User:Guybles/No Place Like Holmes!
No Place Like Holmes! was a short-lived comic interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, adapted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for the younger reader. It lasted only one page before Conan-Doyle realised that his idea was truly, truly abysmal and should never be continued. To this day, only three copies remain in existence: two are in the hands of private collectors, while the other is held by The British Library as an example of literature gone wrong.
For once, there was no involvement by Alan Moore, although he had a damn good try at drafting some storylines involving hideous beatings, drugs and a mysterious anti-hero.
History[edit | edit source]
Following the 1893 publication of "The Adventure of the Final Problem", with the resultant national mourning for Great Britain's favourite detective hero, Conan Doyle received a significant gas bill. Realising the hypocrisy of reneging on his insistence that there would be no more stories, the natural route seemed to be to retread the old material. With a quick call to his artist, Sydney "Syd" Paget, Conan Doyle proposed reworking his prose to make it accessible to a younger audience, combining several earlier stories into a literary portmanteau story, "The Adventure of the Adventurous Adventure".
Early Draft[edit | edit source]
In order to speed up publication, Conan Doyle and Paget used the existing illustrations for several Sherlock Holmes stories. These were pasted into a standard comic book layout, with speech bubbles pasted on convey dialogue. This radical process allowed one page of comic to be printed every twenty minutes - which was almost exactly long enough for Conan Doyle to realise that he was making an enormous mistake. Even as Paget was completing the export of the completed page 1 to an overly large .gif file, Conan Doyle panicked and tried to abort the process. Although the print command was terminated, their trusty LaserWriter II had already buffered three copies, which were subsequently printed. These were hidden amongst Conan Doyle’s private effects and never seen again until after his death.
Technology[edit | edit source]
Conan Doyle and Paget were fortunate to have access to an Apple iMac G3 to undertake the editing, although neither were proficient graphic designers. This explains the poor choice of typeface. Layout was completed using a dodgy copy of Photoshop 6 that Paget had copied from a friend.
Mystery[edit | edit source]
In an eerie forecast of future events, involving the final adventures of the well-known boy wizard, lithographic images of the front page were leaked onto the telegraph network of the day and subsequently viewed by more than seven people. Although Conan Doyle described the unknown individuals who attempted to spoil the story as “Terrible, terrible people”, no suspect were ever brought to justice.
Cultural Impact[edit | edit source]
In the years immediately after the inadvertent printing of "No Place Like Holmes!", Conan Doyle came to realise that he was now just a bitch for writing ever more Sherlock Holmes stories. He spent the rest of his natural life writing ever-more derivative stories, such as:
- Sherlock Holmes and the Adventue in Paris
- The Strange Affair of the Eighth of Prime Columbian
- Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Potato
- Sherlock Holmes and the Philosopher's Stone
- Dr Watson does Dallas
- Sherlock Holmes vs. the Evil Surfer Nazi Cannibals
Nobody ever thought about doing another Sherlock Holmes cartoon until Disney bought the rights to Conan Doyle's estate and released a 1978 test animation of "Li'l Holmes and the Mystery Gang" as an attempt to combat the ever-growing threat of Scooby Doo.
Naturally, it sucked.
The Future[edit | edit source]
Nobody wants to attempt animated Sherlock Holmes ever again. You just can't draw ingrained 19th Century stereotypes (gypsies, sinister foreigners, poor people, women, Queen Victoria and so on) in that much detail.
That said, the crazy Japanese are working on a manga version, Sheruroku Homesu 20X8, which will tell a story of the famous cybernetic detective attempting to protect twelve schoolgirls from tentacle rape by (kssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhh) with some beasts from the eight dimension, summoned by a lonely outcast who was only looking (kssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhh) by getting some new fusion units, only to be taught the dark secrets of the Utsokira (kssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhh) due to a University project which could save the world from the threat of the (kssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhh) with a pineapple.