Poor Mojo's Newswire

The Wire began syndication in 1846, and was published in 60 installments over the course of six years. Each installment was 30 pages, featuring covers and illustrations by Baxter “Bubz” Black, and selling for one shilling each. After the final installment, The Wire became available in a five volume set, departing from the traditional three. Bucklesby Ogden himself has most often been compared to Charles Dickens. Both began as journalists, and then branched out with works such as Pickwick Papers and The Corner. While Dickens found popularity and eventual fame in his successive work, Ogden took a darker path. Dickens’ success for the most part lies in his mastery of the serial format. Other serialized authors were mainly writing episodic sketches linked together only loosely by plot, characters, and a uniformity of style. With Oliver Twist, only his second volume of work, Dickens began to define an altogether new type of novel, one that was more complex, more psychologically and metaphorically contiguous. Despite this, Dickens retained a heightened awareness of his method of publication. Each installment contained a series of elements engineered to give the reader the satisfaction of a complete arc, giving the reader the sense of an episode, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. One might liken The Wire, however, to the novels of the former century that were single, complete works, and only later were adapted to serial format in order to make them affordable to the public. Yet, while cognizant of his predecessors, Ogden was not working in the paradigm of the eighteenth century. As a Victorian novelist, serialization was the format of choice for his publishers, but rather than providing the short burst of decisively circumscribed fiction so desired by his readership, his tangled narrative unspooled at a stately, at times seemingly glacial, pace. This method of story-telling redefined the novel in an altogether different way than both Victorian novelists and those who had come before. . . .

If you watch it backwards, SCHINDLER’S LIST is the happy story of German soldiers rescuing Jews from an unproductive factory, nursing them back to health, clothing them, and helping them move into temporary living quarters in Warsaw. . . . If you watch SHOWGIRLS backwards, it’s about a girl who comes to Vegas, tries on a bunch of clothes, and leaves. . . . If you watch Pokemon backwards, it’s about rehabilitating victims of legalised animal fighting and releasing them into the wild. . . .

Sir Terry Pratchett has signed an agreement with TV production company, Prime Focus, to create a Discworld TV show, based on the adventures of Ankh-Morpork's City Watch. Pratchett's Discworld books have inspired a number of spinoffs, including miniseries and videogames, but this will be their first time as an ongoing TV show. The city of Ankk-Morpork is a little like the real world Budapest, in that it is technically two cities very close together. On its cobbled streets walk humans, dwarves, trolls, golems, vampires, humans who think they're dwarves, werewolves, and a whole host of other fantasy races. The City Watch, under the able command of Samuel Vimes, has the difficult task of keeping some kind of order in the city, Pratchett has referred to the characters of the City Watch as being the jewel in the Discworld crown, and they have starred in eight of the series 38 books, with appearances in plenty of others. This will be the first time that Pratchett has allowed anyone to create new Discworld stories for television, although the author will be overseeing the series. The show will be an episodic, crime-a-week, cop show, and according to Prime Focus, a number of international TV networks have expressed an interest in it.