True Crime and Western Titles

INTRODUCTION I have made my living – half of it, anyway – over the past quarter of a century, researching and scripting short drama and comedy presentations for performance at historical sites around Scotland. The other half, incidentally, is earned acting in such offerings. I can honestly say that every script I have ever produced has been sold and produced. Whether they are any god or not...well, that’s another matter entirely. I’m a hack, a writer for hire. Aside from my Living History dramas, I write books on lcal history and folklore for The History Press, and others. That I’m still in work after a quarter of a century may well have more to do with pig-headed persistence than talent, but my work at least allows me to engage with audiences, and to try to share my enthusiasm for the subjects, themes and issues dealt with in my writing. In 2010 I was approached by the owners of GeekPlanetOnline, and asked to produce a weekly column. These gents were aware of my work from various reviews and commentaries offered up to readers of SFX Magazine’s online forums. GeekPlanet proclaiming itself ‘The Fascination Nation’, I was given free reign to produce pieces on any subject I chose – from Comic Books, Monster Movies and Geek Culture to Philosophy, Literature and issues of National Identity. My own personal bugbears, beliefs, heroes and villains were thus presented for the entertainment and elucidation of the websites ever-expanding readership. I can only hope that, as with my other writing I was able to convey a little of my enthusiasm (and occasional ire) on the subjects at hand to my audience. After a year or so, with sixty-odd columns to my credit, health issues required that I withdraw from GeekPlanet as a regular contributor. Since that time I have been asked many times to compile an anthology of these essays. So, finally, with very little revision, I now present just such a collection. The original columns are still available on GeekPlanetOnline.Com . It’s title, Hangman’s Joke, refers not to the rock band featured in the mythology of The Crow comic book series, as some have assumed – but to the ‘Happy Hangman’, Jock Rankin, Stirling’s infamous 18th-century executioner, whom I portray on the Stirling GhostWalk, and who gives me my online moniker. I hope you enjoy this random selection. If you do, tell your friends. If not...well, it’s free, so no harm is done! Original columns edited by Christopher Brosnahan and Gillian Coyle at GeekPlanetOnline.Com How The Hangman Got His Groove Back Barry’s Dead? (c) 1986 DC Comics It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single geek in possession of a column, must be in search of a gimmick...or, at the very least, a good by-line. I wear my ironic anorak with pride. That said, it came as something of a surprise to be asked, some years back, to opine for your delectation and delight on matters genre- related for the GeekPlanetOnline website. Put simply, I didn’’t have great Sci-Fi credentials. Oh, as a bright-eyed, bushy tailed young quot, I could have quoted screeds of script from Star Trek, and confidently quibbled over continuity quirks in the mythology of Dr Who. And I did. Often. I may not have known my Nine Times Table, but was contentedly aware of Gallifrey’s interspacial co-ordinates in relation to Galactic-Zero-Centre (well, you never know when that kind of information will prove invaluable). I gorged myself on pastry-engineer turned scribbler ‘Skylark’ Smith’s delightfully doughy daydreams. I cracked my teeth on Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat novels, and got sand in my metaphorical arse-crack mulling over Frank Herbert’s Dune. I learned the act of fine fictive dining through the three-course delight that was, is, and shall be ever more Lord of the Rings. I was voracious. I lived and breathed Star Wars, on it’s first release, and my mother commented - as the alien Mothership arrived at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind - that they’d probably come to take me home (Thanks, Mum!). Hell, I even watched every episode of Space Cops. That’s dedication. Or possibly masochism. My great passion, though, was comics. Well, not originally. As a very young child with an advanced reading age I utterly loathed the funny-animal/cheeky-brat titles that dominated the British market in the early ‘70s – Topper, Beezer, Beano and Dandy –and, worse still, the true-blue, gleefully xenophobic dross of Warlord, Battle, Action and Hotspur, war comics which, for years, were the only option for boys who had outgrown the slapstick sado-masochism of The Bash Street Kids – still fighting forty-year-old battles, and creating a generation of blokes whose command of German language and culture remains limited to occasional outbursts of ‘Achtung!’, ‘Gott in Himmell!’ and ‘For you, Tommy, ze var is offur!’ These were not for me. I had a taste for the exotic, even as a seven year old. My youthful heart yearned for the four-colour delights of the US imports – Marvels and DCs, mostly – brought over as ballast, and sold off at the quayside to newsagents. These were heroes with amazing powers. Brave men, sexy women, marvellous mythologies, gloriously silly gadgets and gizmos, satellite HQs – ‘flight rings’, fer chrissakes! - able to face down all manner of menaces, mystic, monstrous or mundane. And they didn’t kill. And in between all the death-rays and thwarted caraclysms I learned about racism, drug abuse and corporate corruption reading Denny O’Neil’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow – subjects hardly ever offered up to young audiences in the squeaky-clean British media of the day. There were ideas here…not just nasty Teutonic types being bally-well blown to billy-o by plucky King-and-Country types. I learned a lot from Black Canary and Wonder Woman, too – women in British comics were mums, girlfriends and teachers, burdensome beldames, battleaxes or victims - but these women were heroes every bit as powerful and courageous as their muscle-bound male compatriots. They just had their bumps in more pleasing places. When the Fantastic Four called themselves ‘Imaginauts’ you knew damned well that they were: anything was possible – anything at all – within those pages. This was the early ‘70s. Crammed into the revolving racks at the back of corner-shops, you were lucky to find two consecutive issues of the same US title. I started making myself known to certain strategically-located proprietors, asking them to keep hold of particular issues of The Flash or Detective Comics if they chanced upon them. Mostly, though, like the work of any gumshoe seeking elusive prey on those mean streets, it was down to leg-work. That added to the exotic nature of the prize. If you really wanted to find out how the JLA escaped the ‘Crisis on Earth-S’ in #136 of their book (and I did, I really did) you had to run around every newsagent and grocer in town seaching for the next issue. Marvel had their own black-and-white UK reprints, of course, and the stories printed there were probably better drawn and scripted than their imported DC cousins, but there was less of an effort required to get through the threshold of the Mighty World of Marvel, and, as you know, every true geek loves a quest. Then came 2000AD, the short-lived (but superior) Starlord, and less satisfying Tornado, and for a few years the best sci-fi and fantasy comics I was reading came from closer to home – ‘Skizz’, ‘The Visible Man’, ‘The Ballad of Halo Jones’, ‘Ro-Busters’…. The early ‘80s saw the so-called ‘Marvel Revolution’, where their half a dozen quality reprints were cruelly supplanted by twice as many insubstantial cut-and-paste knock-offs. It was a cynical, unsatisfying move to make more use of the company’s back-catalogue. I felt cheated. I felt used, goddammit! My heart broken by my first love, I moved on…to university. I didn’t look back. As I grew older – my eyes dimmed and my tail, sadly, the only part of me that was even remotely bushy – my interest in fantastical fictions failed, and I embraced new forms of geekdom – literary, musical, historical and philosophical. I still enjoyed The X-Files (mostly), and the various Star Trek movies, but (aside from an acknowledgement of the universal truth that all the odd-numbered flicks were crap) found that I had lost my enthusiasm for the genre – or, rather, that I still liked a lot of what I used to like, but not to the obsessive, passionate degree that had typified my former fandom. I rarely, if ever, read modern sci-fi or fantasy – save for the occasional academic re-appraisal of Wells, Stoker or M.R. James. As for comics. Pah! Kids stuff. Then an odd thing happened. On a dull, grey Edinburgh afternoon in the mid-’90s, I took shelter from the charming climate of Calidonia’s capital in the city’s Forbidden Planet. I perused the comic-racks in puzzlement. One cover in particular caught my eye: Wally West was (apparently) ‘The Fastest Man Alive’? Bollocks. Where was Barry Allen? Why was Kid-Flash wearing his Uncle’s clobber? I must have been sufficiently slack-jawed to attract the attention of one of the staff, as I felt a consoling hand on my shoulder. “Barry’s dead!” Eh? I felt – ridiculous as it may seem – guilty.

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