Doctor Who: Chap with Wings

I had a mad obsession for the Doctor Who New Adventures novels published by Virgin in the mid-90s, just as they started to go out of print and rapidly disappear from sight. I still managed to snatch most of them up from the bargain bins at Paper Plus, and through the excellent classified adverts in the back of TSV, but it took me 20 years to find the rest.

But I got so many of them back in the day, so fast, that I never had time to read them all. I'd obviously read all the Ormans and Cornells and Parkins and Platts and Aaronovichs, but had only read a handful of those books outside this core group of writers.

So a couple of years ago, once I'd paid way too much money to secure the last books in the series, I figured it was time to get cracking and start from the beginning, with the one about Gilgamesh.

I'm still at it, and try to average one a month - I currently read one in tandem with my one person book club, and it works out surprisingly well - so I've got through a few, and have just got to the end of the vague arc where the Meddling Monk was fucking with everybody's history.

No Future had Cornell's usual sledgehammer wit, but it's really reached the point where following a TARDIS crew who all actively hate each other is just too tiring.

Still, this is one of the ones I read back in the day, and I really only remembered four things about it - the villains; the 'pint of vodka' line early in the book, (Bennie was the drinking buddy I always wanted, which wasn't very smart, because she's just imaginary); the bit where Ace stabs the Doctor, but it's all a fake!; and, of course, the "chap with Wings" line, which is my favourite line in all Doctor Who novels ever, including all the ones from The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

So while I'm really starting to realise what people were on about when they moaned that everybody in the NAs was so unpleasant, it still has moments of classic Doctor Who, and moments of the dumbest fucking humour.

Don't leave Doom Force behind

There's a long-running argument that satire doesn't work, and that it can even be harmful, because people who don't get it just end up taking it at face value. That a film like Wolf of Wall Street might be a searing indictment of toxic masculinity and the craziness of excessive capitalism, but has also inspired a whole new generation of amoral financial bros to further fuck up the world.

I don't know about all of that, but I do know that when I accidentally left a copy of Doom Force behind at a friend's house, I think I put them off comics forever.

Doom Force was a monumental piss-take of the Image era, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by some outrageous talents. Spinning out of Morrison's Doom Patrol - the biggest headfuck in mainstream comics at the time - it pushed all the worst excesses of Image comics over the top. It might all be in Dorthy's head, and it's for the best if it stays there.

When I got a copy of it a year or so after it was published, I thought it was funny as fuck, because I read all the comic press, and was getting heavily into fanzines, and knew all the background behind the thing.

It was also a time when I was desperately trying to get my friends to read more comics, with sincere promises that they were more serious and. more artistic. It was the biggest cliche in the world, but it was also true - comics just weren't for kids anymore.

At least, that's what I told my friend Sarah*, and she sounded genuinely interested when she asked about Sandman or Strangers in Paradise. I had already learned to ease people into Love and Rockets, clearly the greatest comic in the world, because it was one where a lot of people just could not get past the tits, so I was taking it easy with things. And then I accidentally left my copy of Doom Force behind at her house. 

I got it back a few days later and she said she had read it, and made an interesting face, and said it wasn't really her thing. 

But I think I accidentally killed any hope she had for the medium, and I don't blame her - without knowing any of the context, Doom Force is a horrifically awful book, with absolutely terrible art and ridiculously overwritten captions.

It was a full-on satire of all the excesses of the time, and I knew the joke, because I'd been following the whole Image thing right from the start. I knew what Liefeld and Lee and McFarlane were doing, and knew it was ripe to be ripped into. All that promise of comics glory of the 80s took a massive hit when  all the pouches started showing on costumes, and there is a quiet desperate anger in Doom Force, that it had all come to this. 

Sarah didn't know any of that crap - and nobody really needed to know it - and she didn't seem interested in comic for years afterwards.

Still, we talked recently and she raved about how much she liked The Boys, so who knows?

I don't push comic shit on people so much anymore. Not just because of this - although it but it didn't help - but because evangelism for a medium can be eroded away, and you realise that nobody has to like everything. 

But when I do, I'm a lot more careful about the things I leave behind. Nobody needs Doom Force dropped on them, out of the blue.

* Names have been changed because I'm not a fucking monster. I'm still Bob, though.

Marvel's Time Slip: Smith's Silver Surfer, Jones' Thing and Totleben's Doc Ock

The Silver Surfer by Jeff Smith

Doctor Octopus by John Totleben

The Thing by Kelly Jones

Marvel did this one-page 'Time Slip' thing 20 years ago in some hype publication, before collecting them into one comic. They gave some of the hottest talents of the time a chance to radically redesign the biggest names in the Marvel Universe, and those artists came back with some truly breathtaking ideas, which were almost totally ruined by the atrocious graphic designs Marvel slapped all around it. 

Almost. 

I can still dream of seeing Jeff Smith's Silver Surfer.

Still disappointed by the Heck

I'm 48 goddamn years old, which means I'm now in my fifth decade of opening an old Justice League of America comic with a terrific cover and saying out loud: 'Aw no, it's another Don Heck'.

It happened to me when I was buying fairly recent issues in the mid-80s from the local dairy on King Street in Temuka, and it happened to me the other day when I got some issues from 1981from the local comic shop. There would be a fantastic Ross Andru or George Perez cover, and then it's Heck on the inside, all flat and dull.

I feel weirdly bad about it - Heck never got no respect and I actually like a lot of Heck's work, (he drew phenomenal eyebrows). But some disappointments are eternal.

Q's best of 1998: Stoned in the morning light

The last time I ever got to be a proper unemployed bum was the summer that kicked off 25 years ago. Me and some of my best mates from school were all flatting together, it was a beautiful summer, and after years of manual labour, we took some time off spent much of the summer getting mega fucking stoned and listening to music all day long.

And while there was also a lot of Radiohead and Portishead, and I was going through another punk phase, but the disc I most listened was the free Best of 1998 CD that came stuck to the cover of Q Magazine.

I'd been an off-on Q reader for a couple of years, but that one album still stands as s snapshot of that time. Post Britpop, pre nu-Metal, lots of groovy electornica and basic rock, just like you'd expect at the end of the century.

Air grooving into Fatboy Slim, the eternal Teardrop and Placebo, Garbage and Gomez and even flippin' James at their best. Some prime Manics and Neil Finn, Oasis' accidentally creating the greatest B-side of the 90s in The Masterplan, and going out with some Bernard Butler and his dreamy guitars.

I still have the CD, and still listen to this selection from a quarter of a century ago, and it still sounds like 1999 to me.

(There was also a Marilyn Manson tune in there, but seriously. Fuck that guy.)

Dr Who: That little girl will kill us all

Doctor Who is almost 60 years old, and you'll never convince me that it isn't the greatest TV show ever made. You can do anything in Doctor Who, and it usually does it all, sooner or later.

One thing it has always done very well is scare the shit out of the kids, to the point that it's become a massive cliche about hiding behind the sofa when the Sea Devils rolled out. But I wasn't scared of the Daleks, or the Sontarans, or Vardans. It was a 12-year-old girl that really terrified the shit out of me

There is a weird theme of extremely creepy kids in the tail end of the classic series. And the epitome of this might be the unnamed girl in Remembrance of the Daleks. Played by the terrific Jasmine Breaks, she's part sixties schoolchild, and part Dalek battle computer who shoots lethal balls of energy from her fingers.

She was just another villain and pawn of the Daleks when I first saw Remembrance, but something stuck in my brain, because not long after that I had a dream where she came to our house and murdered the shit out of my family in front of me

It was one of those dreams where you're just so grateful when you wake up and realise it wasn't real, because it felt fucking real at the time, with the girl stalking through the house we lived in at the time and brutally killing my family, just like when she hit Nazi Mike with enough force to shatter a staircase.

When it comes to movies and TV, I don't scare much, but some things stick in the subconscious and you might not realise it until the monsters come knocking in the night. I've had a couple of deeply horrifying dreams about the Dark Judges from Judge Dredd, and I can always tell a good zombie movie because I get stuck in an apocalypse of the living dead in a post-film nightmare.

And this was one of those, especially because the anonymous girl was the same age as me, and looked a lot like all the girls I went to school with. Girls were already terrifying enough when you're a typically confused adolescent, and connecting them to the battle computers of a vast fascist intergalactic empire didn't help.

Tony tells it like it is

I take film criticism waaaay too seriously, but how else am I meant to know what's good? So people who say they're giving you an honest interpretation of a film while blatantly getting paid for promotion film me with an unquenchable rage.

Luckily, one of the insanely talleneted people I work with in my regular job is Tony Stamp, and he's the smartest writer about current pop culture in New Zealand, and he recently summed up everything I feel about this issue with a gorgeous little rant that can be found here. I endorse it all.

Giffen forever!

We've lost so many truly great comic book talents in recent years, and I am still dealing with the fact that there's almost nobody left from the Silver Age, and that the writers and artists I grew up reading in the 70s and 80s are next on death's dance card.

Especially when we lose someone like Keith Giffen, a monumentally great comic creator.

There is a vast chunk of my comic collection that has his name in the credits somewhere. I've got all the Ambush Bug he ever did, from the random appearances in Action Comics to the last beautifully bizarre mini-series; I have all the Heckler and Trencher comics; and all the Lobo he ever did.

I have almost all of his Legion of Super -Heroes, and all the Justice league comics he ever touched, and that's a significant chunk of brilliance right there. Even the weird offshoots, like his short Suicide Squad or Freak Force runs, there was always a base level of competency and craft that wasn't always so obvious in his contemporaries.

When I first starting seriously collecting comics, it wasn't hard to figure out that this Giffen guy was the business. As an artist, the slickness of his early work - with all those smooth as hell Larry Mahlstedt inks - evolved over the years, (maybe picking up a little too much influence from the artists that inspired him), becoming a stunningly craggy monstrosity in literally one page of his last proper Legion comic.

The art would have been enough to cement him as a legend. The laughs were always the most wonderful bonus.

The fact that his death was announced with two classically crap gags is everything I liked about the writer/artist/everything. That irreverent sense of humour, with a real touch of irony often lacking in other American creators. Lobo might be his greatest joke that 99% of the character's audience never got, but the Ambush Bug comics were so packed with gags there were always bound to be something that hit.

And he could be so much more than the bwa-ha-ha, with genuine pathos and humanity seeping through. Because while they might have been clowns, it meant you actually gave a shit about Booster Gold and Blue Beetle in a way you never, ever would again, and when you had villains like Despero tearing through the team, it really hurt. 

Such a sprawling canvas on which to show the world his ideas, and Giffen still knew when to come in tight on those hard close-ups of faces; while delivering action scenes with real verve and momentum, and crafting stories and themes and characters building over years and decades of comics. 

His name on the credits was always an absolute guarantee of quality, and Keith Giffen might be lost to us forever now, but I'm proud to still have so many of those credits in my collection.

Even the most majestic empires of light still crumble into dust

Everything is demolished in the end. Some stone ruins last forever, but it's one of life's big existential moments when you realise most of the places you grew up with are not going to be there forever.

It's just a fact of life that we all have to deal with, but that doesn't mean it still isn't a total bummer when they go. Especially when they had the decor and luxury of the cinema.

The one cinema I consider the high bar for all others is the one that I spent the most time in as a kid - the mighty Majestic on Timaru's Stafford Street. And it is bound for destruction in the near future. It's just not quake safe enough, and while I'm really going to mourn the second hand bookstore two doors down when it goes - that shop was my everything - I ache over the fact that the dark red carpet and plush decor of the classiest place I'd ever seen is a part of history.

It lasted into the 90s, and then turned into the best Video Ezy store in the country, and it still smelled like popcorn, but that all ended when Outlander came out.

I should be used to the destruction of this wonderful places like now. The State Cinema - the other big theatre in town - was the one that had all the GY-rated blockbusters like the Star Wars and Indiana Joneses, and vanished and was replaced by the world's shittiest mall in the 80s.

And the cinemas of Christchurch - all those wonderful old theatres in Cathedral Square, all vanished just as I really became a movie nerd (the last film I ever saw in the square was Altman's Short Cuts) and most of the others were gone before the city shook itself apart in 2011. And any that had survived that long soon turned into stairs to nowhere.

Some of the Dunedin ones evolved, and I'm still a little shocked that the glorious St James - where I once saw both Police Academy 3 and Mad Max 3 -  still has its starlit ceiling as part of a multiplex. The one in the Octagon - where Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom blew up my world -  was bowled for another multiplex in the 90s; and I saw Jurassic Park in one that turned into a useless carpark two months later. The one I really miss is the Odeon with the sweet wooden panelling, where I saw Salo and Shawshank, and it vanished into demolition 20 years ago.

I mourn all the great cinemas I never went to, both throughout the country and out in the wider world. The multiplex concept killed so many of them, the convenience of multiple screens leading inevitably to oblivion for the old picture palaces.

Because even the worst theatres I ever went to, the ones with the sticky floors and the tattered curtains, were still impossibly glamorous and fancy to me. I was a working class kid, and never went to no opera or ballet, but I was often dropped off at these cinemas, and they were the most luxurious places I could imagine.

They were full of stories made of light, and delivered in a place so big dialogue would echo around the cavernous space, and everything smelled of popcorn. They had fancy armchairs to relax in before the film started and cheap glass chandeliers that looked like the real thing to me.

There's still so many great cinemas left around the world, but so many are also gone forever. It used to be the easiest way to get a little opulence in your life, instead of getting shoved down the corridor to Screen Six.