the Princess's father? Like that comes out of left field or something in the third movie. Hey, you can pretty much tell that's exactly their relation from the first time you see 'em. Don't believe me? Why, look at the family resemblance...it's uncanny:


And hey, look: they've got the same freakin' last name.


What's more, she has her father's eyes.

A Wodehouse a Week Special: Scream for Jeeves

Happy Halloween, everybody! On this darkest of nights, what say we entertain ourselves by snuggling up in our cozy armchairs and reading some spooky, chilling tales...like, f'r instance, a Jeeves and Wooster story? But Bully! I hear you say (with your mouth all fulla candy corn) Jeeves and Bertie stories aren't scary! And there you have me. Wodehouse's work is nothing if not light and airy: a few scary aunts and threatened marriages aside, there's not a sliver of fright in the lot of 'em. So instead, let's wander off the well-lit path of Official Wodehouse Canon into the dimly-lit and spooky, dead-tree-laden dark woods of fan fiction, shall we? And like much fan fiction, it can be a scary, scary place...

Tonight's special Halloween offering is the professionally-printed but still unauthorized Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (1994) by P. H. Cannon, a loving if unorthodox homage and mashup of two initialed writers who probably never suspected their worlds could collide: P. G. Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft. I'll pause a moment to let that sink in, shall I? P. G. Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft. And, as we'll see in a while, a little dash of A. C. Doyle has been added to the bubbling mixture in the cauldron.

Scream for Jeeves (and I think that's a brilliant title) is a slim volume of three short stories and one historical essay—so brief that I read it all in one single one-way trip to Manhattan on the subway instead of the usual round trip. The conceit is that Bertie Wooster and Jeeves's right-ho Georgian world is the same in which Lovecraft's horrific dark ancient god Cthulhu is breaking through, and Bertie keeps bumbling into the mind-shearing events that precede a horrific bloody invasion with his usual cheerful aplomb (and the life- and sanity-saving help of Jeeves). I'm not as familiar with the world of Mister HPL as I am with Mister PGW, but Cannon certainly has his lead characters and especially the voice of Bertie Wooster down pat, even as he confronts things man was not meant to know:

'I trust you slept well, Mr. Wooster,' said my host, as he pushed the kippers about the plate in a morose, devil-take-the-hindmost sort of way.

'Like a top, old sport. Like a top.'

'I was harassed by dreams of the most horrible sort. First there was a vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalcho, with a horror in a covered platter.'

'Could it have been something you ate?' I said, sounding the solicitous tone. I didn't want to hurt the old fellow's feelings, of course, so I refrained from saying that the fish sauce the night before had been someone below par. In truth, the cook at Exham Priory was not even in the running with Anatole, my Aunt Dahlia's French chef and God's gift to the gastric juices.

'Next I seemed to be looking down from an enormous height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep in filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing.'

'Could it have been something you read before retiring? "Mary Had a Little Lamb" perhaps? Mind you, that one's about a shepherdess, not a swineherd, but it's the same sort of thing, don't you know.'

'Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beast and man alike.'

'Rats! By Jove, this is getting a bit thick. My man Jeeves thinks rats may have been the party to blame for your cats carrying on the other day like they had broken into the catnip.'

In fact, throughout the stories, Jeeves serves as our guide to the dark doings; he's remarkably well-informed (well, of course!) about ancient beasts and demons and is well-read in the work of Arthur Machen. Thanks to Jeeves, no real harm comes to Bertie throughout the course of their dread adventures—at least nothing that a stiff g. & t. won't whisk away later on:

Within an hour the altar stone was tilting backwards, counterbalanced by Tubby, and there lay revealed— But how shall I describe it? I don't know if you've ridden much though the tunnel-of-horrors featured at the better amusement parks, but the scene before us reminded me strongly of same. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling on a flight of stone steps, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones. Not a pretty sight, you understand, but at least there was a cool breeze with something of freshness in it blowing up the arched passage. I mean to say, it could have been a noxious rush as if from a closed vault. We did not pause long, but shiveringly began to cut a swath through the ancestral debris down the steps. It was then that Jeeves noticed something odd.

'You will observe, sir, that the hewn walls of the passage, according to the direction of the strokes, must have been chiseled from beneath.'

'From beneath, you say, Jeeves?'

'Yes, sir.'

'But in that case—'

'For the sake of your sanity, sir, I would advise you not to ruminate on the implications.'

It's not great art and certainly can't stand up to the best of Wodehouse (or likely even Lovecraft), but it has a certain appeal, and it's just the right length. Sort of like a headline from The Onion, the concept is funny enough on its own without delving too deeply into exploring it, and three short stories running 64 pages total are just enough. It's tough to imitate Wodehouse without slipping into total parody, and Cannon carries it off most of the time, although occasionally he piles on so many of Bertie's self-references to actual Wodehouse events (Florence Craye, the article Bertie wrote for his aunt's magazine, Sir Roderick Glossop) that it just seems like he's including them just for sheer trivia's sake. And he's not above inserting an awkward, groan-inducing pop-culture reference when Bertie linguistically tangles with a foreign landlady:

'Ah, Mistair Jeeves, I so glad you come.'

'Wooster's the name, my good man...er, woman.'

'Is just in time. Doctair Muñoz, he have speel his chemicals.'

'Well, I shouldn't worry if he spilled his chemicals on the woodwork or marble. I daresay no one will notice.'

'All day he take funnee-smelling baths.'

'Oh, really? Perhaps he got soap in his eyes and grabbed the jar of hydrogen sulfide instead of the bubble bath.'

'He cannot get excite.'

'He can't get outside? Yes, I know, Randy told me, but—'

'And the sal-ammoiniac—'

'Sal who?"

'Qué?'

I was prepared to play Pat to Mrs. Herrero's Mike as long as I had to, but at that moment Randy arrived and put the kibosh on the cross-talk. 'Don't mind her," he explained, as he clouted his landlady affectionately on the occiput. 'She's from Barcelona.'

Sherlock Holmes is under the magnifying glass as well in these parodies: he pops up in the final of the three stories, thinly disguised as 'Altamont," Holmes's pseudonym in the Conan Doyle story "His Last Bow." That inclusion means Cannon can examine three authors instead of merely two: the last third of Scream for Jeeves is taken up with an essay entitled "The Adventure of the Three Anglo-American Authors: Some Reflections of Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft," which is a nice-enough little piece if it were a salute or admiration, but Cannon attempts to be too scholarly and winds up failing to convince us of any of his arguments, especially when he begins by pointing out the similarities of Doyle, Wodehouse, and Lovecraft are that "the supreme fictional achievements of each are roughly comparable in size: Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon consists of 56 stories and four novels; Wodehouse's Jeeves saga embraces 34 stories and 11 novels; and Lovecraft's core corpus, including his Mythos cycles, amounts to two dozen or so stories and three novels." He goes on to point out that such a superficial similarly proves nothing, which begs the question of why he begins his argument with it. The rest of the essay is devoted to drawing parallels and connections between the three authors. Unfortunately, most of the arguments can connect two of the trio but not the third, and much of it is based on post-facto circumstantial POV evidence that would get his work kicked off a Wikipedia page—for instance, he spends a hefty paragraph pointing out that Stephen King likes Lovecraft and has written a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and that actor Stephen Fry has also written a Holmes short story and has played Jeeves on television. He also spends a good deal of energy discussing racist language and attitudes in the work of the three authors, an argument that I don't think holds water (although I'm understandably prejudiced in favor of the idea that Wodehouse very seldom usages of the n-word were done innocently and in keeping with vernacular slang of the time rather than racism or hate). And then there's this specious argument:

Finally, like Bertie and his chums, Lovecraft had a penchant for assigning his friends funny nicknames, such as "Klarkash-Ton" for Clark Ashton Smith, "Melmoth the Wandrei" for Donald Wandrei, "Hilly Billy' Crawford for William L. Crawford, and "Sonny" or "Kid" or "Belknapius" for Frank Belknap Long, Jr. I rest my case.

Still, don't judge the book on the essay but on the fiction itself, which is amusing and competent. Cannon has the voice of Bertie Wooster down pitch-perfect, although those I've only read a smattering of Lovecraft in my time (it's a little too intense for a small stuffed animal!), he's got that unnerving sense of despair to a T as well. Wodehouse's books spin around the sparkling dialogue and Lovecraft's around the ponderous descriptive prose, and Cannon pulls off a tidy and artful balance of the two, especially bringing two such light and cheering characters into a dark world that is heavy with dread and encroaching despair. Like Lovecraft's work itself, the horrific End of Days events don't manifest themselves concretely in Scream for Jeeves—but the ever-present maddening pull into darkness and crushing dread of his world are wonderfully and elegantly portrayed, and it's an nifty solution to have Bertie black out conveniently whenever anything really horrific is about to happen, only to hear later on from Jeeves that it was all for the best that you did not observe the circumstances, sir. Let that be hope for all of us when the demons start climbing out of the fiery cracks in the broken earth: it's all just a nightmare that can be easily erased by a lingering hot bath and a stiff drink, and the quick wits and incalculable knowledge of our own gentleman's gentleman. After all, if Jeeves can stave off Honoria Glossop from marrying Bertie, then Cthulhu and his quivering tentacles aren't going to make him go 'boo.'



Scream for Jeeves was published by the (aptly named) Wodecraft Press and distributed by the Necronomicon Press, the publishing house where all the ISBNs end in 66-6, but you don't have to go to heck and back to secure a copy. Even though it's out of print, there's still plenty of used copies scurrying about like rats on the internet, and all you have to do is click on the Amazon link to the right and order yourself up a copy. Make sure you pay for it with Visa or MasterCard; never click on the "immortal soul" option when choosing payment at checkout.

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