Even if you don't care about sports

... and even if you know absolutely nothing about tennis, go read Xan Brooks's liveblog the Mahut/Isner fifth set for the Guardian. The first mention is at 2:15 PM on 23 June (the innocuous "while Nicolas Mahut and big-serving John Isner are locked at two sets all on Court 18") and then moves into high gear at 4:05 that day:

The Isner-Mahut battle is a bizarre mix of the gripping and the deadly dull. It's tennis's equivalent of Waiting For Godot, in which two lowly journeymen comedians are forced to remain on an outside court until hell freezes over and the sun falls from the sky. Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 and yet nobody cares, because they're watching the football. So the players stand out on their baseline and belt aces past each-other in a fifth set that has already crawled past two hours. They are now tied at 18-games apiece.

On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.

Ooh, I can see the football out of the corner of my eye. England still 1-0 up!

The match continued for another five hours that day:

9.10pm: Is it over? It is not over. . . . Mahut wants to come off now; the light is almost gone. But the official orders the pair to play two more games. "We want more! We want more!" chant the survivors on Court 18. I'm taking this as proof that they have gone insane.

9.12pm: Mahut prevails! Mahut wins! This is not to say he wins the match, of course. Nobody is winning this match; not now and not ever.

And then Paolo Bandini picked it up on June 24, with the attention to detail that is the true measure of good sportswriting, good writing, the world over:

And so it resumes ... Isner, leg reattached, knocks the ball to Mahut, racket still clutched firmly in cold, greying, hand and they resume right where they left off. Well not right where they left off to be fair - this time they're managing to return the ball back to each other. John McEnroe is up in the stands, wearing a baseball cap backwards, presumably to feign youthfulness. Children are always spared by the undead in the end.

Getting it right "Don't you mean early noughties, Danny Boyle zombies that can run and shriek and etc," demands Hugh Randall. "28 Days Later was out before the Dawn of the Dead re-make." Correct Hugh, except that in 28 Days Later they weren't zombies, but merely people infected with Rage. The players on Court 18 are undead, which is completely different.

The word "epic" gets overused. This is the real stuff.

A quick comics thought

In my extemporaneous lecture on Wonder Woman at last year's Worldcon, I talked at some length about the question of whether Wonder Woman would have been of value even if she had been nothing more than Superman with Tits. My conclusion, then and now, is that she would have been, but fortunately she was much more than that, especially during the utterly bizarre but captivating Golden Age stories of Marston and Peters.

A chance encounter of the TVTropes entry on "Distaff Counterpart" (female versions of male heroes) made me realize that this test had already been run: the original 1950s Supergirl really was little more than Superboy with Tits. Same powers, basically same costume, same backstory, about as similar as two characters can be without being literal copies.

And she inspired a fierce and enduring loyalty among a generation of female comics readers. She debuted in the 1950s, an ebb of popularity for superhero comics (relative to the rest of the American comics field, anyway), so she never enjoyed the success that she could have had if she had debuted in the Golden Age, but she was Superman with Tits, and she was loved.