Maurice

There was a time in the 1970s when daydreams of escape from suburban Britain seemed often to drift towards intrepid sea voyages. Thor Heyerdahl’s televised rafting adventures had something to do with it, and Francis Chichester’s fabled circumnavigation; those adventures stirred a salty restlessness in a generation of men who had grown up with the war stories of fathers and grandfathers and felt the need, in midlife, for tales of their own. One such individual was Maurice Bailey, a hot-metal typesetter from Derby. Bailey,…

When Maurice and Maralyn Bailey decided to build a boat and sail to the other side of the world, it was not on a whim. The couple from Derby had long hankered for adventures that would lift them out of their dreary suburban existence. Over six years, they diligently studied boat designs, routes, timetables and supplies. They gave up their jobs, sold their bungalow and the bulk of their belongings, and oversaw the building of a boat they called “Auralyn”, a composite of their first names. Auralyn would have no radio…

Maurice opens with the eponymous schoolboy taking a walk with his prep school teacher, Mr Ducie. Maurice has grown up without a father, so Mr Ducie takes it upon himself to explain the “mystery of sex” and how the boy will one day settle down and marry. Maurice listens intently since “he knew the subject was serious and related to his own body. But he could not himself relate it; it fell to pieces as soon as Mr Ducie put it together, like an impossible sum.”The book subsequently follows Maurice through public school and…

A well-upholstered ginger cat, a team of talking rats and a slightly half-baked human team up to extort pest control fees from a series of villages. But the self-described “amazing Maurice” (voiced with flamboyant affectation by Hugh Laurie) is a cat with a devious plan: he has no intention of sharing the ill-gotten gains with his rodent colleagues. However, when peril looms, in the form of a “rat king” in the town of Bad Blintz, Maurice belatedly discovers loyalty to his squeaky buddies.Adapted from the book by Terry…

In 2020, when protests over the death of George Floyd grew in cities and towns across the country, Etienne Maurice was inspired to organize his own at L.A. High Memorial Park in Brookside. He was also inspired to stretch before the protest started, so he asked his yoga instructor cousin Marley to lead those assembled in a short exercise session.Maurice said a light bulb went off that day, and on Juneteenth 2020, he led a yoga class called “BreatheGood” for about 25 people in that same Brookside park. Soon, more than 300…

The rodent in charge of the rescue mission explains that picking up the scent of their missing comrade was easy: “He was widdling all the way.” Just one of the many hilarious lines in this family animation adapted from the Terry Pratchett children’s novel about a crew of scam artist rodents. My favourite moment involves a rat on death’s door coming face to face with the grim squeaker.The film is a riot of silliness from start to finish, featuring top dollar actors hamming it up nicely, making up for not some not…

| We recently singled one of the break-out hits of this Fiction House auction, Kaanga Comics #8 with its cover by an underappreciated artist of the Golden Age, Maurice Whitman.  But Whitman's work graced a large number of comics of the mid-1940s through the early 1950s that are undeservedly overlooked. After serving in WWII, Whitman entered the comics industry working in the mid-1940s for the likes of Harry Chesler, Lloyd Jacquet and Jerry Iger. But in 1947, he began working for the publisher with which he would make his…

| Kaanga Comics #8 appears to be one of the toughest Fiction House comics in high grade, and features a spectacular cover by Maurice Whitman. This issue is a recent breakout among serious vintage comic book collectors, as high grade copies are unheard of on the public marketplace. Five years ago, a slightly higher-graded copy sold in the $50 range, while this current CGC 5.5 copy stands at $2500 and counting, with the auction yet to close.  Cover-dated Summer 1951, this comic features some of the early cover work of…

MistThought is reluctant today,tentative for what we knowbut cannot clearly see.The low sky defies description,telling only of absence;the blank page its facsimile.Not a bird sings or comesto the sill where we sitheld in our own keeping.Just now, I glimpsed her faceas it was, in your glance,but dared not look again.Outside, mist gathers its wrapcloser, becomes introvert.We, too, keep our silences,missing her – but unable to sharememories clearer than the day -and all the draughts she made.And there’ll be more such…

A crop of an image from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Image: FoxAudiences will return to the Planet of the Apes in 2024. Fox just announced that the title of the next film in the franchise is Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and it goes into production in October. As previously reported, it’s directed by Wes Ball (The Maze Runner) and stars Owen Teague (It, The Stand) as the primary ape. Now The Witcher’s Freya Allen has joined the cast as the main human along with Peter Macon of The Orville. According to a press…