Pulped!

The first CD I ever bought was Pulp's Different Class. I'd held off on getting a CD player for years because it was the early 90s and they were expensive as hell, and because I had a sizable tape collection that would instantly be obsolete.

But then I came home pissed from the pub one night, and my usual wind-down activity after a night out would be watching the random music videos that played on a couple of TV channels overnight. And I saw the video for Disco 2000 and it was the coolest fucking thing I'd ever seen, and then I listened to the whole album on the listening post at Echo Records, and made the decision to upgrade right there.

I got a free tee-shirt with the CD as well, and it was only a cheap thing with the shiny Pulp logo on it, but I treasured it. I spent the next few years listening to Different Class and This Is Hardcore and all the rest, and while it was immeasurably sad to see the band fade away in the early 21st century, it still felt like a good time to go.

And now they have a new album out, and I bought the CD because I like to have the thing, and to play it on the old stereo in our car, and now I'm driving around town singing badly to Pulp songs like it's 1996 all over again.

It's easy to do because it does feel like a classic Pulp album in the way it's paced - a few rockers, a couple of meandering tunes, and finishing on a high - I think the last song has some of the best lyrics Jarvis has ever done. 

It sounds wanky, but I do think they are missing something with Steve not around anymore, just the crunchy bite he could bring to things. And writing songs about an imaginary relationship with a girl who doesn't know you exist was awkward when Jarvis was in his 20s, but now seems very creepy coming from a guy in his 60s. 

So not the greatest of their albums, but not a nostalgic cash-in either, because they're still putting it all out there, and I'll gladly take it all. I do have vague hopes they might do a world tour, and I'll see one the one great band I've always wanted to see. But I'll take a new record for now.

I've still got that first CD and that tee-shirt. And I've still got a lot of the cassette tapes I thought would be obsolete, all those years ago. And I still a have a fierce devotion to Cocker ad his crew, doing their best, and laying their hearts bare. 

Embarrassed by comics again

I've been busted by friends and workmates on the way back from the library with an armful of comic books lately, and they've asked me what I'm reading - and I really, really don't want to show them.

Because while I get my own kicks from these things, some of them are ugly as fuck, if only on a purely design level. 

I have no shame about reading modern comics as an adult, I got over that kind of adolescent embarrassment decades ago. But so many of them are just ugly to look at, and I don't want to encourage anybody else to subject themselves to that.

Sometimes I might be lucky and have a Chris Ware book or something when I'm stopped, and it's an objectively impressive piece of art, but most of the time I'm taking back some new Superman or X-Men comic, and they are just awful.

The current designs for the X-books are genuinely off-putting. They look empty and vapid. I look at the things that used to get rejected by Carmine Infantino in the 70s, and am actually appalled that today's editors think some of the things they slap on the cover are worth the efforts. They're figures hanging in space, grimacing at some off-screen menace, with no backgrounds so it's a timeless void, and washed-out colour that mutes any excitement in the line.

So I'm getting better at laughing it away when somebody asks me what I'm into. I never thought I'd be so shamed to be seen reading comic books again, but ugly art and lazy design will do that. 

The Jungian thing, sir!

R Lee Ermey rightly stole Full Metal Jacket by skull-fucking it through sheer force of personality, but my favourite line delivery in the entire river of marine shit is always going to be the colonel's slight pause, followed by 'whose side are you on, son?'. Just immaculate.

28 Years Later: The gore is acceptable now

It's extremely unsurprising to me that 28 Years Later is easily my favourite film of the year so far. The original is one of the most beautifully intense films I've ever seen on the big screen, and I am very much into the pastoral horror thing, where the camera lingers on this lush and verdant fields, with something absolutely horrible on the edge of things. 

It's also got an amazing soundtrack, and another absolute gold-standard Ralph Fiennes performance, and - most of all - goes to some truly unexpected places, especially when they get to the life's work of the good Dr Kelson, and an ending with a tonal shift so vibrant and unsettling that I am aching for the next film in the series.

The movie felt like a constant surprise, but the most surprising thing of all might be the film's rating in many countries, because it wasn't the hard R that these sorts of films have traditionally earned. 

It does start with a bunch of kids getting horribly murdered, but it's just off screen - which can make things worse, but it is a genuine relief that we don't see it. And the giant massive cock on the primary monsters is just artfully obscured enough, while also being happily blatant. 

The kind of fake movie violence seen in movies like this would have once got the film in some very big trouble with the censors and other assorted prudes in the past. Now it feels like we've seen it all before, with the various Walking Dead TV series in particular doing just about everything you can do to a decaying human body.

It's just very funny to me that gore effects don't provoke the moral conniptions they once did, especially when I've spent the past few weeks reading old horror movie magazines from the 90s that breathlessly report on the seconds of footage snipped from Italian zombie epics. There have been way more words spilt on that prosthetic penis than the heads getting ripped off, which says something about the 

I'm just here for the ride, and stopped caring about rating systems the day I got old enough they don't matter. But if it's a small weight off the back of my favourite filmmakers, and they can make things as intense as they like without worrying about the killjoys, it must make for better movies.

Blogging about blogging: This is how it works

I've explained why I do this blog several times, and the simplest explanation is that I spend a lot of my life writing straight news stories with no fat or bullshit on them, and this is where I get to unload of lot of absolute bollocks out of my head, and use as much swearing and unnecessary adjectives as humanly fucking possible. 

But I haven't really talked about how I do it, because it's evolved into a weird process that works for me, and I don't expect it to work for anybody else. And while writing about writing is a sin, Martin, this is how it works.

When the Tearoom of Despair started in 2009, I spent the first decade or so writing two or three blog posts a week, trying to break the 1000-word mark. This meant I got into the habit of rambling too much, and conflating too many things, and always trying to find a viewpoint worthy enough of all that time and effort. It was getting harder and harder, and then I went daily, and it's proven so much easier, because I can get to the goddamn point a lot faster.

To keep up that pace, I do follow a vague pattern, which makes it easy to come up with a week's worth of posts - Monday is usually something personal; Tuesday is more of a review of a great comic or movie I've seen recently; Wednesday and Saturdays are low-content days where I'm happy to post an image or video, stick a paragraph or two on it and call it a day; Thursday is when I have a good moan about something, because we all like to get this shit off our chests, Friday is movie or music night; and Sunday is some kind of comic art, usually as part of an ongoing series of posts.

None of these are set in stone - sometimes I just cannot deal with a bitch session, no matter how much it itches - but they provide a good guideline

I generally write a week in advance, it's only just turned July as I write these words. There is one first draft to smash everything out, a longer period of putting it in order and finding some kind of hook or theme, and then a short look over it to make sure all the formats and images don't look like shit.

I don't know if this is working for anybody else, and please don't try to tell me because I never read the few comments left here. Sorry if you've ever said something illuminating about something I've posted, but I haven't looked at those things in three years or so. Social media is the place for dialogues, this is Monologue City.

I don't even know what the audience is, the past couple of months have had some extraordinary visitor numbers for this blog - I cracked a new record monthly mark in June. But I don't believe any of it, and since it is never one big post getting all the numbers, but a bunch of them getting relatively smaller numbers, so I assume it's all some kind of AI scraping, which is reason #723 why AI sucks shit.

But I'm not doing this for the audience, or to make money from it, or raise my profile. I do it because it's fun, and that's the main reason I sit down and spew all this out. That's how I do it, it's as simple as that.

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (70-61): Can I tell them, Pa?

70. Prog 468 - art by Brett Ewins

69. Prog 1654 - art by Paul Marshall

68. Prog 160 - art by Mike McMahon

67. Prog 2295 - art by INJ Culbard

66. Prog 555 - art by John Higgins

65. Prog 1979 - art by Simon Davis

64. Prog 464 - art by Brett Ewins

63. Prog 1912 - art by Paul J Holden

62. Prog 109 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

61. Prog 2393 - art by Lee Carter

Lost in the library (part 13 of 13) - Batman/Dylan Dog

Batman/Dylan Dog 

by Roberto Recchioni, Gigi Cavenago and Werther Dell'edera

My entire exposure to Dylan Dog is a single drunk viewing of that Rupert Everett movie 30-something years ago, and flicking through a comic digest at an Italian service station years later, but that’s enough – like Batman, he is a deeply simple character that you can do any type of story with. 

But while I don’t have enough experience with the character to know if this is the style for a Dylan Dog series, this deep into the 21st century, I know enough about Batman comics to say that the energetic style of this series is something special. 

Combined with a colour palette that is often sadly lacking in many Bat-stories, this is an entertaining and vibrant effort. Maybe there are a lot of Dylan Dog comics like this, but there sure should be more Bat-comics with this kind of life to them.

Lost in the library (part 12 of 13) - One Dirty Tree

One Dirty Tree 

By Noah Van Sciver 

The beauty of autobiographical comics is in the mundane, and stories about unceasing wanking and mean girlfriends can still be tender and graceful. They can also let you glimpse inside somebody else’s world, and the shit they had to put up with. 

Noah Van Schiver has a lot to put up with One Dirty Tree, chronicling a family life that is incredibly crowded and chaotic, with a vast clan of kids dealing with real poverty. As a relatively new father, I feel the patriarch of this family is a complete shithead - even as I appreciate he is suffering from mental issues that mean that shitheadedness is not his fault - and the things he puts his family through are fairly dramatic.

Van Schiver’s scratchy, grainy line is straight from memory, even as time plays tricks. But he captures the grime and grind of getting through the day in a household with no money, as their father abandons his responsibilities to keep them all warm and fed.

Lost in the library (part 11 of 13) - Absolute Power

Absolute Power

By Mark Waid and Dan Mora

The big crossover event comics come along so often they rarely have any real power to them at all, and Absolute Power has all the pontificating about what it means to be a hero, and the usual victories and betrayals, but it’s the gross evolution of Amanda waller into a cackling villain that still leaves the most sour of tastes. 

The Waller of the ‘80s Suicide Squad was a complex character because she had clear motivations, and clear lines that could not be crossed. She bears no resemblance to the current version, because after decades of reboots and severe weight loss programs, she is nothing more than another sad villain, driven only by hate and spite. 

In the end, the superheroes win and get their powers back and she gets taken down when she is broadcast boasting of her evil plan to the whole world, like a fucking rube. It’s not that she’s a bad guy that's so disappointing, it's that she’s just really mediocre at it.