Holmes improvement

On the whole, I'm in favour of reboots. Often the cultural drift in society results in a movie or book or TV show that started out fresh and exciting starting to feel out of touch. It certainly happened with Star Trek - which, if not actually dying, looked like a franchise suffering from Alzheimer's under Brannon Braga and Rick Berman but was gloriously rejuvenated last year by J J Abrams and his team. And they did that by going back to the original series and figuring, "If Gene Roddenberry had launched this in 2009, how would he have pitched it to get the equivalent effect that in had on audiences in 1966?" In the same way, an English translation of War & Peace, say, can always be contemporary, but the prose must seem increasingly archaic to a reader in the original Russian (and French).

That's why a reboot can be so effective. It's like a new translation.

Last week Roz and I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan about the same time I was watching original Star Trek, so I could easily be defensive about such a major reboot. Yet... a few years ago at Christmas the BBC broadcast a Holmes TV movie with Rupert Everett. And it was perfectly good, and Everett was excellent in the part. But it all felt rather too cosy, a comfortable mystery to watch when stuffed with turkey and mince pies, and I got to thinking that's probably not the effect the Holmes stories would have had on Victorian readers. Because when Holmes went over Reichenbach, the public outcry was immense and men went about in black armbands - and, well, yeah, fans will be fans, but you don't ever get that level of excitement from a cosy little detective drama about ticking clocks and puffing pipes.

The new movie tackles the so-what problem head on. Holmes was always meant to be a flamboyent, brilliant, unconventional and slightly disreputable central character, and who plays that combination better than Robert Downey Jr? I grant you this is not the Holmes of traditional dramas: the tall, thin, loftily commanding figure as drawn by Sidney Paget. And yet this Holmes is convincingly a genius, a misfit, one who is a master of all the facts but fares less adroitly in polite society.

Jude Law's Watson is a stronger character than he comes across in the stories - as he needs to be on screen, where the personal reserve we can accept in a literary first-person narrator would not only come across as blandness, but would weaken our impression of Holmes's genius too. And this Watson indulges in little bits of bad behaviour too, though unlike Holmes he recognizes the very specific contract under which Victorian society granted men a degree of licence to do so.

So those elements work, and the relationship between the two is sparky and engaging. It's more of a modern bromance than a Victorian friendship, true, but in a toss-up between historical accuracy and emotional veracity, a good storyteller should always plump for the latter.

Best of all, though, this is no sedate whodunnit to be mulled over in a cosy drawing room. It's a cocaine-shot-in-the-arm of a movie: visually thrilling with some fantastic set-pieces, driven like a hansom down narrow streets at high speed, written and directed with real verve and energy. Oh, and like all the great Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it steers a course very close to the supernatural without ever quite losing sight of the beacon of rational explanation.

Currently it's taken about a tenth of Avatar's revenue at box office (which is one of those things that makes me feel like giving up writing fiction, frankly) so you should get out there and see it on the big screen while you can. I'm going to be buying the DVD too, you bet, but this is a movie that merits the full cinematic experience.

Russell T Davies talks about Doctor Who

I have to admit that Doctor Who is not nowadays, for me, absolute must-see TV. That's no reflection on the show itself, just that it is after all the apotheosis of broad-appeal British light entertainment whereas the few television dramas I go for tend to be US cable output. But I do often find something to enjoy in Who when I see it (when they're not mucking up the Daleks, anyway). And I have great admiration for Russell T Davies, a writer who knows exactly what he's doing and has the chops to pull it off.

In particular, he's succeeded in bringing a depth of feeling to the drama - an emotional dimension that used to be treated quite sketchily, if at all, in the old days. Few TV writers are better at adroitly interplaying "the determination of incident" and "the illumination of character" as Henry James put it.

The main lesson I try to learn from RTD is to tell my stories with pizzazz and showmanship. If old Who was watched from behind the sofa, new Who is definitely on the edge of the seat. Here's an edited interview Davies gave at BAFTA where he talks about his impressive regeneration of the series.

That said, I suspect the show will be more to my taste next season with Stephen Moffat in charge. Allez, Monsieur Davies!

New episode!

In today's new episode: Jack decides he's blowed if he's going to be an errand boy, Estelle fixes a carburettor, and Gran gets a bit of a fright over tea and cake when the Kind Gentlemen lets the spirit of winter off the leash. "Shadows in Silver" is up now, and you can read the previous episodes here.

The Great Winter

"There will come the time called Fimbulwinter. Snow will drive down from all quarters. There will be hard frosts and biting winds, and the sun will give no warmth..."

No, I know it hasn't been as bad as the time Snorri was talking about - that's end-of-the-world weather. But when we were under this last week, it wasn't a big stretch to conjure up a picture of that archetypal death of time that the skalds spoke of, an absolute zero season where past and future are obliterated and the world slips into a kind of shivery dreamtime.

If a shortage of grit (both mineral and spiritual) has paralysed Britain in the last couple of weeks, spare a thought for our spunkier ancestors who were out there roasting chestnuts and baiting bears on the frozen Thames. The hellish cold spells of the late 1600s might cost you a few toes to frostbite but at least they saw off the plague. so it was said at the time. They were glass-half-full, those guys were.

I'll leave the penultimate word to peerless writer Verlyn Klinkenborg:

"I always imagine preparing for a winter you can't muddle through. It's a deep, wooded season. Time pauses and then pauses again. The sun winks over the horizon, glinting on a snow-swept lake - just enough light to wake the chickadees.

"The eaves are low all around the house that this winter comes to, and I've surrounded the entire house with cordwood, leaving gaps for the windows and doors. Winter will go nowhere until I've burned through it all."

Fenris breaks his chains in the new episode tomorrow. Brrr.

Mirabilis in Japanese!

Sneak peek here of something we'll be unveiling on the Mirabilis website in a few short weeks: the whole of the 10-page opening episode, "Stung!", in Japanese. The translation proved to be nowhere near as straightforward as with our French version, and we have to say "domo arigato gozaimasu" to Keiko and Paul Mason for putting in the work required, not just to turn the English text into Japanese, but to figure out how to lay it out on the page. As Keiko notes:

"A completely manga treatment would be impossible as the artwork doesn't follow manga conventions. For example, it is pretty well de rigeur for a manga to display a close-up of a character in any scene where the character has strong emotion. Various bits of visual grammar will then be deployed to express that emotion (hence the huge twinkly eyes in most manga). But the Mirabilis approach is more Western, and in many cases more literary."

Whether there will be any appetite in Japan for a non-manga comic remains to be seen. But the Japanese reading public is pretty comics-literate (unlike some other island kingdoms we could mention) so we'll just have to see.

Meanwhile, our English-language episodes are still up - and watch out this Friday for "Shadows in Silver".

Mirabilis calendar

Never mind him. Today's big news is that you can get a 2010 Mirabilis calendar from Lulu.com right here. Enter the coupon code LOVE when ordering and you'll get 25% off until February 14, which makes it a snip at under a tenner, or around $15. (Be wary when picking your postage option as Lulu defaults to the most expensive "express delivery". You don't need that; the cheapest option will still get it to you in just a few days.)

The calendar is a whopping 13.5 x 19 inches and it's packed with gorgeous artwork by Leo, Martin and Nikos, much of it never seen before. Go on, make it a year of wonders.

Drosty fat ear-boils

Today sees the first of the new episodes that will be going up every Friday on the Mirabilis website. Those nostalgic for the DFC will remember reading these almost a year ago, but we think you’ll agree that liquid crystals show it off so much better than – now what was it called? Oh yes, print.

If you haven't yet seen the earlier episodes, you will find them all here. You can even read a French version of episode one ("Stung!") here and we hope to start bringing you a Japanese translation of the story very soon. And, although it's not part of the main story, you might like our standalone ghostly yarn "A Wrong Turning" which is in PDF here and JPG version here.

This week’s new episode is “The Wrong Side of Bedlam”. You’ll meet Gus again (in the flesh this time), get a glimpse into Jack’s childhood, see our lad’s sparky reunion with the Honourable Miss Meadowvane, and find out exactly what the deal is with that pesky green comet. Ribbit.