Legion Shrugged with An Ryd

When I was becoming more philosophically aware as an adolescent, I got very confused by all the talk of Ayn Rand and her very particular form of objectivism, because I kept getting her mixed up with the character of An Ryd, who was Ultra Boy's old flame and showed up in the one issue of Legion of Super-Heroes that I had as a kid and read a million times over. 

Poor An is quickly murdered in an attempt to frame Jo Nah, while Ayn has inspired some of the most terrible people in the world, who have objectively made the world a worse place. Ultra Boy's old girlfriend only ever appeared for a few pages in a Legion of Super-Heroes comic, but she was probably a better source of inspiration.

Freed from the tyranny of a self-imposed list

For the past few years, I've been taking note of how many films I actually see every year. It was useful to look back on when people asked me what I'd watched recently (my short term memory is shot to hell, man), and to see how many films I actually watch in a single year (usually around the 300-350 mark). 

It was also useful in that it forced me to watch new things, and more films with subtitles. More old films and more movies made in my own country. Less repeat watches, less franchises and sequels, and more films at an actual cinema.

This year I got off to a slow start, and by the end of April was only up to about 70 films, which means I was going to end up watching a lot less than recent years (this is a year to catch up with television). But I was tracking to see far more in the theatre, and a lot of non-English movies, and that gave me the dose of cinematic smugness I need in my film diet.

I never made a Letterboxd list, or made entries in a spreadsheet or database or anything like that. It has always just been a list in notes on my phone, and the other day I fucked it up and completely wiped this year's list.

It was shaping up so well, and it was all lost in a moment of idle bullshit on the phone. I know it was up to 70 films, but I'm fucked if I can remember all of those movies, so the list is a write-off for the year. I'll pick it up again in the sci-fi year of 2027.

But it has been oddly freeing, and my viewing habits are becoming not so rigid, so regimental, this year. I don't have to worry if a strange 69-minute doco on Tubi counts as a feature film, and if I have a mad desire to watch all the Marvel superhero films in a row, just to see how they hold up, I'm not going to fuck up the ratios. I can rewatch as many damn old films as I like.

I will start it up again, but for now, I can watch bits of movies, or the schlockiest of schlock, just because I feel like it, not because I'm trying to achieve some mad quota that absolutely nobody else in the world gives a damn about. 

There might be less old and foreign films that will undoubtedly be transcendentally good when I do finally see them, but I just don't need to worry so much about that for the rest of the year. 

Beatrix Potter and the sheer silliness of Hunca Munca

Most kids fiction rides on the tides of fashion and whim, and the things the kids read and watch today are very much not the same things they were into 10 years ago.

But some things last for more than a single generation, especially when parents can't help introducing their offspring to the same things they loved as a kid. And some very rare things last for many decades, even though they are full of references to things from long ago.

Among the greats of children's literature is, of course, Beatrix Potter. Her ideas and concepts are still being lucratively mined, nearly a century after she died, and audiences are still responding to her gentle adventures of Peter Rabbit and chums, and the incredible artwork that depicted them. 

They also, on occasion, sound completely bloody insane when you read them out loud to children.

We've had a small collection of Potter books in our house since long before our kids came along, and now they are at an age that they are suitable for bedtime reading, but then my wife hears me reading out a line like "there was no end to the rage and disappointment of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca" and she thinks I'm having a stroke or something.

The general moralising of these stories still stands up, relatively speaking, but some of the details sound like somebody completely off their tits. The kids don't mind, of course, they think the names are great.

Maybe this is one of the main reasons people still read Potter books. Not because they are timeless tales of gathering nuts and stealing veges, but for the weird little details, and strange names that still get a reaction from a modern reader, even if that reaction is likely to be 'wait, what?'. Stories have become immortal for less.

A Clockwork Orange still makes me sick

After recently watching A Clockwork Orange for the first time in years, I think I can safely say that it will be a few more before I ever watch it again. It's such an intelligent and wonderfully weird film, with an eternal score by the wonderful Wendy Carlos, some incredible slow motion work and  a truckload of big, weighty themes. But it's also super fucking gross.

Everything in it is revolting - the fashion, the decor, the way Alex eats those peas at the end, the perv teacher drinking the water with the false teeth in the glass. Malcom MacDowell's smirk is deeply creepy, his singing and clumsy use of ultra-violence is off-putting and his retching once he goes through the treatment is properly appalling. That gorgeous Carlos soundtrack is the only part of the film I would ever want to revisit (I always thought it makes a great soundtrack to any writing efforts).

Kurbick famously took this movie out of circulation in the UK for several decades because he was concerned about copycat crime, but he shouldn't have bothered. Everything in the story of Alex and his droogs is awful, and there is nothing there that anyone should want to repeat. 

Death of a blog

Every now and then I check the links in the row of blogs going down the side of the Tearoom of Despair over there - the ones that play the beats I like - and I discover that another one has vanished, with just the oblivion of the 'Page Not Found' message left behind.

I lost all faith in any corporate website ever having a proper archive after just a few years, and feel this is a major contributor to the cultural black hole of the early 21st century. That hole has been fed by the failure of ambitious web businesses, and now personal sites are also fading away. 

I don't blame the people who created the great comic blogs of the 2000s and 2010s for shutting up shop. It's their shop to shut, and they're well within their rights to close things down, when they realise they can't be bothered to paying the hosting fees for another year, and are happy to let their efforts evaporate into the ether.

But I still feel a notable pang of grief when I see another has disappeared. There was, for example, a tonne of great writing and some terrific podcasts on The Factual Opinion that isn't there anymore, (although you can still thankfully find old episodes of Travis Bickle on the Riveria here, and there was even a truly unexpected episode of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell the other week).

The latest one to disappear was one my of my all-time favourites from the golden age of comic blogging - Dorian Wright's postmodernbarney. I went looking for one of Wright's old FCBD write-ups, because they were truly exhaustive in the best possible way, but it's all gone. I still follow Wright on Bluesky and never tell him how much I have loved his stuff, because he does not suffer fools (and foolish nerds in particular), and I find it hard to lavish people with praise without sounding a bit foolish.

There are still some glorious personal archives out there, and I regularly read up old reviews on places like the Savage Critics. There are still some lunatics who still blog on a regular basis, and I never, ever miss a post by blogging royalty Mike Sterling, deadset legend J Caleb Mozzocco and my pal Nik. None of them seem to be going away any time soon.

I regularly back up the Tearoom, because I don't trust blogger.com, although I've been here since 2009 and it's been okay so far. But I'll also always try to keep some kind of record of all of the nonsense that I post here, for as long as I'm able, because the embarssing early stuff is part of the whole picture. I'm not letting that fade away.

The terror of the first record shops

There is a very specific age in life when music suddenly becomes the most very important thing in the world. It's usually around the time that puberty kicks in and there are big decisions to be made at this time - the type of music doesn't fully define who you are and who you are going to be, but it can be a fucking big signpost on that path. 

I spent my childhood in bookstores, but I was always fascinated by the record shops, and the old weirdos who filled them. It wasn't as intimidating as something like the pub, where kids were definitely not allowed, but it was still a little scary - I just didn't understand all the genres and styles, and record shops were stacked with old music and weird ephemera. 

It can be especially daunting when you're not sure about the music you're choosing, and you're flailing around, trying all sorts of things, and never knowing what is going to speak to you, and really get through to your soul. 

My first big music love was for Pink Floyd, and I had no access to internet knowledge, or even much in the way in books, so I knew nothing about them, and that was the kick in the arse that got me going to the record stores regularly, where I would spend countless hours, trying to figure out if Relics was a 'proper' Floyd album.

They reckon that smell is the easiest way to trigger memories, and I totally believe that's true. Sometimes I smell 1995 at the cinema, and the other day I smelt a pile of dusty albums sitting in an old record store and was taken all the way back.

There were several kinds of record store - there were the big neon mega-stores, almost all gone now, and loads of middle of the road outfits, full of top 20 and not much else, which definitely did not survive. And then there was the record shops that all had the strange stuff, usually run by very surly older men who were obviously judging you just by the way you browsed.

It wasn't just the places themselves that gave me the existential shits, it was the vast amounts of unknown music they represented, and how unsure I was in my own tentative steps. 

In the end, it was the grumpy guys who survived, because they provided a curation service, and while they were definitely the scariest places to start off with, they were also the ones where I later became extremely comfortable, a regular who the owner could recommend new tunes to. 

It really wasn't long before I became one of those scary old crusties, and I remain one of them to this day. I just try not to judge the kids who keep coming in, looking for their path, and let them figure it out for themselves.  

A1: I've got this sneaky feeling I've been taken for a ride.

- A1 #1 

Pictures and words by Garry Leach, Barry Windsor-Smith, Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, John Bolton, Graham Marks, Brian Bolland, Steve Parkhouse, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Gibbons, Ted McKeever and Glenn Fabry. We used to have COMICS, man.

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