There's nothing as good as bangers and mash with the Bash St kids

One of my great disappointments in life is that I have never tasted anything that looked as good as the grub in British kids comics like Buster, Cor!! and Whizzer & Chips. 

Rich Christmas pudding looked like a damned delight, giant mince pies that looked like the dream food, shiny fat cupcakes, and, of course, heaping of bangers and mash. No sausage and potato ever tasted so good.

Battlestar Galactica: No reason to get excited

I can still be surprised by people who watch the same things as me and get something completely different out of it. The Sopranos was one of the first times it really hit me, when people I saw it with would be disappointed in an emotionally crushing episode because nobody got whacked.

It has happened quite a few times since, but the biggest difference might still be in the 21st century version of Battlestar Galactica.

I watched the whole thing again recently and it remains a massively intense show. It is still a great watch in these stressful times - the world might be slowly burning down, but at least you don't have to worry about getting blown out an airlock by a fracking toaster. The performances are wonderful - Saul Tigh's amazing emoting eye remains a wonder - and the action still holds up, the shaky camerawork during the space battles used to annoy me but has aged really well, capturing the chaos of warfare in the vacuum.

But my favourite thing about it was always the weird spiritual dimension to it all, lurking behind the militarism and murders. When Baltar admits he sees angels in the room in the final episode - the first time he's really spoken any truth - it's a big moment, but there have been signs and prophecies and genuinely supernatural events that can not be explained, right from the start.

And most of all, I adore the idea that All Along The Watchtower is some kind of eternal song, a deep species memory that comes back out again and again. People hear it coming out of the walls of spaceships hundreds of thousands of years ago, before it finds a new frequency with Bob Dylan's mind in the 20th century. A song so good it transcends space and time and becomes a signal from the divine.

I still see people scoffing at the unknowable nonsense that permeates Battlestar Galactica, they just want to see soldiers shoot the shit out of robots, and I do respect that. But that's not why I got so much into it, I watched it for the strange and the spiritual, and for a song that existed out there in the universe long before humanity rose on Earth, and which led the way home.  

Phone etiquette in the theatre

Maybe it's because I grew up in the last age before everybody in the world had their phone in their pocket, but I was always just a bit too militant about the use of mobile phones in the sanctity of the movie theatre. 

I used to insist that everybody I went with turned off their phones as soon as things got projected on the screen, because this was the time to concentrate. I obviously got more lenient on using them through the advertisements before the start, especially when sometimes the ads are more than 20 minutes before an overlong film starts, and are the same crass slices of capitalism every time. 

But I do think the movie theatre is a slightly sacred place, and it is somewhat profane to sully it with an outside distraction, and that the phone should go away once the trailers start, and the experience begins. 

Like almost everything in life, parenthood changed everything. I have always used to turn my phone off. Then I had kids and it just wasn't responsible to go out of contact for so long, when you have small humans depending on you, and you need to be reachable for any kind of emergency.

I still mute the fucking thing, and turn the screen glare all the way down to the bare minimum. I don't check the phone during the feature presentation, but I will know if somebody is trying to call me by the vibrations.

Unfortunately, we do live in a deeply selfish age, and I know there are so many people out there who can't bear to be away from their feeds for two whole hours, and blithely don't care if they are fucking off everybody else in the room. It's everywhere - I had to tell someone to put down a whole goddamn iPad during a fucking Jim Jarmusch film, and they seemed genuinely baffled by how remarkably annoying they were being.

It's much more noticeable when I go to a Saturday night film in a crowded house at the multiplex, although many of the films I watch at the cinema are with the weekday morning crowd, where it's much less of a problem (and much easier to move about to avoid annoying distractions).

So it might be a losing battle to keep the auditorium dark, but I keep to my own standards and keep my phone off. Unless the school is calling because one of the kids has fallen over in the playground. That'll always be more important.

To be a loose cannon in LA

There has been a significant lack of Friedkin in my cinematic diet, so I finally caught up with To Live And Die In LA when it showed up on my Tubi feed recently. And I have to give it to old Billy, I was genuinely surprised how much it dissected the hugely dramatic idea of a loose cannon going on a roaring rampage of revenge, and showed how hollow it was.

Going into the film, I knew the fate of William Petersen's properly unhinged Dick Chance, and how that twisted the genre. But I didn't realise how much of an absolute arsehole he was before that bloody end. Chance is out to avenge his partner's death, but mainly manages to cause monstrous harm. He gets people killed, he fucks things up, all his loved ones think he's cracked, And most of all, he's a failure. His big plan to get vengeance doesn't work, he doesn't even get the satisfaction bringing down the bad guy and it's up to cousin Ira from Mad About You to get the job done.

I've seen literally hundreds of films with similar themes, but few that showed how hollow and awful that path in life can be, and the dead end it takes you down.

Loving the facsimile

Two thirds of the comics I got on a recent new release day featured George Pérez art, and considering we lost the big fella a few years ago, that's not a bad ratio. 

I get on average about one American monthly comic book every week - gotta keep that fix under control somehow - and I could never go cold turkey on new comics. But a sizable proportion of the ones I have been buying in the past couple of years are comics that were originally published years ago, and I've never been able to find them in any form until now.

They call them facsimiles, and I love them so very, very much. I don't think of them as artificial copies, they're just the latest printing of a comic that has not been in print for a very long time.

I've been unable to resist the new editions of Treasury comics from the 1970s that I only ever saw in the house ads of the time, and never in the flesh, and now I can feast on the Batman art has never looked bigger or brighter, and watch Superman race the Flash in the largest format possible.

These reissues are also wonderful for plugging those annoying holes in the collection. I've had the first and fourth issues of the wonderful JLA/Avengers crossover since they came out, but could never find copies of the middle two issues due to reprint problems, and then they were just available at the local comic store to pick up. 

And I always wanted the 200th issue of Justice League of America, especially with pages of Bolland's Batman taking on Black Canary and Green Arrow and the facsimile copy of that I just snapped up was even in that Treasury format.

These blasts from the past still have just as many thrills as they did when they were first published, and I still grab random issues when I'm at the comic shop. Why not get the first Sgt Rock comic, or a very special issue of the X-Men? They still count as something new to me.

Muting the Avengers

I survive the never ending maelstrom of social media with a heavy blocking and muting policy. It does not take much. Any gross display of entitlement, any thoughtless piece of rudeness, or any bigotry at all, and it's an instant block. Life is much better that way.

But there are some topics where good people have dodgy opinions that I just can't get behind, and that requires a delicate sense of muting. And several months out from the latest Avengers film from Marvel, I have trained my meagre social media presence to ignore all things related to that film.

On one hand, there is some mindless adoration and endless publicity that I can avoid, but on the other, I get to also avoid exposure to all the cool kids telling me how much they hate the films. So I still want to follow film writers who bang on about great transgressive cinema, but I really don't need to know how much they hate Spider-Man movies, because of course they fucking do.

I really don't get either side of the love/hate equation to the Marvel superhero movies. None of them are masterpieces, but none of them are total dogshit either, they're all just fine. And sometimes fine is okay is all right. Some basically competent filmmaking with a few things we've never seen before is all I need for a good night out at the movies. I rarely remember much about them, but that's all right, my brain is full enough.

The trigger for my latest bout of industrial strength muting was the general complaining about all the homework that was supposedly required for the new film. All the past stories that needed to be revisited to get the full effect of the latest effort. 

The biggest complaints seem to come from people who would never see the new film anyway, and I don't think you need to see a damn thing before going to these movies. I can get the gist. I don't understand the plots of almost all the James Bond films, but I like the sex and violence.

Besides, I was 350 issues behind ion Fantastic Four when I first started reading that regularly, complete bafflement about the history of every damn little thing is the point.

So I don't find myself missing much by cutting out the chatter. It can make the end experience better because it's no context, all feeling. I've enjoyed the past few years of Doctor Who a lot more because I haven't been interacting with that vast and sprawling fandom at all, and I greatly enjoy going to see films as soon as they come out on a weekday morning, before any reviews or general hot takes ruin it for everybody

So I won't know much more about the new film before I go see it in December- unless they put a big spoiler on the sides of buses or something - and I look forward to that marvellous experience all the more for it.

Bowling With Corpses: She paused to examine her own heart

- Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown 

Art and story by Mike Mignola

Colors by Dave Stewart

Letters by Clem Robins

Burn, baby, burn

I might not find the most excellent Milk and Cheese comics by the even more excellent Evan Dorkin quite as funny as I did when I was a 21-year-old edgelord. 

But the older I get, the more I think their ongoing rampages of destruction are entirely justified. 

The best guitarist I ever saw

I've had the extreme good fortune of seeing a handful of the world's best guitarists do their thing in the flesh. I've watched Neil Young shred it up with his Crazy Hose buds, and I've seen Jack White play to his audience of one.

There are many, many of the world's greatest guitarists who I have not seen, and never will. I'll never see Hendrix in the flesh, or any of those 60s greats that have, at the very least, retired from constant performing.

Then there are the great bluesmen of the old days, whose work survives in scratched permanence, and they were doing great work a century ago. And there are the people I've seen in pub bands who never broke big, but could do remarkable things with their guitar. And even some mates - my friend Louis has some of the best slowhand technique I've ever seen, but is content letting it rip at jam nights at the local pub.

But when it comes to the big shows and the big stars, there is one guitarist who genuinely impressed me more than anybody, and that was Tom Morello.

I didn't even know Prophets of Rage was a thing - a supergroup of members from Public Enemy, Audioslave, Cypress Hill and Rage Against the Machine - until my mate Brian convinced me to go to their show, and I was fucking glad I did because it was one hell of a gig, with that kind of back catalogue to dive into.

It was also a great fucking show because I spent almost the whole time staring with absolute adoration at Morello's guitar playing. I'd seen the big man perform a thousand times in music videos and concert films, but seeing him show off all his tricks in front of a huge audience was a total trip.

He shredded the big riffs, of course, but his playing was also so light and playful. He actually made feedback work as a separate instrument, and filled in the songs with all kinds of crazy noodling about. He had been doing this for several decades now, and obviously knew how to impress a crowd, but made it look like he was coming up with new ideas on the fly, as if this was the first time he'd ever thought of playing his guitar upside down.

And he made it look so easy, as if the six-strings were another part of his body, and playing unearthly sounds on it was just as natural as walking.

I've seen a lot of the huge bands I grew up loving, and look forward to seeing more - I finally got to see Pulp this year, so anything is possible! But it would take something to beat what I saw Tom Morello do on stage that one time.