It's good because it's hard

There is no editor for the Tearoom of Despair, it's all just me. Nobody ever reads any of these words before I publish in the world, which should explain some of the more egregious typos and grammatical eras. I bash them out, I give them a single read over, (and sometimes I leave the typos in because they are funny), and I publish and be damned.

But I have worked with editors who have reigned in all my unauthorized narcissism, and helped make me stop getting high on my own supply. Unfortunately, some of the best lessons I've learned about writing as a working journalist were taught to me by the very worst people, actual sociopaths who showed me the best way to break up sentences, while also treating their staff like total dogshit.

This was not, fortunately, the case with the best editor I ever had - the wonderful Chloe Maveal, who edited some nonsenses I wrote for the Gutter Review, (although I stand by all that nonsense, and still insist that Mean Machine Angel really is just deeply misunderstood). 

After pitching a few articles, I sent off things, and Chloe - who you can currently hear doing some super hot podcasts for the official 2000ad website here - would come back with incredibly perceptive comments and suggestions, and I would be fucking destroyed.

It was hard. So fucking hard! I would spend an inordinate amount of time feeling sorry for myself, refusing to even think about the changes she'd suggested, and wondering what the fuck I was doing, thinking anybody would be interested. I'm mope around the house and inwardly moan at the great injustice of it all.

And then I just went and did the work and ground it out, and really had to put some proper fucking thought into it. Sometimes I'd have to substantially redo the whole thing and it was hard and painful and when it was done I felt like the king of the fucking world.

That's what the AI hype merchants never understand, what they always miss - the harder it is to do something, the better it is for everybody. 

It's a message little children understand - there is, of course, a very good Bluey episode about this subject - but people with billions of dollars to burn don't ever seem to stop and consider that maybe we like to push ourselves, to actually work for the results, and can stand by those results with more pride than anything else you've done, not least the mad ramblings on a blog

It's not worth anything if you don't try, and it's good because it's hard.

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (100-91): I operated on by own brian!

100. Prog 2034 - art by Brendan McCarthy

99. Prog 485 - art by Kevin O'Neill

98. Prog 326 - art by Brett Ewins

97. Prog 1395 - art by Steve Yeowell and Chris Blythe

96. Prog 1163 - art by Chris Weston

95. Prog 250 - Art by Carlos Ezquerra

94. Prog 941 - art by Mark Harrison

93. Prog 406 - art by Ian Gibson

92. Prog 1892 - art by Colin MacNeil

91. Prog 387 - art by Kevin O'Neill

2000ad has broken my heart again, but that's because I care so much. And it's enough to have me spend a ridiculous amount of time ranking my top 100 2000ad covers to share over the next few weeks. They're not the 100 best covers, that's an impossibly objective goal, but it's the 100 I like the most out of the 2400+ they've given the galaxy so far.

How to start in Bond

I've watched every single Bond film ever made - I saw Casino Royale on the day I got married and have very strong opinions about who the next Bond should be - and all that is almost entirely due to the fact that I saw the opening action scene to the Living Daylights when I was 12 years old and thought it was the most exciting fucking thing I'd ever seen in my young life. The part where the truck goes through the tight tunnel and the Bond stuntman only just avoids cutting his fucking legs off!

Bond frequently disappoints, but when it's good, it's the best thing in the world.

Friday night frights on The Dark Side

I recently bought a small pile of issues of The Dark Side magazine, a British magazine focusing on horror movies. It has been running since the early nineties and is still going strong, shuffling on with all the vigour and unrelenting inevitability of the decaying living dead. And I think it's pushing me back down a path of horror nastiness, and I'm more than willing to head down such dark roads.

The Dark Side is shamelessly gross, with more of an international slant than other horror mags, and loads of naked women. Unsurprisingly, it was one of the first magazines that I bought regularly with my own money, finding out about Umberto Lenzi films and seeing actual pictures from his impossible-to-find videos like Cannibal Ferox in the Northtown Mall carpark. 

I only got it for a year or so back in the day, as I branched out from horror films to all sorts of genres and moods, and became a proper film geek who was still a little bit embarrassed about all that lust for trash movies. I did get over that shame, but it took a while.

So I stopped getting it in 1995, but would occasionally see a copy in an airport bookstore or something, and use it to read on a long flight (after ensuring no sensitive or young souls will see the fake carnage splattered across its pages). 

And then a local second hand bookstore got in a good collection of issues a few months ago, and I've have been reading a lot of issues form the late 90s and 2000s I missed, and it's reignited that fire I always had for these awful, awful movies. 

If we can find one moment of light in this hellish year, we can find it in the accessibility of all sorts of horror films I only dreamed of seeing, so many years ago. Half of the video nasties can be found on Youttube or Vimeo, with minimal effort.  

So I've already got stuck into it again, although I have to watch them when the rest of the house has gone to bed. Starting with old favourites like House by the Cemetery and The Beyond, and wondering what Jesús Franco I should indulge in next. 

This won't end well. I know I'll overindulge in this kind of film, and get jaded about it all over again. But for now, I'm happily going over to The Dark Side every Friday night, once the kids have gone to bed.

Giving up 2000ad again: Unlimited thrillpower is still no match for late stage capitalism

I've been enjoying 2000ad since I could read, and have followed it through the decades on a weekly basis, indulging in some of the best comics I've ever read in my life, so you're goddamn right I get emotionally invested in the weekly progs.

The world is a horrible place, full of terrible people doing terrible things, but that weekly dose of thrillpower, usually read while I'm walking away from the local newsagent, is just a tiny taste of pure happiness that I could still grab onto - and even that is now being taken away from me.

Because while 2000ad is as good as it ever was - it really is! - and even though I was delighted to find a local thrill-merchant who understood the importance of the weekly hit, I'm still going to have to stop getting it because unlimited thrillpower still can't stand up to the brutality of late stage capitalism.

The first regular issue of 20000ad I ever bought cost 55c. Then it was 77c, then 95c, then $1.35, and on and on. There would be a regular increase in price of between 20 and 50 cents every year or so, and that was the price to pay.

I always thought I might give it up when it went over the $10 mark, but it quietly did that a few years ago, and I stuck with it, largely due to the entirely unexpected brilliance of late Abnett, and it was hovering over the $11 mark when I had to quit it last year due to geographical prejudice.  

It took me a while to find a place that actually still the Galaxy's Greatest Comic when I came back to the big city, but then I was sorted, and had even picked up a whole bunch of the ones I'd missed in the past year on the second hand market

And then some fucker, somewhere down the line, decided to hike the price by almost 50 percent to more than $16 an issue in my part of the world, and now I just feel like a drokking mug.

It's now terrible value for money, and it's particularly galling because the Judge Dredd Megazine remains the best value for money in modern comics, at $22 for 130 pages. I did the math - a new issue of the Meg is about eight cents a page, a 2000ad is more than fifty cents a page. That's just bad economics.

Of course I could fucking afford $16 a week - you can't even get a decent lunch for that much these days - but that's not the point. If I wait a few months, I'm sure I can get most of the missing progs for less than $5 each. I just feel like a fool paying full price when I see those kinds of deals in the following weeks and months.

It's a return to the most non-linear of reading experiences, but it's not like the regular weekly issue down the local shop is that regular anyway, it's been three weeks since they got an issue in.

I definitely don't blame my local merchant, he's as baffled by these price rises and I am, and the actual prog remains the same UK price it's been, but somewhere down the line, someone thought of people like me, regular readers who have stuck with the prog through good times and bad, and decided to ream us for all we're worth.

Sometimes it feels like the only real power you have in a late stage capitalist society is the ability to say 'no, fuck off, I'm not buying that', and that's all I've got left.

There are no other options, reading digital comics on tablets and phones just feels like work, and a weekly subscription would be more expensive, and would be less reliable - a 30-year love affair with the UK movie magazine Empire has finally come to a grinding halt this year because my regular subscription had become increasingly irregular, and it doesn't feel worth it when a quarter of the issues never even turn up anymore. 

So it's the secondary market for me, which even though stops me feeling like I'm being taken for a ride, does make me feel guilty that I'm not financially supporting the actual comic and all its great staff and creators. I'll certainly get some of the forthcoming missing issues in three years or so when the 2000ad shop starts selling them off for pence, like they always do, and I may have to get the odd digital copy just to see what Wagner is doing, or to see how the imminent Ennis/Flint Dredd v Alpha thing shakes out, or even to see what the hell is going on in the brilliant Brink.

I won't be a regular reader anymore, but I'll still be collecting the comic as much as possible. And I'll still get the Meg, until somebody starts asking $40 for it.

A wee bit of assistance?

Even the most mediocre films can have some moments of pure delight, and Cloud Atlas actually has a few of them, even if it doesn't hold together as a whole.

Maybe the entire movie doesn't reach the kind of transcendent fission it is clearly shooting for, but this plea for help from the bloody English is just pure joy, while also saying something about class, and injustice, and community, and still gives you a rogue tooth falling into your beer.

The quiet hell of Hellboy

Hellboy in Hell is literally an astonishing comic - the capstone to years of Mike Mignola's epic series that still finds new things to say at the End of All Things, and looks bloody gorgeous.

Mignola's art has always had a place in my heart since he did that interlude scene in the middle of an early X-Force comic, but his work on Hellboy in Hell is incredible. Free from having to draw cars and power lines, Mignola goes deep into his imaginations, and brings up demonic nightmares and truly grotesque monsters from the abyss. All running hard against Hellboy's brilliantly deadpan incredulity, and his willingness to beat the crap out of anything that messes with him.

And this Hell, it's something new, even as its legions of the damned have been seething underneath all of the big red guy's previous adventures. By the time Hellboy gets there, it's silent, and quiet, and dead. There are no grand dukes of the infernal, no lakes of fire. It's all dark and rundown, the rulers are torn apart by their own armies, which are in turn consumed, and there are no politics there anymore.

There are still some talkative ghosts and vengeful vampires, and far more puppet shows than are really necessary, but Hellboy was brought into existence to end the world, and that's what he does to the place he was named for. The city Pandemonium falls, and falls again, until the dark lake at the center is still and dead.

And then you have a massive Hellboy striding through the quiet darkness, the pure creature of Apocalypse he was always going to be, the Armageddon that was promised, finally delivered to the infernal realms. 

But in all this darkness, there is something new, glimpses of something Hell could become, not beholden to millennia of dark tradition. No pacts, no wars, no empires. No courts of diabolical intrigue, just a taste of hope, as the world turns anew. There will still be snakes, but they will be a new kind of nemesis.

Hellboy in Hell might be my single favourite comic of the 21st century so far, because it's deep and dark and beautiful, in ways only the best comics can be. 

I was a teenage shoplifter

Most of them have longed faded into retail oblivion, but there are still some bookstores that I buy stuff from because I am still guilty about stealing comic books from them more than three decades ago.

I never got caught in my short and regrettable career as a teen shoplifter, although I came damn close, and would have got in so much fucking trouble if I had been. I only did it for a year or so, but that was more than enough.

I only ever stole comic books, because they were so expensive, and every spare cent went into snapping up every Marvel and DC comic I could get, but that wasn't nearly enough. They were also easy to tuck away under a shirt or in a bag, because they were so thin and flat.

Some of those comics still linger in the collection, and shame me every time I see them. I really thought it was worth it to get hold of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition (1989 update), but I could have just waited and bought them like a normal person later on.

As deplorable as all this was, I still had some limits. I never stole money or anything like that, just chipped away at the livelihoods of booksellers who were only providing me with the best things in life. I also weirdly never stole an issue of 2000ad, probably because it was cheap enough, and I could always scrounge the 77c I needed, but also because didn't want Tharg to hit me with the Rigellian Hotshot.

I also never stole from the local bookshop that supplied the majority of my teen comic thrills, because I didn't want to mess up a good thing. 

But most of the stores I stole from were small owner-operator joints, which increased the guilt that followed down the years. It was just so much easier to disappear a comic when the only person working in the store was dealing with another customer or something.

I eventually stopped when a classmate at school offered to pay me five bucks to get a motorcar magazine. I wasn't risking everything for five bucks, I was risking everything for a 10-year-old issue of Fantastic Four, but I also didn't want a reputation as that kind of person. What would Batman say?

Besides, I was starting to get money from actual jobs like mowing lawns and babysitting, and that was so much less stressful that the five-fingered discount. And so much of the money I've earned in the decades since have gone back into those shops, while they still lasted. 

I never paid off the guilt though, and I never will. It just wasn't worth it.

A week of phone dumping #7: I can feel!

I don't know the artist, but I do know that logo

Cheese! by Lord Birthday

The Misfits

By Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

Art by Roger Langridge (I think)

Art by Ian Gibson (for sure)

The world needs more true romance comics

Biffo the Bear by Dudley D Watkins