Having a Great Time Outdoors, Even in a Shithole

I was reading my less talented but infinitely more successful contemporary Charlie Brooker'seffete account of Glastonbury on the train this morning. All those people having an amazing time despite the rain, mud, bad drugs and worse toilet facilities. Then, as I cycled up the polluted, filthy Euston road I saw there were people happily sitting outside Costa, enjoying their coffee in a pavement seating area, as if the trucks and buses weren't thundering past. It was like they imagined were on a secluded piazza in Florence.

This was when I realised that one of the great abilities of Homo Sapiens is the ability to completely ignore one's surroundings and doggedly have a GOOD TIME OUTDOORS. I would even postulate that there's a part of the brain devoted to filtering out hideousness when having a GREAT TIME OUTDOORS. In fact, I've decided that this cognitive centre is called Al Fresco's Winnet.

Al Fresco's Winnet is especially developed in the British, for whom HAVING A WHALE OF A TIME OUTDOORS is especially challenging. It's either pissing down with rain or so global-warmingly hot that our pasty skin gets fried after 5 minutes in the sun.

No doubt when we have completely fucked up the planet and have to live in survival-fridge-domes to protect us from pollution and a boiling atmosphere there'll be Britishers sitting outside laughing, drinking frapuccinos as their brains boil.

Charlie Brooker - Allied to C***s

I have been, along with everyone in the ex-AKQA diaspora, dabbling in the world of Facebook for a few weeks now. I usually check in once or twice a day and feel stupidly happy when someone puts a message on my ‘wall’. Coincidentally Charlie Brooker wrote about his social ineptness on Facebook in the Guardian last week. This is a good enough excuse for me to haul out my very own Charlie Brooker anecdote.

Many years ago, when the Internet was young and I was somewhat thinner, I worked at a (now defunct) new media agency named Zinc. Every week the creative dept. would look forward to the latest online TV listings spoof ‘TV Go Home’ written by Brooker. A series in the imaginary listings was ‘Cunt’, which was, ironically enough, about a feckless new media wanker just like us named Nathan Barley. Thankfully he was public school and had a trust fund, so the parallels weren’t too painfully direct.

Then one week the TV Go Home e-newsletter featured a link to the site of a man declaring himself to be the ‘Real Cunt’. He used this ego toss-space to boast about his agency work, film script efforts, gorgeous aristo girlfriend, not to mention the Notting Hill flat funded by Daddy. You get the picture. The idiot foolishly put an email link on his site. This tempted half a dozen of us to write abusive emails to the dolt.

My email was pretty reasonable – just asking him why he was proud of his similarity to a self-obsessed, ignorant, lazy, pretentious, venal Thatcher’s child arsewipe. I got an irate reply and a frank email ‘exchange of views’ ensued. Meanwhile we’d sent his URL to people elsewhere and sending him abuse went viral. He blamed me and it all got a bit silly, with him threatening lawsuits (I still remember the threat of ‘my dad’s a lawyer’).

It all culminated in an anonymous email arriving in his inbox (which eventually turned out to be from my friend John) describing all sorts of sadistic scenarios climaxing with the ‘Real Cunt’ ending up in a full-body cast and being anally raped by hospital porters. He pinned the email on me – again threatening legal action (I could have killed John when I found out he was responsible). He also took down his website, which was sensible really.

This was when Charlie Brooker stepped in and ‘flamed’ me in the TV Go Home newsletter. Here was the supposed enemy of cunts defending one! He even accused me of hypocrisy as the name Tristan sounded suspiciously public school! Oh, the betrayal. Needless to say Brooker lost a bit of cred with me after that. Not that he’d give a shit, the successful bastard.

The Walking Dead Comic by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard: Emotionally Believable Zombie World

It’s rare that a mainstream comic book comes along that features ordinary people with human weaknesses trying to cope with the emotional fallout from a disaster. It’s even rarer to find emotional empathy in comics, where the need to big, violent things to happen and for even bigger things to explode (like the occasional planet) appears to dominate.

Having devoured 5 books of The Walking Dead in one week, I’m happy to have found a comic that has a cast of believable ordinary people and applies emotional realism to its storytelling. Admittedly these believable ordinary people spent their surrounded by (as well as fighting and being eaten by) zombies, but their reactions to this extraordinary situation are refreshingly realistic.

The scenario is the same as most zombie flicks: we follow a group of survivors as they try to stay alive in a nightmarish, shattered United States ruled by the shambling brainless dead with a penchant for dining on living flesh. We start out encountering a small-town cop Rick Grimes as he wakes up in hospital after being put in a coma by a gunshot wound (echoes of Danny Boyles' 28 Days Later). After quickly getting acquainted with the flesh-eating zombie situation, he tries to track down his wife and child in Atlanta (which is chock full of carnivorous corpses).

I don’t want to talk you too much about what follows, as I’d love you to read it and become as gripped by the twists and turns of the plot as I was. Suffice it to say that the writer, Robert Kirkman, deals with well-worn Romaro-style tropes and explores them in his own way. The characters develop, experiencing survivor’s guilt, fear, depression, boredom and loss. They harden up as the old social norms and certainties slip away. They grow and change. This is unusual for the horror genre in any medium, let alone comics.

In the main, the art is handled by the UK artist Charlie Adlard (who I know from his virtuoso black and white drawing for ‘Savage’ in 2000ad) whose dark, rough and expressive style adds to the realistic atmosphere.

Having never been a big zombie fanatic, I’ve had 7 days of living with the dead and I love it. Just have to wait for volume 6 to come out now…