Off-Topic Tuesday!

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Inthe comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like. Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat amongst yourselves.

Well, good personal anthropomorphised cosmological concept almighty, the UK Political situation is currently.. I believe the term the young folk use is "cray-cray". To summarise for those who probably wisely, haven't been paying attention.

• Britain voted (narrowly) for Brexit last year in a purely advisory referendum.
• The Conservative Prime Minister who said he's oversee the Brexit process if it was voted for promptly quit, prompting a leadership election.
• New PM eventually appointed after the rest of the contenders perform the political equivalent of a suicidal Keystone cops routine (I started to right that out but gave up, because no one would believe it all)
• New PM triggers Article 40 to start the Brexit process
• The new PM promised repeatedly she'd not call an election as we needed "stablity" and the current Parliament runs until 2020 anyway. (Since in the UK you vote in a party, not a person. the parties are allowed to change leaders without an election, though it's sometimes a risky move)
• With less than two months to go before the start of Brexit negotiations, she calls a General Election to increase her majority.
• Vicious campaigning, PM predicted to win a landslide despite genuinely appalling track record on campaign trail Refused to debate, constantly reciting "snappy" mantra's like a Dalek in a twin set ("Strong and stable" being the one that lingers), awful media presence, etc.
• Young people come out to vote in record numbers, many for the first time (And bless every single one of them) and many vote for the opposition, a very old school Left Wing chap of a sort we haven't had in decades (think Bernie Sanders).
• PM loses her majority.
• UKIP wiped out and lose their only MP, who had already quit the party to defect to the Conservatives.
• In order to achieve a majority, PM has to form an alliance of some sort with the only party prepared to do business with her, Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party, which won ten seats in the election and so can swing things the Conservative way, for an unspecified political price.
• The DUP has been described as both "the Political Wing of the Flat Earth Society", and "The UK equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church". A bunch of highly religious, homophobic, anti-abortion, "woman's place is in the home" zealot throwbacks who would be only slightly scary if they weren't currently holding the balance of power in their hot, sticky hands (For some samples of their positions's try this list, but assume trigger warnings for homophobia, misogyny etc etc)
• Alliance with DUP may seriously damage the UK's involvement in Northern Ireland government, as they are supposed to remain impartial and neutral when dealing with the various parties there, which they are now quite clearly NOT.
• The leader of the Scottish Conservative Party, who is about to marry her same-sex partner, makes it clear to her London based boss that she is NOT happy about the DUP alliance.
• Current PM's projected political lifespan measurable in weeks, possibly months, but can perhaps console herself with the fact that whilst she has incredibly low popularity, all her likely successors have even lower ratings.

As a friend put it "Basically, Britain is drunk and doing politics."

Sorry, I needed to vent a little I think.

Not that the US has much to be happy about with with the Comey deposition not exactly winning him friends at the White House, and the Trump machine, basically acting like the Trump machine does... which hardly needs cataloguing at this stage.

E3 is this week, so there will doubtless be good news and disappointing news depending on what you were expecting to hear.

The sad loss of Adam West has been noted already in another thread, but I will risk you ire by mentioning again. A host of delightful, and in many cases heartbreaking, tributes have been paid to Mr West since Saturday, including editorial cartoons, art tributes and perhaps my favourite, a US digital billboard company changing all their boards to the Batsignal shining into the night sky.

Michael Palin has donated a large quantity of notebooks, annotated scripts and diaries to the British library, which includes many pieces relating to Monty Python and his own travel writings. It's hoped they will eventually go on display.

The new Doctor Who may be announced soon, with former showrunner Russell T Davies revealing that he knows who it is, but is saying nothing beyond that. The most recent episode included the return of the Ice Warriors, and gave us our first female Martian in the form of the Ice Queen Iraxxa.

Preacher #1

[history79]

CBS NEWS: This comic's publication in 1994 seems like a turning point in the industry. Do you sense how it influenced the comics world since?

GARTH ENNIS: At the time, there was a real sense of treading on uncharted ground. Certainly no one else was doing anything like it in comics, so there was a good deal of groping in the dark. Comics up to that point, until the mid-80s, had effectively been juvenalia, so that was the point of Vertigo, to be able to do material like that in mainstream comics. As the influence it's had since, that's harder for me to say. I feel that the material that inspired Vertigo back then has been to an extent cordoned off and forgotten -- perhaps not forgotten, but it's been put on its reservation.

Alan Moore's work on "Watchmen" and "Miracleman" -- that should have written the end of the superhero. But they've essentially been shoved off to the side and superheroes have continued like a juggernaut. I don't really read a lot of comic books and it's because of that domination of the superhero. If I was to talk about "Preacher"'s influence, I can kind of see that in "Y: The Last Man" by Brian Vaughn. Beyond that, I would find it hard to trace "Preacher"'s exact influence.


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