It was a gas.

Blondie's Heart of Glass is one of the earliest music videos I ever remember seeing, and I still find it disturbing in a way I can never properly articulate. There's the sparseness of the tune, Debbie Harry's soaringly high voice, the minimal movements of the band - it all just makes me feel like a tiny kid again and truly creeps me out. 

Nobody else might be disturbed by how shiny her lip gloss is, but it takes me back to a time when the world was scary and unknowable, and I'm afraid I have not learned as much as I would like since then.

Love and Rockets: Grandma Dynamite

Maggie is getting old. 

We're all getting old, but we don't see it in the mirror, we see it on the faces of our loved ones. When you hit a significant milestone, it's no big deal, but when your little sister gets there, it's an entropic stab in the heart.

And after following Maggie and her story in Jaime Hernadez's staggeringly brilliant Locas comics for so, so long, you can see the weight of the years on her back as she sits in the doctor's office on the cover of the latest issue of Love and Rockets, waiting for some results.

She's at that age where she's wondering what's it all about, and maybe superheroes and other dreams aren't real and she just has to face life without them, but Maggie also sees an impossible figure in the clouds during a flight to see a dying parent. 

It's so far away you can't tell if it's falling to earth or rising into the sky. But it's definitely there, even if nobody else can see it. 

There's also the first mention of Penny Century in an age in this story, and maybe she finally got her wish and ascended to the heights of superpowers, and is checking in on her magpie. Or maybe Maggie is just seeing things. 

And maybe Ray and the foghorn were always meant to be together, and that's why they can't sit together for more than 10 seconds before tearing into each other. But they're meant to be together in the same way Maggie and Hopey should be, and it's just not going to happen.

There's always a lot of beautiful maybes whenever a new issue of Love and Rockets come out, and it's always worth to linger over them, especially when they never turn out like you expect.

The collection dissolves

I found another one of those existentially troubling collections at a favourite second hand bookstore recently. While they grant the opportunity to bulk out my own collection with rare delights, they still always give me the shits. 

There was a pile of The Dark Side and Fortean Times back issues, and a large amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs material, particularly Tarzan and all those various off-shots. There were a lot of early Warhammer books, and the first dozen or so Wild Cards anthologies.

It all showed up quite suddenly at the same time, and felt like it all belonged to the same tastes, slightly to the side of mine, with enough overlap to be interesting. All these books and magazines most certainly came from a distinct perspective, and the bulk of it suggested an estate sale, sold off as quickly as possible with little care for the finer details.

I've consolidated my own collection in recent weeks, and it's a lot of stuff. Vast piles of The Comic Journal, every single issue of everything from the Justice League International and Legion 5YL days. I can't help but wonder what will happen to it.

I don't care who makes money off my own collection when I leave this world. I would like to just give it all away, but I do have a family who deserve to get something out of my lifelong obsession for more nerd stuff. Even if they get cents on the dollar, I'd be glad to pass it on to them to dispose of it.

Sometimes I think... Sometimes I think I could just burn it all. But that feeling never really lasts.

Still, I did my part at the bookshop recently, and took home a few of those Dark Side and Fortean magazines to add to the small pile of other issues I have had for years, and filled some nagging holes in my Wild Cards and Phillip Jose Farmer books. 

And that's all I can hope for the issues of the New Warriors I've had in a handy box for 35 years. If they end up in a huge pile of other geek nonsense, I hope they find another home, in another collection, where they will be loved as much as I loved them.

The Witching Hour: What's going on?

- The Witching Hour (2000) #3 

Art by Chris Bachalo 

Inks by Art Thibert 

Words by Jeph Loeb 

Colours by Grant Goleash 

Letters by Richard Starkings

Valentine's Day with my boys

While I remain painfully heterosexual - I have had quite vivid dreams about getting it on with some extremely fit men which just left me cold and disappointed in myself - I can still recognise beauty in the male form, and have a few man crushes.

I have had a crush on Denzel Washington since the 80s, mainly because of the way he walks, and have happily transferred those affections on to the strut of his son. I did have a severe case of the Stathams for a number of years, but the unintentionally funnier he got, the less I was interested.

Tom Hardy is definitely a fave, but only specifically when he is tight and mean. Even more specifically, Dan Stevens is sex on legs in The Guest, and a twitchy weirdo in almost anything else. I feel stirrings down below in any film that features Scott Adkins doing one of his spinning double-drop kicks, but especially when he has a Russian accent (he doesn't kick anybody in the face in that recent film where he quite believably played Ben Affleck's brother, but he did look good in a suit).

There are dozens more - I would do anything Bruce Campbell ever told me to do, Richard E Grant could break me in two if he likes, and I'm going to my first comic convention in years soon because they've got the mighty Frank Grillo as a guest - and while I remain as boringly straight as ever, I can still appreciate the fineness.

How I deal with music festival announcements

One of the certainties in life as you get older is that you will see the line-up announcements for all the big music festivals, and you will recognise less and less of the names as time goes by, and you can feel your grip on the latest culture slipping away in real time.

It's okay. It's very normal. One day you'll look at the line-up for Coachella and be stoked that you recognise more than half a dozen names, and some festival will roll into your home town, and all the headline acts will be complete mysteries.

You can try your best to keep up with it all, but it slowly gets away on you.

I've found the best way to deal with it is to try to have fun with it, and I've found a guaranteed way of doing that - whenever I see the list of bands, I read them in my head as if they are being said by Alap Partridge.

It's very easy to do, even if the only person who can actually do the voice properly is the mighty Steve Coogan.  You can tell which ones would be read with Alan's baffled amusement, or just completely mangled by him. Even the most genuine and earnest band names can come out as hilarious with a dose of the Partridge absurdity. 

It doesn't make me any younger, but it turns a reminder of the unending grind of mortality into something a little bit funny, and I'll take that as a win.

I still have very strong feelings about Lobo

When you mix up universes, you don't get a lot of depth, but you do get some fun, and the backup stories in the recent Batman/Deadpool crossovers have been largely light and humorous affairs. There's not much more to say when you jam two characters with some vague connection - like magic or archery or being an animal - together in a five page story, other than 'look how cool it is to see these two dudes together', but at least they've got some fine artists doing their best to give you a good time.

Except for the bit with Logo - the amalgamated Lobo/Wolverine character - which was really fucking annoying, because I still have very strong feelings about Lobo.

Lobo is a heavy metal force of chaos, and the crazier his shit gets, the better it hits. I was genuinely appalled when they tried to make him more sleek and stylish a decade ago, and am happy to see they have walked Lobo back to his primal riff roots since then. 

So I'm a prime target for Lobo getting into some multiversal shenanigans in the new DC/Marvel crossovers, but then all they did was combine him with Wolverine, which is a real lowest common denominator kinda move.

For a starters, it's a stupid fucking name, which is much less wolf-ish and just makes me think of some stylised lettering. And he's really just Lobo with claws, which isn't very interesting. Wolverine is all restrained and civilised and honourable shit, and that gets steamrolled by Lobo's vicious anarchy, so it's all 'Bo and no Wolvie. (There's a reason the only successful amalgamated version of Lobo is when they combined him with Howard the Duck, because it's the absurdity, not the violence, that is the common factor there.)

And while there is little in the back-ups that resembles a proper story, the Logo bit just a gross attempt at post-credits titillation, and we all got sick of that shit a long time ago. Just have him bash against some angst ridden dweeb from the Marvel U. Don't water him down into a bad cover version.

Looks like masturbation is the winner on the day.

"Oh no! It's soft porn, the worst kind of porn of all! People who hate porn don't like it! People who love porn don't like it! What's the point?" - Wankrace 2001

The art that inspires

All my opinions on movies, TV, music, comics and art in general are as subjective as everybody else's, but one way I judge the relative merits of my entertainments is by finding out how personally inspiring they are - that they're such good pieces of art that they want me to go make my own.

The Velvet Underground were famously the band that only a few thousand people really listened to, but every single one of them went out and formed their own bands afterwards. I didn't get quite the same drive from the first night when I heard All Tomorrow's Parties, (although I instantly knew I would never do anything in my life that would be as delicate and beautiful as Pale Blue Eyes), but I have felt it in plenty of other places, and especially in my comics. 

It's no coincidence that the most prolific I ever was at writing fiction was in the 90s, when I wrote a disturbing amount of movie screenplays that had absolutely no chance of ever getting made, and when I was deep in my fan fiction days - pumping out thousands of fairly useless words a month for J Street adventures on the Never Ending Board at comicbookresources.com - and this was also when I was getting new issues of The Invisibles every month. 

Every issue of Grant Morrison's opus was a delight, I fell deeply for it all, and every time I finished a new issue, I just really wanted to do my own, and would write mountains of extraordinarily dorky copy. If I ever started to flag, I just read the Flex Mentallo mini series again, and would get going again. 

I was also hugely inspired by the Doctor Who New Adventures in the 90s, especially the more modern takes from happily enthusiastic amateurs, and the new books from the likes of Cornell, Orman, Miles and Parkin fuelled the fire.

Some authors inspire me in different ways - Kim Newman books make me want to write stories where everybody teams up with everyone to defeat everything, and James Ellroy books make me want to cut back on all the unnecessary words in my writing, and then go even further. 

Reading something great from a talented writer makes you want to write your own view of the world. It's just the way things work.

It comes through in all media, the vast soundscapes of Richard Wright's keyboards on Pink Floyd songs want me to sail into the infinite, and seeing Van Gogh at in the flesh makes me want to look at the world differently. 

In the world of cinema, all my favourite films make me want to go out and make movies, despite a severe lack of opportunities and a gross over-confidence in my own abilities. I still want to make something great when I see a Kubrick of a Coen Brothers film. Sergio Leone films always fire me up, and Morricone music will be playing while I'm writing anything for the next month, and the exact same thing used to happen when a new David Lynch came out, and I would go full Badalamenti for a month.

The single most inspiring piece of work was probably Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, which I saw on a trip to the US and was deeply inspired by, especially by Belladonna's haircut, and had an idea for a novel that I actually went and wrote. It took five years, but the premise, late twist and ending where all figured out before the end credits of that film rolled in early 2015.

I've been stuck halfway through the sequel to that story for a couple of years now, I really need to do a PTA binge to get things going again. Some of the old favourites still get those sickly-sweet creative juices flowing, and there is always something new to show the way.