2000AD Prog 2012 - A medical review

2000AD prog 2012 is the big Christmas 100 page special, rather like the old annuals that British comics used to put out. It's an excellent jumping on point for 2000AD as several new stories start in this issue so there isn't a lot of previous continuity to catch up on.

The Judge Dredd story in this issue is a stand alone that parodies choose your own adventure books. It's ok but after the building tension of the recent Day of Chaos and Assassination List storyline it seems a bit lightweight.

More interesting is the first part of a new Absalom story, "Sick Leave" by Gordon Rennie, with art by Tiernen Trevallion and letters by Simon Bowland. Harry Absalom is a police inspector who heads up a paranormal investigation team that spun out of another 2000AD strip called Caballistics, Inc. He is a cranky and hard drinking old-school police officer who is also suffering from advanced cancer. While his team are investigating some strange graffiti in an East London estate, Absalom is at the hospital for a consultation with his oncologist. He is shown into a clinic room where he encounters a demonic ghost version of himself.

The above panels reveal that Absalom has cancer of the Pancreas which has a notoriously poor prognosis. Sadly, you can't diagnose Pancreatic cancer from x-rays as the demon does here. It needs a CT or MRI scan to detect the tumour in the Pancreas gland which lies behind the stomach and underneath the diaphragm, which separates the chest from the abdominal cavity. The demon seems to be looking at chest x-rays with lots of dark, round shadows on them. Presumably these represent metastases or spread from the original cancer. Technically the shadows should be in in the peripheries of the lung fields and not, as they are shown in these panels, overlying the central structures of the heart, mediastinum and sternum. You can see an image of a real chest x-ray with metastases here.  Spread to the lung can occur in many different types of cancer, and are not typical of pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately you can't tell what type of cancer causes lung shadows like this just by looking at them. Still, let us assume that demon, ghost thingys have diagnostic powers beyond those of us mortal doctors.

The other very interesting thing about the Absalom strip is its references and nods to other classic works of occult fiction. The next page in this issue includes these panels.

Harry Absalom refers to Inspector Trout from the Abominable Dr. Phibes movies, starring Vincent Price. Inspector Calhoun was played by Donald Pleasence in the 1972 film Death Line, in which he investigated Cannibals in the underground.

Jack Regan was, of course, played by the late John Thaw in The Sweeney. Inspector Barlow was a character in the British TV shows Z Cars, Softly, Softly, Barlow at Large, and Second Verdict, and was played by Stratford Johns. Regan and Barlow didn't investigate the paranormal although Barlow, with his colleague John Watt, did look in to the Jack the Ripper case once.

Finally, the "Irish git who was involved in that Zombie mess up in Manchester" is a reference to the film The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, and to the police sergeant played by Arthur Kennedy.

The images in the third panel show from the left, Dr Phibes, Inspector Barlow, Jack Regan and, I think, Inspector Trout. Hopefully, somebody will let me know where the demon with the inverted cross on its head comes from.

The artist and writer got a bit confused about Pancreatic cancer, metastases and chest x-rays, but they more than made up for it with the cult references. For medical accuracy this story gets a solid 3 out of 5 outpatient clinic appointments. However this is a great first episode and I've now got something to look forward to in 2000AD other than Judge Dredd. If you are interested you can read the first episode of the original Absalom story from prog 1732 here.

Big Finish - The Witch from the Well

This is Big Finish release 154 - The Witch from the Well.

The eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley get caught up in a seventeenth century witch hunt which gets more complicated when the fast return switch on the Tardis separates them by 400 years.

This story didn't quite hit the heights of The Silver Turk but it is very good. There's a nice creepy element to the mystery of the titular witch. Personally I could have done with that mystery carrying on for a bit longer before the science fiction solution is revealed, but that is just my preference for spooky ghost stories.

There is only one problem with these eighth Doctor stories and it's the music. I assumed that Big Finish were using the appropriate theme music for each doctor and that this was the music from the TV movie. But as Paul from the TimeVault podcast pointed out on my previous post this is actually a remix.

When Channel 4 did their countdown of the 100 scariest moments they included the original Doctor Who theme music as an entry in its own right. The rock journalist Alexis Petridis described it then as a perfect piece of music, and I agree. That's not to say that I don't like the updated versions for the subsequent Doctors, I actually enjoy all of them apart from the movie version. If you want to listen to an interesting run through of all the theme tunes up to the tenth Doctor then check out Tom Dillahunt's Podcast Who and, in particular, his episodes 40, 41 and 42.

Anyway, this soft rock of version of the theme tune is the worst version out there, it really spoils the cliffhanger endings to the four episodes in this story. But let's look past that and give this Big Finish story 3.5 out of 5 Radiophonic workshops. Next up I'm jumping back in the Big Finish timeline and will be listening to Neverland.

Last Boredcast

Here's another bad movie review to liven things up. This is The Last Broadcast from 1998.

This is an extremely low budget movie of the found footage variety that pre-dated the Blair Witch Project, and may have influenced it. A team of paranormal investigators travel into the woods to research the legend of the Jersey Devil. Bad stuff occurs and years later a documentary film-maker tries to figure out what happened from their surviving videotape.

My copy of the DVD bears the tagline "Incredibly creepy. Don't see it alone." Personally I would amend that to "Incredibly boring. Don't watch it at all."

Now don't get me wrong I am a big fan of shows like Ghostwatch and I found the Blair Witch Project really quite scary, but this is dull as ditch-water. I don't normally spot twist endings but I saw this one coming a mile off, and it still makes no sense.

Terrible film. And if you don't believe me just send me the price of a stamp and it's yours. 0 out of 5 stars. A new low for bad movie bingo.

Seriously now

"We interrupt this broadcast." Don't worry, normal service waffle about Doctor Who, comic books and bad Pierce Brosnan movies will resume shortly but this is important.

A sceptical blogger wrote a piece about the Burzynski clinic, an American facility which charges thousands of pound to treat people with cancer with its "pioneering" Antineoplaston treatment. This has been in the news recently because of some high profile campaigns to raise funds to send British patients to Texas for this treatment.

We can all understand how the parents of a child with incurable cancer will look for any possibility of hope at all, and likewise we can see why well-meaning celebrities would lend their support to fund-raising. However, we have to consider whether such a treatment actually works. Many of the newspaper articles about the Burzynski clinic mention that the treatments are "not available on the NHS". There may be a reason for that.

The Burzynski clinic make the chemicals they call Antineoplastons, which are normally found in urine. In keeping with my Doctor Who theme this sounds as pseudo-scientific as reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. However it is still possible that the treatment might do something You can read more about it on this useful site from the US National Cancer Institute. The important thing to note is that there have been no randomised, controlled trials of the treatment to date.

In the spirit of scientific openness we might expect Dr Buryznski and his colleagues to welcome enquiries and discussions about his treatment. Instead the clinic has responded to the original blog and others with threats of legal action written in the most bizarre fashion. Again you can read some of the email threats here.

Interestingly the resulting blog frenzy has brought a lot of attention to bear on the Burzynski clinic in another ironic example of the Streisand effect. If they had kept quiet then the original posting might have sunk without trace.

Anyway, you can read the various websites and make up your own mind. However, to show my support for the original blogger and oppose the irrational threats to free speech and critical enquiry I will add the following:

That's it. Thanks for reading. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Target Acquired

I'm supposed to have less books now. I have a Kindle and everything, I've had a major de-clutter, so why am I making impulse purchases of second hand paperbacks on eBay?

I do have one shelf of old paperbacks. I have all the Quatermass scripts in their original Penguin releases. I seem to be accumulating a few classic 1970s Panther science fiction books with their great Chris Foss covers, but more about those later.

And now I have these.

Four of the 1970s Target novelisations of some of the Doctor's classic adventures. I'm blaming this entirely on Paul from the TimeVault podcast and Brian from British Invaders.

They do look rather nice on the shelf though.

Day 30 - To finish we need a great tune for the end credits - what's your favourite sci-fi theme?

I chose Rebel Alliance over The Empire but have already said that the bad guys get the best tunes. I love the Imperial March from Star Wars, as composed by the great John Williams. I've been watching some classic Irwin Allen television recently and was astonished to find out that Williams composed the original theme tunes for Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. To be honest I could pick one of those tunes but let's stick with my original idea and march out to the Darth Vader theme.

Day 29 - Best pre 1980s sci-fi

Another film that I remember from those great days in the 1970s when all this fantastic science fiction turned up on TV. I was completely floored by the ecological message in Douglas Trumball's Silent Running and absolutely charmed by the three service robots. It was great to see Huey, Dewey and the remnant of Louie show up in the recent Where'e WALL-E? poster.

However, I haven't seen this film in years. I suspect it might be a little boring now but I shall have to get hold of a copy and let you know.