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Interview by Andy Diggle for Fusion
Alan Grant is one of the comics industry's most respected writers. An amiable but forthright Scot with a wicked sense of humour, he first rose to prominence writing Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog for British weekly 2000AD with his friend John Wagner. He is probably best known in the USA for his work on Batman: Shadow of the Bat and Lobo.
I tracked his down to his home in Essex - a stunningly beautiful 14th century converted church, complete with stained-glass windows and a sensory-deprivation tank in the sanctuary (I kid you not) - and started off by asking him how his career in comics began...
ALAN GRANT: I answered an ad in the papers for "trainee journalists". DC Thompson was a very patriarchal company to work for. They expected you to work there for life, and in return they would really look after you. John Wagner, Pat Mills and I all benefited from the fact that they gave you a thorough training in all aspects of editorial work. You got constantly shifted around from department to department; you were encouraged to learn other people's jobs rather than just doing the one.
My very first job in journalism - I was 18 years old - was working for DC Thompson in what they called their General Fiction Department, and the first week that I worked there, I was given the horoscope column to write for the Dundee Daily Courier. So I was Madam Gypsy Rose Lee or whatever it was... And I guess it's quite a good way to learn, because it requires a certain creativity to avoid repeating yourself. And I know that Wagner and several other of my friends who went through the Thompson set-up - we all ended up doing the same thing. You start slipping little messages in like, "Pisces: a close relative is in danger" or "Taurus: it may be unwise to leave the house today..." (laughter)
Another of my early jobs was, I was given a 75,000 word paperback novel which they had for serialisation in their afternoon newspaper, but it was serialised in like ten chunks of 750 words - so my job was to cut 75,000 word novel down to 7,500 words. And it was great, I loved doing it! I would say to everybody who wants to be a writer - they should start doing that. Take a book, a thick book, any Stephen King book is always a good start, and go through it and cut it by fifty per cent. Then read it again, and see if it still makes sense as a story.
Okay, the early days of 2000AD - what was it like behind the scenes?
Well, not only was I behind the scenes, I was behind the scenes approximately 500 miles from where it was happening, because I was living in Scotland at the time, and I didn't have anything to do with 2000AD other than the fact that I was a friend of John Wagner and Pat Mills. At that time I was a collector of American comics, and had been for about the previous ten years. Since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby started the Golden Age of Marvel, I had been a Marvel Comics fan, and I had quite a large collection. So John and Pat visited me with a view to looking through all the American comics to see if there was anything that they could 'Briticise' for 2000AD. And it was quite funny because they went though - I'm not saying they read them all, but they certainly flicked through many many hundreds of American comics, and at the end of the day they said that there's nothing there that they could use in 2000AD! (laughter) I think the thing that actually came closest to being any kind of consideration for a 2000AD-type story was 'Deathlok The Demolisher', which was actually very intelligently done when it first came out.
When I was kid, I grew up on a mixture of British and American comics. But, when I was eleven years old - 1960 I think it was - Marvel launched The Fantastic Four, The Sub-Mariner, The Avengers, The X-Men and everything, and I gave up all other comics and became a Marvel comic reader. I didn't look at a British comic again until 2000AD actually came out, so I never saw any copies of Action until afterwards.
John and Pat were working in comics, because when they left DC Thompson, they went down to London and started working on the humour division at Fleetway or IPC, whereas I had ended up somehow at DC Thompson at Romantic Fiction. When I went down to London, I ended up working for magazines like Honey and Loving and Love Affair and Mirabelle and Valentine and God knows what else. It was all teenage fiction stuff. So when I eventually left IPC to go freelance, it wasn't comics I was thinking of writing at all. I had been taught - or had taught myself - how to write women's fiction, and I became a women's fiction writer, I guess. I wrote stuff like 'I Stole To Have An Abortion', 'My Boyfriend Was A Hell's Angel', 'I Threw My Baby Off The London Train'... These were all first person true-confession type stories.
My first ever comics story was printed round about then, I think it was in a magazine called Mirabelle. It was a romantic story, although even then there was something odd and unsettling about it. It wasn't funny, but it was like a traditional romance story with a touch of horror, so people get stabbed and stuff like that. It wasn't a normal story - which was I guess why they bought it.
The British 'Action' comic was withdrawn for being too violent, even though they'd hit on a hugely popular formula. Was there a sense or carry-through from Action to 2000AD - like, 'This time it's got to be science fiction'?
Well definitely, but I think the 'It's got to be science fiction' came from Kelvin Gosnell, who worked quite closely with Pat. Kevin O'Neill was also very involved in the creation of 2000AD, or he came along very soon afterwards. He was already working for something like Buster as what they would call an 'art bodger'. If the artist had tried to slip something through, like in the background drawing a pair of breasts on a statue, it was the bodger's job to go through it and white out things like that, or if the artist had signed the work, it was the bodger's job to go through looking for signatures and white them out. So Kevin was doing that kind of thing on Buster when 2000AD was started, and he soon gravitated on to become Art Assistant. So really it was Pat Mills, Kelvin Gosnell and Kevin O'Neill, although I believe it was Pat's brain-child and he was the carry-through between Action and 2000AD. Because, having been the editor of Action, he saw what the right type of story could do.
Now, almost all if not all of the stories in Action, as I recall, were based on things which were culturally popular at the time, but which weren't necessarily available to kids of Action-reader age. So, the story Hookjaw, for instance, was their version of Jaws, and of course it was actually much more violent than the movie Jaws. But the kids weren't allowed to see Jaws because it had an X or an A certificate, I dunno how they work these things. Dredger was a tough cop in the manner of Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies, for instance, which again were forbidden to kids. So Pat realised there was this tie-up between things that were forbidden to kids and what was going on in popular culture, and when they switched to 2000AD, I think it was Kelvin who pointed out that the Star Wars movies were being made at that time, and that they were expected to be huge, and that they should go down the path of science fiction.
It's remarkable that 2000AD has lasted almost 20 years, you know, particularly with the amount of bitterness they've caused between themselves and nearly everybody who's ever worked for them...
You've done a lot of writing in partnership with John Wagner. How did that begin?
I got a job working editorially on 2000AD when Steve McManus was the editor, and John was writing Dredd and Strontium Dog and Robo-Hunter at the time. I was sharing a house with him, so he was using me as a sounding board for his ideas for the story. When I left Fleetway, I didn't actually leave to go freelance. I was offered another job with a guy who published puzzle magazines, and it wasn't a great job but the money was 50% more than Fleetway were paying me. So I left, turned up on the Monday morning at the offices to start this job, and there was a guy I didn't recognise there, and I said "Hi, I'm Alan, I'm looking for Stewart, I'm starting work here today." And he said, "You're not starting work here today. This is my studio." And the guy had sold out the week before, but without bothering to tell me! (laughter)
That was how I ended up as a freelance writer. I had never intended to be a freelance writer, but I had just arrived to start my job and there's no job. I didn't have any choice. And as fortune - or ill-fortune - would have it, at the time John Wagner was suffering from some kind of illness, and he wasn't able to maintain his obligations to write for 2000AD, so he asked if I could help him out. We were sharing a house, so we were sitting around at night talking about the stories anyway. It made sense to formalise it and that was it, we started writing together. We had been friends for, I dunno, a decade before that, so we knew each other quite well, and I have to say that although I've tried writing with several other partners, since John and I ceased writing together on a regular basis, it's never worked out as well.
Is there a significant difference in the work you produce with him and the work you do on your own?
Humour material is always better when there are two of you working on it. That's why so many famous TV shows and funny movies were written by two people, because you've got constant feedback. You always know if something's funny or not because you get an instant reaction. Whereas if you're working on something of a serious nature or something that means something to you or has a message that you personally want to say, if another person is involved in the writing of that, then the whole work becomes a matter of compromise, and you end up saying what neither of you wanted to say.
I think John and I can pinpoint the exact moment our partnership... it didn't fail, we stopped before it failed, but it started to falter. We were writing The Last American for Epic, with Mike McMahon as the artist, and we spent a whole day working on something, and at the end of the day we had actually written two pages less than we had when we started, because we had argued so much that we'd just scrapped it. You can't work on that basis.
At the same time we were writing the end of the Chopper in Oz story, and we had - very unusually for us, because John and I don't usually disagree - but we had a vehement argument about what should happen at the end of Chopper. John wanted Chopper to win the race, and escape from Dredd. I wanted Chopper to win the race and for Dredd not only to shoot him dead but to shoot him in the back. And John's agenda was, he wanted Chopper brought up as a hero, whereas my agenda was that I wanted Dredd painted as even more of a bastard than he already was. And shooting Chopper in the back - I don't think he would ever have been forgiven by the readers! Anyway, we split up at that time and John actually wrote the last instalment of the story himself.
Do you think the younger readers pick up on the irony in Dredd - the fact that he can be the villain?
Sometimes it seems to me that the irony escapes the older readers as well! It's a really hard one for me to comment on, because when me and John write the story, obviously we know exactly what we are getting at, and obviously we know that there are two layers to it, and obviously we know if we're being ironic. But we can't interpret it through anyone else's eyes. Experience gives you some ability to do that. But as you say - and I suppose it is particularly with younger readers - the irony escapes them. I've actually been thinking about what makes Judge Dredd popular, and I figure it's because nearly everybody would like to break many of the stupid laws which we have, but they're afraid to do so. And instead of that fear translating into rebellion, it's translated in a more politically correct way which is enjoying other people being punished for breaking those laws.
And it's like, watching criminals being punished has now become the major entertainment on television. It's like every channel, every night, you've got programmes where the hero is our drug squads or the bill or customs and excise men - anybody that wears a uniform is a hero. And the people that they punish are always shown to have no redeeming graces, like for instance if they're after heroin guys, these guys are smuggling in forty tons of heroin and it's gonna kill all the children in Europe and stuff like that.
With Judge Dredd, we used to think that it was a satire on that sort of thing, and we only said it half in earnest. When people asked in interviews, we used to say, "Well, Dredd is a pointer towards the way the world's going, and if you're not careful, that's what we're going to end up with." And although Dredd's set up in something like the year 2115, the horror is we've actually come up with Dredd laws now - almost all the world is under oppressive Dredd-like laws. It's happened now. And the next step - what do you think the next step is? Totalitarianism.
I don't know if something like, say, the Internet can prevent this, with the spread of information. Information can spread faster than the authorities can stop it spreading. The authorities are all in the business of stopping the spread of information, so they can control it. The explosion that's going on now may just mean that authority is dead. Which would be a really good thing, because then the worst excesses of Judge Dredd would be avoided.
For instance, at the end of The Apocalypse War, we had Dredd do a really terrible thing. He forced the East-Megs to select the centre of their city and then detonate a nuclear device in it, killing millions, as if the lives of all these people mean nothing at all. And actually, the way the world is, to the authorities - to all authorities - lives don't mean anything at all. Our lives are valueless. They don't care. They will kill all of us if they have to, if they thought that it would do them any good. And that is what Judge Dredd is. Judge Dredd is a fascist. Never mind all the rhetorical "do it for the good of the city".
I saw Howard Chaykin's got a new comic out called Cyberella, and I saw that he starts the story off with a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying that 95% of the people in the world are sheep, and need to be told what to do. Now, to a certain extent I can accept that. The horror is when you realise that the people who think they should be telling the other 95% what to do are people like Arnold Schwarzenegger! That's where the horror comes into it, because people like him believe that they have a right to tell other people what to do.
Nobody has a right to tell anybody what to do, as long as their action isn't harmful.
What did you think of the Judge Dredd movie?
Well, now you're asking... Firstly, I feel pissed off that by the time they got around to asking John Wagner and I if we were interested in having a go at writing a screenplay for it, they had already had fourteen screenplays written. When they called us, we spent six weeks working on it, and we finally figured out what we thought was the way to make Judge Dredd palatable to a mass audience. So we called the studio, and they immediately said, "Fax it to us," and we said, "Well, we've spent six weeks working on this, we wanna know if we're getting paid for it." "We'll talk about pay after we've got the idea," and we said "No, that's what you're paying for, the idea," and they said "Well, fuck off!" (laughter)
I have lost count of the number of times that I've been phoned up by people from the film world saying, "I've got a great new 'in' to this studio, I've got a great new source of finance, or whatever, and we need ideas to get it started off. Can you let us have half a dozen ideas? We're not paying just now, but once we're in production..."
At the moment, the people who have the option to the Lobo movie have had at least three screenplays written, and all three of them - which I have seen, although I'm not supposed to have - are total shite. In one of them, for the first twenty minutes of the movie, Lobo's a really bad bastard, doing all the things that you expect of Lobo. And then you get a scene of Lobo in a hospital where his grandmother is dying, and it turns out that the reason he's committing all these crimes and carnage and atrocity is because he loves the old lady so much, and she's on this rarest drug in the galaxy... Have you ever heard such nonsense?
So Keith Geffen and I decided we'd had enough, and we've done a treatment for a Lobo movie off our own backs, send it in to the studio, and the feedback that we got back from everybody except the executives is that it's great, this is the way a Lobo movie should be. But the feedback that we get back from the executives is "Oh, well, we're not sure about this. You guys are comic writers, we're used to working with professional movie writers." These people are like the editors I was talking about earlier. They stay in their jobs, and their main purpose is to justify their own existence rather than to make money or produce successful films....
I can't imagine what your question was!
The Dredd movie! The finished product...
(laughter) Right, the finished product, the Dredd movie! I thought that visually it was very good, I thought Kevin Walker and the guy who did Mean Machine, Chris Halls, they did a marvellous job, it looked really great. The kernel of what was wrong with the movie is the fact that, instead of telling Sly Stallone, "You're being paid nine million dollars for this, Sly! Act the part of Judge Dredd!" - Sly said, "I'm being paid nine million dollars for this - write Judge Dredd to fit my pre-existing character." So instead of being a bad tough-guy, Judge Dredd had to be a nice tough-guy. And we know that he's not a nice tough-guy. I mean you can put it another way and say, what they were trying to do was gloss over the fact that Judge Dredd is a fascist, because they figure you can't have a fascist as a hero. So they changed the essence of Judge Dredd.
Now, I haven't seen the Tank Girl movie, but I've read the comic adaptation, and they changed the essence of Tank Girl. They gave her an origin and all that shit which she'd never had, and it made her into something which she wasn't. Tank Girl was Tank Girl because she was anarchic, and they tried to give an anarchic character a structure, and of course the movie was gonna be a failure.
If you look at the one character that has been a consistent hit in the movies, it's Batman, and that's because they haven't changed the essence of Batman. Batman is still an obsessed loner who fights crime because his parents were killed in front of him when he was a child. They haven't changed that in Batman. They made the Joker the guy who did it, but that didn't matter - the basic kernel of Batman is at the centre. Whereas they changed the nugget at the core of Judge Dredd, they changed what was at the core of Tank Girl. If they do any of these versions of Lobo that they've got scripts for so far, they'll have changed the essence of Lobo, and it'll be a failure.
It's like Hollywood trying to cash in on teen crazes - you just know, you just need to hear the title of it to know they're not in step with the audience that they're trying to capture. They don't get the joke. And that's what happened in the Dredd movie, they didn't get it. I know that it's easy to say and it's hard to do, but had they come to John and I at the start, when they first decided to make a movie - if they'd said, "Do you wanna have some input on this," we could have corrected every mistake that they made all the way along. Instead of an eighty-five million dollar failure, they could have had an eighty-five million dollar hit. But there you go - as I say, it's easier to say that, and it's a lot harder to have proved it at the time. It's easy to say it with Lobo, and it'll be a lot harder to do it.
The Bogie Man was an extremely funny independent comic about an escaped lunatic who thinks he is Humphrey Bogart, set in modern-day Glasgow. How did the project first come about?
You'll have to forgive my perception of time, I can't tell you what year this was, but the first year that DC started looking for British talent, they sent Dick Giordano over to this country to interview people who might want to go to the States to work. I think they called people like Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Ian Gibson. John Wagner and I decided that we should get in on this trend as well, and we came up with this character who was a detective. The story was actually set I believe in New York, and it was The Bogie Man.
I think that at that time Ian Gibson, we wanted him to be the artist on it, but he read the script and he wasn't amused. We submitted it to DC and DC said, "No, we don't publish this kind of thing." We put in a proposal I think to Denny O'Neill, and he said, "No, we don't do this." This was before they started Vertigo, I guess that it could have been published by Vertigo.
Anyway, it just languished in a file, and we thought no more about it, until it was announced that Glasgow was going to be the European City of Culture. Robin Smith and John McShane, who owned AKA Comics in Glasgow, were talking, and John McShane was saying that Glasgow was gonna get world-wide publicity because of this thing, and really they should publish a Glasgow comic. And Robin had the bright idea - he remembered this Bogie Man thing that John and I had done and he said, "Would that work if you set it in Glasgow?" And there you go, that's how the Bogie Man was born.
It probably worked much better in Glasgow than in New York.
Oh yeah, definitely. It was much funnier than it would have been if we'd done it in our original American version. John McShane with his partner George set up a company called Fat Man Press, and they published the first Bogie Man mini-series. However, because of a series of misunderstandings and the fact that they didn't realise that publishing is as hard as it is to make a profit in, things didn't work out well. I believe that at 28,000 copies, The Bogie Man's still the best-selling independent comic ever in this country. But there was a string of bad luck. 50,000 copies were stolen from a warehouse, the comic shop was broken into and thousand Bogie Man T-shirts were stolen - y'know, just a whole load of things like that, and the publisher's budget ran out. So issue 2 didn't actually appear until a year after issue 1, and nothing is hot enough to stay hot for a year. So we had lost a lot of the momentum.
Channel Four, BBC and Scottish Television approached us to buy Bogie Man for television, and because the publisher was acting as our agent - that was normal in these cases - and as we didn't have any first-hand knowledge of either STV or Channel Four, we chose the BBC.
Bogie Man as you know is a farce, and it is impossible to translate farce into any other medium, it just can't be done. A farce is a farce is a farce. But at the time, Robbie Coltrane wanted to escape his comic actor image and he insisted that Bogie Man be written to give emotional depth to the character. So that instead of just being a lunatic, he was a lunatic with a purpose, a lunatic for a reason, or a lunatic with a cause, the whole search for his father's death and all that sort of nonsense. It totally lost the farce-like intensity of it - and having watched the first episode of Cracker, it was obvious from that that Robbie had found what he had been looking for in Bogie Man. But having said that, you should have just fucking left Bogie Man alone, ya bastard, Robbie!
Because, like the Dredd movie, it turned into a hybrid. Half of it was funny and half of it, you're going, "What's all this about?" Whereas they should have just played it as a farce. Because the first one was a flop in the ratings, it meant that they didn't pick up on the Chinatoon story and they didn't pick up on the Bogie Goes To Manhattan, and the fourth and final Bogie Man story - Return To Casablanca - is still languishing in our Bogie file. It's never been written because we don't have a publisher for it.
We got excited about two years ago - Andy Helfer's Paradox Press decided that they would like to publish Bogie Man in their little format books, and they told us that if it was successful, they'd then commission Return To Casablanca for an original Bogie novel, which is all we want to do. We've got one more Bogie story that we want to tell, and just leave it there. And of course, they never put it out. And the contract stipulates that we can't do a new version for any other publisher until they've done their version. So the whole Bogie Man thing is in abeyance.
Although I can complain that I'm one of the only three people in the country who's had a show on the BBC and hasn't been paid for it. The publisher's company went bankrupt, so John and I haven't even got our writer's fee from the BBC!
A lot of your writing includes references to old movies. Is that something you're conscious of?
Oh yeah. I guess these were movies that we were brought up on, black and white movies. From a writer's point of view, almost any movie which had Humphrey Bogart or Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney, just having these people in them did something to lift it above the normal quality. In the same way I find that, say, the Three Stooges, although they're a bit slow compared to comedy now, and Laurel and Hardy - if you can slow yourself down to that, in essence they're much funnier than almost anything that I see now. That may just be because when I was a kid that's the sort of thing I was seeing at the Saturday morning matinee or whatever, but I've always had a great love for black and white movies. I was gonna say it's not just the nostalgia, but it might just be nostalgia, I dunno...
I prefer black and white comics as well. I was brought up on black and white comics and to me a colour comic is an American comic, and when I see 2000AD now, and I see that it's all painted colour, it looks like segments taken out of a graphic novel rather than a vibrant, spontaneous weekly comic. It's lost that feel that sort of put it in tune with the readers.
How did you get to write Batman?
Well, Batman's always been my favourite comic character, even though I gave up on DC Comics when Marvel launched The Fantastic Four etc. I didn't buy an DC Comics for at least the next 20 years, so I'd no idea what was happening with Batman, I learned about Neal Adams and stuff in retrospect. Anyway, John Wagner and I had tried to get DC Comics interested in us, and DC Comics weren't interested in any projects. The first was Bogie Man, the second was Bob The Galactic Bum, which they finally got around to doing last year, and the third one was, I think, The Chronicles of Ghengis Grimtoad, which eventually was mutated into a thing that Ian Gibson illustrated and that Marvel UK put out. Anyway, they had turned them all down and John and I were at our wits end.
Totally out of the blue we got a call from Denny O'Neill saying, "I've just taken over as Editor on Detective Comics, I'm looking for a new writing team. I've read your Judge Dredd, we think you could do Batman in that kind of gritty style." And we said, we'll have a go. And he said okay, give me a two-part story. So we did The Ventriloquist story, and he said okay, you've got the job.
John and I wrote another three together before John decided to pull out. Sales of Detective were below the break-even point, and I believe that even though it was DC's oldest comic, they were considering closing Detective Comics down at that time, because it was selling so badly. Our input into it did not significantly raise sales. But then the first Batman movie came out with its attendant hype, and sales of Detective Comics went up by close to a thousand per cent. From that high point they fell gradually over the next couple of years, but then they took off again when the Knightfall thing started in Batman.
I like it because Batman has always been my favourite character. I'm surprised that I'm still working on it after all this time, and in an ideal world I would actually have gone to work on something else, but like everybody else I've got the rent to pay, and it's not easy to give up a job if you haven't got another job to do.
So what kind of story would you like to do ideally?
Well, ideally I would like to do my own comic. I believe more and more that it is the way of the future for anti-authoritarian freelancers like myself, who find that many editors are so fucking stupid that they could do it themselves. I believe that self-publishing is the real answer. However, in my own case, I've spent my entire working life, or almost all my working life, as a freelance, which means that I am dependent on other people coming to me with characters and saying, "Could you write a story about this character for us?" To self-publish something means that I've got to come up with a character of my own, which is worthy of finding an audience. And I think it would be easier to do that when you're young and at the start of your career rather than suddenly having to do it - not when you're thinking of retiring, but you know what I mean? I'm 47 years old, and the older you get, the harder it gets to make any kind of change at all.
So ideally, I've got things worked out for it, I've got artists planned, I've spoken to artists, and they keep trying to gee me into doing it, I've got plans to bring out my own comic. And it would not be to please anybody except for me. If people don't like it, they could fuck off and not buy it. If they did like it, that would be okay, but at the end of the day I would still be able to say, it's my comic. And it would be anthology style. We've got stories, some of them have been partially developed, but because of my regular work, which I've got to do to make a living, I don't have the time to devote to it that I would like to have. However, I'm hoping that after this summer...
I'm doing the junior novelisation for the new Batman movie, and they've asked me to write an original Robin book. I quite like writing fiction. John and I have always been on the lookout for alternatives to comics, and we have tried, you would not believe how hard we've tried. I have got several books of short stories which are published by Hamlin and Purnell and various other publishers. We tried doing some stuff for radio which didn't work out, we tried doing some stuff for TV which hasn't worked out yet, although we've got a brilliant idea for a situation comedy, the best sitcom since The Young Ones, in fact. It's well-developed, there's only the last part of it to be done, but every time we sit down and start on it, something seems to happen.
We've tried a gag strip for The Daily Mirror and The Sun, both of which had the same reaction to it - "We thought it was hilarious, it made us laugh out loud, but it would upset too many of our readers." I'm not going to go into it, because I've been involved in this business long enough to know that ideas are two a penny. Everybody who works in this business should have a hundred ideas a day. The hard part is firstly, finding a good idea, and secondly, putting that good idea into practice. And this gag-strip that John and I did for the newspapers, I'm not saying it would be a phenomenon, but it would be very popular, just because of the nature of it. It captures a feeling that's there in culture anyway and gives it a voice. And that's what the most popular things are, that's the way that they take off. Something like Viz. When they did it first it sold something like 250 copies and they were doing it as a home magazine. It required the marketing deal to expose it to the audience that it should have been before anyway. Instead of comics fans it was kids; obviously kids were going to pick this up.
It's galling that, having had an idea that has global potential, we can't even get it published in this country because they're afraid that it'll upset their readers. Although they themselves - they the editors - think it's funny - so funny that they laughed out loud - they are trying to do it for the sake of their readers, which they shouldn't do. A good editor will be doing it for themself. If they think it's funny, other people will think it's funny as well.
Anyway, it's not just cynicism, that - there's truth to it. Once an organisation has been set up - any group - it's almost impossible to get it to close down again, whether its objectives have been achieved or not. It takes on a life of its own which seeks to kill competition off at the roots. It's very unfortunate. It's what makes it harder for lots of these young kids to get into comics now, although there are so many people looking for work that you could almost put out a proper little comic aimed specifically at people who wanted to work in comics! I've thought about writing a book - "How I Made A Million Writing Comics" - although I could call it "How I Made A Million Writing A Book Called 'How I Made A Million Writing Comics'"! (laughter) I've gotta work that into a Lobo story!
It's interesting to hear you talk about self-publishing, because Alan Moore has been talking about producing his own magazine...
I think that would be great, and it would be the perfect way in which to view Alan and Alan's views, rather than filtering Alan through the medium of Image comics, for instance. Yeah, I sincerely believe it's the way of the future. It's just that for anybody who's set in their ways, it's really difficult to break out of them and break into self- publishing, and to a large extent economic necessity is what's gonna drive people into it.
If you did do an anthology comic, what sort of stuff would you want to include?
I'm not telling you that - because then you'd go and do it! (laughter) It's really easy to sit around and talk about something like that - the hard thing is actually doing it. However, let me put it this way - it wouldn't be a case of "get the old guys together again to show what we could do". It would be a case of utilising the wannabes and the people who are on the point of making it the way that they deserve. There comes a point in everybody's would-be career where, if their confidence isn't built up, everything goes downhill after that. Now for me it was when that editor rejected my first comic stories when I was 17 or 18. He cost me ten years worth of comics writing. I went to other fields, but I never tried comics writing again for ten years. If he had said, "Well no, it's not what we want - but if you did this and that in the next thing and tried something else", gave me encouragement, hope, optimism, it might have changed absolutely everything for me. I might have been writing Batman ten years before I actually started writing Batman. So I feel really bad when I see other people having difficulty, when they have talent. I figure it would be a way of exposing them, and giving them an opportunity.
Isn't this a risky time to develop a new comic?
Yeah, well it is a risky prospect. The thing is that it's at times of the greatest depression that the greatest opportunities arise. Anybody who starts off a successful comic, or successful line of comics, could be in at a turn of the market, and they will be first, and they will make the most money out of it. Fleetway in particular - and this isn't just their comics division - Fleetway is renowned for being a follower rather than a leader. It's always been Fleetway's motto, "Wait until somebody has a success, and then we put our vast resources behind copying it." If you look at what Fleetway have done over the years, they've hardly ever started any trends, but when a trend has started, they jump in. Whoever starts the next trend, or whoever's in there at the start of the next trend is gonna make a fortune out of it. I don't know, unfortunately, what the next trend is. Even if you could predict it, it has to be something which appeals to you personally. For a while it looked like Manga was going to be it, but I watched half a dozen Manga movies, and figured, that's enough. I've seen all that I ever want of it, so for me, it didn't really work. The cultural difference was too great.
What advice would you give to would-be comics writers?
First, if you believe in yourself, don't let anybody else put you off. That doesn't mean to say, don't listen to other people's advice, but don't let anybody talk you out of it if you have a sincere belief in yourself. Endurance is a useful quality. Quite often when I write back to people who are trying to get stuff accepted into the market, I use the example of a crime writer called John Creasey, who did a character called The Toff, who you may not have heard of, but he was quite popular I think in the 1950s. Anyway, this Toff was selling tens of millions of copies in languages all over the world, but Creasey had 450 rejections from publishers for various stories before he got his first Toff story in print. He believed in what he had. The Toff wasn't actually very good - I don't know why it sold tens of millions of copies, but the point is he believed in it enough to keep on doing it, and if you believe in your stuff then you've got to keep on doing it. It's very easy, and I speak from personal experience, it's very easy to be put off.
A lot of the characters you've written tend to be outsiders. Is that a part of yourself your own character coming through?
Yes, I'm an outsider. I love people in general, I love the idea of people and I love the idea of Mankind living in harmony... but I find that on an individual level people are bastards! They really get up my nose! (laughter) So, ideally, I would like to live on a secluded cliff-top fifty miles from the nearest civilisation, and once a month I would go and get my groceries and that would be it. The only people I would see would be the people who considered it worth making the effort to make the journey. But because Sue works up in London, we've got to have a kind of compromise. She's got to live within travelling distance of London. So instead of some rocky island in the Atlantic, I live in Essex!
Do you feel a moral responsibility towards your readers?
Oh yeah. I wouldn't write any story with a moral contrary to what I believe myself. (pause) I'm just trying to reconcile that with Lobo... (laughter) You've got to treat Lobo the way that I treat him - he's a parody. He's a cartoon character, and DC don't accept this. DC still think that Lobo's part of the DC Universe and that he's a superhero, whereas I know that he's not. Lobo's like Bugs Bunny, that's what Lobo is. But they don't accept that, and consequently a lot of the stuff I write that is parody gets censored. I don't know if you saw Lobo Goes To Hollywood, but that had to be re-written several times.
Under American law, if something is stated to be a work of parody, for instance National Lampoon or Mad Magazine, they have then got some amendment under the American Constitution which protects their free speech to make parody of something. But unless DC announce that Lobo is a parody, Lobo doesn't enjoy that protection. At the moment I believe that DC is being pursued by Johnny and Edgar Winter. They're blues guitarists who were also pop stars during the late Sixties and early Seventies. They're albinos, they've got white hair and pink eyes, and they're shit-hot blues guitarists. I've got one of their albums still around. Anyway, Joe Lansdale - I think in a Jonah Hex comic - as a tribute to the Winter Brothers, used a pair of villains called the Winter Brothers who were - and I quote, I think - "Pig-fucking cannibals". (laughter) And of course when this came out in print and the Winter Brothers saw it, they failed to see it as the homage which Joe Lansdale meant it, and they're now suing DC.
I got a call from the editor of Lobo to say that he was in a bit of a quandary because in an issue of Lobo that I did with Martin Emond, I had called them Johnny and Edgar Summer, and although they weren't cannibals and they weren't pig-fuckers, they were remarkable mainly for their stupidity... (laughter) But the DC lawyers had sent a memo around asking everybody if they had ever mentioned these brothers, and to let them know. So they had to be handed over, and since then Lobo scripts have been subjected to quite a lot of scrutiny. There's one Lobo script - which was originally called "The Hand-To-Hand Job"... (laughter) ... which was changed to something like "It's A Man's World" and famous artist Frank Quitely who is doing the Flex Mentallo stuff with Grant Morrison, he was the artist on it, so he did all the pencils for it. They have got a 22-page Lobo sex story, which they refuse to release...
I'd pay good money to see that...
It's a parody of Hugh Hefner. The guy gets kidnapped by this male-liberation group because his exposure of the female body is responsible for female lib. This is one of these Iron John male-bonding groups who kidnap him and they're gonna torture him, and Lobo is hired to get him back. It was actually quite funny, but it's never going to see the light of day! (laughter)
We did a 36-page Lobo's Dog special. At the start of the story, Lobo falls into quicksand, and he's in danger of drowning - even his great powers can't get him out of quicksand - so he gives the dog these detailed instructions - "You've gotta go do this, get that and save me". And the dog, by the time you've turned over the page, the dog's seen this female dog (laughter). So it's away humping, and anyway, it gets involved its own adventure, and it's only on the second to last page it remembers it has to go back and save Lobo. Anyway, the artist drew the dog complete with bollocks in every picture, and in the pictures where the dog has a secondary role, like something else is happening, he's drawn the dog just sitting casually scratching itself and licking itself! And DC have paid for it, but now they've binned it - they're never going to put it in an issue because the dog's got bollocks! (laughter) Oh, it's unbelievable...
You've described yourself as anti-authoritarian. How do you reconcile that with a sense of responsibility?
The way I see things, only an anti-authoritarian is capable of any sense of real responsibility. Almost all authority in today's world is corrupt. The people in positions of power use deceit to get themselves elected, manipulation to keep the masses enslaved, and force or threat of force to keep themselves in power. Unfortunately, the example they set means that their evil has spread to almost every part of life today.
How can anyone whose existence depends on deceiving or threatening or assaulting other human beings possibly feel any sense of responsibility? Of course, all authorities trot out the same irrational reasons for their psychotic behaviour - they claim that everything they do is for the good of 'the state', or 'the country', or ' the ruling ideology'. It's all crap... irrational reasoning which allows Deng to crush protestors with tanks, or Yeltsin to slaughter 80,000 Chechenians, or John Major to keep the war alive in Northern Ireland.
Look at it this way: when Fred West killed a dozen innocent people, he was branded one of the most evil men in history. When Boris Yeltsin ordered the 80,000 deaths in Chechenia, he was re-elected President of Russia. Objectively speaking - behaviourally speaking - speaking from the point of view of all those innocent dead people - which man is the more evil?
Or take the right-wing president of Albania, whose Shik secret police have tortured and slain many tens of thousands of innocent people. This president has been given billions of dollars by Britain, Europe and America, whose governments were all aware that money would be used to kill his political opponents. But they gave that money anyway - they took it from honest, hardworking Brits like you and me, gave it to a psychotic mass-murderer, and now they profess shock that he used their money to kill. The truth is, the authorities don't give a shit how this dictator treats his 'subjects'. In their heart of hearts, all of them share a terrible secret - they would just as happily torture and kill their own people if they thought that they had to.
In his book "The Insanity of Normality", America's top psychologist Dr Arno Gruen remarks that he applied the test for psychotic behaviour used in mental institutions to American presidents Bush and Nixon. Both scored so low that Gruen concluded that, if they hadn't been politicians, they'd have been forcibly locked up as dangers to society.
Do you get the feeling that comics are diversifying now to seek out new markets?
Oh yeah, yeah, and I think that quite a good job is being made of it in the search for other markets. Although I used to be a science fiction fan, I'm not particularly a science fiction fan any longer. And although I used to be a superhero fan, I'm not particularly a superhero fan any longer. I have tired of the soap opera which most superhero comics are. I'm not criticising it - fuck, I'm 47 years old, I should be tired of it, y'know? I've been reading comics for a long, long time. But the whole thing needs a fresh slant on it, in the way that Frank Miller and Alan Moore gave the whole market a fresh slant when they did the things that they did. Swamp Thing - there had never been a comic done like that before. Miller's take on Batman took it back to its roots but in a context that we could relate to. Now, very few people have that capability.
Having said that, the other side of that coin is, very few people are character creators, and you notice that characters like Batman and almost all of the Marvel characters and almost all of the 2000AD characters were created by a very small group of people. Wagner and Mills for 2000AD, Kirby for Marvel, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson on the Batman stuff. It's a talent that very few people have, to continue to spew out new characters and make them different from each other. And what I do and what most other people in this business do is to interpret characters that these few character creators have brought out. I mean, both Miller and Moore fall into the category of character interpreters rather than character creators. I think that out of everything that Alan Moore's ever done, there's only one comic still going, at least for DC, that has his stuff in it, and that's Hellblazer with John Constantine. But they've been using ideas that Alan gave them.
The whole of Vertigo is based on his ideas, isn't it?
Yeah, well that's it. The guy's a fucking volcano of ideas, they should never have let him go in the way that they did. And it's an example of how stupid any authority can be. Because they would rather bite off the hand that feeds them than allow the hand to have any kind of share in the profits that they've generated. It's unbelievable.
Have you ever been tempted to tell a company or an editor to get lost?
Ah... Yes, I have told editors - it's not anything I would want to talk about, but yes, I certainly can be a fairly forthright person. I've had a lot of disputes with Fleetway over the years. When I first started off as a freelance, I was the National Union of Journalists Freelance Organiser, and had several brushes with management which may have coloured their attitudes towards me in later years. It was the same people who fired me that I came up against fighting for the Union. But I quarrelled with the Union as well - I quarrel with all authorities, and basically the Union fired me as well! (laughter) Well, they didn't fire me, but I resigned from the Union. I found that the Union was the same as the employers, in different ways. All authorities, everybody who purports to tell you what to do, if you're not harming anybody else in what you do, everybody who purports to tell you what to do is wrong.
I don't know how deeply to go into it. I'm trying to do it in comic stories, but I don't know how entertaining it is. I'm doing an Anarky mini-series with Norm Breyfogle where I'm attempting to have Anarky espouse my own political beliefs. At the time that I created Anarky, I thought I was more or less an anarchist, but I realise that I'm not an anarchist, I'm something else. I'm not sure that there's a name for it, but like I said earlier, my observation is that almost everything in society is based on deceit, and the ones who commit the greatest deceit have to have armed force to back them up. So that, although we apparently live in a democracy, if there's anything that you don't agree with...
Let's say that you don't agree with your Income Tax being used to subsidise arms companies that are selling arms to the Indonesians that killed 300,000 people. If you don't agree with that you've only got one option - vote Labour at the next election. Which won't make any difference, because they give the same subsidies to the arms companies. So there's something evil going on here. Money is taken off us - because if you refuse to pay it, you are put in jail, and they'll take whatever you've got anyway - so we are being forced to give money to make guns to shoot innocent people on the other side of the world. What is the fucking sense in that? Who profits from that? Only the people who make a living out of deceit have got any reason for doing anything at all like that. Sue forbids me to watch the news or current affairs programmes or anything else like that on the television any more, because it is a constant stream of outright lies, sly deceits and subversive non-sequiturs. They take everything out of context.
I read The Guardian, and The Guardian has been raving about this new sitcom Friends. But I watched it, and all I want to do is hit these people. I want to have a big chain around my fist and just pound it into their stupid, lying, deceitful fucking faces. And yet, according to The Guardian it's the high-point of one-liners, and it's like life has been reduced to a series of fucking one-liners, and there's no context for any of it. Except for me, I've got context, and hopefully I can put it over via Anarky.
Alan Moore has said that he doesn't want to use superhero stories to discuss important issues - whereas you don't seem to have a problem with that.
Maybe Alan's just quicker on the uptake than I am. I do feel increasingly that it's impossible to deal with many real-life situations in comics for the simple reason that all comics are founded on irrationality. They rely on the reader 'suspending his disbelief'. It is not possible to use irrationality as a foundation for the rational treatment of story subject material. The truth is: if there really was a Batman, he'd have used his incredible detective brain to have figured out exactly what is wrong with the world. If there really was a Superman, he'd immediately be able to see through the web of lies that enmeshes our civilisation. If there really was a Green Lantern, he'd fuck off and live on the Moon.
However, never let it be said that I don't enjoy butting my head against a brick wall. I'll keep trying.
Do you feel like you're trying to 'teach' people--?
No, no. Fuck, I'm a hopeless teacher, but through the medium of what I hope is an entertaining story, I want people who read the story to think about it, and say "Fuck, could that be right?" I believe - and I'm not alone here, this isn't any sort of elitist nonsense, in fact it's anti-elitist nonsense - but I believe that I have seen through something that, so far, not many people have seen through, and that in that the near future, an awful lot more people are going to have to see through, because we cannot go on the way that we are. I'm speaking globally, where tens of millions of people are dying every year, for no reason whatsoever. And there's all this amazing potential. If nothing else, all these people that are dying could be buying my comics, you know? They could be making me rich and instead they're dying! And the more that I think about it, the more that I look into it, the underlying reason behind all of it, and I don't want to be too simplistic, but... Ah fuck, there's not any way of me telling you this without going into the whole fucking thought behind it, okay?
It's generally accepted that consciousness has been evolving since Man first evolved as a separate species around two million years ago, and that consciousness is supposed to have evolved gradually since then. A guy called Julian Jaynes, about twenty years ago, came out with a radical theory - that consciousness was only invented less that 3,000 years ago, as a result of collapsing civilisations. Prior to that point - and he has given evidence that has swayed me, I believe him - prior to that point, man was an unthinking, unconscious animal who was capable of arithmetic, hieroglyphics, reasoning, astronomy, astrology, but he did not have ego-consciousness that allowed him to think in blueprints and maps and metaphors the way we do. According to James, society became so complex around 1,000 BC that the old ways of doing things could no longer stand the sheer pressure, society collapsed and ego-consciousness was born out of that collapse in society.
Now the extrapolations from Jaynes' theory is that for the last two and a half thousand years approximately, since the golden age of consciousness in Greece, we have been living under a particular paradigm which is wrong. In ancient Greece the two philosophical schools basically were Plato's, which held that Mankind was by nature a brute and an animal, and needed an elitist government to look after it - much as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say - and Aristotle, who said that Man is basically good and kind and decent and gets on okay with other men, as long as some bastard doesn't come along and try to impose an external authority on him, which is basically what my philosophy would be.
For the last 2,500 years, the Western world has followed Plato's ideas. They form the ideological bed on which all government by force or coercion is founded. he 'reasoned' that some men have golden souls, and that this entitles them to rule the men with 'silver souls', who still get to lord it over Joe Public, who only has a crappy bronze soul. In Plato's world, the country/flag/ideology/religion is always worth more than the actual human individual. This allows Marxism, fascism, Catholicism, Islam to slaughter anyone who refuses to accept the 'one great truth' which they always profess to have.
If I can divert us again for a moment; in the harshest economic terms, there are only two kinds of people in the world. Producers, who create goods, services and values to sell or exchange with others... and Non-producers. It is recognised that certain non-producers (the sick, old, young) must be cared for. But there is a class of non-producer which seeks deliberately to live off the producers; call them parasites, or leeches. Applying this criterion to many facets of life produces some interesting results - chiefly that politicians, royals, religious leaders, lawyers, bureaucrats, gurus, and many journalists, are all fucking leeches.
Since the discovery of rational consciousness, they have constantly abused rational consciousness to provide their own unearned livings - only possible by destroying the livings of others. Now, for the first time in recorded history, there are more leeches than there are producers. The center cannot hold. As global civilisation continues to become more complex, at an ever-increasing rate, problems multiply. The mumbo-jumbo voodoo answers given by all politics, religion and philosophy are found to be wanting. As the information revolution spreads, the parasites are increasingly revealed for what they are.
In a perfect world, the parasites would all just fade away and die. In the real world, it is evident they will never give up their unearned privileges. They have now embarked on the greatest feeding frenzy in history in a desperate attempt to grab what they can before the planet goes down the drain. Of course, this is also totally irrational behaviour. However - and this is the single thought that keeps me going - one by one the people of the world are going to waken up (me too). They're going to realise - there are no Messiahs, no Gods, any more than there is a need for force-backed government.
I'll tell you, though - it's really hard to get that across in a comic book!
© Andy Diggle 1997


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Netflix Announces New Series Based On Selena Quintanilla's Life Story
New Songs, New Audiences: Nancy Wilson Says 'I've Never Been To Me'
"Selena will always have a lasting place in music history and we feel great responsibility to do justice to her memory."
Laura Stavropoulos
It's been a banner year for biopics and now Netflix has announced they will take on the life story of the late Tejano music icon, Selena Quintanilla.
The network announced a straight-to-series order, writes The Hollywood Reporter, and the streaming giant has shared a mysterious teaser on Youtube.
The production is working directly with the Quintanilla family, including the singer's sister Suzette Quintanilla and her father Abraham Quintanilla Jr, famously depicted by Edward James Olmos in the 1997 film Selena.
While a premiere date and number of episodes have yet to be announced, the talent behind the production is already promising.
Moisés Zamora (Star, American Crime) is writing the script and serving as executive producer alongside Campanario Entertainment president Jaime Davila, Rico Martinez, Suzette Quintanilla, Selena's father Abraham Quintanilla Jr and Simran A Singh.
"Selena will always have a lasting place in music history and we feel great responsibility to do justice to her memory," says Suzette Quintanilla in a statement.
"With this series, viewers will finally get the full history of Selena, our family, and the impact she has had on all of our lives, Selena's sister, Suzette Quintanilla, said in a statement. "We are excited to partner with Campanario and Netflix to give fans a never-before-seen glimpse at our story and highlight why Selena will remain a legend for generations to come."
Campanario Entertainment president Jaime Davila also shared his excitement for the new series:
"Selena and the entire Quintanilla family are an inspiration to many and especially to me, a millennial of the same heritage," says Davila.
"Selena's career achievements are legendary, but our scripted series will focus on the incredible story of a Mexican-American family and how an extraordinary young woman transcended categories and borders to become a global star. I can't imagine a better partner than Netflix to celebrate Selena and her family's lives."
As one of the beloved Mexican-American entertainers of all time, Selena was poised to be a huge global star before her rising career was cruelly cut short when she was shot and killed in 1995 by her friend and fan club manager Yolanda Saldivar.
The singer, actress, model and budding fashion designer was on the cusp of achieving crossover success in the pop music world. Nicknamed the "Tejano Madonna", she became the first female Tejano artist to win a Grammy for best Mexican/American album and remains the best-selling female artist in Latin music history.
Shortly after her death, her story was told on the big screen in the 1997 film adaptation starring Jennifer Lopez as the titular singer. The film launched Lopez's career and remains a cult favourite, but only focuses on a small timeframe in Selena's life.
The new Netflix series is described as a coming-of-age tale, that will focus on how Selena became the global icon she is today.
Related Topics:Classic PopLatinNetflixSelenaSelena Quintanilla
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I am sorry for not updating this blog recently. I have obtained another book assignment with a short deadline. Suffice to say it was hell writing it and I have aged ten years.
For my own career development and to provide better services, I have signed up a tour guide course, so posting will not be regular. But be assure, I will continue to post new, hard to find places as soon as I see them.
NTU is one of the top Government University in Singapore. The campus itself is largely opened to public, although not a tourist place, there are still several highlights that may interest visitors.
4) inside access to the Bio-science labs where new frontiers in knowledge are being pursue.
In this visit, a NTU professor explains to the students on the world of microbiology, DNA sequencing and career path of a microbiology scientist.
After the 2 hour presentation, students are invited to visit the School of Bio science labs. One lab showcase the use of living organism to provide power while the other one showcase how microbiologists use the lab to investigate or analysis different life form.


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Wetland Baquedano Park, City of Llanquihue, Chile
Llanquihue is located at the south of Chile in the Los Lagos Region and is situated at the border of the Llanquihue Lake, the second biggest lake in the country, overlooking the Osorno volcano. The city has a complex hydrological system including the border of the lake, the birth of Rio Maullin and a network of freshwater wetlands. The current wetlands existing in the city are highly vulnerable to housing development and urban sprawling. The city of Llanquihue derives from a German immigration period around 1894 and it became an official commune in 1968. The lushness of the area, with its vegetation and water, prompted the a rapid development of the city associated mainly with agriculture and the related manufacturing industries. The city lies over a network of wetlands and small creeks with superficial and subsurface connection to Llanquihue Lake and Maullin River leading to highly disturbed ecosystems in the middle of the city. Given the unplanned growth of the city in the past, several parts of this system have been lost. Nowadays the city has four main wetlands: Baquedano, El Loto, Los Helechos and Las Ranas. These wetlands are a habitat for more than 70 species of birds, 100 species of plants, 20 species of native fish and nearly 50% of the migratory birds from Chile. Present threats to this wetland system include invasive species, such as stray dogs and lotus, the filling of wetlands and its water retention, the illegal deposit for garbage and debris, industrial liquid residues and illegal wood extraction along with the low sense of value placed on it by the community.
The Baquedano wetland is located in the north side of the city and is classified as permanent wetland on inorganic soils by the Ramsar Convention, specifically the subtype of forest swamp. It is habitat for several species that are exclusive to wetlands, such as Piden (Pardirallus sanguinolentus), Chilean Frog (Calytocephalla gayi) and remnant of swamp forest species such as Pitra (Myrceugenia exsuca), highlighting the value of these urban wetlands for biodiversity conservation. At the same time this wetland fulfills a role for the city, contributing to the mitigation of and protection against flooding. Despite its important role in the urban ecosystem, this wetland is highly fragmented and disconnected from the wetland network. In 1962 the wetland covered 4350 m2 and at the present shows a loss of 92% of its surface due to housing construction. In addition, the wetland is cover in debris, garbage, polluted by runoff and disturbed by stray dogs and parked vehicles.
A Green Infrastructure Plan of Llanquihue, which includes the Baquedano Wetland Park, was developed through the joint working of the Landscape Architecture Master Program Universidad de Chile and the NGO Legado Chile Fundatio. It is a response to several socio-ecological pressures created by urban living that were affecting ecosystems within the city boundaries. In 2016 both institutions called on an open dialogue with 300 members of the community, including residences, local authorities, the school community, regional services, representative of productive industries, scientists and planners to co-create the principles for the design of a Green Infrastructure Plan. As a result, the first future vision of the city, for the middle term and long term, was developed together with a portfolio prioritising projects to be done. The plan included the execution of a pilot project that served as a milestone and reference point for planning with green infrastructure, done with the Baquedano Wetland Park.
The project was funded by different institutions including the Regional Government and the municipality, through Funds for Local Initiatives. The project was implemented by Legado Chile Fundation, Landscape Architecture Master Program UC and the Municipality of Llanquihue, under the Conservation Plan "Llanquihue, city of wetlands" (report released July 9th 2020).
The green infrastructure plan, and the pilot project that served as a milestone, had three main objectives and actions related:
1) To restore the ecology of the urban ecosystem as it has a key role for the city, its need to be valued and integrated into planning.
2) To integrate social programs in the restoration initiatives, promoting the sense of place from the community.
3) To connect the diversity of wetland patches through a continuous network of public spaces, developing circuits and corridors that socially and ecological enable connections.
Several actions based on the use of green infrastructure were implemented, included mobility strips focused on favour the direct contact with the landscape elements, contributing to maintain ecological and hydrological processes, promoting ecological connectivity. These strips have been managed through soil management, the design of infiltration strips, walking circuits at the level of the natural elevation, with fine gravel soils to favour infiltration and elevated walkways to regulate accessibility, allowing the ecological recovery and hydrological function of the urban wetland. The nodes of the system are places to notice in the landscape, given by the landscape components in the area, the visibility towards the surrounding landscape or given its role and significative public space such as playgrounds, refugees or lookouts. The areas are recognised as elements of management of larger spaces that have a significant ecological or cultural role which require management actions for its recovery and/or conservation. This includes actions of restoration of wetland vegetation, native tree planting to restore habitat functionality and capacity to serve as a refugee for fauna.
After a year of implementing the project, the changes in perception were evaluated using qualitative analysis evaluating 9 dimensions of the wetland. Most people recognise the value of wetlands and its benefits by giving positive adjectives such as beautiful, important, attractive, related with identity and biodiversity. A third of the surveyed people visited the park once a day, while more than 50% visited the park weekly. The most mentioned activities done in the park included walking, contemplating, resting and observing nature. Perception changes from the previous condition of the wetland had negative attributes associated with it such as ugly, dirty, dangerous, and the majority of the surveyed people didn't visited the wetland. Finally, the people recognised that the responsibility of taking care of the wetlands should be shared by public institutions, NGOs and the community. In the case of the park itself people recognized that the responsibility lies with each person to care for the environment.
The most evident benefits of the EEP implementation are relate to:
Maintain Biodiversity.
Increase quality and quantity of green and blue infrastructures.
Improve connectivity and functionality of green and blue infrastructures.
Greater ecological connectivity across urban regenerated sites.
Increase communities' sense of ownership and social interaction
Restoring ecosystems and their functions
This case study provides actions and information for upscaling the results and learning lessons from this interventions on the Baquedano wetlands; it can be used to inform management in other wetlands or blue infrastructures in the Los Lagos Region.
Alexis Vásquez
Santiago de Chile, Chile
alexvasq@u.uchile.cl
BiodiveresityCroplandEcosystem servicesGreen infrastructureGreenspace managementHeathland and shrubHuman wellbeingInternationalParticipatory planning and governanceRivers and lakesSocial justice and social cohesionSouth of South AmericaUrbanWetlandsWoodland and forestZoning
Llanquihue Municipality https://llanquihue.cl/
Legado Chile https://legadochile.cl/parque-humedal-baquedano/
Municipality of Llanquihue
Landscape Architecture Master Program Universidad de Chile and Legado Chile Fundation
Moreno O., Gárate T. 2016. Parque Humedal Baquedano/Ciudad de Llanquihue. Fundacion Legado, MAPA UC, Munipalidad de Llanquihue. 9 de Julio 2020, Llanquihue, Region de los Lagos, Chile.


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House Republicans tout innovation agenda
By Aisha Chowdhry
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) plans to send the Senate a number of technology innovation bills that have passed the House. The bills are all part of the Innovation Initiative that seeks to change lawmakers' attitude toward how they function in the digital era.
"This is changing the mindset of Congress," McCarthy said at an April 27 congressional forum on the initiative. "This is continually bringing more bills each time that fit that mode of innovation."
He told FCW, "You can take innovation and make government more accountable, more efficient and more effective."
"The innovation initiative is about a mindset," Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) said. "It's not a Washington mindset. It's not a Capitol Hill mindset. It's where the people are."
The bills that will be incorporated into the package for the Senate include the Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act, Modernizing the Interstate Placement of Children in Foster Care Act, No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, Small Business Broadband Deployment Act, and Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women Act.
McCarthy and Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) both voiced frustration with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Hurd said the time frame for making the VA's and the Defense Department's electronic health record systems interoperable has changed numerous times.
"When I look at the VA, so many times I get frustrated because I see an idea to change but I don't see a solution," McCarthy told FCW. "I want to see direct solutions. I think technology is a place that could really help us do that."
He stressed the importance of consolidating systems whenever possible and mentioned how useful it would be if veterans could rate their doctors via an app, have easier access to their health data and not have to go through a convoluted process just to get a doctor's appointment.
"We need to not be afraid of technology," Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) said at the forum. "We need to embrace it."
She gave her own example of how she finally started using Snapchat because it is one of the best ways to communicate with her younger constituents, and as a lawmaker, it's her job to do so.
Aisha Chowdhry is a former staff writer for FCW.


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Pakistan's Take on Brubeck's "Take Five" - Second ...
Pakistan's Take on Brubeck's "Take Five" - First T...
Willis Conover hosts Duke Ellington - 5
Another take on Willis Conover
Willis Conover in His Own Words
Music at VOA: Willis Conover - 3
Pakistan's Take on Brubeck's "Take Five" - Second Take: The Man Behind the Music
(photo used with permission)
In my previous posting, I included excerpts of an interview with Izzat Majeed, who was responsible for the Pakistani version of Dave Brubeck's Take Five (which was recorded by the Sachal Orchestra and became an iTunes Number One hit in the last week of July), about aspects of his founding of Sachal Studios and the recording of the video itself.
In this second portion of the interview, we return to the subject of jazz itself. In addition to his exposure to traditional Hindustani music in his childhood, Majeed spoke of the regular visits, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, of such American "Cultural Ambassadors" as Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington (see my previous posts earlier this month), Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis, among others, who performed in the auditorium of the Nido Hotel (also a residence for government officers) next to his house in Lahore, in on a location where now stands the Avari Hotel:
But up till now, I've said nothing about the circumstances which enabled Izzat Sahib to undertake the construction of the multimillion dollar Sachal Music studios, as well as the Sachal Orchestra project. In the flood of publicity following the release of "Take Five", in articles in such newspapers as Britain's august Guardian and the business publication Blue Chip, which notes in and extensive and illuminating interview that Majeed "is famed for his landmark investments in Pakistan, most notably the purchase of Union Bank which was transformed into one of the top seven banks of the country. After establishing Union Bank as a leading player in Pakistan's banking sector, Izzat Majeed sold the bank to Standard Chartered." In that article, Majeed, with his typical modesty, attributes much of the success of that venture to his colleague, Shaukat Tarin, Similarly, as noted before, a question about Izzat himself leads back to his father, who was clearly a decisive role model. Speaking of his businessman father's ventures into music, he says:
And while (again modestly) making no claims about his own musical pedigree, nor mentions of eminent teachers with whom he might of studied, he admits that he played a central role in the production and arrangements of many of the Sachal Orchestra recordings, though again, crediting his collaborator, Riaz Hussain:
(One can discover much more about this remarkable man in the aforementioned Blue Chip article, e.g., "As an advisor to leading Saudi entrepreneurs on energy, he gained renown for his honesty, reliability and trustworthiness." Majeed has also shown an indefatigable dedication to furthering the visions of moderate Islam--when I was scheduling my interview with him, he explained that at the time I had requested, he was scheduled to give a public lecture on the subject. And Blue Chip also reveals that Majeed is a poet as well, with his third volume, "Random Prose", has received high acclaim in both Britain and the U.S. (yours truly, an incorrigible bibliophile and occasional poet himself, is already lusting after a copy . . . .) When I asked him about the book, his answer was perhaps the most understated and self-deprecating example of self-promotion I have ever experienced from a writer:
"Allegedly", indeed!
And what of the future? Several of the articles mentioned a documentary film in the works, about which Majeed spoke with cautious non-commitment. When I asked about future plans, he said that he'd like to see a U.K. and American tour of the Orchestras at some point in the spring of 2012, but that planning was only at the exploratory stage, and which would of course have to take into account the increasing difficulty for musicians to obtain visas to perform in the U.S.
But in the meantime, the viral popularity of the Sachal Orchestra's Take Five continues to soar, as evident in the daily increase of views on the YouTube video above. In due course, I hope to write further on the Sachal Music Projects adaptation of my own particular interest--the traditional ragas and talas of South Asian music. "


Glow is an coming of age journey set in a world where magic catalyzed both industrial revolution and nuclear holocaust.
Mythopoeia's second title, Glow follows two extraordinary siblings as they're chased through the Wastes by those who seek to exploit their powers. The settings combines elements of fantasy, dystopia, steampunk, and western into a unique world full of magic and mutants; warlords and witches.
© 2015 Mythopoeia Ltd. All Rights Reserved.


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Jeep's Design Boss Says The Gladiator Ain't Pretty
by Karl Furlong Design / Comments
Not many design bosses would say this out loud.
It took Jeep nearly 30 years to re-enter the pickup truck segment with the 2020 Gladiator, and most will agree that the wait has been worth it. The Gladiator offers superb off-road chops, along with the unique ability for its body panels and roof to be removed for a true outdoor experience. Even Hennessey saw so much potential in the Gladiator that they turned it into a 1,000 hp ultimate off-road machine for a cool $225,000.
A big part of the Gladiator's appeal is its unique proportions, but even Jeep's own head of design, Mark Allen, wasn't always sure about the styling. In a recent chat with CarsGuide, Allen admitted that it took the Jeep team "a long time to stomach the proportions." Well, that's as honest an assessment as any you're likely to hear.
"The Gladiator is odd when you stare at it in profile," elaborated Allen. "I incorrectly predicted that having a convertible top on a pick-up would be dumb. But now, it's my favorite feature. I say this a lot: It's not pretty. But it's pretty cool."
Now that Jeep is back in the pickup segment, Allen was also asked whether the brand would consider introducing a second, smaller truck option. While he wasn't averse to the idea, he admitted that it's unlikely, without ruling out the prospect entirely.
"I would like to take the challenge," he said. "It's probably not going to happen right away, but I do like small trucks. I always have."
While we agree with Allen's opinion that the Jeep Gladiator is distinctive rather than attractive, we like that it looks like nothing else, standing out among other midsize trucks like the Ford Ranger and Toyota Tacoma. Besides, if anything is halting the Gladiator's progress now, it's not the way it looks - a recent class-action lawsuit was filed against Fiat Chrysler Autombiles (FCA) for a so-called "death wobble" that afflicts the pickup, a problem first identified on the Wrangler.
Let's hope that FCA can sort out this issue early on in the Gladiator's life, as we wouldn't want to see Jeep's return to the truck segment shrouded in controversy. It may be a bit of an oddball, but it deserves to succeed.
Source Credits: CarsGuide
Tags: #Jeep #Design #Off-Road
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Jeep's latest pickup offers best-in-class performance with legendary Jeep capability.


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


I am so grateful to share my testimony of what Yoga has done for me. It has really been a game changer and lifesaver! I have always been very health conscious due to my Fathers poor heart health and lifestyle changes he had to make when I was in my early 20's. It really helped me to live proactively.
It wasn't until after my 3rd child that I began my yoga practice.
I had suffered with mild depression and anxiety along with migraines and arthritis.
I noticed the effects Yoga had on me almost immediately.
I asked "How can I make myself do this forever?'"
That's when I decided I would be a Yoga Teacher. How cool!!!
200 Hr RYT in Buti, Vinyasa, and Hot Yoga.
This is a life long journey, to continue to grow and share with others, ways to live more mindfully. Honoring our bodies and our health and living life to the fullest!!
It is an absolute honor and pleasure to do what I love and help others to love themselves by taking care of themselves!!
We only have one life and one body to carry us through it.
No one wants to live in pain, no one wants to have to be taken care of.... we have to start caring for our bodies from the inside out. Eating a well balanced diet, exercising, and practicing yoga will help us look better, feel younger and be better!! Enjoy the JOURNEY!!!


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* Buckwheat Zydeco, Hollowman/Badwater @ Vinyl Music Hall 10/24/10
My parents took me to my first concert in 1977 to see the O'Jays perform in the Mobile Civic Center. My dad was in the Navy and we had just moved to Pensacola. It wasn't enough that music was played constantly in our house, but we had to see it, feel it, as well as hear it being played by real musicians. Music was huge in our family, as with many families across the world; the styles may vary, but the bonds created are universal. I cannot tell you which parent is more passionate about their music, but since my mom raised me while dad traveled and served his country, her love of gospel and soul music was closest to my heart most of my young life until I became a teenager and made her endure the craziest of musical rebellions.
"Now that's real music" is what she would say on road trips whenever her favorite songs would interrupt the miles of dark roads and nights. Mom even developed a physiological response to such music; As soon as the "real music" came on, her elbows would press against her side, her shoulders would lift up slightly and she would slowly sway her body to the music and snap her fingers to the beat. I don't remember the details of my first concert (I had just turned 3 years old) but I do know that she has taken me to quite a few concerts when I was growing up, so to repay the favor, I try to take her to shows every now and then. I haven't taken her to any shows recently, so when it was announced that Buckwheat Zydeco was playing Vinyl Music Hall, I decided to ask her. Her quick reply was, "Who?"
Zydeco music and the 2009 Grammy Award winner for Best Zydeco/Cajun album, usually aren't mentioned alongside Mahalia Jackson, Betty Wright, Shirley Caesar and other artists that are familiar to my mom, but Buckwheat Zydeco (whose real name is Stanley Dural, Jr.) puts on a show that could move just about any lover of music, regardless of genre.
Opening artists for Buckwheat Zydeco's first performance at Viny Music Hall were Hollowman/Badwater. Comprised of local favorites, Betsy Badwater and Lang Hollowman, Hollowman/Badwater gave the audience a special surprise as they played a set before and after Buckwheat Zydeco's performance, giving everyone a tasty meal of zydeco music sandwiched between two hearty slices of the blues. Their first set quickly heated up the crowd, preparing everyone for the ensuing Zydeco invasion.
Making a quick entrance to the stage, Buckwheat Zydeco and company fired up the crowd with their fast paced and unique blend of music. Between songs, the Zydeco legend asked those in attendance, "Everybody, having fun?" which was reciprocated loudly by the crowd.
The only real pause in the set occurred when Buckwheat Zydeco haulted the music to tell a story. In what I thought was going to be a serious moment, he told a tale so full of dramatic pauses and tension that it would make the most seasoned of storytellers jealous. It was the story of how he was half asleep during a flight and two twins who were seated nearby, came to his seat, looked at him curiously and said, "Who Dat? Who Dat? Who Dat say they gonna beat them Saints?" The crowd exploded with laughter. Even I, being a Bucs fan, found the moment amusing.
Towards the end of the set, the group performed a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe" which was loudly greeted with approval from the crowd. As the performance was about to close, Zydeco waved to the audience and exited the stage as a band member followed close behind him with a coat extended out, shadowing the performer as he walked away. In a move made famous by James Brown, I anticipated that Zydeco would fall to his knees while his band mate draped the coat over the exhausted entertainer's back, to which Zydeco would throw it off and return for an encore to everyone's delight. Zydeco didn't throw off the coat, but he did return for an encore. This time, leaving his accordion silent, he walked to the piano that he tickled occasionally during the night, only this time, he gave the ebony beauty his full attention while seducing the audience with showmanship, soul and heart.
After finishing a song that he stated was not a cover song, but a song inspired by "Bob Marley, The Master," he stood with wide open arms, humbly accepted the audience's adoration, and lifted two loving peace signs. As for the previously mentioned coat, he picked it up, put it on by himself, one arm at a time, and gracefully exited the stage.
If mom had been able to attend the show, I'm pretty confident that she would have given all of the artists performing this night, her "real music" stamp of approval.
-Michael Smith
Betsy Badwater, blues, Buckwheat Zydeco, florida, Lang Hollowman, music, pensacola, vinyl music hall, zydeco
One thought on "* Buckwheat Zydeco, Hollowman/Badwater @ Vinyl Music Hall 10/24/10"
* Asleep at the Wheel, Betsy Badwater and the Hillbilly Chrome @ Vinyl Music Hall. 02/19/11 « TAKE COVER AND SHOOT!


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You are here: Home / FRONT PAGE / TOP Press / Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx Announces Unmanned Aircraft Registration Requirement
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx Announces Unmanned Aircraft Registration Requirement
New Task Force to Develop Recommendations by November 20
WASHINGTON – U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and FAA Administrator Michael Huerta today announced the creation of a task force to develop recommendations for a registration process for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS).
The task force will be composed of 25 to 30 diverse representatives from the UAS and manned aviation industries, the federal government, and other stakeholders. The group will advise the Department on which aircraft should be exempt from registration due to a low safety risk, including toys and certain other small UAS. The task force also will explore options for a streamlined system that would make registration less burdensome for commercial UAS operators.
The task force may make additional safety recommendations as it deems appropriate. Secretary Foxx directed the group to deliver its report by Nov. 20.
"Registering unmanned aircraft will help build a culture of accountability and responsibility, especially with new users who have no experience operating in the U.S. aviation system," Foxx said. "It will help protect public safety in the air and on the ground."
Every day, the FAA receives reports of potentially unsafe UAS operations. Pilot sightings of UAS doubled between 2014 and 2015. The reports ranged from incidents at major sporting events and flights near manned aircraft, to interference with wildfire operations.
"These reports signal a troubling trend," Huerta said. "Registration will help make sure that operators know the rules and remain accountable to the public for flying their unmanned aircraft responsibly. When they don't fly safely, they'll know there will be consequences."
While the task force does its work, the FAA will continue its aggressive education and outreach efforts, including the "Know Before You Fly" campaign and "No Drone Zone" initiatives with the nation's busiest airports. The agency also will continue to take strong enforcement action against egregious violators. At the same time, it will continue working with stakeholders to improve safety to ensure further integration and innovation in this promising segment of aviation.
Secretary Foxx was joined by representatives from the following stakeholder groups:
The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
Academy of Model Aircraft
Air Line Pilots Association
American Association of Airport Executives
PrecisionHawk
AirMap/ Small UAV Coalition
Consumer Electronics Association
To read statements in support of today's announcement, please click here.
Source: FAA
FAA Announces Small UAS Registration Rules
FAA Doubles "Blanket" Altitude for Many UAS Flights
Regulations will create new opportunities for business and government to use drones
Federal Aviation Administration Grants Exemption for the Trimble UX5 Aerial Imaging Solution
Trimble Obtains Exemption to Operate its Unmanned Aircraft System
5 Point Before you Fly Drone Checklist
Filed Under: TOP Press, UAS / UAV Tagged With: Unmanned Aircraft Registration


Lateness. Expectation. Murmur. Disquietude. Magic.
Veljanov does an engaging ballet almost without moving. Big.
"Second Sun" follows. He sits down, but he's bigger than ever. The emotions start to flow, without control, without boundaries. If life was an electrocardiogram this performance would roam through the entire spectrum of human emotion.
After "Who'll Save Your World" they offer, with great affection, to take us on a journey through their discography. With a perfect symbiosis, Alexander and Ernst get involved in a flawlessly choreographed dance. After playing "The Game" the audience is completely absorbed. Veljanov whispers, like he is fighting himself in an inner monologue.
According to the instructions of "Follow Me", the songs succeed each other, the story keeps being told and, without hesitation, everyone accompanies… no single misstep, perfect grasp of this eternal moment. Nothing bothers Veljanov. The hairstyle has been the same for almost 30 years, so has the company. Faithful, loyal, inseparable. Why change something that can't possibly get any better? Vertiginous. Exceeding talent for so much humbleness.
During "One Night" I look down to the audience from the Press gallery. There isn't a single cellphone light on. Pure analog pleasure. It would be a blasphemy to divide attentions and who knows how we would get punished. And Horn threatens with his majestic piano, tenebrous, big.
Suddenly, a little surprise - a song inspired by Neil Gaiman's short story "The Goldfish Pool". Ernst prepares for "A Fish Called Prince" by making the piano seemingly out of tune, sounding almost like a harpsichord. A new world, with a distinctive atmosphere, opens up. We go everywhere, at their mercy… hypnotized… entranced… like a sirens lullaby.
There are only 2 spotlights in the stage and every once in a while Veljanov disappears from the penumbra into the shadows. His voice - a beacon in the dark.
Between songs someone screams "Love me 'till the end!!!" and Alexander dismisses them with a humorous "yeah… yeah…". They will not change the route. There is no space for digressions. It is what is is.
We keep going and arrive to "The Mirror Men". Aggressive. Assassination. The tempers gain a new momentum. Ernst plays with the piano cords like a xylophone in the hands of angered gods. I don't know where they are taking me, should I be afraid? I have to trust. A leap of faith. Horn abuses the piano, making it his slave. Nobody wants to believe what is happening before our eyes. We doubt the humanity of these beings. Demi-gods?
"Return" shows us that everything is fine after all. Little by little we start to accept them again as mere mortals, even if placed in a higher plane. They give us a warning… the next one won't bring any optimism, we better brace ourselves.
And indeed, during "Gone" I find myself looking back… not sure if I should have a nostalgic smile or a sad regard. We've all had days like that. He warned us… and he fulfilled the prophecy.
"Without Your Words" makes us walk through a more recent path, but no less tortuous. It's still not the time to breathe. After "Fighting The Green" there is a break. Completely necessary. The muscles can finally relax.
We return to the room for a French lesson. Perhaps "Vivre" will be useful to entrench all the knowledge we acquired in the first part of the performance. Alexander coughs. Not wanting to break character he apologizes in French. He starts over. Human, definitely.
We get the warning again… the next few minutes will not be happy ones. "Over And Done" is the next stop down this abrupt road and we see Alexander debating himself once more, like a disturbed man. Horn caresses the piano chords directly, echoing the despair.
While "Away" is busy ravishing what is left of my heart, I can't help wondering what goes on in the souls of these men, that makes them able to spit out this sort of emotions without even blinking.
I sit back for a while and watch "Blue Heart" and "Darkstar" unfold. Sometimes Veljanov looks like a marionette controlled by higher powers. Possessed. Visceral. Transformed.
They threaten with departure. But we cannot accept the end. No. Not like this. No.
But the prodigal sons return with "Wunderbar". Bliss. Return to childhood. Innocent smile. Everything is still possible. Sweetness in honesty.
We find in "Love Me To The End" the apotheotic culmination of all the previously poured energy. Catharsis.
Before leaving us they let out a timid "we love you"… And the feeling is undoubtedly mutual.