Mad Men: A place where we know we are loved

I've burned through much of my collection of movie DVDs as background noise while I worked at home over the past year or two, but this year I'm focused on the TV, and have started the year with some Mad Men.

It took me a few weeks to get through it all, but my extremely inane opinion is that it is still very, very good. It's the kind of drama that cuts to the soul, even if you don't have anything in common with these strange and ancient people who believed such weird things like smoking indoors. Sometimes you see their real selves - and they see it themselves - and it's devastating.

It's also incredibly funny - the lawnmower episode is an all time great and the scene where Roger gets to fire Burt for a second time is fucking hilarious -  as we watch these generally appalling people try to make a connection with others among the skyscrapers of the modern world. And occasionally uplifting, with the rise and rise of Peggy and Joan against a society that is full of nothing but old boys.

I've long thought that one of the greatest strengths of Mad Men is that no matter how much you hate Don Draper for the bullshit he pulls, it is infinitesimal compared to how much he hates himself - Jon Hamm's acting in the moments where he cracks and turns into Dick Whitman are actually heartbreaking.

But I've also always said Deadwood was my favourite show of that golden era of US TV because it was the one prestige show that wasn't about the death of the American dream, it was about the birth of it, as terrible people try to change to build something together, almost forming a civilized society by accident.

And Mad Men is set in the height of America, and the big twist is that it's not really a golden age, because the cracks are there, and a hell of a lot of people fall through them. It was a fine time for old white men and completely ratshit for absolutely everybody - anybody who doesn't fit the mold is kept away from any kind of power - and there are things that are taken for granted that are properly startling to the modern viewer. The most shocking thing in the whole series is still the moment where they have a roadside picnic, and then leave all their rubbish on the side of the road and just walk off.

It's the ideal of the American dream, and it's all fake ideals created by fake men, and sometimes you see the real human being beneath the suit or beehive hairdo. And al the powerful men are really scared little boys behind their wealth and influence, but at least the offices they work in and the clothes they wear are stylish enough to hide their pain.

Twin Peaks makes the top five

Deciding on my list of the top five movies ever made is something I take far more seriously than is warranted. Nobody else cares, or should, but I have thought about it a lot over the years, and have become certain in my verdicts. 

They say your tastes are defined by a very specific age in your life, when you're a very young adult and figuring out what kind of person you are going to be. And they're right because my personal list of the top five favourite films hasn't changed in decades. It was always an easy list to decide upon and has been the same since the 1990s.

(The top 10 is much more flexible and has never been set in stone, Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later come in and out, and Rocky Horror Picture Show and Die Hard have always been floating around in there, along with the best westerns. It's a fluid list.)

O Lucky Man! usually tops my top five, because it's always nice to have an absolute favourite film that is slightly unique, and I watched it again last year and it's still fucking awesome in what it says and sings; I have never got over the buzzing feeling of transcendence that I've got every time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey; Withnail and I has the best quotes of any movie ever; and the original Dawn of the Dead warped my mind right at the moment it needed to be warped.

The last spot was slightly flexible, but was always a western and usually a Clint. It was mainly The Searchers for the moment where the Duke's voice cracks at the end, but on any different day it could be the Outlaw Josey Wales for the words of iron speech; or Unforgiven for the final 20 minutes of wrath; or the Good, The Bad and the Ugly for its soaring magnificence.

But I've been thinking that list recently, and have come to the inescapable conclusion that while the westerns are all brilliant and still lingering in the more vague top 10, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is most definitely enshrined in that top five.

I saw it soon after it came out, and it's always spoken to me. It would be another five or six years before I actually got the chance to watch the TV show, and I was frequently lost by the dense plotting of the feature film. But it was such an intense experience it felt intoxicating, and I was greatly unimpressed by the critical indifference at the time (Kim Newman was the only writer I ever saw who captured what I felt about it).

I had that soundtrack on my walkman as I walked around town at night for years and years, and I got a real indication of a life in that darkness. I watched the film over and over, and can quote an embarrassing amount of it, and I finally saw it on a cinema screen for the first time last year.

It was the brilliance of that screening, and the full body chill that it gave me, that has now cemented it in my top five forever. A lot of the original show and The Return are staggeringly brilliant, and Fire Walk with Me is part of a vast tapestry of twisted genius, but it's also a genius work of cinema on its own.

I'm never gonna get vox popped by Letterbox, and that's fortunate because I'd be fucked if they did because they only want four films and I can't get it down that to just four. But those two hours in the town of Twin Peaks will always be one of them.

DC - The New Frontier: It has filled my heart with hope.

- DC: The New Frontier #4 

Written and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke 

Coloured by Dave Stewart 

Lettered by Jared K Fletcher

Jilted John: It's still a classic

It was the first record British superhero Zenith every bought, and we know this because he said it was a classic in a pop star profile that ran on the back page of a 2000ad in the late eighties.

I had never heard of Jilted John when I read that, and thought it must be nothing more than a joke record, because Zenith was always the great brat of 80s superheroes, and then I heard it years later and was delighted to discover it's the ultimate expression of the heartbreak of the whiny and problematic working class teenager, crying on his way to the chip shop - Gordon IS a moron! - and also a genuinely banging tune.

Zenith was fucking right! It is still a classic.

Outlander is gone now

I might have been the only person in the world who thought of an old poster for Outlander (2008) as a genuine cultural institution, so I'm almost definitely the only person who was sad to see it go, and I'm sure it's my fault.

I think I fucked up by pointing out that there were still posters for these films in a story I wrote for work about the state of the Majestic Theatre in Timaru. They were the last signs of the video rental store that used to live on the bottom floor of the theatre, put up and forgotten for more than 15 years.

I always liked to check if those posters were still there every time I went back home, because both the cinema and the video store were Very Important parts of my life at some points, and while the faded posters might look like neglect, the fact that they stayed up for years and years was always gently reassuring.

Then I only had to go and bloody point this out, and the last time I went home for a family wedding, they were gone. There's just a flyer for a beer festival down the bay now.

Nothing else has changed, there is no sign of any actual restoration of the theatre, but there are just blank windows instead of faded cinematic dreams. 

In this fucked up world, it's a stupid thing to care about, but I really did, and I'm sorry they were cleared away.

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.