Jonathan McCalmont’s always provocative SF Diplomat blog has published an interesting piece on Iron Man.

His reading of early Iron Man as a straightforward, modernist, anti-communist hero is perfectly defensible, but I’ve felt there was always something more to Iron Man/Tony Stark’s character that, typical of the work of Stan Lee, has meant that there was scope for the character to grow and adapt.

McCalmont says: Iron Man stood partly for the might and freedom of the American capitalist but also for the idea that, through science, man can not only improve and better himself but also solve the problems of the world. Iron Man stood for progress and man’s scientific dominion over nature and his power to remake the world in accordance with his own desires.

But thinking about what actually happens to Tony Stark doesn’t necessarily only support that straightforward reading. Here we have a war-mongering, arms-dealing millionaire (and a feckless playboy to boot) who is taught a lesson about humility and how to be a hero only after he has his heart ripped to shreds and he is forced to rely on very unreliable (it was always failing at crucial moments) technology. Yes, as Iron Man, Stark can do amazing things but perhaps the most memorable image of Stark in this era is of him slumped in a chair with his breastplate plugged in just to keep him alive while he moans about how all his money, fame and technology can’t buy him happiness. This image becomes by far the most frequently repeated motif after Tales of Suspense 47, when Lee takes over the full writing chores on the Iron Man stories that he had previously only “plotted” which had then been scripted by Robert Bernstein) But even in the origin issue Lee describes Stark as: “This man who seems so fortunate, who’s envied by millions… Is soon destined to become the most tragic figure on Earth.”

Above: Iron Man strikes an iconic pose of misery, courtesy of Don Heck, Tales of Suspense 56.

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Not even being on holiday can stop the Friday Flash. Actually I was just going to drop an old story in here this week, but “27 ways to avoid doing any actual work” came to me fully formed at 3:15am on Wednesday night, I sat up, hand wrote it in a notepad and transcribe it here for the first time.

I could get seriously used to this sea-side/no-job-to-go-to lark, sitting watching the waves and tapping away at stories is, well, it’s what the dream of being a writer is about, isn’t it? Doing something you love without pressure. Of course, if I was doing this thing for real, it’d be work and therefore probably not as much fun.

Anyway, for the last time from (very nearly) sunny Newquay, enjoy.

27 ways to avoid doing any actual work

The editor called at about five. I’d been waiting for the call, so I let the answerphone take
it.

As I say, I’d been expecting the call, but not for it to start: “Fucking hell, Wilksy, this is the best thing you’ve ever written -”

I snatched the phone from the cradle.

Brilliant, she said.

Could have easily have been just another hack job, she said, as if that’ what she’d been expecting.

But this! This had charm. This had elegance. This had brio!

Brio?

I had to look that one up.

And not just on time, but a whole day early. I must really be turning over a new leaf, she said, and we both had a good chuckle about that.

I took all the praise pretty well, I thought – given the circumstances. I tried to be modest, which was easy enough, and to reflect some of the credit back onto her enlightened editorship – which was harder.

Anyway, she finished, if I could keep writing stuff like this there’d always be work for me as long as she was editor of Boom!

I have the magazine now.

She’s really done credit to the article. Six spreads, beautifully illustrated and laid out.

And she’s right the article is great. Insightful. Witty. Urbane without being too wanky.

There’s no doubt about it, “27 ways to avoid doing any actual work” is the best thing I’ve ever written.

Or rather, it would have been.

If I hadn’t been busy doing number sixteen.

Hello fellow denizens of the dimly lit, slightly compulsive world that is the blogosphere.

As i write this today I’m sitting in the lounge of a nice hotel in Newquay. Unlike the rest of the UK,which appears to be subsiding beneath grey clouds and a deluge that’d have scared Noah, I’m looking out beautiful blue skies and a rolling ocean of blue, not brown, water.

Note that I’m “looking out” and not actually outside. Two reasons for that - first I made the mistake of going outside for twenty-five minutes yesterday without wrapping myself in a blanket and so today I’m sporting arms and a nose that makes lobsters look like they’ve got a slight blush. One of the joys of being Irish and starting out a faint shade of blue instead of pink like the rest of the world - I burn easily.

The other thing keeping me inside is the crappy battery life of my “portable” - which seems to have finally given up the pretense that it ever works when not directly sucking the electrical equivalent of several flood-threatened power stations.

Nothing more substantial to say, except perhaps that the new issue of Interzone is a beautiful thing and full of interesting stuff too.

In an unusual fit of stickability, here’s the second installment of my Friday Flash commitment.

This one’s a little longer and brand new.

Hungry girl

The girl was skinny, skinny like one of them you see on teevee. Not the pretty ones, the starving ones – though my momma says sometimes you can’t always tell which is which, these days.

She was just standing in the corner of the lower field, her back to the empty Interstate. I let the big green John Deere we drove on the farm in them days grumble and splutter to a halt a little way away.

She was skinny and her clothes were too big. The green jacket she wore, one that looked like maybe it once belonged to a soldier, hung off her shoulders and reached down to her ankles. She seemed to bend under it, like it was too heavy for her. Her collar bones were sharp ridges and you could see every thread of muscle in her neck. I could count her ribs through the dirty white vest she had on under that jacket.

She pulled her coat closed. She didn’t want me looking at her, counting her ribs or nothing. Her shoes were worn to scraps, she’d walked a long ways and her feet were black and bloody.

“Ain’t you hawt?” I says. It was early in the afternoon, the sun was high and I don’t reckon there was a cloud between here and the Pacific.

She shook her head.

“I bet you is thirsty, though.” I pulled a bottle of my momma’s icy lemonade from the cool box that was by my feet in the tractor cab.

The girl was pale, with straw hair and dark eyes that followed every tiny movement that bottle made. She didn’t move though.

I just shrugged, and rolled down the window on the tractor’s cab, feeling the heat roll in. I reached out and set the lemonade on the wheel arch of the John Deere then slid the window back up, letting the air-conditioning roll back over me.

The girl’s eyes flicked from side-to-side, nervous like. Then she moved, real quick, flitting forward and then back almost faster than I could follow.

She cradled the bottle of lemonade in her hands then raised it to her forehead, rubbing the cold bottle across her temple.

“You come from the city?” I asked.

She nodded.

“You got it bad?”

She just stared at me.

Bad enough, I thought.

She raised the bottle to her lips and drank half the lemonade in one long gulp. She gasped.

“Too cold?”

She shook her head, but her hungry eyes never left mine.

“Good, aint it?”

She raised the bottle again and swallowed the rest. She wiped at her mouth, sucking the last drops of the lemonade from her fingers.

She smiled and revealed a mouthful of sharp-edged teeth.

Yep. She had it real, real bad.

She took a step forward. Her dark eyes seemed to sink back further into her head. Her black tongue ran along her bottom lip.

She was coming for me.

I grabbed for my gun, but before I could draw it level she was at the cab’s window, clawing at the glass, her mouth open so that I could count her teeth and see the black sores on her tongue and down her throat.

I got the gun level, then stopped.

She dragged at the door, but it was locked tight. She punched at the glass, but it was reinforced, better than bullet proof.

She screeched, a sound like I once heard a dog make after it had been shot.

We stared at each other, stalemated.

And her eyes widened.

She gripped at her gut, then her whole body spasmed violent enough to throw her right off that John Deere. She tried to scream, but the muscles in her throat slammed shut like some giant hand had gotten a hold of her by the neck.

There was a second then, when she looked at me and I could see she was just a girl, furious, desperate and confused.

I pointed at the empty lemonade bottle lying on the ground where she’d dropped it a moment before.

“Poison,” I said as the light went out of her eyes.

That was the first of the sick we had around these parts, folks say. The first I remember, for sure, but not nearly the last. Still, I never met one that could resist my momma’s lemonade on a hot day.

One of the hardest but, I think most important, tricks to pull off is to walk along that very fine line between gullibility and cynicism that is the path of the open mind.

This morning I was listening to Radio 4’s Today programme, while they hosted one of their depressingly contrived seven-minute “heated debates”. This one was about the testing of medicine on animals. In one corner they had Professor Robert Winston (him with the moustache off the telly who whispers about the marvels of life) who was speaking up on behalf of a booklet published today by the Research Defence Society on the benefits of animal testing. And in the other they had Cathy Archibald (her not off the telly at all and with the quavering voice of one not used to being interviewed by Mr Evan “Dragon’s Den” Davies) who was from Europeans’ for Medical Progress.

Rather reasonably and without any of the usual rancour this debate usually stirs up, Cathy argued that there should be a proper and in-depth scientific study into the efficacy of animal testing. She cited a neat case where animal testing had lead to serious delays in the introduction of an effective treatment for cancer because the drug had been highly toxic to dogs, but not for humans. She was willing to be convinced - she supported medical advancement and wasn’t just a cuddly-bunny-hugger - she just thought there should be a proper study. She was a geneticist and had just had her life saved by high-tech drugs - she just wanted a faster route to medical treatments using new testing techniques rather than following the animal research dogma (do you see what I did there?). She even accepted that sometimes animal testing could correlate with human reactions and said wouldn’t oppose animal testing if it could be demonstrated to be more effective than alternatives.

None of which made the slightest impression on Prof Winston who sounded like he’d just got up after a heavy night and who had come prepared for a knife-fight with some ALF thug. He wasn’t going to have any of this namby-pamby stuff about actually weighing the pros and cons. It was a fantastically arrogant performance - those who disagreed with him were “pseudo-scientific” and he talked all over Cathy at one point in the way only a senior medical consultant really can.

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Gareth L Powell start it, Paul Raven at Velcro City is running with it, and I’m not too proud to steal a perfectly good idea. So here’s my first “Friday Flash” - called “For Allepa” - which is actually a “drabble” a story exactly 100 words long. There’s something about the pointless precision of drabbling that appeals to me.

For Allepa

“Who’s that?”

There was darkness, the tang of decay and breathing, rasping and loud.

“I’m here.” Petr shuffled forward, arms outstretched, almost blind.

“A doctor?”

“Here to end your suffering,” Petr said.

“Of course!” It chuckled – dry, humourless and knowing. “After all these years?”

Petr took a more confident step, his eyes growing accustomed to the gloom. The old man was grey-faced and so wasted that his body barely showed beneath the yellowed sheets.

“For Allepa!” Petr raised his pistol.

A flash. Claws? Steel? Petr never knew. Blood gouted.

The old man pulled Petr to him.

“I feel better already.”

Sometimes, as a press officer, you find yourself answering questions you really never expected to have to face.

Personal highlights include: “What should people do if they think they’ve got the plague?” and “Is it true that there is a national shortage of dwarves?”

But I’m guessing Major Mike Shearer might have just one-upped us all when he answered the question: “Are the British Army releasing man-eating badgers in Iraq?”

If only he could have been able to answer “Yes!” and cackled maniacally.

Not being on anyone’s permanent reviewing staff and not being the kind of blogger with enough influence to shape the fate of publishing empires, I don’t get free stuff through the post that I can boast about, but I do buy a lot of shit. And I thought, in lieu of any real content to put up tonight and being too tired to start an argument about all the stuff that is bugging me today, I’d tell you about the nice stuff currently sitting on my desk.

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I want to thank FranQ for reading my blog and taking the time to comment, it’s nice to know that I’m not just burbling to myself here, all alone in the dimly-lit land of blog. And I’d like to thank him, too, for giving me a chance to explain why I fundamentally disagree with him while recycling arguments I’ve used before. It’s efficient, and it reduces my argument footprint, which is good for the environment – or something.

I think I disagree with FranQ on the merits of both Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (which I found a bit juvenile and overwrought, but that’s hardly surprising given Chabon was practically juvenile when he wrote the book) and about Dodgeball (I laughed, several times) but that’s not the point of this post. I have bigger fish to fry.

 My point is that if Michael Chabon is happy to let a film maker change 85% of his story (how do you even come up with that percentage anyway?) then he is showing immense good sense.

 Before I go on to make a handful of points, let me point out that this is not a rant at FranQ in particular, but at “fans” in general and fans who have opinions about film adaptations in particular:
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Posted July 10, 2007 Comments(2)