The Ballad of GI Joe: Do I really have any friends who love me for being Zartan?

The whole concept of GI Joe, of rampant American militarism running riot around the world, feel a lot sharper than it used to. The only way they can do GI Joe comics these days is by leaning heavily on the irony, or getting the Transformers involved somehow.

I do like the idea that they've talked about in the recently announced movie, which seems to latching onto the concept of Cobra emerging from small-town America, and all the fake picket-fenced suburbia with missile silos hiding under the elementary school. Larry Hama was really onto something when he was digging into that vein of ideas in a dumb comic about war toys.

But I don't know if my kids will get into GI Joe like I did in the 80s. They were the best action figures, and the coolest comics - but they have a lot more toy options to choose from, and I don't want them to just follow my nerd path, I get my kicks from seeign what roads they forge for themselves. 

Still, I do need to hide my most precious Joes away on high cupboards so they don't get broken by the vigoroius play of the young. I don't want my original Cobra Commander in battle armour to lose any more limbs, he's already got one of Zandar's legs. 

And the kids have already been exposed to GI Joe in the most gentle manner properly, because they freaking love the Funny or Die video about the Joes and Cobra living their best lives after hours. A lot of the films made by that crew are purely ephemeral, already vanishing into the ether.

But some of the them stick around, and I will never get sick of this tune, and the gentle ballad of  ninjas taking out the trash, mortal enemies talking on the CB radio, and Destro and the Baroness, practicing their clarinets. 

They're practicing their clarinets! That's a much better use of their time than using the Terror Drome to fuck up the world for everybody. Yo Joe!

No more than a movie

Some movies don't need any kind of sequel, and many of them really do not need it to be multiple hours of television.

The phenomena of the unwanted sequel is still with us -  where one movie is perfectly good enough, and the follow-up can't help but disappoint. We all saw it recently when Ready Or Not 2 came out to a critical and commercial shrug, because that movie made its point pretty fucking well in the first one, and there really wasn't much more to add, except for mindless escalation.

And now we get the unwanted TV remakes, prequels and sequels, and they're not only unnecessary, they stretch out for hours and hours and hours.

They keep trying to sell me on the new Man on Fire, and while the original movie does have a much better reputation than it did at the time (critics always got dazzled by the style of Tony Scott films, and were blinded to the substance that could lurk beneath his glossiest of surfaces). But even with a fine cast in the TV version - that lead dude in the new series is usually pretty excellent - there's no Tony Scott, there's no Denzel, there is no way many hours of the new thing is going to be better than two hours with those deadset champions.

Now there is a long remake of Cape Fear, and lots of people I trust say it's actually pretty good, but I just don't want to spend 10 hours in that kind of nightmare. A tight two hours and eight minutes with prime Marty Scorsese was enough for me. 

There is so much out there it's easy to ignore a lot of it - there's no need to bother with the forthcoming Harry Potter (and when the creator is using the cash it gives her to cause real harm to real people, it's a moral imperative to shun it and you can rest assured it will never be mentioned on this blog again); it did take me two seasons to realise the new version of Interview with a Vampire is really not my bag; and I never had the slightest interest in seeing that series about a young Nurse Ratchet.

Because it doesn't feel like it's not being added to, it's more like it's being leeched off. It's a dilution, not a construction.

I'm such a fucking film snob. Even after all sorts of televisual brilliance over the years.  After a catastrophic failure of my movie cataloging for this year, I've been catching up on TV series and some of them are great and some of them are okay and all of them would be better as a two hour movie. If you can't tell a story in 120 minutes, maybe you shouldn't be telling a story, and not everything needs to be 10 hours.   

This is obviously not a hard rule - get some Dekalog into you, that shit is aces, and there is always the exception of Twin Peaks - but when so much talent so sucked up into a story that was already told with a lot more efficency, it all just feels so pointless. 

Hail Satan

A friend of mine occasionally sends me out of context comics panels from Jack Chick comics, and this one is definitely my favourite so far.

Grendel: Caring about Christine

When a comic character has been dead and gone for decades, one simple way to get the reader invested again is to show that character's raw emotions, and how they can carry a hurt that never dies. Christine Spar is back as Grendel and she is just as complex and angry as she ever was, but she's also devastatingly human.

Matt Wagner pulls off a fittingly neat and efficient narrative trick in the latest volume of Grendel. We're hundreds of years into the saga now, and Christine - a main character from the earliest days - has returned, cloned into new flesh. And the new Christine has work to do. This future world is run by leech-like vampires and she has to make it right, because Grendels fucking hate vampires, and this one most of all. 

Bringing back a new character as clone is the hoariest of cliches, but it takes less than an issue for this Christine to be established as a real person, because while she knows she is a copy of the original, she is still haunted by the death of her son, so long ago. 

It's the worst thing you could possibly imagine as a parent, to lose a kid. Christine's son was taken from her by a vampire Kabuki dancer hundreds of years ago, and she still feels his absence in the world, long after he would have turned to dust, even if he'd lived a full and rich life. 

All that lost potential will also be missed in Christine's world, wherever she is, and whatever flesh she is cloaked in.

It's a strong way to instantly give the character some weight and depth. It also helps to see her slice up some future fascist fucks in her first real outing - and Wagner's action sequences still sing with clarity and purpose - but it's the grief that makes her human, an ache that we all can recognise, if only in our worst nightmares.

The silent scream of getting old

There is a certain time in your life when you suddenly become very invested in how old Wilford Brimley was when he made Cocoon, and while he was playing someone vastly older than he was, there is some existential shock when you hit that age. 

Another moment like this that has stuck in my brain for decades is when Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise takes note of how old he is getting in the first TNG movie, and that he has come to terms with the idea that there were more days behind him than ahead of him, and I almost certainly crossed that particular threshold sometime in the post decade, and it is giving me the shits, man.  

Especially since it's been a blink of an eye since Malcolm McDowell killed Captain Kirk in that film, and it's somehow 30 years later. It's certainly comforting to see Sir Patrick still out there doing his thing in the X-Men, but he is much, much closer to that end he talked about with Deanna Troi, and it doesn't feel like he should be.

I do like being in my fifties, I'm far more well-adjusted and self-confident and plain old happier than ever before. I love my family and we just moved into our new home, after a lifetime of renting. I still love my day job, and while the world is in a general spiral of shit, all is right with the world around me.  

But it's also August already and I do feel time slipping through my fingers, like sloppy wet sand. And sometimes the sheer rage at how fast it is sliding by makes me want to scream in some kind of never-ending howl.

That's normal, right? One thing I can rely on in this uncertain world is that when it comes to aging, we're all in the same boat. We all feel life slipping away, even as we try to hold on. Time is a merciless bastard, and we all age together, and we're all silently screaming about it, and pushing it to the back of our minds so that we can just get through the day.

Even Jean-Luc Picard feels it, and his lack of a biological family gives more weight to the doubts he feels, even as his considerable accomplishments are immortalised in history. He'll be okay. After all, he's just a fictional character, and will live on long after I've merged with the infinite, which I still hope remains a long, long way off.

Bad Boy: Trying to escape.

- Bad Boy #1

Art by Simon Bisley

words by Frank Miller

Colours and letters by Angus McKie

One last hit from the past: A moment of Cassidy

- Originally published October 21 2014

I haven't woken up like this in a long, long time, but I'll never forget that feeling.

Here comes the past #31: Goodnight Kiwi, (and so to bed)

Whenever I find it hard to sleep, all I have to do is watch the above Goodnight Kiwi video - which ran for nearly 20 years on New Zealand TV - and it instantly makes me drowsy. Not because of that groovy, lounge-lizard version of Hine e Hine, or even because of the quiet, subdued animation. It makes me drowsy because that little clip is still telling me that the day is finished, and it's time to go to bed, because there is no more telly.

The idea of all-night TV was a totally foreign concept when I was a kid. There were only two TV stations in NZ until 1990, both part of the public broadcaster, and when the Goodnight Kiwi clip came on, usually just before midnight, it was followed by nothing, until TV started up again in the morning (although Breakfast TV was also a foreign concept).

When I was a teenager, and staying up as late as I could, that would generally mean the end of the day, and it was time for bed. You could always stay up later and watch a video, but when a beloved cartoon icon is settling down for the night, it makes sense to join him and his cat in slumber. 

That blessed closedown of the broadcast was eventually replaced by the cash grab of terrible, terrible infomercials, and night-owls and other insomniacs could watch awful steak-knife demonstrations all night long.

A screen full of nothing was better than that, and also brought some much needed closure to the day. When it feels like life is hectic and never-ending, there was something soothing about the nothingness that followed the full-stop of this little cartoon. It was time to recharge, and start up again tomorrow.

Goodnight, Kiwi. Goodnight everybody.

- Originally published 28 February 2020 

Good night.

Here comes the past #30: Who is the Man From LOVE?

This is the Man From LOVE:

#1. It all starts at the movies
#2. No shot
#3. All you need is dance
#4. A night off from saving the world
#5. Dinner with the Goodsons
#6. Cleaning up afterwards
#7. How to sign up
#8 A virtual certainty
#9. All will be well
#10. Wrong
#11. Don't look now
#12. Dealing with it
#13. Metaphysical manipulation for fun and profit
#14. Run fool, run
#15. This is not normal
#16. The man in the moon
#17. A nice glass of red
#18. The Trevor situation
#19. Left behind
#20. There is no Trevor
#21. This is not you
#22 Cross country
#23. Good morning
#24. Lost with the fairies
#25. Alone
#26. Fighting and fucking
#27. The House of Good
#28. How the world works
#29. Everything is everything
#30. Cool

The Man From LOVE was written for the NaNoWriMo thing a few years ago, which should be obvious due to its brevity and half-assed plotting. It was also born out of a general frustration that every attempt to do a 'secret agent for the 21st century' story was still mired in 20th century genre and cliche, and I wanted to do something that genuinely tried to update the conventions.

Like almost everything piece of fiction I ever write, I just wanted to do it for fun and did absolutely nothing with it when it was done. This was mainly because I couldn't even imagine anybody ever giving a shit about it, but also because it painfully exposes my crippling anxiety about mortality, which is a bit embarrassing.

But this has been a rough year, and I needed to take a break from writing about the latest dumb comics and movies for a while, so dug up this story from the depths of a half-dead hard drive and put it up. It's out there now, for all the world to see, and we can all move on. Normal service will resume later this week.

I should really get around to finishing The Woman From LOVE, a sequel which is more of the same, with added time travel and vampires and maybe even an explanation of what LOVE and HATE stand for. That'll probably appear here in another three or four years. You can't rush the meaning of life. 

- Originally published 1 September 2018 

That was the Man from LOVE. I became a dad almost immediately after posting this and have written very little fiction ever since, but did start writing the very last LOVE story a few months ago, because why would you ever stop?.