All the computers are still wrong

The tech giants have been spying on me for fucking decades now, but all the algorithms are still wrong, because I only just found out there was a movie on a streamer I've had for more than a year where Frank Grillo gets involved in a big underground fight club, and ends up calling in his mate Scott Adkins to help him out with some arse kicking, and it's like they don't even know me, man.

...28 Years Later: A sort of insanity rarely seen

It really looked like Ralph Fiennes was going full Colonel Kurtz in ...28 Years Later. The bright dye covering his naked torso, the intense gaze seen in glimpses in that remarkable trailer, it seemed obvious that he was going to be a new kind of monster among the infected.

And then he wasn't that. He wasn't that at all.

The more I think about it, the more things I love about.that this belated sequel that was already predictably my favourite film of the year. There's a lot to like, especially in the way it does not go in any direction anybody was expecting, but the character of Doctor Ian Kelson, as played by the indominable Fiennes, really is something special.

Because he is obviously insane, but of a kind that is rarely seen in cinema, While he's clearly lost his mind, he still doesn't want to hurt anybody. He still wants to help. He is dealing with such unimaginable trauma in a way that he truly believes is honouring the dead that surround him.

He gets shunned by a 'normal' society that hides behind ancient masks, doesn't have a single doctor and sends out 12-year-old boys to fight insane rage monsters, because they do not understand what he is doing.

He will go about his task on his own if he has to, but the relief when he gets to explain what is going on, and the compassion he shows when he finally has a new patient shows that there is still vast oceans of humanity beneath that iodine-stained surface.

Fiennes is always good in everything, and sometimes he gets a transcendent role in films as diverse as In Bruges, Schindler's List and The Grand Budapest Hotel, with his Kelson clearly ranking with those, for the subtlety he uses to portray a fierce will at the end of the world. 

Obviously conflict breeds drama, and the vast majority of mental illness seen in movies and TV are used as an excuse for terrible, hurtful behaviour. But there are more people in real life like the good doctor, broken into a million pieces inside, but still going around and trying their best. 

He might get smashed apart again in the imminent sequel - the latest trailer does make him look more fierce - but I do weep for his quiet humanity on this isle of the dead

Uncle Scrooge kept me in comics

I tried to give up on reading comics half a dozen time when I was a kid, because everybody told me they were bad for me, and they were prohibitively expensive for a working-class household, and there were lots of other things to get obsessed with, like BMX bikes, and video games, and running around with sticks down the river, pretending I had a lightsaber.

There were also other times I tried to kick the habit because I believed the fools who told me I was getting too old for comics, and some other times - especially in recent years - where the cost to reward ratio was just not worth it.

But I kept getting dragged back because I just fucking love the medium, and sometimes I get pulled back by a single issue. The first issue of the New Warriors was one, an issue of an Ambush Bug comic was another. A couple of times it was random issues of 2000ad, and one time the very first Punisher comic that Ennis and Dillon did was enough to relight the fire.

The first time I tried to give up, I was six or seven years old, and I think it was because I got sick of my poor Mum complaining about the mess I was making with the huge collection of 20 or so comics I had. It just didn't seem like it was worth the hassle, even to my young brain.

And it was an issue of an Uncle Scrooge comic that kept me going. 

I can't remember any of the details around it, or even the cover. I feel it was yellow and had something to do with ice fishing, and that's all I've got. I'm still halfway sure that I would recognise it if I ever saw it again, but only halfway sure.

But I can remember how it made me feel. It was funny and clever, and looked so pretty, and I read it a dozen times that week. The issue itself is long gone - at that time I used to trade a big grocery bag full of comics at the second hand bookstore my Nan worked at every Tuesday, so I never really kept any of them - but it still represents everything that is great about comics to me. 

I've barely read any Uncle Scrooge comics since those days, but that pivotal issue is always more powerful as a metaphor than an actual object.

All attempts to give up on reading comics have been as half-hearted as this, and there has always been something to keep me hooked. It's unlikely to be another Duck comic in the future, but there's always something.

Ambush Big Nothing Special: I could so too die!

- Ambush Bug Nothing Special #1 (1992) 

Inks by Al Gordon 

Colors by Anthony Tollin 

Letters by John Costanza 

Words by Robert Loren Fleming 

Everything else by Keith Giffen

Scared by the wobbly bridge

While I don't have a huge problem with heights, I'm always a little bit wary of all bridges everywhere because I saw the video of the Tacoma Narrows Birdge pulsating like a motherfucker in the winds before its collapse in 1940 when I was at a very impressionable age, and I kinda assumed that this happened to all bridges at some point, and I did not want to be anywhere near them. 

I still sometimes have nightmares about being on that bridge when it's doing that. The dreams are always in black and white.

The Nirvana paradox

Nirvana didn't sound like anyone else to our 16-year-old ears when it came out. It was so angry and so snarling, but still somehow so full of the joy of life. 

My mate Anthony heard them first, late at night on the rock station beaming in from Christchurch, and none of us knew what he was talking about with his raves about the 'entertain us!' song, and then we all heard it, and we were all on board. 

Not everybody was a Radiohead fan, and Pearl Jam wasn't for everyone, but if you didn't like Nirvana in the early 90s, there was definitely something wrong with you. 

Even now, decades after Kurt Cobain died by his own hand, the music is still as raucous and relevant as ever. One of those rock stations just did a survey of the greatest songs of the 90s and Smells Like Teen spirit came in at number one, and who is going to argue about that? 

It's a testament to its power that I still don't know all the lyrics to their biggest song, even though I've heard it a million times. I've never felt the urge to look them up - it would literally take 10 seconds to google it - and even though it does contain incredible lines like the one about feeling 'stupid and contagious', which I've often had running through my head when I've felt particularly embarrassed by my own foolishness. But I know the lyrics to the Weird Al piss-take better than the original.

And even though Nirvana even did a song about how people know all the words to their songs and sing along, (but they don't know what they mean), I'm happy to stay in some ignorance, and warble out whatever sounds right. 

So I can still sing along with all these marbles in my mouth, and don't need to now exactly what it is saying to know what it is really saying, about that rush of andolesdent need and that yearning for something bigger and better, and all that straight-up anger that still burns, all these years later.

Where did Batman go?

They keep making endless jokes about Batman disappearing when peoples' backs are turned, and have the characters making snide comments about it, or turning it back on Batman himself, or something equally clever. 

It's just a little amazing that anybody actually thinks there is anything new to wring out of this cliché, because I always thought the matter was settled decades ago, with this little gem of a sequence:

That's from 1999's Legends of the Dark Knight #125, in a story written by Greg Rucka and drawn by Rick Burchett. It's followed by a slightly cringe moment where Bats cries about how it's because he finds it hard to say goodbye, but it was refreshing just to see him confronted for how goddamn rude he's been. Look at how Gordon slowly towers over the superhero, with his moral righteousness giving him the extra height.

 

And it's all you have to say about the subject. Batman wants loyal friends and allies, and you don't get them by being fucking rude. Bruce Wayne is meant to be the smartest person in the world, he should be able to figure that out. (I really liked how the Brainiac 5 from the recent Bendis Legion wasn't a jerk, because he had figured out you got better results with a kind word and a compliment, which cost nothing and gained him so much.)

Even though his adventures are currently being published by a bunch of craven cowards, I love Batman comics, because even the worst of them have moments of style or beauty or truth. And this came out during a particularly dire period for the Dark Knight Detective, and says something about the character that still resonates, even if it's been roundly ignored by every writer who wanted to do their own version of this bullshit all over again.

The look of Dredd

Carlos Ezquerra's design for Judge Dredd's uniform really shouldn't work, with the giant pads, an incredibly distinctive helmet and the huge badge and chain. And yet it has remained essentially unchanged in nearly 50 years, with just the tiniest variations giving individual artists extreme leeway.

Partly it's survived because it's so specific - there is always the eagle on the shoulder, and there are very strong opinions on how many bars the helmet respirator should have -  but also open to constant interpretation. Even in the golden age of 2000ad, McMahon, Bolland, Smith, McCarthy, Kennedy, Higgins and Carlos himself had very different looks for the main character, while always been quintessentially Dredd. Maybe it's the chin.

Ezquerra knew what he was doing with the mad hybrid of fascist leather street cop and pirate regalia, and it's a design that can not be improved upon, because nobody would be crazy enough to try.

Besides, everybody knows that the real design freedom comes in doing the city itself, and the massive apartment blocks and sprawling crowds of block maniacs in Mega City-One come in a bewildering amount of styles, and that's where the great artists really get their freak on.

Marvel v DC: Don't make me choose

We all like to get a bit tribal sometimes, and stand with our clan, but I never really got the point of blindly siding with one comic company over another. They all go through good periods and bad, but I'm not going to ignore great comics just because of the publisher.

So I was never a Marvel Zombie or a Johnny DC, I was always a bit of both, because it always felt so limiting to confine myself to one. There were times when I was reading one company more than the other, but that was just because that publisher happened to be putting out more things I was interested in, and it's never been lop-sided in any way since I was a little kid.

Sure, Batman rules, but Spider-Man is cool too. When the big Marvel v DC crossover happened in the 90s, it was all about who could win in a fight, and led to some really dumb storytelling (don't ask the fans what they want, for crying out loud), instead of celebrating the differences between the universes. 

Like a lot of the worst nerd culture that we struggle with in 2025, this has spread from the comics to infect other media, and fans of superhero movies can be so desperate to be true to their school that they refuse to acknowledge that any Marvel film can be any good, or that one of the DC universe(s) films could possibly have any merit.

You can like one thing without shitting over everybody else's vibe. It's really easy. 

Besides, when the management at both companies can act like complete shits - and make no mistake, I think the head honchos at DC have never been more cowardly than they have been in the past week - it's the talent involved in making the film that matters, and the story they are trying to tell, not the ultimate owner of the intellectual property. There's no automatic path to greatness, and swinging both ways is always more fun.