Murder Falcon: The road to true heavy

Almost every new comic book these days comes loaded with some kind of high concept - some crazy twist on the usual things, often with the volume turned all the way up to 11. That is all well and good, and can even be nothing more than pure entertainment, but grounding it with something real can give all that intensity a greater dimension.

That's what happens in Daniel Warren Johnson's quite wonderful Murder Falcon comic. I've liked Johnson's comics for a while - his Superman story in the Red and White anthology that came out a couple of years ago was an absolute stunner. So when my pal Nik, who has been on a Johnson kick for a while, insisted I read more of his work, I was only too happy to follow his recommendations.

So I started with Murder Falcon, and it's the most heavy metal comic possible, full of the power of the chunky riff, the intensity of a thick bass line and the throbbing propulsion of a 20-minute drum solo. It is ridiculously over the top, and with Johnson's energetic art style, full of slashing lines, eye-scorching colours and some very exact perspectives, it doesn't get much heavier

This is hardly a unique storytelling path to take - heavy metal and comics have had a long and occasionally very strange relationship - but the thing that Johnson's comics have that so many of these contemporaries lack is that it still has a foot in the real world, and that juxtaposition of the mundane tragedy of real life mixing with the insanity of interdimensional musical warfare is very tasty.

It's not just about the way the Murder Falcon with the bionic arm on top of your van is beating the snot out of eldritch nightmares from beyond the veil, it's about how someone deals with a cancer diagnosis and how they can lash out out at the people who really care about them.

These are the quiet bits between the shredding solos, and they're all the heavier for their silence.

A walking man

I recently had a medical checkup that produced some surprisingly good results, which is always nice. Despite a hideously indulgent diet - especially since I became a parent - I've not yet reached the stage in life where I have to cut back on the finer things in life, and can just barrel on ahead as usual. (The lovely wife, while obviously happy with the clean bill of health, is still hugely annoyed that I haven't learned a goddamn thing when it comes to my diet.)

It was particularly surprising because I don't really do a hell of a lot of exercise. I've never belonged to a gym of any kind, and seem to be lacking the sheer thrill of narcissism that leads to outrageous feats of physical exercise. I got too many books to read to worry about that stuff.

But I do walk. I walk a lot.

I've always enjoyed going on a good walk, every since I was a kid. I've never been much for running, but if I keep to a steady languid pace, I feel like I could walk forever. I do greatly overestimate how well I would do at the Long Walk, but sometimes I really do feel like I could walk for much longer than most people.

And I have walked for hours and hours, and not just on big hikes through the big country. Never anything competitive, and never anything organised, because that always takes the fun out of everything. Just walking for the sake of it.

Apart from the physical benefits - it really does feel the one exercise that we are evolutionarily designed to do, and I do very duly heartened after going off on a good ramble - it's the mental state of mind that comes with the slow transport of your own legs,. Having the time to actually take in all your surroundings, down to the merest speck of dirt, while also losing yourself in your own head during a long hike. 

My mind wanders far further than my legs can ever take me, as long as I'm not distracted by the burn in the thighs or anything like that. I think big thoughts and small, and sometimes I don't think about anything at all.

At least 80 percent of the ideas that end up published on this blog come from these walks - the idea for this one came while I was on the track down to Blockhouse Bay beach the other night. And the silent trod can also help get my thoughts in order about how much I enjoyed a film or book or other piece of media (one of the reasons I still love going to movies on my own is that I'm not pressured to have an opinion as soon as the credits roll, and can let things percolate).

It's a dynamite way to problem solve, and de-stress, and just feel at peace with the world around you. Taking one step at a time, every day, on this walk for life.

Fighting with Frank (part 8 of 13): Go for your guns, girls!!

- Hondo City Law: Babes with Big Bazookas 

Art by Frank Quitely

Script by Robbie Morrison

Letters by Gordon Robson

I'm always surprised by Benny Blanco from the Bronx

I've seen Carlito's Way a dozen times - with the pool hall bit, and the part where Big Al shelters under a trash can, it's a top five DePalma for me, easy - and every single time I think that this time Carlito is actually going to get on that train, and get away. 

I'm so caught up in that chase around the rail station, and the final dash to the train, I ignore the fact that you can see Benny Blanco from the Bronx running ahead of him, and he so nearly gets away from that awful life forever.

I still think that one day, one strange day, Carlito might actually make it onto that train. 

My all time top five rock concerts #5: Calling on!

It was as good as New Zealand rock music got. Right about the turn of the century -after years of nurturing local talent and competing against international behemoths - rock bands in Aotearoa had their own sounds and styles, and could stand tall against the best in the world..

Some of them were just fun - like Stellar and Tadpole and Goodshirt - but Shihad were the kings of the local rock scene, bringing absolutely mega riffs into existence for more than decade by that point. Peaking off the success of The General Electric, they were the best band to ever come to Timaru in that small and wonderful slice of spacetime.

And they came with Weta, led by the brilliant Aaron Tokona, who wrote these powerful songs that built into transcendent crescendos. Tokona had no time for the business, and never recorded as much as he should have, and passed away a few years ago. But that was all in the future, and he made a Tuesday night in Timaru feel eternal, with some chugging AC/DC shredding as they set up for their next epic.

And they also came with Fur Patrol, which was fine by everyone, because Julia Deans was unquestionably the coolest person in the country right then, and she still might be.

But it was Shihad we came for, and Shihad who delivered all the rock we would ever really need in our lives. It was before they went down the ill-fated Pacifier route, and when they ruled the country. Shihad were the band who pumped the heaviest of riffs right into your skull, and would have lyrics that could be surprisingly tender, and a band that would have a joint with you in the back alley behind the Loaded Hog. 

It was the greatest gig my home town had ever seen. All those bands had been there before and would be there again, but for one wonderful tour around the country, they were better than any other fuckers in the world.

My all top top five rock concerts #4: All the hits!

And sometimes it's just a case of getting exactly what you want, and hearing all the hits, and getting that perfect encore, and being happy, with few surprises.

Like seeing the Beastie Boys in their mid-2000s pomp - it's something I'll never have again, now that Yauch has merged with the infinite, but their performance that cool January night will stick in my head forever. Or going to Queens of the Stone Age when they were touring with NIN, and both bands were trying to outdo each other in showmanship and crowd reaction, or the time we went to Radiohead (not that one) and it was just an predictably unpredictable as expected.

I do think Alice Cooper is more of an artist than the popular perception, but an Alice Cooper show without the fake guillotine and the rubber bats, as well as No More Mister Nice Guy, wouln't feel like a proper Alice concert at all.

The only important thing is that once you've seen the kind of show, you don't repeat it. I saw Iggy Pop do his thing at a Big Day Out and it was so good, it was all the strutting and crowd surfing you could ask for, but then I saw him a couple of years later, and it was exactly the same. All the same tricks. And not quite as good, since the first time featured as many of the original Stooges who were still standing at the time, and the second time didn't.

It's like eating the best piece of cake, but then ruining it by going back for seconds, when you should have got a fuckin' sausage...

My all-time top five rock concerts #3: Against The Wall

Pink Floyd's The Wall was the very first album I ever really fell in love with, and I loved it hard. While I later turned punk and pretended I didn't know all the words for Nobody Home for a decade or so, my early teenage years were spent mired in Roger Water's lament for his dead dad, and his complaints about how hard it was to be a rock star.

Waters and the rest of the Floyd parted company a few years before that obsession really kicked in, so I obviously never got to see the legendary stage show they did for the album, but when Roger Waters came to do the show a few years ago, I was all in.

And when In The Flesh exploded on stage with all due pomp and circumstance, it was a proper overload, with lights and indoor fireworks and smoke and all sorts of things going on, and just when you think 'that's how you start a fucking show!', a goddam plane crashes into the side of the bloody stage.

It was a full-on sensory experience from there - as well as the practical effects of building the wall, the use of laser-sharp images on its blank face moved everything in whole new dimensions.

I've seen bigger shows with my own eyes - including a big Broadway hit from the front row, and the Beatles' Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas - and there was that one time I went to an AC/DC concert and could not even get my head around what I was seeing ('Oh, it's a giant inflatable sex worker on top of a full-sized replica train' I finally realized.)

But the most impressive thing I've seen in a concert was the first music I ever fell in love with, and first loves usually aren't that grandiose.

My all top top five rock concerts #2: Two-thirds of Neil

I've seen Neil Young play in real life twice, but I feel like I've really only seen two-thirds of what he can do.

One was a big festival set where he played almost all the hits (although the wife managed to straight up hallucinate one of them). It was incandescently good, I could see the music buzzing through the air when he did Cortez The Killer, and it was absolutely everything you would want in a Neil Young concert.

That's what I thought anyway, until I saw Young perform again with Crazy Horse a few years later, and it was fucking brilliant in a whole new way. He was just jamming with his mates, and the songs went on forever, and he played about three songs that everybody knew, and then a bunch  of deep cuts from decades of songs, and it was glorious in a whole new way. 

The disappointed faces of the other concertgoers who never got to hear him do anything they could sing along to - that just made it all the sweeter.

The only thing I need now is to see Neil in his most laidback, acoustic mode, warbling out Harvest Moon on a stage covered in straw. The big fella is not getting any younger, but I still have high hopes that I will get to see this Neil Young, and complete this particular circle of life.

My all time top five concerts #1: Seeing it all through another pair of eyes

As much as music ruled by life in my teenage and early adult years, I didn't actually go to my first big rock or hip hop concert until I was well into my twenties. I went to plenty of gigs at the dankest pubs in the South Island, and saw my mates get up on stage and do wonderous things, but I never got to see any of the really big international acts.

There were all well outside my reach, for starters. The mega gigs were all in the far-off big cities, and getting tickets, transport and accommodation would cost hundreds of dollars, when I was lucky to get $5 a week for the latest issue of Excalibur. The only people to have the willpower to get to the big shows were the obsessives like my mate Kaz, who went to ever damn U2 show that came within a few hundred miles. I was so fucking jealous.

But once I had disposable income of my own, and moved to the big city, I got to see almost all of the bands I grew up with, and always adored. I saw most of the Clash play with the Gorillaz, and Faith No More do their thing, and Massive Attack up close. Dozens of shows, to the point where I have to consciously remember what concerts I've been to. 

And this week, with all the horror in the outside world still pressing down on us all, I'm going to remember the five top gigs I ever went to. It's actually more like nine or ten, because I loved some very different shows for very similar reasons, but top five always sounds more appropriate.

None of them are going to be very surprising, or anyone that obscure, because it should be abundantly clear that I am the most basic of all bitches.

So of course I'm picking the one time I got to see the Manic Street Preachers. It was years after I'd been a committed Manics fan, but they did all the big parts. What made it so great was that it was the best example of introducing my lovely wife to something that meant a lot to me, because that's when I got to show her the glory of Nicky Wire.

We've been married for 20 years now, and she still doesn't give a damn about many of the things I'm into - she never got into comics, and I will never make a horror fan out of her - and that's absolutely fine, because everybody has their own things to be passionate about. But I can still slowly introduce her to the music that speaks to my soul, and she will sometimes fall for it harder than I ever imagined.

And so we are at the Manics gig in Auckland, and while we are waiting for the show to start, she wonders why one of the mike stands has an outrageous feather boa on it, and I say it's because Nicky Wire, and then she got a crash course in the eternal coolness of the bassist. Her later discovery of his love of tidying up the house only made it better.

It's happened a couple of times. Checking out the late and truly great Mark Lanegan at the Reading festival in 2012 was another bet that paid off, his stoic stage presence making another new fan with the absolute minimum of effort, and the Rammstein show we saw at another festival was most impressive pyrotechnics I've ever seen, with the flames vaporising the light rain that was falling, and burning with such heat we could feel it on our faces 50m from the stage. But the most surprising thing about that was that she immediately went out and bought every single one of those albums.

And this is a win for everybody, we both enjoy the music, and can luxuriate in it together. But there is also just something truly special about finding a new connection with the love of your life.

Big rock concerts are all about a connection on the macro level, with thousands of people all living in the same moment, all jamming to the same tune. But it's also about those tiny connections, and it's just always better when you can share the love.