Squid Game: Old Ben's an android!

We're a bit slow around these parts, and only just got around to watching that Squid Game show that all the cool kids were raving about years ago. But the timing was fortuitous, with a second season about to drop on the world, and it's now so old I feel slightly less guilty about spoiling the shit out of it.

Because while it was just as fun and heartbreaking and tense as everybody said, I can't believe I got sideswiped by the oldest twist in my book again.

So we figured out that the actual mastermind behind all the squid gaming was the crazy old guy - who you hadn't actually seen die - a good 30 seconds before he showed up again on screen, and all I thought was that they got me again.

Forty years ago, Harry Twenty on the High Rock was one of my absolute favourite strips in 2000ad. The comic was in its absolute golden age, and Harry 20 stood with the best of them, with plenty of space-prison thrills from writer Gerry Finley-Day and artist Alan Davis. 

And the late second-act revelation that Old Ben - the crazy old coot who had been at the prison since the start - was an android blew my eight-year-old mind. Ben had been a vital part of Harry's attempts to get off the Rock, with the usual dose of comic relief that always comes with that kind of character, and the sudden turn that he had been a pawn of the evil warden all along was genuinely shocking.

And then Squid Game pulled that dusty old trope out for its last episode twist, and I never saw it coming. O Yeong-su is so good in the role, charming and befuddled, an inane grin in the face of slaughter. Of course he was the bad guy all along.

I fully expect to fall for this again in the future, because time is a flat circle, and I never suspect the harmless old guy.

The only horror I could get

The closest I come to the hoary old thrill of browsing at the video store these days is when I go to the local library to load up on the triple features I need while I'm working, and I'm still amazed that it doesn't cost a cent. It's all free with the library card, and I load up on half a dozen films a week.

I'm amazed because having your own copy of anything used to be ridiculously expensive, especially if you had the audacity to want it for longer than one night. I once got hit with a huge $70 bill for a copy of Turkey Shoot that got stolen from my car while I was renting it.

If I actually wanted my own copy of something, especially one that wasn't second-hand, I had to save up for it. The first film I ever owned on video tape was Pink Floyd The Wall, and that cost me $35 in 1988 money. I could have bought 10 X-Men comics for that.

So the only way to build up any kind of movie library was to haunt the video stores, and pick up the stuff they've put out for sale. It didn't matter that they had been played hundreds of times already, or that they were covered in the store's stickers, or were just usually the shitty movies that nobody cared about anymore, every one was precious.

Or, at least, between 10 and 15 bucks, which was still a lot of money for young Bob. I still managed to scratch together enough spare change to get enough, and of course I tried to get as much horror as I could.

The first was the best - I picked up Dawn of the Dead at the Record Parlour in Timaru for $10 of birthday money, and I still have it now. I was also stoked to get my own Robocop, especially because the one I had taped off the TV was censored to hell, and I also still have the gorgeous Jean Rollin suckfest that I got in 1995 up on the bookshelf.

But those were rare gems, and I still ended up with a  load of very dodgy movies, like CHUD, or Waxwork, or a compilation of the Freddy's Nightmares show.

They weren't, by any measure, the greatest things in the world, but they were the start of a film collection, and I held onto them for years without watching them, (I'm still not sure I ever watched that Freddy thing.)

Now I own and have access to hundreds of films, the sort of movies I would have killed to see in the 90s. But those first films, picked up from video stores and second hand stores around the country, were somewhere to start, and we all have to start somewhere.

This is a house of McMahon: Proto Dredd

Mike McMahon was literally right there from the start of Dredd - while not a co-creator, he drew the first stories to be published - and helped create the look and feel of Mega City-One, but it still took him a while to define his own individual style. His early work is more crowded, and more rounded, than the sharp, angular brilliance that was to come, but the greatness was starting to shine through by the time Judge Dredd walked out of the Cursed Earth. 

Come and see the violence inherent in the system!

I don't know, man. I know we're supposed to be laughing at the sheer idea that peasants who make their living slinging mud might be politically aware - and articulate enough to express their dissatisfactions - but a system of government based on aquatic tarts lobbing scimitars at people passing by sounds a lot more logical to me than the US electoral college. 

At least the Lady of the Lake lives in some kind of reality. Even if it is very, very wet.

The black dog runs at night

Angelo Badalamenti might have left this world behind, but his music still has extraordinary power, especially in the night, especially on the deserted streets.

I figured this out decades ago, walking around town late at night, listening to his collaborations with Lynch on my first shitty walkman. When you're alone in town, surrounded by a sleeping city, and familiar areas become strange and dark, nothing is better than the smooth, dark sounds of Badalamenti for strutting through it.

It's the perfect soundtrack for the darkness all around, the endless black sky, the empty streets, the lonely car driving around, the distant barks of lonely dogs, the cats in their weird gatherings on the silent roads.

All of his work is wonderful, but I have a special place in my heart for the Fire Walk With Me soundtrack, especially on those night wanderings. The thrust of The Pink Room, the groove of A Real Indication, the eternal charms of the main theme music, the heartbreak of Questions in a World of Blue, the everything of The Black Dog Runs At Night.

My last Walkman got thrown out a long time ago, but I've rediscovered the joy of Angelo in the night. I've downloaded all the soundtracks onto my phone, and I am listening to that on my nightly walks. And I'm not alone on the quiet streets anymore, I've got my ghost of my previous self from all those years ago, walking in my same steps, walking to these strange beats.

I'm trying to be better, every single day

Look, I know the world is a shitty place right now, and there are places to confront all this horror, and this stupid little blog is not one of them. But once again, just for the record - I love my trans siblings, I am on the side of the kids getting bombed and nobody else's; and a woman's choices are literally none of my fucking business.

I often feel remarkably pointless, prattling on about comic books and other nonsense when my news feeds are full of people in tents being pounded to death by horrific amounts of firepower, but the annoyances and joys of everyday life and the entertainments that fill them really are separate from the deep raging over the world's injustices that I do feel inside. This is just not the place for it, because otherwise I wouldn't do anything else.

The big sky of Texas

You can watch all the cowboy movies you want, but you really have to go to Texas to see the big sky.

I saw it outside Houston in 2016. We were barreling along one of the satellite roads, heading for the airport, and there were the most massive clouds in the air before us. We were skirting a storm, and it felt like it went on forever. Those giant skies felt like nothing else I've ever seen in my life.

Maybe it's the flat land, or the high altitude of the clouds, but it was bigger and wider than anything. It has felt a little like that back home this year, with the air above the Canterbury Plains stretching a lot farther than the Auckland view I'd had for the previous years, but the big sky of Texas really was something else.

Trusting individual voices in a world of white noise

Even as the state of writing about pop culture gets more and more dire - with great media websites shutting up shop because Google farted; or AI rubbish replacing the point of view of an actual human being - one thing has remained constant: you gotta trust somebody.

It's harder than it has ever been, because there is just a tiny number of professional critics around these days. But there are still people to follow, because experience can shown you that you can trust what they are going to say.

My number one movie critic for the past few decades has undoubtedly been the mighty Kim Newman, who comes to every movie he reviews with an open mind, and can find new things to say about the trashiest of films, all with a heavy dose of wit and intelligence. 

I've been a huge fan of Newman's fictions sicne first stumbling over Anno Dracula at the local library, but his reviews have also been consistently great. I will see a movie just because the good Doctor Shade recommends it, and will avoid anything he says is not worth it. He knows what he is talking about, and who could ask for more? 

I can, because I also like different tastes. There are writers who I don't always agree with, for various reasons, but I find their reasoning and writing so compelling that I never miss their opinion. 

These days, the two who come to mind first  in that regard are the dynamic duo of Sean T Collins and Gretchen Felker-Martin. I've followed both of them for years, and even when I've violently disagreed with their conclusions - they are both out of their minds when they say Mad Max Fury Road is trash - they have written with incredible eloquence, passion and insight about the last episodes of Game of Thrones, or the most genuinely unsettling horror movies.

I'll often still try out something they've panned, and give others a go because they raved about it. But I always read what they write - Felker-Martin is busier with her excellent fiction work these days and I'm really looking forward to the Manhunt adaption, but Collins is still in the muddy trenches of regular recaps and reviews of TV shows, and doing remarkable things on a weekly basis - his takes on the recent Mernandez Brothers films is just shattering.

And there are plenty of others like Chris Ready, who is still astonishingly astute, able to find something interesting to say about all sorts of movies with just a few short paragraphs, or Matt Zoller Seitz and the rest of the crew at he Roger Ebert website, (which is a little funny, because I never actually rated Ebert's stuff that highly, too much baggage, man); or Tegan O'Neill, who has been doing regular video reviews of the most beautifully random comics - nobody else is talking about Paul Chadwick's The World Below, but Tegan is getting stuck in there.

These are the main voices I like listening to, and can trust in a ocean of rotting chum. I'm putting my money where my mouth is next month with four weeks of daily comic reviews, but I walk in the shadow of pop culture giants. Find your own, and you won't ever regret it.

No Marvels around here

There are many weird things about the way superhero comics have changed over the years, but the strangest thing might be that while everyone knows who Thanos is now, and you can get a Groot tee-shirt in the local chain-store fashion outlet, you are shit out of luck if you just want to read a new Spider-Man comic. 

The movies might be racking in billions - and all the toys and lunchboxes and other tat even more - but you can only get new comics from the biggest comic publishers in the English language at one comic store in the whole goddamn South Island these days.

It isn't a complete drought, There are still issues of the Beano in the bookstores that have held on, and sometimes I even find a precious 2000ad. And there is always bloody Phantom comics everywhere, because of course there are bloody Phantom comics everywhere. But nothing by the big American companies, apart from occasional remaindered collections of random shit at the big box stores.

You can, of course, order what you want over the internet - I've kept up with the usual Love and Rockets and Punisher comics by Garth Ennis on mail order, and you can order any comics you ant from all over the world with relative ease.

But you can't just walk into a shop and buy a new Marvel comic book anywhere. So there is no chance of picking up something random, just because the cover looks aces, because there is nothing there.

And they really did use to be everywhere, long before Robert Downey Jr started flying around in his iron jocks. There were a couple of dozen places, even in my small town - bookstores, corner dairies, supermarkets, post offices, cafes, you could find a Marvel Team-Up or Avengers West Coast or What The-?! or Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition in all of them.

The direct market was just really kicking in when I was a kid, and it might have saved the comics industry in the 80s, but now you can't find the actual issues anywhere, it's no wonder the original publications are viewed as no more than IP farms.

So no chance of grabbing a Captain America because it's got Diamondback in it, or spying a Daredevil with a great cover while I'm down the store, or picking up an Uncanny X-Men on a whim. They are just not there, even as they cinematic counterparts are universal. I know I could just grab that Groot tee-shirt - it even has actual Kirby art! - but it's just not the same.

It's just not the same.