The White Stripes finished off my era of tapes

One cold, hard lesson that has taken me almost half a century to learn is that you usually don't know when a very particular era in your life is over, not until long after it ends. 

I didn't know something was over when my mate Kaz gave me a cassette tape of this new band she'd heard called the White Stripes to listen to on the long drive home from Dunedin, sometime in 2002. I had no idea that this was the end of that part of my life when my mates made me tapes, and the end of the era when I used them to found new music. 

There was a time when I lived entirely on a musical diet of dubbed tapes. Albums cost at least $20 in 1980s money, but you could get a blank C-90 tape for three bucks, and fit two albums (or one double) on that. My music collection was extended out to whatever else my mates and their families were buying.

It all started with Pink Floyd, when my good friend Stephen gave me a copy of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, followed closely by The Wall. It would be a few more years before I properly got into the rest of the Floyd, but  I listened to those first two albums constantly on my alarm clock/tape player.

The little rectangles of hard plastic become pieces of personal history. Chris T made me tapes of all the Beatles albums he had and I still have the copy of Magical Mystery Tour/Get Back, and Chris W made me a lot of Queen, and I still have some of that too.

My favourites were the ones that were dubbed off an LP - digging on the hiss and crackle, and there are some albums that don't sound right to me when I listen to them digitally now, because they don't have the same random skips the taped copies had.

Kaz was right, by the way. The White Stripes sounded magnificent to my 2002 ears. It was the first two albums on one tape and it was revelatory and loud and I blasted that motherfucker on the three-hour drive home, and nobody ever made me a tape like that again. 

It all changed with file sharing over the internet, and now songs float down the fibre-optic cables, instead of being burned onto magnetic tape. I still get playlists, and I cling to physical media with the purchase of half a dozen CDs every year, but despite attempts to bring tapes back, I know nobody is introducing me to another band with  a shitty copy of something great. That drum beat faded out a long, long time ago.

We don't need this many number ones

I love the serialised nature of regular comic books and adore big long runs by the same creative team, but they don't always make that easy for you.

I did, for instance, once really want to get into Jason Aaron's Thor comics - because they sounded like a lot of Viking fun - but by the time I started seeking it out, there were already three or four different volume ones, with more to come.

I couldn't follow the order of them all and the endless relaunches are constantly making me feeling left behind. Until the 2000s, the various Justice League of America comics all notched up more than 100 issues, but there have been six or seven new Justice League #1s in the new century, and I literally have no idea what order they come in.

This is partly due to the general glut of mainstream comics - I felt genuinely bummed when they followed up Hickman's House of X thing with seven immediate new titles, if they just had one X-Men book, I would have got it.

But as much as the comic companies only seem to be interested in the extremely short-term benefits of a new number one, the restarting definitely hurts in the long term. How many Daredevil Volume Ones does the world need - that's another title that has ben particularly egregious at rebooting back to #1, even with the same creative team involved.

I could tell you a vague history of everything that happens in the Avengers title up to, say, #300, but not anything in the past couple of decades when they keep closing out around 32 issues.

Sometimes the long runs, like those Aaron Thor comics, get collected in massive, heavy books, but even if I could afford something like that - which would easily run into the hundreds of dollars - it's not a great format. 

And all I really want is an easy way to follow a single story, with sequential numbers, or something like that. That might be an archaic idea, but it still works.

Catching up on my Roeg

I often have absolutely no idea what is happening in Nicolas Roeg's films, and that's the way I like them.

There isn't anybody quite like him in modern cinema - an impeccable craftsman who got into gorgeously mind-expanding madness when he got given the directorial reins. Some of his movies are almost unwatchable - Eureka has an incredible Gene Hackman performance, but is a hell of a slog - but he also constantly reached for the transcendent, and sometimes even made it.

I saw all of his most challenging films when I was a young film nerd, but have been revisiting them in recent months, and they're all fucking brilliant. His run of four films in the 1970s - Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth - is a body of work that few have ever matched in the history of cinema. I wish we had a thousand Nicolas Roegs out there, but I'll have to make do with an impeccable one.

Look what they did to John Constantine

The SixPack comics by Garth Ennis, John McCrea and Russ Braun came out about a decade ago to resounding indifference. A dubious spin-off to the still highly-regarded Hitman series by Ennis and McCrea, the adventures of SixPack, Dogwelder and the other assorted miscreants of Section Eight were full of puerile humour and a resounding lack of respect for some of DC's biggest spiritual entities (The Phantom Stranger's gangsta rapping skills were certainly... unique.) 

It's all generally harmless, even with one of the characters fighting evil with the power of perversion, and another character literally just a pile of guts, but there is enough sharp humour, and the tiniest pieces of pathos in the sad story of a hopeless alcoholic.

The best parts in the two series that we somehow got were when Ennis got in some nice biting of the hand that fed him, with the Batman imploring that he's not a racist as he tries to get out of a parking ticket, and Superman cheerfully giving a hopeless alcoholic a bottle of booze and telling him that everything is going to be okay.

The most biting part is for poor old John Constantine. In interviews talking about the character and his work on it in the past, Ennis was always clear that Constantine was one of the most interesting characters in mainstream comics - a chancer, a lurker, someone who is very much not a hero, but will ultimately try to do the right thing if he has to, (and often totally fails to be both good or useful).

The world improbably got 300 issues of Hellblazer with that character, with some very good and very not-good issues in that run, but Constantine was always clearly the same man. And then they refolded him back into the DC universe and he was hanging out with the Justice League again and firing magic bolts of energy from his fingers like a right dickhead.

This clearly did not sit well with Ennis, who wrote Hellblazer at an astonishingly young age and clearly has fondness for the fuckup that is John Constantine. So in the the SixPack and Dogwelder comic, Constantine shows up riding a cosmic surfboard and wearing a stupid fucking helmet

The character is self-aware enough to realise that he doesn't really work when he has to use his Hellblazer pistol to weave his magic, and spends his entire appearance moaning about his current situation (while still manipulating the team into saving the world when all the other superheroes are just bloody useless). 

It's all there to drive home the point that they had a truly great character and have just wasted it, and now John is just another tit in the crowd in the big crossovers. There has been some attempts to return Constantine to his darker roots, most notably in some excellent comics by Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell, but that just further proves that John doesn't belong in a room full of spandex..

At least we did get one last Steve Dillon drawing of Constantine, crying on the cover of #2 with his cigarettes between his fingers like he's Wolverine. That's something.

I'm living in a 1992 headspace

I recently rediscovered an old diary from 1992, back when I was 17 and very, very unsure of my place in the world. And after reading it through, it's a little remarkable how much I hide my anxieties behind a rabid obsession for comic books. 

It was my last year of school, and there is an ongoing thread through the entries where I have no idea what I'm going to do in the next year, and it's a heavy fucking thing to lay on a 17 year old. 

I have no aspirations to go to university like all my other smart friends. I try out for a tourism course at polytech and I try to get a job at a TV and video store, and I fail miserably at both. There is, inexplicably, some talk of joining the police or becoming a teacher, but there is a glimmer of hope - I make vague motions of going to a journalism course and give up on it far too easily, but I will be back there in 2004, and doing the course was easily the single best decision I've ever made in my life. 

I'm just obviously so scared, because I just don't know what to do, but I also start working with my dad in a factory that makes and packages animal dripping, and I have actual money for the first time. I go on and on about how my bank account has too much money in it, the entries are just saturated with an obsession with cash, and it's laughably small amounts - I'm incredulous that I will make more than $120 a week. 

And it's all going on terrible, terrible comics. This is, after all, 1992 and there are a lot of terrible comics to buy. Some of them I have actually held onto - there is a tense period early in the year where I'm really not sure if the last two issues of the Infinity Gauntlet are going to show up at the local shops, and that's the biggest disaster in my life. 

They are all I seem to care about. There is one bit where I go to Dunedin for an interview at the polytech for a tourism course down there, and I write that I got "sick of talking to boring girls" and went to the local shops to load up on Superman comics, which kinda sums up exactly how much of a loser I was. 

1992 was a big year for me in other ways, our family shifted from Washdyke to Temuka, and that might not mean shit to anybody else in the world, it changed my fucking life, and every day I'm doing stupid shit with my best mates, and carving out new friendships that mean a lot to me today, (even if they do sometimes take a while to give you your Big Dave comics back).

The diary is, of course, painfully adolescent - there are some bits where I genuinely go into 'nothing I ever do is right!' moaning, and there is some outright hatred of my younger sister that I genuinely do not remember at all.

But I do remember that Infinity Gauntlet obsession and I still do have those comics, and issues of the New Warriors and 2000ad and the Justice League and the Nth Man that I got at the time. The rest are long gone, and so is that 17-year-old kid who didn't know shit about the world, but had very strong opinions about the Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Power Pack: Oh my! The whole world's turned on edge!

- Power Pack #47 

Story and pencils by Jon Bogdanove 

Inks by Hilary Barta 

Colors by Glynis Oliver 

Letters by Joe Rosen

Who are the Mindless Ones?

I've been following the Mindless Ones for years and years, and think they have written some of the sharpest reviews and criticism of comic books ad other nerdy ephemera I've ever seen online, (although I could never get into the podcast for some reason, sorry lads).

And they're still doing it in the age of newsletters, putting out some new writing every Sunday without fail, and it's just as random, just as pointed, and sometimes just as mean as it ever was. Bullets of media critique, daft jokes and personal hauntings. I highly recommend it and you can find it here.

My only criticism of the newsletter is that I do really wish they credited which parts were by who, because some of it gets really personal, and a name on the other side of that kind of story is always welcome, because I'm always craving that human connection. Aren't we all?  

Chilling with the Cryptkeeper

When it comes to late night TV comfort food, there is nothing quite as tasty as watching Tales From The Crypt, even with all the rotting corpses lying about.

I've been watching the 90s television series at the end of every day lately, and it might be full of unashamed gore, macabre twists and truly horrific puns, but it's been an incredibly chill way to end my day.

Every single episode has some actor at their absolute peak - Demi Moore never looked better as a ravenous gold-digger, William Sadler never looked sweatier than when he played a fired executioner; M Emmett Walsh made the best stuffed body.

And there is some top talent behind the camera, familiar names from genre cinema as writers and directors like Walter Hill, Richard Donner, Mary Lambert, Fred Dekker, Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin and many, many others. They even get Ry Cooder to do some music for an episode.  

(It's also slightly fascinating to see episodes directed by huge actors, big name players given a chance to call the shots, so there are episodes by Bob Hoskins, Kyle MacLachlan, Tom Hanks, Michael J Fox and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they didn't direct much else anywhere, so there is a pleasant element of ambition and showing off.)

So the production values are high, and the stories are, of course, a boatload of fun. All based on the classic EC comics, and those mad geniuses were using cliches back in the 50s that are no less creaky or predictable now, but the payoff is always worth it. 

It's quite cozy horror, with a lack of irony, and a lack of self referential smugness. The cruel characters in these stories get their just desserts, and all is is at should be. 

The world outside my window could use some more accountability, and I get a taste of it in the dead of night before I go to bed, watching evil people getting hacked up by a zombie out for vengeance.

I love the smell of fireworks in the evening

It's Guy Fawkes night tonight in this part of the world, and the evening air will be popping with the sound of fireworks for hours, and I love every second of it.

The local media has been bulging with stories about wimps wanting to get them banned, because won't someone think of the poor pets or firefighters, and while these may be absolutely legitimate concerns, I still can't deny I get a thrill from explosive lights.

There was a line from a comic writer who turned out to be a total shithead about a particular noise that human beings make when they look up and see fireworks, and even shitheads make good points sometimes, because that line has stuck in my mind for years now, because it's true. It's not a cheer, not quite a gasp, but more of a primal tones of awe. It's a lovely sound.

The wonder of fireworks is in all of us, even if we try to deny it. Even if we try to deny it with sympathy for some sensitive dogs might have to sleep under the bed for one night, or for the firefighters who have to deal with the actions of idiots. They can also be terribly dangerous - a friend of a friend lost a finger to a firecracker that he held in a closed fist when I was growing up, but that taught me some valuable safety lessons (like don't hold a fucking firecracker in a closed fist).

And I will admit that their use outside the usual days of celebration can be extremely annoying, but for one night of light and noise, it isn't the end of the world. 

I will always look up at fireworks and make that weird noise again. I always do.