lexy with the bad hair

The paper is terrible, which is generally a sign that this was perpetrated over my nan’s house. My nan was in the habit of feeding me mint Viscounts and sugary tea, but I’m not sure any quantity of blood glucose would justify this nonsense.

What is with my conviction that people in the Future have weird flicky hair? I’m not counting Cinda the alien in this since I’m not sure that even counts as hair. It may be ribbons. Also I love how I have completely given up on trying to draw hands and given her doilies.

(Seriously, though, Cinda has six fingers for Reasons. Aliens have mastered space travel because they have twelve digits and hence count using the duodecimal system, which is better than ours because imperial > metric. Or something. How I was capable of reasoning this while simultaneously giving her A BUNCH OF THUMBS remains beyond me.)

Today’s thing which is going to destroy the world is overpopulation; but at least we haven’t managed to fill Mars yet, which is something, and perhaps Cinda will share the secrets of inter-universal travel with us so we can colonise some more planets; though she seems more interested in mooching around on her weirdly-named spaceship with her new bestie than in helping out our struggling thumb-deficient civilization. Never mind. She’s evidently Doctor Who’s teenage girl regeneration, so they must have loads of other planets to rescue.

As Lexy is from the Future she lives in a skyscraper with a pet snake (called Mixy, because as everyone knows X is the most futuristic letter) and a stepmother, since real parents would interfere with the having of adventures. I don’t know who these mysterious people are who want to stop girls from different universes having adventures, but they’re not relatives. Maybe they just want to stop the entire space-time continuum from collapsing, or something. Killjoys.

Disappointingly, there doesn’t seem to be any human-on-alien action in this one, but that is of a piece with my general heteronormativity at this age. Don’t worry, there’s a lesbian road trip on the way.

(Why, yes, it is based on Thelma and Louise, since you ask. I had never actually seen that film until a couple of months ago, but when did that ever stop me in my plagiaristic tracks?)

13 October 2024 0

born on a space shuttle

I am phoning this in, rather. Everything is in crappy blue biro, the title is repeated three times for no apparent reason, and I seem to have dispensed with anything resembling a plot. OK, we have ‘five sixteen-year-old girls, one from each continent’. So far, so BBC Three documentary. But there doesn’t appear to be anything to connect them other than the fact that they are all sixteen-year-old girls.

I kind of love that ‘Californian’ is equivalent to ‘African’? Um, hello, neither of these are actual nationalities. And I suspect that Maria Luisa is actually Colombian, unless she was born on a space shuttle.

I feel that having a character born on a space shuttle would have made this substantially more interesting.

Let us review. Naturally our representatives from South America, Asia and Africa live doomed lives of poverty and unrelenting misery. They are either knocked up, ‘coping’ with repressive regimes (it is so hard to be sixteen and not able to vote! oh, wait…) or homeless. Meanwhile, our girls in Europe and North America seem to be doing… not very much, to be honest. Poor Veronique hasn’t even been given a dilemma, while Lullaby (LULLABY) seems destined for an endless round of pointless plastic surgery.

(Your ‘first nose job’ should really be your last, if your surgeon knows what they are doing. Noses are not breasts. Glad we got that cleared up.)

There are times when I think these things were less a spontaneous overflow of my creative mind than a desperate attempt to avoid doing my maths homework.

19 July 2011 0

revolutions are not an everyday event

(No, I didn’t suddenly develop a tremor, my biro was running out)

So yeah, fall of the Iron Curtain! It’s 1989! I’m twelve! I can’t draw hands!

I will say, even now, that as names of fictional eastern European countries go, ‘Barillia’ beats Enid Blyton’s ‘Baronia’ to which it is closely related. And that as made-up eastern European names go, ‘Romilla’ could be worse.

I love that Paul is ‘promising’ and ‘talented’, because recognising that Barillia might not be a Marxist utopia of happy smiling peasants is obviously really hard, especially with all these people wandering around in Dickensian rags covered in bruises and weird haematomas (what is that on Romilla’s foot? and that blonde woman who is presumably her mother has, like, a snake issuing from her mouth, it is freaky).

He tricks his way into the workhouse! He rescues a hot skinny blonde chick! He becomes a fugitive! He becomes a revolutionary! Whatever would ‘bleak Barillia’ have done without the hunky Western guy to help them out?

OK, so the ‘winds of change’ are operating independently of him (bonus points for Scorpions reference! also bonus points for totally subconscious Sydney Carton quote) and Romilla does help him out a bit with the whole revolution thing, maybe by acting as an interpreter. Or possibly Paul is so super that he picked up the language in a week. Or (more likely, this) everyone just speaks English.

I cannot end this piece without pointing at the bloke in the hat. And the bob. And the purple bowtie. And the mad eyebrows. And the moustache which entirely conceals his mouth (how is that even possible?) He is clearly EVIL and quite possibly a dictator of some sort, but how for the love of god is he getting anyone to take him seriously in that hat? Does he just shoot everyone who laughs at it? Or is he cultivating an image as a murderous yet lovable buffoon so the West will sell him arms? (Oops, sorry, wrong batch of revolutions)

7 March 2011 0

ack

Um, I went to a school that was 95% white so I should probably have a cookie for realising black people exist? No? You mean ‘black girl gets a boyfriend’ doesn’t constitute a plot? Even if I have given her an appropriately ‘black-sounding’ made-up name based upon my studies of the Rikki Lake show?

I think this is possibly the worst title ever invented. I might be able to understand it if the girl actually had an afro, but even then it would be the worst title ever invented. And naturally she has to be ‘sassy’. Head, meet desk. I have a feeling you are going to become close friends.

(I don’t really know why the picture has been done separately and stuck on with sellotape. Clearly I have sniffed all the glue.)

‘Fizzy, frizzy and dizzy’?! [bangs head against desk repeatedly].

OK, words are failing me here. Sparky innocent girl torn between the twin evils of OMG RASCISM! and ‘political correctness’ because she happens to have a boyfriend the same colour as her? No wonder ‘poor Lesondra’ might ask what the big deal is. The only lessons I can draw from this are a) if you are a teenaged white girl at a school that is 95% white, you should keep the hell away from writing about race because you are going to get it horribly, offensively wrong, and b) if you have a teenaged white daughter at a school that is 95% white, do not, under any circumstances, allow her to watch repeats of nineties-era American talk shows.

17 February 2011 0

oh no she didn’t

Well, Darci, you should really have been able to tell from Karl’s deranged monobrow that he wasn’t quite right in the head. I don’t even know whether it’s a monobrow or whether he’s just been carving random shapes in his forehead with the sharp object he is now pointing at his crotch. (Do it, Karl! your severed penis in a box is going to be so much more impressive a love token than that lame red rose!)

This is another of those creepy stories where I appear to believe that ‘leading boys on and breaking their hearts’ inevitably results in getting raped/stalked/murdered. I really don’t know whether my mind was warped by reading YA novels, or women’s magazines, or some unholy combination of the two.

and he’ll kill to get her… When this doesn’t work, he kidnaps her

This segue cracks me up, it’s so casual. I really want to know who Karl killed and why he thought this would persuade Darci to give him another chance. Or possibly it was his attempt at killing that didn’t work, so he thinks kidnapping will be easier. I don’t know why Darci’s hair is longer post-kidnapping, either she has been in captivity for a while or he has given her forcible hair extensions.

I’m not that worried about Darci, to be honest. Her chin looks like a deadly weapon. Evidently my thirteen-year-old self thought plectrum-shaped skulls were beautiful and ankle socks were cool. Note also the shoulder pads. (It was 1990-ish. I feel that shoulder pads should have gone by this stage, but then I did grow up in a cultural backwater where people wore shellsuits well into the 21st century.)

5 July 2010 0

war is hell

Hmm, torn between two equally shitty titles, what am I to do? I know, use them both! If Shakespeare can do it, so can I!

The teeny-tiny mask thing and oversized babygro-with-wellies ensemble sported by Peter dates this to the first Gulf War. Sky News was always on about chemical weapons, and as I was only thirteen I believed everything they told me. So war in the 21st century is going to be a nightmare, as opposed to, say, the fourth century, when it was obviously fun. And it is still going to be a male-run affair, in spite of the fact that Leni is some inches taller than Peter and looks considerably harder.

OMG is that a CND symbol she is wearing? That is adorable. My vision of this millennium involves the CND, side ponytails, shoulderpads and handwritten ‘correspondance’.

(Well, I was right about the shoulderpads.)

As Florence and James are Leni’s great-grandparents, presumably he must survive to procreate in spite of the horrors of war / his weird moustache? Way to kill the suspense there. If Leni’s great-grandad had been killed in WWII she would know this already. So maybe it is Leni’s blossoming love with her ‘distant cousin’ that gets snuffed out by trad trg tragedy? I’m not sure I really cared, even then.

1 June 2010 0