Marvel Fanfare portfolios: The spectacular Craig Hamilton

- Originally published in Marvel Fanfare #35

Marvel Fanfare portfolios: The astounding Kevin Nowlan

 - Originally published in Marvel Fanfare #18 

 (It's another round of school holidays, so the Tearoom of Despair is going into low content mode for a couple of weeks while I take the kids to the zoo and the movies to see the new Shaun the Sheep. As always, I am filling the void in daily posting with artwork that makes me happy, and in this case it's my favourite pin-ups sections from the Marvel Fanfare series of the 80s. That comic was full of strange little one-off stories with some remarkable artwork, and sometimes editor supreme Al Milgrom would devote a few pages to the artwork of various artists. The fashions may have changed, the characters they depict might look nothing alike anymore, but they still all look gorgeous to me. Holy shit, I can't stop looking at the Mark Badger chalk drawings.)

Airtight Garage: At last!

- The Airtight Garage (Epic ) #1
Story and art by Moebius 

Translated by RJM Lofficier 

Colours by Isabelle Leconte, Rick Wayne, Arlette Auvergne, Allison Kendis and Chris Palomino 

Letters by John Workman, Gaspar Saladino, Kevin Nowlan and Phil Felix

The Joker doesn't need any daddy issues

Considering how much American genre fiction loves giving its characters daddy issues to explain all their complex problems, I am genuinely pleased that nobody has ever picked up what Marty Pasko and Irv Novick put down on the last panel of the 70s Joker series, and the promise of the story of his father. 

It's a very weird final issue, with Elton John showing up as the devil and the Joker murdering/not murdering the Justice League, and ends on this cliffhanger which remains unresolved to this day (as far as i know). And long may it remain so - the Joker doesn't need something as basic as a traumatic childhood to explain his homicidal laughs, that's far too easy for him.

You wouldn't deadname the Wu-Tang Clan

I once got into an argument an elderly relative about how hard it was to remember the new names of people who had chosen fresh ones to better express who they are. Their argument was that people should just stick with what they were called because that was easier for everyone else, and my argument was that it wasn't that fucking hard to call someone by their preferred name.

And while I didn't make this reference because they were very old, I also wouldn't ever deadname somebody, because that would be like meeting Ghostface Killah and calling him Dennis, and that feels both rude and dangerous.

The concepts of stage names and pseudonyms have been around as long as they have been actors and writers, and nobody ever had a problem with it. So when my friends and colleagues go through any kind of transition process, I will always gladly use their new chosen name, because it makes them happy, and that makes us all happy.

The act of choosing a new name for yourself has inherent power, but it also can have deeper resonance and meaning than your birthname, which always was out of your hands. 

The members of the Wu-Tang Clan are made up of people who were named Russell and Clifford when they were born, but that's not who they are, and the names they are now known by throughout the world also happen to be completely fucking awesome.

The Wu-Tang are, of course, all about honour and respect, while also being badass gangsters, and if I ever did have the fortune to meet one, I would call them by their true name. Because they are not some dudes from Staten Island, they are kung fu master monk warriors from the ninth dimension. I could only show my real life friends, the ones who have happily buried their dead names, the same respect.

I think my Dad is haunting my sunroom

I don't know the psychology behind how smelling something can trigger memories that might be long buried. I don't understand how the way I can sometimes smell 1996 is almost metaphysical.

What I do know is that sometimes I can smell fried dripping and cigarette smoke in the sunroom of our new home, and I can only assume it is the ghost of my dearly departed dad, keeping an eye on the grandkids he never got to meet, and stinking up the whole joint. 

No context, all feeling: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

A recent urge to only read reviews of new movies after I've seen them has been really paying off. I can still get the idea of whether a film is worth seeing from headlines, star ratings and general vibe, and I can leave the analysis for afterwards.

Sometimes I don't think I'm getting anything further out of it, and almost every piece of criticism about something is making the most basic of observations, the most inane of takes. And increasingly, I find a lot of modern film writing genuinely baffling, because they are immersed in a wider context that is so broad that I just can't get my head around it.

Teenage Sex and Death At Camp Miasma is clearly not for everybody, but I definitely got my kicks from it - I got the jokes about who produced The Burning, or the name of the old-school director. It's not the sort of film that I would recommend to everybody, because there is complexity in the way it tells its story, and I'm not entirely sure what is real and what isn't by the end of it, and I am 100 percent fine with that. 

I'm sure I am missing a whole bunch of subtext, just because I'm not a gender-fluid young person still figuring out their place in the world, but there are universal pleasures in a subversion of a slasher film, along with recognisable feelings of awkwardness and horniness that can resonate with anybody. If nothing else, we can all admit to having a giant crush on Gillian Anderson, no matter which way you roll.

And I have read some writing about the film since seeing it that has giving me wonderfully intellectual food for thought, and most of it has been generally positive about the film. But I've also stumbled across some fairly harsh criticism of the film, and it might be completely warranted, but I honestly have no idea. They are all about the film's place in a vaster and largely online culture that is completely alien to me. I just have no idea what they are talking about. (And I'm not going to link to the piece here, because that's not going to help.)

I have only tasted the tiniest portion of queer cinema, and love it as much as a painfully hetro dude can, because it gives me another point of view of the world, and that is always valuable. But I don't really engage in the wider culture around it because it's not my culture, and the last thing it needs is another buffoon like me trampling all over the fuckin' place.

But I do my best, and I don't sweat it when this film is slammed for improper representation, because they might have a point. I don't know.

I'm sure this kind of criticism is extremely useful for people who do understand what they want, but looking at a single work as just as a tiny piece of a wide context also feels like a faintly miserable way to engage with an artwork.

There is a blissful ignorance in not knowing exactly what is going on, and what it is trying to say, and I look forward to making some effort to getting my head around it. It's something new to learn about, it's that wider view of the world again, it's what it's all about.

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.