Do I really need all that?

After moving away for a year, putting a bunch of stuff into storage, and then coming back and moving it out again into a new space under the new house, I've been given a real perspective on how many things I actually need to hold on to.

My comic, magazine and book collection has always been an unwieldy thing, but it really does feel a bit out of control right now, and it needs some harsh pruning. I do this every few years, and it's been a while since the last time, and I'm feeling particularly ruthless with this purge.

Culling the collection, figuring out what really matters. I should not be having so much fun doing this.

But it took me years to complete a full collection of the generally excellent Shade The Changing Man comics by Peter Milligan and his pals, but do I need all 70+ issues? I'll read them again for another concentrated dose, and then they're gone. I'll shift them on in bulk, giving somebody else the chance to inhale all the Meta madness in one go.

I certainly don't need all the Kick Ass comics I have - it's some of John Romita Jr's finest mayhem, but nothing much more than that. But I'm also starting to realise that I don't need all the Groo and Sgt Rock comics I've got, even though they are all of consistently high quality. 

Because as good as they are, and they are really good, there is a certain amount of repetition. Groo really only has one joke, and it's a great joke that can play out in an infinite variety of situations, but I don't need all of it to hand, and just a few choice examples would do. I've got about half of the Groo comics they've put out, which must be well over 200 issues by now, and that's a  lot of jokes about cheese dip. 

And the mild pacifism and propelling thrills of the Sgt Rock comics have the same kind of delicious repitition, and I've got another 100 of them, and really only need a dozen. So I've gone through and picked those 12 out out, partly because they have particularly good stories, but mainly because they have nostalgic value, or just really good Joe Kubert covers.

I'm not getting rid of any of my Unknown Soldier or Enemy Ace comics, of course. I'm not crazy.

The biggest chunk of the collection that is already destined for a new home is the past 20 years of  Empire mags, as previously mentioned. I've picked some of them out too - I'm not getting rid of the one issue I got on my first ever trip to London - and my mate Kyle is getting every one with an X-Men cover, because that's his thing.

There's piles and piles of other comics that can go - I've come to the realisation that I don't need any of the Hellboy comics after his properly mythic adventures in the underworld, and I definitely don't need all those Warren Ellis comics that I thought I had already ditched.

It took me many, many years to realise I couldn't collect everything, and only needed to keep the stuff that actually met something to me, one way or the other. Sharpening your collection is surprisingly fun and good for the soul, when there is always more to cull.

Maybe I don't need quite so much Unknown Soldier.

Fighting with Frank (part 4 of 13): Must try harder next time.

- Multiversity: Pax Americana #1
Art by Frank Quitely
Story by Grant Morrison
Colors by Nathan Fairbairn
Letters by Rob Leigh

My life is my own

I don't know much about poetry, just a few lines from random epics have cling to the inside of my brain, but most of it has been pushed out by the desperate need to know who was in the New Warriors.

But the words of Number 6, and even the order he lists his demands, is seared into my soul forever, man. I don't know much about poetry, but I know it when I see it.

21st century Radiohead (through the CDs in the car)

It's taken me a few decades, but I think I'm finally ready for 21st century Radiohead.

I will always regret the fact that I missed a very early Radiohead concert at a South Island pub that all my best mates went to, but it took me a while longer to get onboard. The first album was 20 percent too whiny for me at that time of my life, and The Bends was lots of fun, but it was the eerie way that OK Computer felt like it was beamed in from the future - even with the odd duff song - hooked me in.

And that enthusiasm carried on to the next few albums, but then I dropped away, and have barely listened to the past three or four albums.

There was no conscious reason for this, I still liked the band as much as I ever did, I just never quite got around to it. I still always enjoyed the singles, but it was the full esoteric breadth of the albums that somehow put me off.

Fortunately, we still live in the 1980s here in my corner of the arse end of the planet, and still have CD players in our cars, so when there's nothing good on the radio - or when they sync up their ads to all run at the same time - we play a CD. I don't have the very modern laziness of not wanting to keep changing the discs, so if one goes on, it needs to be something I can listen to a lot, and the past few Radiohead albums are good for that

I'm also a bit over the playlist thing, and just crave full albums, and I need ones I don't get sick of after a couple of listens during the week. And I've been listening to In Rainbows, and Hail to the Thief, and even the most 'difficult' songs make an easy soundtrack for driving around town, and I can listen to them over and over again, in a way I haven't listened to albums since I was a teenager.

I still don't know what they're on about in a lot of these songs, and I'm still struggling with some of them, but I'm not skipping through anything. If I can listen to Throbbing Gristle enough times to find the beauty in Hamburger Lady, I can handle Pyramid Song.

There are rumours of a new project from the Radiohead crew, and I don't know much about that, but if they do, maybe I can get into it before we get too much closer to the 22nd century. Or maybe I'll just save it till then.

The money cliché: We're better than that

We've all got those moments in movies that hit us the wrong way  - clichés that never fail to bug you and take you out of the movie. Sometimes it's when the movie is trying to depict something you have personal knowledge of - it never fails to bother me how movies think daily news journalism actually works - and sometimes it's saying something small about the world we live in, and getting it weirdly wrong.

And while there's loads of cinematic clichés that really annoy with their ubiquity, the one that always bothers me is where someone -  usually in some kind of serious crime business - throws armfuls of money up in the air,  and everybody loses their minds trying to grab it so our protagonist can make an easy getaway.

It's like the sight of money drives people crazy, but if you drop something in real life and somebody grabbed it and walked away, you'd consider that theft, and rightly so.

Like, there might be the thrill of free money over-ruling all rationality, but it's not free, you're just straight up stealing it, and with the predominance of cameras everyhwere in your life, you could get prosecuted for a few measly bucks, which seems risky.

When I've seen people accidentally drop their shit in the street, they haven't had to scoop it all up before human vultures descend on it. If anything, the vast majority of people nearby will want to help, because they genuinely want to. That's the kind of reality I see, not this silly cliché of animalistic fervor for dead presidents in the sky.

Actually, maybe Seto Thargo can be a thing again

If this blog leapfrogs the rest of the world's AI and somehow gains sentience, it'll have some wild mood swings, because my recent wailing at the difficulty of getting the new 2000ad and keeping the complete collection going may have been drokking premature.

After looking around the whole city for a good thrillpower dealer and failing miserably, I found a bookshop 20 minutes walk away that is run by a fellow Squaxx dek Thargo who is now my regular dealer, and has even filled in a little of the gap. But he is assuring me that I'll be able to get an issue every week, and the Meg every month and that's all I want.

Now I just got to resist the urge to get every issue of The Dark Side that he gets in. I've been reading that horror movie mag since 1992 and I can't believe it's still a thing.

High on rhinestones and wearing the best cocaine

My absolute favourite podcast in the world right now is Andrew Hickey's revelatory history of rock music through 500 songs, and it is so painstakingly researched, considered and presented that it can take weeks to get a new episode.

Any and all delays with the podcast are fine by me - complaining that creators take too long to produce your favourite stuff is so fucking crass - but I need to have something to listen to while doing the housework or wandering around the suburbs, and Hickey's regular shout-outs to Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine and Rhinestones podcast made it an obvious choice.

Both podcasts end each episode by talking about the importance of word of mouth to grow an audience, and it certainly worked in this case, because I am very much not a country music person, and would not have sought out something like this on my own. 

Even though I grew up around adults that loved the twang of country, I just don't know shit about that type of music. I always appreciate the ragged cowboys like Townes Van Zandt, and immortal voices like big Johnny Cash, but my knowledge wasn't ridiculously limited

But now I'm having a great time hearing about country stars I know nothing, and their weird and wonderful stories. It's all new to me.

Fuck, isn't that what we're here for? Isn't that why we're here on this planet? To learn new things, to gather new information and throw it into the churning infinite mass of your mind, and the less you know about the subject going, the more pours into your head, and shapes who you are in tiny ways.

Plus you get to learn how fucking evil Spade Cooley was, and gather further contempt for the fools who tried to rehabilitate his image.

There hasn't been a new episode since 2022, because the older I get, the longer it takes me to catch up with everyone else. But there is plenty of listening about country music and all its mysteries before Hickey does his next podcast, and learning of the glory of George Jones while doing the dishes.

Abandoned ideas still carry weight

I might be a mature and sophisticated 50-year-old now, but I'm still quietly fuming over Yoda's 'there is no try' thing. There are a lot of more important things to worry about in this fucked-up world of ours right now, but that doesn't change the fact that I still think that that little piece of snot is totally wrong.

I like to try, and keep trying, and there are things I don't give up on, because the effort is the thing. And ideas for creative endeavors might get abandoned, but that doesn't mean they're forgotten forever.

Sure, I might not finish the ratty unfinished novel that I found in a box under the new house the other day. Any digital versions of that novel were lost several computers ago, so it only exists on the paper I printed out at my office job in 1997, but it does still exist, and it is truly terrible.

The lack of any kind of plot might be an issue. It's about someone who is walking down the street one day, and then decides that nothing means anything and goes on a roaring rampage of violence and donuts. I got to the part where the Reservoir Dogs analogues show up (c'mon, it was the mid-90s) when it stopped, but it took about 30,000 words to get that far. And I'm never going to finish that.

I found this tatty thing in the bottom of a box of stuff that I've lugged around for decades and inexplicably held onto (although I did deeply enjoy the surprisingly deep analysis of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol that I printed off that same work computer in 1997 that was slightly stuck to pages of the unfinished novel), and that box had all sorts of writings I'd done over the years

Apart from the 20 years of journalism, which is responsible for tens of thousands of stories, articles and assorted essays, I haven't been published very much, but I've never let being an abject failure of a human being stop me from trying, and I've start to write dozens of things with great eagerness, only to lose the thread and move on to something else.

There's a movie script I did about a black ops kill squad infected by empathy that will forever be two-thirds done, or the bright idea I had 20 years ago for a story featuring Hannibal Lecter in 1840s New Zealand, and never got more than a handful of pages into.

But you never abandon these ideas, they never go away. I never stopped thinking about that last one, and have recently been inspired  to actually do that last one as a rip-roaring pulp novel (the epiphany that led to this desire to finish it was that the story needed 100 percent more Wulf Sternhammer).

I still haven't given up on the sequel to The Man From LOVE - which features lots of vampires and lots of time-travel, because I like stories about vampires and I like stories about time travel. I'm almost exactly halfway through a three-novel series about the city of Auckland that might take another 10 years to finish, and I haven't added to that in a few months, but came up with another idea for a chapter for the third book at the local park the other day, and I do need to get that down someday. 

There's also unrealised ambitions to write Judge Dredd and Doctor Who stories which nobody needs to know about, and I've had plenty of ideas around that, and have been making them over and over in my head, with just a few scraps committed to the written word

Actually, my Doctor Who ideas might make a decent post for the blog in the future, so maybe I will share my thoughts on The Second Life of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Because as much as I like to abandon things, this here blog is the one creative strand that keeps on going, and keeps on giving.

And now I'm here, years and years later, and I'm still thinking about how I'd end that first novel, even though I never will write another word, I wonder where that first character went, all the way into homicidal indifference at the norms of society. My brain goes places, and sometimes I follow it, and sometimes I like to let it get away from me.

Fighting with Frank (part 3 of 13): You can probably stop doing that now.

- New X-Men #114
Pencils by Frank Quitely

Inks by Tim Townsend
Story by Grant Morrison
Colors by Brian Haberlin
Letters by Richard Starkings

There was only one Servalan in the galaxy

There is a lot of talk about how quickly the people of the Star Wars galaxy memory-hole the Jedi after the Empire cracks down on them, becoming a galactic legend with a smuggler's lifetime.

But hell, I could handle the way the entire galaxy in Blake's 7 pretends Commissioner Sleer in the later seasons isn't obviously the mighty Servalan, as if there were two homicidally ambitious women with that fashion sense and that haircut. 

I'm still a little confused why she had to go through that deception, but even in the near infinite diversity of a future civilisation, there could only ever be one Jacqueline Pearce.

If I lost you would I cry - Changing my mind on music

I used to get so mad about music, and just so very angry that the loud, intense and moody stuff I was into wasn't topping the charts.

When you're a teenager, music can feel like the most important thing in the world, and combined with all those adolescent hormones, there is always going to be some kind of audio obsession. 

I just always liked it big and loud, with the heaviest rap beats and the sharpest guitar riffs. But I came of musical age in the late eighties, and that was the era of soft and fluffy pop songs. The hardest thing you got was Michael Jackson's Bad posturing, and the only guitar bands that troubled the charts were full on hair metal.

I hated it so much, hated Phil Collins, and Sade, and the New Kids on the Block, and all of them.

It took me years to get over my own prejudices, and longer still to really see how fucking stupid it was,. Sometimes I hear those old songs on some golden oldie station playing at the supermarket, and I can't deny that it has got a funky beat. Even something I considered at the time to be the most annoying song in the world still brings joy to the world. 

And while singers like Whitney Houston and Tina Turner were obviously deadset legends - I always thought Tina was fucking magnificent in Beyond Thunderdome - their music was so ubiquitous in my corner of the world, in that space of time, that I hated it with everything I had. 

Why weren't people listening to Iron Maiden, for Eddie's sake?

As a mellower old fart, I can get past this adolescent stupidity, and see this music for the brilliance it is. There was a time in my life that if I heard Whitney's 'I Will Always Love You' one more rime, I would rip my ears off, and now it's a pleasantly bombastic ballad, while the memories of Tina Turner's music being ubiquitous before rugby league games that I can recognise River Deep Mountain High as one of the greatest songs in the history of forever.

I'm glad I grew out of that self-importance, and all that sneering, just gives me more to enjoy, and more to groove to around the local supermarket. It wasn't the music that changed. It was always great.

Sports betting needs to get away from me

I gave up reading books on futurism, because they were all convinced that algorithms know me better than they know myself, and one day they might, but today is not that day. We're not even close, and sometimes it feels like the algorithms that drive the few social channels and advertising recommendations I get thrust in front of me are aggressively running away from me. 

Because after three decades on the internet, and two decades of blogging and social media, I still keep getting served ads for sports betting, something I absolutely loathe with every fibre of my being. I've been yelling in the digital void for half my life long, and all I'm getting back is stuff I legitimately can't stand. How does that even work?

I'm not opposed to the concept of sports betting, one of the small pleasures in life is putting $20 down with your mate on a big game, giving it all a bit of spice, especially when the chances are the winner is just gonna buy beers for everybody anyway. 

But the corporate sucking up of this disposable income - promising massive riches through astronomical odds - does real harm with no goddamn benefit, and we've got enough of that in the world, right? There is a mountain of evidence that this shit does actual harm to people, but it's tolerated and encouraged, and I fucking hate it.

And yet, every second podcast I listen to thinks that this is something that I would be into, and throws it in my face in every inserted advertisement. 

I'm just not that into it. I'm just not a betting person,. We visited Vegas once and I bet $5 on a Star Wars slot machine at the airport on the way out, and that was as far as my gambling went (all that opulence, all clearly hoovered straight up out of the pockets of the marks who flocked for the cheap buffets).

The idea of targeted ads does have some appeal - maybe show me the books and movies and music I'm actually interested in buying, and might not know about. But no, instead I'm being told to constantly get my bet on, like all the other fucking rubes.

We're finished. All of us.

When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can't do that, you're like some animal. You're finished. We're finished. All of us.

Sam Peckinpah could be a mean and ornery old drunk, but 56 years ago he showed us all that he knew what had actual worth in life with a far greater moral clarity than the people who lead his dustbowl of a nation in the year 2025. Sam would curse them all to hell.

A letter to Empire

Dear Empire Magazine,

It's not you, it's me. It's been a journey, and I think it's over now, and I think it's time we went our seperate ways.

When we first met in the mid-90s, you were the sexiest movie magazine on the shelves, and you had some proper competition at that time. Movieline had the steamiest covers, and Premiere had the big stars, but Empire had the passion for good cinema, and while you still came with the patent lust for beautiful movie stars, you were the first place I heard of thousands of great films.

And I've got you every month since then, as best I could. There were the years when your Australian cousin came in and muscled in on the action, driving your right and proper UK edition right out of the local market altogether, but I've I've kept up by subscribing for more than a decade now. 

Even then, I usually miss two issues a year, and I used to complain about it and the subscription people were very nice and always sent out a replacement, but sometimes that replacement disappeared too, and that was that. There would always be holes in this long collection, as much as I've held onto every issue I ever got.

But it's always been an absolute goddamn delight when I have got my hands on a new issue. Finding out what's coming up, reading the latest reviews (and the inevitable disappointment at seeing how many promising films turned out to be mediocre), and getting some proper cinematic history - there have been some great articles about ancient Hollywood history in the past few years. I still try to guess the spine quote every time, dig the regular Kim Newman column, and always read the last scene.

And there have been things that have been annoying - the tedious podcast banter spreading into full articles, the way some reviews are relegated to online only - (I still have the issues that will tell me if 1991's Shattered was any good, but online reviews from a decade ago are pure vapor.)

I thought I could handle all that, and all those missing issues, but it's the holding onto them that has broken the magic. Hundreds of big bulky issues breathlessly excited about the latest Harry Potter movie or Star Wars TV show, and while every issue has a gem of an article or a review, it's a lot to hold onto.

So I'm abandoning most of the Empires I have held onto for more than 30 years now. I'll sell them for dirt cheap so some other young movie nerd can soak up all this cinematic data. I don't need to any more.

And I think I'm abandoning the regular issues, because I haven't seen a new one in three months now. I'm not sure my attempts to change my address have really stuck, and if nobody else cares enough to rectify the situation, I don't know why I should care about getting the magazine anymore.

It's not a clean break, I'll probably get the odd issue if I see one in a random magazine store or something (which hasn't happened in years now), and I'm still holding onto most of the 90s issues I got, because I imprinted on them hard.

I know I'm never getting rid of that one issue that was Bard Pitt's first cover. Those eyes still slay me. But it's time to move on.

Thanks for the memories, Empire.

Love,

Bob

The random bookcase

My poor wife hates moving house, she finds it frustrating on an existential level, and enormously tiring. I understand completely where she is coming from, and when she tells me how much it sucks, I still bite my tongue and don't tell her how much I find it tremendously exciting, no matter how hard it gets.

She doesn't need to hear that. That won't help anybody.

But I do secretly love it, because it's a chance to redo all the bookshelves, to sort them out in new and interesting configurations. I fucking live for that shit. 

I have put hours of thought and labout into organizing my bookshelves. I find it very calming, and very relaxing. If something isn't quite right on the shelves, if a book is in the wrong place - and it's always obvious - I have to remedy it as soon as humanly possible.  Sometimes I order them on a thematic level, other parts are by author, and most of the time it's by size, and whatever fits. 

And our recent move back to the big city has seen a complete revamp of the bookshelf space in our house, and I am very much into it. The new place has loads of storage space, so I've been able to get all my 2000ads and Empire magazines out of our rented storage unit, and air out some books that have sat in a banana box for a decade now. 

There are dozens of boxes, and I've proper fucked my arms lifting them around, but I've also stashed them all away in the old concrete room downstairs, for easy access. And I'm taking my time going through them, and deciding which of them are bookshelf worthy, and which can go back in the box.

I've got all the worries in the world hanging over my head, just like everybody else, but it doesn't matter when I'm digging out all the BPRD comics I haven't read since 2012. I have no idea what happens in each individual issue. It's all the fun of getting new books, without spending any money on them.

But I'm taking my time sorting out the main bookshelves, the ones my lovely wife got for me exactly 10 years ago. As I slowly bring the boxes up from their concrete tomb, I start by shoving all the books wherever they will fit, and slowly organising them over the next few weeks, months and years.

It's not just the aesthetics of the thing, it's the personal nostalgia, sorting out the books stirs up all sorts of terrific memories when I'm reminded of their existence - every book on that bookcase blew my fucking mind when I first read it, and I can still feel the embers of that cultural explosion in my head. It lingers.

And I'm definitely shallow enough to also have a deep emotional connection to the Alice in Sunderland and Art of Grendel books that I bought during our days of international travel. We don't travel so much any more, but those books can take me anywhere.

But I have worlds and universes on those bookshelves, that are slowly taking shape, in their right and proper way.

Fighting with Frank (part 2 of 13): I can't hear you laughing.

- Missionary Man: Bad Moon Rising

Art by Frank Quitely

Story by Gordon Rennie

Letters by Annie Parkhouse

I missed you, Jeff!

Sometimes, when you've listened to a regular podcast where the hosts talk about their personal tastes and private lives for a long time, you can feel a little bereft when it suddenly ends, and you're left wondering what happened to them, or even how they're doing, and even though the person you've been listening to for years has no idea who you are or if you even exist, you desperately want to know if they are doing okay, and while you might follow them to a substack, or on social media, those things have a habit of disappearing, and when they do, they're gone. 

And then sometimes, just sometimes, you find them on a new social media account, and while it might not be the same, it's heartening to know they're still out there doing their thing, and haven't faded away into the great tapestry of the world. 

Respect for the Beasties

The Beastie Boys were obviously a joke band., everybody knew that back in 1987.  Fight for Your Right had the adolescent glee of youth, and really felt like one of the many novelty songs of the period, certainly nothing more important than other eighties tunes like Didn't You Kill My Brother, or Shaddap You Face. A minor trifle that gives you a laugh, but certainly nothing more than that.

But the Beasties turned out to be so much more than that, of course. They quickly became aware of the fact that being an ironic douchebag is all well and good, but you're still a douchebag, and they went off in strange new directions. This was enormously successful, with some inspired lyrical wordplay, remarkable sampling and some massively fat beats.

And, most of all for me, they did something that so few people seem capable of these days, and they  admitted they had been wrong, and actually apologized for their youthful stupidity. They have said sorry so many times for the way they treated Kate S, and so they fucking should. 

It's hard enough for a loser like me to admit I'm wrong about something, it takes some fucking balls to do it when you've sold 20 million records.

Yauch has been gone 13 years now. How fucked up is that? There's been no more Beastie goodness since then, although there have been some lovely retrospectives. But the three year old in the house thinks Body Movin' is totally bitching, so while they did some dumb shit, they also made some art that lasts, man.

When actors write better comics than writers

The comic book business loves getting in celebrity names in to write their funny books, even if those famous faces have limited actual experience with the medium. It's always been a part of the industry, but there have now been so many comics written - or ghost written - by some big marquee names, there is room to see what works and what doesn't, and it's a little surprising to see that actors generally do better than novelists.

Some novelists have made the transition to comics with ease, but most of them tend to fall short, especially if it's a huge name in regular publishing circles, who are less likely to listen to editorial direction.

I'm not going to name any particular writers here, partly because I'm a coward who doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but also because it's more of a vibe from the dozens of novelists who have had the crack at high-faluting graphic novels. And the vibe I always get is that the writer doesn't have the full faith in the art that a true collaboration needs, and tends to overwrite the hell out of everything. 

You only have to look at the dense caption boxes that always come with these kind of projects, and even if some of them don't come across as overtly serious and ponderous, they betray their own anxieties about a new medium, by assuming that they've been hired on the strength of their words, so loads of words is what you are going to get.

This also happens when actors take a stab at writing comics, something that usually happens when the actor from a Star Trek or Buffy franchise gets involved with the licensed works. There are plenty of those that are thoroughly mediocre comics.

But actors can also prove particularly adept, they spend their professional lives playing certain people, it stands to reason they're going to know more about those characters than anybody else. And actors also appreciate the visual aspect a lot more, and I've read several in recent years where the star writer was secure enough to let the pictures do a lot of the talking (a recent Sgt Rock v zombies comic by Bruce Campbell was particularly good at this aspect).

Like I say, there is no scientific data to back up this analysis, just my own anecdotal experience. But those experiences tell me s story, one that inspires me to trust actors more than novelists when they have a crack at this comic business.

Weird connections: Closer to the Day Today

It's always an absolute kick finding out about some strange connection between two different things, hiding in plain sight. This week it was discovering that the gloriously useless Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan, economics correspondent for The Day Today, also wrote the Closer play and movie with Clive Owen and Natalie Portman. 

O'Hanraha-hanrahan never knew what he was doing or how he got there, but sounds like he made a hell of a playwright.

Back on my library bullshit

Small town living was all well and good, but one of the very first things I did when I got back to the big smoke was rejoin the library and start loading up on the comic book graphic novels and trade paperbacks that I had missed out on this year.

Obviously this means catching up with old favorites and seeing what Batman, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four are up to, and they seem fine, which is nice.

But the city library system gets so many comics every year, I've had to pick and choose what to read now, for fear of getting buried in Venom-related comics. So I'll get to the big DC event books of the past couple of years at some point later on, and Daredevil can also wait.

But I had to check out the Immortal Thor, after enjoying Al Ewing's Hulk comics, and the first two books of that were a lot of fun, (although while the magical comic book is clever at all, it's hard to take seriously when it's such an intentionally shit comic, there has to be some kind of baseline quality - or at least a lot less corporate dick sucking - to make a magic comic find an audience and gain power through their adoration).

Other than that, there were the latest three Brubaker/Phillips books, the staggeringly beaufitul Batman/Dylan Dog comic, all the issues of Sight and Sound I can inhale (which are not comics but are equally vital), more Trigan Empire reprints and Mignolaverse books, the last gasps of the X-Men's Krakoa era, and simple pleasures like the recent Silver Surfer Rebirth by Marz and Lim, a gentle reminder of a cosmic time long swept away into the void of Marvel space.

I also can not help myself from trying out the new Ultimate comics. That's never been a healthy or particularly deep adoration, loving the various Ultimate comics so much, but it's adoration all the same.

I've got a thousand other such interests in the wild world of comics, and I'm feeding them every time I get another library book. It's still the fastest and cheapest way to inhale the goods.

I thought we were past this shit

The older I get, the more I get fucked off with Generation X. It's my generation, even if I came up on it late. But it's so dispiriting to see all the ironic nihilism turn into dull apathy, and the older we get, the more we turn into our goddamn parents, with the same old stupid bigotries. 

Look at the perilous nonsense our trans siblings put up with every day, it's fucking heart-breaking. I thought we sorted out this shit in the 90s, but here we still are, with very stupid people questioning matters of personal liberty that were settled and proven to be right so long ago. It's none of your goddamn business what gender your neighbor identifies as, and your prejudices just make you the neighborhood dickhead. 

I remember reading an interview with somebody a long time ago -  I can't remember who it was or what it was about, but it was sometime in the early 90s and they were saying how Hollywood's stabs at queer representation were not working because so few of them resisted the temptation to make somebody's sexuality their only defining trait, and you couldn't have a regular arsehole character who was gay and was just a natural born arsehole.

And it felt like we got there in the end, where it was No Big Deal how somebody identifies, and you can just get on with things without focusing on one aspect of a complicated human being. 

And yet, it turns out that time really is a flat circle, and the same shit just keeps coming around. Now the same old morons are back with the arguments about gender and freedom, reducing insanely complex issues to simple soundbites, and trampling on the people who just want to fucking love and live. 

Make no mistake - anti-trans arguments are facile and pathetic. The people who spout them show their ignorance on their smug mugs. Their reasoning is infantile and their prejudices are obvious. The world is clearly a better place when people are free to be their true selves, they make it brighter and more colorful, and that's good for fucking everybody. And their choices are their own, and should never be stomped upon by bigots who fear change so much their hearts have atrophied. 

It's fucking ridiculous that these things even need to be said. How are we ever going to advance as a species if we keep having to overcome the same dumb bullshit? 

Gen X has been leaning hard on the fascism in recent years,  and while it might be facile to blame the movies, there is s small part of me that thinks more people should have watched the Thin Red Line instead of Fight Club back in 1999, and spent more time appreciating nature than moaning about how the world doesn't care about them.

I truly thought we were past the inane bigotries and that the 90s club kids kicked them all to the curb, but that was foolishly naïve. All I can do it feel the shame of my generation turning its back on the poor and unfortunate, and refuse to turn my own.

Fighting with Frank (part 1 of 13): Step aside.

- Batman and Robin #3 (2009)

Art by Frank Quitely

Story by Grant Morrison

Colors by Alex Sinclair

Frank Quitely's gorgeous art takes him forever, but the results are always worth it. That shakily detailed line, the stunning use of perspective and balance, a healthy dose of a very wry sense of humour and a general sense of inventiveness. He's a thoughtful, meticulous artist, and he's also excellent and drawing fight scenes, putting the human body in outrageous poses that have a scream of truth to them, full of incredible acrobatics and real force behind the atomic punches. It's a delight to highlight 13 of my favourite fight scenes by Frank over the coming few months of Sundays.

The paths that people make are the best paths

One of my favourite little things about exploring modern towns and cities is something I just found out is called desire paths, where a concrete path goes around a piece of grass, but the grass is worn away by people taking shortcuts across it, flagrantly disregarding the authority of the concrete.

I know it's unsightly and all, but these are it takes thousands of feet to get that result, all seeking to save a few seconds, all finding the most efficient path.

They're ghost paths, liminal walkways, and a physical reminder that people won't always be pushed in the direction they're told to take, and I love them for that.

This is the Tearoom of Despair. Crap metaphors are what we are all about.

A murder is happening right now

I must have read tens of thousands of back covers for video tapes at rental places during the age of the video store. I used to spend hours browsing for the right movies, and would frequently judge them by their covers, because that was the filmmakers' one big chance to get your average punter to fork out the money for an overnight hire.

And I can't remember the vast, vast majority of them, because they got deleted from the short term memory as soon as I put the tape back on the shelf, but some stuck in the mind, especially when they made you feel like a goddamn murderer.

That's what the back cover of The Killing of America did to me. The 80s documentary was in a long line of mondo films featuring raw footage of death and carnage, and for all my love of horror film gore, I didn't really want to sit and watch the real thing for entertainment purposes. I never bothered with any of the Faces of Death, and the only thing I really saw was something called Inhumanities, one that my mates insisted we get out one Friday night, and was just full of grim war footage and gross animal mutilation. (A shock cut of some penis mutilation was the big hit from that.)

So I didn't want to watch these things, but I still read the back covers of everything, and while I haven't seen a copy of The Killing of America on the shelves in decades now, I still remember it's stark notice that in the time it took me to read the blurb on the back, another American had been killed.

I was only 11 or so when I saw that and could not get my head around it, that an entire life could be snuffed out in the brief moment I was reading that back cover. I have no idea if the claim was even true, but it was enough nightmare fuel for years.

And while I know this is nothing I can't find on the internet with two minutes of searching, but that creeping horror of all those deaths, and I felt it just by looking at the back of video tape.

Look at the plastic bags: Change is never as hard as it looks

I do miss the weird wonder of a plastic bag blowing around in the wind like that bit in American Beauty -  it's so easy to be a cynic about it, but it really is the only part of that movie to still hold up - but that's all I miss about them

The world changes every day, and while unfortunately a lot of those changes are for the worst, there are bright spots out there, where things are actually getting properly better.

Take the issue of one-use plastic bags. They were banned a few years back around here, and there was so much deep concern about what this meant, and how it was the nanny state run wild, and people would now face the massive inconvenience of having to remember to bring reusable bags. 

And it all turned out to be fine. It's not hard. All the whining and worrying was for nothing, people adjusted easily enough and remembered to bring their bags next time they went shopping. And if they forget, that's okay, because there are all sorts of environmentally friendlier options, and that's a tiny price to pay to keep decaying plastic bags out of every gutter.

I had to get out a bunch of Christmas decorations recently and they were in bags that were just a few years old, and they were nasty as fuck. I don't miss them at all.

This is not going to change the world, it takes far more than any one gesture, it's a grand effort. The actual environmental impact of all those bags might be little more than greenwashing, but it does make the world a slightly better place, and maybe we could all use a few more tiny inconveniences to get our arses into gear.

Nobody was ever cooler

For all the vodka that we drank that night, it was a deeply sobering experience. Because I was 21 and saw Geena Davis do that shot glass thing in The Long Kiss Goodnight and that was when I realised that no matter what I did in my entire life, I would never, ever do anything anywhere near as cool as that.

Slipping away from the Seto Thargo

It was nice while it lasted. A few years ago, I achieved a life-long goal of collecting every single issue of 2000ad, all 2000+ progs. And for a short while, I had them all, and was truly Seto Thargo.

But only for a short while, because last year I moved to a town where you couldn't get the Galaxy's Greatest Comic anywhere, so that immediately created a gap of almost 50 issues. I only got six progs at other bookstores around the South Island during the year, but with 2000ad coming out relentlessly every week, I was coming up well short.

And now I can't fucking find them on the shelves anywhere in a city of 1.5 million people, which feels wrong on a quantum level. Because 2000ad used to be everywhere - every corner dairy, every bookstore. It slowly faded away from all of these places over the years, and for the past decade or so, I knew of only two shops in all of Auckland that were selling it, and now that I've returned from a Southern odyssey, even those two places don't get it anymore.

Reading the latest issue of 2000ad while working back to my work or home is one of the great small pleasures of my life, and it's s shame to give it up. It's such a primal experience for me that I could never replicate with a digital subscription to the comic - the tactile nature of the thing plays a huge part in my enjoyment of it, along with being out the world with it.

And getting a mail order subscription is prohibitively expensive, and I have no doubt that many progs would go missing every year on their journey to the other side of the world (I have a monthly subscription to Empire magazine, and at least two of those go missing every years, to the point where I've stopped complaining about it.)

So I'm still looking for a regular source, and will pick up the missing back issues when they become available in some way, but I bet I miss a few. There's already at least one issue from the past few months that is sold out on the 2000ad website, and if you can't get it there, you can't get it anywhere.

I really need to stress that I am not complaining about any of this. This is the way I've read comics my whole life, in non-linear fashion, and the hunt is the thing. Now I'm looking in every random bookstore (half the progs I managed to scrape up last year were in a chain bookstore in a town of 7000 people), and that's genuinely fun.

The one thing I do regret is that I have no idea what's going on in my favourite strips, I've missed a lot of the brilliant Williams/Wyatt/Flint Dredd stories in recent months, (although they are all, of course, thoroughly spoiled). And I remain absolutely fascinated by the late-career brilliance of Dan Abnett - always a good writer, but a truly great one in recent years with Brink, The Out and Lawless, and he has even evolved hoary old Sinister Dexter into something spectacular.

I'm not totally bereft of thrillpower - you can still get the Judge Dredd Megazine in multiple places, probably because the newsagents selling them get a higher return on their shelf space from it. The Meg is still superb value for money, so there's still some thrillpower coming through, just not that weekly dose, the one I've been craving since 1982. 

This is 50?

It doesn't feel any different, turning 50. Not as much as I thought it would. It's a big number, but it's not the milestones that grind you down, it's the ongoing slog through life.

I did get a nasty cold just before my birthday in January, and a cough lingered on for weeks afterwards, which means that so far my fifties have been one of fever and hacking. But other than that, I still feel like the same idiot I've been for decades now.

I know in my brain that I'm a very different person from the young fool running about in the 90s, smoking away his 20s in a haze before actually doing something with my life. Everything good that has happened in my life came from the decision to go to journalism school when I was 29, but even that is more than two decades ago now.

I thought I was supposed to be getting more conservative as a I get older, but that hasn't happened. Maybe it's because I've been locked out of any generational wealth, still living on every paycheque and still nowhere near owning my own home, but it's mainly because my hatred of bullying and injustice has only got more rock solid over the years, it hasn't been eroded away by fear and loathing.

I may have lost some of the enthusiasm for the media I consume, not as all encompassing and it's taken me a while to figure out I don't need to rage about the most superficial of things, but I think I'm getting there.

And that undying love for a good comic book or movie or tune, it's still there, I still get so happy finding  a book I've been looking for, and some I've been hunting for decades are still out there somewhere (I will have you Lovely Biscuits, oh yes, I will have you). 

The moments when I walk into a random store, and see the Superman v Flash treasury edition going for a song, or finding that one Shooter/Byrne issue of The Avengers that I've been after since 1979, that's when I feel like the same old nerd I always was, and probably always will be.

Here's to the next 50 years, right?

Darwyn's DC: Not always what you expect (part 2 of 2)

 

Darwyn's DC: All superheroes should look like this (part 1 of 2)

I am ideologically opposed to variant covers on comics in almost every case, but that one time DC had the bright idea of letting Darwyn Cooke do whatever he wanted for the covers for one month almost makes it all worthwhile.

It's still very weird to think that Cooke isn't with us any more, these covers alone are so full of wit and momentum and love and grace and power and friendship and life. We should have got another 40 years of this kind of beauty, but will have to be content with the brilliance that we got.