Doctor Who and the Blunted Sharpness of Media Criticism

I still read every issue of Doctor Who Magazine as it comes out, and have been doing so regularly since the nineties. I think it's a remarkable publication - more than 600 issues and decades of reviews, analysis, interviews and comics - and it's as strong as it ever was.

Having read it for so long, I do see how it has changed over the years. And there is still a lot to admire - the design team have been consistently strong, and some of the most recent covers are as striking as ever, getting a lot out of the limited number of photos of William Hartnell they might have. But the general tone of the magazine has also evolved, sometimes in strange and unexpected ways.

I'm generally on board with all the changes, the entire concept of Dr Who is built around the idea of regeneration and moving with the times. But I do wish it was a little bit meaner, like it used to be.

I do genuinely believe the publication was at its best in the wilderness years - with no TV show to preview and pore over, the magazine turned more introspective, and was filled with essays and articles about what it all meant. But it was also a time when they didn't have to play nicely with the BBC to ensure they kept up their extraordinary access to the production of the show, and could more easily acknowledge the faults of the thing they loved.

They could get particularly scathing about Dr Who's old producers, especially when they were picking away at sacred cows, and the reviews of the New Adventures books got downright nasty at times.

But then the show came back in 2005, and there was definitely more of a celebratory tone which has grown and almost calcified. And 21 years later, there is no room for rampant miserabilism any more.  They'll find something nice to say about even the worst Big Finish audio - and some of them are objectively awful - and the latest season of the TV show is always the greatest ever.  

It's not just in the rarified airs of Doctor Who fandom - all the music magazines I respect rarely give five stars to new music, but they don't get one either, it's almost all in the usual 3 or 4 stars range. And I miss the regular meanness of the Comics Journal, arguing about things that feel like dust in the wind now, but were so important at that time. While I do occasionally see sparks of the old viciousness, I still feel remorse for the fact we never got a full on scathing obituary of Stan Lee from Gary Groth. 

People are, obviously, as mean as ever, and you can see that online every day. But the more mainstream things get, the more those sharp edges are filed off, even though it's often the sharpness that make you feel something in the first place. 

The perfect Spider-Man

I was far too young for Ditko, and only knew the Romita era through reprints, but the Ross Andru version will always be the one, true Spider-Man to me. 

I got a beat-to-shit copy of Amazing Spider-Man #179 out of a dollar bin recently, and it's got everything I ever want in my Spidey stories. It's got a splash page with Spider-Man trapped by the Green Goblin, while swearing that he has to break free because Aunt May is dying and he's the only way who can save it; some beating up of some random thugs with appropriate quipping; Spidey's webbing breaking under the strain during a crucial moment; some small moments of soap operatics with the supporting cast; a last page twist about the Goblin's identity; and the cleanest art in 70s Marvel. 

It's all I ever wanted in a Spider-Man story. It's all I'll ever need.

Living for the fifth week

My local comic store started the year with a restock of its $1 comics, because they are true and beautiful people, and I saw them post about it on Instagram and I was there an hour later, and was the first to suck up the cheap stuff.

I mainly went for the Unknown Soldier comics, because I still have a deep affection for the bandaged WW2 warrior that goes back to the days when I first learned to read. But I also hoovered up some absolute mint mini-series published by Vertigo around the turn of the millennium, mainly for the Glen Fabry and Phil Winslade art.

And I also scored almost every issue of the DC fifth-week comics event that brought back the Justice Society in 1999, and that was quite a score, because I'm always trying to live in the fifth week.

DC used to have this small gap in their publishing schedules with the 'fifth week', and would fill it with some specific event full of one-shots by some very interesting creators. They only did it for a little while, and haven't really done it for years, probably because the entire distribution system doesn't work like that anymore, and almost certainly because many regular readers took it as an opportunity to save money on comics that week, instead of buying something that 'didn't count'.

Of course, the ones that aren't tied so much into contemporary continuity are the ones that age the best, and are far more readable a few decades later. The most successful fifth-weeks were the ones that had a looser connective tissue - the GirlFrenzy, New Year's Evil and Silver Age events were mainly a bunch of one-shot wonders, while those that strived to tell a bigger story like The Kingdom or the Tangent books often feel half-baked.

But no matter how well the stories hold up, they often come with gorgeous artwork - that Justice Society one alone has pages and pages of wonderful work by Russ Heath, Michael Lark, Eduardo Barreto, Chris Weston and many others, and that's always worth hunting out.

They'll never be worth any real money, and may be little more than snapshots of a specific moment in time, but they're always worth digging out of the dollar bin.

All my friends are here

I always found the easiest way to make new friends was to find my fellow dorks. Even in the tiny town of a few thousand people where I was growing up, they were there. And while it sometimes took a little while to find them, I could always track some down. The geeks were my tribe, and my people. 

We might not all have the same passions, but it was the enthusiasm that always hooked me in. People who could get loud and excited about the weirdest shit were always the people I wanted to hang around with. I could feed off their positivity, and I still do. This shared happiness makes us all feel alive. 

Not all my mates share the same kind of drive for the nerdiest things in life. There have been some who actively hate the things I love - more than a few of my dearest friends think Dr Who is the stupidest TV programme in the world and tell me this on a regular basis, and I will always tell them they're wrong

As long as I can agree on the biggest things in life - some friends took a sharp turn down Bigot Ave, and it was painful to cut them out of my life, but it had to be done - there will always be a loving connection.

I went to a concert the other week with one of my oldest mates in the world, who I have known since 1984, and he's still as wild and honest and keen as ever, and it was the first time we'd gone out to something in many, many years, but we could have been 17 again. (Although he did not fail to remind me of the Radiohead gig he and my other pals saw in 1993 that I missed out on - still one of the great regrets of my life).

My oldest and deepest friendship started with a shared bond over the Judge Child Quest reprints that Eagle put out, and has been built on a shared love of 2000ad, X-Men, cricket and Doctor Who, but he's still the most loyal and kind person I know, and that counts far more than our shared opinions on Brian Bolland.

There were still times, when I felt like the only dork in the village, and the only one listening to Iron Maiden and reading Namor The Sub-Mariner comics. Those times felt like they would last forever, but they were extremely short-term in the end, because I always find my people. 

We're everywhere, and can bond over the dorkiest shit, and can always find each other.  

The Matrix Comics: Nothing more than a friggin' ghost in the machine

- The Matrix Comics

Art and story by the Wachowskis, Bill Sienkiewicz, Ted McKeever, John Van Fleet, Dave Gibbons. Peter Bagge, David Lapham, Paul Chadwick, Ryder Windham and Kilian Plunkett.

When nobody loves you

No disrespect to the author, but while I know things are getting worse in this world because the grand simulation we live in is getting overcomplex, so reality has to take shortcuts to fit it all in, putting a book called 'The Unwanteds' in the 'FREE!' box outside the best bookshop in town really feels on the nose.

Leatherface: The third saw is my favourite saw

The last few Texas Chainsaw Massacre films have been trapped in recycling mode, hitting the same old beats as all the rest, but my biggest hot take on the series is that Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is the best of them all.

Everybody knew about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was a kid. It was meant to be the worst of the worst, and everyone knew it. It was hard to find on video in our part of the world, so all we had to go on was that glorious name and concept, spoken in whispers and third-hand accounts. 

When my dad finally got a copy, I was about 12 or 13, and he refused to let me see it. His verdict was: 'It was all right, I suppose'.

The second movie turns everything up to 11, into something epic, and there is something awesomely apocalyptic about the last few moments of the film. But it was the third I saw first - after I got it from the new release shelf at my local video store in 1991  - and I thought it was magnificent. 

It's just a high quality splatter movie of its era. It had the slick sheen of that time, when even sordid little horror movies looked beautiful on film with the proper lighting, and it looked as slick as a Lethal Weapon. 

It was the same Chainsaw story - a group of slightly obnoxious young people take the wrong goddamn turn and end up in hell on earth - but it was also ruthlessly entertaining, with great performances all around.

It's most notable these days for a young Viggo Mortensen - he was obviously too good for this kind of thing, but still charming and nasty in equal measures. And it also gave the mighty Ken Foree a meaty role, after he was so good in the original Dawn of the Dead - he has a pleasing 'I can't believe I have to deal with this white boy shit' vibe going on, and I will never forget the way he spits out "You're toast, fuck!" at the end.

It's the one Chainsaw film I've seen the most. When I finally saw the original, it was messy and dark, and while I do appreciate the gritty grotesqueness of that first film, it's still the third that I'd always watch again, for all the thrills and chills.

Pixar never got into my heart

I've tried - I really have - and I truly respect the artistry of the movies and the way they have managed to connect with a mass audience on a very personal and emotional level, but I just never got into the Pixar films.

I was totally the wrong age for them, for starters. I was 19 when Toy Story came out, and I didn't want to see movies about toys that came to life, I wanted to see gangster films and gory horror and arthouse brilliance. 

And there was just something about the aesthetic of the whole thing that turned me off. The closest I ever came to seeing a Pixar at the movies was right back at the start, when A Bug's Life came out, and CG-animated films was still very much a new thing. But I chose to go to Antz instead, because it looked a tiny bit more edgy. 

There are no hard edges in Pixar films, and my favourite animation is always sharp and colourful. The characters were shaded and rounded and too smooth. Even the supersquare jaw of Mr Incredible has a roundness to it, set in jelly more than stone. And while there has been great colour work in recent Pixar films, those early years locked in a very pastel aesthetic.

This did become the default look for 99 percent of animation films and that's how you always tell the great films because they change a whole style - Saving Private Ryan isn't a great movie because of its clumsy script, but because every war movie after it is indebted to it - and everybody wants to look like Pixar these days, so fair play to them. 

For a while, I would watch Pixar films on long haul flights, because there was something about the proximity to a film in high altitude that made me feel a lot more emotional, but I got bored of that too.

But the kids are into them, and while it's not to any obsessive degree, they've watched all the adventures of Buzz and Woody, so I've seen them in bits and pieces, many times over. They seem okay.

Not today