Leaving behind oceans of ink: George, Neal and Carlos

There have been great losses in the comic book world over the past decade or so - I literally miss Carlos Ezquerra every single day - and some of the artists we are losing are absolute titans.

But most of them have had decades of work in comics, and have produced an amazing amount of art, so it always feels there is so much new wonder to discover, and it doesn't really feel like there are really gone. Not yet.

There is just so much still to discover from such prolific talents, working from such a young age. I can flip through any random stack of silver age comics in the back issue bins of any comic store, and I'll see a Neal Adams cover I've never seen before, and it will inevitably be gorgeous. There are so many covers like this that I've never seen, and it's always a delight to see a new one. There are also wonderfully primitive sketches that have sat unseen in private collections for years getting dusted off and shown off to the world.

Adams did anything and everything for DC for a while, and it's all dynamic and weird. I do definitely  lose interest in his art once he decided comics looked better with a colour palette that literally looked like puke, but the dozens and dozens of covers and fill-ins and pin-ups he pushed out for DC as a keen young artist are still so wonderful.

I still ache for the massively assured line of George Pérez in my superhero comics, and he set the standard for thin detail in superheroics, and I still have my breath taken away by some of the things he did back in the 70s that I somehow missed, kung-fu and sci-fi comics that are 50 years old and still feel more alive than 90 percent of the stuff on the new release shelf.

The various TwoMorrows publications are full of sketches from these two masters, and some of the best covers of Back Issue Magazine in the past few years have been slightly reworked versions of Pérez masterpieces.

But after growing up on a steady diet of Joe Dredd and Johnny Alpha, it's still King Carlos that I miss the most. His sense of bulk, the amazing amount of grit on everything he did, that weird black edging he would do.  And even after devouring everything I've seen of the artist's work for almost a half century now, there is still more to find.

I can google his name and see some sketch I'd never seen before, and there is a tonne of his pre-2000ad war comics that I need to indulge in one day. Ezquerra was a massive talent from such  a young age, and even his earliest, clumsiest attempts are powerful and thrusting. 

All these greats are no longer with us, but their art lives on, and it's as much a privilege to see it as it ever was. 

I would totally hench for a proper villainess

I had all the usual adolescent crushes on all the usual cute young comic book heroines like Kitty Pryde and Donna Troy - spunky teens who didn't take any shit from anybody - but they stayed young and I grew old, and right out of those feelings decades ago. 

But even before I fell for the cute, smart and tough teenagers, I liked the bad girls. And I still kinda do.

One of my very earliest memories in reading comics is having strange feelings for Deathbird in a Ms Marvel comic. I don't know where those feelings came from, but they were definitely there, and I literally did not have the words to describe them.

Sure, she was a bad girl, but she was also misunderstood, and probably didn't really deserve so many kicks to the face. When she took on Carol Danvers, I was Team Cal'syee all the way.

And some of the first DC comics I remember reading had villains like the Cheetah and Poison Ivy, and there were feelings for both of them, no matter how rabidly homicidal they got. Although it should be noted that I have no interest in their more modern incarnations, where they are more animal and plant than human, I just liked it when they were super mean and feral in bright leotards. 

And there was Madame Zodiac hamming it up in a sleek black dress in a World's Finest comic that I was convinced was a lot more important than it was. If she popped out of thin air into my jail cell, I'd be following her anywhere, even if she did have a thing for malevolent clouds of demonic smoke.

This wasn't confined to comics - the oldest dream I can ever remember involves the fucking mutoids from Blake's 7 - and there were a number of evil queens in various sword and sorcery things that might have been murderous monsters, but maybe they just needed a friend?      

These kinds of things don't go away. I still like the bad girls, even when they turn into interdimensional monsters - Steve Yeowell is drawing new pictures of Penny Moon in 2000ad, and that could be worth the astronomical prices they ask for an issue of the galaxy's greatest these days.

Because arched eyebrows and devious plans never stop being sexy, and I would do anything for those girls.

Ice Cream Man: Gosh, golly, gee...

Ice Cream Man #17 

Art by Martín Morazzo 

Words by W. Maxwell Prince 

Colors by Chris O'Halloran

Garth is the real Bitchfinder General

Mick Flanagan's films aren't my thing - who recasts Jack frickin' Nicholson? - but his recent interview with the mighty Garth Marenghi might be my favourite thing he has ever done. He's game for it!

Watching the quiet movies

There is a new Kelly Reichardt film out there in the wild, so we've already got the inevitable reviews moaning about how slow it is, and the more hot takes I see talking like that, the more I really want to see it, because I love the slow cinema.

Getting copious amounts of plot and dialogue thrown at you doesn't make great cinema, and is often detrimental to it. Movies need to breathe, and don't have to rush through everything, they can indulge in time and mood instead.

Besides, most of these complaints about that kind of movie are factually incorrect - saying 'nothing happens' just because you're not getting spoon-fed everything says a lot more about the complainer than the film itself.

Look at Perfect Days, Wim Wenders' wonderful ode to the cleaning of Tokyo's public toilets -  the main character barely speaks a word for most of the running time, but there is a lot going on. The way Hirayama buys his morning drink from the vending machine, or the music he chooses for his morning drive, it all speaks multitudes in a way no dialogue could ever capture.

There's one part where Hirayama is filling in for the unreliable Takashi and a kid comes along and is obviously playing a long-term game with the flaky worker, and is visibly shaken when it's the older man instead. There is a whole other movie in that tiny interaction.

My wife hates Jim Jarmusch films because she thinks they have got their heads up their arses, and because nothing happens, but I adore the slow pace of all his films. Night on Earth has heartbreak and comedy and everything about the human condition, and literally half the film is a car driving around dark streets, and the most dramatic part of Patterson is finding out what the deal with the letterbox is.

It feels like you should be able to get away with paying less attention to these films, but you've really got to focus, or you'll miss the crucial moment. And when Hirayama's face breaks into a million different emotions at the end of his story, it's worth a million plot twists and turns. 

The computer needs to know what I don't want

We've all been stuck in the mire of social media for decades now, and it took me an unfeasibly long time to figure out that the act of blocking jerks was the way to go, and is, frankly, the only way to survive online.

There's just so much bad faith, and so much grift, and so much fucking stupidity. If you block enough people (and bots) that engage in this shit, and just never interact with them at all, life is a whole lot easier.

And eventually - eventually! -  the dumbshit algorithms that throw the stuff up in your face get the message, and will stop feeding it to you. It's never perfect, and sometimes I get some Nazi bollocks or anti-vaccine shit, but it's very definitely in the minority.

I also got an inordinate amount of enjoyment from going through the 'recommended for you' listings on YouTube and telling it exactly the kind of videos I didn't want, and while Youtube is still a horrible place that really needs to face some consequences for the genuine harm it has caused to the world, of all the media platforms, it got the message I was sending the fastest.

After blocking a few alt-right and blatantly hateful videos, it got the idea pretty quickly. The one thing it does struggle with is that I do have to keep telling it that even though I love a good video essay about my favourite movies, I never, ever want to watch long video essays pointing out all the boring nitpicks, because the system isn't smart enough to tell the difference between the good and bad movie takes. 

Telling the world about the stuff you don't like is so fucking easy and lazy, I always appreciate people who get off their arse and tell me why something is great, and make a passionate and articulate argument for why something rules, and don't just point out the continuity flaws and sit back like they've clocked movie-watching or something.

But the snark does sneak through, no matter how hard I try to keep it positive. They're all hot takes on movies, right? Even the best algorithm in the world can't sort that shit out.

Revenge of the Jedi was Drew's best movie poster

I've seen the Mona Lisa in the flesh, and have seen truly great works by Van Gogh and Monet and Picasso and a hundred masters, but the first paintings I ever really appreciated for their craft were on a movie poster, under the shining lights of the local cinema.

The late, great Drew Struzan did a lot of these gorgeous artworks for the empire of light, and while he was rightly hailed for his photorealist style - it took me a long time to realise that many of his works weren't actually photos - my absolute favourite will always be this shot of Vader's giant head on speckled red, with the lightsaber battle beneath. Just a strong, arresting image, put out before they even changed the name of the film, and the perfect way to get the first glimpse of the climactic film in the original trilogy.

It was used on a huge amount of merchandise, and I still have a beach towel featuring this design that I was given in 1983. It's barely holding together after all these years, but I think I'll have it until the end of my days.

The same things keep happening at the end of the world

He has produced a mountain of great fiction in his long career, but I always thought The Stand was Stephen King's most monumental book, so I was fully on board for The End Of The World As We Know It, a new anthology featuring stories set in that world (or on the very edge of it).

There's more than 30 stories in the collection, and like any book like this, there are some mediocre tales, a couple of excellent ones, and many that are okay. They all make some kind of point about surviving in a world where 99% of the population has choked on their own fluids,  and some of them are mean, and some of them are hopeful, and there is a strong mix of grim nihilism and tentative optimism. There are also a couple of very good dogs, there at the end of everything.

It's also pleasingly linear, after the last big TV adaption made the perplexing decision to go the non-linear route, and completely demolished the greatest appeal of the book - seeing how things start off badly and get suddenly very, very worse in an inevitable slide into apocalyptic chaos. The new collection starts off with stories set during the plague, followed by a few tales of the immediate aftermath, and a handful at the end that look decades and centuries into the future.

Fortunately, these last few are among the best in the book, with a wicked sense of humour about how things turn out. And it is interesting to see how other parts of the world fare  - they still dream of cornfields and the Walking Man, but are also explicitly told there is no way they can influence the apocalyptic fight for America, and just have to fight their own spiritual warfare on their own battlegrounds.

But it does get very repetitive at the start, where everything is falling apart, and it's endless passages of people dying with swollen necks, and the ubiquitous dreams everybody is having just makes the complexity of human morality just a little more simplistic.

I can't say I'm really super inclined to check out any of the new writers - there are, of course, some very familiar names like Joe R Lansdale and Poppy Z Brite in the mix -  but nobody really shits the bed, and they're all perfectly readable. My only suggestion would be to space out the stories a little - I just read one story a day, and when few of them are longer than 20 pages, that was an easy ask. The end of the world might be very fucking nigh, but there is no need to rush it.

Unexpected kindness in the mail

It all gets a bit grim out there sometime, with appalling events happening around the world, with great injustices and cruelties that go unanswered by anybody with the power to actually do something about it.

There's so much coming down the shit pipeline every day, that it can be almost overwhelming when somebody performs a tiny act of kindness out of the blue.

I got a pile of mail that had somehow got lost in the system suddenly appear recently, and among it was a small run of recent 2000ad comics from an online comic book retailer. I had no idea how they got there, although I do remember buying something from that same retailer years ago, and assumed at first that somebody had mixed up the address somehow, and accidentally sent all this thrillpower to the other side of the world.

But there was a name on the packing slip - it was a total dude named John in the UK - and I emailed him about it, and he told me he had read my complaining about the difficulty of getting the Galaxy's Greatest Comic in the sci-fi year of 2025, and bought some recent ones to send to me.

It's not fighting a great injustice, and I know I'm a pretty privileged motherfucker in life and love, but I was genuinely touched by John's gesture, because it helped remind me that people do good things without being asked to, without being forced to, just because it's a nice thing to do.

And kindness inspires kindness, and passing empathy forward is always emotionally fun and spiritually profitable. After John's inspiration I went out and donated blood for the first time in ages, and gave more to the charity muggers waiting outside the supermarket than I usually would. They're only tiny steps, but tiny steps still get us somewhere, especially if we all take them together.

Unfortunately, because the entire global postal system has broken down, it somehow took six months for John's kind gift to get through, (along with eight months worth of Empire magazines), and by the time they got to me, I'd already got those issues of 2000ad elsewhere, and now they I have doubles, but it would feel weird to sell them off the same way I get rid of most of my comics, so I'll have to find some worthwhile person to give them to - I did think about the local hospital, but 2000ad is most definitely not for kids any more.

Anyway, do something nice when it's not your turn. That's the lesson I got in the mail last week.