Learning to let it go

I used to get so angry about pop culture bullshit.

I remember being incandescent with rage when I found out that Hulk Hogan had won the 1990 Royal Rumble. I was shattered (several times) by the fact that the local shop missed an issue of 2000ad that week. I actually sent an angry letter to TV2 in 1991 when they screened Robocop and cut out so many gory bits that they made parts of the film nonsensical.

I was angry when more people weren’t reading the Invisibles, and when Youngblood sold a million copies, and when I gave some Love and Rockets to somebody who would not stop going on about Gabriel García Márquez and he couldn’t get past the big tits.

I used to get so angry, but it just doesn’t bother me any more.

Look, I ain’t no saint. Like anybody else, I still have anger in my life. Bad drivers are deserving of utter rage, but that’s all fleeting. If you cut me off in the fast lane on the motorway and then drive 20 kays under the limit, I’m going to curse you, your family and your ancestors until I go blue in the face, but I will have forgotten you exist in five minutes.

Computers that won’t do what they’re bloody well told also drive me mental, and one day I’ll probably be found slumped dead over a piece of technology that is still only 53 per cent loaded. But that’s another anger that is also fleeting, once things are working like they should, everything is hunky-dory.

Actual atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity are also worth getting angry about - it’s a righteous rage that we all share against injustice that is helping us evolve into better people. We all do what we can to prevent that kind of horror. We all hate sheer injustice, and seeing it happen is always going to make people angry, and that’s a good thing, because then things change.

I do still have some enemies, but I don’t really think about them too often.

But that’s about it. It’s all petty inconveniences and social injustice. And while I used to get so ridiculously annoyed at certain things happening in the funny book business, now I see examples of ignorance and stupidity, and just let them slide by.

I still think the way the major comic companies have treated their creators over the years is frequently unethical and reprehensible, but I don’t rage over it any more. I still care, but I don’t feel real hate.

Besides, taking a position of unbridled rage is good for grabbing attention, but actually accomplishes fuck all.

In my day job, I help run a major news website, and deal with a fair bit of the correspondence which comes in from the lovely public. Most of it is pretty depressing, but you build up a thick skin for it. When you literally get told every single day that you're doing a terrible job and should be ashamed of yourself and are probably South African (I’m not sure where that last one comes from), your skin hardens up pretty damn fast.

So it’s got to the point where a really aggressive missive just seems more funny than disturbing. Angry rants about the website are quickly written off and ignored – if there was a point in there the writer was trying to make, it was lost.

On the other hand, a point made calmly and clearly is likely to have far more of an impact. It still might not accomplish a lot, but if you can stop yourself from raising your voice (even with the written word) and don’t have to resort to personal insults, you will be listened to. A little politeness always goes a long way.

Most of the things people rage about in the emails I get at work are usually fairly trivial. (They think that just because they care deeply about something, everybody else shares their ideology, or should. But we don’t, and we don’t.)

And while there are things in this life worth getting angry about, comic books and other debris of modern pop culture are not, because they are about as trivial as it gets.

Once upon a time, something like Before Watchmen would have driven me into a rage, now it’s just something else to ignore. I once was passionate that all superhero comics should be great, now I find it easy to live with the mediocre, because it’s so easy to stay away with it.

There is so much rubbish – idiotic and misogynistic and unethical comics that can arguably cause actual harm, but there is also so much good stuff, it doesn’t seem worth it to worry about the bad stuff, and just focus on the best.

While there might be the odd bit of sneering at the sheer stupidity of many modern comics, there is nothing worth crying about. There will always be bad stuff, why give it any heat at all?

It’s so easy to do these days. There is so much other good things to focus on, and so much of it is so more easily available than at any other time in human history, that I just can’t get cross about the stuff that isn’t worth bothering it.

Even that rage I used to feel when I was denied something I really, really wanted isn’t really there any more, largely because there is so much access to anything. If I miss a particular episode of a favourite TV show, it’s not worth agonising over, because there are half a dozen ways I can seek it out now, and if I miss a comic, then there are other ways to get it.

The local newsagents still miss the occasional issue of 2000ad, but it’s okay. It only happens a couple of times a year, and I always track down those missing issues, one way or another. It might take some time, and it might screw up the flow of some comics, but yelling at the shopkeeper won’t help that.

Technology and all the new options it offers has helped with gaining access to stories I never would have before, but I have also just gotten a lot mellower as I get older. As I’ve grown up, I’ve realised that I eventually do get to see or read anything I really want to, even if it takes time.

And so much of that pop culture bullshit that seemed so important is just so… trivial. And it’s not just comics, I used to get angry about bad music and movies, and simply couldn’t understand why people weren’t into stuff that was CLEARLY SUPERIOR. I once raged against New Kids on the Block, now something like One Direction are more likely to get an amused shrug. (Largely because all those young girls screaming over bands like that are going to be horribly by it in five years time.)

I do still get annoyed by some things in the entertainment world – I’m still a little pissed that films like Kill List or Cabin in the Woods don’t get any kind of cinema release, when that’s the only way I really want to see them, and I do genuinely think Before Watchmen is a terrible idea.

But they’re just not worth getting angry about. Not when it’s so much more fun to just enjoy the good stuff.

Prometheus: If you reach for the stars, you’re going to burn your fingers

Prometheus is a film that tries to offer up some glimpse at the real meaning of life, while also providing some genuine chills and shocks, all wrapped up with heavy doses of intense spectacle. It doesn’t quite reach the heights it is going for, but is still well worth the ride.

Like The Avengers, it is not a great movie, but it is a very good film, and like The Avengers, I found far more to like than dislike. (And at least they know how to credit people properly, with H R Giger’s contribution to the whole Alien saga properly credited.)

In fact, while the lack of a prominent Kirby credit at the end of The Avengers ultimately left me leaving the film with a bad taste in my mouth, there wasn’t a single thing I actively disliked about Prometheus. There are things in it that just don’t work, holes in the story you could drive a power-loader through, and a few plot points that left me cold, but I still enjoyed the film a great deal. (It helps if you don’t go into it with any kind of preconceptions, with most of the negative reviews I’ve seen so far resorting to “But that’s not what I waaaanted”, which is no kind of criticism at all.)

There are loads of spoilers in this post, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, move along. Nothing to see here.

Some things I liked about Prometheus:

* It is a goddamn beautiful film. The production design is razor-sharp, there are some incredible uses of location and every now and then there are shots that are straight out of a Chris Foss painting. (And Foss = pure sci-fi in my brain.) There are wonderful shots, familiar from previous Alien films, of spacecraft descending on a planet and just being swallowed up the sheer size of another world, and some slightly off-putting light on a strange new planet, and some sharp uses of bright colour amongst the dead dust.

* It’s also genuinely nice to see a huge, bombastic and expensive film that isn’t aimed at eight-year-olds.

* And it’s not just for kids because it features some genuinely distressing scenes - including a bit of DIY surgery that is almost unbearable to watch - and several other moments of harsh and disturbing horror. It’s because it really does really reach for the profound, and that is a lot more than you can say for the average blockbuster. Prometheus is about the search for the meaning of life, and comes back with some slightly worrying answers, while Transformers is about giant robots smashing into each other. I know which one I always prefer.

* I also find it really, really funny that one of its ultimate points is that God is real, and he hates our fuckin’ guts.

* Even better, the sequel bait suggests it will be a case of man (or, more likely, woman) vs God in forthcoming movies. Bring it on.

* I mean, I like the cerebal sci-fi more than anything. 2001 is easily one of my favourite films of all time, and I finally got around to seeing the original Solaris a few weeks ago, and I freaking love it. Anything that tackles the big questions of life, the universe and cricket should be a bit obtuse, because the subject matter is so big.

*I just think it doesn’t hurt if you can spice up the action by having someone’s face burnt off with acid while you're asking those questions.

* Noomi Rapace is great, and even manages to convince with her British accent every now and then. But she sells the intensity of the moment like few other actresses can manage, and follows in Sigourney Weaver’s footsteps by giving us a lead character who isn’t smarter, or more charming, or funnier than anybody else, but will do whatever it takes to survive and not let these bastards take her down, no matter how painful it gets.

* I also really liked the use of good, strong character actors like Rafe Spall and Sean Harris – I find Spall to be an endlessly fascinating and watchable actor, (I still always think of him as one of the Andy’s, and he was terrific in The Shadow Line), while Harris has become the go-to guy for wiry psychos, now that Robert Caryle has mellowed out a bit, and was great in the Red Riding movies. (He was also, of all the onscreen Ian Curtises - Ian Curtii? – the best Ian Curtis.) Both don’t get a hell of a lot to do in Prometheus, but they do it well.

 * In fact, there is some terrific acting across the film – Idris Elba brings a large amount of charm, even though he barely leaves the cockpit, Charlize Theron is eerily convicning as a cold woman who suppressed almost all of her human emotions a long time ago, but it keeps spilling out, and I really like the way Logan Marshall Green strutted around like he was the main character in the film, when everybody knows he is going to be the first victim.

 

* But even with all that talent, Michael Fassbender still stands out as the robotic David. Always incredibly calm – he is comically relaxed during the tense rescue from the rock storm – with an insatiable demand for knowledge that leads him on a singular agenda he shares with nobody, especially not his creator. David has a slight disdain towards his creators because they’re so disappointing, but shows real enthusiasm at the discovery of flute technology, and Fassbender is intentionally and literally channelling his inner Peter O’Toole. He’s do damn charming, that he keeps doing things other people tell him not to, and gets away with it with a shrug and a “sorry”. He has moments of robot despair and robot glee, and that isn’t easy.

* The lovely wife hasn’t seen the film yet, but when she does on Friday, I know she is going to demand I build her a Fassy-bot.

And then there were the other parts:

* There wasn’t anything I actively hated in the film, although it won’t be surprising if those of a strict religious nature find the theological implications of the story troubling. There are huge holes in the story, and sometimes people act incredibly stupidly to get things moving (a biologist fails to recognise the most hostile reaction a new animal can show, a captain lives his bridge unmanned), and sometimes things happen for no other reason than “C’mon, we gotta get the plot moving”, and sometimes there are bits that just don’t make sense (How does the thing in the med-bay grow so large when it has nothing to feed on? That mass has to come from somewhere….)

* And it doesn’t live up to its own philosophical goals. It really does reach for something profound, but gets totally tripped up on its own implications. There are no real answers to those big questions here, even though there are lots of hints.

But that’s all that really bothered me about the film. The initial critical reaction appears to be one of slight disappointment, but I really think that’s largely a mix of unrealistic expectations, and concerns about plot over spectacle. I’m all about the intense spectacle, and Prometheus delivers plenty of that.

My Friend Dahmer (More something for everybody)

Jeffrey Dahmer was a sad little man who lived a sad little life, committed sad little murders and died a sad little death. Derf Backderf grew up in the same town as him, and made a comic book about it.

My Friend Dahmer looks at the growth of a killer from a side-on view. It makes a brief stab at getting inside the head of Jeffrey Dahmer, and while it is also funnier and more sharply observational than could be expected, it also manages to be just as disturbing and queasy as the subject matter suggests.

And my wife freaking loved it.

I’ve learned – to my cost - not to push comics too hard on people who never read the things. It’s too easy to be too eager, and that pained and barely-hidden enthusiasm can turn people off the medium for good.

If they come to me, asking for stuff, then I’m always willing, and if I can help them stumble across something they might really like, it feels like it’s my duty to help out. But even though I often spend Saturday afternoons at home ranting about how much I enjoyed the new issue of The Boys, or Peter Bagge’s latest bit of brilliance (seriously loving Reset), or how much I’m digging the Gibbons on The Secret Service, I never go any further and really push these things on my lovely wife

She puts up with a lot of comic-related shenanigans. She has spent more time waiting patiently in comic shops than anybody really should – her favourite ones are the ones that have a “wife couch” - she has almost forgiven me for dragging her halfway across San Francisco just so I could get an issue of Onomatopoeia from Comix Experience, and puts up with storage issues that would drive a lesser woman mad.

She just doesn’t like comics.

That’s fair enough – she loves horses and I can stand the big-teethed abominations – and there is nothing wrong with a couple having completely different interests (as long as the important things still harmonise).

She always tells me that when it comes to reading fiction, she would rather form the pictures to a story in her own head while she is reading, rather than be nailed down to one single artist’s vision, which is kinda hard to argue against. (Trust me. I tried. And yes, I did point out the film and TV hypocrisy) And the need for literary trash in her life is more than fulfilled by romance novels.

She has read Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell, mainly because of the movies, but isn’t interested in Miracleman or Swamp Thing. And no matter how many times I tell her Love and Rockets is a heartbreaking journey into the soul, built on a punk-rock ethos that keeps it real, even as it reaches for the sublime; that’s as far as it goes.

Fortunately, she also has a slightly morbid streak, that means she doesn’t consider a museum to be a proper museum unless it’s got mummies or bog people or some other kind of dead body, and she soaks up any kind of True Crime story. (Though I never should have let her watch that documentary about the BTK killer. I still have to check the wardrobe sometimes.)

So as soon as I read My Friend Dahmer, I knew it could be something she was interested in. I just had to be subtle about it.

It had a good chance of catching her eye, because My Friend Dahmer is a pretty morbid book based on a grimly fascinating real event. Fortunately, it’s not just relying on the voyeur side of things – Backderf’s story is not just about Dahmer, it’s about the adults who didn’t notice he was drinking every day at school, it’s about a creepy and banal horror, and it’s about the deeply disturbing undercurrents that flow under any society, even one as dull as seventies suburbia.

It’s that same sense of a rotten core surrounding by a boring and apparently uneventful surface that pops up in films like Halloween and the Virgin Suicides. All those kids on those big empty streets, blindly wandering into the abyss.

Backderf hung out with a future serial killer when he was growing, and took his time telling that story in the years since. Fortunately, while it could have gone down the guilt-trip path (“Oh, why didn’t I do anything”), Backderf just keeps it real, balancing out the horrible inevitability with some deft touches of humour, and some wonderfully goofy art touches.

His last book, Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, was a lot lighter than this effort, but both share a keen eye for detail, and some blunt and deliberately clumsy artwork, that sometimes gets so grotesque, you can only laugh.

(The funniest, and quite-disturbing-if-you-really-think-about-it, part of My Friend Dahmer is saved for the two page epilogue, right at the end, which actually made me laugh out loud, which is a nice place to leave a disturbing book like this.)

In short, Mr Friend Dahmer is a pretty terrific comic book that is both more disturbing than you might expect, while also poking fun at the strange institutions of this time gone by, that allowed this horror to fester. A horror that never really goes away.  

 

I mentioned the comic to the wife when I bought it, and left it lying around on the coffee table in the lounge for a couple of days. I thought it might be something she might dig

And then I came home from work, and she’d already read half the thing. Dinner was late that night, and she had it finished by the next morning. She really liked it, and now she is pushing it on others with an enthusiasm that is both appealing and embarrassing. (My favourite pitch line so far:  “It’s a comic, so it’s easy to read.”) Last night, she gave it to my sister-in-law, who as far as I know, has never, ever cracked open a comic book.

I still honestly believe that when it comes to comics, there really is something for everyone. Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, they’re for everybody. You just have the find the right one, and sometimes it will show up in the place you least expect it, like the fevered mind of a young budding killer.

The Conversation

Never mind all those Dads who say that there isn’t any smart writing on comics these days, and that the art of critical thinking has been irreparably diluted by the sheer amount of material on the internet, and that things aren’t as smart as they used to be, and all that bullshit. They don’t know what they are talking about.

There has never been a more better time for rich and thoughtful essays, blogs, reviews, interviews about comics. The world is full of this sort of thing, and we all have access to it. This is a Golden Age of Comic Thought, and more fool you if you can’t see it.

Those same Dads are always moaning about the dire state of comics journalism, and can’t see the vast forest of knowledge past their few ignorant trees. But this sort of complaint about the lack of critical thought is nothing new.

In an interview with the Comics Journal in 1994, Neil Gaiman and Gary Groth had an exceedingly pleasant conversation that strayed into the area of comics criticism, and both men took the opportunity to bemoan the fact that there wasn’t a wide range of critical writing. They both managed to dredge up a few examples, (and did an admirable job of not mentioning the Journal itself, which is, was, and will always be a fine source of critical thinking), but for the most part, they despaired about the lack of real thought on comics.

But that was 1994, eighteen years ago, and things have changed. The age of the Internet was just about to kick in, and neither man could have predicted the explosion of writing about comics that would produce, to the point where the kind of thing that were aching for in that pre-web age is now everywhere on a daily basis.

To be fair, there is still a lot of crap to wade through. A recent blog post by Dave Lartigue perfectly nailed the laziest of critical thinking – throwing in a couple of post culture reference is not the same as critical thought. Lartigue’s piece – which was better than zombie apes and pirate ninjas dueling with light-sabers over one of Gil Gerard’s white leotards that has caught fire, with bacon – pointed out that there are smarter ways to express enthusiasm for something without resorting to easy referencing

But while there are plenty of examples of this, all over the place, there is also a lot of really intelligent and thoughtful writing on the internet, with more showing up every single day. In blogs alone, there is Colin Smith's unwaveringly polite devotion to comics craft, or the brilliant pieces of character analysis on Tim O’Neil’s site, or J Caleb Mozzocco’s ongoing quests for simple pleasures. Group blogs like Savage Critics, the Factual Opinion and Mindless Ones have individual identities that demand excellence and decry mediocrity.

Lovely people like Tom Spurgeon, Graeme McMillan and Sean T Collins provide essential linking,  and old warhorses like the Comics Journal are still helping out, with strong writing on both print and screen.

And this isn’t even getting into comic videos and podcasts. There are too many to keep track of, and not enough free time in the day to listen to them all, although it is possible to follow a couple faithfully (I never miss an episode of House to Astonish and Wait, What?)

All of this, and so much more, creates The Conversation, which I think is always worth listening to.

The Conversation about comics is a vast and sprawling thing, that spreads between a dozen main websites and dozens more blogs and online columns and magazine articles. It’s never talking about one single thing – the only thing connecting all these threads together is an interest in the form, medium and business of comics.

Sometimes, a large part of the conversation gets fixated on a single aspect of the medium – in recent months, Before Watchmen has been on a lot of peoples’ minds, and has generated an incredible amount of debate and reasoning. It can all get a bit much, (especially when the only sensible option for dealing with this kind of appalling idea is to give it no oxygen at all), but it’s not everything.

There are still hundreds of other parts in the Conversation which are more interested in things like Chris Ware’s new box of books, or the new stash of mini-comics snapped up at some dreary suburban comic convention, or a debate on the merits of some almost-forgotten artist from decades ago.

Sometimes it can get into things I’m not bothered about – I’m right behind everybody who says the Kirby estate deserve a bigger cut of the Avengers pie, but a lot of this discussion gets bogged down in a boring focus on the money. And while it is a phenomenal amount of money, it’s not the most important part.

There isn’t as much talk about the fact that concepts and ideas that Jack came up with decades ago are finally becoming the most absolutely mainstream thing, and the ideas that he had with Stan back in the day, and passed on and built upon by hundreds of other talented creators, are now taking root in the minds of a new generation. I’m far more interested in hearing that side of the deal.

It's an endless discussion. It's loud, occasionally obnoxious and can get very, very weary. But while there has never been more rubbish to wade through, the riches that can be dug out are like nothing else.

The Conversation – as far as I’m hearing it – is composed of all sorts of voices saying all sorts of different things, talking about everything to do with comics. There is loads and loads of smart thinking, some really charming humour and an unbridled love for comic books. Anybody with any interest in the form, medium, industry and life of the comic book world can't help eavesdropping, and might even contribute to the beautiful noise.

Classic X

I used to have hundreds and hundreds of X-comics, but I now have more issues of Kick-Ass than the Uncanny X-Men.

The rest have gone in various purges – eaten up in online auctions, swapped with mates and given away to kids – but I’ve held onto a few X-books – I still love a lot of the incredibly weird mid-eighties New Mutants and X-Men annuals and specials (especially when Art Adams was involved), and I will never, ever get rid of my Alan Davis Excalibur comics.

I’ve also held on to the first 45 issues of Classic X-Men from the late eighties, partly because it’s always nice to have the brilliance of those wacky and still-meaty Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne comics, and partly because of those absolutely mental backups.

Even though the X-Men are now nowhere near as groovy as they once were, there have still been millions of words singing the praises of the original comics that were reprinted in Classic, so there is no need to go into that, although it could be noted that they still stand up a lot better than their other contemporaries of that time. Byrne’s art is as polished as ever, nobody ever drew a screaming face with quite the same passion as Cockrum, and Claremont laid out a storytelling template that was so rich, he could go back to it again and again, and its influence ended up seeping into almost every mainstream superhero comic.

All those imitators and dilutors couldn’t change the fact that they’re great comics, but they’re not the main reason for holding on to these comics in this particular format. It’s the little extras, which included some splendid covers and frontispieces, (with our man Adams playing a large part in that as well), an early example of remix theory showing up in mainstream comics, and some fantastic back-up stories.

Those back-up strips managed to be something that really was all new and all different at the time these X-comics were published. Even though they were centred around stories that were more than a decade old at the time (and are now more than three and a half decades old), they also brought a late eighties sensibility to mid-seventies comics.

It’s easy to see, even under the guidance of the same writer, a subtle evolution of the mutant story. There was only a decade or so between those original Uncanny X-Men and the Classic reprint series, but the growth was there as the clunkiest of characterisation gave way to surprisingly subtle storytelling.

After all, it had been a significant decade of change for superhero comic books. It followed another huge seismic shift in the decade before, where the DC heroes went from charming clunkiness to streamlined speediness, and Marvel took its soap operatics to the cosmic level.

But there was still another sizable shift in regular superhero comics between 1975 and 1986. Storytelling evolution is always with us, and fittingly, the X-Men were at the front of this evolution for much of its history. The artists from the X-books redefined popular art comics in the mid nineties, (for better or worse), Morrison's x-run was the centrepiece of Nu-Marvel and its current average-ness is indicative of super-hero comics as a whole.

But under the deceptively soft line of John Bolton, the back-up stories told tales set in and around well-known comics, adding depth to those more simplistic stories and showing just how bad things were in the background.

Sometimes they were surprisingly uplifting and there were little moments of triumph for common decency, like Nightcrawler walking down Main Street, USA without hiding his real face, but they were also stories where an innocent woman gets her throat cut to prove a point to Magneto, or where Sebastian Shaw has the Hellfire Club brutally shot to make way for his own Hellfire Club, filled with his psychopathic and snappily-dressed mutant buddies.

The work by Claremont and Bolton has a strange, dream like quality. Never strictly canon, and all the better for it, these side-steps often showed an affinity for mood over plot. Even though Claremont could cram a lot of plot into these short stories (especially when he did something about a character with a real history, like Banshee,) Bolton’s art gives the stories an atmosphere that is oddly unique.

Bolton’s art was terribly unfashionable at the time, when names like Lee, Liefeld and McFarlane started appearing in big mainstream comics, but it still absolutely beautiful work, capturing Wolverine’s scowl, mad space wars and vast existential terrors with equal aplomb. It certainly stands up a lot better than those early Image founders’ efforts.

Things got even odder when Ann Nocenti, still doing marvellously weird things in titles like Longshot and Daredevil, started writing the back-ups, and brought out Bolton's sense of weirdness even stronger. Nocenti was less inclined towards filling in gaps, and, thankfully, was more interested in telling her own tales. They’re still creepy and memorable and often involved some kind of disturbing body horror that would be right at home in a Cronenberg film, and oddly fitting for a comic about mutation and evolution.

While these back-ups often told the story behind the story, the other extra material in Classic X-Men were all about the gaps between the panels. Additional story pages featuring all new material, cut and pasted into the old narrative, adding to the complexity and covering over youthful indiscretions.

These new bits fleshed out the past in incredible detail. It wasn’t always a good thing – it could disrupt the flow of the original work (something George Lucas was still figuring out more than a decade later) and they could make the whole thing a bit wordy for its own good, but there is the odd bit of depth. They gave none-more-eighties- villains like Apocalypse and Mr Sinister background roles in stories that were printed years before they first appeared.

Directors' cuts are everywhere now, but this early example of a remixed mainstream comic book was just as clumsy and oddly endearing as you would expect. It’s easy to sneer at these efforts, but hell, I still find it fun to try and figure out where the seams are.

Eventually, they stopped bothering to insert new stuff and the back-up stories dried up. Bolton stopped doing them after a couple of years, and there were some inspired efforts (including that Jim Lee fellow), they weren’t quite the same, and often tied into more modern X-comics in a way that left a bad taste in the mouth.

By the time they got to the end of the Byrne era, the Classic X-Men editors decided to ditch the additional material, and just do straight reprints (although there were still some lovely covers to come by the likes of Mike Mignola and Adam Hughes).

I stopped getting it soon after this, but I never got rid of that run, and even went to the effort of filling in the few gaps I had. (It took more than a decade.) Because even though these classix are now available in variable formats, and some of them are lavish and sexy, I like the Classic X-Men comics and their weird little extras the most.

Moving. Just keep moving.

The lack of activity at the Tearoom of Despair over the past week can be blamed on one simple fact – we had to move house, and even though we were only moving a couple of blocks down the road, it was a hell of a lot of work.

All self-inflicted, of course. It would have been a whole lot easier if I didn’t have literally dozens of big boxes full of comics, books and magazines. It would have been a lot easier if I just got rid of the lot and went minimal.

It would have been a hell of a lot easier, but this was never going to happen. I look at all those boxes I’ve now got piled up in the new spare room, full of all this crap, in stacks that are taller than me, and I love it all, more than ever.

Every time in the past few weeks when I told somebody I was moving, they would lurch into immediate sympathy mode, usually followed up with some horrific moving story of their own. Which means there must be something wrong with me, because I actually really like moving.

Okay, I could do without some of the back breaking labour of actually shifting these things. While it is decent exercise and can give you guns of steel, I also ended up with scrapes and bruises all over my body, in the oddest of places. It’s taken three days for my arms to stop aching, and all that labour killed the appetite, leading me further into the Realm of the Unwell.

But it’s worth it. I truly love the sorting, the organising, the opportunity for new display options, the excuse to have a dig through those forgotten boxes in the bottom of the cupboard, and find old issues of Amazing Heroes I didn’t even know I had, or old diaries that still make me laugh, or videotapes full of esoteric bullshit.

I like the opportunity to take stock, but because I’m a lazy bastard, I never end up doing it until I absolutely have to. You can’t put it off dealing with this stuff any more when you have to shift it. And you never know what you’re going to find.

During one of the recent excellent Group Think things Tom Spurgeon does on The Comics Reporter, he asked readers to chime in with their thoughts on digital comics, and what they actually wanted, and what they would pay for digital stories.

I didn’t participate, because I would have been that wanker that rains on everybody’s dreams of the future. Because I wouldn’t pay a single damn cent for a digital comic, but happily spend thousands of dollars every year on print comics. I have absolutely no interest in comics unless I can have the paper to flick through.

Even though I try to kid myself when I say I’m all about the story, I do have a real fetish for the printed page that looking at something on a screen never, ever satisfies. (Plus, y’know, technology hates me, and digital devices can fail in dozens of ways that a book never will.)

But one of the things that genuinely surprised me about the comments left on Spurgeon’s roundtable was how important space was as a consideration. Many people appear to have switched to digital comics because the act of storing them is just too hard.

I never thought of it as work. Whenever I’ve moved house, I’ve never asked anybody else to move the boxes of comics, because they’re my responsibility. (If they keep offering, I’m not going to say no, though.) They’re all mine, and if they have to be moved to a new location, than I’m the one who has to do it.

There are still a lot of boxes – my 2000ad collection alone fills nine full banana boxes – but I can fit them in a couple of carloads, and it’s never that much of a bother. I get so much enjoyment out of all these things, it’s worth a little effort. And pain.

There will always be an issue of storage space, especially when we’re moving into another small-ish flat, but I’m efficient with my space.

I have two sisters, so when I was growing up and when we were moving around a lot, I always ended up in the tiniest room in the house on my own while they shared the other big one, and I got very, very good at storing my geek shit. I still am, and can slot away every Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and Alan Moore comic I own under the bed.

I like the puzzle of putting things in the right place. The nearest digital equivalent to all this is cutting and pasting files into new folders, and I don’t stumble across a fascinating 100-page interview with John Byrne in his prime in an issue of David Alan Kraft’s Comic Interview by right-clicking on stuff.

My parents always rented houses when we were growing up, so we were always moving, and by the time I was 30, I had lived in 33 different houses. (I can’t even name all the streets anymore.) We moved into this last flat more than four and a half years ago, which was, by far, the longest I had ever lived in one place in my entire life.

Maybe that’s why I ached so much more after this shift. I was out of practise, and, well, I’m thirty-seven, not eighteen. There are more aches and annoyances than ever before.

We were also firmly entrenched in that last place, and there were things in there that I hadn’t seen in years, and it was always nice to stumble across some comics that I had bought, and completely forgotten about.

A good collection of comics is never stagnant, and over the past five years I have got rid of more than I have got new, but there was still a shitload to move. But now it’s all done, and in the new place, I get more display options. I spend a lot of time figuring out if the Iron Fist comics are good enough to warrant a living room place - (They do. For now.) – and whether that Knight and Squire book belongs on the bookshelf in the spare bedroom. (Sorry, Knight and Squire, but you were just a little too arch.)

It’s a total pain in the arse sorting all this out, and moving house can be a huge inconvenience.  But it’s totally worth it.

Happy happy. Joy joy.

The comic industry can seem a grim and miserable place sometimes, with companies screwing over creators and bitter feuds in this tiny community developing over decades, calcifying into some real hate.

All that bile and sadness can really gnaw away at anybody with a real enthusiasm for comics, but it’s always easy to find a few happy things in all this misery. There is always something to look forward to, or to enjoy over and over again, and it wasn’t hard at all to come up with a short list of comic things that make me happy:

* The manner of Chris Roberson’s exit from DC Comics was wonderfully noble, even if it’s tragic how rare that kind of stand really is. It’s not really that hard to say you don’t want to work for a company with dodgy ethics. There are always other options.

* Jeff Smith’s Rasl is reaching its conclusion with unexpected (and welcome) speed. I honestly thought it was going to be another big epic, but it has turned out to be a tight and fast-paced piece of scientific action.

* After all this time, it was incredibly satisfying to see Katarina Dante, pirate queen of the Pacific, finally getting her revenge on Dmitri Romanov at the climax of the entire Nikolai Dante saga. (I thought it was going to be Jena, but Captain Dante was far more apt.)

* The CENSORED Howard Cruse was the best of the Free Comic Book Day comics I read, partly because I’m always fond of seriously shameful autobiographical stories, (and it doesn’t get more shameful that shooting your load every time you put pen to paper), but mainly because I was tickled by the idea that what I thought was behind the big black bars was actually a lot filthier than what it probably actually was.

* I had a brilliant moment of realisation when I discovered that The Losers Showcase that I had just got out of the library featured dozens and dozens of pages of gorgeous John Severin art. I can never, ever get enough Severin. Even though he’s a goddamn comics legend, I still think he is incredibly underrated and worthy of more appraisals.

* Thanks to the same book, I finally made the distinction between artists Russ Heath, Ross Andru and Russ Braun, which had been bugging me for ages. It was the Ted Nugent/Todd Rundgren thing all over again.

* I also love looking at the art in the letters page of old issues of Amazing Heroes, because you always find well-known artists doing odd things well before they were famous, like Paul Chadwick drawing Kitty Pryde, or a John McCrea Spirit, or Bruce Timm doing an exceptionally Gil Kane-y Green Lantern.

* Even though Alan Moore keeps saying he is done with comics, there are likely to be loads more League of Extraordinary comics still to come, and this is a good thing.

* A recent rediscovery of an old diary reminded me how much I loved Matt Wagner’s Grendel comics back in the day, so I went back and read every single one of them in the past week, from the earliest black and white (and incomplete) Hunter Rose stories, up through Spar, Orion and Prime, to the last Grendel Tales, and back to Rose for black, white and red misadventures. It was an extremely rewarding experience.

 
* The promise of more Palomar stories in Love and Rockets #4 is just as exciting. I know Beto has been reinvigorated by doing all-new things in the past decade, but I genuninely do miss Heraclio, Carmen, Israel, Jesus, Chelo and all the rest.

* Seeing Tony de Zuniga’s art on a Kull story in a recent Dark Horse’s Savage Sword 80-page comic was a pleasant surprise. Outside of the rare appearance in a Jonah Hex comic, I had not seen any of the artist’s work in years, but I adored his stuff in Marvel’s black and white horror comics of the seventies, and I had assumed he had retired. But there it is, instantly recognisable, and as beautiful as it ever was. The joy is obviously tarnished by the fact that the artist passed away three days after I read that comic, but his art was as strong than ever, right to the end.

* I know this isn’t comics, but the fact that Mad Men gets better every single season gives me an enormous feeling of well being. This latest series is so fucking good, so effortlessly rich, that it is a pure joy to watch, even if it does give me terrible nightmares.

  

* Speaking of nightmares: Oh my Grud, the Dark Judges are coming back. They’ve basically been on ice since Necropolis, which was – blimey – 22 years ago now. Even Judge Death has been off the scene for nearly ten years, and Fear, Mortis and Fire’s return to the pages of Judge Dredd is insanely exciting.

* I love the enthusiasm and slight embarrassment in this blurb from an ad for the first Fantagraphics issue of Love and Rockets, which appeared in the October 1982 issue of Amazing Heroes: “No kidding! LOVE & ROCKETS is Madness unleashed! Super-science! (Fantasy.) High adventure! (Low-to-medium adventure.) Monsters! (Super-heroes.) Epic battles! (Petty squabbles.) Human drama! (Satire.) Naked women! (Clothed women.) Love! (But – no rockets!?!)”

* Another Parker book by Cooke soon. Good. A likely long delay until the next one because of all that Watchmen nonsense. Not so good.

* In August we’re going to the UK for a couple of weeks and I’m gonna go to the Forbidden Planet on Shaftsbury, and Gosh and Orbital, and I’m gonna find the comic shops in all the big British towns and cities, and I’ve already started looking up things on the internet, and I’ve already started apologising to the long-suffering wife for dragging her around to all these places. I’m so excited, I think I’m gonna burst.

  

* There are dozens – probably hundreds, maybe thousands – of new comics already out there that I still haven’t heard of, that are going to blow my socks off one day. There is so much great stuff out there, it can take years to get to it, so I better not waste any more time.

The Tearoom of Despair is now closed for the week for existential renovations Normal service resumes next Monday.

Straight to Hell, Boy

Mike Mignola and his pals have been producing excellent Hellboy comics for nearly two decades now, crafting a massive and far-reaching epic that manages to be creepy, exciting, goofy, spooky and beautiful, all at the same time. The Hellboy comics and the various spin-offs are some of the most stylish and visually exciting action comics on the stands, and the stories are always rewarding. Hellboy has spawned a miniature comic empire of its own, and produced two reasonably successful movies. Hellboy comics are emotionally rich and full of powerful action, and have been for years.

I think it’s about time I started buying it.

In my defense, I was there at the start, buying all four Seed of Destruction comics off the shelves of one of the first comic shops I ever went to, although that was mainly because I was a John Byrne completist at the time, even if he was just doing the dialogue. (Although I had been a huge fan of Mignola’s work ever since he showed up in an early issue of X-Force and did a dozen pages that made all the hot artists of the time look like the amateurs they really were.)

But I lost track of Hellboy, and somebody borrowed those first Hellboy comics and never ended up giving them back, and the next thing I knew there were dozens of Hellboy comics, and even more spin-offs, and I didn’t even know where to start. By the time I even realised BPRD was a thing, there were half a dozen trade paperbacks, and now there are Baltimore and Witchfinder books to check out.

It’s a small mountain of reading material to get through, and even though every single book in the Hellboy universe has been thoughtful, rewarding and entertaining, it can still take a long, long time to get through it all.

Even though I quickly lost track, I’ve been trying to make up for lost time, and have read almost all of the Hellboy world comics, in some form or another, and almost completely out of order. Some through friends, most through local libraries. It can get very confusing, but it’s always worth it, because they always turn out to be fucking awesome comics.

They are always beautiful books, from both an art and design perspective. Mignola’s use of negative space and thick colour have influenced a small stable of artists who still have their own identifiable style – Duncan Fegredo’s beautiful work always, always looks like Duncan Fegredo art – helping to create a cohesive world that has a certain style, look and feel all of its own.

And the long game that Mignola is playing is rewarding, often in unexpectedly moving ways. Plot elements set up in the very first Hellboy stories are only just paying off, and the world has enough depth and feeling, so that it actually means something when somebody is betrayed, or makes the ultimate sacrifice.

Hellboy comics are always good.

They’re so good that you never really see them show up in the cheap bins, which is where I usually get started on something that is too big to follow. Pick up a few issues from a few different $1 bins, and before you know it, you’ve got enough of a huge comic that it is relatively painless to fill in the gaps. I’m still collecting things like Cerebus and Bacchus this way.

But I have never seen issues of Hellboy of the dollar bin. They never really filter through into the second-hand market. People who buy Hellboy tend to hold on to Hellboy.

Until a couple of weeks ago where - at the same place I was finally turned on to Chaykin – I picked up a couple dozen of Hellboy issues from the Gotham Comics stand for a buck each.

This was a good score.

It was a mix of the past 15 years worth of Hellboy, little one-offs like Hellboy Jr, or stories with beautiful art by the likes of Kevin Nowlan and Richard Corben, a few random pieces of the overall tapestry, and – most interestingly – all of The Fury storyline.

The Fury is the one of the peaks of the Hellboy story, with the main character’s time on Earth coming to a spectacular and horrific climax. It’s suitably apocalyptic, with thousands, possibly millions, of innocent people incinerated by fire from heaven, and Hellboy in the centre of it all, trying to stop the end of the world with punching.

His blunt force does work, and Hellboy does bring a halt to Armageddon with his tenacious will and fucking giant fist, but does end up making the ultimate sacrifice.

It’s not much of a spoiler to say this is where Hellboy dies – it’s been promised since 1993, and the next series is called ‘Hellboy In Hell’. After all, he was often promised that his story would not end with his demise, and that he would never know the peace of the grave.

Mignola is coming back with Hellboy in Hell, which is terribly exciting news, because even though the work of Fegredo and others has been outstanding, (especially with the weirdly trans-atlantic feel of the series), Mignola is still a master, and never looks happier than when he is drawing a new Hellboy story.

So that’s where I’m finally jumping on the Hellwagon. The promise of more Mignola, the fact that The Fury was just so good, and the obvious fact that the storyline is at such an interesting position that I really can’t wait for the inevitable collection. I want to know now what is happening in Hellboy. I have to see where it is going.

And if I’m coming on too late, if this is the end of Hellboy completely, now that he has finally come to his long-prophesised death, then that is okay, because I have a lot still to catch up on, and plenty of older material to devour.

I do feel a bit guilty that it has taken me this long to really dig the Hellboy, to the point where I will be buying every new issue from now on, but hell, better late than never.

Comic Book Men are all right by me

Even though I have just been digging right in the back of my Cupboard Of Secret Shame and coming back with horrible nineties diary entries, there is always room for more, and I do have a new addition to pack in there:  I really enjoyed the Comic Book Men television show and hope they do loads more.

I didn’t see a lot of positive reviews for it, with the most common criticism being that it reinforced stereotypes about the masculine dorkiness of the comic book store, a stereotype that many other retailers have spent years trying to overcome in a bid to welcome new demographics.

And there was certainly some of that, but I still tuned in every week, and enjoyed every episode, because I can never get enough of seeing comic shops on television.

In that same clean-out that turned up those painful old diaries, I found a stash of video tapes I hadn’t watched in years and years. I had to have a look at them, just to see what was there, and found a lot of them had weird music videos and movie trailers and news items about geek culture from the early to mid nineties.

I had taped the first mention of Pulp Fiction on Entertainment Tonight and movie montages from the Academy Awards and the trailer for Casino, which I think is still the first great movie trailer I ever saw. There was tonnes of this stuff.

Most of it is on YouTube, but a lot of it isn’t, so a lot of those videos avoided going into the rubbish skip. There is one Oscars montage in particular, from somewhere at the turn of the century – a collection of great documentary moments, scored to the Beatles’ Let It Be – that I have an unbelievable fondness for, finding it an accurate summation of the 20^th century, from the horrors of war, to the noble humanity of the fight for freedom, to the beauty of humanity’s greatest art, to the eccentricities of individuals like R Crumb.

(I should digitise all those clips, but even though I do look like a total nerd, and do have a vaguely useful natural ability to use computers, I don’t know shit about technology or IT, and have actively avoided updating my tech knowledge for more than a decade now, and I can’t even use my iPhone properly, and it’s all because nothing drives me into a rage like computers that don’t do what they’re bloody well supposed to do and I have no idea how to turn video tape into a digital file. So I hold on to the tapes.)

As well as crazy slices of pop culture like that Oscars montage, I also obsessively taped any news items that mentioned comic books, and there were a surprising amount of those.

There were the dudes at Mark One Comics in 1992, talking about the Death of Superman, and there was the NBC story about Rob Liefeld doing a terrible comic inspired by the Rodney King riots.

At the time I taped these filler news stories, I had an obsessive relation with comic shops. I’d only been to two ever in my entire life, and I almost mythologised these stores I saw on TV, and would go back and forth on the tape, trying to recognise the comics on the shelves behind them, and being blown away because I recognised a Love and Rockets cover for a comic I had never read (and wouldn’t for another good decade).

Even though geek culture is now everywhere, and even though I’ve now been to literally hundreds of shops all over the world, I still do this – if I see a news story about comics on the TV, I’m checking out the background, to see if I can recognise any of the comics on the shelves.

I have done this when the story has been about a shop I go to every single week, which is just wrong, and I certainly still do this when the camera goes roaming around Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash.

Even though I still have an inordinate fondness for Kevin Smith (except when he does superhero comics) , there are things I really don’t like about Comic Book Men – I never like the moment when somebody who thought they had something really valuable finds out it’s only worth a couple of bucks, and the way some people can’t hide their complete disappointment is always a tiny bit heartbreaking.

And there is too much dude humour on the programme. Despite some laudable efforts, comic book shops are still incredibly male places, and that amount of dumb testosterone in the room means there is going to be a lot of toilet humour, usually at the expense of their fellow man. That sense of humour doesn’t always translate well into a television format - people who have been giving their friends shit since they were all in grade school might seen like the funniest people in the world, but they just seem like bullies when you only see them for less than an hour a week.

And the little missions – heading to the flea market, putting on a zombie sale - they come up with every week just come off as the gratuitous padding they are. Sometimes it feels like the show would work a lot better in a half-hour slot without it.

But there are also moments in the show that I do genuinely enjoy, and it’s not just the same old little thrills of recognising that issue of Hellboy that Ming is flicking through.

Because in a show like this, you can’t fake a genuine enthusiasm for something like comic books. You either got it or you don’t. In his introduction for Jonathan Ross’ Turf comic, Mark Millar writes about how you can tell when somebody is faking geekiness, and how it’s always obvious. It’s right to be suspicious of anybody who starts saying how much they love Jack Kirby’s Spider-Man (unless they are talking about the King’s brief role in the character’s genesis).

And the Comic Book Men might be occasionally obnoxious and rarely funny, they do love their comics. When somebody comes in with some gorgeous original John Buscema Silver Surfer art, there is nothing staged about the way store manager Walt breaks out in the cold sweats, or the goggle eyes on Mike when somebody whips out a copy of All-Star Comics #8

That’s the pay-off for all that crushing disappointment when somebody finds out their Aliens doll isn’t worth shit. Somebody comes in with some old comics that they don’t know anything about, and find out they’re walking around with a box worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of comics in it.

Bloody hell, even I got a bit excited about seeing some guy comes in with a Detective Comics #38, and there was nothing phoney about the way the Store staff barely contained their shit.

There was another part of one episode that I really liked, because it was so painfully familiar.

They’re rummaging through a pile of random comics at some yard sale, and it looks like the usual nineties painfulness, and then they stumble across a lovely little vein of  fifties and sixties Jimmy Olsen comics, and Walt the manager’s slightly less comic-geeky friend is trying to talk to him about some other dorky thing, and Walt looks at him for a second, blinks, and then says ‘yeah, yeah’ and just totally ignores him, because he’s busy, damn it, seeing what other little beauties are in the pile, and doesn’t have time for any other bullshit..

Man, I have done this to my poor friends and family far too often, and I always feel bad about it afterwards, but when there is just enough time for one more look around the store, they can wait, damn their eyes!

It's these little touches of painful familiarity that I like so much about Comic Book Men, but I also like it when people come in with real treasures. And I like the show because comic shops are my favourite shops in the whole world, and I’m always keen to hang around one for a while, and see what they got. Even if it’s just on television.