Flash Gordon: He'll save every one of us!

Queen's Greatest Hits album was the first actual LP record I ever bought with my own money, and one time at a pub quiz I proved I was the biggest Queen nerd in the room by easily naming 10 of their albums (this was before the movie, when their music found whole new audiences).

But if I had a ray gun to my head and was asked to name the best Queen album ever, I would almost definitely pick the Flash Gordon soundtrack. 

It's certainly the one I've listened to the most, on long road trips in my car, or as background noise in the house. I bought the cassette tape from the DEKA store in Timaru in 1989, and still have that tape, and it still sounds totally rad. There is a particular appeal in soundtracks that are composed entirely of one rock band's efforts - the Young Fathers' music in 28 Years Later being a prime recent example - but nobody ever did it better than Queen.

It's almost a musical - the scintillating riffs spliced with judicious use of dialogue, and you can easily follow the story of Flash and Dale and their pals overthrowing the evil Emperor.  I never get sick of hearing General Kala's dispatching of War Rocket Ajax to bring back Flash's body.

It's also got a terrific wedding march - I listened to it on the day I got married to get the blood pumping - and some moody, long bits of ambient dreaminess as they sail through the void, with the occasional thudding drums pushing through to remind us of the emergency.

And above all, the thumping, soaring theme song - with that insistent, pounding bass, and the plaintive wailing for someone, anyone, to save the world.  

I've listened to all of Queen's albums to various degrees over the years, but the Flash soundtrack is still the one I want to listen to the most. It's great for listening to during a long writing session, and it's even better when I've got nothing more to do than lie back and listen, and let Queen take me to another world.

House of the Dragon: There are no sides

Now that the thoroughly excellent Dunk and Egg TV show has finished its limited run, the publicity machine is already kicking in for the the third season of House of the Dragon, which is only a few months away.

Unfortunately, it looks like the people who sell that TV show are ignoring the complex and loud subtext of the story and are sticking with a 'whose side are you on?' theme. And that is bonkers to me, because it's missing the entire point of the thing.

With all the fictional reference books about the history of Westeros and the world in exists in, there are a thousand weird stories to tell about the people who live on that world. The Dance of the Dragons isn't particularly one of my favourites, but it is still an intense and stylish show. 

But it is properly annoying when a pop-up ad on some news website demands to know if I'm for the Greens or the Blacks, and I do find it somewhat offensive, because that's the kind of thinking that sparked this fictional war and the infinite carnage and untold misery caused by some cunts who think they deserve to rule the land. 

Both sides in the Dance of the Dragons have some despicable and nasty people doing things in their names, and both sides have innocents, and both sides are full of good people forced to do what they can for the survival of their families.

It's these complexities, these details, that make the vast brushstrokes of this story so vivid. And it's certainly not dependent on whose side you are on. If you're not on the side of the smallfolk and other innocents, it doesn't matter who you support. 

They're all monsters. They're all dragons.

Aprils Fool's Day: Always a day behind the bullshit

I've always hated April Fool's Day. Right from the start - I hated getting tricked as a kid. I thought it was dumb.

I particularly hate April Fool's Day now as a journalist, because even with all the evidence you can gather, you ultimately have to trust people at their word, and can be severely fucked if they go back on it, and there is just one day in the year where you can not trust any motherfucker.

And I very much hate it in the internet age, because I have been tricked a number of times on April 2, when people on the other side of the world are still playing the fool, while the rest of us have moved on.

Who is more foolish - the fool, or the person being fooled? It's the fucking fool.

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.