Hero Today, Gone Tomorrow

Marvel is celebrating it's eightieth birthday this week. The date on the cover of Marvel Comics #1 is October 1939, so presumably it's for business reasons that the celebrations have shifted.

During the Golden Age of comics, Marvel gave us great characters that are still with us, Captain America and Namor to name but two, along the way, however, there were casualties. I wrote this in honour of those characters that were there at the beginning that didn't necessarily stand the test of time.

Carruthers Ten Years On: February 2009

February 2009

I'd clearly gotten into a bit of a routine of searching for things that could lead to multiple post and Pursue was no different. An abuse of a Trivial Pursuit card, which wasn't particularly funny and I probably only posted it because I realised I could include upside down text. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Phil Reed.

Other than that, it was a pretty lean month, probably because I was waiting for the Rehearsals footage to arrive. I like this one and the title of this one.

Five More Outsides In

ATB Publishing have announced the contents of the next four five volumes of Outside In.

The X-Files Outside In will be split into two separate volumes. The first entitled Outside In Trusts No One covering the first six seasons, the first film and the original series and TV movies of Kolchak.

The second volume is called Outside In Wants To Believe (as predicted), and covers The X-Files seasons seven to eleven, the second X-Files movie, Millennium and The Lone Gunmen. No word yet on Harsh Realm...

The volumes concerning Babylon 5, Twin Peaks and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine remain as yet untitled, but some details have emerged. The Babylon 5 Outside In will feature the TV series, the TV movies, Crusade and Babylon 5: The Lost Tales. The Twin Peaks Outside In will be the first in a series of shorter volumes. There are no details yet as to what the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine contains, but the smart money is on 173 episodes of that series, Birthright Part One, Caretaker and maybe even that bit of DS9 you can see over Quark's shoulder in Firstborn.

Carruthers Ten Years On: January 2009

I started a run of posts on the Twelve Days Of Christmas in December 2008. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth, ninth and eleventh were nothing particularly special, but I was quite pleased with the first two posts of January 2009.

The tenth day's post was pretty good when written, but went up the day after Matt Smith was announced as the Eleventh Doctor, which was less than topical on my part. It was all essentially a long run up to the twelfth day's post which I was far more proud of. It entitled me to use the same photo of Pulp's drummer Nick Banks twelve times and there are so few opportunities to make maths funny.

I discovered that I could 'schedule' post decades before they were written, which inspired a Life On Mars-style post and a diary entry from 1973.

I liked the posts on New Year's Resolutions and Yellow Alert, which is presumably a reference to the widely-mocked US Homeland Security Advisory System, which assigned a colour to the potential risk of terrorist attack. I don't remember what event, or lack thereof, might have caused them to change the colour.

The blog reached 250 posts this month which is by now is pretty unremarkable, but it did lead to my learning the word: semiquincentennial.

Fourth Dimension, Fourth Wall

Doctor Who has always had an interesting relationship with the viewer at home. Characters can look out through the television screen and talk directly to the audience. This breaking of the 'fourth wall' is never directly commented upon within the television programme.

I wrote this for Hero Collector to catalogue the many instances of fourth wall breakage in Doctor Who from the sixties to the modern day.

Carruthers Ten Years On: December 2008

We had talked about doing a Christmas show in December 2008, but it didn't happen because among other things I was in the doomed second Dickens Of A Christmas show. We managed to film some stuff, but more on that later.

The Carruthers blog hit 200 posts, but none this month were particularly stellar. There's a handful of posts I still like: one on the song 'White Christmas', the anniversary of Wright Brothers first flight, the Winter Solstice and Noche de Rábanos, but my favourite is probably this one written in broken Esperanto.

Outside In Gains A Soul Is Available For Pre-Order

Fresh from dealing with Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, the latest volume of the Outside In series of books has turned its unshakeable gaze toward spinoff series Angel. Outside In Gains A Soul is available for pre-order at a 15% discount here.

But wait there's more: Outside In Gains A Soul not only focusses o each and every episode of TV's Angel, but also Firefly, its big screen follow up Serenity and, thanks in part to yours truly, it's obscure online curio The R. Tam Sessions.

You're welcome.

Outside In Gains A Soul is available for pre-order at a 15% discount here.

Carruthers Ten Years On: November 2008

I've been getting a bit behind with these, so I'm going to try and get back on track over the course of the next month. If only for myself.

November 2008 was clearly a bit of a slow month. I delved into an analysis of the demographics that that were watching the Carruthers videos, which probably only interested me.

The Sitcom Porn strand was clearly my favourite with posts on American comedy, both live action and animated.

I like the wording of this post designed to tie into our Trainspotting sketch. Mostly stolen from a stand up routine I did and a great example of a joke you can do in your mid-twenties that you can't do when approaching forty.

Probably the most potentially tasteless post was this Bobby Davro survival announcement. It's aged surprisingly well and at the time of posting is still true.

Man On The Moon

It's been fifty years since humanity took a giant leap onto our closest neighbour and we have been honouring the astronauts, but what about the real pioneers, the actors, writers and directors who pretended that they landed on the Moon merely for your entertainment? I wrote this to honour them.