fantasy, page 89 of 92

Today, Royal Mail release their Mythical Creatures stamps, six designs by Dave McKean:

Not being a stamp collector, I wasn’t sure whether to get a first day cover (which sounded like it might appreciate in value) or the presentation pack (which sounded more fun), so I stumped for both. The first day cover comes with the stamps stuck on a specially-designed envelope, and franked with a faun postmark, while the presentation pack has the stamps (unstuck) in clear pockets on a fold-out card with more Dave McKean designery inside, and some short pieces by Neil Gaiman on the mythical beasties in question.

My favourites have to be the dragon, the mermaid and the unicorn. They’re the simpler designs, both in content (just the creature in question against a misty-swirly background) and colour (each one being predominately one colour).

I was interested to read, on Neil Gaiman’s blog entry announcing the stamps, that one of the designs was going to be a banshee, till someone pointed out it might be thought letters bearing the banshee stamp were going to contain bad news. Did no-one point out that the 62p pixie stamp might be classed as snail mail?

What’s going on here? Suddenly we’ve got not one but two comedy send-ups of heroic fantasy, one on Radio 4 (just finished), one on BBC 2 (just begun). I must admit I listened to ElvenQuest in a I’m-not-going-to-like-this-but-I-know-I’m-going-to-have-to-listen-to-it kind of way, but grew to like it, and even miss it, now it’s finished. Will it be the same for Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire? Actually, I started liking Krod Mandoon a bit quicker, but maybe because I’d been warmed up by ElvenQuest…

Coming so close together, and being about the same sort of thing, you can’t help finding similarities between the two. For instance, in both shows, the Evil Baddy comes across as a slightly naff office boss, with the descent into management-speak being one of their main jokes (another being the sudden flip into killing employees/servants who don’t please them). Is this a measure of our times, because the biggest evil we’re likely to face in our daily lives is an over-officious line manager? Or is it just another branch of the continued David Brentisation of comedy? Actually, it might be something more deep-seatedly British than that, as Alistair McGowan’s Lord Darkness (from ElvenQuest) reminded me a bit of both Ralph Richardson’s Supreme Being and David Warner’s Evil from Time Bandits — polite and reasonable, but wielding enormous power with an indifferent flick of the finger. That’s just how we Brits expect our bigwigs to be, I guess.

Another point of similarity — although one scantily clad in the form of a wild divergence — is the women. Both serials (or, so far, in the case of Krod Mandoon) have only one real female character of any significance. The main joke with ElvenQuest’s Penthiselea the Warrior Princess (Sophie Winkleman) is she’s completely innocent about sex (thinking babies come from the Baby Tree, if I remember right), whereas the main joke with Krod Mandoon’s pagan girlfriend Aneka (India de Beaufort) is she’s a nymphomaniac on a scale (300 men in one night?) that makes it difficult to retain any sympathy for her, or the besotten Mandoon. (Or am I just behind the times?) I’d be tempted to say it’s a pity fantasy (even comedy fantasy) is still struggling to get free of these sort of female stereotypes (I’m reminded of the way Sword & Sorcery’s flimsily-dressed wenches in distress were “updated” in the 70s by the likes of Raven, Swordsmistress of Chaos, who was just another crudely flipped stereotype), but then again, I can’t exactly say any of the male characters escape being stereotypes either.

But hey, this is comedy, and comedy’s all about stereotypes, right? You can’t have jokes without people being the butt of jokes, because comedy is all about our need to laugh at other people, right?

Actually, I don’t think it is. If you look at the best comedies — Fawlty Towers, Spaced, Alan Partridge — the characters you really laugh at are the ones you know, deep down, are just like you, in some little way. You laugh at stereotypes, but you laugh with characters. Or maybe that’s just me.

It’s weird to think heroic fantasy, which I always thought was going to be kept firmly relegated on the marshy borderlands of culture, is now the subject of two mainstream comedies. I can’t believe that jokes about, for instance, bad riddles inscribed above magic doorways or the ümlautification of names  — which I’d have thought you have to be familiar with fantasy role-playing games to find funny — are part of mainstream comedy. It means that, in a roundabout, backdoor kind of way, heroic fantasy is part of the mainstream, though unfortunately not in the sort of way that will get anyone to think it can be really good. (And it can. Alan Garner’s Elidor, for instance. Short, devastating, and featuring a unicorn.)

It’s no surprise that there’s talk, yet again, of a Watchmen film, when you consider the success of the US TV show Heroes. It’s true that there’s been quite a run of successful films based on superheroes of late, but Heroes is the one thing that could truly pave the way for a Watchmen film simply because it owes so much to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s milestone comic — and not just in the way it presents a more realistic take on what it would mean to live in a world where people have superhuman powers. Nor is it just in the hint of upcoming metropolitan Armageddon, it’s in the very moment-by-moment style of the show — for instance in the way that a newspaper headline glimpsed in a scene belonging to one character’s story makes reference to an ongoing story about another character. Moore has several times spoken of how the density of information he and Gibbons presented in each panel of Watchmen was an attempt to do something in comics that couldn’t be done in film, so it’s interesting to see TV trying to do the same thing. It’ll never manage to equal the sheer weight of world-building information Moore and Gibbons provided in Watchmen, but this is a step closer.

The main difference between Heroes (I’ve only seen the first two episodes, on BBC2) andWatchmen is that Heroes starts at the point where its characters are just coming to realise they have superpowers, whereas Watchmen, in a very dark, 80s way, presented us with the same sort of characters past their point of decline, decadence, and downfall: in Watchmen, it’s all after the main event, when the sheen of heroism has long worn off and the rust and tarnish is all too evident; Heroes starts at the beginning of the road to that fairy-tale moment of self-discovery.

Having watched the first two episodes, I’m not quite sure whether I’m going to watch the rest. On the one hand, I really like these sorts of stories where people discover they have special powers — the first X-Men film, for instance, and the first Harry Potter book both got to me for just that reason — but on the other hand, there’s the whole beast of long TV drama series we’re seeing at the moment. The thing about commercial TV is that, because you don’t pay for it, it’s basically all about getting you to sit down in front of the box so you can watch adverts. So it’s in the programme-makers’ interest to, rather than provide a well-paced, well-told tale, string it out like a shaggy dog story for as long as possible, to keep you coming back each week. Lost was a prime example of this. I kept watching it while it was on terrestrial TV because I wanted to know the answer to its various mysteries, all the time knowing I was never going to actually get the answer to those mysteries, or if I was it was only going to be a half-answer followed by a whole new mystery, all the more intriguing than the last. It was how they kept you watching, but it began, more and more, to feel like the cynical trick it was, and I basically felt relieved when the show moved to Sky (or wherever it is now), so I didn’t feel the need to keep watching it. Heroes has a bit of the same feel to it. The first two episodes were full of hints about forthcoming plot-lines which sound intriguing — but are they ever going to be told, or are we just going to be strung along till the show starts to lose ratings and gets cancelled?

Story is one of the most powerful forces to act on (and come from) the human imagination. We live in a world full of stories — films, books, TV shows, news, anecdotes, jokes — but we’re still hungry for them. And why is that? Because real stories, told with style and at the right pace, with genuine skill and integrity, are still so rare. One of the reasons they’re rare is that, as soon as something with real value raises its head, the forces of commercialism jump on it and strangle it in an attempt to make as much money as they possibly can from it.

Money grabbing bastards! Leave those stories alone!