Across the Pond: To Floyd No More

News

A Farewell To Some Things

I’m off. I’m stepping down. You won’t have Floyd to kick around any more. Ciao! Hoo-roo. Sayonara suckers. Hasta la vis- I guess I should explain.

What I’m doing in the paragraph above is kicking around a few phrases involved with my decision to stop doing my ‘Across the Pond’ column. I’m giving it up because of my study.

At this point any readers who also visit the admirable 2000Adonline messageboard will groan, yawn and/or say ‘again?’. I must have taken at least three breaks from the board in order to Get Things Done. I did that because I find the board quite addictive like a lot of things on the net. It’s a struggle for me to only check my email once a day and a struggle to only check the board hourly. This, despite the fact that most of the boarders are in the UK and are sound asleep while I’m awake.

The simple fact is I have a history of hopeless procrastination going back to at least the age of eleven. This habit causes me a lot of pain, and last year it caused me to fail a course which was very important to me. Passing properly could have meant, if not fame and fortune, at least a regular income and good holidays. Plus I would have had the chance to be in a group of terrorists locked in battle with the evil right-wing government we have here. I’m talking about High School teachers, who aren’t doing much to the government, but are being demonised for allegedly teaching Maoist Post Modern Relativism to Australia’s kids. Nicole Kidman, Ian Thorpe and Russell Crowe have all been spotted with copies of ‘Foucault for Dummies’ and The Little Red Book on their persons, besides which the Australian Government works best with fictional enemies. But I digress (which is very post modern of me).

This year I have the chance to try the course again. I’m working full-time and studying part-time. I have a kid who takes up a lot of my time, albeit enjoyably. I’m scared stiff of failing yet again. My plan to avoid this is to choose a minimum number of hours to study each week and to penalise myself for not reaching it and reward myself for reaching it. I’m sure this sounds pathetic to all you non-procrastinators out there, but it has worked for me before.

The other thing I’m doing is ditching as many non-study things as possible. Last night I returned a beautiful shiny Dr Who novel to the library unread. I almost wept. Two years after returning to an English speaking country (well, Australia) from Japan, I’m still like a kid in a sweetshop with all the libraries and newsagencies here. However I must be stern! So, goodbye every book except my War and Peace, which is too intimidating to provide me with more than ten minutes procrastination a day. Goodbye various other time wasters too embarrassing to mention here. And farewell to Across The Pond.

I really regret this. I love writing the thing. Once in a blue moon, I get a letter from a reader, which is always a blast. I also feel guilty for not powering through the course and doing the column. I read the London Review of Books (damn, there’s another thing to put on the backburner this year) and every other literary biography records giants of productivity such as Dickens, Melville, Dan Abnett, for whom work, part-time study and a more-or-less weekly column would be just a warm up for the main event. So be it. I’m not Dickens. If I were, I’d probably have a beard and not wear Aloha shirts.

I miss actively thinking about comics, which is what the column compels me to do. There’s so much there. Acres of worthless trash of course, but eons of good stuff. When I have a commitment to write about it, I appreciate it more, from the many works of Tharg to such divers wonders as Fred Gassit and Claire Bretecher. I’m fond of rubbishing appeals to the ghetto mentality that some sci fi and/or comics commentators engage in; you know, the “Now that there are intelligent comics like Watchmen, people should stop sniggering at my Wolverine t-shirt” sort of argument. Such respectability as comics deserve would mean more bright people would have read Watchmen and would continue to snigger at people with Wolverine shirts. However, it’s a fact that in our culture there are people who read comics and people who DON’T. The folks who ‘DON’T’ sometimes show an irrational pride that they read Dan Brown instead of the vastly more intelligent Preacher or From Hell.

I’m glad to be one of the ones who do and I’ll keep it up of course.

It’s really too late for my last column. That was going to be a tour through an ‘Essential X-Men 1′ I came across in Tokyo of all places. I snapped it up for 50 yen and never was money better spent.

For me, the X-Men were a case of finally not missing out. Jonathon Lethem in the London Review of Books1 talked about growing up in the 70s, listening to Wings and knowing you’d just missed out on the Beatles. He made a parallel with reading 70s Marvel Comics and knowing you’d just missed out on this golden age Stan the Man was always banging on about. He was right on the money there. I was eighteen when that much-parodied decade wound up. I remember.

When I got the X-Men, I found an exception. That was something that started in the 1970s. I know, there was an X-Men in the 60s, but it hadn’t been the stellar success that Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spiderman and the rest had been. The 70s version was a re-launch and I was in on it at the beginning. I got to sell my fifteen cent comics for fifteen dollars each later on too.

Re-reading the first of the new X-Men stories now, they are still cool. I can see why I liked them before. I’m happy to report that John Byrne, whom I now know to be an obnoxious old narcissist, is a pretty ordinary artist, at least to my untrained eye. The characters still grip; prissy Scott, perennially grumpy Wolverine and Storm, who is so busy being in touch with her African roots. In fact Storm is in touch with Africa, the air, things that fly and her inner claustrophobic child, it’s a wonder the woman has any time left over to do super stuff.

(Rebecca Rojin-Stamos tries in vain to make me procrastinate)

I would need several new columns to do justice to 2000 AD’s last five issues. Suffice to say everything is good; new story from D’Israeli, called ‘Stickleback’, which is very reminiscent of Alan Moore but none the worse for that, Dredd taking a breather in the middle of a very interesting epic called ‘Origins’, Nikolai Dante being beautifully drawn fun and the return of ‘Low Life’, a very entertaining story about undercover Judges in Dredd’s world. My last present to my readers is some free advice: if you’re not reading 2000AD now, start at once. The covers could be better, but that’s a quibble when there’s so much excellence behind them.

So don’t delay! What are you doing sitting around reading online columns, when you could be giving your credit card details to Denise, the Rebellion subscriptions woman? Get a wriggle on!

As for me, I’m off to study. In the remote event that my ‘year of getting things done’ works so well that I have spare time, I’ll be back. Otherwise, farewell and thank you.

1. Jonathon Lethem, ‘My Marvel Years’, LRB 15 April 2004