Here comes the past #23: I’m in love with Richard Harrow

My wife thinks I’m in love with Richard Harrow from Boardwalk Empire, because I keep talking about how noble and sad and brilliant Richard Harrow is, and I keep sending her texts about Richard Harrow that say things like HOLY FUCK RICHARD HARROW JUST KILLED THEM ALL TO SAVE A LITTLE BOY and I WOULD TURN GAY FOR RICHARD HARROW.

So yeah, she’s totally right. I am in love with Richard Harrow.

I overdosed on Boardwalk Empire recently, watching all of the latest season in less than a week. It was a show that always felt richer if you let a few episodes build up, but I didn’t realise the season was almost over until it was almost done, so did the whole thing in one straight shot.

Watching two episodes a day might be the optimal way to see Boardwalk Empire, the tension never flags and the story motors along at speed. It’s a television show that can get unashamedly over the top with the sex and violence and intensity, but can also take a long time to get to the point.

I watched almost all of the late at night, around the Witching Hour, which wasn’t always the best idea, with one episode – the one that ends with a main character delivered in a box – giving me terrible nightmares that evening.

But I’ve always thought of bad nightmares as good signs of effective entertainment – if a story can upset up on that kind of subconscious level, it must be doing something right. Boardwalk can get downright nihilistic at times, especially when the body counts start to rise, and it’s still surprising, and enjoyable, to see something like that in a TV show.

And after two seasons of tantalising brilliance that was often buried in clumsy, obvious mush, Boardwalk Empire got a lot of things right in its third year.

Boardwalk Empire has always been beautifully shot, right from the Scorsese start, but sometimes the camera placements and lighting were just a bit too obvious. Not as painfully obvious as, say, the soundtrack to a Zach Snyder film, but almost exactly what you’d expect from an ultra-violent gangster flick.

After a couple of years of this, the homaging of older works is still there, but the show makers are just gleefully giving in to it. The opening few minutes of the last episode alone has homages to half a dozen great filmmakers, and it’s hard to hate that too much. (To paraphrase Sean T Collins, whose analysis was always the first thing I read after watching an episode, "Full Peckinpah! Full Scorsese! Full Coppola!Full Silence of the Lambs!")

Especially when the production design is so lush, and the landscapes so wide and open. It should also be noted that for a weekly genre television programme, it has some surprisingly courageous camera movements, talented and experienced HBO directors breaking down basic rules around blocking and light sources, finding the sublime shot in a world of gangsters and betrayal.

 

All of this would mean nothing without a solid narrative. Fortunately, the narrative meat of the story, which has long marinated in its own juices, finally gets a decent tasting. Boardwalk Empire is unashamedly Epic, a story of kings and king-makers, full of assassination, intimidation and deal making with the highest possible stakes. When Nucky’s plan all pay off in the final episode, I can’t tell if it’s a last minute gamble that happened to pay of, or long-gestating schemes that just happen to pay off.

That kind of dead-serious storytelling can awfully worthy and wordy, but Boardwalk can also be incredibly funny. Sometimes its deadpan seriousness is the funniest thing in the world – Michael Shannon’s barest twitch is hilarious – and sometimes it’s just sublimely silly – like when Stephen Root leans in to whisper a name in James Cromwell’s ear.

A lot of the humour and humanity in the sprawling cast of the show is due to the wonderful cast. Fantastic character actors like Root or Cromwell get a couple of scenes and show everybody how this acting thing is done, but there is also Michael Stahlberg’s Arnold Rothstein and the way he stands there with a cup of tea, a fixed smile and a murderous stare; the great Stephen Graham doing another charming psychopath with a heart; and Michael K Williams with his smirk-of-a-thousand-meanings.

Steve Buscemi still takes scenes that you always know are coming, and overcomes the cliché and delivers something unexpectedly real, while Kelly Macdonald is fantastic when she can’t help calling someone on their bullshit (even if she only gets to do it about twice a season).

The cast is full of charming people who hide their ugly sides beneath sharp haircuts and sharper suits, but it’s the broken ones who are the most fascinating, the ones who try to find a place in a world they can’t connect with. Broken ones like Richard Harrow.

Richard Harrow – as played brilliantly by Jack Huston - went away to war and got half his face blown off. He thought it also blew away part of his soul, but it’s still there, he just can’t connect with people.

It’s still there because he’s trying – so hard – to connect, and sometimes he fails, and he is made to feel foolish. And sometimes he receives a kind word at the right time, and he actually feels something far better.

The great tragedy of the character is that his inability to connect with his fellow man makes him the ultimate killer. He doesn’t necessarily wants to kill anybody, but if he has to, he’ll act without any hesitation or remorse. He’ll walk into a house full of gangsters and kill everybody in it, quickly and methodically and efficiently.

 

Huston is surely destined for better things, and even though the blank stare of his mask does a lot of the work, the way he moves around a room, or grits his jaw in silent determination, or stares out at the world through one good, lonely eye, makes him the most compelling character in a story that is full of them.

It’s been a great year for serial television drama, with shows like Mad Men, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad all providing some stunning moments, and Boardwalk Empire is as strong as any of them. It’s a lot less self-conscious than it needs to be, and approaches greatness on a weekly basis.

It’s not just because of Richard Harrow, but he certainly doesn’t hurt.

I’ve also been catching up on Breaking Bad over the past few weeks, and have nearly totally caught up on that, and I think I’m in love with Jessie Pinkman too, but that’s mainly because I think the boy could use a hug.

- Originally published 10 December 2012

Richard Harrow, like a lot of people, did not get out of that series alive, but I do think the best ending was reserved for Michael Shannon's Nelson Van Alden, which was hugely cathartic on a number of levels.

Here comes the past #22: Galactic Guardians and the death of a minor obsession

Anticipation

The first place I ever saw Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, it wasn't in a comic book. It was on a towel.

As a kid, I had this beach towel, which got some heavy use over the years, mainly down the local rivers, and it ended up falling apart at about the time I turned into a sorry-arse teenager. It had a picture of the Guardians of the Galaxy on it, and even though I didn't have any idea who they were, I thought Starhawk looked bloody cool.

A few years later and I'm deep in a Marvel mood of mind. I'd seen the Guardians show up in a few comic books, with one legendary appearance in The Avengers during the Korvac saga. The last issue of this storyline left the Guardians and most of the Avengers in a state of mental limbo, as they are casually slaughtered during the climax. They all came back to life in the same issue, but there was just something about that resurrection that left my nine-year-old brain a little confused, and I never saw the following issue that would have set it all right. Were they really back? Or were they really dead? And who were these Guardians of the Galaxy anyway?

It didn't take long to figure that one out, and they showed up, here and there, over the years, fighting against the Badoon and zipping around in time. I had a little trouble figuring out how the Vance Astro in the New Warriors was connected to the Vance Astro of the year 3000, but a bit of confusion is good for the soul.

And then I heard about the new series, launched by Marvel its early nineties blitz of titles that never made it to issue numbers with three digits. Writer/artist Jim Valentino had a pleasingly loose style, and all the right friends. It sounded like something worth reading.

Naturally, the first one I got to read was issue #8.

Interpretation

It didn't make any sense. I had to know more and figure out what it all meant.

So what’s new? This is a fairly regular occurrence for any reader of mainstream American comics. Picking up a random issue of a title you might have heard about somewhere maybe, and being so totally lost as lots of people run about yelling at each other and dropping buildings on their heads. The first dip into a new continuity can be bracingly shocking, or just mildly confusing.

Sometimes this leads to obsession, ranging from a mild dose to full-on rage. Most of the time it's just mere interest, and in the case of Valentino’s GotG, this was as far as it ever really went, but that was enough.

The eighth issue of the series was one of the placeholders that mainstream comics are so very good at doing, moving off from a Big and Important climax and heading towards the next, with the usual amount of juggling sub-plots. When I saw it in a Timaru bookstore, I knew I had to have it, even though the first seven issues had never shown up in the town. 

That Saturday afternoon is still burned in my mind, even though it really was nothing special, sitting beside Caroline Bay and flicking through it, along with some recent Avengers and X-Factor action, and the series clicked. A thousand years on, the Marvel Universe was a very different place, but Valentino laid out all sorts of mysteries about the fates of the world’s greatest heroes and villains, and I’ve just turned 16 years old and in love with superhero comics like never before, so I’m hooked.

The next few issues feed the mutant fever young teenagers can always identify with, as our Galactic heroes found a lost x-colony, with all the pain, misery and Phoenix rebirths that this would predictably bring. The Guardians made their way back to Earth and a tonne of new mysteries were piled on, just as the old ones were sorted out.

The book remained surprisingly downbeat – there was all sorts of carnage, somehow made worse by Valentino’s splendidly cartoonish approach to art, and there was no guarantee of a happy ending, especially when billions of people had been horribly killed before the series even started. There aren’t that many shits and giggles in the apocalypse, so Valentino did a good job of showing the character’s humanity, buried amongst the vulgar sci-fi. None of them were technically fully human, but they all had soul.

As a 16-year-old misery guts, the early nineties Guardian of the Galaxy really was one of my favourite comics. For a while.

Purge

I never bought the five early issues I needed to complete the collection and bailed on the comic completely soon after Valentino bailed for Image. He stayed on as writer/plotter/vague presence in the background for a little while, but the drop in quality when his art disappeared was a good reason to quit. It was an irrational hatred of Kevin West’s art that saw me finally give up for good – West also finally got me to drop Justice League International, after sticking with it through that surprisingly good Dan Jurgens run – and I never bought a single issue past #33, or even read any of them.

Guardians of the Galaxy stumbled on for a few more years, and even made it as far as #50, but like almost every comic Marvel debuted in 1990, it didn’t make it to triple figures. Nobody really noticed when it finally died, nobody really cared.

I certainly didn’t. By that time, I was lost in Vertigo and Los Bros Hernandez and Dark Horse and Dan Clowes. I didn’t even notice when the last few Guardians comics came out, and it took me a while before I even noticed its absence.

That interest in the 30th century Marvel universe never really came back, and successive issues of the comic were sold off over the years, during periodic purges. It was easy enough to get rid of those Kevin West issues, and then the latter Valentino run went, with no second thoughts.

Eventually, I ditched the rest, getting rid of comics that I’d gone to a lot of effort to get back in the early nineties. I could still look at them and remember exactly where I’d bought it, but I need that bit of my brain to do other stuff now, so that scrap of memory can go. That was a lot harder to do, but I haven’t missed carting all those issues around, when I just didn’t care enough.

Or so I thought – the other week, I was sorting out the box of Marvel comics I’ve still held onto after all these years and I found issues 8 and 16 wedged between issues of Groo and late eighties X-Men annuals.

And the weird thing is, I was really, really glad to still have them. I’d obviously held onto the earlier issue for reasons of unashamed nostalgia, but I really thought I got rid of the second issue years ago and I was glad to have another look.

Reading them with a 2010 eye, they’re clumsy and a bit crude and they really don’t stand up as individual issues, but they’re going back into that box of Marvel. Maybe I just feel sorry for it.

Because it was just another nothing series, published during a massive glut of product. The stories haven’t been reprinted in recent years and are unlikely to be. There is a new Guardians of the galaxy series, but it has little to do with the earlier (later) team, apart from appearances by Star Hawk and Vance Astro.

But I still care. I can’t help it. The slight obsession that lasted for a year is long dead, but there is still some fondness for this unloved comic, and I can’t dispute that.

I also once had a thing for the Wonder Man comic that came out at the same time, but that’s another sad story altogether.

- Originally published 2 July 2010 

My affection for the old school Guardians of the galaxy hasn't dimmed in the past 16 years, and I've read those Valentino comics again recently and they hold up a lot better than the comic's contemporaries. The Guardians are a whole different thing now, but I always love it when the original crew show up again.

Here comes the past #21: Wold Newman (or: The Ubiquitous Doctor Shade)

Every couple of years, I get sucked into the fiction work of Mr Kim Newman, and it is taking me longer and longer to get out of that pleasurable pit again, because there is always more and more of it, and it's always entertaining.

I genuinely think Newman is the most entertaining writer on the planet, and I always love his work - from his numerous pulp-culture drenched short stories and novels to his meticulously researched and very funny non-fiction work.

When it comes to movies, he remains the one reviewer I invariably can trust (I’ve even come to concede that he was probably right about Army of Darkness), and when I pick up one of his books, I know I'm going to be entertained and absorbed. Whether it’s as his whiskey-drinking alter-ego Jack Yeovil, or as Mr-Strokey-Beardey Critic, or as a horror writer who finds queasy terrors in the midlands of England, or as a builder of his own worlds.

There is so much of it now, that when I start reading Newman’s books again, I end up reading nothing else but Dark Future, Anno Dracula or Geneviève stories for weeks and weeks after, and it’s always totally worth it.

1. Pulp Friction!

Orgy of the Blood Parasites was going to be called Bloody Students, and that sums up the brilliant nastiness of Jack Yeovil’s hard-boiling debut. The only Yeovil novel that wasn’t part of a series, (although the name popped up on numerous genre-related reviews), it took Cronenberg horror to a nice English university, unleashing primal rages between the exams, and slaughtering its cast with unbridled enthusiasm.

Sometimes I think Yeovil’s books are my favourites of all Newman’s work. They’re so busy and rushed and packed, but even though Newman reportedly wrote most of them in a couple of weeks, there is still room for fun and excitement, with a healthy 'anything goes' attitude.

The Warhammer fantasy books are better than they should be - Drachenfels starts with an epic quest, gets that crap out of the way in 20 pages and gets into the real story, which somehow turns into an extraordinary satire of the movie business in a medieval setting, and ends with my unashamedly favourite last line in any novel ever. Beasts in Velvet is a giallo murder mystery, right down to the gruesome deaths and weird perspectives (I’m still chuffed that I figured out what the dead man wrote on the barrel he was buried in), and all of the Geneviève stories have hidden depths, just like the smile of the incredibly old teenage girl who drifts through the tales. 

The Dark Future books are even better. They’re set in a world where anything goes, post-apocalyptic shenanigans banging up against Things From Beyond The Veil. It’s a series of books that are loaded down with noble heroes with tarnished souls, disgusting villains that kill you if you’re lucky, and a small mountain of pop-culture references.

Jackie catches JFK in bed with Marilyn in the early sixties, Nixon becomes president and epically bad pollution turns most of the US into a dangerous wasteland, filled with roaming teen gangs, and genuine monsters in all shapes and sizes. But it’s okay, because Colonel Elvis Aron Presley didn’t sign that contract for the devil, so there is still hope.

They are a painfully unfinished series of books, and I would give anything to read United States Cavalry, the once-promised conclusion. But I still end up reading the whole series all the way through, over and over again, because they’re so silly and so funny, and so noble and so passionate.

One book has Jason Voorhees, Michael Myersand a small army of fictional murderers taking part in a nuthouse riot – and that’s just a sidebar to the main event where a young punk girl stares down an unfathomably ancient evil. I know that I’m in the right place

2. Reel Life (or: ‘I didn’t raise my daughter to be a severed head’)

The Dark Future might be still unwritten, and it has been an agonising wait for some of his books, but I still read new words by Kim Newman every month, in things like Sight and Sound and Empire magazine.

I’ve been getting Empire every month since 1993, and it didn’t take long to realise Newman (or Yeovil) was writing most of the reviews for films that I was interested in – all the gross horrors and cheesy sci-fis – and he was usually right. I’ve trusted Newman’s opinion for nearly twenty years, and it’s never steered me wrong.

After all, his criticism is always fair, and usually manages to find something – anything – nice to say about a lot of the films he watches. It’s still worth following up a Video Dungeon recommendation. So much of genre film is inherently worthless, you need a trusted voice to find the gems amongst the filth.

And he knows what he is talking about, because unlike many reviewers who think relatively slick movies like the Hostel or Saw films are as bad as things can get in cinema, Newman really has seen it all, and his film knowledge is actually scary.

It’s there in all editions of the excellent Nightmare Movies, where Newman categorises a vast amount of movies into various sub-genres, and finds interesting ideas and themes stretching across dozens of movies. He’s also written excellent books on western movies and apocalyptic cinema, and his first proper book to be published was non-fiction – the fun Ghastly Beyond Belief with pal Neil Gaiman, which is a list book of funny quotes from genre literature and cinema – some of it is incredibly funny, although poor old E E (Doc) smith gets an intellectual kicking.

The knowledge shown in Newman’s non-fiction work seeps through into fiction, and they also share an undisguised enthusiasm for all this horror rubbish. It’s still there in every issue of Empire, and every new short story.

3. The horror, the horror

Newman’s stand-alone novels and short story collections cover a wide range of genres and styles, but there is always, always horror in them.

Jago, the Quorum, Life's Lottery, Bad Dreams and The Night Mayor, along with several collections of short stories, call upon a host of weird influences. It’s the same sort of humorous horror that British horror fiction is so good at, a Grand Guignol of such grotesqueness, it manages to be incredibly funny and genuinely disturbing at the same time, especially because everybody is so bloody repressed. Built on a base of Hammer horror, with a fair amount of Amicus and those old Rank chillers added for taste.

Newman’s horror books can be nakedly brutal – in the climax of Jago, the hero, who is already suffering the worst toothache in the world, bites down on a mouthful of pins so the pain can override a psychic nightmare. But they can also be subtle – I took three goes at the kitchen-sink Choose-Your-Own-Adventure fun of Life’s Lottery before I realized it was a story about the horror of the mundane, and that it’s about ordinary lives full of wrong choices that skate around the edge of something vast and old and malevolent and ultimately lead to your doom. Unless you cheat, and then all will be well.

There are shadowy figures lurking in the background of these short stories and novels, who appear over and over again – Derek Leech, born in the Thames filth and a multi-media Mephistopheles for a New Wave Britain (and the narrator of Life Lottery), or Doctor Shade, slithering between universes, a dark presence in a dark car.

But while these books share more than the odd character, they also share feelings of deep dread, the sense that something crushingly normal has gone terribly wrong, and a whole lot of body-horror. Newman is from the Video Nasty generation of UK horror writers, and shares a bleak and bloody view of modern horror on the council estate that has also been mined by diverse voices such as Clive Barker, James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell.

But there is also hope – even though there are often horrible things happening to innocent people, the only ones in Newman’s horror fiction who are truly damned are those who deserve it and almost embrace their fate, (most notably in The Quroum, where Leech gets four souls for the price of one,) and the bleakness is balanced by the occasional piece of simple kindness.

After all, there always has to be some hope in the darkness, or what’s the point?

4. Somewhen else

The first Kim Newman book I ever read was Anno Dracula, which I picked up off the new release shelf at the Timaru Public Library in 1993. This was a good place to start, especially since I’d just seem Bram Stoker’s Dracula the week before, and it was very easy to imagine Richard E Grant as the devilish Doctor Seward in the book.

But the thing I really loved in that book - and the thing I still adore – was the author’s willingness to throw in an incredible amount of references, with vampires and other dubious characters from movies, books, television and comics filling the pages of the books.

It’s the sort of series where you see references to the work of a Professor Langstrom at the Gotham University during a conversation between Doctor Moreau and Herbert West, or where a prime suspect in a later murder mystery is Superman, or where Biggles takes to the sky to fight giant vampire bats, or where James Bond actually physically transforms from Connery to Bond.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did the same sort of thing, but it’s no use playing “who did it first?’, because Phillip Jose Farmer wins that argument every time, and it’s not just about the fun. While it is immensely pleasurable to get a reference to some incredibly vague story, it gives the story added weight.

Bringing in characters from other pieces of literature negates the need for unnecessary background. A vague reference to the fate of poor dim Carmilla can actually have resonance for anybody familiar with her story, and when there are huge amounts of characters, there is a lot of depth. You don’t even need to see the name Fu-Manchu to know of the incredible schemes and plans the Oriental mastermind is working on in the background of Anno Dracula, and when a vampire Moriarty dreams of the centuries he can spend working on an Ultimate Mathematical Theory Of Everything, it adds a sense of tragedy that the “real” Moriarty couldn’t put aside his hate long enough to pursue the numbers.

I really, really like all of the Anno Dracula books. They’re full of action and humour and some incredibly satisfying plotting. I love playing Spot The Reference, and I don’t mind when I don’t get them all, because I might the next time.

I’ve been reading this series of books for nearly two decades, and I never, ever get sick of them.

On the other hand, I only just got to read the Diogenes Club books in the past six months, after stumbling across all three of them at a local library.

It’s almost the same world as the Anno Dracula series, but just a little closer to reality. The Diogenes Club breaches the gap between Arthur Conan Doyle and Adam Adamant, high octane cerebral adventures in the world of super spies and supernatural shivers.

It was a bit much, reading all three of the books in a two week stretch, and I've already forgotten a lot of the details of these stories, but they will be worth coming back to. All of Newman's stuff is worth coming back to.

Although Newman’s books have often been incredibly hard to find, and some – like the Diogenes Club books – fetch stupid prices on the second hand market. But the Anno Dracula books are now out in lovely new editions from Titan, with even lovelier extra material, and even though I have bought all of the books, the new editions were impossible to pass by.

So I'm looking forward to cracking into the Vampire Romance story in the new edition of the Bloody Red Baron, and I'm extremely excited that Johnny Alucard is actually happening. And there is the Hound of the D'Urbervilles, starring Colonel Moran, another collection of linked stories, and more new short stories in strange places and thoughtful reviews and essays in the expected places, and I still haven't read Back in the USSR, or the Doctor Who novelette he did, and it's all so much bloody fun.

Because it's all about the blood and the fun.

- Originally published 22 June 2012 

I just finished Newman's latest book - Model Actress Whatever - and was stoked to find it was a strong continuation of his Diogenes Club books. The hots just keep on coming.

Here comes the past #20: The secret origin of the Tearoom of Despair

It was exactly 10 years ago, and we were somewhere near the monastery on the pillars of Meteora, when I realised what my name was.

The lovely wife and I had just got married, and we celebrated by heading off around the world for six months. At this point, we were 30 days into a 46-day tour around Europe, and disaster had struck: I'd run out of things to read. The scenery around Europe was mindblowing, but a lot of the travel was along anonymous highways, with just grey walls and straight lines of trees to see out the window. We were on a tight schedule to get around the continent, so there were hours and hours on those dull roads, with nothing to do but sleep, drink or read. (Or all three.)

This was before the ubiquity of e-books, so almost everybody else on the tour had their own dogged paperbacks, and they'd all get handed around. I'd already burned through Robert Fisk's 1200-page History of Civilization in less than a week, and got through my Carl Hiaasen omnibus in two days, so was desperate to read anything, and there were no English-language bookshops about. So I read the only Harry Potter book I've ever read, and even choked down a James Patterson novel. I got five books into Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen saga, and never actually finished the series, which isn't much of a problem, because I can't remember a single thing about any of those books.

What I do remember is this - staring out the window because there was nothing else to do, and deciding at some point that I needed to get a lot of the bullshit about comics and movies and other debris of pop culture out of my skull and into some sort of online journal, right about the time blogging became terminally uncool.

It was always going to be called the Tearoom of Despair, but I couldn't use my real name, because I couldn't bear the endless jokes about The Cure. I needed a fake name, and as we were traveling through the Greek countryside, and I saw these giant pieces of rock stabbing into the sky. And while I felt so fucking far from home, I knew that wherever I went, or whatever I did, I was always going to be Bob from Temuka.

It took another 18 months before I actually started publishing in the Tearoom, but that was where it really started, and I haven't stopped since.

This is the 1000th post at the Tearoom of Despair.

A thousand posts of ill-thought comments, and ridiculous opinions about the dumbest shit. A thousand posts of trying to convince the world that Love and Rockets is as good as it ever was, that Doctor Who really is the best TV show ever, and that Frank Miller still has something worthwhile to say. A thousand posts of bullshit, and half-arsed opinions, and desperate pleas for attention.

I've spent countless hours writing this out, and have posted every single thing with a 'fuck it, that'll do'. I still lie awake at night wondering about the next post, and have now racked up nearly 700,000 words on the dumbest subjects.

It's been going a lot longer than I thought it would last, but I'm hardly going to stop now. I feel like I'm still just getting started.

Still, real life is a right arse sometimes, and the Tearoom is in a semi-low content mode at the moment, and that will continue for a couple more weeks.

It doesn't mean I don't care. I still love you all. Here's to the next 1000 posts.

- Originally published August 1, 2017

Blogging about blogging is a sin, Martin. It's a sin!

Here comes the past #19: Consider the McCarthy Dredd

One of the nice things about the Judge Dredd comic is that the more stylistic and individualistic an artist is, the more successful the story. There is something about that deceptively simple uniform, the weird world of Mega-City One and the comic’s willingness to embrace the absurd that works so well with a truly individual artist.

It’s where the stumpy feet of Mike McMahon can sit alongside Paul Marshall’s absurdly clean line. It’s where a fiercely independent talent like Carlos Ezquerra can build an unexpected and rich history, and then Brian Bolland comes in and makes it all look so incredibly easy.

It’s a comic where an utterly unique artist like Brendan McCarthy can dabble in Dredd over a few decades, and produce some truly iconic and massively influential work.

McCarthy has been there since the early days – and his art was as clunky and clumsy as the Dredd strip itself. Back in the late seventies, neither had really found their own voice, although they were certainly showing promise at this young age. McCarthy was heavily influenced by the dubiously addictive talents of Brett Ewins, resulting in a Dredd that looked like this:


Which is about as generic 1979 Dredd ever gets. But by the time 2000ad had turned three years old, he had moved on. He was off perfecting his craft elsewhere and finding his voice. And when he did, he came back and talked like this:



This is something extraordinary and beautiful - I’ve been looking at that cover for 25 years and it’s still as shocking and brilliant as ever. But more to the point: his Dredd looked like this:


or this:



or what-the-hell-am-I-even-looking-at this:



Awesomely coloured and brilliantly experimental, McCarthy’s Dredd has a helmet that only this artist could pull off. While he’d been away from the comic, he’d evolved into a fierce talent that was endlessly readable, while still slightly painful to look at.

Okay, that’s a bit simplistic. McCarthy never really went away, and in between these two styles, he produced several covers and pin-ups that defined Dredd for a new post-punk generation.

In particular, there is this pin-up from the early eighties, later reused as a cover for a reprint:


Even by the standards of 1984 - this Dredd is something else. Look at him! Look at his power! He doesn’t need to pose or wave a gun or stomp on somebody’s head to assert his authority, this Dredd is cool as fuck because he is totally relaxed, while still in complete control. Literally clasping the law in his hand, with no need for a massive physique, Dredd’s will is all.

Look at those legs! He’s still got the McMahon big boots (even though a contemporary storyline had Dredd trade his boots in for a tighter fit) – and several current Dredd artists have singled this one piece of art out as a key influence in their work.

He also produced a couple of cracking Dredd doppelganger covers at the time for the City of the Damned storyline, like this one:



I was 10 years old when this comic came out, and a comic that promised a blind Judge Dredd fighting his zombiefied future self was more than my thrill-receptors could handle. Especially when it all paid off! With violence! -


Ungh indeed!

McCarthy always had a humourously clumsy action style that has infinite charms, and in a short few years he had developed an entire style that remains essentially unchanged, while always evolving.

Whatever it was, in the wake of Riders on the Storm in Prog 473, there was to be a rich offering of McCarthy’s Dredd. He went on to do more covers and more stories, including a splendid couple of issues of Oz that let him loose with the Judda – perverted copies of Dredd hiding out in Ayers Rock. Between the hilarious action setpieces and beautifully designed giant mutant Mexican birds, there was always the McCarthy awkwardness, that leads to panels like this, full of rage and power and frustration, while also just a picture of an angry man in his underwear:



And then, after a typically weird one-off with Jamie Hewlett in Prog 614, McCarthy was off. He buggered off to do terrific covers for Shade the Changing Man, and doomed pieces of brilliance like Skin. There was also a load more film work, which is undoubtedly more lucrative, but there is barely a second’s worth of Highlander 2: The Quickening that is worth the months he worked on it. Although, to be fair - the idea of a Brendan McCarthy-written Mad Max film still makes my brain drool.

And then he came back, late last year, with an all new Dredd, and it’s all different again. In one sense, the cozy weirdness of new McCarthy art feels like it never went away, but you have to take another closer look at his Dredd, which has gone somewhere very interesting:


The helmet is back under control and the scowl is still there, and the chin is still there, but it’s not the same. It’s something different, all over again:


This is something new again. A new, more wiry Dredd, tough as ever, but even more relaxed and again. This Dredd is the same old hard bastard (especially when writer Al Ewing has him threatening an innocent rat and shooting Doctor Who in the head), but he’s a bit more stripped back and a whole lot leaner.

This kind of face is nothing new to McCarthy, but usually it would be used for a tech-judge or some other minor character. To give this face to Judge Dredd promises all new possibilities, and all new avenues to explore.

It remains to be seen if McCarthy will produce any more Dredd in the short term future. It’s entirely possible that he’ll disappear for another few decades. But if he ever comes back, it will be well worth watching out for.

Because this is a Dredd that is all new and all different, every single time. There are things that never change, like the basics of that uniform, but there are endless variations, endless possibilities.

What more could you ask for?

- Originally published March 11, 2011

We got that Mad Max in the end, and it was good. And McCarthy still does the occasional cover or pinup of Dredd, and it's always different, a recent effort featured a hulking, brutish Dredd that didn't look like any other McCarthy Dredd, so some things are eternal.

Here comes the past #18: Blake's 7 outbleaked them all

Blake's 7 was a pretty bleak show, right from the start, and right to the end. The whole programme had a profound impact on me as a kid, to the point where it would show up as a metaphor in a dream for young existentialism. So it should have come as no surprise when it ended with the absolute slaughter of every main character, but it was still a genuinely shocking thing to witness. 

I was probably six-years-old when I first saw this last episode and it did me harm.

It's not just that they all get gunned down in the final moments, it's that they haven't changed anything, with no hint their death will inspire others to rise up against the Federation. Even the figurehead they all rallied around - the title character of the whole damn show -  turned out to be another weak man, who buckled under the pressure and started working for the system. 

Avon gets the last grin, but the Federation rolls on, crushing all in its path. The rebels are annihilated and the system endures. Servalan is the only main character who is still alive by the end of the series and gets to rock off into forever with her crew of mutoids.

There's been plenty of sequels in books and audio adventures, but they don't really count. While they give some hope, the utterly nihilistic end of the show is the only way this story could ever end. Even though they were onto a space trek straight into oblivion from the start, it still hurt.

I'm still a couple of years away from my next 11-year rewatch, but it's coming. As inevitable and inescapable as that bloody Federation. 

- Originally published 24 September 2019 

I am right in the middle of that 11-year rewatch now, and I'm delighted to confirm that it is just as brutal as I remember. It's a cold universe out there, chums!

Here comes the past #17: Red Dwarf is my late night comfort food

It’s goofy and silly and the characters never really grow and the special effects were always a bit rubbish, and the science in the fiction was always a bit dodgy and it’s got the single daftest end-credits music in the entire history of television.

Smeg, I love Red Dwarf.

I always liked Red Dwarf, right from the start, but I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed the latest season - Red Dwarf X

After a couple of series that mixed up the formula and just got too clever for their own good, the tenth series of Red Dwarf was a consciously back-to-basics exercise – just the same four blokes bombing around the same infinite galaxy in the same giant rusting spaceship, three million years from home. The last human, his massively annoying (and dead) best friend, a robot and a cat, all truly lost in space.

At its best, Red Dwarf can be both surprisingly subtle and totally broad – it’s practically enshrined in the show’s format. And that makes it perfect late-night TV comfort food. After all, I’ve been watching Red Dwarf in late night telly since the late eighties. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an episode before eleven at night. It would feel wrong.

It was always a late night treat in this part of the world, ever since the first series was on Friday nights in the late eighties, chopped up as part of an end-of-the-week music show. And it still feels right to watch it at the end of a long day. All the weird bollocks sci-fi and morose introspection in the immensity of the universe just feels right when everybody else has gone to sleep and the world is quiet, and you’re all alone, and it’s cold outside.

So here we are, more than 20 years after the first series, and characters have barely grown or developed, and the basic situation hasn’t changed at all.

All of the stories in the tenth series could have happened in the first years of the programme. The effects are a lot better, and the art of television production design has come a long, long way, but the stories stay the same.

There is almost a checklist that needs to be filled out for Red Dwarf X – there’s the part where a crew member finds out something shocking about his family history, there’s the whole episode spent wandering around the ship processing news from home that has arrived on a mail shuttle, and there’s the bit where dodgy pseudo-science allows the crew to interact with a famous historical figure (they finally got around to Jesus this series).

It’s easy to sneer at this blatant attempt to recapture the past, but after the frankly awful Back To Earth series and various other attempts to shake up the crew, the back-to-basics approach – after 24 years! - from co-creator Doug Naylor really does work.

The main effect of this strike at the heart of the series is a renewed focus on the characters. It’s the same actors, still living in these roles, and the dynamics have changed and grown over the decades, but their relationships are eternal.

The programme does often feel like a real boy’s club, but it only really works as a total sausage fest, because a female – any female – gives Lister hope that the human race can go on, when there shouldn’t really be any hope. There’s no real defense of the fact that the only two female characters who show up in season ten of Red Dwarf are a traitorous starship officer and someone so dim she takes a walk out of an airlock, but attempts to bring females into this blokey-bloke world upset the balance.

It’s why Kochanski can to go, even though Chloe Annett was a welcome dose of beauty and new humour in the show, and why one of the many failings of the aborted US version was making Cat a female.

It’s a long story about two main blokes who are at the bottom of society, even when society is all gone. The relationship between Rimmer and Lister is endearingly complex, they are mean and snide to each other on a daily basis, but do actually care for each other. Even if they’ll never say it.

Kryten is still a three-joke wonder, usually over some kind of housecleaning attachment, but invaluable for plot movements, even if this has rendered Holly redundant. (I still miss you, Holly.) And The Cat is still the series’ ace in the hole – totally narcissistic, able to speak easy truths that others don’t even notice, and easily distracted by pieces of string.

I got seriously hooked on Red Dwarf somewhere around its peak in the third and fourth seasons (it’s no surprise to me that Red Dwarf was most popular during the years there was no new Doctor Who). I remember one late night in the early nineties, that was just a little too late, and I fell asleep and slept right through a season three episode, and I was so fucking mad with myself for falling asleep, because I had no idea when I’d get to see it again. (Remember when you missed something and that was it? Tough titty if you wanted to see it again? The past sucked, man.)

I even got the Smegazine, with its largely dull articles and some decent comics. And I can’t help feeling affectionate towards the magazine in particular, because I had a girlfriend who worked in the bookstore that sold it, and we first got talking about it, and started going out, and lasted about two weeks, because Red Dwarf was all we had in common. (But it was a great two weeks.)

So yeah, I don’t care if Red Dwarf is just comforting and silly, because it’s a harsh world out there sometimes, and a bit of comfort isn’t too much to ask. Red Dwarf is still goofy and doesn’t really develop the characters, but the special effects this time were excellent. 

And I still sing along to that end credits theme tune, every time the show ends. It’s a cheerful way to sign off on the day, especially when I’m all alone. More or less.

- Originally posted 24 November 2012

I have the nagging theory I may have missed a couple of Red Dwarf series in the last decade, but I figure I'll get to them, one late Friday night.

Here comes the past #16: Wildstar won't make you rich, Joe Dirt

I’m such a fucking dork, I still obsessively try to figure out what comic books I’m seeing when they show up on screens in movies and TV shows.

It’s so dumb, but I keep doing it, every single time.

Like all idiotic obsessions, it started young, and then really got out of control in the teenage years, and I just never fucking grew out of it.

In my defense, I was a totally rabid comic book fan growing up, living in a small town that was very far away from any comic book shops, and I was getting by on the meagre offerings at the local bookstore and dairies. I was hungry to consume any comic book I saw, but there wasn’t much to eat at all.

But sometimes, they’d show up on the TV, or in the odd movie, and they would flash by on screen, and I couldn't focus on anything else anymore. I’d always try to figure out what they were. Like most teenagers, I spent an embarrassingly large amount of my teenage years with my finger on the pause button of the video remote, but unlike most other teens, I wasn't looking for brief flashes of movie star nudity, I was trying to work out if that was a copy of The Human Fly that showed up on an episode of CHIPs.

One of the best sources to seeing comics out in the wild of the wider world was the news. There were so many news stories about comics 'growing up' in the late eighties and early nineties, and getting into socially relevant shit, like the AIDs epidemic or the Rodney King beatings, and funny books full of swears and titties and blood. The stories would always go the same way, with obligatory referencing of the 1960s Batman TV show and sometimes would get somebody like Alan Moore to pontificate on what it all means, but the bit I always like best about these news stories was the part where they would go to the local comic store and find out what the local geeks thought of all this.

And as sad as it sounds - because I was so outside the loop that I didn't even know things the The Comics Journal existed and literally got my comic news from Marvel's Bullpen Bulletins, or their subscription pages -  those news reports are where I first heard of Love and Rockets, or some of the gloriously stranger Batman titles of the late eighties. Seeing their covers flash by as the news report did a sweeping pan across a comic store somewhere on the other side of the world was genuinely illuminating.

I used to tape all those news reports, and I’m pretty sure I still have a lot of them still somewhere in the back cupboard, buried at the end of dubbed copies of Robocop and Apocalypse Now. 

But as good as those news reports were, it was even more exciting when saw them on the movies - like the Nightmare on Elm Street movie with the comic nerd (part five, maybe? they all run together after a while), and there is a long pan across a bunch of Marvel comics scattered across the floor, and there was a genuine and pathetic thrill in seeing an issue of X-Men I had.  (They didn't save the nerd, he still got sliced to bits by Freddy.)

Long before nerd culture was fucking everywhere, dumb, schlocky films like The Ambulance, starring Eric Roberts, with its slight connection to the comic-book world, were as good as it got when it came to seeing comics up on screen, and I would always try to identify individual issues when they appeared.

It wasn't always easy. I’m still trying to figure out what the comic is that Clarence shows Alabama in True Romance. It ain’t Spider-Man #1 like he promises, that’s for damn sure.

I’ve lived in towns with comic shops for 20 years now, and been to them all over the world, and I still sniff out news reports and movie appearances of comics like a dog chasing a squirrel.

It happened again the other day, and I wish I could say it was while watching something good. But it wasn’t, I was watching Joe Dirt 2.

I can’t justify watching Joe Dirt, it was a terrible film, with a wasteland of laughs, and I watched the whole damn thing because it was two in the morning and I had nothing better to do. But then there was the part where Joe Dirt goes back in time (don't ask why, I don't have a fucking clue), and he gets the bright idea to buy some old comic books, hide them away, and cash them in decades later

And I looked at it, trying to see what issues he was going for. Was it an early FF, or the first appearance of Wolverine or something? It must be something big to be worth a lot of money years later.

Wait... Is that….?

Is that fucking WILDSTAR?

It is fucking WildStar!

Al Gordon and Jerry Ordway’s WildStar comic was an early Image superhero effort that didn't last very long at all - he got half a dozen issues of his own, and turned up in a few other Image comics, most notably The Savage Dragon. While it's certainly a professionally put-together comic, WildStar is precisely nobody's favourite superhero, and even the biggest comic nerds would find little worthwhile to say about it.

Unfortunately for Mr Dirt, I could get you five copies of WildStar for a buck, and they are literally worth less than toilet paper. Like many of the Image comics, there were tonnes more printed than needed, and with all due respect to the creators, they have been stinking up quarter bins for two decades.

Maybe this was the joke all along - Joe Dirt is as dumb as shit, and rather than paying for his children's future, he is literally buying something that will lose value over the years, rather than accrue it. WildStar comics might be worth something in the far future, when Earth is a burnt-out cinder circling a bloated sun, and a single copy of WildStar preserved in mylar is the last sign of human civilisation, but they aren't worth dick in the here and now.

I think I’ve given Joe Dirt 2 more of my brainpower than this dumb film could ever expect.

I’m sure I’ve learned my lesson, and the next time a comic book flashes across the screen, I'm sure I will be able to resist rewinding and pausing, 'just to see'.

I’m sure.

- Originally published February 20, 2017 

Nine years later and comics are freaking everywhere in mass media these days, but I still try to make out issues in the background. I can't stop.

Here comes the past #15: My one big idea for the DC Multiverse

I would always rather have something that tries to be crazily ambitious and fails, than anything that plays it safe and uses the excuse of taking things 'back to basics'. This particularly applies to Doctor Who, and after the last series showed a crippling lack of ambition, I fan-wanked all over the place a few months back with my idea of the unknown history of the main character from before he was William Hartnell, and his other roles before he took on the title of The Doctor.

But it also applies to the big, dumb superhero comics that I can never really get over, and with so much opportunity that the DC multiverse offers, it's always a bit disappointing when the biggest idea seems to be turning Batman into the Joker.

The dark multiverse shenanigans of the past couple of years might feel edgy and groundbreaking for some, but surely the people creating these things actually want to do something new and different. Don't they?

Shit, if I had my way - and I can happily share this nonsense here because there is no way in hell I'll ever have my way - I'd be making the DC multiverse a lot more metaphysical, and have the different universes housing the souls of the same characters, with their spiritual essence traveling between universes at the point of death, so that the Bruce Wayne of Earth-2 isn't just the same person as Earth-1 Bruce physically, they're the same person spiritually, and the afterlife that has been well established in many, many DC comics is a way-station on the soul's journey, before the souls head on to the next universe, in an endlessly self-perpetuating cycle of rebirth and renewal, so you could create an endless rebooting, and it's always the same person, even if they can't remember their past lives, and  the time differences would all be a bit Jeremy Berimy, but that's easy to fix with an exposition box or two, and we can have endless Bruce Waynes, always updating for a new generation, never bogged down by years of bullshit, while also hinting at the actual meaning of life, at least in a fictional universe, and oh shit, I've just bored everyone to death again....

- Originally published November 13 2019
I still think it's a rad idea.