Trade missions: Sandman, Scalped and the Goon

I'm totally addicted to comic books, so every now and then I go into a comic shop, and I'm determined not to leave until I buy something. I don't know what it is when I walk in the door – I just want a new comic. I get a comic itch that must be scratched.

Sometimes, this isn't as easy as it should be. Looking around the store, I'll have everything I really want, and everything that is left is just too expensive or too mediocre.

That's when it's a good time to pick up part of a series that I've had my eye on for a while, even if there are still many other parts to collect. That's when it's a good time to complete another decent chunk of a long, complex story.

That's when I need a trade mission.

My very first trade mission was Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. I only started getting it on a monthly basis with the World's End arc, two-thirds of the way through the series, and I was desperate to read the earlier parts of the story. Fortunately, it was one of the first long-form comic series to be completely collected, and it was relatively easy to get all the other pre-#50 issues in book form.

This was in the early nineties, and I had never really been able to read such large chunks of a single comic before. I still remember the absolute delight I felt when I was 150 pages into The Doll's House, and realised I still had a 100 pages to go, because I was enjoying the story so much. After a long diet of bite-sized 22-page comics, something that went on for hundreds of pages, and used that length in an interesting way, was just wonderful. I loved the trade paperback format for comics, and I still do, with bookcases full of them these days, (including those Sandman volumes, which I still dust off every couple of years).

That first mission took me about a year, because I didn't live anywhere near a comic shop, and I could only get my hands on a new book about once every two month or so. But I eventually got them all, and had the whole story, and after a lifetime of piecemeal comic reading, where there was no guarantee that every monthly chapter would show up, that was the way to go.

The first few years of getting trade collections of significant comics were a little feverish, as I completed runs of things like Sin City or Grendel fairly quickly, but then I started buying series in book form that weren't so immediately exciting, even if they could end up proving just as rewarding.

Ever since those Sandman days, there has always been some other series I've collected in that way. There are always comics that rack up a phenomenal amount of issues before I can ever get to them, which turns into a phenomenal amount of collected editions. And once I decide to get into a series, it could take years to get them all, simply because there were so bloody many of them. Series like Jeff Smith's Bone, or The Walking Dead, or the first Ultimate books, racked up more than a dozen trades, very quickly. (It's certainly arguable that Marvel's Ultimate universe lost a lot of its sheen once there were so many books it became a chore to collect them all.)

But while I'm always grateful when something large is collected in one, easy format – the Bone complete edition is still my absolute favouirite example of this – I also like chipping away at a long run of collections. They can be quite expensive in this part of the world, it's still unusual to find a decent-sized trade paperback that retails for less than forty bucks, and that's the main reason for taking so bloody long, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

If there are more than six books in a series, the pattern is always the same – a few tentative steps, (usually sparked by some kind of cheap deal), followed by a long period of consolidation, picking up books here and there, when I see them on sale, or when the itch needs scratching, followed by a blitzkrieg of the last few volumes.

And that's how it's gone for the past 20 years, ever since Sandman showed the way. When I desperately need a comic fix, there is always another trade to go for. It's never as good as finding something I've been after for ages, or – even better – finding a book I didn't even know existed but have to have RIGHT NOW (the most recent Bagge book was one of these), but it's better than nothing.

That's what happened with Scalped, the most recently completed trade mission. There were seven books out by the time I picked up my first one, and it's taken me nearly three years to complete the series.

Scalped was always a comic that I would enjoy immensely while I was reading it, but it would never stick in my mind afterwards. I'm not sure if that's my fault or the comic's, but it did mean it had to be read in large chunks of three or four books, or I would keep forgetting about it.

So I just kept chipping away at it, and got stalled for a long time because I got mixed up around book six over which ones I had actually got. (the covers, while certainly distinctive, didn't really help.) Until I got the last three books in one weekend, and the mission was done. And it's pleasing to see that Scalped is one of those series that really does read better in one go, even if it's hard to read all ten volumes in one sitting..

Of course, once I was done with Scalped, I needed a new mission. One that I could take my time with. Preferably, one that didn't have a convoluted story that could be impenetrable if I happened to read the books out of order, and something that would always reward when that itch needed scratching.

I came very close to finally going for the BPRD collections, because that's a comic that has got better and better over the years, to the point where I'm seriously considering getting in in monthly format, even this late in the game. But instead, I've gone for The Goon.

I've always admired Eric Powell's spooky crime shenanigans from afar, picking up the odd issue and enjoying the few books the local library got in. It's has consistently strong art and a goofy sense of grotesque humour that I find extremely appealing. While wandering around my local store, looking for something new to get into, I picked up Chinatown and The Mystery Of Mr Wicker, and it was a nice, self-contained way into The Goon's sizable story, and it sparked an appetite for more.

So The Goon is my latest mission, and it might take a couple of years to complete it, but that's what it's all about. There's no need to rush these things. Good missions take time.

It's all about the merch!

A few years ago, I went to an amusement park just outside Sydney which had a vague Marvel superheroes theme, which basically amounted to a couple of blokes in sad costumes and the odd garish painting around the park.

Like any attraction, the exit was out through the gift shop and after I'd had my fill of the roller-coasters, I had a look around to see what they had. And I can still remember how disappointed I was that while they had plenty of products with superheroes slapped on them, there weren't actually any comics.

There were ties and tee-shirts and frisbees featuring Elektra, the Punisher, Captain America, Wolverine, Cable and dozens of other characters, but no sign of any of the comics these characters first appeared in. No collections, no single-issues, no digests, nothing.

And I also remember how I wished I lived in a time when it wasn't all about the merchandise, and when the comics that actually generated all that crap were more important. Which is fairly ridiculous, because it's always been all about the merchandise.

One of the reasons I like buying old comic books instead of any collected edition is the chance to see old adverts for other comics and toys and Battlestar Galactica jackets and army sets and Shaun Cassidy tee-shirts and x-ray specs. Even the most rubbish bronze age comic features a fascinating glimpse into the zeitgeist of the time, as seen through the ads.

So when I was poking about in a second hand bookstore recently and found a copy of The Heroes World Catalog #2 from 1979 – which is nothing but advertisements for all that shit – I had to get it. It was a comic book-sized catalogue produced for the Heroes World chain of comic stores, edited by big Joe Kubert, and put together by his students of the day, (including Tim Truman, Tom Mandrake, Ron Randall and  Jan Duursema). Oddly, there are very few photos of the products they are trying to flog off, probably because photos never produce well in comic book newsprint – most of the ads have some kind of original art and some book covers are actually redrawn for the catalog

It is a fascinating object, produced just after the first Star Wars film, at a time when everybody saw how much George Lucas raked in on the merchandising rights, and tried to get a piece of the action, with all sorts of toys, lunchboxes, underoos and primitive electronic games, featuring all the major superheroes and other examples of 1979 nerd culture.

Unfortunately, this rush to cash in on the vast new market for geek merchandise meant that comics were pushed out of the way. In this 44-page thing, just half a dozen pages – right at the back – are reserved for actual comics. There are more pages devoted to wheeled toys than the actual things where those characters were created, developed and grown.

And who can blame them? There is always more money in toys than comics, and it has probably always been that way. There has been all sorts of cheap merchandise produced in tandem with comics ever since the Golden Age, much of which now commands collectors prices that are as high as the contemporary comics, and comic creations that somehow strike a chord with readers are soon used in a hundred different products, in a hundred different ways.

This focus on product over story certainly worked for Heroes World – in the years after this catalogue was produced it grew to become the third biggest distribution company in the country, before a spectacular destruction at the ham-fisted hands of Marvel (which almost took the entire damn comic industry down with it).

There is still plenty of money to be found in the comic business – there are hundreds of new comics being published every month, and no comic that makes no money lasts very long at all, so there are plenty of profits in comics. But those profits pale into comparison to the money they can make on spin-off products. Movies might be the ultimate merchandise, and Marvel's extraordinary box office success over the past few years made it the multi-billion dollar behemoth it is today.

When Disney paid that billion-dollar price for Marvel, the one thing it kept banging on about was the character bank it had purchased, snapping up the rights to thousands of Marvel characters (the fact that most of these characters were of the level of, say, Red Raven or Blastaar, was mostly overlooked.) The actual comics didn't really figure into it. It was all about the copyright.

I'm still half-convinced that one day the people who make the real money in these companies will decide that the ridiculous over-saturation of DC and Marvel comic product is doing actual harm to the character, with too many sub-standard stories diluting the value of its brand, and that they will ensure the comic lines - as we know it – are ended.

I'm not convinced that this is necessarily a bad thing.

I'm not even saying that merchandise is an inherently evil thing - I'm partial to the odd toy or tee-shirt, although I never go overboard with it. But what is undoubtedly bad, and shameful, and just plain mean, are the deals that ensure comic creators – the actual people who come up with the ideas that generate so much profitable merchandise – are frequently squeezed out of the benefits.

Marvel and DC have both lost many of their best creators thanks to arguments over merchandise - Alan Moore was legitimately pissed about editorial interference and proposed classifications systems in his final days at DC, but those Watchmen buttons were the last straw.

But the companies will keep screwing the creators over. drowning out cries of outrage by stuffing $100 bills in their ears. Because that's where the real money is - not in floppy comics that barely register in modern culture, but in products and spin-offs that garner huge cash returns. Like it or lump it, it's always all been about the merchandise, and that's unlikely to ever change.

Five books that rekindled the comic love

After being swamped in the awfully neutral tones of the DC universe in the last post, I needed to read some good stuff to get back in the comic groove.

Fortunately, it's 2013, and there is loads of good stuff. Like these five books.

The Adventures of Superhero Girl
by Faith Erin Hicks

It's maddening to see the default setting for superheroes is ultra-serious, when there is still so much fun to be had. In a perfect world, Faith Erin Hicks' Superhero Girl would sell more than the JLA.

It still might, because these types of light, funny superhero comics are infinitely more timeless than Superman's collar. It's not as twee as it first appears, and each strip is bright and colourful, and genuinely humourous (I especially liked King Ninja at the job interview), and that never goes out of fashion.

Shamefully, this is the first of Faith Erin Hicks' books that I've really read, largely due to availability, and also because I'm a total loser when it comes to digital comics. But it won't be the last.

 
Avengers vs Thanos
By Jim Starlin and chums

This is the kind of trade paperback I used to literally dream about when I was a spotty teenager – all those impossible-to-find issues of Captain Marvel and Iron Man and Warlock where Thanos first appeared. (I like Thanos. A lot.)

As a slightly-less-spotty 38-year-old, I'm still quite chuffed it was put out, because I still haven't read any of these stories. I'd never even seen anything before he showed up in Adam Warlock's often-reprinted story. I knew all about it, thanks to in-story recaps and the indispensable Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (Deluxe Edition), but I'd never actually read the comics.

Until Marvel, inspired by a tiny cameo at the end of the Avengers film, decided it needed to get as much Thanos out there as possible, and cobbled together this collection.

It's fascinating to see how the character evolves, especially when almost all of his development is steered by Jim Starlin, who plots and draws the vast majority of this big 500-page collection.  Thanos isn't quite the nihilistic demi-god he will become, and it's interesting to note that while he is a rip-off of Darkseid, he also shares that initial character clumsiness with the DC villain.

But that does work itself out, and by the time he literally walks through a hole in the universe into Warlock's saga, he is almost fully formed and recognizable as the character he is today – verbose, eloquent and utterly ruthless. It all climaxes in the Team-Up/Two-In-One annuals where Thanos is a legitimate threat to all existence that must be stopped, no matter what the cost.

The stories in this collection are fairly clunky to the 21st-century eye, but they are also energetic, fast and effortlessly epic. I might not have had the chance to read them when my Marvel zombiness was at its heights, but I'm glad I got there in the end.

Peter Bagge's Other Stuff
By Peter Bagge

So I went to Free Comic Book Day and got the new free 2000ad because it had new Dredd and Zombo stories in it, and I saw a copy of this book, and I didn't even knew it existed, but I wanted it so bad, but it was forty-five bucks, and I didn't want to spend that much right there (plus, I'd actually read most of the content in the book, in one place or another), but then for the rest of the day, all I could think about was how I should've bought it, and it kept bugging the shit out of me, so I went back to the shop ten minutes before it closed and snapped it up.

I was right to do so. This book is excellent. Like the Thanos collection, this collects all sorts of scattered Bagge (although most of it has appeared in Hate, in one form or another), including his collaborations with Crumb, Moore, Tomine, Clowes, Ryan, Hellman and Los Bros Hernandez.

It's not as tightly focussed as his earlier Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me, which collected his cartoon reporting, but the looser Bagge's stuff gets, the better. Other Stuff is funnier than that book, even if there is that same sociological satire, because it has Bagge people wigging the fuck out, and nuthin' is funnier than that..

Batman: Cover to Cover

My recent disappointment with the look of DC comics is all the harsher because they can sometimes look incredible, especially when the company has some of the best designed characters of the 20th century.

After all, it has Batman – a character whose design may be the most effective of the past century, with his blend of deep, dark shadows and ostentatious goofiness, and nothing highlights that like Batman: Cover to Cover, a collection of various Batman covers from the first sixty-something years of the character.

The book came out in 2005, and it's already a bit dated, with Jim Lee getting a bit too much love, and a heavy weighting towards the post-Crisis years. But the book also has pages and pages of gorgeous, full-colour Bat-covers, from all periods, in all sorts of styles, and they show that DC has a history of strong art, innovative design and terrific colours, a heritage that it should always try to live up to.

Sometimes, I just want to sit around all day and look at the covers for Batman comics. Sometimes, I do just that.

Four Color Fear
Edited by Greg Sadowski

It's easy enough to sample the output of EC's horror comics from the 1950s – they've been reprinted often in a variety of formats, and some of the most famous stories are comfortably familiar.

But the great thing about the world of comic books is that there is always more to uncover, and there were plenty of other comic companies who followed EC's lead and dabbled in macabre fiction. Four-Colour Fear, a 2010 book from Fantagraphics, digs up some of these rotting corpses for 300 pages of monsters and madmen.

The EC comics were incredibly slick productions, with a fine roster of talent producing great comics. Their contemporaries didn't have the same level of quality control, and many of the stories in Four-Colour Fear are really clumsy, in both story and art.

But, oddly, the clumsiness ends up making the stories more disturbing- the way demons and ghouls just turn up without any dramatic entrance, as if the supernatural is just an everyday thing, helps fuel a sense that anything could happen, at any time, and that something horrible could be coming to tap on the shoulder of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare.

Some of the stories are reasonably well-done, with strong plots leading to gruesome pay-offs, along with gorgeous art by the likes of Jack Cole, Wallace Wood, Basil Wolverton and Joe Kubert. The book also features a small selection of covers, and while most of them are the usual mix of grotesque horror, a couple of them are pretty damn stunning. William Ekgren's covers for Strange Terrors #4 and Weird Horrors #7 are extraordinary:

The flashes of genius amongst the gore in these comics can be breathtaking, and there is still plenty of creepy fun with the rest. And that, along with the other books, is all it takes to remember how much I love comics.

No style, no love (or, How Samurai Jack and DC lost their mojo)

Even though many comic readers cling to the misguided belief that comics will only achieve a serious status in modern culture by overcranking the prose, comics are still an inherently visual medium, rather than a literary one. A comic could have the smartest and most meaningful plot, dialogue and characterisation in the world, but you need great illustrations to make a great comic book.

It's all a matter of style, and the very best comics always feature art that is distinctive and stylish – a pure artistic vision that can only come from the pen of an individual. Any comics that come with bland, generic and derivative art barely qualify as a comic. They're just product.

Shit, no wonder I'm reading less DC comics than any time since forever.

I inhaled all four seasons of the fantastic Samurai Jack recently, falling hard for it's streamlined storytelling, crazy action and quiet moments of humanity and honour, all smushed together in a kid's half-hour cartoon. But the thing I liked the most about it was the crazy stylisation in the animation, with bold jagged lines, sparkling colours and slick movement. It really didn't look like anything else.

And even though he is always willing to point out that it's a real team effort, most of the credit for Samurai Jack's brilliance is given to creator Genndy Tartakovsky. When he followed up Jack with the best Star Wars cartoons ever created, it really looked like he'd found a place in modern culture for a distinctive vision, one that was both creatively and commercially successful.

But when he made the leap into full-feature filmmaking last year, it was crushingly disappointing when the result turned out to be Hotel Transylvania, a totally generic piece of computer animation.

It still had some of the Tartakovsky pacing, especially during the action scenes, but instead of the distinctive style generated by pen and ink, Hotel Transylvania has the same look as a dozen other CGI kids films – the same over-realistic backgrounds, mushy human faces, and washed out pastels. There are still hints of Tartakovsky's style in the exaggerated chins and updated monster designs, but it's buried beneath that cloying layer of artificiality.

If there is no style, there is nothing, and the disappointment I felt when I saw Hotel Transylvania was the same I feel when I flip though an issue of Previews. There is still plenty of good stuff coming out every month, but there is also too much bland anonymity.

DC is the biggest culprit, churning out too much mediocre comics just for the sake of maintaining a market share. The New 52 relaunch was a perfect place to diversify its superhero line into a broad range of styles, but soul-crushing deadlines, editorial panicking and a dedication to quantity over quality meant the art of most of those 52 comics was simply sub-standard.

There are, of course, exceptions - Moritat's art on All Star Western has been fantastic (and the back-up artists aren't too shabby either), and Chris Burnham has been doing a bang-up job on Batman Incorporated, but they're islands of stylistic brilliance in an ocean of medocrity.

It's funny to look back at things like Back Issue magazine and see the kind of covers that editors like Julius Schwartz and Carmine Infantino and Joe Kubert used to reject in the sixties and seventies – brilliant work by Neal Adams and Nick Cardy and Jim Aparo that still wasn't quite good enough for the editor. In contrast, a lot of the current artists on DC comics, some of whom have been in the business for years, show a stunning disregard for storytelling, or even basic body language, and wouldn't come near a printed page if the standards of the past had been held to.

Books like Demon Knights needed their own look, a chunky and dark style would have suited the story well, but it ended up with the same scratchy, clumsy, washed-out bullshit that so many other books share. John Constantine makes the leap from Vertigo to the regular DC, and that means his art also has to be as generic as possible, a severe letdown after the last few years of Hellblazer, when Giuseppe Cammuncoli and Simon Bisley were doing wonderful things.

Almost all of their biggest artists – with some notable exceptions, including the always-reliable Doug Mahnke and often-brilliant Cliff Chiang – share a fondness for the overworked line, covering up art deficiencies with complicated muscles and silly digital effects. There are too many third-generation Jim Lee clones, which shouldn't be surprising, considering the best superhero artist of 1992 is still the biggest artistic name in the company.

And the colours aren't helping – Grant Morrison's Action Comics become surprisingly hard to get into when they're covered in muted greens and pale browns. There is no sense of design in the colour schemes, or any flow. It's all over-complicated bollocks, from art to colours, to big 'master-plans', and that's why the only DC comic I'm getting at the moment is Batman Incorporated, which will finish soon.

The story isn't quite so bad at Marvel, which has also committed to a line-wide relaunch recently, without forgetting to load up on actual talent.

Most of Marvel's biggest books have excellent art and a bewildering amount of brilliant styles, with artists like John Romita Jr, Chris Bachalo, Daniel Acuna, Jamie McKelvie, Esad Ribic, Javier Pulido, David Aja, Alan Davis, Chris Samnee, Mike Allred and Stuart Immonen all bringing their typical A-game to various books. The most recent issue of Uncanny X-Men is drawn by the magnificent Frazer Irving, and his usual gorgeous art actually fits in nicely with the look of the book.

Marvel's best comics – including Daredevil and Hawkeye – both have a beautiful colour scheme taht compliment the efficient stories and staggeringly solid art, with people who actually put some thought into how the comic's palette will run, rather than hacking it out.

The talent pool is fairly thin. Marvel is just as bad as DC at over-saturation, and beyond the main titles and a few smaller gems, there is still plenty of mediocrity. But at least they're making the effort.

After all, they're still better than DC, and other individuals and companies have shown it is possible to create a line of comics without resorting to bland conformity. Just look at Mike Mignola's mini empire of comics.

Mignola and his talented collaborators have created a number of comics - including Hellboy, BPRD and numerous spin-offs - that all have a deliberate look, without swamping the artist's individual style. These books all have strong use of shadow and a heavy black line which unites artists as diverse as Duncan Fegredo, Guy Davis and Mignola himself. Combined with an impeccable design sense, these books all look beautiful, complimenting the crazy stories they tell.

A lot of my passion for individual art styles comes from growing up on a steady diet of 2000ad, and gorging on the instantly recognisable artwork that filled its weekly pages, and this is why I'm repulsed by dull same-old same-old shit.

It's a comic that can have a bewildering amount of different styles beneath the covers - recent issues have mixed up the old school blockiness of Carlos Ezquerra with the stark, glowing lines of D'Israeli, while still finding room for Henry Flint's multi-coloured madness, the straight-up storytelling of Patrick Goddard and Steve Yeowell's latest work, which has him drawing people like they're characters in a Terrence Dicks book (which is a good thing).

This is where mainstream comics are at their best - when they have artwork that doesn't look like anybody else, and give the reader something startling and new. The dullness that captured the creator of Samurai Jack has also caught DC Comics, but it really doesn't have to be that way.

Star Trek Into Darkness: Spoilers in space!

Through her connections as a hard-hitting entertainment reporter, my lovely wife got us free tickets for a preview screening of Star Trek Into Darkness on Monday night, so we got to see it a few weeks before most of the world. I am a Star Trek geek. She is not. We both thought it was terrific.

But it's impossible to say what is so terrific about it without giving away some fairly vital plot details, so there are two reviews here – one short and safe, the other longer and needlessly detailed.

If you have any interest in Star Trek, and are looking forward to this film, I implore you to stay away from spoilers. I stopped reading anything about the new film two months before it came out, and was successfully surprised on a number of occasions. There was one wonderful little cameo that I never saw coming, a couple of fairly surprising twists on the formula towards the end, (which were actually blatantly telegraphed in the trailers), and when one of the main characters reveals his true name, somebody in our cinema actually said “Aw hell no!” out loud. You don't want to miss out on that kind of thing.

Star Trek Into Darkness (the safe version)

* Obviously, I thought it was excellent.

* I like the fast pace of modern Trek, and the way the story barrels on, barely giving a damn if you can keep up. Plot holes are skimmed over, in favour of spectacle and bright lights, a deliberate shift that has alienated some hardcore Trek fans, but revitalised it for everybody else.

* Like the first one, this film moves at warp speed, and the characters are all constantly running, jumping, flying and falling. All that relentless motion means you miss the more retrospective moments of classic Star Trek – long, pointed conversations in crew quarters are reduced to hurried snatches of conservation along the corridor. This is the price of the pace.

* This is the second film for the lead actors, and they're all doing a fine job, nailing the characters without resorting to impersonation. Like all the best Trek films, they all get something to do, and Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto sell the eternal friendship between Kirk and Spock. But all of the actors seize the opportunities given them, with John Cho and Zoe Saldana particular stand-outs.

* Alice Eve is also fine as the latest addition to the crew, although her big dramatic moment is almost ruined by the most baffling use of lens flare in any of J J Abram's films.

* That said, lens flare in 3D is kinda awesome, especially when it looked like the people getting up to go to the bathroom were walking behind the flare.

* And Benedict Cumberbatch's character is a much better villain that Eric Bana in the first Star Trek from Bad Robot. Any more on this subject would be spoiler.

And that's about it for non-spoiler stuff. Once again, if you're interested in this kind of thing, (and if you're not, you're on the wrong blog, brother), show some freakin' willpower and go away. Come back when you've seen the film. Because it's better that way.

...

...

SPOILER SPACE

...

...

I'm not joking, and I usually don't give a shit about spoilers.

...

...

...

You've done so well to avoid things so far, it's only a matter of days now...
...

Okay, then.

Star Trek Into Darkness (the super spoiley version)

* So. Yes. KHAAAAAAAN!

* Wrath of Khan has always been my favourite Star Trek movie, and after this film.... it's still my favourite. Star Trek Into Darkness is trying so hard to be the WoK in this series, and sometimes that feels forced, but it also gives the movie an epic feel, as hatred and vengeance spans universes.

* And while I think Cumberbatch was brilliant a times - the reveal of his name is a powerful moment, thanks entirely to his voice - I still like Ricardo Montalban more; mullet, bared chest and all. The modern version doesn't get his Moby Dick speech or have that fire in his voice. On the other hand, this isn't a remake of Wrath of Khan, it's a remake of Space Seed, so if Cumberbatch comes back in twenty years time for his revenge, that could be something interesting.

* Also – as a work collegue points out in this spoiler-safe review – he's playing the part of the villian as if he is a vampire in a sixties Hammer Horror melodrama, which is just awesome.

* But there are a lot of homages to the first Star Trek II, getting more and more obvious as it goes on, until one of the climactic scenes has actual dialogue from that first film. It all leads to the noble sacrifice at the end, which is fairly predictable, because it's so heavily signposted in all the trailers, and it's the sort of cross-time story inversions that these filmmakers like.

* (Although the film did do a decent fake-out in the trailer with the big spaceship crash at the end, which was very well done.)

* The death is also a bit weightless when you consider the Tribble factor – an earlier get-out-of-jail-free scene, about two-thirds of the way through the film, which gives heavy hints of how the film will end, especially when it has dialogue like this:

KIRK: What's this, Bones?

BONES: Oh, that's a completely unrelated thing I'm working on, I'm trying to bring a tribble back to life.

KIRK: That'd be useful!

* But the nice side-effect of this sacrificial switch is that it drives Spock completely mental, and scenes where the man with a billion bottled-up emotions loses his shit are always impressive, in any universe. And the part where he runs down Kahn in the streets of San Francisco was great fun.

* As good as that was, the one scene cameo from a very familiar face may have been my favourite scene in the whole film - so good I don't even want to spoil it here. I just always like it when smart and charming characters say things like “I can't help you. However...”, and the way Khan's full name is used is just perfect.

* It's also another part of that relentless pace. The information given in that scene is something Spock was always going to figure out, so why not cut straight to the chase? This happens over and over again in this film, and you don't have time to moan about the plot illogicalities, or you'll miss the next scene altogether. The film starts at the climax of another mission, and within 15 minutes there have been explosions and exposition dumps and they're off and racing again, and I feel a bit tired just thinking about it again. In a good way.

* Blinging Klingons! It's always nice to see proper angry Klingons, and even better to hear somebody talk back to them in their snarling tongue about honour and revenge.

* And there are a dozen other little moments of pure Trek perfection like that in Star Trek Into Darkness, some epic and grand, others tiny and heartfelt. It's a movie about human determination, and the triumph of compassion, and crazy science fiction bollocks, and sweet sexy uniforms, and the silent eternity of space, and vengeance, and kick-ass aliens. What more could you want from a Star Trek film?

Three things nobody needs to know

There are many, many things that nobody needs to know about anybody else, but this is the age of sharing, so here are three of mine, in painful detail. (Besides, it’s my hot blog, I do want I want.)

Thing #1: I hate everybody (sometimes)

So it was Record Store Day the other day, so I wandered on along to the biggest store in town, which was celebrating the day with some fine live acts. The place was packed, and I only got about 10m inside the door. But I only lasted five minutes before I had to go again, because it was extremely hot and sticky, and because I’d just finished a nine-hour shift at work, and because it was one of those moments in life when I fucking hated fucking everybody.

You know what I mean? One of those days where you're not feeling any kind of connection to humanity, and everything you see just pisses you off more, and you hate everything about everybody.

It doesn't ever last long, but sometimes I fucking hate everybody. And Record Store Day was one of those days.

I hated the old fogeys with grey beards, thinning hair and a Buzzcocks tee-shirt that was one size too small, nodding their heads out of time to a beat they couldn't follow, determined to prove they were stil hip. Still with it.

And I hated the young punks, sneering at everything in the world, but refusing to give up their spot by the Star Wars bobble-head dolls. They hated me right back, so at least there was some agreement there.

But I also despised the even younger punks, who had just discovered something amzaing, and had to tell the whole damn world about it, even though the whole damn world couldn't give a shit.

And I hated the college-aged douchbags in their ironic white vests, loudly declaring that the only reason they were there was to see if the “hot political reporter” from the TV news who was doing a DJ set was as good looking in real life. They didn't give a shit about the music, and there were far too many high-fives for this day and age. And since it was apparently okay to judge people by their apperances, it's probably fair to say that these guys were fuck-knuckled stupid white trash hicks with delusions of humanity, and deserve to be shoved into a sack with a rabid weasel and tossed off a bridge. (I also hated the DJ, just on general principle.)

And I felt proper hatred for that dick who was standing outside in the rain, blocking the entrance as he smoked a cigarette and watched the action without joining in, because he was just a bit too cool for that, even though he was not cool enough to pull off that ponytail he was rocking.

And the goth kids who were wearing too much leather and too much hair for a muggy Auckland afternoon, and stinking the whole joint up

And the guy who was sitting down behind me, loudly explaining to his docile mate that Steven Moffat was the worst thing to ever happen to Doctor Who, and they should do it right by adhering to the styles and standards of the old series, and the sense of jealousy and entitlement in his spiel was so dense it almost became matter. (This was actually the week before, at a Doctor Who thing, but I was still angry about it a week later.)

And I wasn't the only one giving filthy looks towards the guy who had brought his five-year-old daughter along, because he was still cool, even though he was a dad ; he could take his kid and it was never too late to get her started. He was a Cool Dad. Even though she was clearly NOT having a good time.

But most of all, I hated that one guy who only made it 10m inside the door, and lasted five minutes before running like a terrible coward, and writing about it on a motherfucking blog. So busy judging everybody, instead of joining in with the fun on a nice Saturday afternoon. He sneered so much his lip now aches, and deserves to be shunned as the outcast he is.

Yeah, fuck that guy the most.

Thing #2: I’m totally not gay (But I sometimes wish I was)

So I always thought it would be nice to be a bit gay, mainly because it would piss off all the right people. Even though I was always into girls, I always thought there would be a part of me that wasn’t all conformist and boring, and could play for the other team, under the right circumstances.

Even after I got married to the most wonderful girl in the world, there was still a chance, and we would often joke about how I would totally turn gay for Fassbender, or Statham, or 80 per cent of the All Blacks.  There was always the chance, and there was no denying that these were some fine looking men.

And then I had a dream where I got intimate with one of those All Blacks. It was quite nice – lots of cuddling and spooning. And in the middle of that dream, one thing became clear – I wasn’t that into it. I wasn't grossed out or anything, it just wasn't doing nuthin' for me.

This was actually quite gutting, because it meant I was just another dull old hetro-sexual after all. Just another dude who digs chicks. Nothing interesting to see here.

Oh well, I'm still quite chuffed when a gay guy says he likes my shirt, and even though I have no stake in the issue, I was extremely moved when our country legalised gay marriage last week.  (I’m still somewhat baffled by the whole idea of homophobia in general, because it’s not any of my fucking business who anybody else falls in love with. Why would it be?)

While I kinda wish I didn't have that dream, because it shattered a few illusions I had about myself, it's also nice to set the record straight. (I also once had a dream where I found out how I would react if I actually ran into a proper ghost, but that’s another story altogether.)

Thing #3: I can still be pretentious as fuck

So we all go through a period in our lives where we can be pretentious little fucks, and for most of us, it’s the teenage years. That’s when we spend all of our time attempting to impress people with our knowledge of art and literature and other important shit, without having a goddamn clue what we’re talking about.

That’s the time in your life when you want to be taking music very, very seriously, and sit around reading collections of T S Elliot poetry and telling everybody that The Sandman is opening your eyes to the possibilities of the comic book medium.

My tolerance for all things pretentious snapped quite suddenly when I was 20, about halfway through a cinema screening of Peter Greenaway’s Baby of Macon, when I was overwhelmed by the sheer bullshit of the movie. This sparked a backlash against anything with any hint of pretension. I kept right away from prog rock, refused to sit through any movie that took itself too seriously, ditched the vast majority of my Vertigo comics and limited my poetry intake to the odd Walt Whitman or Edgar Allen Poe verse.

And that became the time in my life when I was all about the punk rock – not just the music, but the whole DIY ethos that could be applied in all mediums, convinced it was the only valid form of artistic expression. That’s when I got heavily into the sharp, clear writing of the great crime writers of the mid 20th century, because they managed to tell taut, tight stories about the human condition without ever getting ostentatious on it. That's when I only wanted songs that lasted three minutes or less. That's when I wanted movies that didn't choke on their own seriousness (and lasted less than two hours).

There was always a bit of love for the pretentious that never really went away – I always liked Grant Morrison’s comics, and the more up their own arse they went, the more I liked ‘em. But in general, when it came to art and stories, I wanted truth, and only truth, with no delusions of grandeur.

But then I grew out of that as well, and learned to appreciate the bollocks a bit more, because at least they were trying to do something meaningful, and when the world sometimes feels like it is devoid of all meaning, that can be comforting. Something can take itself so dead seriously that it becomes funny again, or can even be enjoyed for it's efforts.

So now I'm looking forward to the new Sandman comic this year, and I feel real fondness for things like the Cloud Atlas, which was courageously self-important. I still don't dig the poetry but I've stopped sneering at it, and I can even handle the odd bit of prog rock.

Moaning about stuff being self important ends up feeling like an act of self importance, and it's best not to worry too much about whether something is pretentious or not.

Which ends up making me one pretentious motherfucker.

Lone Wolf & Cub: Walking the white path

Ogami Itto's death stare is almost the best thing in Lone Wolf and Cub. Koike and Kojima's epic saga is brilliant in so many ways, but the death stare never fails to impress.

It's the stare that Ogami throws out just before he unloads on some fool, part of the aura of death he must project before he takes another man's life. It's a slight squint of the eyes, a heavy furrowing of those awesome eyebrows and the shutting away of all compassion. It is a warrior preparing to perform his art, and it's going to be bloody business.

Sometimes it only happens for a panel, sometimes it stretches on for pages, but it happens a lot in Lone Wolf and Cub, and it's effective every time. It's the death stare, and it brings oblivion.

My knowledge of Japanese comics is woeful – I read every new volume of the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service for kicks, I've got through all of Akira about half a dozen times, and I was genuinely disturbed by a lot of Barefoot Gen, but that's almost it.

But there is also Lone Wolf and Cub, and it's easily my favourite Japanese comic, even though I came to it quite late. I was vaguely aware of the Shogun Assassin movie growing up, but the first time I saw a proper Lone Wolf reference was in an issue of What The-?!, Marvel's lame humour comic. In it, Lone Wolverine is taking Chris Claremont around in a cart, and when they are confronted by assassins, the duo kill them with the razor sharp edges of Claremont's internal monologues.

I didn't get that joke for years.

But when First Comics started presenting them in handsome – albeit thin – prestige format comics, I finally got that joke, and finally got the brilliance of Koike and Kojima's wonderful comic.

Even though the tale often gets bogs down in the complicated politics and clan loyalties of 17th century Japan, Lone Wolf and Cub is the simplest of stories – a wronged warrior pursues a slow path of bloody vengeance, accompanied by his very young son. It's a story that is dripping in philosophy, while never skimping on the blood.

There of dozens of stories throughout the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of Lone Wolf and Cub, and they're unrelentingly brilliant. Each story is very familiar - Ogami and Daigoro roll into some new part of the country, unleash some hell, and roll on again – but the variations are infinite. There are stories of vengeance and honour, and blood and thunder, and peace and contemplation.

Ogami Itto is a lost soul, bound for hell, but he stands up to bullies, and the corrupt, and the foolish, and he never fails to fulfill hos oath. There are all sorts of parables in these pages as Itto takes step after step along the white path - stories with an environmental theme, stories that judge the cost of human progress, and stories that remind the reader that sometimes, the best thing in life is an act of simple kindness

There are philosophical stories, heavy on Buddhist teachings, that can be as blunt as a clenched fist, or as sharp as the finest blade. The Lone Wolf knows that he is walking a path of damnation, and there is existential drama in his willingness to take those steps. When he encounters truly holy men, he is humbled in response, and when he meets evil men, he is noble in defiance.

And all that philosophy inevitably ends in some kind of bloodshed, which also makes Lone Wolf and Cub so compulsively readable. When the babycart assassin explodes into action, Goseki Kojima's pages spring into life – these forty-year-old comics are still packed with vitality and movement, and Kojima's heavy use of thick ink lines grounds it all in a dirty reality. The pacing of the action is also extraordinary – moments that take a dozen pages to get to are over in a split second, while a simple stare-down between two foes can last for pages (and if they're standing there thinking about the various attacking moves they could perform, it can go on for dozens of pages).

This is why the comics remain the best version of Lone Wolf and Cub, despite some succesful adaptations. These moments can take as long as the reader wants – they can linger on an infinite moment before death, or speed through a moment of high action. The reader controls the time, and that control is put to great use in the Lone Wolf stories.

Unsurprisingly, given my deep affection for stories that mix up intense action with pop philosophy, I fell hard for the Lone Wolf comics when I first read The Gateless Barrier – a story where the Lone Wolf is hired to kill a holy man, who is so pure and noble that no assassin can take on the karma of his death.

It's a story that involves the main character sitting around, trying to breach a barrier with no gate, before he makes a spiritual breakthrough and is strong enough to carry out one extraordinary moment of poetic violence, and it's one of my absolute favourite comic stories ever.

This dichotomy – the struggle between the base violence of the real world and the aspirational beauty of a better one – has rarely been more blissful or moving, in any format.

I first read that story, and much of the earliest part of the Lone Wolf and Cub saga, in the English reprints published by First Comics in the late eighties, the ones that came with some gorgeous covers by Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz and Matt Wagner. It's a nice format, even though the volumes are painfully thin – usually only about 48 pages long – just enough to get in a decent story, but over too quickly.

The only Lone Wolf I actually own are the two-thirds of the First comics, and while they're still rewarding to dip into, the collection is incomplete.

The easiest collection to acquire in English are the little digest comics, and while I like them, the pages need room to breathe, and feel stuffed into the smaller format. I did use them to see how it all turns out at the suitably epic end, but I wish they would publish a cheap Showcase-type collection like they did with Akira, hundreds of full-sized pages on cheap newsprint. It's the perfect comic for that format, which makes its absense all the more puzzling. (ADDENDUMB: Good timing!)

At least there are always the movies, which are exceptionally easy to get hold of. I really like the films, even though they simplify certain aspects of the vast overall story and complicate stuff that didn't need to be complicated. There is still enough of that Lone Wolf genius on screen, seeping up from the page, but I mainly like them because I love the way Tomisaburo Wakayama's wonderfully shabby Itto just runs into a vast horde of bad guys and starts hacking away, and ends up killing everybody.

He's all graceful and shit when he's preparing for battle, and in one-on-one duels, and when he strikes his first stance, but the fight choreography is just wild and clumsy, and endlessly entertaining. Floatey/dancey swordfighting amongst the trees with superhuman skill can get a monotonous - sometimes it's fun just to watch a warrior go completely apeshit, even if he looks a bit silly doing it.

At least Wakayama has still got that death stare down, and when he whips it out, serious shit ius going to go down.

The death stare is almost the best thing about Lone Wolf and Cub, but there is also something stronger, and deeper, than a gaze of deadly concentration, and it's there in the babycart that Itto rolls ahead of him. It's the moments between the Wolf and his cub, when they face off against impossible odds together, or in the painful moments where they are seperated by dire circumstances.

It helps that Daigoro is so damn cute, in all of the mediums he has appeared in, with those massive eyes, emotive lip and silent demeanor, but it's that relationship between father and son that takes the story onto a new level. It's more important than any philosophy, or any death stare. On the path of death, there is still love, and that redeems all.

Fear of a camp Bat

Old issues of Amazing Heroes from the eighties remain fascinating items, because of all the trivia they come loaded with. I really do enjoy finding out about forgotten feuds and controversies, or reading about coming comics that never materialised, or even just finding out about something that had stayed under my radar for decades.

They are also an invaluable insight into fanboy mentality. With the internet, that sort of thing is all out in the open now – it's not hard to find out what your average geek thinks of your comic book controversy. Sometimes, there is a comic so bad that everybody knows about it, and occasionally you get a comic that has almost universal love, and it's not hard to find out about them either (even the dissenting opinions just reinforce the consensus).

I got a small pile of Amazing Heroes from the very late eighties recently, and while it's almost interesting to read about things like The Maze Agency and Airboy, it's the collective mentality that is most fascinating, as everybody gets in behind Jack Kirby in his fight against Marvel, and everybody knows that Watchmen is opening the door to a new age of sophisticated suspense in superhero sagas, and everybody knows this is the dawning of a new age of super-serious comic books.

 And everybody knows that the sixties Batman TV show was the worst thing that ever happened to comics, and Tim Burton better not let any of that camp nonsense infect his new movie.

Like a lot of people, I loved the Batman show as a kid, loathed it as an adolescent, andlike it again as an adult. If you like your Batman to come with a huge dose of grim 'n' gritty, chances are you still think it's a terrible thing that is best forgotten.

But the consensus has changed over the past couple of decades, and there is a lot more fondness shown for the sixties television version in the 21st century. All the deadpan seriousness, bulging tights and bright, colourful sound effects still hold up, thanks to that knowing wink.

 And after years of quietly denying it ever really happened, (apart from one brilliant bit of nonsense from Ellis and Cassady in the Batman/Planetary comic), DC is now putting out a comic set in that pop-soaked world, gleefully tapping into this newfound fondness. It's still plainly a show for kids, but there is no shame in admitting you like it as an adult.

It wasn't always like this. And in the months leading up to the 1989 Batman film, there was a blatant terror in fandom that the Burton film was going to be silly.

Even though the Adam West Batman had been off the air for two decades by that point, it was still the most popular pop culture item to be associated with comics. The use of its cheesy sound effects in newspaper article headlines swiftly became a cliché, but that's because it was what the general public thought all comics were like.

Even after all the truly mature works that had come out in the seventies and eighties, comics were still primarily seen as a juvenile medium, and the Batman show was often held up as the ultimate example of this. Which drove many comic fans – who were desperate for legitimacy – absolutely bugfuck mental.

They cursed any media attention that still banged on about the show, and were unable to convince anybody that Batman stories could be serious and grown-up. Reading those old Amazing Heroes, and there is some ferocious condemnation of the television show. Batman fans who wanted a Dark Knight instead of a Caped Crusader tore into the series.

In one issue alone, the television show is described as 'irritating', 'childish', 'ridiculous', 'foolish', 'harmful' and 'shameful'. Even the one writer who admits that he liked the story has to do it in the form of an apology.

This idea, that Tim Burton – who made a Pee-Wee Herman film – could be influenced or infected by this silliness when he made his film, was terrifying.

And it's easy to forget what a big deal the Batman movie was in 1989. It was the first major comic book movie in years, and was propelled by an astonishing media blitz that guaranteed success. Whatever anybody thought about superhero comics, it was going to influence the public perception for the next decade.

So when it turned up all shrouded in deep shadows and hellish fog, there was a palpable sense of relief. It was still pretty goofy – Nicholson's Joker is all over the show – but it was also treated fairly seriously. There was no winking here.

I was 14 when it came out, and I certainly felt that relief, because when you're 14, you deeply, deeply care what other people think of you, and you're convinced everybody is judging you by your tastes in movies and books, and I was convinced that a silly Batman movie would be too embarrassing for words.

I loved that first Batman film – it was one of the first films I saw multiple times in a theatre – because it was big and epic and dark. The bit where the newsreader laughs herself to death after being poisoned by her hairspray was directly responsible for onr of the worst nightmares I ever had in my life, but I don't hold that against it. Any kind of film that can get that kind of reaction from my subconscious works for me.

Twenty-four years on, and that Batman film hasn't aged that well. With Burton's insistence on huge sets over real locations, the film feels claustrophobic and stifling. And the storytelling is clumsy, filled with awkward exposition and half-thought-out scenes that don't really go anywhere.

Ironically, it's the campy shit that stands up better now, Nicholson's hollering is strangely timeless, the absurdity of the story is part of the charm and the gaudy spectacle is still striking. The later Batman films played up on this more and more, and were inexorably pulled in by the cultural gravity of the sixties show, getting campier and campier, and dumber and dumber, until the nadir of Batman and Robin. (Which now has some brave souls who are willing to stand up for it.)

The Nolan films went back for the real-world darkness, but it's notable that some of the most successful parts of the series – things like the Joker's unearthly cackle, or Bane's voice of high villainy – are also the most absurd. Crucially, Nolan knew that the more serious you take these things, the sillier they're going to get, and it's no use ignoring it.

But it's 2013 now, and there have been a lot more superhero films under the bridge since then, and few of them have that cultural weight that the first Batman had. There has been enough variety for the general pubic to realise that superheroes don't all have to be one style – they can be as silly or as serious as they want – there is room for both camps.

And this is the quiet, knowing triumph of Adam West's Batman. There is nothing wrong with a deadly serious Batman, who lives on pain and vengeance, but there is also room in that vast utility belt for some Bat shark-repellent.

Tuesday recycling: Who break

There was supposed to be a blog post here today about the most terrifying thing late-eighties superhero fans could contemplate, but I spent the weekend at my very first Doctor Who convention, and got to see Doctors 4-8 on stage, and I’m not saying it was the greatest day of my life, but it’s certainly in the top 100, and I got into so much that I haven’t written anything for today.

Besides, I bought the latest Doctor Who Magazine, an issue of Vworp Vworp, several cheap audio plays (including Jubilee and Spare Parts) and Harry Sullivan’s War, so I’d rather get stuck into that lot, instead of productive blogging.

So instead, here's some recycled posts about Doctor Who books. Normal service will resume on Saturday.

---

An extraordinary thing happened to me on the way to the pub 
Originally posted July 29, 2009

It’s the Tom Baker that catches my eye.

A couple of weeks ago and I’m walking down the street near my flat, on the way to the pub for a Saturday afternoon catch-up with an old workmate. It’s a miserable day and the footpaths are packed with material put out for an inorganic collection programme running that week. Mainly old mattresses and television cabinets, surrounded by all sorts of old junk.

Wandering past one of these piles, I carry on for another few metres before I decided it really was Tom Baker I’d seen on top of one of that broken-legged desk. It was him, the fourth Doctor’s unmistakable hair and Baker’s own unique grin. I have to go back and have a closer look.

It’s sitting on top of a beaten-up box and I’m not expecting much. It’s probably just some old, tatty magazine with little worth reading, an old Starlog or SFX that gets breathless about long-forgotten geek interests. But then I turn it over to look at the cover and it turns out to be a late 1980s issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine, the best publication to ever cover my favourite television show.

DWM issues are still pretty rare around these parts and it’s good to get hold of any back issue, especially one that is sitting unloved on the street, ready to be carted away. I check underneath to see if there are any other unfamiliar issues and see another Doctor Who logo, so I dig a little deeper.

Wait a fuckin’ second….

When I’m nine years old, the Radio Times Doctor Who 20^th Anniversary special is my bible. It’s a nice, chunky magazine that is packed with information and I read that fucker until the cover falls off. Then I read it some more and the first and last few pages also fall off and then I finally put it away, having memorised all the information I need.

At this stage, I’d only read a couple of the Target novelisations and seen a few handfuls of episodes, but the local television has just started running them from the early days (claiming, bizarrely, that the Mind Robber, from deep into the second Doctor’s run, is the earliest complete story available and starting from there).

And then I got this magazine and it had a full episode guide, with the briefest of synopsis and details about the Doctors and every companion they had and stories about the behind the scenes people and even some weird fan convention photos that fascinated the fuck out of me.

Doctor Who was always on the television, but it was the printed page that got  me hooked on the show. It’s the magazines and books I find over the next few years that fill me in the background of this great, great series.

This is the mid eighties. This isn’t just in the days before DVD box sets, this is before many of these stories even got a video release. The local video store had some beaten up copies of the very earliest video releases featuring stories like the Seeds of Death, Revenge of the Cybermen and the ubiquitous Five Doctors, with annoying things like credits edited out. But apart from that, there was nothing.
 

 A whole generation of Doctor Who fans could only read about the older stories, as there was no chance of seeing them anytime soon. If a new episode was missed, tough luck. It might get repeated somewhere, but the chances were slim.

Amongst all the novelisations and magazines, the best source of info turned out to be the official Doctor Who magazine. First published in the late seventies as a weekly, it soon became an indispensable part of the entire experience. It’s not just the story details it gives, it’s the huge amount of background detail and analysis of classic stories that make it so damn useful.

It also helped to be full of interesting comic strips, from a variety of fantastic creators, including John Wagner, Pat Mills, Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, John Ridgeway and many, many more, including the odd story from Grant Morrison and Alan Moore.

The magazine got a lot of mileage out of the series when it was still on its original run, breathlessly introducing every new Doctor or companion, and eagerly scooping up any snippet of information.

Remarkably, the magazine got even better in the years following the cancellation of the original run.

Wild speculation often filled the pages, and little of it turned into reality. (The magazine must have told us that the Doctor was definitively back a half dozen times before Russell T Davies came along.)

But with no show, the level of analysis came to the forefront, and the magazine became a much richer experience because of it. There was always new product, including original novels and audio adventures, but without that ongoing television saga to follow, the publication still managed to get some great in-depth pieces out of the overall Doctor Who culture.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t always easy to get hold of copies of the magazine. It has always been on newsstand, but has also been a fairly pricey read in this part of the world, and if an issue was missed, it was so hard to find might as well have been a lost episode of The Celestial Toymaker. Back issues would rarely show up on the second hand market, and while it was possible to pick up older back issues now and then, they proved pretty elusive.

So when I see Tom flashing his big cheesy grin on that pile of inorganic refuse, I know I’ll be happy if I get a single back issue. It’s something, which is always better than nothing.

But wait a fuckin’ second…

I’m late to meet my friend at the pub, because something much more important has come up. Turns out that one issue of the Doctor Who magazine was just the tip of the iceberg and there is a whole pile of the things. I have to get them home.

I know I look horribly skody, swiping a bunch of magazines from a pile of inorganic refuse, but I don’t care. Walking down the street with a box that is starting to fall apart, all I know is I’ve found the kind of score that doesn’t come along very often.

I get them home, stash them away safely and head back off to the pub. I apologise for the delay and get the beers in, but can’t stop thinking about that beautiful pile I’ve got sitting back home.

It doesn’t take me long to get the issues in order and see what I’ve got, and it’s a true treasure haul. Every issue of Doctor Who Magazine from #89 up to #210, along with a dozen special editions, including a decent copy of that Radio Times magazine that disintegrated under my obsessed hands.

 

It’s been a few weeks now, and I haven’t even made a dent in that pile. There is just so much material to get through, but even with the vague browsing I’ve managed so far, it’s still fascinating to see how the show evolved during the late eighties, with the actual magazine blossoming into something new after Sylvester McCoy walked off into the sunset with Ace. More analysis, more fiction, more experimentation. The introduction of the New Adventures novel range were a pretty big deal at the time, even if it has led to a massive amount of similar auxiliary product. At the time, NAs were unique.

There really is a whole lot more of these magazines to get through, and I’m looking forward to it. I sometimes wonder if I should knock on the door of the house I found the magazines outside and thank the person who decided to dump them, because I am incredibly grateful to have the chance to read this stuff.

I dream of finding hauls like this, and still can’t really believe how easy it was to find them. It really is the kind of opportunity that comes along very, very rarely.

Thanks to Tom Baker and his unmistakable grin, and the decision to walk to the pub instead of driving, I ended up with a pile of great reading. I’ve always love Doctor Who and always will, and a decade of unlikely magazines only reinforces that love.

Especially when they’re free.

---

Who's the best?

Originally posted December 8, 2011

When I get obsessed with comics and books and TV shows and movies, I want to know everything about them. When that obsession lasts more than three decades, I soak up a whole lot of information.

I have spent a significant amount of his life with my nose buried in a Doctor Who reference book, and I can honestly say that Lance Parkin’s aHistory – a comprehensive history of the Doctor Who Universe – is easily my favourite.

Reference books used to be an absolutely invaluable source for any kid who was crazy about Doctor Who. Before the internet, before episodes were easily available for viewing on DVD or YouTube or download, reference books were sometimes the only thing you could use to find about more about Doctor Who.

After all, by the time I was born, the Doctor Who production team had created 12 years worth of stories, and there was a lot more to come over the next decade, and I could barely keep up with it all.

Target novelizations were excellent for reading about past Doctor stories, but even though those books were everywhere, there were still vast sections of Who continuity that I was painfully unaware about.  (The fact that Target books sometimes had completely different names to the televised stories didn’t help.)

But reference books offered a better glimpse inside Who continuity. A classic magazine produced by the Radio Times for the show’s 20th anniversary was my bible for years, and I literally read that thing to pieces. Whenever I think of a particular point in the series history, I automatically think about its position on the pages of the episode guide in that magazine. (I’m not joking – I always think of the Key To Time stories as the ones going down the right hand column of one page, and the Dalek Invasion of Earth is sitting at the top of the second page in the guide.)

Over the years, there have been plenty of Doctor Who reference books to help fit in the gaps. Some of them were a bit too fixated on the behind-the-scenes stuff (which was always fascinating, but there are only so many times you can hear the same old stories of creating such wonder on an incredibly small budget), or offered up dodgy background material that didn’t always conform to anything else in the series (like The Gallifrey Chronicles and Cybermen).

My favourites were the ones that focused on the stories, rather than the production or anything else. I wanted to know about the Doctor’s adventures, not about the special silver paint used to colour the Cybermen’s shoelaces.

So when Lance Parkin’s chronological stab first got a decent printing from Virgin in 1998, I was always keen, and I must have read that book all the way through a dozen times.

It put all the televised and novelised adventures – at that time – into order, starting with an older universe containing its own Time Lords and its destruction with Event One back in 13,500,017,903 BC, and ending with our own universe consumed by its successor, the realm of Saraquazel.

Considering how obsessed I was with the Virgin New Adventures at this time, without actually being able to get my hands on the majority of titles, it was an invaluable resource, and it was a real kick seeing ho wit all stacked together, all the Doctor’s adventures in Time and Space with his ever-resourceful companions.

But in the decade that followed the publication of A History of the Universe, the amount of Who material increased by an incredible amount, with new television, novels, audio adventures and comics.

It’s almost impossible to keep track of it all. The audio plays from companies like Big Finish have had spin-offs of spin-offs, with whole series of non-Doctor adventures taking place in the same universe.

It’s easy enough to just follow the TV show, (although with the Moffat’s tendancy for intricate time-twisted solutions, even that can be asking a bit much sometimes). But with all this other new material, I just can’t keep track. I’ve never heard Evelyn Smythe's voice, or read a third of all the comics produced in the past five years.

But I have got aHistory, and that helps a lot.

If I want to check out how many times the Doctor was on the Titanic, or what exactly he was really up to during World War 2, it’s all there. Any voyage the Doctor has taken on screen, or page, or through speaker, has all been catalogued and put in some kind of order. (Well, every adventure up to the 2007 second edition of the book that I have. There has been even more since and an update is inevitable.)

It’s a massive, thick and detailed work, and I’m surprised Parkin produced it without going totally mental, found in a corner somewhere gibbering about the 1980 reference in Pyramids of Mars and how it relates to Sarah Jane’s birth date.

Because he’s dealing with a chronology that involves the entire history of the universe, created by hundreds of writers over all sorts of mediums. There are inherent inconsistencies that just don’t match up. The New Adventures had the world decimated by plague and war before 2010, when the Eleventh Doctor was wandering around a completely recognisable world.

Chronology only becomes a problem when you take it too seriously, and Parkin treats these inconsistencies with some half-hearted explanations and a bit of a shrug, which is the right way to go about it. There has been an extraordinary debate over the past four decades regarding the UNIT years, and Parkin has to deal with it. His solution doesn’t make a lot of sense if examined too closely, but it’s a game effort.

Parkin – who has also written some very fine Doctor Who novels over the years – shuffles everything in some kind of order, while gleefully pointing out the inconsistencies, and wrapping them up with closed-off alternate timelines and the fact that the Doctor is a terrible name-dropper who is prone to extreme exaggeration. It almost all makes sense.

All this passion and research is poured onto the pages of aHistory. It just goes on and on, dense with information and hidden meaning. I might not be able to afford all those Big Finish productions, or follow all those expensive Doctor who comics with the poor art, but I can still use this one book to see how all those adventures play out.

It’s not the sort of book that you can burn through in one sitting – my lovely wife gave the book to me as a Christmas present last year, and after reading it steadily for most of the year, I’m still only up to the 23^rd century.

But it is a book built for dipping in and out of – and an ideal travel book (It is big and bulky, but I have never, ever complained about the weight of my books.) Parts of a long road trip around the American desert earlier this year are seared into my brain alongside earnest consideration of whether a Cyberman Empire actually existed, or whether there are more than one Dalek timelines.

(A couple of months later, I watch a new episode and see the Doctor sitting in almost the exact spot in Monument Valley where I stood in February during that same trip, sparking a chain of unlikely coincidence that climaxed when the Doctor literally made a house call in October. Not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story.)

Back in the day, when you couldn’t see old episodes anywhere, you could only read about them, and dream about them. It was years before a repeat of a William Hartnell story showed up on television, and all I could do was soak up plot synopses and faded photos in old magazines. They were enough to spark the imagination, and while the actual productions often turned out to be slightly awful when I finally saw them, I still love the stories.

aHistory taps into that feeling – and I spend more time than I’d like to admit wondering what that Zagreus business was all about, without hearing a single Eighth Doctor audio that didn’t have Lucie Miller in it. It’s that feeling that there is always more to read about, always new adventures in time and space to follow.

---

Two new Who
Originally posted August 23, 2009

It’s a long, cold year for people who dig Doctor Who. Even though it’s nothing when compared to the great gap of the 90s, it’s still missed. After four years of fantastic television, a couple of specials spaced months apart is a brilliant way to build anticipation and keep the series fresh, but I do genuinely miss it.

We’re all a bit spoiled, really. That break between The Seventh Doctor and Ace wandering off in search of a cup of tea and the Ninth grabbing Rose’s hand and telling her to run for her life was a tough one. It feature some occasionally spectacular novels and one TV film that tried its best, but the idea that Doctor Who could come back felt more and more remote every year.

And then it came back and it was so good and suddenly Doctor Who wasn’t old vid-fired DVDs and great novels with terrible covers any more, it was a massively successful television series that didn’t have to compromise to fit with mainstream tastes.

The decision to take it off for a year is a sound one. It’s an excellent one to differentiate between the Davies/Tennant era and the Moffat/Smith one. It means we don’t get sick of it, it means we appreciate it all a bit more when it does come back.

But I still miss it.

There are still the new novels and audio adventures, even if they feel a little unnecessary now. There are also plenty of books and magazines that remind me of everything I like about the television, while still showing me something new.

This week, I’ve been indulging in a couple of new Doctor Who publications. One is a dense and in-depth look at the inside of a writer’s head, while the other gives a broad overview of the appeal of the show, by drilling down into the details.

Doctor Who: The Writers Tale
By Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook

Davies has taken a fair bit of an online kicking from dickheads who don’t know what they are talking about, accusing him of storytelling laziness and sneering at him for being populist while vaguely hinted at some ill-defined and ill-mannered gay agenda.

I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, but if there is one thing I’ve figured out, it’s that Davies is about as far from lazy as you can get, unashamedly populist and massively gay, although I still really don’t understand why this is supposed to be such a bad thing.

The Writers Tale is 500 pages of correspondence between Davies and Cook, essentially a year long interview with Davies explaining the writing process while he’s doing it, chugging through the fourth season of the show with copious amounts of raw script. Davies is also amazingly open about the whole process, his part in it and the 3am terrors, when he convinces himself that everything he writes is shit.

And it’s absolutely fascinating stuff. There have been several thousand behind the scenes books on the series over the years, but none of them have crawled into the head of the main creative voice on the programme and taken a look around like this book has.

With the hindsight that comes with the familiarity of the episodes he’s working on, it’s a wonderful opportunity to see a story take shape, even if Davies’ first drafts are surprisingly resilient, with many familiar lines and moments that survive every aspect of the rewriting process.

It’s also interesting to see Davies explain why he does the things he does, forced to always think about the budget he has to work with, while always trying to push the limits of British television capability.

It really is a fascinating book. It’s not just the best book I’ve ever read about writing Doctor Who, it might be the best book I’ve ever read about writing television altogether. Davies is intellectually naked here, always aware of the pressure that surrounds his position, while relishing the opportunity to craft a definitive chapter in his favourite television series.

I really hope he doesn’t take all the online criticism to heart. Some people are only too eager to rip one of his stories to pieces because it upsets their precious sensibilities. But if they could understand the actual storytelling process and all the limitations and liberations that come with it, they might actually have something interesting to say.

(Davies is a nice little sketch artist too, so if this Doctor Who thing never really works out, he could always find a home on the Beano.)

Doctor Who: 200 Golden Moments
Edited by Tom Spilsbury

The UK-based Panini Magazines, which also publishes the regular Doctor Who Magazine, (along with several American comic reprints), has put out plenty of special editions covering the history of Doctor Who since the new series started five years ago.

In fact, this is the twenty-second. But while the previous 21 have been packed with fascinating trivia and amazingly fresh anecdotes, this is the first one I’ve actually bought.

Because while the others are full of behind the scenes trivia and broad overviews of distinctive periods in the show’s history, this one focuses on the little moments, picking 200 tiny little slices of Doctor Who, summing up everything that is great and wonderful about the Doctor and his adventures in time and space.

Every story is covered, from Hartnell hiding in a junkyard, to Tennant striding the silky sands of San Helios. Some of the top moments are unexpected, some are obvious. Some are full of grandeur and operative vigor, others are tiny little character moments or good scares.

There are the Cybermen walking in the shadow of St Paul’s and the Doctor wondering if he has the right to wipe out the Daleks at their genesis, but there is also Jamie’s anger at being used by the Doctor to prove a point, or the Doctor telling Martha about the silver leaves of Gallifrey.

As somebody who has loved Doctor Who his entire life, I don’t mind admitting that it can be a terrible show sometimes, with ridiculously bad production standards only eclipsed by some horrendous acting. But even the most unloved of stories have their moments of charm, every story has one bit that makes it all worthwhile.

And the army of writers who volunteered for the special do a remarkable job of catching that charm in their short pieces. Familiar names like Paul Cornell, Kate Orman and Gary Russell snapping up the opportunity to talk up their own little favourite moments of their favourite show.

It's still a good few months before The waters of Mars and the final two stories of the Davies/Tennant run, but there is plenty of good reading to fill in the time.