Zim’s Invasion Blueprints: A Rough Guide To the NNYverse

On By ArthurIn Comedy, Comics, Fiction, Horror, Jhonen VasquezLeave a comment

Jhonen Vasquez hit his highest level of cultural prominence with Invader Zim, a Nickelodeon cartoon which benefitted from his distinctive artistic aesthetic and playfully overexcitable style. Overshadowed by fare like Spongebob Squarepants, it lasted for a bit over a season, got a Netflix special in 2019, and lives on largely through the massive amounts of merch Hot Topic sold for it. (Though to my understanding, Vasquez wasn’t involved in the merchandising side of things and didn’t benefit from it – shame.)

The other thing people know about Vasquez, other than Zim, is that he got the job after writing a string of flagrantly child-inappropriate comic books during the 1990s, showcasing a style combining genuinely well-observed rants, total nonsense, shocking artwork, and jokes combining cynicism, whimsy, and grimdark lolrandomness in similar proportions. What HoL was to RPGs of the era, Jhonen Vasquez’s comics were to comics – the voice of the mid-1990s dialled up to 11 and fully aware of how ridiculous it was.

For this article, I’m going to look at his breakthrough comic and the various sequels and spin-offs that played on material from it, which between them make up a short-lived fictional universe that Vasquez has subsequently moved away from as other projects take up his time. Come, step with me into the NNY-verse…

The Famous One: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac

Johnny C. – “NNY” for short – lives in a tiny run-down house in an anonymous American city. NNY lives a reclusive lifestyle because he finds most people deeply irritating. Formerly a capable artist, he hasn’t drawn anything of substance for ages, his main creative outlet in that respect being Happy Noodle Boy, a stultifyingly lolrandom stick figure comic he doodles. There’s several reasons why he might be in a rut. Lack of social contact with like-minded people is rarely great for your mental health, and the fact that he has long conversations with inanimate objects certainly suggests he’s got some issues there.

The main thing distracting him from resurrecting his former art career, however, is the fact that he spends most of his time killing people in ostentatiously horrible ways. Some of his sprees happen outside – the authorities seem more or less entirely incapable of tracing anything he does back to him, and he almost never encounters anyone who fights back. A fair amount of his killing, however, happens at home – for there is an extensive underground complex underneath his house, where he confines people he abducts so he can kill them and drain their blood, which he needs to paint a wall on his house so that the Lovecraftian horror behind it can’t escape and destroy the universe.

Is this real or just NNY’s ornately intricate delusions? If any of it is real, how much of it is? Are the authorities unable to catch him because of the same supernatural forces that animate some of the inanimate objects NNY chats with and render him unable to die, or are the cops just miserably bad at their job? Is NNY really an unstoppable killing machine, or are we just witnessing the revenge fantasies of a deeply lonely man? And what will become of Squee, the little boy who lives next door and who NNY has decided to mentor?

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Doctor Who: Big Finish, Bigger Scarf – The Fourth Doctor Audios, Part 1

On By ArthurIn 4th Doctor, Audio Drama, Audiobooks, Doctor Who, Fiction, I: The Classic Doctors, Nigel Robinson, Peter Anghelides, Science FictionLeave a comment

The Companion Chronicles concept, which has a companion actor mostly narrating a story audiobook style with another actor in a “second voice” role to add aspects of audio drama to the production, was devised to let Big Finish with tell stories featuring the first four Doctors, none of whom they could get in to appear in full-cast audio dramas. But there was always an underlying asymmetry there; whilst Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee all had inextricable grave-based scheduling conflicts, Tom Baker was in theory available to work with them, but in practice didn’t want to.

This did not deter Big Finish from including Fourth Doctor stories in the first and second seasons of The Companion Chronicles, and it would have been kind of unfair if it had – after all, why should Tom holding out on negotiations get in the way of any of his companions picking up a paycheque for narrating some of these tales? In this article, we’ll cover six Companion Chronicles, narrated by three different companions – two from Leela, two from the First Romana, and two from the Second Romana.

Empathy Games

As in The Catalyst, Leela has been imprisoned by the Z’nai. The tables have turned on her captors, but her situation is no less dire; the Z’nai have all expired from a plague to which Leela is immune, but with no survivors left to free her from captivity, she is facing a different kind of death. As she mulls over her past, she recalls a time when she and the Doctor came to the world of Synchronis, ruled over by the cruel Co-Ordinator Angell (David Warner), who recruits “Cathartics” to fight in the Empathy Games.

As much ritual as sport, the Games see the champions of the people symbolically overcome their darker side for the sake of preserving the tranquility and order of Synchronis. It largely revolves around fighting giant rats – something that Leela is used to from her recent brush with The Talons of Weng-Chiang – but as the fight continues, Leela realises that there’s something up about these rodents. Can her own empathy extend to the mutant rat-people?

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Doctor Who: The Virgin Decalogs

On By ArthurIn 1st Doctor, 2nd Doctor, 3rd Doctor, 4th Doctor, 5th Doctor, 6th Doctor, 7th Doctor, Andy Lane, Ben Jeapes, Books and Periodicals, Colin Brake, Craig Hinton, Daniel Blythe, David A. McIntee, David Auger, David J Howe, Doctor Who, Fiction, Gareth Roberts, Guy Clapperton, I: The Classic Doctors, Jackie Marshall, Jim Mortimore, Justin Richards, Keith R.A. Decandido, Marc Platt, Mark Stammers, Matthew Jones, Mike Tucker, Pam Baddeley, Paul Cornell, Peter Anghelides, Robert Perry, Science Fiction, Stephen Bowkett, Stephen James Walker, Steven Moffat, The Savant, Tim Robins, Vanessa BishopLeave a comment

So, here we are, having covered the last of the New Adventures and the final Missing Adventures. There’s one last bit of content for me to get through before we’re done covering the Doctor Who fiction Virgin put out whilst they were the keepers of the flame for Doctor Who: the Decalog collections. Beginning in 1994, these were annual short story anthologies which, as covers proclaimed implied, offered up ten stories which between them got you a little Doctor-y fun with each of the classic Doctors.

Whilst they could, if they wanted, have rushed a fourth volume in 1997 so they could do one with the Eighth Doctor, they opted against this; Decalog 4 offered snapshots of the lives of Roz Forrester’s ancestors and Decalog 5 had only one story which even touched on the Benny-fronted New Adventures which Virgin put out after losing the licence, the others apparently being unrelated sci-fi tales. I don’t intend to cover either; Roz was a great character but her family was never really the point, and neither of the Doctor-less Decalog entries seem to get much love.

As for these collections – well, the first one was a hot seller which can be credited with taking Doctor Who short fiction out of the realm of fanfic and brief low-effort numbers rattled off for Christmas annuals and into a form in its own right, and the third one has a very special authorial debut indeed. Might as well do the second one while I’m at it!

Oh, and content warning – there’s a story here where to meaningfully and honestly discuss it, I have to address its rape themes.

Decalog

The task of editing the first Decalog was taken on by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker, who were also co-authors of the Handbook series. In the process, they decided to work in a framing device which would allow each of the individual stories in the collection to act as part of a cohesive whole, at least in theory – we’ll see how well that worked in practice.

Walker’s own Playback provides the connecting tissue: the Seventh Doctor wanders into a private detective’s office in 1947 in LA, where he explains he’s come down with a bad case of amnesia. The detective takes him to see Silverman, an aristocratic former client of his who might be able to help – for Silverman is a psychometrist, who can clean information from handling objects. And the Doctor’s pockets are so full of tat that some of it must have psychometrically interesting properties. Having done this setup, Walker then switches back to this story between the individual tales to narrate Silverman moving from object to object as he searches for the Doctor’s identity.

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Lexxual Debauchery: Season 3

On By ArthurIn Fantasy, Fiction, Jeffrey Hirschfield, Lex Gigeroff, Lexx, Movies & Television, Paul Donovan, Planetary Romance, Science FictionLeave a comment

After their struggles against His Divine Shadow and Mantrid led to the destruction of the entire Light Universe, the crew of the Lexx have fled to the other universe – the Dark Zone. Almost immediately, they run into a serious problem: the Lexx is achingly hungry, having used so much of its reserves in the final showdown with Mantrid, and it now no longer has enough power to work its engines (though it does have a few planet-killer shots left in the tank).

There’s nothing for it: Stan and Xev will have to join Kai in cryogenic sleep, as the Lexx drifts and 790 maintains an ongoing scan of nearby space, hoping for the day when the Lexx arrives somewhere it can find something to eat. This lasts for thousands of years, until eventually the heavily armed bio-ship finds itself caught in the strange dual planetary system of Fire and Water. The two planets are on closely aligned orbits, and are sufficiently close to one another that there’s actually an atmosphere bridge between them – and both are inhabited.

Water, as the name implies, is essentially covered by one massive ocean, with people inhabiting islands dotted about here and there. The folk of Water seem happy in their own way, each settlement being aligned with some manner of happy, positive pursuit they can all get behind – but they must contend with regular raids from Fire, whose inhabitants make hot air balloons which can undertake the perilous ascent across the atmosphere bridge. Fire, meanwhile, is a desert planet of conditions so harsh that none can survive outdoors on its surface for long without shelter. Its bickering, violent inhabitants primarily live in towering city-states ruled over by violent warlords, the most dangerous of whom is Prince (Nigel Bennett).

With the Lexx caught in a gradually decaying orbit, sooner or later the crew are going to have to get enough food for the ship or accept it’s going to land. Every so often, Lexx ends up pointing directly at Fire or Water, and the easiest and least ethical way to get Lexx fed and move on would be to blow up one planet or both and nom the remains. But it isn’t so easy – for after Prince boarded the Lexx in his balloon, he’s drawn the crew into a web of intrigue that’s left them all with decidedly mixed feelings about the situation.

As the gang investigate these strange new worlds, they find that Prince is not who he appears to be – and death doesn’t work the same way here it does in the rest of the universe. Prince can die over and over and return, often in the guise of others – and there’s people here who seem to be folk the crew knew from the Light Universe, reborn in strange new contexts…

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Foundational Asimov

On By ArthurIn Books and Periodicals, Fiction, Isaac Asimov, Science Fiction, The Reading Canary5 Comments

Ah, Foundation. Along with Asimov’s robot-themed stories, the Foundation series vies for the title of Asimov’s most influential work. I suspect the robot stories have it – the Laws of Robotics have made their way into the wider culture far more than psychohistory has – but time was when Foundation reliably showed up on lists of the definitive science fiction series every reader ought to dip into.

Still… there’s caveats. Asimov worked on the series over a span of decades, though in practice this happened in two bursts – the initial flurry of novellas released from 1942 to 1950, which from 1951 onwards were repackaged as the series of fix-up novels that constitute the original Foundation trilogy, and then a duo of brick-sized belated sequels towards the very end of his career, followed by a couple of prequels when he realised he had no idea what happened next.

I’ve long since written off both the prequels and sequels. The prequels seemed essentially unnecessary – a two-volume biography of the figure of Hari Seldon, an individual who perhaps works best as the distant and barely-glimpsed version of the character he appears as in the rest of the series than someone whose life history is given serious consideration.

As for the sequel books, they exist solely to address an enigma: why, in a future so astonishingly far forward in the future that the existence of Earth has been essentially forgotten, aren’t there any robots, when in Asimov’s science fiction set in a less distant future the process of interstellar colonisation is massively reliant on robot technology?

The Doylist answer to that is quite simple – the Foundation stories and robot-themed ones were written separately and not originally meant to be in the same continuity at all. Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth are meant to provide the Watsonian answer, the whole thrust of the two brick-sized novels culminating in a bid to tie all of Asimov’s major science fiction works into a single continuity and explain anomalies which really didn’t need explaining. (Fundamentally, an author who has declined to the point where they’re putting out dreck like The Robots of Dawn is not going to stick the landing on a project that ambitious.)

I had, however, previously had some residual affection for the original trilogy, though I hadn’t actually bothered to reread it for decades. Now I have, and I regret to report it’s rubbish, and may always have been rubbish.

As I mentioned, the original trilogy consists of “fix-up” novels – essentially a bunch of connected short stories lashed together. Foundation, the first book, consists of short stories and novellas from 1942 and 1944 (plus a prologue written for the book release), Foundation and Empire contains follow-up novellas from 1945, and then Second Foundation incorporates a run of novellas originally released from 1948 to 1950. I did not get to the end of the first book before I decided to bail, which surprised me – I thought I’d be throwing my toys out of the pram towards the end of Foundation and Empire at the earliest.

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Doctor Who: Bessie’s Tape Deck – The Third Doctor Audios, Part 1

On By ArthurIn 3rd Doctor, Audio Drama, Audiobooks, Cavan Scott, Doctor Who, Fiction, I: The Classic Doctors, Marc Platt, Science FictionLeave a comment

Arguably, Jon Pertwee was instrumental in pioneering the Doctor Who audio drama format. Sure, Tom Baker had done The Pescatons back in the day, and Colin Baker had done Slipback, but it was The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space which were the first officially-sanctioned full-cast audio dramas involving a legacy Doctor and his supporting cast coming back to slide a few more stories into their canon, with episode lengths and serial formats like the TV show. It’s that recipe which, three years after Ghosts of N-Space was belatedly broadcast, Big Finish would pick up and run with, and it’s particularly frustrating that Pertwee didn’t live to see them start out and maybe lend his talents to some of their work.

Still, the Pertwee era would eventually be addressed by Big Finish, and right from the first two seasons of The Companion Chronicles Pertwee stories would be a cornerstone of that series. It certainly helped that the Pertwee era saw a combination of memorable main companions and a regular supporting cast who between them could provide a varied range of narrators. For this article, covering four mainline Companion Chronicles and one special (The Mists of Time) we’re going to get two from Jo Grant, one from Mike Yates, one from Liz Shaw, and one from an unexpected source…

The Doll of Death

The Doctor and Jo Grant investigate a temporal anomaly centred on a mysterious tablet that Professor Saunders, a museum expert, is studying. Bizarre manifestations in the area – hounds running backwards, spectral dolls talking nonsense, and an explosion which somehow has done its damage before the moment of detonation – herald the unthinkable truth: the tablet has strange properties derived from a parallel universe overlapping ours in which time runs backwards. And the eccentric Mrs Killebrew (Jane Goddard) has become the puppet of an inhabitant from that place…

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Doctor Who: Oh, My Giddy Audio! – The Second Doctor At Big Finish, Part 1

On By ArthurIn 2nd Doctor, Audio Drama, Audiobooks, Doctor Who, Fiction, Historical, I: The Classic Doctors, Nigel Robinson, Science Fiction, Steve LyonsLeave a comment

After the first and second seasons of The Companion Chronicles test-drove the concept, Big Finish would regularly return to the Second Doctor era in the context of that series – a special format designed to allow a single narrator and one other actor to carry a story, rather than producing full-cast audio dramas. In later years, Big Finish would become less squeamish about recasting characters whose actors had died, and they’d end up producing some full-cast Second Doctor dramas as a result – but early on their Second Doctor output was focused in the Chronicles.

For this article, I’m going to cover four of those – one set in Season 4, two set in Season 5, and one set in Season 6. Interestingly, only one of these stories will really resemble the type of serial those seasons focused on; the remainder are all pure historicals, a format the Second Doctor era on television only dipped its toe into very briefly before giving up on it altogether. Is this a weird departure from precedent, or have Big Finish found ways to do Second Doctor historicals that the TV show failed to develop?

The Great Space Elevator

The Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria have arrived in Sumatra, near the Earthside base station for the crowning engineering achievement of this future era – a space elevator extending into orbit. Taken into custody by security officer Tara Kerley (Helen Goldwyn), they are brought into the base station and so witness the receipt of a distress call from the “sky station” – the orbital space station that’s at the other end of the elevator. Soon enough, they’ve volunteered their services to help Tara investigate the orbital Base, and what do you know – it’s Under Siege!

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The Reading Canary: Seeing the Aardvark’s Shadow

On By ArthurIn Comics, Dave Sim, Fantasy, Fiction, The Reading CanaryLeave a comment

Attempting to read Cerebus the Aardvark for what you could describe as “the good bits” is a bit like being Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day in reverse: if I don’t see the shadow of Dave Sim’s later downfall, I’ll happily keep reading, but if I do see the signs of what’s coming then I am done. A while back I reviewed the first phonebook-sized collection of the comic, titled simply Cerebus, which covers the era when the series was mostly telling short, brief stories, though slightly longer arcs were becoming more frequent towards the end of the book.

High Society would be when the definitive gear shift happened – an ambitious storyline originally published over a span of two years or so, it would mark the point when the Cerebus project’s character fundamentally changed. Storylines would, with a few very rare exceptions, unfold over multi-year-long arcs. The artwork would become increasingly complex and ornate, to the point where early in the Church and State story (which would eventually run for some five years or so) that followed High Society Sim would bring on Gerhard as a hired gun to handle the backgrounds.

Accompanying the greater span of the stories and the heightened production values would be a shift in the narrative. The focus of the story, already drifting somewhat from the Conan parodies of the comic’s earliest days, would definitively abandon its earlier approach to instead cover concepts like politics, religion, feminism, revolution, human tragedy, civilisation, and so on. The standard narrative on this – indeed, the viewpoint I’d previously subscribed to, and can still somewhat defend (albeit with some major caveats) is that High Society is the start of the best stretch of Cerebus – the period when it was really pushing the boundaries of the medium and telling its most meaningful stories.

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Bellairs At the Crossroads

On By ArthurIn Books and Periodicals, Cthulhu Mythos, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, John Bellairs1 Comment

John Bellairs as an author was prolific in his lifetime, and ended up being one of those authors whose signature series get extended by other hands for well after their deaths, but there are two novels of his which seem to be more widely-recommended than any of his other material. The Face In the Frost is a fantasy piece which is accounted as being his last work for older readers; The House With a Clock In Its Walls was his next book, and saw his writing taking a gear shift towards younger audiences, though it seems to be regarded as the sort of thing that adult audiences can enjoy too.

After The House With a Clock In Its Walls, Bellairs never put out another novel for older audiences, though he did prepare some notes towards such things (including an unfinished Face In the Frost sequel) – so it’s worth considering them both together to consider whether this represents a smooth course correction or an abrupt shift in his writing.

The Face In the Frost

Somewhere in the vicinity of medieval Europe (and not too far away, I like to think, from Jack Vance’s Lyonesse) lie the lands of the North and South Kingdoms. Somewhere in the South Kingdom is the wizard Prospero (no, not the Shakespeare one), who contents himself puttering about his house, undertaking his researches, and using his scrying mirror to gaze upon far-off lands and other times.

One day, he is visited by his best friend and fellow wizard, Roger Bacon (possibly the historical one). Prospero is glad to see Roger, for he’s been assailed by a much more unwelcome guest of late. As the two compare notes, they come to believe that somewhere out there is another magician who has gained access to a particularly eldritch tome of intense power and fathomless malevolence.

Further investigation reveals the worst: the book has fallen into evil hands – specifically, those of Melichus, who was Prospero’s fellow apprentice back when they were learning their craft. Wicked then, and utterly corrupt now, Melichus (or the force that is now working through him) seems intent on resolving some unfinished business he has with Prospero back from their apprenticeship. As Prospero and Roger journey to confront Melichus, tensions mount between the Kingdoms, and an unseasonably early winter sets in. A winter in which those who dare look can glimpse The Face In the Frost…

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Pentiment: Layers of Meaning, Labyrinths of Motive

On By ArthurIn Adventure Games, Crime, CRPGs, Fiction, Historical, PC, Videogames2 Comments

Somewhere in the Bavarian Alps is the little town of Tassing, steeped in ancient traditions and legend and overlooked by the Abbey of Kiersau, one of the few remaining monastic houses in Christendom where monks and nuns live as part of the same institution. It is the early 16th Century, and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire the Reformation is getting underway – but Tassing and Kiersau will find themselves gripped by problems much closer to home.

1518: Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist from Nuremberg working towards being recognised as a master of his craft, comes to Tassing to work as an illuminator in the abbey’s scriptorium. One day, another guest arrives – Baron Lorenz Rothvogel, here to check on a work he’s commissioned from the artisans of the abbey. The Baron is no stranger in these parts, and given the way people react to him he seems to have no shortage of enemies. When he’s found murdered in the abbey’s chapter house, the elderly Brother Piero is accused of the killing, but Andreas realises that this just isn’t plausible, and resolves to save Piero by seeking the truth – or at least a better suspect…

1525: Andreas, now an accomplished master of his guild, is travelling with his young apprentice Caspar.. When they visit Tassing on their way home to Nuremberg, they find that the town is on the verge of open revolt. The taxes levied by Abbot Gernot, already burdensome during Andreas’ first visit, have become outright ruinous, and Gernot has also imposed harsh restrictions. Meanwhile, the people have learned of risings happening elsewhere in the Empire, inspired by the Twelve Articles, themselves influenced by Protestant theology.

Otto, a leading voice of the growing revolt, is found murdered – and the townsfolk blame the Abbot, chasing him and the other monks into the library of the abbey. Realising only disaster can ensue if the mob storms the abbey, Andreas convinces them to give him a chance to discover the true killer – but the Duke of Bavaria’s troops are on the way, and Andreas must act fast…

1543: Magdalene, the daughter of the local printer Claus and a talented artist in her own right, can just about remember the events of the revolt, though she was very little at the time. The Rathaus, where the newly-constituted town council works, is to be decorated with a grand mural depicting Tassing’s history, and Claus has been commissioned to do it. As he is in the midst of his research, before he has even decided on which subjects he will depict and how he will do it, Claus is attacked by a mystery intruder.

With Claus bedridden with a terrible brain injury, Magdalene steps up to take up the mural project herself, and in the process she begins to peel back the layers of the town’s history to find a secret someone is determined to prevent coming to light. It is a secret which will lead her to the very foundation of the town – and to the hidden thread running through the two murders Andreas investigated…

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