Looking for Jimmy's End: Part five of five

BT: Moore has always been sneaking songs into his comics, which is probably the worst possible medium for conveying music, and he's always dabbled in recording tunes, so it's no surprise that he'd put a lot of thought into the first proper soundtrack for one of his works.

I do tend to dismiss a lot of his earlier singles as pure novelty - after burning through Watchmen, From Hell and V For Vendetta, the lovely wife said she thought Moore was a lot less cool after she heard March of the Sinister Ducks, although she does sometimes sing snatches of the lyrics while she's doing housework. And I alwys thought the Gangsters Never Die song was deeply, deeply annoying.

The diegtic approach is always a fine idea - it certainly worked for The Wire, which only broke that rule for the obligatory end-season montage. And it is another fairly obvious David Lynch influence, Lynch is always pulling that sort of trick, and even making fun of it on occasions with various lip synching jokes. And Lynch is another filmmaker who juxtaposes cheeery love songs with awful events, although that's a trick that every hack movie maker has caught onto in recent years.

I certainly didn't notice the overlap between the films, but that's another of those things you can only do in a film, or a series of film. Y'know, I think that might be one of the things I like most about these films, they're clearly having so much fun making them, and revelling in all the little tricks and illusions that cinema brings. It's the sort of thing rookie filmmakers always do, and I always find it really charming, even if I'm grimacing at the more embarrassing moments. A little enthusiasm goes a long way.

KS: So, do you have any favourite or effecting moments from the films? I've been watching them again, when writing about the songs, and have come across one or two parts which jump out when in context with the rest of the films.

I'm thinking particularly of the scene where Faith is speaking on the phone making her 'emergency' call. at a certain point the inflection in her voice drops and it goes from risque patter to a dead toned statement. It's scary and sad, particularly when you see it in relation to Matchbright's taunting in 'Upon Reflection'.

It's the combination of those two scenes, along with her conversation with Jimmy when they are dancing together, that you begin to get a sense of Faith as someone who is paying a very heavy price for something that is not her fault. Suddenly her character springs into sharp relief and becomes more complex and so do the films by extension. 

BT: I'm not sure if there is any one moment that really stands out over everything else, although I am a total sucker for any scene where characters enter a state of climactic transcendence. When I try to think about my favourite bits from the film, it tends to be more of a mood or atmosphere that captures my fancy.

I like how sensual all those exact preparations are in Act Of Faith, and how Faith's home, and the music and even the act of stuffing some plastic in the mouth takes on a smooth, sexy context. And I really like it when it all suddenly sours and all those rich visual tones and thick sounds suddenly become stifling and rotten, and becomes too much for Faith as she chokes on her last breath. That switch is really well done, and emphasises the horror, as her silly little ritual goes horribly wrong.

Upon Reflection is still my least favourite of the films, because it's just so mean, but watching it again, it's remarkable how much detailed information is packed into that single static and warped shot. A Professional Relationship is much more palatable, and while it does expose how heavy handed some of Moore's dialogue can sound when it comes out of actual mouths, I could listen to Moore talk bollocks all day long.

There are more individual moments in the full Jimmy's End film, and my favourite scenes usually involve Darrell D'Silva looking totally befuddled as he wanders around slowly, but I do like the slow dance scene, mainly because I always like a slow dance scene, especially when the dancers are using their dance to hold off total despair.

And again, there is that moment of "the loight", when the brightness of the world overwhelms everything and leaves the story on a note of hope. They're strange little films full of strange little people (some of whom might be strange big gods), but we're all part of the same divine light, and sometimes we need to be pushed into it, or we'll be trapped by our own guilt.

That's why Jimmy's End feels so optimistic to me, even with all the cruelty and venom. Moore's stories have often been all about the eternal desire to drag ourselves out of the filth and into the light, and this is another fine example. 

Which is why I'm also very keen to see the last film in this series, to see what sort of fun they're having with a bow tie that wraps everything up. Moore always likes his works to be well rounded and full of synchronicity, and a series of short films is a good medium for that sort of thing.

As a long time reader of Moore's work, it's pleasing to see how much he's enjoying this new medium, getting to craft his small cinematic gems without interference from money-men or bull-headed collaborators.  I hope he makes some more, once that final film was done, and turns this late-career interest in movies into another decent chapter in his story.

Looking for Jimmy's End: Part four of five

KS: Another thing about the spoken word pieces and the virtues, or not, of adapting them-with some small regard to Mr Eddie Campbell's work (which, I hasten to add, I really, really like too.)

Jim Woodring once explained in the TCJ why he thought it was difficult for comics to engage in a manner as deeply or directly as a really good novel. Basically, he felt that when a novelist describes something, even something as simple as a table, we are bringing something of ourselves to that table when we imagine it. When we see a table in a comic it is the cartoonists table we are seeing. There is not quite the same personal connection.

For a work like The Birth Caul which was 'just' words and voices, until good fellow Eddie Campbell picked up his pen, there is a tremendous power in those limits. Moore is talking about the very stuff of life here. Fucking and conception and birth and death-the whole shebang. When you bring yourself to that, when you strain your imagination to render those words into understanding and personal interpretation, then I think your pushing at the very edge of yourself, making yourself bigger. That's good.

BT: I get what you're saying about the spoken word pieces and how they force the imagination into bigger and bigger spaces, but comics are still my favourite medium, and it's in that weird space between writer and artist that I like so much (even if it's a single writer/artist).  A comic story isn't a story until it's been drawn, and the artist has to interpret and edit the tale. There is a certain amount of laziness in letting Eddie Campbell supply the visuals for Snakes And Ladders, but he also sells the pain of Arthur Machen, falling into black waves of despair. As much as I love Vocie of the Fire, and as much as I'm looking forward to Jerusalem, I just like the stuff with the pictures more.

Which brings us back to the Jimmy's End films, and the collaboration thing, and I think it's really funny that he has more direct collaborators in this - including Jenkins, the cinematographer, the actors, and everybody down to the tea boy - than anything else he has ever created, but it also feels pure MOORE in a way that his comics mostly aren't, and his stage presentations are.

I guess the whole point is that everyone involved, from the director through to the fans who put money into the Kickstarter, is in awe of Moore and his work, and want his vision to get on a screen without any compromise. I assume that many of the creators only got involved in the first place because Moore was on board, and I know that the vast majority of the people who do sit down and watch these films are only doing so because they have enjoyed Moore's past works. I know that's why I'm here.

Because Moore's stuff is almost always worthwhile. There have been a few comic projects that have been inevitably sundered by shite art, and a couple where he really didn't put any effort into it at all, but for the most part, his comics, prose and stage shows are incredibly thoughtful, emotionally rich and downright clever, and I have no hesitation in putting these new movies in that latter category.

For people who don't like Moore's work - and that's perfectly all right, because it's different strokes for different folks - I imagine these films will be tedious and self-indulgent, but I think they're just super.

How would you rate them in the Moore Pantheon?

KS: So far I'm rating it pretty high. I'm thinking at this moment somewhere just below Promethea, which ranks in turn below a couple of the spoken word pieces, V, Unearthing, From Hell and Voice of the Fire. So, maybe, somewhere in the top ten?  For a final decision I'm waiting until I see 'His Heavy Heart'.

 Before banging on about something I haven't seen I thought we should touch on one of the other successful collaborative relationships that contribute so much to the films - the songs. I like them. They are an essential part of the rich atmosphere of the films. As Alan and Mitch tell us, in one of the promotional videos or interviews that are out there, the films music is all diegtic.

That is, sound that originates within the environment the characters are in. If we can hear so can they. At times this makes for a slightly muffled soundtrack but it also makes for richly atmospheric moments. Check out the part when Jimmy enters the club and is walking down that awful piss yellow hallway.  Strains from 'In the Past Again' echo around him, drawing him deeper into the story and onwards toward his impending fate. It is creepy and unsettling in no small part due to that ominous serenade.

 The song also serves as a nice overlap with 'Upon Reflection'. In that nasty little short the song begins in the bar just as Matchbright starts to brutalise Faith and marks the point, somewhere else, that Jimmy enters the building.

 Surprising, when you get to hear the songs unimpeded they are lush, romantic and melancholic. I suspect that they get closer to the heart of what Moore is seeking to evoke/impart than the surface level of the films does.

 "Every song I hear on the radio,
sounds like something from before.
Different words and different scores,
but much the same.
And the ghost of the times I had back then,
they still follow me around.
Those dead old melodies,
it's like their haunting me,
and won't let the present be."

 Crook and Flail, the producers of the material, the music wranglers, do a superb job of realising Moore's words. I have no idea of how much they talked to him before beginning the process but this isn't the first time they have worked together  and I suspect they are in tune enough to go it alone or with minimal guidance.

 As for 'His Heavy Heart', I'm real keen to see it. The Kickstsarter site tells us:

 1. There's glitter, gold and rust

2. There is a smiling man with an inappropriate personal soundtrack

3. Traditional rules and regulations of processes are observed.

Apparently that last bit involves Egyptian funeral rites so it's probaly not for the faint hearted.

I'm really not sure what to expect. Given Moore's public musings on the nature of space and time it's possible we can expect some sort of return to the start of Jimmy's mis-spent existence but other than that I'm not so sure.

I like that.  

TOMORROW: BUT WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT?

Looking for Jimmy's End: Part three of five

BT: We were talking about collaboration and the people Moore works with, which might be a good segue into Unearthing, and why you thought it was a dilution of pure Moore.

KS: I don't really think his vision has been dissipated by film, I just thought I would say that to get a reaction.

Indeed it seems that the films are drawing on the big man's strength for collaboration and producing something new and involving. Jimmy's End feels different from what has gone before. I can't put my finger on exactly what is unique except to say that the cycle of films have their own atmosphere that is rooted in the setting, (which might be why we keep coming back to workingmen's clubs). It will interesting to see what happens if Moore and Jenkins get to make The Show, since, apparently, that will be set out and about in Northampton (or at least a version of Northampton).

Unearthing, the prose piece, is one of my favorite Mooreisms. It is a love letter to an old, dear friend. It is also a bravado piece of writing. It is dense and engaging and beautiful and sad and enigmatic and very, very, very spooky. Unearthing is prose which you can get wonder around in-as long as you are prepared to risk getting lost and never finding your way out. In short, I think Unearthing is massive.

I don't really like the photo adaptation of it. It seems besides the point. Unlike the things we have been discussing Unearthing was never conceived of as a collaboration. To make it one seems forced and takes away from the power it has been when it was 'just' words on the page:

"The ceilings gone, the room opening up into a space above that isn't night, and something stoops, leans in from outside, gathering identity with its approach, It pushes its unfathomable face down into our aquarium, displacing world, spilling reality on heaven's front floor."

Or this:

"Jim, his father's barrack-room nativity just one twist further down the helical ancestral staircase, mans the rocket battery that's stationed on the golf course, uphill from the former gibbet-fields. Phosphorus tracers hyphenating giant blackness, boom and siren, recoil shuddering the green and distant firebursts pluming from the cower of the city."

I mean, does that writing need pictures? Does it want someone to go through and change the font size and type? Every page has at least twenty bits of writing which are just as captivating. I rest my case.

Moore's commitment to community is admirable and it kind of makes a lie of his claims that he would like to be a hermit and just left alone. I also really like the fact that he seems to know the dirt on everyone. There is that great interview where he, along with Pat Mills, talks about Ken Reid. Moore's contribution is about the personal tragedy and circumstances of Reid's life. There is his great obituary for Robert Morales and I really love his introduction to Richard Corbean's adaptation of House on the Boaderlands where he gives the DL on many old pulp writers. Moore's own description of his telephone relationship with Morales reminds me of Michael Herr describing Stanley Kubricks use of the telephone:

"...he was one of the most gregarious men I ever knew, and i didn't change anything that most of his conviviality went over the phone. He viewed the telephone the way Mao viewed warfare, as an instrument of protracted offensive where control of the ground was critical and timing crucial, where time was meaningless, except as something to be kept on your side. An hour was nothing, mere overture, or opening move, or gambit, a small taste of his virtuosity...I've been hearing about all the people who say they talked to Stanley on the last day of his life, and however many of them there were, I believe them all."

Fuck I love that book*. Everyone should read it. (*Kubrick by Michael Herr).

Humour is one of those things in Moore's work which I have not always responded to. While I agree with you about D.R & Quinch and Abelard Snazz, (and I would add Jack B Quick to that list), I have sometimes found the laughs lacking in other works. I like the Bojefferies for many reasons but I just don't find it that funny. The humour all seems a little forced. Indeed one of  the things I most admire about the series is that Moore has  said how difficult it was to write. Every word was carved in granite was his summary I believe.

Thinking about that last paragraph I realise it is utter nonsense. What I should of said is that the parts of his work which are funniest are often the droll, almost throw away comments made by characters. "Big Figure. Small World" says Rorschach as an overture to the unpleasant mayhem which is about to play out in and around his jail cell. I laugh each time I read that line. 

One of the works where the humour flows in a very natural way is Big Numbers. It's full of the everyday laughs that get people through their lives and has moments of absurdity that are in keeping with Jimmy's End. "I don't think there's any need to use language" is one of my favorite lines from that series. The section where Christine calls her father on the phone and has to listen to him berate a visiting priest is gold.

BT: I always found the funniest bits of the BoJeffries Saga were the parts where it just got full-blown weird - like when one character tries to build a working model of the Atlantic Ocean in the living room...

The photo adaption of Unearthing is the only version I've seen, so I have nothing to compare it to, but I do have a real love/hate relationship with some of the imagery. Like I said before, the more mundane it gets, the more I like it, but some of the photos are just so literal, it's really cringe-worthy.  And the constantly shifting text really does irritate more than anything else.

But I don't think the fact that it was never conceived of as a collaboration should be held against it. Neither were the comic adaptions of Snakes and Ladders and The Birth Caul that the esteemed Mr Eddie Campbell did were ever meant to be comics, but after finally listening to the recordings of the performances, I have to say the comics are vastly more entertaining and moving. I don't have a lot of time for adaptions of Moore's short text stories and music lyrics, but when interpreted by a talented creator like Campbell, they can be absolutely delightful.

All that said, I got totally bogged down in the Jenkins-illustrated version of Unearthing, in a way I don't think I would have if it was purely prose, and still haven't finished the final ten pages, two months after I got it.....

That jocularity is back in Moore's tone whenever he goes on about being a hermit - he is quite clearly committed to his community in a way few creators bother with. We all hear about his public spats with people like Steve Bissette, but he also appears to be extremely loyal to his mates, and anybody who does breach that loyalty is just cut off forever. It means he sometimes sounds like a bit of a cunt, but at least he stands by his principles, and has moving things to say about people he genuinely liked, like Bob Morales (Most of the obits I saw after Morales' death were fixated on the fact he once did a slightly-controversial Captain America comic, but that Moore piece makes it clear he had so much more to say). And he's always been an incorrigible gossip, and more well-read than he really admits, so any introductions or essays are always well-researched and argued.

Getting back to the movies, one part of collaboration that Moore can't do much about is the acting in the Jimmy's End movies. I got my own thoughts on it, but don't want to pollute yours yet, so how do you feel about the acting efforts? Do you like the largely amateur cast? Do Moore's words lose or gain power when they have to be articulated by other people? Do they really just belong on the page?

KS: I think, by and large, the acting is pretty good in the films. Certainly there are bits and pieces that don't work. The guy doing the voice on the telephone in 'Act of Faith' is awful and Melinda Gebbie as Lil doesn't really come across,  but as a whole I thought they did well.

 I imagine that directing the actors is one of the most difficult things to get right when making a film, especially if you are someone that comes from a technical background and that's how I see Mitch Jenkins, someone used to focusing on lighting and mood but now having to deal with the messy complexities of hitting marks and the actors line delivery and ensuring that the performances all have a compatible tone.

Having said all that I think Jenkins has been making leaps and bounds in that area since the project started. You can see that emerging confidence reflected in Alan Moore's performance and the in promo's used for the Kickstarter campaign.

Moore did not come across for me in 'Jimmy's End'. While the finale was great he was basically doing one of his spoken word performances. The section in the changing room came across as clumsy. At the time I wondered if they were having to cut around an amateur performance. 

The behind the scenes short was an eye opener. Here you get a sense of the relish Moore is bringing to his role along with an understated confidence. There's a moment that I love, just after he finishes his monologue, Metteron drops his affable mask and you get a glimpse of the scary prick under the makeup. "I don't like him Dad" said Seamus when he saw the clip. The relish is also there in "A Professional Relationship" and that section is one of my favourite parts of the cycle.

Darrell D'Silva is also great as Jimmy but what I really love is his part in the Kickstarter promo. You get a sense of Jenkin's just allowing him to play around with his performance while keeping the shooting simple and to the point. Underneath it all is a slight tension and unease that resonates with the tone of the cycle. Lovely.

Personally I really like the spoken word performances and would rather listen that read them. Like 'Unearthing' they are dense and at times difficult but well worth the effort.

I can remember when I first heard Moore read a piece of his own writing. "Oh, I get it now" I thought. "All those text panels I skipped in Swamp Thing were meant to be read aloud. Of course". At the core of Moore's creative essence there is a performer and raconteur - you can take the man out of the Northampton Arts Labs but you can't take the Arts Labs out of the man.

One of the nice things about more, um, fuller bodied writing is that there is always something new to discover. These pieces are designed with that in mind. To some extent your meant to drift in and out of them and to be overwhelmed. I think fugue is the word that always comes up. That would probably be even more so in their original incarnations as performances. I would dearly love to attend one before I cark it.

Like the original Unearthing, and the movies, there is more than a tang of the occult in Moore's utterances. But their real power resides in their very human core. You can relate to the stories and messages even become ensnared in the net they cast out. Check out the note Mr Eddie Campbell posts at the conclusion of his The Birth Caul adaptation;

"Somewhere towards the end of this project, Eddie Campbell casually mentioned in conversation with his mother that he was working on a book entitled The Birth Caul. "Oh" he was informed, "you were born with one of those. The midwife said "Look! He's got a wee cap and veil."

I can imagine the weird thrill that must of come with that chat.

All these performances are heavily emotive. You can hear it in Moore's voice and you can feel it in your belly and chest. More than once I've teared up as I listened to the rasping vocal. Push through the dense verbal web and you will find forgiveness and understanding and respite.

At times too they spotlight Moore's astonishing talent for turning the incomprehensible and alien into something understandable and personable. The Birth Caul's rendering of childhood is haunting and beautiful but where it really jumps up and starts to mess with your head is the description of conception and development in the womb.

TOMORROW: WORTHINESS! SINGING! AND THE GHOSTS OF THE TIMES I HAD BACK THEN!

Looking for Jimmy's End: Part two of five

BT: So the setting of these films is either a way-station on the road to the infinite, or a grotty little working class club. I have to admit that working men's clubs do freak me out a bit, and they are bastions of outdated social values, but they have their good sides, too. It's not just the cheap beer, (although that helps). My parents are straight-up working class stiffs and they have a great time down the club, catching up with mates, playing a couple of pokies and having a jug or two. There is a real sense of community and camaraderie in these places, that is often overlooked in this day and age, when everybody has glued their nose to some iBullshit.

And all of Moore's major works over the past few years have been about the community around him, and it gives those works more of an emotional resonance, because he's talking about people and places that mean a lot to him. Moore is also perfectly comfortable hanging out with his working class mates in working class places and he knows there is worth in these social occasions.

The setting for these films is a gloomy, claustrophobic place, but it's also a place that people go to so they can be with other people, share stories and have a laugh.

The other thing about the workingmen's club setting is that it is terribly mundane, in the best possible way. One of the things I did like about the Unearthing book Jenkins did with Moore (and we'll talk more about this, and our differing opinions, later), were the shots of an utterly mundane setting, with the implication that transcendence can be found in ordinary flats and houses. That there is something magical in the inanity of a milk bottle or a kitchen table. Jimmy's End does a bit of this, and the fact that it's set in this place which is pretty banal, despite the fancy trimming, gives it an extra heft of reality.

I know that the strangest things that ever happened to me always happened in the most ordinary surroundings.

I also have to say I really, really like the glossy look of the film, with the garish colours and eye-searing sharpness. I just like purple. To be honest, I'm massively impressed by the production values of these films - when it was announced that Moore and Jenkins and some of their mates were making some films, I expected something a lot more low-rent, but the democratization of movies that digital technology has allowed directors and cinematographers to create some beautiful images on shoe-string budgets. There is some terrific imagery in all of these films, which I really wasn't expecting. I came for Moore's script, and stuck around for the sweet camera shots.

It does get a bit too glossy, and it's almost an uncanny valley kind of thing, where it all gets too sharp, too real, and you can see the artifice of the film. (Kinda like the problem people had with The Hobbit in 48fps). Some of the lighting is just too bright, and there could be a lot more shadow.

But let's face it, while Mitch Jenkins has a very talented eye, it was the words that we both came for, isn't it? Isn't that why we're really here, because we've both had the back of our brains blown off by Alan Moore's comics?  You're the only person I know who is more obsessed with Moore's work than I am, but before we dig into his script, maybe we should explain our own histories with Moore, and your triple whammy...

KS: I said to you the other day that it was a triple whammy but part of me thinks it's more like an ongoing initiation (and as Moore and Morrison and Robert Anton Wilson will tell you, the initiation is always ongoing, the initiation never finishes).

With that said there is indeed a triplicate of starting points with Moore's work. Reading experiences I recall as having a  profound effect on me in one way and another. They are the first three comics that come to mind when I think of my initial encounters with the mind and work of Alan Moore.

My first memory is seeing a 2000AD that had arrived from the future, Prog 350 to be precise. It was being held by Thomas Bates, the eldest brother in a family of four boys. They were English immigrants and one of the perks of that status was periodically receiving gift packages from relatives in the UK. These contained exotic sweets, enviable toys and comics that were ahead of the local ones shipped to New Zealand on container ships (a three moth trip). Thomas was showing the off the page where DR & Quinch are pleading their intentions to go, like, straight man. I could write hundreds of words about that image. How fresh and strong it was, how idiosyncratic even in a comic with a history of singular art. Artists with styles so strong they turned school kids into opinionated critics and rigorous aesthetes by the time they were ten. I know now that it was written by Moore but it was Alan Davis that caught my imagination. Having said that it is a prime example of Moore being able to tailor scripts to the strengths of individual artists. DR & Quinch played to Davis's strengths; exaggerated character and creature design, explosive cartoon mayhem and a highly disciplined control of every aspect of the pages composition.

Second was the first issue of Warrior magazine. I secured it from a second hand bookshop in Campbells Bay on the North Shore. It was a badly lit shop buried in a crap mall, a bit sleazy really. So, I brought Warrior #1 and read it. Then re-read it again and again and again. Well, I re-read two stories; Marvel Man and V for Vendetta. The rest of it was a fine, great even, but those were the stories that stood out. It is impossible to emphasis how fresh they were. We live in a time when the re-boot is not just a cliche but a grim reminder of how sterile and exploitative corporate culture is. Marvel Man was an explosion, a re-defining of parameters, while V blazed forward into new, unknown, territories. Again both comics featured strong artists. Gary Leach, who should be given a VC for services to letratone, and David Llyod, who redefined noir just for comics, deftly mashing up Orwell with Coronation Street.

Third was Swamp Thing, more specifically third was The Anatomy Lesson. That one fucked my head. This was the real gateway drug. The real initiation. It was the first time I came across the idea of our personality being little more than a shell, nothing but a collection of ticks and habits. This was overwhelming, terrifying even, and as I read the issue I could feel my head expanding until it broke open. After, I'm sure my consciousness was a little bigger, a bit more pliable, and the world was a stranger, spookier place.  Years later I can see this reading experience, (as in 'Are You Experinced'), formed the consciousness raising beach head that Grant Morrison would storm with The Invisibles and through which I would learn that life, and myself, were malleable things that I could change and play with.

You look back at that summary and the question that comes to mind is does Mitch Jenkins fit into that tradition of strong artistic partners? Moore himself has said is what he has learned about writing film scripts is the necessity to leave room for others to do their job. Plainly he has always done that but maybe in film you have to leave even more room. Enough space for the the director and actors but also the DOP, the lighting technicians, the artistic director, the props people, the score composer, probably even the caterer.

Does this dissipate the intensity of Moore's work? 

BT: My first exposure to Moore's stuff wasn't as metaphysically mental as yours - the very first time I ever really noticed his name on something was in the Abelard Snazz stories, closely followed by DR and Quinch, and I thought they were abso-freaking-lutley hilarious. I still think Moore achieved some kind of humorous nirvana with the "Jog for your lives!" moment. So I've always associated his work with a strong sense of humour. The main influence on his work is still probably Harvey Kurtzmann's Mad comics, and even his darkest works have a small streak of humanistic humour.

I certainly still hear it in interviews he does, where you read them and he comes off as a bit of an arse, making ponderous comments about the state of comics and his place in it, and then you actually hear his voice, and he's chortling away happily, and it's hard to take any of his pronouncements so seriously.

I did have a blow-the-back-of-the-skull moment with his Swamp Thing though, although it was the first annual Moore did, where Swampy went off to heaven and hell and everywhere in between, searching for his lost love. It was a well-structured story with some groovy appearances from some of DC's great magical characters, but the idea that Swamp Thing could just let go and drift away from his body blew my ten-year-old mind. And that bit when he runs into the soul of the real Alec Holland kept my mind spinning for years.

Moving on to the issue of collaboration, you definitely have to make more room for other viewpoints in a film. Even though I remain a massive fan of Voice of The Fire, I do think Moore is always sparked by the presence of a co-creator, and this has made him suited to the rough and tumble world of comics, where two main viewpoints of both writer and artist are merged together to create something new. (Unless it's a writer/artist thing, which is a different kind of alchemy altogether.)

But film is a far bigger collaborative effort, because you're not just working with a director, you're working with a DP, and a set designer, and the actors, and, even on a small film project like this, dozens of other creatives, right down to the caterer. They're all adhering to a specific vision, but it's more of a shared vision than a specific writer's.

This is not a bad thing. It's just a different thing, I don't think it dissipates the intensity of Moore's vision, but it does force him to make it something it might not have been, and that kind of surprise is always welcome.

TOMORROW: JOCULARITY! PURITY! AND SOME EXCERPTS FROM BETTER MEN!

Looking for Jimmy's End: Part one of five

Jimmy’s End – and the films surrounding it – are part of a relatively recent film project written by Alan Moore and directed by Mitch Jenkins, revolving mainly around the various nefarious things happening at a spooky old workingmen’s club where people who might be dead wander through, lost and confused.

Like much of Moore’s work, the films are thoughtful, stylish and occasionally baffling, and they’re certainly worth discussing. So I’m delighted to be joined in the Tearoom by Kiwi comic creator (and previous contributor) Kelly Sheehan for a daily dialogue about the films and surrounding ephemera. He's the only person I’ve meet in real life who is more passionate about Moore’s work than I am, and I know that, because he bothered to import all of the performance CDs, and I just borrowed them off him.

This will fill this blog for the next five days while I’m off in Hawaii, looking at lava.

So. They’re great little films, but what does it all mean, anyway?
 

Bob Temuka: Moore literally does put all his cards on the table in one of the Jimmy's End films – a cinematic image he's had in mind since the eighties, according to the recent Fashion Beast comic. So it's only fair we do the same. What do you think the films? Do you like them?

I know I enjoyed all of the films, and watched them within hours of getting them. Time will only tell if they stand up against the great works in Moore's career, but I found the films funny, smart and surprisingly slick. At some points they're massively cheesy, but an undercurrent of absurdity helps offset the darkness of the story.

I like some of the films more than others, and I dig the way they are all structured around the one magical night. Sometimes it gets a bit nasty, but that's another part of the pleasantly variable tone. And sometimes it wears its influences on the sleeve just a little too obviously, but that's inevitable in a debut feature like this.

So, on the most basic level, what did you think? Are they a bit silly? Are they too serious?

Kelly Sheehan: The answer to the most obvious question, do you like them, is, of course, yes. In fact, I dig them the most.

Together they add up to a creepy whole, (well, almost whole), which leaves you more than a little uneasy. The ideal response to films which were originally billed as 'occult, noir-flecked pieces'. The tone of all four is about right; grim, claustrophobic, brooding. The comedy comes with a very sharp edge and, as you say, a sense of absurdity. The absurdity of lives unfulfilled. The absurdity of bad choices repeated. The absurdity of being in an unfamiliar bar at four in the morning by yourself and with no idea how you got there.

In short, things we can all empathize with. That mundane undercutting grounds the films nicely, though some might say it's not so much a grounding as a miring in a bog of depression and darkness. Whatever, that sense of the everyday is a constant feature in Moore's work and the fact that he makes it sing and resonate, without losing sight of the heartache and pain, is one of the reasons I love his work so much.

Today my pick of the lot is A Professional Relationship, though my favourite bit in any of them is when Matchbright tells Jimmy he's here because that's what easiest, that he's followed the path of least resistance. Chilling. Made me think about my life and what I'm doing with it.

So, that's what I thought.

Also, I like the fact that the cycle's atmosphere is so particularly English. Jimmy's End resonates with David Peace's Red Riding Quartert, Get Carter, Morcombe and Wise, Peter Cook and Dudley (no relation) Moore's Bedazzled.and even Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. All firmly rooted in the English sixties and seventies with their sleazy bars, bad cops, shitty class system and awful comedians (and I'm not referring to Pete and Dud here).

Have you seen the behind the scenes video? It's worth watching for the Frank Metterton part at the start. He describes how he is playing a character called Alan Moore "who has grown up to be an embittered, monstrous figure." While I wasn't really convinced by Alan in Jimmy's End itself, (well, the bit in the dressing room, the closing monlouge works just fine), the 'making of' made me think that he might just pull this off.

There also does seem to be more of a link between Jimmy's End, the spoken word performances and prose. in that work in these areas has a more direct relationship to his occult preoccupations. While that is present in the comics, (Promethea being the best example), there is not quite the same palatable undercurrent of weirdness that goes with that territory.  The end of Jimmy's End itself features a monologue which would not be out of place on the The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels CD. It was like Moore had driven one of his spoken word pieces at high speed into the back end of Jenkins' film, (in a good way).

BT: Well, his performance pieces almost always have a crack at reaching the sublime, some moment of transedental awareness, and Jimmy's End also has that going for it. It's a good theme, worth returning to again and again, and it is often surprisingly satisfying on a plot level.
 
But yeah, the films do get a bit nasty and mean sometimes, especially in the Upon Reflection part, but they are also more than a little bit silly, and that balancing act has long been a standard in Moore's work. The part where the grand climax is suddenly undercut by Moore's big golden face groaning about "the loight" is suitably shocking, and has made me laugh out loud every time I've seen it. I think Moore's work in general is often mistakenly criticised as dour and gritty, because everything he has done has some small element of silliness, because his stories are always about human beings, and human beings are inherently silly creatures.

It's all just too absurd. Which is also very, very English, and I saw all sorts of other influences in the films as well - there is a definite creepy Lindsay Anderson "chocolate sandwich" vibe, and a little of Sapphire and Steel as well, with very strange things happening in mundane places.

And this is set in a workingmens' club, which is about as mundane as you get with its working-class gloss. My parents are still members of some of Timaru's finest clubs, and I always find them strange places to visit. There is always a hint of despair and wasted opportunites and bloody cheap beer. I still associate them with Unknown Places That Kids Aren't Allowed, and spent more than a few afternoons waiting in a stinking hot vehicle in the car park, waiting for Dad to finish his last jug at the club. The idea that I'd have to pass through one of those places to my eternal reward is more than a little horrifying for me.

Also, "the absurdity of being in an unfamiliar bar at four in the morning by yourself and with no idea how you got there" is dead right. I got the existential shits from that a couple of times. One time I woke up in the pitch-black basement of a 150 year old pub in Dunedin, and it took me an eternity to get out of there, and when I got to the surface, I was alone in the pub, so I jumped out a window.

Which has very little to do with Jimmy's End, really, but is a neat story at parties.

What do you think of the setting? It's bright and colorful, but you know it stinks of stale booze, old smoke and hopelessness. Is that the right place for this kind of story?

KS: For sure it's set in the right place.

 As you point out it's a setting which brings with it a palatial sense of despair alongside the suggestion of confinement and doomed dreams. Even if it was not set at night there would be no natural light in the Jimmy's End Club. The atmosphere is smothering, choking even, as if all of this is taking place in some sort of isolated, pocket universe. Metterton and Matchbright are petty tyrants in their own rotten borough. Strange that, the occult and the supernatural should bring with it a sense of the infinite. 

You know, the working man's club is not really an institution which brings with it progressive social values, particularly the idea of equality of the sexes. There is a barely concealed rank misogyny that seems to simmer in many scenes. Obviously this is most apparent in Upon Reflection but Matchbright's treatment of Faith at the start of Jimmy's End is almost as appalling in its contemptuous restraint. I don't for a minute think this is a reflection on Moore or his attitudes but rather part and parcel of the haunted nature of the location and the time and place it is reminiscent of.

The question of influences is an interesting one. Everyone seems to cut straight to David Lynch because there are a few curtains thrown in there (and I really do wonder if they were just part of the clubs decor that Jenkins decided to exploit on the day). I much prefer your suggestions of Lindsay Anderson and Saphire and Steel. What Mitch Jenkin's seems to have added to that mix is gloss. You can see it is in the camera movements and the colour schemes and the slick edits. I'm not sure if I'm entirely down with some of those creative decisions. That might be because my current preference is for someone like Ben Wheatley and his complete embracing of a mundane naturalism that allows for concentration on the action/performance at hand. But that's not what Jenkins has gone for. Indeed it is all very well for me to make these observations but it brings up one of the problems of writing about a project which is only partially complete. Jenkins has said that should the next section of the project be made, the movie titled The Show, it will be set in an everyday Northhamton. So maybe I should just shut up and wait and see.

I should add that I do like the colour schemes used in the film. There's that hallway, the one with the sickening nicotine patina, the washed out, shitty brown of the bar walls and furniture, the violent, burning red of the dance hall and toilet and that awful purple in the dressing room (where Meterton lays his cards out on the table....)

"Chocolate sandwich", indeed.

BT: Dude, Oh Lucky Man is the best film ever, because I still have nightmares about the guy with his head grafted onto a sheep.

TOMORROW: GLOSS! PERSONAL HISTORY! AND THIS BUSINESS CALLED COLLABORATION!

A colossal cavalcade of current comics

I started reading comic books when I was three years old and I'm still reading 'em now, and in all that time, there have only been a handful of days when I didn't read some kind of comic book.

I really think I couldn't live without a regular comic infusion. So I have to buy more and more and more. Like these ones.

I saw the ad for Superman: The Earth Stealers a thousand times in late eighties DC comic books, but I only got around to reading the darn thing last week after finding it in a dollar bin, and it was just as stilted as I always thought it would be, although there were still some bright spots.

It does feature Curt Swan art, at a time when he was well entrenched in his final, ultra-stiff style, and it doesn’t mesh that well with John Byrne’s slightly-more-extreme-but-only-slightly eighties Superman – there is one moment where an alien creates a projection of all Superman's family, friends and allies,  that would be a big over-designed and important double page spread these days, and they're all just standing there, chilling out like it's a 1950s cocktail party

But the clash of art and script does reach a point of beautiful absurdity, when Superman gets into an argument about life itself with an alien nihilist, where Supes argues that the transience of human lives is what gives them meaning, and the alien believes that all existence is pointless and that oblivion is the only way because we're all inconsequential in the grand schemes of things, and this Ultimate Nihilist is this pudgy little alien with a space-handlebar moustache and a ray gun on his hat.

Superman comics have always taken themselves a bit too seriously, and nobody took them more seriously than eighties comic creators, but the beautiful silliness of it all is still there to be found in a dollar bin, lurking under a ray gun hat.

The last few issues of Daredevil have been excellent, just as Mark Waid's entire run has been. They're still some of the most clever, stylish and witty superhero comics around, which shouldn't be much to ask for in a comic book these days, but is still, somehow, a rarity.

There is just enough goodwill to keep me on board when the series re-starts from another number one soon, even though that would be a terrific jumping-off point, especially when the only reason for a new number one is the need to sneak in a 33% price increase. It's not easy to pretend the big comic companies care about anything more than the bottom line, when a title is given a fake #1 just so they can raise the price.

That makes it a nine dollar comic in local money, instead of the six dollar comic it was, and that’s really pushing it.

Although - I don't know what I'm really complaining about, since I got the second issue of the latest Shaolin Cowboy comic the other day, and it was in that nine-buck range, and it's deeply, deeply unsatisfying on any kind of plot level, since it consists of nothing more than the title hardcase slicing his way through a crowd of zombies.

Page after page of a chainsaw on a stick, and decaying bodies coming apart in new and various ways. No dialogue, no deviation in panel layout, no real story.

It’s fucking magnificent. By the time you realise the issue is going to be nothing but zombie-stomping, it’s already outlived the joke, and then keeps on going, with dead hearts being punched out of chests and new bits falling off thoroughly dead people.

I’m getting more and more interested in spectacle and style over plot and script as I get older, and Shaolin Cowboy is the perfect example of this. It’s nothing but spectacle, and it’s fascinating to watch the various ways Darrow does the same scene over and over and over again, to the point where the single sound effect – the sound of the chainsaws – across the top of the page becomes heavy with meaning.

I also like the way all the zombies have tattoos.

The nice thing about wandering into a Dunedin second hand bookstore and finding stuff like a British hardback annual of American super-comics from the eighties is that these things are often stuffed with secret delights, like a short story written by someone like Moore, or Morrison, or Milligan, jobbing it out before the proper DC came calling. Those things never get reprinted, so it’s always a delight to find them.

The Official Superman Annual 1986 has some late pre-Crisis Superman fun and a random Legion story, but it also has some Milligan and some Morrison, and the latter is some prime Morrison Supes.  It features a bunch of criminal geniuses dialling directly into Superman’s unconscious and trying to find his innermost fears and secrets, only to be undone by a bit if super-jiggery-pokery.

As one of the earliest examples of Morrison entering the ever-evolving DC universe, the story could be read as an early sign of the themes that would come to overwhelm his work. The villains are brought down by their inability to see any dream images as anything but metaphor, blind to the possibility of the literal. They take a ride into the imagination, which allows them to see inside the mind of a living creature, while callously mis-reading the results. It’s possible to see the dichotomy between the real and the imagined, and the literal and the metaphorical, throughout Morrison’s most esoteric work, and he delights in switching sides on the argument between stories, leaving any long-term reader bewildered by the higher implications. The dream machine could be the dream in which Morrison’s entire DC career existed, and still exists, in a space between nothing.

Or it could just be a short story about a big green dream machine, done for a forgotten annual, with a daft joke about Krypto.

I bought a hardback copy of Ultimate Comics: Hawkeye at the same place because it was going cheap – for the same price as a new single X-Men comic - and because I keep wanting to like Jonathan Hickman’s comics, because people much smarter than me keep telling me they’re so good, and I was really getting into it, and it was a groovy little story, with some slick art, and then it turned out to be just a prologue to something much bigger and more complicated, and I stopped giving a fuck about this comic right about then.

Hellboy: The Midnight Circus is an even slighter hardback than the Hawkeye book, clocking in at a mere fifty pages or so, but it's infinitely more satisfying, largely due to Duncan Fegredo's wonderful artwork and Mike Mignola's confidently sparse plot.

It's the most obvious story for a young Hellboy - he runs off to join the circus, only to find it full of mysterious ghosts and demons, as well as a glimpse of his own terrible destiny. But it's a moody bastard of a story, with Fegredo often using dark, washed-out tones to portray a supernatural gloom, and then often glowing lights in the darkness, throwing everything into sharp focus with Fegredo's shaky detailing sparking up again. Everybody knows how good Fegredo's Hellboy art is by now, but it remains as breathtaking as ever, and makes The Midnight Circus a thoroughly satisfying book, even with that meagre page count.

I'll take that kind of quality over quantity any day.

I always like things like skip weeks events, because they tend to be tight and self contained, and a place where bold new voices and eyes get to strut their stuff.

But there have been so many of these kind of things, I somehow miss entire events. While I like the fact they're pretty inconsequential, it also means they're very easy to skip. Take the five Mighty Marvel Western comics, which came out in the summer of '06 - I'd never even heard of them until I saw them very recently.

Which is a shame, because they're pretty good comics. They're western anthologies, a combination which may see many comic readers instinctively recoil away, but there are short, punchy stories by the likes of Slott & Barreto, Giffen & Allred, Parker & Coker and Englehart & Rogers, backed up with a healthy dose of Kirby classics and lurking beneath some lovely Eric Powell covers.

They're mostly short and snappy revisionist comics, taking some old character and giving them a 21st century spin. Happily, this doesn't always been they have to be grim and scowling - many of the creators still find a healthy sense of fun in all this lust in the dust, and that ain't always the easiest walk to walk.

Autobiographical comics started getting a bad rap in the mid nineties, after one too many comics about the existential horror of picking the right flavour of breakfast bagel, but if an idiosyncratic artist has interesting stories to tell about their life in times gone by, I'm always interested.

Spain Rodriguez had some stories to tell. I was always a little intimidated by Spain's seething rage and clumsy anatomy, but his Cruisin' With The Hound book, which I only stumbled across this week, is a beautiful little slice of autobiography

Published by Fantagraphics last year and bringing together all sorts of autobio work from Blab and Zap and Comics Journal special things, Cruisin' With The Hound tells the story of the shenanigans that Spain used to get up to as a proud teenage delinquent in 1950s America, and the freaks, geeks and happy losers that he spent his time with.

It's not just a snapshot of a particular time in American history, it's a book about a particular attitude in American history - the rebel who hates being told what to do, and will only find freedom when all the stale aspects of modern life are burned down. Spain's autobio comics are all about that anarchic freedom, and that energy is splashed across every page, even as the past is meticulously created.

There are inevitably great comics produced any time an artist like Spain opens up his own past for the world to see, and Cruisin' With The Hound is packed with rock and rollin' great comics, and that's the best kinda great comics.

The Cartoon History of Everything

Will Eisner always used to say that you could teach anybody anything if you put the lesson in the form of a comic, and then he went on to prove it on an industrial scale with decades of P*S army maintenance comics.

If there wasn't such a prejudice against the form, every school textbook would be full of comics, because if you want something to stick in the mind, give it something visual to hang on to.

After all, nearly everything I know about history I learned from Larry Gonick.

Gonick's books are both massively popular and criminally underrated. He has more than a million copies of his Cartoon Guides in print, but there is little real appreciation for his art and technique. His books make complex subjects more simple and easy to understand, but sometimes the books and the storytelling have to get complex in their own right.

He's actually created a wide variety of strips and books, but it's the Cartoon Guides and Histories that are his crowning achievement. He takes dry, dusty facts, and brings them to life with efficiency and humour, and he makes it all look so easy.

It's the humour that is the first thing to grab the attention, and makes a lot of Gonick's subjects so palatable. History is full of unpleasant people committing appalling acts, and even though I remain an eternal optimist, I have to concede the human race has been built on a foundation of blood and terror.

The Cartoon History Of The Universe books frequently feature scenes of genocide and massacre, as entire cities are put to the sword, their homes destroyed and the earth salted. It could all be a bit too grim, but Gonick lightens the apocalyptic mood with awful puns and visual gags.

There will frequently be a bystander commenting on the action, and pointing out the horrible absurdity of it all, defeating the reputations of the monstrous personalities who shaped our history. Every now and then the voice of reason will pop up and make history's greatest monsters look agreeably daft, especially with Gonick's talent for googly eyes and wide-mouthed astonishment, which is always funny.

Bringing this kind of humour into super-serious subjects like history doesn't diminish the lesson – it enhances it. Making fun of terrible deeds and terrible people is one of the best ways to beat them; there is a reason why cartoonist David Lowe was on Hitler's death list.

 History is full of upsetting incidents, but the odd joke can help the details stick in the mind, which is awfully useful in Gonick's history books, because he has a lot of stuff to get through, and he hasn't got the space to dwell on matters before moving onto a new subject, often on the other side of the world.

There is an efficiency in Gonick's books that is just staggering – he packs in centuries of incident from around the world in a couple of hundred pages. A powerful civilisation that ruled the known world for decades can be dealt with in a matter of pages, and judicious use of footnotes allow Gonick to take short side trips along the alleys of history. He only has three or four panels in these footnotes to look at some issue, but you can tell almost any story in the world in three or four panels, if you cut it right down to the bone.

Some of those notes are ridiculously clever, and the way Gonick puts his story together is often quietly impressive. His solutions for age-old problems like the depiction of Mohammed are deceptively simple, and his ability to boil a complex and convoluted  series of events down to the pertinent details is sensational, especially when he doesn't lose that twinkle of dry humour when he's rushing to the point.

These Cartoon History books have to be efficient, because there is so much to get through. But this is just another appealing aspect of the books – they don't just tell the story of the Great Powers of the Western World. They spend a lot of time in Latin America and Africa and Asia, well away from the concerns of white men (who usually come crashing into the narrative at some point).

Some English kings barely rate a mention, while the rise and fall of Mayan culture is thoroughly examined. This multicultural approach to history, and the way it tells the big story of how all the world's different cultures and civilisations have smashed into each other, means the books are constantly enlightening.

Gonick always wears his own innate prejudices on his sleeve, often passing judgement on characters, making them look ridiculous and psychopathic. No reading of history is every going to be purely objective, because the author is a constant presence, but he's always up front about it.

Besides, there was never any chance of it ever being objective, once Gonick decided to tell this story as a comic book.

Because art is never, ever objective. It's always told from somebody's perspective - that's the big difference between art and all the other beautiful things in life that are just chaotic nature.

Gonick uses his art to tell the story, and that inevitably prejudices the tale, so he doesn't bother pretending to be objective, giving it all up in the name of his shaky, lively art style.

Which is absolutely fine. It all gets a bit goofy sometimes, but can also be oddly epic, as legendary characters from history launch themselves into bold endevour. Gonick's characters are always jiving around the panel, bringing history to life with their hysterical eagerness, and sometimes the big battle scenes are actually bloody impressive, and sometimes he captures the aftermath of some big battle, and his effortless line blurs out, unwilling to dwell on the horror.

History isn't just facts and figures, it's people doing crazy shit to other people, all the way down the centuries, and there is plenty of crazy shit in Gonick's art, so it all matches up nicely.

And all that humour, efficiency, cleverness and groovy art make Gonick's books pretty damn charming. They're so good, I almost bought the Cartoon Guide To Statistics at a comic convention the other week, until sanity prevailed and  realised I was about to buy a textbook.

He completed The History of the Universe a couple of years ago, but there is still plenty of history to come (there's that eternal optimism again), and plenty of other historical and educational avenues for Gonick to take. Why aren't all school textbooks full of comics, when the lessons can be this much fun?

To love, and be loved.

Over the past week, I've made it pretty clear that I really do think Doctor Who is the best fiction ever, and this is a fantastic time to be following the series, with the 50th anniversary of the show, and all sorts of relevant celebrations to mark the occasion.
 
I've certainly been celebrating it – I've been gorging on audio plays, reading Doctor Who mags (both old and new), catching up on some favourite old episodes, re-watching the recent Paul McGann mini-episode, dipping in and out of several reference books, I adored An Adventure In Space And Time when I saw it on Friday, and earlier this year I got to see four Doctors up on the same stage.

The crown jewel in the anniversary celebrations was the big special episode that premiered over the  weekend, featuring the return of David Tennant and Billie Piper, and the appearance of John Hurt as a new, tragic side to the Doctor. It was in 3D, and played in sold-out cinemas, and was screened in a worldwide simulcast premiere. It even played on New Zealand television screens early yesterday morning, which still feels bloody weird, when I used to wait years as a kid, waiting for episodes to screen here.

It was a chance for Doctor Who enthusiasts to all join in the same adventure, at the same time, breaking down barriers of geography and culture – everybody getting in on the fun.

Except for me. I totally missed it because I was flying home from a mate's birthday party.

Sometimes I tell the wife that the only thing I love more than her in the world sometimes is Doctor Who, but that's not really true. There are brief, fleeting moments when it is the best thing ever, and I feel a real emotional connection that it really quite powerful, but that's still nothing compared to her smile.

It's not just Doctor Who. It is fun to pretend that the main reason I go travelling around the world is to see what the comic shops are like. It’s fun to pretend that I travel just to see what sort of comic shops are out there, and while I do absolutely enjoy hunting them out, they are just a bonus.

I really travel to see crazy shit, and find out how people live in far-off places, and go scuba diving in Egypt and snowmobiling in Lapland and things like that. And, most importantly, I do all these things with my lovely wife, and we share all these wonderful experiences, and often relive them together. She is there for almost all of the greatest moments in my life, and none of them involve going to a comic book shop.

I’m not denying that I can go a little crazy in book and comic shops when I go travelling, and sometimes I drag the poor wife halfway across cities on the far side of the world to see if they have any Eddie Campbell comics, but I’m really there for the experience of these foreign lands, more than anything.

I care about my entertainments, and I can get passionate about them, but I'm still baffled by people who care so much that anything they don't like drives them into a total rage, even if that's the default setting for any kind of discourse on the internet. 

I’m just still not convinced that things like art and entertainment are always worth getting passionately angry about. Art is a great thing - and many would say it is the greatest thing humans are capable of - connecting us as individual people and pushing us forward as a species. It’s a record of who we are and how we think, and shows us unseen facets of our hidden selves.

But even though I can be – and have been - profoundly moved by great art, none of it compares to the moment the love of my life said she’d marry me, or any time my dad tells me he is proud of me, or even any time I can do something nice for any loved one. I certainly don’t begrudge anybody who does think great art is more important than real-world relationships, but that ain’t me.

So I can spend a large part of my week (and, for that matter, my whole life) neck-deep in Doctor Who and all its riches, but miss the most important part of the whole celebration, and I don’t feel conflicted at all.

When my mate told me he was having his birthday party on the 23rd, I knew straight away that it was on the weekend of the anniversary, and that there would be a great chance I’d miss out on something important, because I had to travel three-quarters of the way down the country to go to the birthday.

There was bound to be something missed (especially when I have fine form of just missing big Doctor Who moments because of travel – I’ve been stuck in Heathrow twice while new Who is buzzing through the air around me).

And when it was finally revealed that there would be a simulcast and that it would be at a certain time, my plans were set, and I knew I’d miss out on joining in with the fun.

For one brief, tiny instant, I considered not going to the party altogether, but fuck that.

I love Doctor Who with the white-hot power of a thousand suns, but I’d never let that get in the way of an actual real relationship. In the most extreme example, the despair I would feel if Doctor Who disappeared forever is absolutely nothing compared to the pain of losing a loved one, and I can miss a history-making episode of a television show because, well, it’s just a fucking TV show.

I chose a skody old mate over the best television show ever, and that's the way it should be.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with being passionate about your entertainment, although that passion is often gobbled up by the Rage Monster, with fans of something incredibly dorky often driven into total anger by silly, trivial things.

I’m certainly passionate about all sorts of dorky shit, but I also think it helps to have a bit of perspective.

It might sound incredibly cheesy, but I really do believe the most important thing in this life is to love, and be loved, and it’s as simple as that. A TV show can move me, and make me think, and make me laugh, but it won't love me like my wife does, and it won't share the experiences we have together.

Besides, after all that, I did end up seeing The Day Of The Doctor a couple of hours after everybody else, so it ain’t all bad.

Unsurprisingly, I thought it was magnificent.

101 more reasons why Doctor Who is the greatest TV show ever

In my last post, I came up with three reasons why Doctor Who is the greatest fiction in the history of everything.

But that was too easy, and didn’t cover all the little things that I love about the show – the weird jokes and tiny inflections – and also didn’t deal with the big, epic moments of life, and death, and cups of tea.

So here are 101 more reasons why Doctor Who is the greatest fiction in the history of everything:

1. That thudding, pumping and otherworldly theme music. It’s not just a fantastic tune, it’s a beautiful metaphor for the whole damn thing.

2. The no-space in The Mind Robber and Warriors’ Gate.

3. All of the Doctor’s mates flying the TARDIS together and towing the Earth back to its proper place in the universe at the climax of Journey’s End.

4. The show’s charmingly desperate need for cliff-hangers, which often saw individual episodes end on nonsensical notes. There might be fewer multi-part stories now, but it’s a tradition that has been proudly carried on to the new series.

5. The Special Weapons Dalek, and the way the other Daleks look at it as an abomination.

6. The Ninth Doctor takes Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen out for dinner in Cardiff.

7. The unnecessarily long pan across the dead beach at the start of The Leisure Hive.

8. Zoe Herriot’s arse in that spangly catsuit.

 

9. Zoe’s brains, especially on the occasions when she was actually smarter than the Doctor, and that was even sexier than the catsuit.

10. Ace’s bombs.

11. The moment when you discover what the object is that is getting everybody so hot and bothered in Lawrence Miles Alien Bodies, and the fact that it’s just one of dozens of times when everything about Doctor Who changes forever.

12. The thrill of the montage of all the Doctors at the climax of The Eleventh Hour, and the way the new ‘un walks right through them, straight into the role.

13. The mystery faces of the Doctor that appear during the mind duel of The Brain Of Morbius, and the fact that every serious Who fan has their own serious ideas about what it all means.

14. Nicholas Courtney sneaking into the background of Silver Nemesis.

15. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink cut to black right in the middle of Vengeance on Varos.

 

16. The just-revealed fact that it wasn’t the Eighth Doctor that fought in the Time War.

 

17. “You've touched so many lives, saved so many people. Did you think when your time came you'd really have to do more than just ask?”

18. The whole last ten minutes of The Doctor Dances, but most especially the part where the Doctor gets one good day, and everybody lives. I always hoped Doctor Who would be good when it came back on telly, but I never really expected it to be genuinely great.

19. Bill Nighy’s speech about the ecstatic beauty of Vincent Van Gogh’s art.

20. The way the Third Doctor’s frilly sleeves would flail about when he was laying some kung fu from outer space on some pitiable fool.

21. The bit with the wires in Genesis of the Daleks.

22. The idea that the entire Time War, and all the devastation and death that came from it, all started with that bit with the wires in Genesis of the Daleks.

23.  Romana and the Doctor, punting away in an episode that will never be finished.

24. Ian Chesterton’s tie.

25. Jo Grant’s hair.

26. Peri’s bald cap.

27. Those gross, gross, gross giant maggots in The Green Death.

 

28. The beautiful structure of the plot of the Dalek Invasion Of Earth. Everything I ever need to know about plotting, I learned from that novelization.

29. The use of ELO in Love & Monsters. And I frigging hate ELO.

30. The Masque of Mandragora. Just that story title. I really like it a lot. I think it’s terrific.

31. The suckers on the Zygons.

32. The brains with eyestalks in The Keys of Marinus.

33. The hiss of an Ice Warrior (or Ice Lord).

34. That one time Ice Warriors weren’t total dickheads.

35. Abslom Daak, DALEK KILLER!

 

36. The use of a cricket ball to propel the Doctor through space in Four To Doomsday.

37. The slightly unexpected death of The Third Doctor in Interference.

38. The moment in The Parting Of The Ways when the Ninth Doctor’s hologram is talking around Rose, and then he looks right at her.

39. The massive data dump that occurred when I learned the answer to every single question in the Second Doctor Who Quiz Book from Target, in some mad attempt in 1984 to win a competition for every single Target book published, and I never heard anything about that competition, although I did get a Target badge in the mail, which was just confusing.

40. The First Doctor’s absolute and invincible stubbornness.

41. The Valeyard, and all he promises/threatens.

42. “Oh my God, I’m the tin dog.”

43. The endless running around in Paris in City of Death.

 

44. The moments where the voices in Midnight go from past to present to future.

45. The fake Sarah Jane’s face falling off in The Android Invasion.

46. The cracking “chap with Wings” in-joke in Paul Cornell’s No Future.

47. Those funky high collars the Time Lords use for their formal duties.

48. Gemma Moffat’s cheeky-as-hell “Hello Dad!”

49. The bit at the start of the Chase where the Doctor and Barbara sunbathe. While fully clothed.

50. Everything about the Time Crash mini-episode, but especially when 10 stops everything to gush about 5.

51. The cup of tea in the Doctor’s hand in the cover scene of The Also People, as he has a natter with some sentiment battle spaceships which have enough firepower to put a hole in the galaxy and are all very, very pissed off.

52. The Doctor’s explanation for how the TARDIS manages to be bigger on the inside at the start of Robots of Death, and Leela’s quite-right statement that it all sounds a bit silly.

53. The tiny, epic conversation between Unstoffe and Binro about the state of the universe in The Ribos Operation, and the look on Binro’s face when he is told he is right about other worlds.

54. The face of the Doctor in the opening credits

55. Vicki’s formal gown in The Crusades.

56. Sarah Jane’s Andy-Pandy outfit in The Hand Of Fear.

57. Tegan’s accent.

58. The ridiculous miming when Donna sees the Doctor again at the Adipose Industries headquarters, and that terrific punchline.

59. "One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.”

60. The characters’ accents in Spare Parts.

61. The fact that I’m still not that sure what actually is going on in Ghost Light.

 

62. The cup of tea that sparks the Tenth Doctor into full action in his first adventure.

63. The Fourth Doctor knocking over the wine goblet in contempt in Warrior’s Gate.

64. The sad fate of Dodo in nineties novels. Soon after reading Man In The Velvet Mask and Who Killed Kennedy, in which she catches a terrible disease and is ruthlessly murdered, I had a vivid dream about the character, which was the saddest goddamn dream I’ve ever had in my life.

 

65. “There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes.”

66. The slow journey through the long decades in Father Time.

67. The weird anti-twist involving the spaceship in Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

68. Any time the Daleks or Cybermen would appear in front of some grand London landmark.

 

69. The John Simm Master, tapping out the sound of drums on the table in Downing Street, after he’s just murdered everybody else in the room.

70. Derek Jacobi’s switch between the lovely and compassionate Professor Yana and the malevolent and immortal Master.

71. The low chuckle that always announced the totally surprising appearance of Anthony Ainley’s Master.

72. The Roger Delgado Master watching Clangers on a prison television set.

73. The daily singalong between all the souls trapped on New New York’s motorways in Gridlock.

74. The ninth Doctor’s genuine fear at seeing a lone Dalek had survived.

75. The DVD conversation in Blink.

76. The fact that the Doctors rarely get along with each other when they do their big anniversary team-ups.

77. The Eighth Doctor’s perfect shoes.

 

 

78. The Ballad Of The Last Chance Saloon. Hardcore Who people often hate any attempt to bring the taste of the musical into their beloved science fiction, but I always dig it.

79. For that matter, I liked  the singing in The Rings of Akhaten, too.

80. The fact that it only took them one episode to realise that Kamelion was a really, really bad idea.

81. The Controller standing up to his tyrannical masters in Day Of The Daleks.

82. “Always take a banana to a party, Rose! Bananas are good!”

83. The bit in one of the New Adventures where Benny orders a pint of vodka.

84. The cactus Doctor in Meglos. Rubbish story – fantastic visual.

85. Romana’s desperate, clawing attempts to stop the Movellan bomb going off on Skaro.

86. “Your leader will be angry if you kill me – I’m a genius!”

87. MC Escher’s mad perspectives invade Doctor Who in Castrovalva.

88. Brian’s diligent study of an inert black box in The Power of Three.

89. Any time the Doctor takes an older person along as a companion – sometimes Wilf and Evelyn are my favourite companions ever.

90. The bit in Transit where the Doctor comes barrelling out of an interpalnetary travel tube system, and maintains his footing.

91. The trippy matter transportation in The Daleks’ Master Plan.

92. Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart standing up against ultimate evil at the end of Battlefield, without ruffling a hair.

93. The convention-favourite story about the eye patches.

94. The trip to the wrong 1980 in Pyramids of Mars.

95. The skull door appearing in Nyssa’s room in Terminus.

96. The part in ..Ish where the Doctor and Peri forget the name of the TARDIS.

97. The fight between Salamander and the Doctor aboard the TARDIS, and the sheer joy of actually seeing it for the first time a few weeks ago.

98. The bit with the cat in The Dying Days.

99. Adric’s death. Most Doctor Who fans are rightfully glad to see the back of the annoying little twerp, but he died when I was eight-years-old, and I was bloody shattered.

100. “Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere the tea’s getting cold.”

101. The TARDIS.