World Enough and Time

From The Seven Blunders of the World:

The Seven Blunders of the World is a list that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi gave to his grandson Arun Gandhi, written on a piece of paper, on their final day together, shortly before his assassination. The seven blunders are:


• Wealth without work.
  
• Pleasure without conscience.
  
• Knowledge without character.
  
• Commerce without morality.
  
• Science without humanity.
  
• Worship without sacrifice.
  
• Politics without principle.

I almost missed this comic; I hadn't put it on my subscription at the Silver Snail and they were sold out by the time I found out about it. Hate it when that happens.

But The Comic Book Shoppe came to my rescue and I read Wisdom #1 at lunchtime. It's a story about nasty fairies - a fine companion piece to last week's Torchwood episode, "Small Worlds".

Pete Wisdom is a character invented by Warren Ellis in Excalibur, and Ellis was in fine form that day. Wisdom is a mutant and British government operative whose sphere is the paranormal and the unexplained - MI-13. Wisdom was quite impressive when he joined Excalibur, which was pretty much a bunch of fresh-faced mutant teenagers at the time. He came into the comic and the team wearing a trench coat and a suit instead of a cape and a latex costume, chain-smoking, wise-cracking, arse-kicking, gun-waving, and he promptly seduced Kitty Pryde. I adored Pete Wisdom with a passion. One of my budgies is named after him.

But the years have not been kind to Pete Wisdom. Writers after Warren Ellis didn't know what to do with him, and floundered. He was in a brief, unfortunate run of X-Force, which he didn't survive. He came back recently, and Chris Claremont, who wrote him passably, seemed to have no idea what to do with him. In the hands of other writers he became a sleaze, a loser, and a nonentity. Parallels to DC's John Constantine come to mind, though Constantine has fared better in fits and starts, and has at least had his own comic for many years.

So now Pete Wisdom has his own miniseries, written by Paul Cornell and drawn (badly) by Trevor Hairsine. I can forgive the art; the writing is fine. I knew I'd heard Paul Cornell's name before, but it turns out it wasn't in connection with comics - it was in connection with Doctor Who. He wrote the wonderful episode Father's Day, and Bernice Summerfield and various Doctor Who novels and audioscripts. He's good.

In this story, Wisdom is sent to the Otherworld to deal with a fairy kidnapping of a human child. Wisdom instructs his team:

We will show the little gossamer bastards we will respond to aggression... You run into King Arthur: not not hurt him. Do not tell him we could do with him. Do not join the round table. Don't eat anything. Don't pull anything from anything. Don't marry anything. I don't want to hear about 'zapping' or 'tagging'. We are special forces, when we kill we say 'kill'. But we kill arms-bearers. You lay hands on a civilian, you're staying there.

And when they arrive at the Fairy Hill Fort, Wisdom announces himself: "Morning. We're MI-13 and we haven't had our breakfast."

I'm enjoying this. Too bad the art isn't better.