Hergé, Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique)
**
Fresh from his racist hunting holiday in the Congo, the intrepid reporter sets his sights on cleaning up Chicago's gangland with a detour via Red Indian country. It's an interesting period piece of the time, but it's mainly a tedious catalogue of death-defying escapes from suffocation, drowning, lynching, freefall, burial, explosion, high-speed collision, industrial mincing and various bullets, nearly all thanks to sheer luck more than wits. Sometimes the dog helped.
Alan Moore and John Totleben, Miracleman Book Three: Olympus
***
As happened with late Swamp Thing around the same time, Moore's Miracleman swan song goes off the rails as he turns it into the sci-fi pet project he wants to write instead, narrated in that same highfalutin voice all his pompous supermen have. It was a struggle to get through, except when it briefly becomes action-packed in his most unflinchingly violent comic issue outside of From Hell. John Totleben admirably keeps up.
John Darnielle, Black Sabbath's Master of Reality
**
Likely the most lightweight and pointless entry in the 33⅓ series, the Mountain Goats guy eschews the customary technical analysis and oral history approaches to tell what's presumably a fictional story of an institutionalised teenager finding comfort in Black Sabbath. From this perspective, feelings, dubious folk tales and false assumptions rule over facts. You won't learn anything, but there probably wasn't that much to learn anyway.
Danny Wallace, Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play2008 / Ebook / 406 pages / UK
***
The contrived scrapes were going to get stale sooner or later. This crisis of maturity is more relatable and less wacky, thus less entertaining.
William Gibson and Johnnie Christmas, William Gibson's Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay
**
Alien³ has a bad reputation, centred around it not being very good. Its overriding grimness means that not even the nostalgia of it being the first 18-certificate film I was excitingly allowed to watch more than a decade early doesn't give me any fondness for it. I didn't expect William Gibson's rejected pitch to be any better, and with its dull and formulaic plot and bizarre lack of Ripley not excused by the other returning characters, it's probably worse. Still, it's always satisfying to see these curious artefacts unearthed and presented authentically in spite of taste.
