The Walking Dead was always at its strongest - in both comic and TV show - when it dealt with the desperate logistics of surviving a world where the dead were getting up and killing the survivors.
But when it becomes a story about what philosophy and ethos is best for a post-zombie society, it starts to fall apart faster than a rotting corpse in the sun, because the philosophies it puts forward are always so fucking stupid, and usually some variation on 'might makes right, and you have to be cruel to survive', and never really anything else.
It's almost enough to make you wish George Romero had never stumbled into the idea that zombies could be a metaphor for anything, and giving zombies that extra shallow level of complexity, when it always leads to this awful and shallow philosophising.
Whenever I find it hard to sleep, all I have to do is watch the above Goodnight Kiwi video - which ran for nearly 20 years on New Zealand TV - and it instantly makes me drowsy. Not because of that groovy, lounge-lizard version of Hine e Hine, or even because of the quiet, subdued animation. It makes me drowsy because that little clip is still telling me that the day is finished, and it's time to go to bed, because there is no more telly.
The idea of all-night TV was a totally foreign concept when I was a kid. There were only two TV stations in NZ until 1990, both part of the public broadcaster, and when the Goodnight Kiwi clip came on, usually just before midnight, it was followed by nothing, until TV started up again in the morning (although Breakfast TV was also a foreign concept).
When I was a teenager, and staying up as late as I could, that would generally mean the end of the day, and it was time for bed. You could always stay up later and watch a video, but when a beloved cartoon icon is settling down for the night, it makes sense to join him and his cat in slumber.
That blessed closedown of the broadcast was eventually replaced by the cash grab of terrible, terrible infomercials, and night-owls and other insomniacs could watch awful steak-knife demonstrations all night long.
A screen full of nothing was better than that, and also brought some much needed closure to the day. When it feels like life is hectic and never-ending, there was something soothing about the nothingness that followed the full-stop of this little cartoon. It was time to recharge, and start up again tomorrow.
It's probably a total coincidence that it was being published at the same time I was going through puberty, but the 1980s Australian era of the X-Men really was the sexiest ever.
Claremont's X-Men comics were always horny as hell, especially when the dominatrix vibes and sexy lingerie of the Hellfire Club got involved - but there was something about the eight team members all hanging out in an abandoned town in the outback that made everything so much sexier.
It helped that the eight core team-members at the time had something for everybody- there was a pop star bringing her own bright lights; a southern belle who couldn't be touched; a member of the cold English nobility who could read your darkest thoughts; and a true African goddess. And on the male side, there was the big bloke who's actually a sensitive artist; an impressively restrained energy blaster stuck in the shadow of his big brother; the up-for-anything four-fingered plaything from another dimension, and the rough and tumble of the ultimate Canucklehead. There really was something for everyone.
And looking back at those comics now, it seems blindingly obvious that they are all gay as hell. If mutants are the next evolution, it make sense that they wouldn't be bound by boring old heterosexual norms, (as seen with the current X-books' idea that Scott, Jean and Logan are shacking up as a long-term threesome), and there was definitely a lot of swinging going on down under.
Between the fights against the Reavers and the Brood and institutionalised prejudice, there is no doubt the X-team of the time were filling in their days with the odd orgy, while Longshot and Colossus were spooning in the cold Antipodean nights. Storm was always up for anything, and
Wolverine and Havok were definitely getting down to business in between panels when they go off on their Meltdown spin-off.
Astonishingly, the team didn't even have two of the sexiest X-men ever in those days, with the cute charms of Kitty Pryde and the devilish raconteuring of Nightcrawler shuffled off to England (the dripping sexuality of Excalibur was just as hot).
But while the Comics Code and the general homophobia of the 1980s meant they were playing it safe on the surface in the main X-Men book, and only showing the chaste romances between men and women, you don't have to dig very deep to see things were getting a lot more fluid. They're the next stage of human evolution, after all, and that's always going to be terrifically queer.
The new series of Doctor Who - the second with the excellent Jodie Whittiker in the lead role - has been a great improvement over her first. It's still weirdly clumsy and awfully blunt, but at least it's showing some of the ambition that was so sadly lacking in the first, especially with Jo Martin's gloriously impossible Doctor turning up.
But that storytelling clumsiness is still a big issue - the Doctor's turning away from Graham when he talked about his deepest fears was bizarre, and they way she is just constantly giving up seems like it really needs to pay off somehow.
And last week's story - where the TARDIS crew hang out with the Shelleys and Lord Byron on the weekend Mary had the idea for Frankenstein - really hit a sour note with its casual approach to death. Doctor Who has always been saturated in carnage, and the overacting deaths have long been a feature of the show, full of crazy screaming and writhing. And 'The Haunting of Villa Diodati' is no exception, with several poor serving staff meeting a gruesome fate at the hands of a renegade Cyberman.
So far, so Doctor Who, but then it goes on to say that some lives are more important than others, and that a poet's life is worth more than the working class stiffs who serve them, and that really grated. While the idea that 'words matter' is a strong one, they still don't matter as much as an innocent human life, and the victims are just as worthy of saving as somebody who was a famous writer.
Never mind that it overlooks that maybe the serving staff has subtle ways of influencing hat happened to the Great People around them, which may be lost - who's to say Mary Shelley wasn't affected by the loss of her nanny to put her off writing anything else - but the idea that their lives aren't as important as a poet's, that their experiences have no value, is just cold.
There was a recent case in our local justice system, where a drunk driver got off without a conviction because he wrote a song about the experience, and I had a similar reaction to that. It doesn't matter how good your song, or your poetry, or your paintings are, you shouldn't get preferential treatment in the justice system because of it.
And just because you're not one of the priveleged few whose art will be remembered in years to come, it doesn't mean you're not worth saving. The Doctor should know that, better than anybody.
Historical battle scenes in the biggest movies usually go for the huge visuals, and spectacle over everything, which invariably means you have two masses of heavily armed blokes charging into each other's faces and hacking away the arms and legs of the other side until only one is left standing.
But one of the best battle scenes ever put on film breaks all of those rules. It comes a fair way into Michael Mann's 1992 adaption of Last of the Mohicans, when the retreating English army is attacked by Mugua's warriors along a grassy road as they flee a surrendered fort. It's a sudden, bloody affair in the green wilds of a young America.
And it's not a big historically important battle that decides the status of nations. It's just a skirmish in the grand scheme of things. Nobody is changing history or anything like that, and it's something that would only feature as a footnote in any textbooks
But the personal stakes are as high as they get for the participants, with Magua's massive war party out for vengeance, and their English counterparts just fighting to survive. And the staging of the whole thing is superb, with a quiet, strange opening - a lone warrior coming out of nowhere and disappearing again - before suddenly exploding into mass carnage.
And as crazy as things get, you never lose the main characters, who aren't there to win the battle, or even really take sides. Their English comrades have turned on them for daring to suggest that family is more important that country, and they have no love for Magua's people, they just want to survive.
So instead of charging at the enemy, they travel through the battle at a side angle, with the relentless efficiency of the movement of Hawkeye, Chingachgook and Uncas translated across the chaos of the open
battlefield. They're just focused on their goal, and taking down any fool that gets in their way.
And the confusion of the opening stages carries through to an undecided outcome - the main characters all abandon the field of battle to row their way to freedom, and hide under a waterfall to make big speeches about surviving. The skirmish ends somewhere far in the background of the main story.
But none of that matters, because the fighting is so personal, and so focused on these few warriors and women, caught up in the havoc of history. That makes it so much bigger than the biggest army maneuvers, and more thrilling than a thousand cavalry charges.
In 40+ years of comic buying, and 20+ years of a raging internet, I've rarely bought my comics online. It just always felt so easy, like it was cheating somehow, because how can you appreciate something that took no effort to get? Besides, I also always wanted to support my local stores, because no ease or convenience matches the fun of interacting with actual people.
But in a desperate bid to complete some comic runs that I've been after for years - and in some cases, decades - about once a year I do a small buy of a dozen or so comics from an online retailer based in the States, and get them shipped over.
This year's lot arrived last week, and it was so satisfying to fill the inevitable holes in the collection. After years of stumbling across random issues here and there, I was able to get the last few issues of Dylan Horrock's Pickle, (although I'm still missing the 'lost' issue he finally published last year); and Peter Milligan's Hellblazer comics (the last John Constantine comics ever published, as far as I care); and the early Cerebus comics I've been after since forever (giving up on the second half of that 300-issue run was a great decision); even that one issue of the Superman: Panic in the Sky comic that had been a hole in that storyline since 1992 (I have no excuse for this, other than I freakin' love that story); and the last two BPRD comics I needed and one of the three Hellboy comics I'm trying to find (I should've just waited for the omnibi); and an issue of the Wagner/Grant/Kennedy Outcasts comics from the late eighties (an entire series I have never seen anywhere in real life).
Getting them in the mail is cool, and while it's still not quite as satisfying as finding them in the local shop, closing off the search for those specific runs - when I live in a country where back issues are very, very hard to find - felt pretty damn good.
And there is always more - there are always a few issues of Shade The Chnaging Man or DC Comics Presents I'm after, and I still cannot, for the life of me, find that one issue of the last Mage series from Matt Wagner. Seriously, #4 isn't anywhere. Maybe it'll show up when I do next year's lot.
It's really great how Amazon came along, and people in this country started buying all their books from there, and all the local independent bookstores closed down because people were giving their money to a giant overseas corporation that doesn't pay any bloody taxes, and now Amazon is refusing to deliver anything here because they can't be fucked working out how to deal with a goods and services tax, and now you can't get books anywhere, and I feel guilty about it because I ordered five books through Amazon in the past 10 years, (and they were all Kim Newman books) but nobody else seems to feel any guilt at all.
Jack White hasn't stayed out of the spotlight much since the White Stripes first blew up two decades ago. After the end of the band, he has produced a whole lot more music, both on his own and with his mates, and a lot of it has been bloody good.
We don't hear so much about Meg these days, except in innumerable 'where is she now' bullshit articles. But it should be never be forgotten that she was an incredibly vital part of the band's success, offering a solid, thumping counterpart to Jack's flights of guitar fancy, and that was essential to the success of the duo.
Meg White was not a technically proficient drummer. She was no Bonham, or Moon, or even a Ringo, but she was as essential to the White Stripes as any of them were to their bands. That plodding thud might not have been perfect, but it could thud forever. It wasn't just an important counterbalance to Jake losing his goddamned mind on nearly every song, it was an indispensable part of the band's charm, that DIY punk aesthetic. It didn't have to be good, it just had to be alive.
The choice to step away from the drumkit, at least in public, is definitely Meg's choice to make, but it's so easy to miss her contribution to that sound, and wish there was more of it.
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