This is a house of McMahon: Modern Dredd

Beyond the most obvious appeals of McMahon's late period Judge Dredd, with pleasingly abnormal colours and blocky, abstracted action, there is always something nice about the way it is still embraced by a British audience. He does a 2000ad cover like the first piece featured above, with wild distortion and crazy anatomy, and they instantly put it out as a tee-shirt, because it's so damn popular. This kind of strangeness should always be that damn popular.

Got the radio on.

I cannot stress how much impact this episode of Dancing in the Streets - the BBC documentary series about the history of popular movement - had on me, I must have watched it a hundred times in the late nineties. I think I've still got the videotape in storage, on a tape after a dubbed copy of the Third Man. Even for an absurd sentimentalist like myself, that's a bit much.

But this episode, man. Just when I was trying to figure out what kind of person I was, I watched this and saw something I didn't know I needed. It opened my ears to the political aspect of it all, and the fact that it was a working class artform. It showed me that music didn't have to clash with other cultures, when it could make friends with them instead, and that there is no different between a hard punk riff and a deep reggae groove.

I could chant 'no future!' with the best of them, but this was my own, personal future. 

Hiking through Lost with a good backpack

I've been hugely tempted to go back and watch Lost again recently. I've seen the whole thing twice - once during its first broadcast, and one binge watch a few years back, but I'm steadily persuading myself to get into it again.

Not because all of that silly mystery box stuff - all that nonsense really doesn't matter once you've been given all the answers you are going to get - but because I'm a sucker for its blatant sentimentality in a world of sci-fi craziness, with a terrifically romantic cast jumping through all sorts of existential hoops, and - like Buffy - occasionally beating the tar out of each other. 

Plus, I keep thinking about how Lost proved one thing above all else - the value of a decent backpack.

A lot of that story was spent walking all around that fucking island, and it really proved to me the value of a plastic bottle and a backpack.

The most basic things become the most important, when all else is stripped away from you. And you could be lost in literal oceans of time, and slogging through some strange esoteric history, but it's a lot easier to keep away from a metaphysical smoke monster with your hands free and your bottle in your bag. 

It reminds me of other stories I've read, based on real events in far off countries, about how when all of society is collapsing around you, and you just need a lemon tree or something that produces food. You might get sick of lemon tea, but can use the excess lemons to trade for other goods to keep you alive and healthy.

And even though it's just a lemon tree, you have to  protect it with your life, because it is your life, and you might not think you're capable of killing someone over a lemon tree, but if it's all you've got and the difference between your own survival or annihilation, all morals go out the window.

But it's that most basic thing - a single tree or a backpack on a desert island - that can keep you going, and keep you alive. Or at least make all that hiking for answers a little easier. 

Where's the Buffy?

It's a little weird to notice that there aren't any Buffy The Vampire Slayer comics coming out anymore. They have been more or less in continuous publication for a quarter of a century, before slowly fading away and stopping altogether earlier this year, and nobody seems to be in any hurry to bring Buffy and the gang back again.

Probably because nobody really talks about Buffy at all very much these days. The whole thing has been overshadowed by the awful personal behaviour of the creator and principle creative force, and all the things the TV show did that were so innovative and new at the time have been endlessly rehashed by lesser programmes.

I certainly have fond memories of many parts of the TV show - it could surprise, or move in unexpected ways; and sometimes it just had some terrific fights between extremely good-looking people.

And I've read a hell of a lot of the Buffy comics that started coming out while it was still on the air, and that have continued to be published in the many years since the final episode was broadcast. Some of them had lovely art, and a few of them had stories that were fun and entertaining, but they have mostly been fairly mediocre. 

There have been several attempts at revitalizing the Buffy comics, often bringing in creators from the show and going in grand directions, but they almost all petered out. There was even a full reboot a few years ago, for one last bite at that plump artery, but that new well also soon ran dry. 

So there have been a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics, and there was something oddly comforting about the way they kept it going, regardless of results. It's like when I see Tom Sniegoski still writing Vampirella comics - it's not my thing but it's something that is nice to know is still quietly ticking along out there.

Everything ends eventually, and even wildly popular TV shows pass into history, and while I have little doubt that somebody, somewhere will pick up the Buffy concept and run off to do comic books with it, it's still slightly disconcerting to see it currently so quiet on the slayer front.

Criminey cripes, Colossus!

I've used 'criminey cripes!' as a very mild form of profanity for more than 35 years, after seeing it once in an 80s panel of Uncanny X-Men by Chris Claremont and Rick Leonardi. There's something so charming about the innocent way Rogue uses it, even as her invulnerability protects her hand from melting off against Colossus' buff metal bod. 

I don't use it very often, but there are times in my life when a 'criminey cripes' is the only thing that will do.

Doctor Who and the Jeje Delight

As Twitter collapses into a black hole of sheer nastiness, there are still bright points of light on its event horizon, burning with the desire for some kind of happiness in this cold, cold universe.

Like so many of us, I've drifted away from almost all social media, bored by idiotic algorithms and the slow and dawning realisation that most people on planet Earth are actually complete cunts. Twitter used to be a genuinely invaluable source of breaking news, but has steadily become more and more useless, with extremely lax quality controls fucking it up for everyone. Even with an incredibly proactive block policy, it's got worse and worse, and now feels like just another dying suburban mall.

But even those terminal malls have some kind of interesting stores between the shuttered chain outlets, and if these are actually the last days of Twitter (I'm not calling it X because I'm not a fucking 14-year-old edgelord) before it fades away into terminal obsolescence, I will remember them as the time of one person's utter delight for Doctor Who.

For a long while I would go online and look up all sorts of instant reactions to Doctor Who episodes as soon as I'd seen them, but I stopped doing that somewhere in the reign of the Eleventh Doctor, because even the mildest of episodes were targets for unrelenting negativity. Just too much nitpicking, too much needless context, too much fucking baggage.

But then along comes jeje - a Matt Smith fan who just started randomly watching Doctor Who because they hadn't seen the big man in his first big role and just fucking loves it, with lots on intensely happy reactions.

You can see the glory of it all for yourself here, although the Doctor Who stuff is mainly in beautifully mad rambling and messy of threads, so there is no good place to start. But it's full of deeply inappropriate reactions memes, ridiculous nicknames for the cast and proper wide-eyed enthusiasm for this silly little show.

It's impossible for me to watch Doctor Who in such a pure way, coming at it with decades of backstory, and the sheer love is such a surprise after years immersed in Who fandom, that it's genuinely charming and refreshing. The fact that a 61-year-old TV show can inspire such joy is testament to the glory of Doctor Who, and to finding some light in the dark.

Taking care of my own parish

In times like this, you find hope where you can, even if it's in yet another bloody podcast.

I was listening to a recent interview with Dr John Cooper Clarke, the monumentally important punk poet, and in-between poetry readings and sartorial musings, Clarke talked about about his current political views, and how if you want to change the world, you have to start local. Keep an eye on your local parish, rather than the global community. It's the only way to change your world.

And those are some ideas that I've clung to with a feverish mental intensity for the past few weeks, as the global political situation looks increasingly grim, with vast hordes of people actively choosing bigotry, ignorance and downright malice in their leaders.

Because Clarke is right, when it comes to politics you can only make real difference on the local level, and take care of your own. Seeking any further political power always leads to compromise and inevitable failure, but you can change the world immediately around you.

It also makes me think of Ikiru, the classic movie by the mighty Akira Kurosawa, and the way a man at the end of his life finds purpose in doing one small, tiny thing for his own neighbourhood. He finds some peace in the task, although it remains tragic that it took a terminal diagnosis to actually do something. 

It's only natural to feel anxiety about world politics, even if you're far, far away from the epicenter of them all. But if you really want to do something, start small and start local. The worst thing you could happen is that you end up with a nice playground for the kids, and maybe you can change your local world, just a little bit.

(You can find the whole interview with Clarke here, on British comedian Adam Buxton's podcast. It's excellentt, like all of Buxton's interviews, although I am still confused over whether Rosie the dog actually exists or not. It's not the end of the world, all things considered, but it remains quietly infuriating.)

This is still a house of McMahon: Prime Dredd

Mike McMahon's classic version of Judge Dredd is so monumental, it's dizzying to note that he was only a regular Dredd artist for a few years, before moving off to other pursuits. That sacred cragginess, the relentless invention, the dynamic and distorted capabilities of Dredd's body, that truly idiosyncratic use of colour, those big drokkin' feet - it all flares up and burns out in just a couple of years.

30 days of comics #30: Room for one more?

What The--?! #3

By Herdling, Saviuk, Busiek, Fry, Howell, Sinnott, David, McFarlane, Hembeck and Baker.

One of the core tenets of the Marvel Universe is that all these very silly events and characters must be taken absolutely seriously. The fandom hate it when you make fine of their favourites, but fortunately the creators do still love doing it.

These comics often get swept under the table - when I was at my peak Marvel Zombie period, I literally could not tell if Not Brand Ecch was actually a real thing, or some kind of weird bullpen in-joke. And nobody talks much about What The--?!, even though the first half dozen issues had art by the ultra-hot Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Erik Busiek and Whilce Portacio, with other stories by deadset legends like Steve Ditko, John Severin, Hilary Barta, June Brigman, Jon Bogdanove, Fred Hembeck and John Byrne.

All these artists benefit from the loose nature of exaggerated cartooning - Ditko in particular breaks out of that beautiful rigidity to create something truly energetic with Severin on the inks - creating comics that are full of jokes that haven't aged well, on stories with art that remains more timeless than the serious comics of the day.

This particular issue was always my personal favourite, I got it right off the shelf at the time, and still have that copy today. Most of it is concerned with a gentle pisstake of Kraven's Last Hunt, with the terribly underrated Alex Saviuk doing some good homages, some classic Hembeck foolishness, and a really terrific spoof of the X-Men teams of the day, with wonderfully goofy Kyle Baker art.

It also has Todd McFarlane doing a very, very silly Batman two-pager, and this wonderful one-page strip, which would quickly feel gently naïve when you know what is coming in the 90s- 

So some humour is still there, and deserves to be remembered with some fondness. There is worth in comic book satire, and some gorgeous art to be found, especially when you don't take your funny books so damn seriously.