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

Dunk and Egg all the way

Even with such strong source material from George R R Martin, it's been a sheer fucking delight to see how thrilling and entertaining the Dunk and Egg TV show has been. 

It has the kind of perfect casting that has been the secret strength of all the Game of Thrones shows, while fleshing out characters by seeing them sing and drink and fight and fuck - the Laughing Storm finally comes across as a real person, not just a convenient plot point.

And it's a show gets straight to the point, with a laser focus on a far smaller cast of characters than anything else in Westeros, and is all the richer for it. There are still depths, especially once they really get into the whole Blackfyre thing - there is a monstrous amount of history and battles and romances lurking behind the simple story of Ser Duncan and his squire Egg.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has already been renewed for a second season, but my hope is that they keep going past the end of the third novella that has been published so far. The large picture has been there in the various histories of Westeros for some time, enough for the television version to tell many of those stories that fill in the gaps with some certainty.

Prose is always better - I am a book man, first and foremost - but why not show what happens in Winterfell when they finally get up there; or the story of young Prince Duncan and Jenny of Oldstones; or the fight between the Laughing Storm in his rage and the Hedge Knight in his duty? Why not go and meet young Maester Aemon - arguably the greatest character in all the song of ice and fire - in his prime; or go all the way up to Dunk's final moments, saving Jon Snow's dad from the flames that consume some of the greatest of Targaryens. 

We will, of course, miss the interior thoughts and ideals inside Dunk's head that you get with Martin's marvelous novellas, but you can see it all on Peter Claffey's giant jaw, and I hope we see a lot more of it in the coming years.

The story behind the Image

I can remember where I was when big news events were happening, like the Challenger explosion, or the underarm bowling shenanigans, and I remember exactly where I was when I found out that Rob Liefeld was leaving Image Comics.

It was a few months after it actually happened, because there was no internet, and news about comic artists did not make the local papers or the six o'clock TV news. I only found out about it when I read the article in the latest Wizard magazine, a month or two after it happened. I saw the news while me and my mates were on a Christchurch mission, eating bread rolls and drinking chocolate milk beside the Avon River.

I know exactly where I was because I had been absolutely fascinated by all the stories behind Image Comics, far more than I was by the comics themselves.

I was certainly primed for Image - the Lee/Liefeld/Mcfarlane years at Marvel were all in my early teens, and I thought they were all magnificent - Jim Lee in particular made a huge impression. But I missed the boat completely when they all jumped ship and formed their own company - there was no comic shop near me, and the internet hadn't quite arrived, so all I knew about these comics were the articles in months-old magazines.

So the comics never meant much to me. I later bought the ones where they got someone like Alan Moore involved, but 95 percent of the Image output was actively off-putting by the time I saw them regularly on the shelves - they were some of the most rancid looking comics I'd ever seen.

I still think what happened at Image broke a lot of the arguments that the very smart people The Comics Journal had been making for years - that all creators needed was full control over their work and then they would produce heartbreaking art of staggering genius - and when that happened to the biggest artists of the day, they just added more guns and spikes and pouches.

So it's not like the comics meant anything to me, but the personalities behind them all were absolutely bonkers, and far more entertaining. The interviews I read with the Image founders might have been months old, but they were exciting and bold and brash.

When they ditched Marvel, it felt cataclysmic, in a way that was weirdly optimistic and earned. By then everybody knew how artists had been screwed over for decades, with the creators of Superman treated appallingly by a company that made billions out of their ideas. To see the power shift so dramatically was something to behold, and while it only lasted a few years before the big two companies reasserted their traditional dominance, this was something new.

When the first hints of them got through to me, it sounded fucking great. The trash talk of youth translated to my favourite medium. The artist taking on the suits, and starting a whole new line of comics. There had certainly been other comics publishers outside DC and Marvel, but most of them had vanished by the time the Image juggernaut got moving - Dark Horse hung in there with some excellent licensed comics - and none of them had the raw power that Image did.

All the optimism was soon tempered by generally dire quality of the comics, and the late books and non-arrivals, and the new talent they brought in to rush through the books who produced art that were mostly dire imitations of the superstars, artwork that satisfied nobody.

I bought a small handful of Image comics in the first few years, and they were pretty dull and ugly, but I never tired of that trash talk, and then some of them were sniping at each other, and then Liefeld was out, as I discovered on a Saturday afternoon by the river. The drama died down, and by the time Lee cut ties to go and do his thing at DC, most of the excitement around Image was gone.  

To everybody's credit, the company persevered and evolved over the years, and while it still makes some bone-headed moves, it has also produced a mountain of great comics in the past 30 years - less big cyborgs with guns, more heart-wrenching sagas with a very specific twist - and I've enjoyed more Image comics in the past decade than ever before.

Some of the comics are so good, I've even enjoyed them more than the stories behind the scenes, like the cheapness over a plane ticket that cost Marvel their superstar Jim Lee. But whenever a retrospective on that era is published, or one of those beautiful loudmouths gets on a podcast, I'm there to hear all the old stories of a seismic moment in the industry, when anything was possible. That potential might have failed to reach expectations, but it still gave us a hell of a lot of drama. 

Werewolf Jones & Sons Deluxe Summer Fun Annual: Hick!

- Werewolf Jones & Sons Deluxe Summer Fun Annual #1 

by Simon Hanselmann and Josh Pettinger

You think it's funny? - I hear Joe Strummer's words in my head every day

Joe Strummer was a true troubadour - he grinded new sounds out of his guitar, had a pleasing devotion to the magic of a campfire, and wrote genius lyrics that will live forever.

Sometimes he was just showing off - it's not enough that (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais soars to undreamed musical heights, it's also the story about hitting the clubs that has two pieces of lyric that are among the greatest ever written - the one about turning rebellion into money, surely the most righteous sneer I've ever heard on a record, and then he's talking about how they'd send a limousine for Hitler and it's still resonant, still smart, still so angry.

We should all mourn the loss of Joe, we can only dream of the songs he could have written about the last two decades of bullshit, but at least he left us with tonnes of small wisdom, sometimes in the same song.

Shifty: This is another story about rational control

I'm usually right on top of the new Adam Curtis films, but it took me six months to see there was a new project out there in the world. Once I was made aware of Shifty, I watched it all as quickly as humanly possible. You should too, because Curtis's films are always good.

I always think of them as essay films, with Curtis sometimes making wild leaps in deduction to bring separate events together under a common theme, just enough to push them out of straight documentary territory. But the hidden connections he finds in the world are always well argued and presented, and make some strange sense of the white noise of modern culture.

You always know what you are going to get - unearthed archive footage that is almost poetic, beams of light in dark rooms, rampant individualism making everything worse, and the great institutions of the world  giving up power to new money in the name of rational ideas, and seeing it pissed all away.

As bad as the world is now, there are also some reminders of how awful the good old days could be - the footage of the cops interrogating a rape victim is really hard to watch, because they really are unbelievable cunts. 

Some of the footage is so on the nose that it's hilarious - Princess Diana locked outside while the establishment party within; or a leering Jimmy Saville taking a bunch of quiet kids inside Thatcher's office. But it's also possible to be heartbroken by an elephant losing its soulmates, or buoyed by the fury of old soldiers who saw their complex pasts reduced to basic jingoism.

My favourite bit of film is the part where it captures all the girls looking incredibly unimpressed at the air guitar club in the 1980s. Those poor, poor girls. 

I do miss Curtis' narration, mainly because I really like the way he says 'rational' and 'control', but there is still an easy narrative to follow. And Shifty also comes with a pleasing amount of self reflection in its closing moments, admitting to the manipulation in the five films you have just watched.

Curtis is no hypocrite, just self aware enough to see what he is doing. It is informative, enraging, incredibly entertaining and occasionally moving. Just like life.

Bane is lying!

There are a lot of weird politics in Nolan's Batman films, and the relative complexity of the films are still very blunt and obvious.

But the idea that Bane actually stands for the little guy, against the corrupt oligarchy, and is a direct criticism of justifiable protest action - that one still grinds my gears. 

He's Bane! he's lying! He's using that righteous anger as a weapon, but he doesn't actually believe the shit he says. He's just another hateful ogre, using the usual brute force for his own goals, and he doesn't care who he has to sacrifice to achieve his monstrous goals.

You can't trust Bane!

The various Occupy movements were still happening when this film was released, and I can see how easy it is to see this silly Batman movie as a criticism of them, but it felt like more of a warning. Even as the protest movement's methods and infrastructure were co-opted by selfish, shallow fools, that doesn't mean their aims and goals were foolish -  making the world a better place is always a noble idea.

Politeness is not getting us far in this world, and it may take the guillotines before we get any real social change, but Bane is not doing that. He stands for nihilism and the void, and just wants to burn the world down, not build a new one. 

He had one of the great voices in modern cinema - anyone who complains that hey can't understand his mumbling is a total wiener - but Bane wasn't interested in making the world a better place, he just wanted to terrorise it. Any fool can see that.

This is the way the world works, with Tyranny Rex

2000ad has informed most of my politics over my life - much of my rage at the unfairness of the modern political and capitalist system was stoked by Pat Mills alone - and this one small sequence by John Smith and Steve Dillon, featuring new character sensation Tyranny Rex being sentenced to death for illegal cloning by a corrupt judge with a wedge of cash on his desk, informed a lot.

Much of my opinion on the modern judiciary can be traced to that last panel.