Phoenix - The Untold Story: Haven't you already done enough!?!

- Phoenix: The Untold Story 

Art by John Byrne and Terry Austin 

Words by Chris Claremont 

Letters by Tom Orzechowski 

Colors by Glynis Wein

The best lesson in journalism I ever got was a Jim Aparo interview

I did a year-long course before I became a journalist more than two decades ago, and I have spent those years learning new things every day. But I still think the best lesson I ever had in writing up an interview was the transcript of a conversation with legendary Batman artist Jim Aparo that I read online, shortly before I trained up as a reporter.

I can't find it now, and haven't read it in my many years (Aparo passed away in 2005, after all), but it kept all the ums and uhs and repeated words that big Jim spoke during the conversation. And it was transcribed perfectly, and it made Aparo sound like a total dipshit, even though he was saying some interesting and insightful things.

The written word is not the same as spoken speech - and when you transcribe someone talking, you take out all the repetition and weird noises people make when they're trying to think of the right word to say. You never, ever add words to what they are saying, and even moving them around at all is highly dubious.

But it's all got to be edited for clarity, otherwise everytime you see another glorious Bat-cover from the 70s, you can't help but see the ums.

28 Years worth of tonal shifts

Nailing down the tone of a movie is a lot harder than it looks, whether you are going to be serious or silly, or tragic or romantic or whatever. You can always tell when a movie makes a tone shift that doesn't work, that jars you right out of the story.

An obvious recent example is the Caught Stealing movie, which is a silly runabout of a crime film with some charming nonsense, and then halfway through hits the audience with some proper tragedy. And then it tries to remain a knockabout farce, but it's tainted by that heavy dose of bummer. 

It's especially hard to fuck around with tone in a drama film, and sometimes it's hard to even get a grip on the proper vibe of something like The Life of Chuck, but horror films are one area where you can wave all over the place and really get away with it. 

It is still easy to make a misstep when transitioning from farce to horror and lose the audience, but there are a load of great horror comedies that get it right - the Evil Dead films, for just one example, go from absolute slapstick to bone-chilling horror with extreme deftness.

My absolute favourite example of tonal cinematic whiplash in recent years has been the two 28 Years Later films.  To be clear, I thought both films were fucking brilliant, with fascinating things to say beyond the 'run away run away' and 'humans are the real monster, don't ya know' of most zombie films.

But I also don't blame people when they can't get on board when the Telly-Tubby Jimmy Saville parkour ninjas suddenly appear at the end of the first film. There is some real whiplash there, and that can be too much for some.

At least it gave the audience a taste of what the next sequel will do, because that's at least four movies in one. One second it's a quiet meditation of the nature of mortality; then it's the grossest, nastiest shit ever to take place in a barn; the next it's a dumb stoner buddy comedy; and then it's the most metal thing I've ever seen put on screen.

I fully understand why this kind of thing puts people off, and there are plenty movies where I can't handle that shift. But that delicate juggling act can separate the great from the good, if there is enough of an audience to go along with it.

Social media is infecting my documentaries

I love watching documentaries about culture and history, but any doco about something that happened in the past 20 years invariably has an awful moment when they suddenly cut to the social media reaction, and a montage of moronic tweets fills the screen.

It could be a story about about sports or movies or anything, and something monumental could happen, and they cut away to a that big graphic-filled montage of social media posts, like that proves fucking anything.

I take that back - it does prove one thing: the people who are making comments about an actress getting old or a sportsperson falling short in some game are just the fucking worst. Tedious morons, spewing their garbage thoughts, immortalised now as part of the story.

The mean and insulting ones are easier to take, because you can just write off those posters as utterly useless human beings, but even those who don't really think they're saying something mean, and are just dumb jokes, are offensive in their inability to think beyond the next sick burn.

Especially when the doco always cuts to the person who is the butt of the joke, who was genuinely harmed by all those dumb jokes and pithy observations and you see there are real people suffering real pain.

I have long wondered about the cultural black hole that is expanding in 21st society, but now I'm also worried that the historical records of the early years of this century will be some dipshit's crap joke about a current event. I'd be appalled if anybody used this blog as a representation, I'm just another dipshit, and my comments would be a terrible example of modern thought.

Maybe our 27th century descendants will think we're all a bunch of Nathan Barleys. And maybe we are.

Batman: So much black and white

I lost track of the monthly continuity of the big superhero universes a long time ago, but now I can't even keep track of how many groovy short story collections there are, or even how many black and white Batman comics exist.

There is a flood of black and white anthologies at the moment, often with an added colour (usually red), but DC have been publishing B+W Batman tales in special anthology mini series and back-ups since the 1990s, and every now and then I find a new collection of them that I genuinely had no idea existed, even though it's full of great writers and fantastic artists like JH Williams III, Greg Smallwood, Emma Rios, Kelley Jones, Nick Derrington, Sophie Campbell and many, many more.

I got a 2020 one from the library the other day, and it was full of stories I'd never seen before. Most of the writing was just a bit obvious, but there is also a beautiful array of these modern artists, letting their freak fly. I should ignore all the colour comics more often.

Comics of future past: The Best of 2000ad Monthly

I was born just a little too late to be in on 2000ad from the start. I was only two years old when it began, and even though I was reading it from a young age, I wasn't that ahead of the game.

The first ones I remember reading were three years into the comic's existence - Fiends of the Eastern Front was slightly too intense for my young brain - and I was reading it regularly by the time I was eight. But even then, I knew there had been years of thrill-power before that, and I had access to absolutely none of it.

And then the reprints started showing up everywhere, and I read all of the Judge Child Quest and the Apocalypse War in the Eagle reprints - the ones with the excellent covers, surprisingly solid color work and some effort to make it fit the dimensions of a new page.

But most of my slightly historical thrills came in the pages of The Best of 2000ad Monthly, which was just all killer and no filler. You'd get dozens and dozens of pages of of golden age Strontium Dog and Nemesis The Warlock and DR & Quinch, with some of the truly great Dredd stories - the issue that reprinted every part of the Judge Death Lives, while also giving us some relatively non-racist Robo-Hunter, was truly something to behold

It was the single most exciting comic I'd ever seen in my life. So much concentrated thrill-power in so many pages. It can't have been good to me, creating expectations in my comic thrills that have never been seen again. I was getting regular Bolland and McMahon and Gibbons and Ezquerra and Fabry and all the greats, I literally did not know how lucky I was.

It would take me a long time to get all those older issues that I missed out on, I only became Seto Thargo a few years back. So I have all those reprinted stories in their original form, but I'm also grateful that I got to read them in such a condensed form.

Each issue of the Monthly was three times as expensive as the regular prog, but was well worth the $1.65. It was quite possibly the best bang for my buck I've ever had in comics, and one I'll never have again. That level of thrill-power remains rare.

In dreams, I talk to you

Despite hundreds of books and essays on the subject, nobody really understands how dreams work, even though we all have them, all the time. 

I don't know why they happen, I don't know what is happening in our minds when we dream this stuff, I don't understand them at all. But I do know I have three kind of dreams these days. 

The first is the vast majority of them, which are the ones that instantly fade when I wake up, with residual nonsense images already disappearing from my mind. Strange people and unlikely events that are gone in seconds, even if I try to hold onto them. 

There's been a couple of times I've written the greatest book or movie script ever written in a dream, and it seems so obvious, and then it's swiftly gone in the morning. Some dreams stick around in the memory for years, but the vast, vast majority of them are already gone by the time I get out of bed.

The second type of dream is one where I am glad to wake up, because they are so horrible, or so terrifying, or just really, really annoying. I dream about car crashes and losing loved ones, and those type of dreams have certainly got more intensive since I became a parent, because I know what the worst thing in the world could ever be.

I also have dreams of my teeth crumbling to dust in my mouth, and being on planes that are going down among the high-rises of a city, and being late for vital appointments. I wake with relief, and also the lingering existential shits about how easily my whole world could turn to shit, but mainly relief. 

The third dream is one that I hate to wake up from, because it's such a good time. For most of this life this wasn't something normal like getting close and personal with some crush, or winning the lottery, or going on a magnificent holiday, it was finding a hidden stash of lost 2000ads, or a treasure trove of Best of DC Blue Ribbon Digest books. I would even think about how glad I was that I wasn't dreaming in the dream, as I pull out a digest-sized collection of Martian Manhunter comics by Alan Moore and Gil Kane. 

These days, now that I've clocked up a half century of life on this fucked up world, I don't have these kinds of strong feelings about old comic books, although I'm always glad to stumble upon some Bolland Strontium Dog that only exists in my head. 

Now I'm far more likely to wake with regret when I meet people I have loved and lost over the years, and get to talk to them, and hear their voice, and even though I know it's a dream and I'm not talking to my dear, old Dad, it's as close as I get, and I get to tell him about the grandchildren he never met.

Those dreams still break my heart, but they're still the only place I get to have a cup of tea with my Nana, or sink a beer with one of my uncles, so I still cherish them. Those sorts of dreams I never forget. Those sorts of dreams I never want to.

Mazeworld: To exit from the maze is to be reborn

- Mazeworld Book One: The Hanged Man 

Art by the extraordinary Arthur Ranson 

Words by Alan Grant

Letters by Ellie De Ville

The depths of human stupidity can always be plumbed further

- One of my favourite caption boxes of all time. It's from a Judge Dredd story, obviously - one of the 1980s annual stories by Wagner/Grant - but I also find it to still be extremely pertinent on a daily basis.

Flash Gordon: He'll save every one of us!

Queen's Greatest Hits album was the first actual LP record I ever bought with my own money, and one time at a pub quiz I proved I was the biggest Queen nerd in the room by easily naming 10 of their albums (this was before the movie, when their music found whole new audiences).

But if I had a ray gun to my head and was asked to name the best Queen album ever, I would almost definitely pick the Flash Gordon soundtrack. 

It's certainly the one I've listened to the most, on long road trips in my car, or as background noise in the house. I bought the cassette tape from the DEKA store in Timaru in 1989, and still have that tape, and it still sounds totally rad. There is a particular appeal in soundtracks that are composed entirely of one rock band's efforts - the Young Fathers' music in 28 Years Later being a prime recent example - but nobody ever did it better than Queen.

It's almost a musical - the scintillating riffs spliced with judicious use of dialogue, and you can easily follow the story of Flash and Dale and their pals overthrowing the evil Emperor.  I never get sick of hearing General Kala's dispatching of War Rocket Ajax to bring back Flash's body.

It's also got a terrific wedding march - I listened to it on the day I got married to get the blood pumping - and some moody, long bits of ambient dreaminess as they sail through the void, with the occasional thudding drums pushing through to remind us of the emergency.

And above all, the thumping, soaring theme song - with that insistent, pounding bass, and the plaintive wailing for someone, anyone, to save the world.  

I've listened to all of Queen's albums to various degrees over the years, but the Flash soundtrack is still the one I want to listen to the most. It's great for listening to during a long writing session, and it's even better when I've got nothing more to do than lie back and listen, and let Queen take me to another world.

House of the Dragon: There are no sides

Now that the thoroughly excellent Dunk and Egg TV show has finished its limited run, the publicity machine is already kicking in for the the third season of House of the Dragon, which is only a few months away.

Unfortunately, it looks like the people who sell that TV show are ignoring the complex and loud subtext of the story and are sticking with a 'whose side are you on?' theme. And that is bonkers to me, because it's missing the entire point of the thing.

With all the fictional reference books about the history of Westeros and the world in exists in, there are a thousand weird stories to tell about the people who live on that world. The Dance of the Dragons isn't particularly one of my favourites, but it is still an intense and stylish show. 

But it is properly annoying when a pop-up ad on some news website demands to know if I'm for the Greens or the Blacks, and I do find it somewhat offensive, because that's the kind of thinking that sparked this fictional war and the infinite carnage and untold misery caused by some cunts who think they deserve to rule the land. 

Both sides in the Dance of the Dragons have some despicable and nasty people doing things in their names, and both sides have innocents, and both sides are full of good people forced to do what they can for the survival of their families.

It's these complexities, these details, that make the vast brushstrokes of this story so vivid. And it's certainly not dependent on whose side you are on. If you're not on the side of the smallfolk and other innocents, it doesn't matter who you support. 

They're all monsters. They're all dragons.

Aprils Fool's Day: Always a day behind the bullshit

I've always hated April Fool's Day. Right from the start - I hated getting tricked as a kid. I thought it was dumb.

I particularly hate April Fool's Day now as a journalist, because even with all the evidence you can gather, you ultimately have to trust people at their word, and can be severely fucked if they go back on it, and there is just one day in the year where you can not trust any motherfucker.

And I very much hate it in the internet age, because I have been tricked a number of times on April 2, when people on the other side of the world are still playing the fool, while the rest of us have moved on.

Who is more foolish - the fool, or the person being fooled? It's the fucking fool.

Project Hail Mary: You look pretty good down here

Project Hail Mary is a movie about how the need to help other people is a universal constant, even if those people look like rocks and don't have a face, and that's just the kind of message I need to hear more often right now. And judging by the audiences it is getting, I'm not the only one.

It's grim times around the world, and I see people doing the most abhorrent things to their fellow humans on a daily basis. You don't even have to be a full-time doom-scroller to see how nasty people can get out of there, with violence and brute ignorance running rampant.

So any kind of film that offers something resembling hope is always welcome, no matter how fantastical. (I mean, I could handle the science fiction of the interstellar engine drive and such, but was taken aback from frequent assertions that all the nations of the world were working together to solve this problem.)

I am also in the mood for stories that don't feature being dicks or arseholes or bullies, because I don't care about these fucking dolts, even though the rules of English fiction dictate that all bullies must face justice at some point. And like The Martian, there isn't anybody like that here, and it's so damned refreshing.

Dickheads are the easiest way to generate conflict in a story - creating drama through selfishness and meanness - but I still truly believe in my heart that people want to help each other when we get the chance, and we should pay little heed to those who insist otherwise. 

And a movie with no bad guys other than the cruel indifference of the universe - where nobody is being a dick just because they can, just because the story needs it - is the type of movie I really needed right now.

Also this film has sad karaoke, and if you really want to get into the proper depths of human feeling, you can do it with sad karaoke. 

Losing track of it all

I've been trying to get the comic and movie collection in some kind of order this year, and figuring out what I've actually got, and it's probably going to take me a lot longer than 12 months. Because after decades of collecting, there is a fucking shit-tonne of stuff.

As I'm going through it, there are genuine surprises, I find copies of Flash comics from the Silver Age and random Michael Moorcock novels I didn't know I had. My memory ain't what it used to be, and I have no recollection of actually buying them at any point. 

I used to be able to confidently say exactly which individual comics I had, even when I had thousands and thousands of them. I could tell you what one issue of Jungle Action I had buried in a box, or how many issues of Booster Gold I had.

That kind of useless information has definitely been under pressure in recent years, with brainpower more likely to be devoted to things like 'making sure my kids are not playing in traffic', or 'remembering when they need to take $3 to school for a sausage sizzle'.

I do know some things for sure. I know in the room downstairs there are exactly 2351 issues of 2000ad in a number of genuinely life-threatening boxes, and that all the Hitman and Grendel and the first 25 issues of The New Warriors are carefully boxed away.

But I can be surprised by what I actually own when I crack open dusty boxes, and sometimes I just can't find very particular things that I'm sure I had.

I've totally lost track of who I've leant stuff to over the years, and sometimes I get a pile of DVDs or trade paperbacks returned from family and friends, with profuse apologies for taking so long with them, and I didn't even know they had them in the first place. I knew my boxsets of The Wire were somewhere, I just didn't know they were at my sister-in-law's house.

I know a lot of people have databases and spreadsheets to keep track of it all, but that turns it from a hobby into a chore. The closest I ever got is a list of all the individual comics I need to complete various series, still printed out on paper and shoved into my wallet for the next time I stumble across a pile of Jonah Hex comics from the mid-2000s.

In the end, I'm not actually that bothered that I can't keep track of it like I once did. I've already outsourced all sorts of things like movie knowledge to places like the IMDB and wikipedia, and I long ago made peace with the idea that I can't own everything and know everything. 

A little mystery is good for the soul, even if it's just the mystery of what I did with that issue of Amazing Heroes with the Alan Moore interview in it that I've been looking for. I'm sure it's somewhere.

The Maxx: It's not cool to hallucinate, sweetie

- The Maxx #14

Pencils and inks by the late, great Sam Keith

Words by Sam Keith and Bill Messner-Loebs 

Colors by Steve Oliff 

Letters by Mike Heisler

Waiting for Samurai Jack

Ever since I became a parent, I have been asking myself the same thing over and over: When can I watch Samurai Jack with them? Are they ready for Samurai Jack? Are they old enough for the intensity of Samurai Jack? Wil they appreciate the delicate symmetry and balls-out action of Samurai Jack? Is it time for Samurai Jack?

Nearly. It's nearly time.

I also do think they are ready to start playing Risk, the other thing I've been patiently waiting for them to get old enough for - without taking all the little pieces and flinging them around the room. Small steps, but we get there in the end.

Aotearoa in the background

It used to be huge news when films were shot in New Zealand, and something as forgettable as the Race For The Yankee Zephyr was a huge fucking deal, even if it's a film that nobody cares about today (it does have some aces helicopter action in the hills around Queenstown).

Now I can be watching some random film, and I'll recognise the hill that an action hero is hiking over as one where me and my mates got stoned in the 90s, and I never even knew it was made in this country.

It's always very clear - the rocks, the tussock and the riverbeds of Canterbury and Otago are like nowhere else on the planet, and have been in my back yard for most of my life.

It used to be an actual news story when an overseas production was filmed in Aotearoa, and then the Lord of the Rings came along, and showed that a bunch of halflings at the arse end of the world could make epic cinema as good as anybody, and a big part of that epicness was the landscape.

Now that landscape shows up everywhere, and sometimes there is no way the Ash Vs The Evil Dead TV show can convince me that the back roads of Waikato are actually just outside Everytown, USA; or that a Mission Impossible part set in the foothills of the Himalayas is actually clearly spent near Lake Wanaka.

I don't even keep track of what is filming in this country anymore, so when I see the flora of my high country, it's little surprise when I look it up and find that it was filmed a metaphorical stone's throw from where I was born.

The most recent Predator was the one of the best recent examples, because that alien landscape that the predators is stomping through is clearly around the headwaters of the Rangitata River, with a whole bunch of vivid CGI alien landscape stapled on top of it.

I used to see things like that in the sky when I took acid on those hills, so it's no surprise to see that kind of landscaping on the cinema screen. It's familiar, even if it's a million light years away.

Not everyone is as miserable as you

I used to be a whiny adolescent, thinking that we all hated it when our friends become successful, but the person who gave us a song called that turned out to be a famously miserable cunt, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it. And letting famously miserable cunts convince us how the world works can have some extremely toxic results. 

I do believe Lord of the Flies has caused some real harm in the real world, because people think that in dire situations, everyone is going to go feral. It's become a cultural shorthand for when civilisation breaks down, and that it's human nature to destroy everybody to save yourself.

And it doesn't fucking happen - when a bunch of Tongan boys were stranded on a Pacific Island for more than a year in the 1960s, they worked together, and survived as a group.  Because that's how society works, we work together to build things, and when we turn on each other, it destroys everything for everyone.

It was only recently that I found out the writer of Lord of the Flies was a raging alcoholic who seemed to really dislike people in general, and that's not really the kind of personality that you should be telling us the score.

Because the real harm came in things like Hurricane Katrina, where help was withheld because of stories of the survivors turning on each other at the arena they fled to when everything else broke down, and exaggerated stories of terrible events were used an excuse to delay that much needed assistance.

Kill your heroes, they say, because they'll always let you down - the beat generation were incredible writers and almost uniformly terrible people by 21st century standards (with some bright and notable exceptions), but you can still dig their vibes - and some people will spend their lives trying to tell us that everybody is as wicked as they are. 

But we don't have to listen, or believe them.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight: Everyone feels the festive fever

It's hard to find cheap issues of the Moench/Sienkiewicz Moon Knight series these days, they often go for quite extraordinary amounts of money. Partly because they made a TV show about the superhero, but mainly because they have some truly fucking awesome covers.

But I still grab any inexpensive issues when I see them, because they are full of lovely Bill Sienkiewicz art, and because it's always fascinating to see an artist growing into their true style.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight comics are full of obvious Neal Adams moments - 

 - and then in the very same issue there will be moments when the beautiful chaos of the artist's later works starts to show through, and things break down in glorious fashion -

Seeing one of the great modern comic artists discover their true self is truly a great appeal of a monthly run, especially when it's such a vivid change of style.

The Nth Man is my main Marvel expertise

I was already interested in the new Marvel Age of Comics essays - small books full of information and analysis, looking at some of Marvel's most celebrated comics, because one of them was by Paul Cornell, and I was reading his stuff in the 90s when he was doing the same sort of thing with Doctor Who.

They are great little reads, especially Cornell's extensive look at the Avengers in the 1970s. They do sometimes get a little bogged down in plot recaps and explanations, but are pleasingly full of behind the scenes information and musing on the themes and artistic goals of these ephemeral comics.

I burned through them all in a weekend, and have already starting digging back into my Shooter/Perez issues of the Avengers. I have also been thinking about what Marvel comic I'd be qualified to write about if I did one of them.

Doing something basic like the Byrne/Claremont X-Men or Simonson Thor would be right out - they're still magnificent comics, but have been covered extensively in the decades they have been published.

There could be rewards in zeroing in on something like Alan Davis' ClanDestine, and use it as an excuse to get into the whole Marvel UK thing, and the brilliance of Davis' two Excalibur runs. There would also be ample room for thoughts ClanDestine's inability to get a grip inside the wider comic marketplace.

But I'm fairly sure it would probably be The Nth Man by Larry Hama and Ron Wagner. It only lasted 16 issues and change, but those 16 issues are full of world war, ninja mysticism and a dork with absolute reality-changing powers. It's incredibly propulsive and a deep mindfuck, and while it looks a lot like Hama's GI Joe, it is very much its own thing.

I could get 10,00 words on the career of Larry Hama, and a few more on Wagner's incredibly energetic art. It has some vague connections to the wider Marvel universe - they all show up in an issue of Excalibur in between those Davis runs - but it's a rare complete story from Marvel, even as it all gets cosmically goofy by the end of things.

If they did a series of books for 2000ad like they did for Marvel, I could write a dozen longs long essays on multiple long-running series and short shocks. But the Nth Man would be my Marvel man.

Doctor Who: Something from nothing

Anybody who has spent significant amounts of time immersed in the universe of Doctor Who will have dreamt about the lost episodes. Precious dreamtime given over to sitting down and watching a TV show that literally does not exist any more.

Those missing episodes of the Hartnell and Troughton years, lost due to stupidity and deleted from the historical record, are a hole in the story that is never really going to be filled. Marco Polo and the Myth Makers and Power of the Daleks only exist in re-creation now, and as much as we yearn to see them, they are more than likely gone forever.

Many of them only exist in dreams anymore. I've seen episodes of the Macra Terror in my sleep and while I can barely remember any detail, the giant crabs aliens were much scarier in my head than they were when they showed up in 21st century Who.

I first became aware of the missing episodes in a small write-up in the seminal 20th anniversary magazine, and they all seemed lost then. There was a strange fascination with this - no matter how determined I was to see as much of the show as possible, there would always be this missing part, forever out of reach, forever mysterious, forever gone. You'd need a TARDIS for that.

I have seen the missing episodes as best I can, in fairly crude reconstructions that put telesnaps over the soundtrack, and it's easy enough to follow the story, but not enough to really get engaged. A significant amount of missing stories have also been recreated in animation form, and they do have their charms, but they do miss the crucial subtilties of Hartnell and Troughton, the strange ways they moved and gestured that were so important.

There are also some fools who have been trying to recreate the missing episodes with AI, and that's just as creatively and morally bankrupt as expected, and should be of no interest to anybody.

So the animation is probably your best bet if you want to see some version of it, and you live with this tiny sliver of void in the best story ever told. 

And then every few years, somebody dusts off some old film can, and suddenly you're watching the Doctor and Salamander fight on the floor of the TARDIS, and the dream comes true. There is nothing in all entertainment that compares with the news that they've found some of the Dalek Master Plan, and we'll actually get to see Katrina and Bret Vyon in full episodes. Nothing.

I might still dream about them, but they've also escaped out into the real world, and always bringing the hope of more.

GI Joe: Howsabout punch-for-punch?

- GI Joe #64

Pencils by Ron Wagner

Inks by Russ Heath

Script by Larry Hama

Colors by Nel Yomtov

Letters by Joe Rosen