Aotearoa in the background

It used to be huge news when films were shot in New Zealand, and something as forgettable as the Race For The Yankee Zephyr was a huge fucking deal, even if it's a film that nobody cares about today (it does have some aces helicopter action in the hills around Queenstown).

Now I can be watching some random film, and I'll recognise the hill that an action hero is hiking over as one where me and my mates got stoned in the 90s, and I never even knew it was made in this country.

It's always very clear - the rocks, the tussock and the riverbeds of Canterbury and Otago are like nowhere else on the planet, and have been in my back yard for most of my life.

It used to be an actual news story when an overseas production was filmed in Aotearoa, and then the Lord of the Rings came along, and showed that a bunch of halflings at the arse end of the world could make epic cinema as good as anybody, and a big part of that epicness was the landscape.

Now that landscape shows up everywhere, and sometimes there is no way the Ash Vs The Evil Dead TV show can convince me that the back roads of Waikato are actually just outside Everytown, USA; or that a Mission Impossible part set in the foothills of the Himalayas is actually clearly spent near Lake Wanaka.

I don't even keep track of what is filming in this country anymore, so when I see the flora of my high country, it's little surprise when I look it up and find that it was filmed a metaphorical stone's throw from where I was born.

The most recent Predator was the one of the best recent examples, because that alien landscape that the predators is stomping through is clearly around the headwaters of the Rangitata River, with a whole bunch of vivid CGI alien landscape stapled on top of it.

I used to see things like that in the sky when I took acid on those hills, so it's no surprise to see that kind of landscaping on the cinema screen. It's familiar, even if it's a million light years away.

Not everyone is as miserable as you

I used to be a whiny adolescent, thinking that we all hated it when our friends become successful, but the person who gave us a song called that turned out to be a famously miserable cunt, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it. And letting famously miserable cunts convince us how the world works can have some extremely toxic results. 

I do believe Lord of the Flies has caused some real harm in the real world, because people think that in dire situations, everyone is going to go feral. It's become a cultural shorthand for when civilisation breaks down, and that it's human nature to destroy everybody to save yourself.

And it doesn't fucking happen - when a bunch of Tongan boys were stranded on a Pacific Island for more than a year in the 1960s, they worked together, and survived as a group.  Because that's how society works, we work together to build things, and when we turn on each other, it destroys everything for everyone.

It was only recently that I found out the writer of Lord of the Flies was a raging alcoholic who seemed to really dislike people in general, and that's not really the kind of personality that you should be telling us the score.

Because the real harm came in things like Hurricane Katrina, where help was withheld because of stories of the survivors turning on each other at the arena they fled to when everything else broke down, and exaggerated stories of terrible events were used an excuse to delay that much needed assistance.

Kill your heroes, they say, because they'll always let you down - the beat generation were incredible writers and almost uniformly terrible people by 21st century standards (with some bright and notable exceptions), but you can still dig their vibes - and some people will spend their lives trying to tell us that everybody is as wicked as they are. 

But we don't have to listen, or believe them.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight: Everyone feels the festive fever

It's hard to find cheap issues of the Moench/Sienkiewicz Moon Knight series these days, they often go for quite extraordinary amounts of money. Partly because they made a TV show about the superhero, but mainly because they have some truly fucking awesome covers.

But I still grab any inexpensive issues when I see them, because they are full of lovely Bill Sienkiewicz art, and because it's always fascinating to see an artist growing into their true style.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight comics are full of obvious Neal Adams moments - 

 - and then in the very same issue there will be moments when the beautiful chaos of the artist's later works starts to show through, and things break down in glorious fashion -

Seeing one of the great modern comic artists discover their true self is truly a great appeal of a monthly run, especially when it's such a vivid change of style.

The Nth Man is my main Marvel expertise

I was already interested in the new Marvel Age of Comics essays - small books full of information and analysis, looking at some of Marvel's most celebrated comics, because one of them was by Paul Cornell, and I was reading his stuff in the 90s when he was doing the same sort of thing with Doctor Who.

They are great little reads, especially Cornell's extensive look at the Avengers in the 1970s. They do sometimes get a little bogged down in plot recaps and explanations, but are pleasingly full of behind the scenes information and musing on the themes and artistic goals of these ephemeral comics.

I burned through them all in a weekend, and have already starting digging back into my Shooter/Perez issues of the Avengers. I have also been thinking about what Marvel comic I'd be qualified to write about if I did one of them.

Doing something basic like the Byrne/Claremont X-Men or Simonson Thor would be right out - they're still magnificent comics, but have been covered extensively in the decades they have been published.

There could be rewards in zeroing in on something like Alan Davis' ClanDestine, and use it as an excuse to get into the whole Marvel UK thing, and the brilliance of Davis' two Excalibur runs. There would also be ample room for thoughts ClanDestine's inability to get a grip inside the wider comic marketplace.

But I'm fairly sure it would probably be The Nth Man by Larry Hama and Ron Wagner. It only lasted 16 issues and change, but those 16 issues are full of world war, ninja mysticism and a dork with absolute reality-changing powers. It's incredibly propulsive and a deep mindfuck, and while it looks a lot like Hama's GI Joe, it is very much its own thing.

I could get 10,00 words on the career of Larry Hama, and a few more on Wagner's incredibly energetic art. It has some vague connections to the wider Marvel universe - they all show up in an issue of Excalibur in between those Davis runs - but it's a rare complete story from Marvel, even as it all gets cosmically goofy by the end of things.

If they did a series of books for 2000ad like they did for Marvel, I could write a dozen longs long essays on multiple long-running series and short shocks. But the Nth Man would be my Marvel man.

Doctor Who: Something from nothing

Anybody who has spent significant amounts of time immersed in the universe of Doctor Who will have dreamt about the lost episodes. Precious dreamtime given over to sitting down and watching a TV show that literally does not exist any more.

Those missing episodes of the Hartnell and Troughton years, lost due to stupidity and deleted from the historical record, are a hole in the story that is never really going to be filled. Marco Polo and the Myth Makers and Power of the Daleks only exist in re-creation now, and as much as we yearn to see them, they are more than likely gone forever.

Many of them only exist in dreams anymore. I've seen episodes of the Macra Terror in my sleep and while I can barely remember any detail, the giant crabs aliens were much scarier in my head than they were when they showed up in 21st century Who.

I first became aware of the missing episodes in a small write-up in the seminal 20th anniversary magazine, and they all seemed lost then. There was a strange fascination with this - no matter how determined I was to see as much of the show as possible, there would always be this missing part, forever out of reach, forever mysterious, forever gone. You'd need a TARDIS for that.

I have seen the missing episodes as best I can, in fairly crude reconstructions that put telesnaps over the soundtrack, and it's easy enough to follow the story, but not enough to really get engaged. A significant amount of missing stories have also been recreated in animation form, and they do have their charms, but they do miss the crucial subtilties of Hartnell and Troughton, the strange ways they moved and gestured that were so important.

There are also some fools who have been trying to recreate the missing episodes with AI, and that's just as creatively and morally bankrupt as expected, and should be of no interest to anybody.

So the animation is probably your best bet if you want to see some version of it, and you live with this tiny sliver of void in the best story ever told. 

And then every few years, somebody dusts off some old film can, and suddenly you're watching the Doctor and Salamander fight on the floor of the TARDIS, and the dream comes true. There is nothing in all entertainment that compares with the news that they've found some of the Dalek Master Plan, and we'll actually get to see Katrina and Bret Vyon in full episodes. Nothing.

I might still dream about them, but they've also escaped out into the real world, and always bringing the hope of more.

GI Joe: Howsabout punch-for-punch?

- GI Joe #64

Pencils by Ron Wagner

Inks by Russ Heath

Script by Larry Hama

Colors by Nel Yomtov

Letters by Joe Rosen

Brian Bolland and The Invisibles: This looks -- interesting! Everything's -- ok!!

Brian Bolland's covers for The Invisibles are some of the best he has ever done, getting his finest freak on, with Morrison's stories giving the legendary artist the means to really get out there.

My favourite of all of them is the cover to the trade paperback for volume three, where he takes the 12 previous covers he did for that volume and remixes them in pure stream of consciousness fashion. Most of them are messy, some of them are even better than the original version, and several of them are funny as hell. 

They all look like dream comics, with nonsense phrases and absurd images from comics published in other dimension. Just about recognizable, but clearly untethered from our real world, just like an Invisibles cover should be. 

My least favourite is obviously the trade paperback cover with a fleshy, grotesque blob of humanity staring out at the reader. Wonderfully repulsive, especially in the proper tones, but nothing I want to look at for too long.

Still drying my eyes with The Streets

It's been more than 20 years since A Grand Don't Come For Free by The Streets came out, but I heard it again for the first time in ages recently, and it's still a banger of an album, with an emotional kick at the end that I've never felt from any other musical album - before or since.

It's in Empty Cans, the climactic track on Mike Skinner's rambling, beautiful album. The entire thing is a concept album, telling a whole story, and by the end, it's just the narrator alone with empty cans of beers, angry at the betrayal of his mates. 

His TV isn't working, so he gets a repair man in, but they get into a dumb fight and then he's left alone, stewing in his anger, and still down a thousand quid.

And then he rewinds the tape and goes back, and gives his mate a chance to help him out, and he gets his thousand pounds back, and has a party and is surrounded by life and love.

Concept albums may have huge ambitions, but there is real power in the simple lesson of Empty Cans, and the wish fulfillment of getting a second chance to do things right. I don't find that in a Pink Floyd album, as magnificent as they are.

I have - to my great regret - sometimes been swallowed by own bitterness and refused to move on from something, but I have also sometimes found forgiveness so easy to grant, and have enjoyed the results. 

It can happen to everybody, even if we don't all lose a wad of cash down the back of the telly. 

Fuck all the awards

People asked me about who was going to win the Academy Awards this year, like I could give a fuck.

When I was eight years old, I had a magazine that listed all the Oscar winners up to 1982, and I memorised every fact in that mag, taking note of all the big names of all the big films, and wondering how something called Annie Hall could have won in the year Star Wars came out.

That's about as much as I ever cared. By the time I got seriously interested in movies in my late teens, I realized that the Oscars didn't mean shit - they never recognised the films I thought were the best, and rewarded the bland over the innovative.

But there is a whole huge industry behind the awards, and a lot of people have a lot of money riding on them, so they're not going anywhere.

And putting on award shows is literally a big business, I once worked for a company that put them on for a little while, and went to several for things like appliance stores, with people getting very excited for taking the award for best store under 10,000 sqm.

The most awards I've been to are for news journalism, and the team I worked in has scooped a few of them. I understand why people get excited about them, but my main memories of those awards - apart from getting to catch up with old colleagues - is of unworthy winners and monstrous omissions. The very worst night of my professional life was spent at one of these awards shows, listening to the big boss at my work spew on about doing great journalism, while I was about to quit because every choice that boss was making was objectively making it worse.

Of course I do like it when my friends get honoured, because it does make them happy and I like it when they're happy and I'm not enough of a monster to shit on that happiness.

But I don't want awards, and I never, ever seek them out. I find vying for them distasteful, and purely egocentric. The work is the reward, I don't give a shit what baubles it conveys, and I certainly don't give a shit who wins best picture every year.