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

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