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?.

Here comes the past #29: For the love of Batman

“Batman’s rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To be sure this is a lighter incarnation but it’s certainly no less valid and true to the character’s roots than the tortured avenger crying out for mommy and daddy.”

- Bat-Mite

The Brave and the Bold cartoon

Admit it, if you like superheroes, you fucking loved the Batman TV show as a kid. And then you hated it as a teenager. And then, if you grew up enough, you started to like it again.

 

The good bastards at the comic shop near my work put out a whole bunch of comic magazines on sale for $1 each. Issues of magazines I’d never seen before, many from the TwoMorrows publishing outfit – stuff like Alter Ego, Comic Book Artist and Back-Issue.

I had only seen a small handful of these magazines before, and was surprised how much I enjoyed their unashamed wallowing in nostalgia. The sheer amount of reproduced raw art is responsible for most of that enjoyment and a general tone of unabashed enthusiasm is highly contagious. After reading a long, rambling and highly enjoyable conversation between Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell, any reader will be convinced of the genuine worth of that mid-period Legion of Super-Heroes and that funk-tastic design sense.

But the writers often leave their inner fanboy showing a bit, most notably through their enthusiastic gushing over subjects few others care about. There is also the unfortunate tendency to dismiss the Adam West Batman as an unfortunate diversion from the true Batman which has tarnished the public’s perception of the character and pushed back any serious interpretations of the concept.

The inherent fanboy can be heard in the sneering. It’s obviously an embarrassment to all true Batman fans, a campy glitch in the history of the Dark Knight, the annoying uncle you have to acknowledge.

But it’s not. It’s brilliant. Turns out this annoying uncle actually has a good sense of humour and all sorts of stories to tell. The Batman TV show from the ‘60s is bright and colourful and cheerful and surprisingly ironic. It’s a bit stupid, but smart in ways that really matter. All those old showbiz hamming, chewing down on the gaudy scenery. Those catchphrases, those actors and that music, imprinted on generations. It’s brilliant.

When I was a little kid, the first television programmes I ever remember watching were Doctor Who and Batman.

That was my tastes rooted for life.

But I was genuinely excited about the Batman show when my brain was forming, and it was 20 years old then. There is something about that absolute deadpan that made it timeless.

Kids love it because it is loud and fun. It’s got a theme tune that is insanely catchy and these bright characters running around and having adventures. Its most obvious humour level is pitched somewhere around the eight year old’s level, so it always gets them laughing with the dumb joke.

I’ve seen kids in the 21st century fall over themselves in excitement when the Batman TV show was on television. They were eating that stuff up and asking for seconds. Their parents didn’t understand.

And then you get older and a girl catches you reading something meaty like The Killing Joke and laughs at you because she thinks it’s full of Fatman and Slobin and you’re like fuck that shit

I once had a lovely conversation with a girl who sometimes has to go out and do weather reports for breakfast television. They make her do the stupidest things, any old excuse to drag the waking eyes over to a TV screen.

She said she knows it’s all horribly embarrassing and tacky and cheesy, but if you show an inch of that knowledge, it just doesn’t work. The only way to avoid being embarrassed is to be as embarrassing as possible. Otherwise you just look stilted and awkward, and that’s much, much worse.

That’s how the television Batman works. There was just enough winking to show they were all in the joke, but not enough to be mean about it.

I watched it again in my early twenties and it was just stupid, so I filed it away as something best forgotten. Comics are serious business for serious young men. There will be no camp here.

And then I watched an episode with those kids I was talking about earlier, and it was bloody fantastic. The whole programme was dripping with deadpan irony and still played well – four decades after it was made.

It looked crisp and clear in a way that 70s television shows never do. It remains timeless and I can handle a Batman that digs the day.

That’s not everybody’s Batman. Many remain convinced that the tortured avenger of the night is the only valid interpretation of a cultural icon that is deserving of the respect its history deserves. Other people just like a Batman who grimaces and throws bad guys into meat grinders.

Others like a Batman who can be a bit competitive, while always fair. Who isn’t afraid to show others how it’s done and can do it with a laugh.

There have been a lot of thoughtful and genuinely mature stories about Batman that have been absolutely fantastic. There have also been a lot of goofy and funny stories that have been so enjoyable.

They’re all valid interpretations.

Nananananananana! Nananananananana! Batman! Batman! BATMAN! Nananananananana!

I still know loads of people who love reading comics, but wouldn’t be caught dead with them in public. While there are more people reading Sandman on the train than ever before, it’s still perceived as a child’s medium in western eyes. If you like it, you must be immature.

Well, so what? What’s wrong with liking a kid’s product if it’s smart and funny enough? It doesn’t do any harm. If people laugh at you because you get a bit over-excited about Batman and Robin, that’s their problem. It shouldn’t taint my enjoyment of it.

It took me fuckin’ years to figure this out.

- Originally published March 10, 2010

I got a boxset of all the Batman episodes for dirt cheap recently, and have been watching them with the kids. They love the punching, I love the female villains. Everyone is having a good time.

Here comes the past #28: Tying the world together (and getting your end away) with Philip Jose Farmer

Philip Jose Farmer was tapping into something powerful when he had Doc Savage and Tarzan literally cross cocks that one time, and we're not just talking about the obvious throbbing members.

Farmer's A Feast Unknown brought together the two pulp heroes under legal-friendly aliases and is still a ridiculously entertaining action romp, 45 years after it was published in 1970. It's just a tiny slice in Farmer's massive bibliography, but it's one of the most crucial, and most fun.

The fun is self-evident, with the adventure icons racing through a fevered fight against the usual mysterious and vast global conspiracy, while all their clothes fall off. But the importance is seriously under-stated, because Farmer was playing around with some big, culture-defining ideas decades ago, and the mainstream pop world is only just catching up.

Farmer was always the totally harmless, slightly inappropriate and enormously entertaining drunk uncle of late 20th century science fiction literature. He had big ideas about life and existence and consciousness and this wonderful, strange universe of ours, but he was never afraid to get a bit dirty and grubby, and his best works were always a wonderful amalgamation of the gutter and the divine. 

He found a huge audience with his Riverworld books, one of the greatest high concepts in all of science fiction, as everybody who ever lived wakes up on the banks of a world-spanning river, with no explanations or clear purpose. He also got into some seriously psychological shit with his World of Tiers series, even writing a book about the series' real-life use in psychotherapy, and he wrote a genuine Kilgore Trout novel, which pissed off Kurt Vonnegut Jr enormously.

And he wrote dozens and dozens and dozens of other novels and essays and short stories, often targeting subjects that were traditionally taboo in sci-fi worlds, like sex and religion, and all the messy stuff in-between. His stories certainly weren't for everybody, and every now and then he could get genuinely offensive, but they were often more thoughtful than they looked, and just as exciting as they promised.

I came to Farmer by accident – his works weren't found in my local libraries, not even in the adult section, and I would have missed him entirely if I hadn't heard about him from an article in some random issue of Starlog. But that was enough. This is somewhere in my mid-teens, somewhere in the early nineties, and his fiction sounded incredibly enticing, and like nothing else I was reading at the time.

I soon found some slightly soiled copies of his work at the local second hand bookstore, and I was off. His work had a vitality that was often missing in other pulp pastiches, and he always remembered that while man was reaching for the stars, he was mired in physical desires. Sex and death often intertwined, which was incredibly appealing as a teenager, and gave his stories their own swagger.

And, best of all, he made connections between fictions that was remarkably addictive, building up this vast chronology of the fantastic, dating back thousands of years to the time of Opar, and pushing these stale old heroes into strange new territories.

His books could still prove maddeningly hard to find – I still haven't read the Mad Goblin/Lord of The Trees stories, because I've never seen them bloody anywhere – but I still couldn't get enough of this kind of obsessive cataloguing. And as Farmer ended up tying more and more characters into the same world – the world of the Wold Newton family – I was there for the ride.

There were other writers who did similar things before Farmer, and there had been intricate fictional universes in the world of comic books, but not on the scale that Farmer worked on. In his fantastic fictional biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage, he laid out a vast tapestry of ultra-heroism, all dating them back together to a single event – the falling of a meteor in England in 1778.

This real-life event was, in Farmer's hands, the catalyst for all the great heroes of 20th century action yarns, spawning legacies of grey-eyed and steel-jawed heroes. They were often related, and Farmer sometimes even made the argument that different heroes were the same person, cracking under the weight of multiple identities and convoluted histories.

In a long career full of brilliant ideas, this was Farmer's greatest. Bringing the heroes together, and saying they all existed in the same fictional world, was a fantastically strong idea that still resonates, today, and still produces fictions that make billions and billions of dollars.

Farmer's ideas of a shared world reached some strange moment of perfection in the slightly sleazy prose of A Feast Unknown, promising a universe where everything counted, and where everything was connected. It's a small world in the pulp universe, where these indomitable heroes could barely go to the store without stumbling across some other adventurer on a desperate mission of their own, teaming up for the greater good.

It's an idea that has been almost totally drained of anything exciting and new now, and recent attempts to build shared universes in movies and comics and novels has led to some regrettable efforts, but they can still prove both artistically and commercially viable, and both the successes and failures all owe their debt to Farmer.

Philip Jose Farmer merged with the infinite in 2009, but the ideas he left behind are getting bigger and bigger, as shared universes become the ultimate breeding grounds for lucrative franchises.

Farmer really tied it all together, and it's an idea that had been refined with a number of rollicking League of extraordinary Gentlemen stories by Moore and O'Neill, or Kim Newman's bloody fangtastic Anno Dracula series, and anything becomes possible, and anyone can meet anyone.

Farmer sometimes wrote himself into his own stories, using the most obvious pseudonyms, which means that while he is no longer with us, he lives on in his own fiction. Maybe one day we will wake up on a Riverworld, and he'll be there. I doubt he'll be smug if he was proven to be right about everything, but I'm sure he'd be proud.

- Originally published 31 May 2015

Fun fact! A Feast Unknown was the first novel I ever read where I made a conscious decision not to skip to the end to see how it all turns out before going back and reading the rest of the book. It was a terrible habit and I'm glad I broke it. I also finally found the Lord of the Trees/The Mad Goblin books a couple of years ago and they were fucking excellent.

Here comes the past #27: Me, my mates and comics

Some of my best friends in the world hate comic books, and wouldn't read one unless you paid them. Others are into them just as much as I am. It's a good mix.

I never force comics onto my mates, but I'm there if they ever express an interest, and some of them give it a go, and I always remember what they like, so I can recommend something in the future.

Trumpy really, really dug Dicks, Chris gave Love and Rockets a go, (but ultimately couldn't get past the big tits), Samantha thought Peter David's Hulk comics were the best superhero comics ever, Anthony bought all the Vertigo comics that were too weird for me, Suzy gave me her beloved copy of School Fun #2, Glenn turned me on to Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and I turned Simon on to Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Kaz said the Big Books were the bee's knees, and Brian thought Big Dave was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever read.

I bonded with one of my oldest and best friends in 1985 over a mutual appreciation for the Judge Child Quest. I introduced him to the X-Men soon afterwards, and he still gets Uncanny X-Men every month, which is bloody useful when I've got an X-itch to scratch. We grew up together in a small town of 3000 people, so there weren't too many other people who shared our mutual obsessions, so we had no choice but to be best mates.

His tastes are a bit more refined, and mine are all over the show, but it's still an ongoing debate over which of us is obsessed by Doctor Who more, and after being friends for more than a quarter of a century, our Who collections have actually melted together. I tend to get the books and audios, and he gets the toys and magazines.

Kyle has also been into 2000ad as long as I have, and I finally talked him into getting the weekly series again a few weeks ago, and he’s into it as much as ever. The other day he sent me a text, moaning that the local shop had not got the latest issue in, and he was particularly bummed, because it had some new Slaine in it for the first time in ages, and young Kyle loves some new Slaine. So I told him that I would get a copy from my local store and drop it off when I go down south again next week, and that it would finally allow me to pay an old debt.

Twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t get the latest issue of 2000ad because I’d done something wrong and was grounded for a week. (I can’t remember the crime, just the punishment, although it may have involved some form of rocket fuel.) And I was particularly bummed, because the latest issue had some new Slaine by Glenn Fabry in it for the first time in ages, and young Bob loved some Fabry Slaine. Kyle bought a copy for me, and dropped it around after school, and I never forgot how grateful I was.

That's fucking teamwork.

In the past couple of years I’ve made friends with two people named Kelly.

I met Boy Kelly after I said nice things about a comic he wrote, and we now meet up for breakfast every few weeks, usually to rave about some Game Of Thrones shit. He’s as passionate about comics as I am, and even more passionate about the work of Alan Moore, and I’ve never met anybody in real life who was into Moore comics more than I was. (This will become abundantly clear soon, when this blog gets taken over with a discussion between me and Kelly about Moore’s movies with Mitch Jenkins.)

I met Girl Kelly through work, and now we meet up for smoothies every few weeks to bitch about the industry. She could not more more disinterested in comics, and she keeps calling them cartoon books because I do a really shitty job of hiding how much it annoys me. She didn’t even know what a Dalek is, and still can't pronounce it properly, but then again, she is South African.

I like talking to Boy Kelly because he reminds me that my tastes are adequate, and that it is worth getting passionate about your fiction, and what it all means. I like talking to Girl Kelly, because she reminds me that all that crap is not really that important, not in real life.

In the past couple of years, I've also made friends with two people named Nik/Nick, because I figure the less new names I have to remember, the better. They're both totally into comics.

I've made loads of friends on the internet who share my obsessions to a scary degree, but I've only actually met a couple of them in real life, so that doesn't really count.

Ten years ago, and I’m at a film festival screening of the American Splendor movie, and a complete stranger comes up to me in the line and says he has an extra ticket for the film, and he gives it to me for free.

Due to an extraordinarily boring set of circumstances, I happen to have two copies of the same American Splendor comic issue on me at the time, (and it’s the one with Letterman swearing on the cover).  So I give one to the guy, and he’s just as stoked by this unexpected bout of bartering. His name is Mark, and we still trade emails every now and again, usually when a new Love and Rockets comes out.

Sometimes comics just bring people together.

Geoff once told me he'd totally burn my comics for simple heating, and Shane once picked up an issue of Flex Mentallo, flicked through it, said “yeah, nah”, put it down again, and as far as I can tell, that's the only time he ever read any comics. Even my lovely wife is profoundly disinterested in some of the greatest comics ever created.

Fortunately, friends aren't clones, and you'll never learn anything in life if you surround yourself with people who like all the same shit you like. There are always common interests or points of views between close friends, but they are not always the same things between different people.

I can always be friends with a comic fiend, but real mates don't have to care about this shit as much as I do.

- Originally published October 10, 2013

I don't make too many friends at the comics store these days, but that's because comics stores are full of young people, and they don't want to hang out with people who are twice their age, but I can usually find an old crusty to reminisce about Stray Bullets with.