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| Astro Boy is a Japanese superhero whose backside fires bullets. How cool is that? | Sam Leith Are we ready for Astro Boy? He's a cute little robot with rocket boots, spiky black hair and – winningly – the ability to shoot bullets out of his backside. January sees the UK release of the animated Hollywood film Astro Boy, an all-star production, with voices coming from Donald Sutherland, Nicolas Cage, Charlize Theron and Bill Nighy. Their names are all over the movie's website. But where's the name of Astro Boy's creator, Osamu Tezuka? You'd need a magnifying glass to find any mention.In her lavish new book The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, Helen McCarthy acknowledges that her subject is not exactly well known in the west. The first chapter is titled: "Osamu Who?" The fact that the question needs to be asked is indicative of the enduring bafflement with which we regard Japanese pop culture. And the Japanese are not nearly as insular as us: were you to launch a book about Walt Disney over there, its opening chapter would not have to be titled: "Walt Who?"Tezuka, who died 20 years ago this year, is a titanic figure in Japanese pop culture. Born into a wealthy family in 1928, he studied to be a doctor, but chose instead the infinitely more rackety and less respectable life of a manga cartoonist. It paid off. By his early 30s, he was Japan's highest earning artist; after his death, a Tezuka museum opened in his hometown of Takarazuka. Tezuka was the top creator of comics in a country where, according to one historian, more paper goes into the production of comics than goes into the creation of toilet roll. Comics remain a relatively niche interest in the west, but manga are thought to account for around a third of Japan's publishing industry.Created, and then rejected, by a scientist who was seeking to fill the hole left by his dead son, Astro Boy is sometimes ill-used by humans. Nevertheless, he puts his powers, including the machine guns mounted on his buttocks, at the service of "humanity", even if the people around him often don't. And Astro Boy is just the beginning. Tezuka produced more than 150,000 pages of comic strip art: everything from mythic history and literary adaptations, to westerns and science fantasy. There's even a strip, called Black Jack, about the alarming adventures of a struck-off surgeon who does maverick medical work for exorbitant fees.Manga is not read in the same way as, say, the Beano. The comics are lighter on dialogue, much more visually stylised and far faster paced. You don't linger over the panels – you whip through them. Tezuka's visual style is full of kinetic effects: if the foreground isn't whizzing past, the background will be. And his human figures have that doe-eyed look typical of Japanese cartooning, but with elements of EC Segar, creator of Popeye, in there.One of the things that might surprise western eyes is the range of registers a single work can contain. Tezuka's eight-volume life of Buddha, for instance, is serious and thoughtful, yet is also interlarded with buffoonish comic business. His 1953 manga version of Crime and Punishment has pages of distinctly non-Dostoyevskian slapstick, and a cameo by a regular Tezuka character who pops up to shout his catchphrase: "Here t'meet ya!"Tezuka's comics look outward to the world, too: his influences are decisively international. Individual frames, as McCarthy points out, reference Captain Nemo, Frankenstein – and isn't that Mickey Mouse's hat from Fantasia? The backgrounds are pure Fritz Lang, full of hovercars reminiscent of chrome-crusted American cars from the 1950s. Astro Boy himself is a reimagining of Pinocchio (who is, perhaps, a semi-cutesy descendent of the Golem, the creature from Jewish myth made of inanimate matter).Bizarrely, Tezuka treated his comic creations more as actors than characters. They'd make guest appearances in different comics, playing new roles. Some were even aware they were in comics; Tezuka, already postmodern way back then, would frequently appear as a character, too. That disconcerting blend of seriousness and farce is, perhaps, one reason why manga's penetration into western culture is still somewhat limited. But thematic seriousness and low comedy coexist in Chaucer and Shakespeare, while emotional truth and physical caricature get along just fine in Dickens. So Tezuka might yet take off in Britain, especially if Astro Boy is a hit.Some of the themes of Astro Boy – what it is to be a robot, what it is to be human – are already there in the likes of I, Robot, AI and Blade Runner. But in none of those does the hero shoot bullets out of his bum. And that, if you ask me, is their loss.ComicsScience fiction and fantasySam Leithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Petina Gappah wins Guardian first book prize At last night's Guardian first book award ceremony, judges Martha Kearney, Nadeem Aslam and Tobias Hill summarise the shortlisted books, and the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger announces the name of the winner feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi by Andrew McConnell Stott Simon Callow is enchanted by a lively biography of the greatest clown of the 19th centuryJoey Grimaldi, the greatest clown of the 19th century, made his debut at the age of four in The Triumph of Mirth. The triumph was hard-won. His father, a fine and original clown himself, was a monster Dickens would have been proud to have invented, a savage brute (known as the Signor, but more generally referred to as Grim-All-Day) whose idea of training children for the theatre was to put them in the stocks or suspend them in a cage 40ft above the stage. He routinely beat his wife and terrified the household with his obsession with his own death. The devil had informed him in a dream that he would die on the first Friday of the month, whereafter the Signor kept vigil on that day, every month, in a room filled with clocks, gibbering till dawn. His favourite reading was The Uncertainty of Signs of Death; his dread of being buried alive led him to stipulate in his will that when he died his children should sever his head from his body, a task duly performed by his daughter, who kept a hand on the saw worked by the surgeon hired for the purpose.Anyone who could survive Grim-All-Day could survive anything, you might think. Andrew McConnell Stott, in this great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life, notes the cost to Joey of his upbringing, but also observes that it was at the core of his work. If you wanted to breed a clown, the Signor was perhaps the perfect parent, whose "arbitrary justice and irrationality had led him to understand the world as a shifting plane of ambiguities, void of the anchors of reason and authority a parent conventionally provides". Well, yes, but was he funny? The answer, for his contemporaries, was ear-splittingly in the affirmative. He was so irresistibly comic "as to put dullness to flight and make a saint laugh," said one. "His acting and manner leave all competition at a very humble distance." The appeal was across the board: the famously severe lord chancellor Lord Eldon remarked that "never, never, did I see a leg of mutton stolen with such superhumanly sublime impudence as by that man" – impressive expert evidence.His first great triumph was Mother Goose, with which, in true theatrical tradition, he saved a failing season by reinventing a moribund genre: pantomime. In one of the set-pieces at which he excels, Stott recreates it: a non-stop variety show of surreal brilliance, in which live ducks flew out of pies, chairs and tables hovered 8ft in the air, huge balconies suddenly disappeared, hats turned into bells that started to chime, bottles became buzzing beehives. In one climactic sequence, the Vauxhall pleasure gardens were created on stage in all their opulent beauty, only for this vision of loveliness to be rudely disrupted by Joey starting a serenade on a tin fish kettle. He gets all the gentlefolk up on their feet to dance a crude sort of hoe-down, whips off the tablecloths and juggles the crockery. "Waiters charge frantically from side to side, as plates smash and live birds splutter skywards from beneath the dinner platters, confusion that increases its speed and intensity until it reaches a crescendo of pandemonium" – at which point a cheesemonger steps forward and explains that he's the set designer; he is duly – and rightly – applauded to the rafters. It was clearly an early 19th-century Hellzapoppin', mad, inventive and, in that final touch, almost postmodern. The last line of Stott's book is "you had to be there", and in passages such as these, he makes you feel you were.The centre of it all was Joey, the Lord of Misrule. Stott gives a fine description of how, after long years of apprenticeship, Grimaldi created the figure who was, he says, one of the most significant theatrical developments of the 19th century. First the costume: bold patterns, vivid colours and "a kaleidoscopic medley of circles, stripes and hoops . . . the costume of a 'great lubberly loutish boy'". Then the face, a startling mask: "a blood-red wound, a mile-wide smear of jam, to form the gaping, gluttonous cavern of a mouth", eyes ringed round and arched with thick brows, cheeks daubed with red chevrons, topped with a bizarre pyramid of wigs: red mohicans, blue plumes, and orange and green thistle – "half plumber's plunger, half fox's brush". Then gloves and slippers, so that by the end, not a millimetre of flesh was visible: it was a total transformation.Grimaldi's contemporaries were instantly entranced by this "part-child, part-nightmare", Stott writes. "A countenance," said one, "that is a whole pantomime in itself." The mask obviously released Grimaldi physically into hyper-expressiveness: "a thousand odd twitches and unaccountable absurdities oozed out of every pore." Each eye "carried on without the aid of the other"; his "oven-mouth" had a never-ending power of extension, his chin touching the buttons of his waistcoat; even his nose was "a vivacious excrescence, capable of exhibiting disdain, fear, anger and even joy". The impression, according to one commentator, was of "a grown child, waking to perception, but wondering at every object he beholds". Stott calls it a retreat to childhood, after the shattering blow of the double loss of wife and baby son in childbirth: "every aspect of his Clown, from his manic energy and schoolboy clothes, to his insatiable appetite for sausages and larcenous will, was suggestive of pre-adolescent desire." Possibly; or possibly it is an assertion of innocence, native desire unmediated by morality or manners, like Papageno in The Magic Flute, which sits so clearly in this tradition. It certainly released unbridled delight in its audience. It cost him dear, physically.The extraordinary demands he made of his body as he devised ever more extravagant business took a terrible toll, occasionally compounded by the state of warfare that existed between management and stage-hands, who would occasionally "forget" to secure a trap door, sending him plunging 20ft below the stage. He found it increasingly difficult to move: masseurs were standing by in the wings to ease muscles gathered up into huge knots.Finally, at the age of 43, he was diagnosed with "premature old age". In the second of two rather redundant introductions which create something of a false start to the book, Stott tells us that he himself has endured bouts of depression; it is this, one presumes, that leads him to emphasise the melancholy in Grimaldi's temperament, seeing him as the prototype of all sad clowns, a proposition not entirely proven in the book. If there is an archetype to be found in Joey Grimaldi, it is here, in the image of the artist who destroys his body in the cause of his art: Merce Cunningham, Rudolf Nureyev, Laurence Olivier. His son took over his roles, but the hugely gifted boy, desperately mollycoddled – no doubt as a reaction to Joey's own upbringing – abandoned himself to drink and high living, and died, possibly poisoned, at the age of 30, the last of the Grimaldi dynasty of clowns.Stott brings him to vivid life, as he does his vile old grandfather. Joey, in many ways a man out of his times – sober, decent, uxorious, professional to a fault – is harder to resurrect; sometimes the foreground is swamped by the background. But what a background! Stott's pages are bursting with the unruly and madcap theatre of the late 1700s and early 1800s: aquadramas, reindeer shows, infant prodigies; the young Edmund Kean as a child actor terrifying audiences and actors alike at the head of a band of feral juveniles; the saturnine figure of John Philip Kemble, opium-crazed and vengeful; Sheridan in a pub calmly watching his Drury Lane Theatre go up in flames and murmuring "a man may surely enjoy a glass of wine by his own fireside". Stott's pages close sombrely with the inexorable advance of Victorian propriety and middle-class morality. How one longs to have seen Grimaldi's theatre. And how grateful one is not to have been a performer in it.Simon Callow is appearing at the Riverside Studios, London, in Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, two one-man plays by Charles Dickens.Simon Callowguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson Tim Radford on the league of extraordinary gentlemen who changed our view of the universeIn November 1660, the world was a mysterious place. There was no explanation for the rise and ebb of the tides. Air was a puzzling, invisible fluid with unexplained properties. There was no known way to measure the height of a mountain. Minerals were produced by "certain subterranean juices through veins of the earth".A small group of men who began meeting at Gresham College that month and formed a society to promote experimental knowledge (the royal charter came in 1662; the first women fellows were elected in 1945) listened to strange reports from Iceland of smoking lakes and fire in the sea. They wondered why winter was colder than summer, and they speculated on the spontaneous generation of life in the absence of "certain seminal principles".They did more than wonder: they experimented. They choked chickens, gagged fish, strangled dogs and dissected living cats. They transfused blood from a sheep to a human. They tried to imprison a spider inside a circle of powdered unicorn's horn. They also suffocated mice; but according to their first chronicler, they themselves breathed "a freer air" and conversed quietly "without being ingag'd in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age". These men lived in a world of plague, fire, war, public execution, witchcraft, alchemy, religious hatred, political ferment and precarious patronage: but they made it a rule to discuss neither God nor politics, nor news "other than what concern'd our business of Philosophy".As well as collecting uncritical observations of monstrous births and listening to investigations into the supposed consequences of a tarantula's bite, they read a paper from a certain Mr Isaac Newton of Cambridge, which showed that white light was in fact made up of the colours of the rainbow. This was a landmark moment in science, but as James Gleick – the first of many impressive contributors to this substantial celebration of 350 years of the Royal Society – reminds us, we recognise landmarks after we have passed them. At the time, the society's own experimenter, Robert Hooke, dismissed Newton's hypothesis as wrong. This snub drove the sulking Newton back to his obsession with alchemy and scripture.There is a solid case for regarding Hooke and Newton and their peers as the makers of the modern world, but it might not have seemed so at the time, even to members of this not so exclusive club. Past fellows have included Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Edward Gibbon and Lord Byron, and Bill Bryson appropriately enhances his celebratory mix with contemporaries better known for pen than pipette. Margaret Atwood traces the origin of that ever-popular B-movie figure, the mad scientist, back to book three of Gulliver's Travels, and points out that Swift can only have been lampooning the Royal Society when he invented the flying island of Laputa and the Grand Academy of Lagado. But she also identifies strands in the Swiftian mockery – the anal inflation of dogs, the extraction of sunbeams from cucumbers – that eerily prefigure later realities involving colonoscopy and cod liver oil tonics.The science writer Margaret Wertheim uses Dante's Divine Comedy, with its journey through concentric spheres of increasing perfection, to illuminate the retreat from the Aristotelean cosmology that had been shared into the 17th century by papists, Puritans and the first professors of natural philosophy. Euclidian space in a few generations expanded to exclude celestial space. The telescope, and the Copernican principle that there was nothing special about the Earth or the solar system, began to banish God and his angels from any physical location in the heavens. Stark rationalism swiftly provoked its own enduring counter-revolution. "To the continuing horror of many champions of science," she warns, "belief in astral planes, psychic channelling, reincarnation and past lives seems to be growing stronger."But out of untidy discovery, wonders emerged. The universe was an ever-open book, said Galileo, "but it cannot be understood unless you have first learned to understand the language and recognise the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics." Out of the original "Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning" and the work of its correspondents, admirers and imitators, first in Europe and America, and later everywhere on the planet, came so many of the things we now recognise as modern science and technology. Bryson's contributors celebrate aeronautics and evolution; suspension bridges and systematic biology; X-ray crystallography and lightning conductors; Bayesian distribution and Bakelite; climate science and complexity theory.This is a book of cerebral riches, heavy with history, to be consumed at leisure. It is also beautifully illustrated. All but one of its 22 contributors wrote specially for this anthology. Richard Holmes, fresh from his scientific history The Age of Wonder, provides new material on 18th-century balloon flights. Richard Dawkins sums up the significance of Darwin's achievement with renewed metaphorical force. The Natural History Museum palaeontologist Richard Fortey highlights the importance of collections; Steve Jones raises some of the puzzles of biodiversity; the physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford contemplates the enigma of time.Every now and then, the book begins to seem like a royal variety performance: well-known acts trip on to the stage, perform a much-loved routine and disappear, to be followed by something completely different yet equally familiar. But all contributors in their different ways also remind us that the show goes on. Do we see more clearly than Hooke and Newton did three and a half centuries ago? Oliver Morton argues that we may have traded one picture of the Earth for another, but our understanding of the globe remains incomplete; Ian Stewart reminds us that for all Galileo's astuteness, even scientists can be oblivious to the subtle mathematics that underpin their research; John Barrow considers the apparent simplicity of cosmological physics and points out that we do not observe the laws of nature, we see only the outcomes of those laws. "Outcomes are much more complicated than the laws that govern them."The physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies reminds us that even the keystone of the Copernican revolution – the assumption that there is nothing special about us – might be incompletely laid. Is the solar system typical? Perhaps, but supporting evidence began to emerge only 15 years ago, and carbon-based life exists on Earth but, as far as we know, nowhere else. Is there anything typical about our position in spacetime? Davies has his doubts: carbon, manufactured by burning stars, was not possible for the first five billion years, and may not be possible 100 billion years from now, although the universe could drag on, getting ever colder and darker, for another 10 billion billion empty years.Gregory Benford makes the same point: "We seem to occupy an unusual niche in the long history of this universe." The novelist Maggie Gee takes global warming as a text for an entertaining sermon on fiction's love affair with apocalypse. The astronomer Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, who in a 2003 book warned that we might already have begun Our Final Century, is sure that many mysteries remain. "Most of the questions still being addressed simply couldn't have been posed 50 years ago (or even 20): we can't conceive what problems will engage our successors."Science and natureBill BrysonTim Radfordguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Mary morison | Robert Burns by Robert BurnsO Mary, at thy window be,It is the wish'd, the trysted hour!Those smiles and glances let me see,That make the miser's treasure poor:How blythely was I bide the stour,A weary slave frae sun to sun,Could I the rich reward secure,The lovely Mary Morison.Yestreen, when to the trembling stringThe dance gaed thro' the lighted ha',To thee my fancy took its wing,I sat, but neither heard nor saw:Tho' this was fair, and that was braw,And yon the toast of a' the town,I sigh'd, and said among them a',"Ye are na Mary Morison."Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,Wha for thy sake wad gladly die?Or canst thou break that heart of his,Whase only faut is loving thee?If love for love thou wilt na gie,At least be pity to me shown;A thought ungentle canna beThe thought o' Mary Morison.Robert BurnsPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |