The State and the Majestic

When I was growing up in Timaru in the 1980s, there were two cinemas showing all the latest movies, and while I’ve been to many, many other theatres all over the world since, you never forget your first ones.

(There was a third – the Regent – but it closed up just before I was born. While the abandoned theatre was there for years afterwards and I got to explore it when it was used as for furniture storage for a department store I worked at, but it got demolished over a decade ago.)

The State also disappeared decades ago, but it was there when I was a kid. My admittedly dodgy memory is that it was the cinema that played all the big blockbusters, so you went there to see the latest Star Wars or Star Trek II or Legend of the Lone Ranger. The cinema eventually got sucked up into a strip mall which is now full of ghost shops in the middle of town.

The Majestic lasted a bit longer. It got its share of blockbusters – my earliest ever movie memory is seeing Superman there with my cousins – but it mainly had a weird mix of serious adult fare and absolute shlock. I wasn’t interested in the serious stuff, but I definitely saw things like the Village People movie and Spies Like Us there. It was also the first place I ever saw a movie at night, instead of a midday matinee, and I can still remember the thrill of seeing the night sky after walking out of the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer masterpiece Who Finds A Friend Finds A Treasure.

By the early nineties, just when my obsession with all things cinema reached its peak, the Majestic was still there, and I went to everything they showed - including Romper Stomper, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Speed – multiple times. It was soon replaced by a small multiplex somewhere else in town, and the foyer of the Majestic was turned into a video store for a long while, until it went the way of all the other video stores.

Weirdly, the thing I miss most from these old theatres isn’t the lingering smell of popcorn and Tangy Fruits (best lollies ever), or the intermissions, or the single tickets, it’s the sound. These theatres were vast, open spaces (or at least, they felt like that way to a kid), and the sound would bounce and reverberate off the walls, giving movie dialogue, music and sound effects a strange echo effect that has been wiped out by multiplex perfection.

Sometimes I’ll check out an old cinema somewhere that I’ve never been to before, and I’ll catch that echo again. It’s the best feeling, taking me all the way back to the earliest films I ever enjoyed at the theatre. Nothing beats the feeling of your first cinemas, and there will always be a place in my movie-loving soul for the State and the Majestic.

Reaching out

I've never read a Jack Reacher book in my life, but last night I had one of those weird dreams where you somehow manage to read a whole book, and it was a Jack Reacher book where he rolled into town and – after some initial suspicion – it turned out there was no big criminal conspiracy with links to a shadowy military-industrial outfit, and everybody was just really nice and good to each other, and Reacher spent the whole book going for long walks and having nice dinner with people.

It was lovely. I wonder if they're really like that.

If Gary has given up….

After reading a whole lot of old issues of The Comics Journal recently, it was genuinely a bit sad to see that Gary Groth didn’t have that much to say after the death of Stan Lee.

Once upon a time, all it would take would someone like Bill Mantlo to say something snide at the Comic-Con urinal, and Groth would devote seven pages of the Journal to a polemic about how Mantlo's comment represents the dire state of comics, and he certainly had plenty to say about Stan Lee’s place in modern culture over the years.

But after The Man passed away late last year, all we got from Groth was 500 words (including two sizable quotes), with some vague ideas about Lee’s legacy, and that was it.

That’s obviously Groth’s prerogative, and after spending so much of his life beating his head against the mainstream perception of comics, you can’t blame him for being completely bloody sick of it all. He doesn’t moan about anything like he used to, and in an age when long, rage-fuelled rants have been replaced by 140-character snark and putdowns, that’s to be expected.

But after reading all those old TCJ issues, it’s a shame to see that beautifully fiery rhetoric that once filled pages and pages of the magazine has been doused. It’s as necessary as it ever was. How are we going to build something new if there isn't anybody to burn all the old shit down?

Venture this!

"I get it. I suddenly get it! You're children!"

I must do this thing

The lovely wife and I have accidentally been watching a lot of films lately about men who have a life-long obsession that is so powerful it ultimately destroys their lives and the lives of everybody around them.

My only crippling life-long obsession is to collect a complete set of 2000ad progs – I only need 37 more, all from the first two years – so I don’t think this will destroy everything that is good in life.

I might get a couple of paper cuts, and may strain myself moving them all around, but that’s probably about it. The lovely wife might not always approve of all these comics cluttering up the joint, but she knows it won't ruin our lives.

Green Lantern: Nothing will ever be the same again!

Superhero comic fans can be such fucking rubes sometimes.

In the final pages of the most recent issue of Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp's Green Lantern comic, Hal Jordan does something so out of character that it is genuinely shocking, something that is painfully reminiscent of some of his least reputable law enforcement counterparts in the real world.

But what was even more surprising was some of the reactions to the comic, with reviews, podcasts and social media posts that were deeply concerned about this whole new status quo, and what it says about the whole Green Lantern Corps concept, and what it all means for the future of Hal Jordan.

It doesn't mean fucking anything, because it appears that anyone with a stress headache from their furrowed brow has never read any superhero comic before, let alone a DC superhero comic by a writer who has been doing this for decades. Of course it's not what it appears, of course it's some trick or secret plan or something. They always are. Every time.

There are a thousand covers promising that a superhero has gone over the line and done something irreversible like murder, but the pages within always reveal it to be a fake-out or misunderstanding. The next issue of this comic is due out this week, and it might take a couple of issues to explain what is going on, or Morrison's usual hyper-compressed story will explain everything away instantly.

There's a chance I might be wrong, and Hal Jordan might be headed off into new levels of super-dickdom. But I'm not, because this is what always happens, and always will.

Ron Smith’s Dredd always looked like a superhero to me

It never really felt like Ron Smith’s artwork really got the respect I always thought he deserved, even from fellow 2000ad fans, but his recent passing has shown that I wasn’t the only one to rate it highly.

I always have. When I was devouring new issues of 2000ad during the comic’s golden period in the early 1980s, Smith’s Dredd was always the best Dredd. It took me a while to warm to Ezquerra and McMahon - even though they were clearly always working on another level of brilliance - but Smith’s Dredd comics were always so warm and inviting and energetic.

Whether it was the just-another-night detailing of The Graveyard Shift or the climactic awesomeness of the Judge Child Quest, or the sheer economy of the daily newspaper strip, Smith was always there. He captured the insanity of the city itself, and there were always strange details in his future world, with his pages so full of action and impact. (This was helped by the fact that because Smith famously had an alarm clock set to work on a page of comics for a specific amount of time, and if he got the basics down quickly, he could fill any negative space with crowds or architecture that didn’t look like anything else in comics.)

His figurework could sometimes be awkward and strange, with human bodies contorted by exaggeration, but when it came to Dredd, the character blazed through Smith’s pages like an American superhero, with bulging muscles and firm-footed posing.

But Smith was always one of those artists that I could never be objective about, because I loved it unconditionally from such a young age. Those smooth lines were always so attractive to my unrefined tastes, and probably always will be.

Time for an Iron Woman

Marvel Studios has been incredibly secretive about its plans for its next round of films, once Avengers: Endgame is done. A lot of the A-list cast who have helped make the series such a massive success are moving on to projects with a lot less spandex, and it’s highly likely that some of them will go out with the traditional noble sacrifice.

But one thing seems clear and obvious - if they can’t have Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark doing the Iron Man thing anymore, they should definitely give the armour to Letitia Wright’s Shuri, and build a new film around her.

After appearing in two of the Marvel films, Shuri seems like a natural successor, and not just because she is one of the few characters to match Stark on the intelligence front. It’s also because Wright, like Downey, is an amazingly charming actor and the character has shown extreme wit, style and smarts in her few scenes so far.

It’s also time for Marvel to get on board with more diversification amongst its lead actors. The studio has made a big deal about recently moving away from traditional white male leads, and this is a chance to really put its money where its mouth is.

It would also give the entire Iron Man concept a much-needed jolt of fresh energy. Even with Downey Jr giving it his all, none of the Iron Man films have ever been essential viewing, and the concept was already looking tired by the first sequel. If Stark is going out with a bang, getting an audience excited about another Iron Man film will be a lot easier with Shuri under the armor.

Everything must go

There is a special kind of existential horror that comes creeping in the door when you realise that if you sat down and started reading (or re-reading) every book, novel, comic and magazine you kept in storage around the house, you would not have enough time to finish them all before you died of old age.

I really need to get my shit together, and eat better and do more exercise and all that crap so I can live a bit longer.

Or I could just get rid of some of this shit. I don’t need to hang on to these things, if I’m never going to get there, no matter how pretty they look up on the shelf.

Even though I hope I've still got a few more decades left in me, I think I'll be struggling with this for the rest of my life. Eldritch horrors from beyond the veil don't have anything on this slow sense that we're all running out of time.