Went up to London yesterday to the Rainbow Orchid book launch, held at the Gallery in Foyles, Charing Cross Road, put on by the nice people at Egmont. It soon became quite a crowded event:

You might just be able to spot Garen in that picture. It’s one of the few I took of him where he wasn’t blinking!

Not having been to a book launch before, I wasn’t sure if we were going to get a moment where someone cut a ribbon, smashed a bottle of champagne, opened the curtains on a little plaque, or whatever, but finally it came. Here’s a (rather grainy I’m afraid) pic of Garen just having been paid a massive (but deserved) compliment by Tim Jones of Egmont, and looking characteristically modest:

Finally, there were signings, and the giving away of posters, T-shirts and badges:

It’s thrilling to have the book in print and on sale. There’s been quite a buzz about the Rainbow Orchid for some time, and that’s only going to increase now it’s widely available. Keep up with Garen’s blog for more news — and, of course, buy a copy if you haven’t already!

This is not Spinal Tap. This is not Spinal Tap… For the first half of Anvil — The Story of Anvil, you have to keep reminding yourself of this fact. Even if you do hear people saying things like: “I can answer that in one word — two words — three words: we haven’t got good management.” And even if, at one point, we see a dial going up to 11:

But what makes it not Spinal Tap really comes out in the second half of the film, as we get to see the part of the story that was untapped, as it were, by Tap — the part where you meet the real human beings behind the would-be rock-stars, and where you realise that the reason they’re still doing what they do after all these years of slog is they’re so passionate about it. Lead singer/guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow especially — he’s the fire to drummer Robb Reiner’s ice, with no preserved moose in between. Throughout Anvil’s ups and down, he manages to bounce back time and again with amazing optimism, even though the dream of rock-stardom has to be shoehorned into holidays from his job as a catering driver, and even if the resultant European tour doesn’t turn out exactly how he’d hoped. “Things went drastically wrong,” he says. “But at least there was a tour for things to go wrong on.”

In a way, I was sort of thankful Anvil hadn’t made it big. If you compare Anvil — The Story of Anvil to the Metallica documentary, Some Kind of Monster, you see the same in-band personality clashes, only, with Metallica, backed up as they are by megabucks, the egos are turned all the way up to 11. With Anvil, the music may be that loud, but the people at least remain human beings.

So we get to see “Lips” trying to remind rock stars he once toured with who he is (though none of them say “We’re playing the Enormodome”), or thundering through a set with all the enthusiasm of his stadium days even though there’s only one person in the audience, or making up with his lifetime buddy Reiner after a Tap-pish “We’ll never work together again” break-up. (Some of the Spinal Tap-ishness is perhaps contrived, as we get to see Lips and Reiner in a small eatery singing through the first song they wrote together, just as David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel did in This is Spinal Tap — only, instead of it being a skiffle song about riding on a train, it’s about the Spanish Inquisition hanging people up by their thumbs.)

But the ending, where Anvil return to play in Japan for the first time in twenty-five years, is a wonderfully uplifting moment. Both This is Spinal Tap and Anvil — The Story of Anvil might make you laugh, but only one of them brings a tear to the eye.

Metal on metal!

Surely the “Dungeons” part of Dungeons & Dragons owes a substantial debt to the fevered mind of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who stands as a sort of dark fountainhead of one obscure aspect of fantasy art — the multi-levelled subterranean labyrinth.

Born in 1720, Piranesi wanted nothing more than to be an architect, but despite publishing several books on the theory of architecture and architectural renovation (a hot topic in crumbling late-Renaissance Rome), during his lifetime he only received one actual commission that was actually put into effect — and that was a renovation, not a new building. Piranesi made his living in various ways, one of which was producing etchings. His most popular was a series of views of Rome to sell to tourists, but he also indulged in a set of “architectural fantasies” published under the title Carceri D’Invenzione — or, the Invented Prisons.

What a febrile, tortured imagination Piranesi had! This, looking like the nightmare child of Gary Gygax and M C Escher, is one of his more labyrinthine efforts, a three-dimensional maze of stairways and walkways, complete with gibbet-like struts, barred windows and darkly suggestive ropes. The figures, if you can spot them, are dwarfed by their surroundings:

I’ve been collecting examples of the Piranesian influence as I find it popping up, so here are a few. The first is from one of my favourite films (and novels), The Name of the Rose (1986). Not a prison this time, but a monastery library, though this fact hardly makes it any less oppressive (here, forbidden books are imprisoned):

And this, from Guillermo del Toro’s first Hellboy film (2004) — del Toro’s obsession with clockwork replacing Piranesi’s spiked wheels and shadowy torture devices:

Hayao Miyazaki provides this example, from the villain’s castle in Tales From Earthsea (2006), complete with Piranesian winch:

The latest addition to my collection is this panel from Starblazer #190, “The Power of the Warlocks” (1987), drawn by Ian Kennedy (not credited in the comic, but artist info courtesy of the Starblazer Issue Guide). More oppressive religious architecture, this time with appropriate minotaur figures as pillars (and is the one on the lower left flipping the bird?):

But my love of the dark, subterranean, multi-levelled maze began way before I came across Piranesi. It probably started around the time I came across this picture, in The Best of White Dwarf Articles III, drawn by (I think) Bob McWilliams (…or has it always been there, in dreams?):

What would the world have been like had a Piranesi design actually been realised in stone? And what sort of demon patron would commission such a nightmare anyway? For the answer to that, see this story of mine, elsewhere on this site…

2020 update

Some more Piranesian moments I’ve come across: