incandescens | puddles of thought

Quite interesting. Having some spare credit yesterday at Notting Hill Gate Book & Video Exchange, I cashed a bit of it in on a couple of Birds of Prey graphic novels, having heard good things about it. One of them was from before Gail Simone as writer, the other was after.

Based on the evidence, I would say that Gail Simone is a damn good writer, and I need to investigate her more.

(Okay, the pre- one wasn't bad, but it wasn't spectacularly different from any runaround-superhero/heroine comic, either. Women fight crime. Women have breasts. Bouncy bouncy.)

Work tomorrow morning, envelopes to stuff, a manual to QA, and a stikfa to put together over lunch. Could be worse.

(In the meantime, we shall go to look up other people's helpful translations of manga in order to try to get attack names right while writing fight scenes . . .)

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Watch Your Step - I'm Drenched

In Manchester there are a thousand puddles.
Bus-queue puddles poised on slanting paving stones,
Railway puddles slouching outside stations,
Cinema puddles in ambush at the exits,
Zebra-crossing puddles in dips of the dark stripes --
They lurk in the murk
Of the north-western evening
For the sake of their notorious joke,
Their only joke -- to soak
The tights or trousers of the citizens.
Each splash and consequent curse is echoed by
One thousand dark Mancunian puddle chuckles.

In Manchester there lives the King of Puddles,
Master of Miniature Muck Lakes,
The Shah of Slosh, Splendifero of Splash,
Prince, Pasha and Pope of Puddledom.
Where? Somewhere. The rain-headed ruler
Lies doggo, incognito,
Disguised as an average, accidental mini-pool.
He is as scared as any other emperor,
For one night, all his soiled and soggy victims
Might storm his streets, assassination in their minds,
A thousand rolls of blotting paper in their hands,
And drink his shadowed, one-joke life away.

-- Adrian Mitchell