English Breakfast Tea At Tiffay's

Tea Hee!

Ha!  I don’t know how long I can keep up with the tea-based puns.  Probably forever.  Don’t cry!  They are funny!  They ARE!  Well they amuse me, and because I rule this particular reality you’ll just have to put up with it <looks over shoulder to see if Citizen Z is lurking again, in Polish> and back to our scheduled broadcast.   Yes yes yes, I know it’s written not spoken and it goes out over broadband, not as a radio transmission – Dog Buns, do you people have to be so literal?

Contents: delightful

     Okay, you may have noticed that the Header for BOOJUM! has changed, for the first time since our inception; instead of a lowering old man with a spare tyre for a waist, you now have a rather nice painting of New York in space, docking with a giant space vessel.  From the “Cities in Flight” collection.  James Blish, don’t you know.  I would have changed it sooner – Conrad is no oil painting himself – except I’d forgotten how.  Now I do know, expect the changes to get rung regularly.

I’d Be Lion If I Said –

If you were paying attention yesterday, AND YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN*, then you will have seen Conrad’s purchases at the car boot sale.  The “Lion” annual is a very interesting snapshot of what British comic culture was like in 1969.  The cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual contents, but it was still probably present in the collective psyche thanks to James Bond and “Thunderball”.

     Yes, for some reason British comic annuals were always dated a year ahead.  What can I say?  We are a peculiar island race**.  “Lion”,  for your information, was a comic around until 1974.  What is interesting to your humble scribe is what’s not present.

1)    No female characters.  None.  This is most definitely a comic for BOYS, dammit!  There is a woman drawn as “Panicky Extra #5” and that’s it.  Girls, you see, had their own comics.

Panicky extra top left

2)    The only person of colour is a servant.  And, as the comic relief, he can only speak pidgin English.  If you published this nowadays, someone would sue you.

     Then there’s the stories.  Boxing!  Football!  Er – steam trains, anyone?  And the strips.  Typically of British comics, none of the writers or artists are credited, and that would remain true until 2000 AD arrived in 1977.  One double-page spread is, however, instantly identifiable as by the late, great Leo Baxendale.

We will now have a minute's silence

     Then you have this story, and the writer is probably glad there are no credits, because – what the hell was he smoking?  Or drinking? 

Giant robot locusts middle right.  

     Obviously, if you intend to Take Over The World, then you blackmail New York and Moscow with nuclear weapons.  Or not.  Maybe that’s too easy, because this supervillain intends to take over the world with his GIANT ROBOT LOCUSTS! In fact, !!  D'you think the Sulky Fat Lad's bluster about nuclear weapons is just a cunning cover for his even-now being assembled army of GIANT ROBOT LOBSTERS?  (because locusts would be too easy).

     Peculiar island race indeed.

“Churl”

As in “Thou knavish churl”.  Which is probably in Shakespeare, although no way am I going to trawl through Windbag Willy’s collected works to confirm or deny it.

     A churl, as any fule kno, is an unpleasant person.  It’s probably what people call your modest artisan when they feel safely distant from him, and which he proved in the paragraph above.  It used to mean a peasant, perhaps even a pleasant peasant, and derived from the Old English “ceorl” meaning “fellow”.

This is not a peasant.  Nor is it very pleasant, either

     So there you are. 

     BOOJUM! educating you one fact at a time.  Tomorrow – antidisestablishmentarianism.

That Game Of Thrones –

Ah, did you fall for Cirsei’s blather?  The Iron Fleet really did beggar off and leave her in the lurch, and she’s got no way to transport the suspiciously Deus Ex Machina “Golden Company” from anywhere to anywhere.  Nor did she reluctantly allow Jamie Lannister to go sauntering off.  She knows full well he’ll run straight to Jon Snow and blab everything.

     She’s also a bit slow on this “Gigantic Zombie Horde” thing.  If the Night King is allowed to stroll southwards, he’ll have all the population of the North at his beck.  Remember that warning from the horrifying Romero documentary “Dawn of the Dead” – everyone they kill, gets up and kills!

Second scariest documentary ever
("The Thing" being number one)

     Also, that creepy Maister of hers was far too interested in the slavering undead for my liking.  He’s already half-way there with that animated corpse in armour-plate; conceivably he’s going to think up a way to re-kill the reanimated.  With a magic potion.  Not because he got asked to, merely because he can.  Or perhaps he'll just reanimate an army of his own dead and have them battle the Night King. 

     Speaking of last week's epic dragon versus zombie encounter, No!  The dragons could not have strafed the White Walkers, for the same reason Gandalf could not whistle up a giant eagle and drop the Ring in Mount Doom.

Bix Biederbecke, jazz trumpeter.
No, it's not a dragon or the Night King.  I shall have words with Art.

And there we are at count.  And then some.  

*  For only this will save your descendants

**  But you knew that already.  Right?