No context, all feeling: The Hunger Dogs by Jack Kirby

For many years, all I knew about The Hunger Dogs graphic novel was the house ad in other DC comics which reproduced the cover - Darkseid awkwardly crammed into a jet sled, blasting away as he flees the filth who dared rise up against him.

Beyond that, most of what I heard about this comic book was negative - that Kirby was forced to compromise for his grand ending to the Fourth World saga, that last-minute rewrites crippled the story and that there was general bitterness about the way the King was treated. And all the fanzine articles and essays focused on how it's a deeply pessimistic work, with Kirby's hope for the youth curdling away, and the whole book is generally regarded as some kind of failure.  

But finally reading this comic book in the sci-fi year of 2026, all that bending of the plot to cohere with the wider DC universe deeply doesn't matter. The New God continuity has been twisted into a glorious incoherence in the years since, and it really doesn't matter what the current status of New Genesis is in the wider universe.

All you can hope for with any kind of Fourth World story is that it stands up on its own merits, and is an entertaining package in some way, and the Hunger Dogs certainly gave me that.

It might be a downer of a story by Kirby's usually optimistic standards, but it also has his amazing overwrought dialogue and captions, and brilliant full page spreads like this - 

- and this - 

- and this! -

It's magnificent art on slick paper in an oversized format, and the energy Kirby puts into every single page show no hint of the pressures he was under to conform to a mid-1980s DC vision. 

It stands as a spectacular and fitting end to the artist's DC work, and while it may have been sneered at over the years, it's a comic that can still blow your face off with its 40-year-old art. That's no failure to me. 

Death of the big box PC

Our last big box computer shat to death itself last week. It was going okay, but then things started catastrophically failing, and there were a few tense days where I couldn't get it to boot up at all, and I struggled to save my data, which I only managed to do through the glory of the safe mode.

When I say data, I mean all the kids photos, music collection, old fan fiction I wrote in 1997 and rips of Adam Curtis documentaries. You know, the important stuff in life.

I couldn't blame the computer, it was something like 12 years old, so was ancient for that kind of technology. Usually they only lasted four or five years. By my count it was the fifth big box of computing power that I've owned since the 1990s, and almost certainly the last.

Nobody except the most well-off families in town had a personal computer when I was growing up. There were plenty at school, and I did have friends where we could go play the Dune strategy game, or the first 3D Wolfenstein, but they were little more than tools, even for the people who used them for vital business stuff, and also for playing solitaire when business was slow.

Even with the internet exploding all over the show in the 90s, I didn't get my first PC until around 2000 because they were just so damn expensive. My first attempt was an embarssing failure, as I discovered I had been lumped with an awful credit rating after an unreliable flatmate had fucked me, but I finally had my own computer around the turn of the century. I had to save up the money and pay for it up front to get around that shit credit.

Since then, I've crammed files onto these hard drives until they shiver and shake, and then I've uploaded to a new one. My first one played the first halting internet videos, a few years before Youtube changed everything on that front, but I mainly used my computer to stay in contact with my fan fiction mates.

But the time I had got to this last PC, it had accumulated decades of data storage, movies from the 2000s, all the photos of children and travel. Every CD I've bought or borrowed in the new century got ripped onto the drive, and that's thousands of hours of music. All sorts of insane writings, although I did somehow lose a lot over the years - a film script I once wrote with the great Joe Rice somehow got completely lost, and while that's the one thing I missed the most, it's also makes me wonder what else got lost forever that I didn't even notice.

Now that last PVC has died, all the options seem to be laptop based, and there are few options for a chunky box that takes up precious space in the world. The laptops are slim and delicated, but have just as much computing power, and it's dead easy to hook it up to a bigger screen. Nothing has really changed, although I am annoyed by the lack of CD/DVD drives.

So that's the end of another quiet era, and while that thrill of connection my own computer gave me has evolved into a general weariness with the availability of the world of my phone, I will miss my big box of technology.

Daredevil: Get in, sucker!

-Daredevil #265 

Pencils by John Romita Jr 

Inks by Al Williamson 

Words by Ann Nocenti 

Colours by Max Scheele 

Letters by Joe Rosen

You don't know what I want to say

I'm so anti-AI that when my phone tries to predict what I say in a text message, I most definitely do not use what it suggests, even if it's exactly what I was going to say, which is often is. Fuck you, I won't say what you want me to.

This will really make me feel superior when the Terminator crushes my skull into the apocalyptic dirt, is all I'm saying.

Hulk belongs in the desert

Almost all the Marvel movies have some small moment that I can appreciate - a piece of action, some charming moment of acting, or even something approaching some kind of emotional resonance. And one of my favourites came from one of the earliest movies of the modern superhero age, when we first saw the Hulk bounding into the desert and beating the shit out of some tanks.

There was something wonderful at seeing the impossible physics of the jade giant bounding across vast distances - the speed, the surprising agility, not just the raw power you'd expect from the strongest creature on the planet. It's easy to buy into that unfeasibly large bounding across the desert, and you can believe that this unreal creature would be able to crush a full-sized tank.

It's interesting to note that this movie was released just as American troops are heading off to a desert on the far side of the world, and getting bogged down in battle against an enemy that has none of the technological advantages. But it's also a time when everyone has to Support The Troops, and it makes the point of seeing the battered and bruised tank crew stagger out of an impact that should have turned them into red paste coating the interior of their vehcile

But all that wider context doesn't detract from the fun of the thing. This movie was made when they bothered getting directors with actual visions, instead of just people who will serve corporate demands, and Ang Lee and his collaborators made a move that doesn't have that dull reality of later Marvels. 

It's biggest thrill is actually in the unreality of the thing, the relative crudeness of the CGI creation, the vibrant green, which was later dulled down and dirtied up for every subsequent cinematic Hulk, because dorks couldn't stop making Shrek jokes. 

There was a sadly bold focus on the use of split screen to capture the feel of a comic, but the setting brings the familiarity of the original four-colour adventures. For decades the Hulk was roaming around the desert, getting into the shit. 

He belongs in these wide, empty spaces, where he has the room to do a sonic boom clap, or hurl some artillery away over the horizon, and where the only people that could get hurt are the fools that try to pick a fight with the Incredible Hulk.

Raging at the silly shit

I took myself right out of anything to do with Doctor Who fandom a few years ago, and my enjoyment of the show increased, so I remain as convinced as ever that if the entertainment you consume makes you angry, than you're doing it wrong.

Some stuff is supposed to make you angry, to get you fired up about something in the real world that deserves your rage, but so many people seem to think this is the appropriate response to anything you disagree with, no matter how trivial the source material is.

I'm disappointed when my entertainments are disappointing, especially if they waste their potential, but these things are there to make you feel and think and groove, and they are not the most important thing in the world. They are definitely not worth getting angry about.

It just feels like we are all drowning in gross entitlement that so many people mistake for loyalty, that the viewer or reader is owed something by the creator, and that if they don't fulfill those expectations, than they deserve insults and scorn.

I still hated the last Star Wars as much as anybody, but that whole sequel saga is still getting some outraged reactions, and fucking hell, it's not the end of the world. Movies and comics I dearly love have soured, but so fucking what, they're only movies and comics? They're not real, they're no substitute for real love and human connection. 

I do have some hope that we're all just getting burned out by this kind of reaction, after two solid decades of social media foolishness, but it still keeps simmering away.

The world can be a shitty, shitty place sometimes and the past year has been particularly grim, especially when we feel unable to stop the world from burning down, and that's where my rage goes, not into who is being cast as the new James Bond.

All the money in the world can't buy a single gram of style

One of the striking things about the Succession TV show were the spaces these ultra-rich wankers all lived in. They looked like classy hotels, not a place where real people loved and were loved. They were just nothing, with any personal touches styled right out of the room, so they ended up having homes that spoke of their own vapidness.

And I have a weird belief that that the more valuable something is, the tackier it is. The one time we went to the Tower of London, and saw the fabled Crown Jewels, I just thought they were a bit tacky. Too ostentatious, trying too hard to be impressive, and steamrolling any sense of style this finely crafted jewelry could ever have.

Having the kind of money to spend on any kind of jewel, or living in the same places the Roys called home, are not anything I have to worry about. But it's also something I don't think I'll ever miss.

Hellboy and the inevitable end of all things

While there is a general consensus that the BPRD series by Mike Mignola and pals went on for too long, and never really recovered from the loss of Guy Davis' art, the slow apocalypse that truly breaks the world of men in this story is a hell of a ride.

And I remain a little haunted by the final issue of the series, as a metaphor for my own mortality, and the inescapable fate we all must face, sooner or later.

Mignola's art makes a welcome return in those final pages, delivering on the grim promise the entire series has been dealing with. The end that was always spoken of is finally there, and it really is Hellboy standing there with Hecate at the end of all things. The world is destroyed, and he takes his final steps into an iron coffin.

Every Hellboy story has been telling us this will happen, but after reading about the endlessly noble efforts to stave it off, it can't be avoided. And Hellboy has reached the final moments of his story along with the end of the world, and it haunts me because I know we all get there in the end, 

At some point we all face that same moment, despite our own efforts to delay it. We can fight the bug-eyed monsters coming up from the earth, but it will be overrun by dragons, before burning in a  cleansing flame. And one day, no matter how much we don't like to think about it, we will all face our own demise.

We will all be there.

Of course, there have been loads of Hellboy-related content ever since, with the adventures of Big Red as a young monster hunter, or Frankenstein going out into the truly post-apocalyptic world for his own adventures. But this is the inevitable end of all things.

None of us know when that last moment will come, or even if we will face it with fear, or dignity, or something unexpected. Hellboy just gets on with it, and it's something we all have to do as well.

Falling into rock albums again

This might be the lamest thing that a thoroughly basic middle-aged wanker like me could ever say, but it's still true - I think listening to rock albums is awesome.

I feel quite strongly about this awfully controversial opinion at the moment, because I have recently got back into the entire idea of listening to a whole album, to the exclusion of everything else. Lying down on the sofa, putting on some headphones, cutting out the world, and just luxuriating in the music.

I work nights and have some free time during the day while the kids are at school, and I can usually carve out 45 minutes in a day to do nothing else but listen to some Pink Floyd. It is enormously relaxing to do so, and just wipes everything away. I never fall asleep, so it's not an actual nap. Just a lie down.

Everybody everywhere is very stressed at the moment, for unique and justifiable reasons, so immersing in an album is one way to deal with it - and it's one that works for me. 

I sit in the sunshine with my eyes closed, and see patterns as the music plays, strange thoughts coalescing into something almost tangible. Not actual hallucinations, just the brain seeing patterns that aren't there and making some sense of them.

My music listening has been largely run by playlists for a while now, so it actually feels refreshing when you give in to one artist's vision. I try to vary the types of music I listen to in this state, but have been unable to avoid falling into prog rock. I have visited the Court of the Crimson King, and I have really into the Pink Floyd.

The Floyd will always be my first favourite band, the first group where I would listen to their albums on headphones. Sometime in 1988, when I'm just starting to really get into music, I've got some Pink Floyd on the stereo on a regular basis, and spend hours hooked up to the system, oblivious to all the usual teenage angst.

Four decades later, and it's just as relaxing to listen to the same tunes all over again. Possibly more so, with all the stress of actual adult life to deal with and shut out. Get your kicks where you can, kids. even if you have to resort to prog rock.