Friday, January 7, 2011

Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 2

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Left-hand pages are left blank at first, so I can scribble additions to or commentaries on the right-hand pages, if needed.  Then, when it becomes clear that I won't have to do so, I'll add whimsies.  Here, some offhand notes for a fictive essay, "A Brief History of M"

I wrote:

It is a purely [something] joke that the first M was Elric of Melnibone.  That august gentleman was a creature of myth or prehistory, depending on which Oxfordian you know and trust.  
The first M was a playwright named Marlow -- Kit, to his friends.

M is of course the head of MI5, British Intelligence, not only in the James Bond books and films but in real life as well.  As I recall, I had a number of really good historical figures to fill the role.  However, the inspiration for this was Alan Moore's quite splendid comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which there are two sequential M's -- Professor Moriarty and Mycroft Holmes.  I couldn't get around the fact that even if I came up with witty substitutes for those two gents, I'd still be ripping off Moore's idea.

Homey don't play that.  So, five minutes down the tubes.

The picture came out pretty good, though.

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