It's about fucking time.......

I've been waiting nearly 25 years for a decent set of Ghostbusters figures to be released . Then today while browsing the excellent www.comics101.com coverage of the NYC Comiccon is see these beuts.





Absolute crackers. I feel I may weep. A slight improvement over ..........

Nice to see i'm not alone.

An ok song, but with the greatest message that any song ever has had ever all time all my life

Charlie Brooker is right about everything!!!!!!

Crap Christmas Songs: I Wish It Could Be A Wombeling Merry Christmas Every Day

Clearly someone thought it would be a great idea to take two Christmas classics: The Wombles, and Roy Wood ( out of Wizard) and cross breed them. Presumably someone fed all the facets of Christmas into a super-computer and this came out. What results is a song that is hauntingly familiar, and absolutely unlistenable. Total Bollocks

Unedited reviews: Verbal issue 21

Pentti & Deathgirl

Emma Rendel

Jonathan Cape

On July 22^nd 1990 I was involved in an incident at a dog show in a field in County Donegal... On that day I was 12 years old, and I was attacked by a rather large Pit-bull Terrier and sustained a wound on my leg that required 12 stitches to close. As I lay in that field , bleeding, surrounded by a bunch of complete strangers who were gawping at me as I cried in my clown boxer shorts, I thought: “ this is the worst thing that will ever happen to me!” . This remained true until last night when I read Pennti & Death Girl.

The book is split into two parts. ‘Pentti’ is the story of two Finnish brothers and their reactions to a homosexual couple that moves in next door to them violence, anger and repression). Deathgirls Diary is the story of a lonely and friendless girl and her obsessions with stabbing beheading strangling and poisoning. So, it’s a barrel of fun all around then. The stories are threadbare and hateful and I found the artwork at times to be nauseating. This book made my head hurt.

NOW I realise that there may be some cultural differences between here and Sweden, the home of writer artist Emma Rendel and It is possible that I am two shallow to appreciate the deeper meanings of these tales or the artwork . It is also possible that you will love this. However it will cost you £12.99 to find out and I don’t think you’re willing to take that risk. I found the artwork at times to be nauseating

This book is so bad that it actually hurts the reader’s feelings.

Aya of Yop City (Hardcover)

By Marguerite Abouet (Author), Clement Oubrerie (Illustrator)

---

Jonathan Cape Ltd (15 Jan 2009)

I received the first volume of Aya about a year ago. I read it, put it to one side, and paid it no heed. Or so I thought. Upon receiving volume 2, I realized that I remembered every plotline character and situation. I enjoyed reading this so much I immediately went back and read the first.

The Aya Series tells the story of the titular teenage girl and her friends, family and life in the Ivory Coast during the earl part of the 1970’s. It’s very much a soap opera style affair, with romance, business and family problems. I am very surprised by how much I like these books. This is exactly the sort of thing that I should hate and yet I found myself reading two volumes cover to cover in one sitting . Why?

The key to its success is twofold: Firstly is the beautiful art. In sharp contrast to the books mentioned above this is a real pleasure to look at , being at the same time cartoonish and realistic. The characters and in particular the cities and villages are drawn in such a striking fashion that its very easy to loose yourself in some of the more detailed pictures .





French artist Oubrerie has done a fine job in making the city one of the characters in the book, as much as any of the human protagonists.

Secondly is the laid back tone of the writing. Like the dialogue from an episode of Desmonds the words and accent are both strange and at the same time reassuringly familiar and comforting. The major events are simple( a new baby, a beuty contest, a mysterious stranger in town) yet gripping , my only gripe is that it ends on a cliffhanger.

I cant wait for volume 3

Dawn Of The Dumb

Charlie Brooker

As a 30 year old Curmudugeon with a chip on my shoulder and a hatred for mainstream television, I don’t often get the opportunity to have my prejudices reinforced. Three cheers then for Charlie Brooker,Host of ScreenWipe and the Guardian TV reviwer whose Screen Burn columns have been neatly collected in two volumes. The latest of these Dawn Of The Dumb is so funny that if you don’t laugh out loud at least three times when reading it , I will personally give you ten British Pounds. For real. Ciaran.flanagan@verbalartscentre.co.uk.

Im serious.

Three thumbs up.

Reviews from Verbal Issue 20 ( uncensored)

A bit fucked off that all the jokes in this review were edited out This CENSORSHIP~! maskes it sound as if i am fair and unbiased and that is not a notion i wish to cultivate. I have reinserted said jibes in itallics.

Kelly’s Heroes


Kelly: A Memoir
by Gerry Kelly with Don Anderson
(Gill and Macmillan)


A book that’s better on the show, than on the man himself. An opportunity missed,says Ciaran Flanagan.




Here’s a secret that UTV and BBC Northern
Ireland don’t want you to know, but that I
feel is my duty to get out there. Every single
television programme ever produced in the
province of Ulster has been produced by
using an ancient magical Celtic formula that
Verbal Magazine can now reveal to you - the
reading public.
What you do is take the phrase “Northern
Irish Version of….”, and then just add the
name of an existing television programme
at the end. (The only exception to this is
Give My Head Peace - a programme so
baffling that it defies analysis of any kind).
Go on, try it. Talkback (Question Time).
Town Challenge (It’s a Knockout). Suss
(Crackerjack). Dry Your Eyes (Little Britain)
and of, course Kelly. It would be very easy
of me to say that, clearly, some chancer at
UTV saw The Late Late Show in 1989 and
thought “I’m having me some of that.”, but
that would do the man (and the show) a
disservice. Over nearly 20 years the Friday
night chat show has become a staple for
many thousands of viewers. The Kelly Show
is an Institution. But, then again so is Long Kesh.
Anyone expecting an in depth look at the
man himself had better look elsewhere.
Kelly deals largely with the show’s more
than 15 year run on Friday nights, looking at
his life before that only very briefly. It talks
about early hardships (alcoholic father,
mother working all the hours God sent, etc.)
and gives some details of how the talk show
came to be; starting with his initial primary
school teaching career and his early
broadcasting work presenting Good Evening
Ulster alongside Gloria Hunniford – which,
curiously, came about as a result of a case
of mistaken identity. And that’s about it
After that its all about the show, and if you
like the show - great! If you don’t like the
show this will be a little more arduous. A
show like Kelly lives or dies based on the
quality of its guests, and unfortunately, for
every Shirley Bassey or Garth Brooks, there
are a dozen Big Brother contestants or soap
opera cast offs. I once saw an interview with Sid Little( of Little and Large fame), so boring and unfunny , that i went blind out of contempt.
Gerry does defend his position in the
book and to be fair his reasoning (cost,
and availability) does ring true. There is
some mild excitement in the form of bomb
scares and death threats but nothing world
shattering. In short: this is a book about
the Kelly Show, and if you are a fan of the
show, then you’ll be a fan of the man and
his book. If you have something better ( im sorry ,had) to do on a friday night. Look elsewhere.

A Thanksgiving Treat.

Having been involved in some poorly acted and blocked theatre pieces over the years , it gave me great pleasure to come accross this little gem from Macy's Thanksgiving parade 1988 . It has all the charm of of a school play, with features such as a token Black Man , Doctor Dooms langer, and a retarded Hulk, all to the theme music from Back To The Future. Tremendous





Also at the 1.34 mark ROBOCOP~! appears from nowhere , pulls a lever and then fucks off without saying a word.

Happy Native massacre and land steal day America

Charlie Brooker is my Hero.

Try as i might to not watch the X-Factor, it just seems that with EoghinMania(tm) running wild that i have to deal with ill informed 13 year olds explain to me why he is the best thing since sliced bread. Leave it to good old Brooker to sum him up in perfect fashion .


It's Eoghan Quigg. Eoghan Quigg. That's not a name, that's a Countdown Conundrum. It looks like what happens when you hastily type a URL with your fingers over the wrong keys. If they still allowed text voting, he'd have been out weeks ago.

Or maybe not. Because the moment Eoghan bounds on stage, he triggers a dormant maternal instinct in millions of grandmas up and down the nation, enough to overcome any spelling barrier. Last week an elderly neighbour aahhed herself to death halfway through his performance of Anytime You Need a Friend. Because Eoghan's got a baby face. And I mean that literally, as in someone's grafted a baby's face on to the front of his head. Tiny
little eyes and a ruby-red mouth. He's like a cross between the Test Card clown and a crayon portrait of Jamie Oliver. Weird. Eerie. Like the spectral figure of an infant chimney sweep that suddenly appears in an upstairs window, gazing sadly at your back as you walk the grounds of a remote country mansion on a silent Christmas afternoon; alerted by an indefinable chill, you turn and, for the briefest moment, his wet, sorry eyes meet yours... and then he's gone.

That's Eoghan, the ghost of X Factor present. Even if he gets voted out, I'm frightened I'll still spot him intermittently in the dead of night, popping up on screen during old black-and-white films, pleading through the glass like a kitten in a microwave. Swear to God, if he's not gone by New Year's Eve I'm having my television exorcised by a priest.

Perfect.

While were on the subject , why has no one pointed out how much he looks like wee Jimmy Krankie? A point that would be better illustrated if i could find a decent fucking picture of him.