Project Hail Mary: You look pretty good down here

Project Hail Mary is a movie about how the need to help other people is a universal constant, even if those people look like rocks and don't have a face, and that's just the kind of message I need to hear more often right now. And judging by the audiences it is getting, I'm not the only one.

It's grim times around the world, and I see people doing the most abhorrent things to their fellow humans on a daily basis. You don't even have to be a full-time doom-scroller to see how nasty people can get out of there, with violence and brute ignorance running rampant.

So any kind of film that offers something resembling hope is always welcome, no matter how fantastical. (I mean, I could handle the science fiction of the interstellar engine drive and such, but was taken aback from frequent assertions that all the nations of the world were working together to solve this problem.)

I am also in the mood for stories that don't feature being dicks or arseholes or bullies, because I don't care about these fucking dolts, even though the rules of English fiction dictate that all bullies must face justice at some point. And like The Martian, there isn't anybody like that here, and it's so damned refreshing.

Dickheads are the easiest way to generate conflict in a story - creating drama through selfishness and meanness - but I still truly believe in my heart that people want to help each other when we get the chance, and we should pay little heed to those who insist otherwise. 

And a movie with no bad guys other than the cruel indifference of the universe - where nobody is being a dick just because they can, just because the story needs it - is the type of movie I really needed right now.

Also this film has sad karaoke, and if you really want to get into the proper depths of human feeling, you can do it with sad karaoke. 

Losing track of it all

I've been trying to get the comic and movie collection in some kind of order this year, and figuring out what I've actually got, and it's probably going to take me a lot longer than 12 months. Because after decades of collecting, there is a fucking shit-tonne of stuff.

As I'm going through it, there are genuine surprises, I find copies of Flash comics from the Silver Age and random Michael Moorcock novels I didn't know I had. My memory ain't what it used to be, and I have no recollection of actually buying them at any point. 

I used to be able to confidently say exactly which individual comics I had, even when I had thousands and thousands of them. I could tell you what one issue of Jungle Action I had buried in a box, or how many issues of Booster Gold I had.

That kind of useless information has definitely been under pressure in recent years, with brainpower more likely to be devoted to things like 'making sure my kids are not playing in traffic', or 'remembering when they need to take $3 to school for a sausage sizzle'.

I do know some things for sure. I know in the room downstairs there are exactly 2351 issues of 2000ad in a number of genuinely life-threatening boxes, and that all the Hitman and Grendel and the first 25 issues of The New Warriors are carefully boxed away.

But I can be surprised by what I actually own when I crack open dusty boxes, and sometimes I just can't find very particular things that I'm sure I had.

I've totally lost track of who I've leant stuff to over the years, and sometimes I get a pile of DVDs or trade paperbacks returned from family and friends, with profuse apologies for taking so long with them, and I didn't even know they had them in the first place. I knew my boxsets of The Wire were somewhere, I just didn't know they were at my sister-in-law's house.

I know a lot of people have databases and spreadsheets to keep track of it all, but that turns it from a hobby into a chore. The closest I ever got is a list of all the individual comics I need to complete various series, still printed out on paper and shoved into my wallet for the next time I stumble across a pile of Jonah Hex comics from the mid-2000s.

In the end, I'm not actually that bothered that I can't keep track of it like I once did. I've already outsourced all sorts of things like movie knowledge to places like the IMDB and wikipedia, and I long ago made peace with the idea that I can't own everything and know everything. 

A little mystery is good for the soul, even if it's just the mystery of what I did with that issue of Amazing Heroes with the Alan Moore interview in it that I've been looking for. I'm sure it's somewhere.

The Maxx: It's not cool to hallucinate, sweetie

- The Maxx #14

Pencils and inks by the late, great Sam Keith

Words by Sam Keith and Bill Messner-Loebs 

Colors by Steve Oliff 

Letters by Mike Heisler

Waiting for Samurai Jack

Ever since I became a parent, I have been asking myself the same thing over and over: When can I watch Samurai Jack with them? Are they ready for Samurai Jack? Are they old enough for the intensity of Samurai Jack? Wil they appreciate the delicate symmetry and balls-out action of Samurai Jack? Is it time for Samurai Jack?

Nearly. It's nearly time.

I also do think they are ready to start playing Risk, the other thing I've been patiently waiting for them to get old enough for - without taking all the little pieces and flinging them around the room. Small steps, but we get there in the end.

Aotearoa in the background

It used to be huge news when films were shot in New Zealand, and something as forgettable as the Race For The Yankee Zephyr was a huge fucking deal, even if it's a film that nobody cares about today (it does have some aces helicopter action in the hills around Queenstown).

Now I can be watching some random film, and I'll recognise the hill that an action hero is hiking over as one where me and my mates got stoned in the 90s, and I never even knew it was made in this country.

It's always very clear - the rocks, the tussock and the riverbeds of Canterbury and Otago are like nowhere else on the planet, and have been in my back yard for most of my life.

It used to be an actual news story when an overseas production was filmed in Aotearoa, and then the Lord of the Rings came along, and showed that a bunch of halflings at the arse end of the world could make epic cinema as good as anybody, and a big part of that epicness was the landscape.

Now that landscape shows up everywhere, and sometimes there is no way the Ash Vs The Evil Dead TV show can convince me that the back roads of Waikato are actually just outside Everytown, USA; or that a Mission Impossible part set in the foothills of the Himalayas is actually clearly spent near Lake Wanaka.

I don't even keep track of what is filming in this country anymore, so when I see the flora of my high country, it's little surprise when I look it up and find that it was filmed a metaphorical stone's throw from where I was born.

The most recent Predator was the one of the best recent examples, because that alien landscape that the predators is stomping through is clearly around the headwaters of the Rangitata River, with a whole bunch of vivid CGI alien landscape stapled on top of it.

I used to see things like that in the sky when I took acid on those hills, so it's no surprise to see that kind of landscaping on the cinema screen. It's familiar, even if it's a million light years away.

Not everyone is as miserable as you

I used to be a whiny adolescent, thinking that we all hated it when our friends become successful, but the person who gave us a song called that turned out to be a famously miserable cunt, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it. And letting famously miserable cunts convince us how the world works can have some extremely toxic results. 

I do believe Lord of the Flies has caused some real harm in the real world, because people think that in dire situations, everyone is going to go feral. It's become a cultural shorthand for when civilisation breaks down, and that it's human nature to destroy everybody to save yourself.

And it doesn't fucking happen - when a bunch of Tongan boys were stranded on a Pacific Island for more than a year in the 1960s, they worked together, and survived as a group.  Because that's how society works, we work together to build things, and when we turn on each other, it destroys everything for everyone.

It was only recently that I found out the writer of Lord of the Flies was a raging alcoholic who seemed to really dislike people in general, and that's not really the kind of personality that you should be telling us the score.

Because the real harm came in things like Hurricane Katrina, where help was withheld because of stories of the survivors turning on each other at the arena they fled to when everything else broke down, and exaggerated stories of terrible events were used an excuse to delay that much needed assistance.

Kill your heroes, they say, because they'll always let you down - the beat generation were incredible writers and almost uniformly terrible people by 21st century standards (with some bright and notable exceptions), but you can still dig their vibes - and some people will spend their lives trying to tell us that everybody is as wicked as they are. 

But we don't have to listen, or believe them.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight: Everyone feels the festive fever

It's hard to find cheap issues of the Moench/Sienkiewicz Moon Knight series these days, they often go for quite extraordinary amounts of money. Partly because they made a TV show about the superhero, but mainly because they have some truly fucking awesome covers.

But I still grab any inexpensive issues when I see them, because they are full of lovely Bill Sienkiewicz art, and because it's always fascinating to see an artist growing into their true style.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight comics are full of obvious Neal Adams moments - 

 - and then in the very same issue there will be moments when the beautiful chaos of the artist's later works starts to show through, and things break down in glorious fashion -

Seeing one of the great modern comic artists discover their true self is truly a great appeal of a monthly run, especially when it's such a vivid change of style.

The Nth Man is my main Marvel expertise

I was already interested in the new Marvel Age of Comics essays - small books full of information and analysis, looking at some of Marvel's most celebrated comics, because one of them was by Paul Cornell, and I was reading his stuff in the 90s when he was doing the same sort of thing with Doctor Who.

They are great little reads, especially Cornell's extensive look at the Avengers in the 1970s. They do sometimes get a little bogged down in plot recaps and explanations, but are pleasingly full of behind the scenes information and musing on the themes and artistic goals of these ephemeral comics.

I burned through them all in a weekend, and have already starting digging back into my Shooter/Perez issues of the Avengers. I have also been thinking about what Marvel comic I'd be qualified to write about if I did one of them.

Doing something basic like the Byrne/Claremont X-Men or Simonson Thor would be right out - they're still magnificent comics, but have been covered extensively in the decades they have been published.

There could be rewards in zeroing in on something like Alan Davis' ClanDestine, and use it as an excuse to get into the whole Marvel UK thing, and the brilliance of Davis' two Excalibur runs. There would also be ample room for thoughts ClanDestine's inability to get a grip inside the wider comic marketplace.

But I'm fairly sure it would probably be The Nth Man by Larry Hama and Ron Wagner. It only lasted 16 issues and change, but those 16 issues are full of world war, ninja mysticism and a dork with absolute reality-changing powers. It's incredibly propulsive and a deep mindfuck, and while it looks a lot like Hama's GI Joe, it is very much its own thing.

I could get 10,00 words on the career of Larry Hama, and a few more on Wagner's incredibly energetic art. It has some vague connections to the wider Marvel universe - they all show up in an issue of Excalibur in between those Davis runs - but it's a rare complete story from Marvel, even as it all gets cosmically goofy by the end of things.

If they did a series of books for 2000ad like they did for Marvel, I could write a dozen longs long essays on multiple long-running series and short shocks. But the Nth Man would be my Marvel man.

Doctor Who: Something from nothing

Anybody who has spent significant amounts of time immersed in the universe of Doctor Who will have dreamt about the lost episodes. Precious dreamtime given over to sitting down and watching a TV show that literally does not exist any more.

Those missing episodes of the Hartnell and Troughton years, lost due to stupidity and deleted from the historical record, are a hole in the story that is never really going to be filled. Marco Polo and the Myth Makers and Power of the Daleks only exist in re-creation now, and as much as we yearn to see them, they are more than likely gone forever.

Many of them only exist in dreams anymore. I've seen episodes of the Macra Terror in my sleep and while I can barely remember any detail, the giant crabs aliens were much scarier in my head than they were when they showed up in 21st century Who.

I first became aware of the missing episodes in a small write-up in the seminal 20th anniversary magazine, and they all seemed lost then. There was a strange fascination with this - no matter how determined I was to see as much of the show as possible, there would always be this missing part, forever out of reach, forever mysterious, forever gone. You'd need a TARDIS for that.

I have seen the missing episodes as best I can, in fairly crude reconstructions that put telesnaps over the soundtrack, and it's easy enough to follow the story, but not enough to really get engaged. A significant amount of missing stories have also been recreated in animation form, and they do have their charms, but they do miss the crucial subtilties of Hartnell and Troughton, the strange ways they moved and gestured that were so important.

There are also some fools who have been trying to recreate the missing episodes with AI, and that's just as creatively and morally bankrupt as expected, and should be of no interest to anybody.

So the animation is probably your best bet if you want to see some version of it, and you live with this tiny sliver of void in the best story ever told. 

And then every few years, somebody dusts off some old film can, and suddenly you're watching the Doctor and Salamander fight on the floor of the TARDIS, and the dream comes true. There is nothing in all entertainment that compares with the news that they've found some of the Dalek Master Plan, and we'll actually get to see Katrina and Bret Vyon in full episodes. Nothing.

I might still dream about them, but they've also escaped out into the real world, and always bringing the hope of more.