Old men and their books: Model Actress Whatever

I really need to get back into my one-person book club, it always took me outside of my comfort zone with new novels. And I know I need to get back into it because the last three novels I've read are all by old white guys who I have been following for decades.

Fortunately, they are all fucking excellent writers who put out fucking excellent books that are worthy of further discussion, and that's what we are doing here, before I get back onto the road to literary unknowns.

Model Actress Whatever

By Kim Newman

I didn't read anything about the new Kim Newman book before it came out, because I don't need to. Newman books are always ridiculously entertaining and so much fun. I read them all, and never miss a single one.

But just going by the title and Newman's recent record, I did think this one was going to be some kind of Hollywood horror, a perfectly respectable sub-genre about the terrors of life in Tinsletown, possibly similar to the one that had Chandler and Karloff team up to solve gross mysteries in 1930s Hollyweird.

But Model Actress Whatever turned out to be a direct sequel to Newman's Diogenes Club books, taking those 20th century archetypes and seeing how they do in the reality show saturated media of the 21st. A new generation of cloaked superheroes and legacy villains, doing their best in stressful times.

It can be hard to keep track of all the continuity which probably only all makes sense inside Newman's head, but there is a Shade, and a network that goes back centuries still operating under the fantastical streets.

For a book so clearly set in the here and now, it does give an oddly 90s DC comics vibe, taking legacy characters and making sure the lineage goes on - there must always be a Doctor Shade, there must always be some kind  ofSplendid Six - while being ruthless with older generations (I have to admit a certain sadness about the sad end for Richard Jeperson).

It's frantic and breathless, but just gloriously entertaining, full of groaning in-jokes and references. It's a Kim Newman book about a Kim Newman world. He's not too worried if you can't keep up.

The four month comic chasm

I didn't get to comic stores on a regular basis until well into the 1990s, so my entire childhood of reading American comic books was always just behind the times. Four months behind, to be exact. 

Because it took four months for issues to arrive from the other side of the world. So the first time I got to an actual comic shop, it was weirdly disorientating, because it was getting a glimpse months into the future. My first comic shop had the first issue of Excalibur on the shelves, weeks before I even knew what had happened in the Fall of the Mutants. So much had happened in those few months and I was totally lost. 

I longed to send fan letters in to the X-Men, but couldn't be writing to them about the things that happened months ago. It was also hellishly expensive for a kid to send a letter overseas and it didn't feel like it was worth sending something when they are definitely not going to use it because they killed off Rogue a month after I sent something about her being the eternal X-man. (That was the closest I ever came.)

But the situation with the Galaxy's Greatest Comic was even worse, because it was six months before 2000ad got to my neck of the woods. I would spend a significant amount of my childhood wondering what was happening to Dredd in those impossible future comics on the far side of the world. And this was the golden age of the character, where significant shit was going down all the drokking time.   

Those days just added to the isolating feeling that I would feel when reading comics. I had very few friends who cared as much about Kitty Pryde as I did, and certainly no direct connection to any larger community. The temporal chasm just added to that and comics became more of an internal thing, an obsession that I kept largely to myself.

At least until the internet came along, at about the same time I started getting comics the same week as my cousins in the rest of the world. Until then, I had absolutely no idea what was coming, and could only imagine what the rest of the world was reading, which did help avoid spoilers about the fate of Johnny Alpha, I suppose.

But with regular trips to the comic shop and the first online message boards and news sites, I finally had all the information, and was getting comics at the same time and that was a total game changer. I could even interact with other people (and feel that interaction peaked with the discussion of who was going to be in the JLA in Morrison's second year on the title, which as some time ago). 

Now I can still get a new issue of Concrete as the same time as the US (even slightly sooner, due to international date lines). 2000ad is back to six months behind, and too expensive and that's not a big deal because I'm holding fast to my current fallow period (although it's kinda easy when every prog is full of deeply average Kek-W stories). I don't need to keep up.

But I still remember the joy of getting my hands on the first comics from the future, and seeing what my favourite mutants were up to at the same time as everybody else. And the joy of that closing chasm still resonates.

Dracula Lives!: ...Until the end of time.

- Dracula Lives! #13
Art by Tony DeZuniga, George Tuska, Virgilio Redondo, Tom Sutton, Steve Gan and Russ Heath,
Words by Tony Isabella. Rick Margopolous and George Conway

There's nothing as good as bangers and mash with the Bash St kids

One of my great disappointments in life is that I have never tasted anything that looked as good as the grub in British kids comics like Buster, Cor!! and Whizzer & Chips. 

Rich Christmas pudding looked like a damned delight, giant mince pies that looked like the dream food, shiny fat cupcakes, and, of course, heaping of bangers and mash. No sausage and potato ever tasted so good.

Battlestar Galactica: No reason to get excited

I can still be surprised by people who watch the same things as me and get something completely different out of it. The Sopranos was one of the first times it really hit me, when people I saw it with would be disappointed in an emotionally crushing episode because nobody got whacked.

It has happened quite a few times since, but the biggest difference might still be in the 21st century version of Battlestar Galactica.

I watched the whole thing again recently and it remains a massively intense show. It is still a great watch in these stressful times - the world might be slowly burning down, but at least you don't have to worry about getting blown out an airlock by a fracking toaster. The performances are wonderful - Saul Tigh's amazing emoting eye remains a wonder - and the action still holds up, the shaky camerawork during the space battles used to annoy me but has aged really well, capturing the chaos of warfare in the vacuum.

But my favourite thing about it was always the weird spiritual dimension to it all, lurking behind the militarism and murders. When Baltar admits he sees angels in the room in the final episode - the first time he's really spoken any truth - it's a big moment, but there have been signs and prophecies and genuinely supernatural events that can not be explained, right from the start.

And most of all, I adore the idea that All Along The Watchtower is some kind of eternal song, a deep species memory that comes back out again and again. People hear it coming out of the walls of spaceships hundreds of thousands of years ago, before it finds a new frequency with Bob Dylan's mind in the 20th century. A song so good it transcends space and time and becomes a signal from the divine.

I still see people scoffing at the unknowable nonsense that permeates Battlestar Galactica, they just want to see soldiers shoot the shit out of robots, and I do respect that. But that's not why I got so much into it, I watched it for the strange and the spiritual, and for a song that existed out there in the universe long before humanity rose on Earth, and which led the way home.  

Phone etiquette in the theatre

Maybe it's because I grew up in the last age before everybody in the world had their phone in their pocket, but I was always just a bit too militant about the use of mobile phones in the sanctity of the movie theatre. 

I used to insist that everybody I went with turned off their phones as soon as things got projected on the screen, because this was the time to concentrate. I obviously got more lenient on using them through the advertisements before the start, especially when sometimes the ads are more than 20 minutes before an overlong film starts, and are the same crass slices of capitalism every time. 

But I do think the movie theatre is a slightly sacred place, and it is somewhat profane to sully it with an outside distraction, and that the phone should go away once the trailers start, and the experience begins. 

Like almost everything in life, parenthood changed everything. I have always used to turn my phone off. Then I had kids and it just wasn't responsible to go out of contact for so long, when you have small humans depending on you, and you need to be reachable for any kind of emergency.

I still mute the fucking thing, and turn the screen glare all the way down to the bare minimum. I don't check the phone during the feature presentation, but I will know if somebody is trying to call me by the vibrations.

Unfortunately, we do live in a deeply selfish age, and I know there are so many people out there who can't bear to be away from their feeds for two whole hours, and blithely don't care if they are fucking off everybody else in the room. It's everywhere - I had to tell someone to put down a whole goddamn iPad during a fucking Jim Jarmusch film, and they seemed genuinely baffled by how remarkably annoying they were being.

It's much more noticeable when I go to a Saturday night film in a crowded house at the multiplex, although many of the films I watch at the cinema are with the weekday morning crowd, where it's much less of a problem (and much easier to move about to avoid annoying distractions).

So it might be a losing battle to keep the auditorium dark, but I keep to my own standards and keep my phone off. Unless the school is calling because one of the kids has fallen over in the playground. That'll always be more important.

To be a loose cannon in LA

There has been a significant lack of Friedkin in my cinematic diet, so I finally caught up with To Live And Die In LA when it showed up on my Tubi feed recently. And I have to give it to old Billy, I was genuinely surprised how much it dissected the hugely dramatic idea of a loose cannon going on a roaring rampage of revenge, and showed how hollow it was.

Going into the film, I knew the fate of William Petersen's properly unhinged Dick Chance, and how that twisted the genre. But I didn't realise how much of an absolute arsehole he was before that bloody end. Chance is out to avenge his partner's death, but mainly manages to cause monstrous harm. He gets people killed, he fucks things up, all his loved ones think he's cracked, And most of all, he's a failure. His big plan to get vengeance doesn't work, he doesn't even get the satisfaction bringing down the bad guy and it's up to cousin Ira from Mad About You to get the job done.

I've seen literally hundreds of films with similar themes, but few that showed how hollow and awful that path in life can be, and the dead end it takes you down.

Loving the facsimile

Two thirds of the comics I got on a recent new release day featured George Pérez art, and considering we lost the big fella a few years ago, that's not a bad ratio. 

I get on average about one American monthly comic book every week - gotta keep that fix under control somehow - and I could never go cold turkey on new comics. But a sizable proportion of the ones I have been buying in the past couple of years are comics that were originally published years ago, and I've never been able to find them in any form until now.

They call them facsimiles, and I love them so very, very much. I don't think of them as artificial copies, they're just the latest printing of a comic that has not been in print for a very long time.

I've been unable to resist the new editions of Treasury comics from the 1970s that I only ever saw in the house ads of the time, and never in the flesh, and now I can feast on the Batman art has never looked bigger or brighter, and watch Superman race the Flash in the largest format possible.

These reissues are also wonderful for plugging those annoying holes in the collection. I've had the first and fourth issues of the wonderful JLA/Avengers crossover since they came out, but could never find copies of the middle two issues due to reprint problems, and then they were just available at the local comic store to pick up. 

And I always wanted the 200th issue of Justice League of America, especially with pages of Bolland's Batman taking on Black Canary and Green Arrow and the facsimile copy of that I just snapped up was even in that Treasury format.

These blasts from the past still have just as many thrills as they did when they were first published, and I still grab random issues when I'm at the comic shop. Why not get the first Sgt Rock comic, or a very special issue of the X-Men? They still count as something new to me.

Muting the Avengers

I survive the never ending maelstrom of social media with a heavy blocking and muting policy. It does not take much. Any gross display of entitlement, any thoughtless piece of rudeness, or any bigotry at all, and it's an instant block. Life is much better that way.

But there are some topics where good people have dodgy opinions that I just can't get behind, and that requires a delicate sense of muting. And several months out from the latest Avengers film from Marvel, I have trained my meagre social media presence to ignore all things related to that film.

On one hand, there is some mindless adoration and endless publicity that I can avoid, but on the other, I get to also avoid exposure to all the cool kids telling me how much they hate the films. So I still want to follow film writers who bang on about great transgressive cinema, but I really don't need to know how much they hate Spider-Man movies, because of course they fucking do.

I really don't get either side of the love/hate equation to the Marvel superhero movies. None of them are masterpieces, but none of them are total dogshit either, they're all just fine. And sometimes fine is okay is all right. Some basically competent filmmaking with a few things we've never seen before is all I need for a good night out at the movies. I rarely remember much about them, but that's all right, my brain is full enough.

The trigger for my latest bout of industrial strength muting was the general complaining about all the homework that was supposedly required for the new film. All the past stories that needed to be revisited to get the full effect of the latest effort. 

The biggest complaints seem to come from people who would never see the new film anyway, and I don't think you need to see a damn thing before going to these movies. I can get the gist. I don't understand the plots of almost all the James Bond films, but I like the sex and violence.

Besides, I was 350 issues behind ion Fantastic Four when I first started reading that regularly, complete bafflement about the history of every damn little thing is the point.

So I don't find myself missing much by cutting out the chatter. It can make the end experience better because it's no context, all feeling. I've enjoyed the past few years of Doctor Who a lot more because I haven't been interacting with that vast and sprawling fandom at all, and I greatly enjoy going to see films as soon as they come out on a weekday morning, before any reviews or general hot takes ruin it for everybody

So I won't know much more about the new film before I go see it in December- unless they put a big spoiler on the sides of buses or something - and I look forward to that marvellous experience all the more for it.