The best lesson in journalism I ever got was a Jim Aparo interview

I did a year-long course before I became a journalist more than two decades ago, and I have spent those years learning new things every day. But I still think the best lesson I ever had in writing up an interview was the transcript of a conversation with legendary Batman artist Jim Aparo that I read online, shortly before I trained up as a reporter.

I can't find it now, and haven't read it in my many years (Aparo passed away in 2005, after all), but it kept all the ums and uhs and repeated words that big Jim spoke during the conversation. And it was transcribed perfectly, and it made Aparo sound like a total dipshit, even though he was saying some interesting and insightful things.

The written word is not the same as spoken speech - and when you transcribe someone talking, you take out all the repetition and weird noises people make when they're trying to think of the right word to say. You never, ever add words to what they are saying, and even moving them around at all is highly dubious.

But it's all got to be edited for clarity, otherwise everytime you see another glorious Bat-cover from the 70s, you can't help but see the ums.

28 Years worth of tonal shifts

Nailing down the tone of a movie is a lot harder than it looks, whether you are going to be serious or silly, or tragic or romantic or whatever. You can always tell when a movie makes a tone shift that doesn't work, that jars you right out of the story.

An obvious recent example is the Caught Stealing movie, which is a silly runabout of a crime film with some charming nonsense, and then halfway through hits the audience with some proper tragedy. And then it tries to remain a knockabout farce, but it's tainted by that heavy dose of bummer. 

It's especially hard to fuck around with tone in a drama film, and sometimes it's hard to even get a grip on the proper vibe of something like The Life of Chuck, but horror films are one area where you can wave all over the place and really get away with it. 

It is still easy to make a misstep when transitioning from farce to horror and lose the audience, but there are a load of great horror comedies that get it right - the Evil Dead films, for just one example, go from absolute slapstick to bone-chilling horror with extreme deftness.

My absolute favourite example of tonal cinematic whiplash in recent years has been the two 28 Years Later films.  To be clear, I thought both films were fucking brilliant, with fascinating things to say beyond the 'run away run away' and 'humans are the real monster, don't ya know' of most zombie films.

But I also don't blame people when they can't get on board when the Telly-Tubby Jimmy Saville parkour ninjas suddenly appear at the end of the first film. There is some real whiplash there, and that can be too much for some.

At least it gave the audience a taste of what the next sequel will do, because that's at least four movies in one. One second it's a quiet meditation of the nature of mortality; then it's the grossest, nastiest shit ever to take place in a barn; the next it's a dumb stoner buddy comedy; and then it's the most metal thing I've ever seen put on screen.

I fully understand why this kind of thing puts people off, and there are plenty movies where I can't handle that shift. But that delicate juggling act can separate the great from the good, if there is enough of an audience to go along with it.

Social media is infecting my documentaries

I love watching documentaries about culture and history, but any doco about something that happened in the past 20 years invariably has an awful moment when they suddenly cut to the social media reaction, and a montage of moronic tweets fills the screen.

It could be a story about about sports or movies or anything, and something monumental could happen, and they cut away to a that big graphic-filled montage of social media posts, like that proves fucking anything.

I take that back - it does prove one thing: the people who are making comments about an actress getting old or a sportsperson falling short in some game are just the fucking worst. Tedious morons, spewing their garbage thoughts, immortalised now as part of the story.

The mean and insulting ones are easier to take, because you can just write off those posters as utterly useless human beings, but even those who don't really think they're saying something mean, and are just dumb jokes, are offensive in their inability to think beyond the next sick burn.

Especially when the doco always cuts to the person who is the butt of the joke, who was genuinely harmed by all those dumb jokes and pithy observations and you see there are real people suffering real pain.

I have long wondered about the cultural black hole that is expanding in 21st society, but now I'm also worried that the historical records of the early years of this century will be some dipshit's crap joke about a current event. I'd be appalled if anybody used this blog as a representation, I'm just another dipshit, and my comments would be a terrible example of modern thought.

Maybe our 27th century descendants will think we're all a bunch of Nathan Barleys. And maybe we are.

Batman: So much black and white

I lost track of the monthly continuity of the big superhero universes a long time ago, but now I can't even keep track of how many groovy short story collections there are, or even how many black and white Batman comics exist.

There is a flood of black and white anthologies at the moment, often with an added colour (usually red), but DC have been publishing B+W Batman tales in special anthology mini series and back-ups since the 1990s, and every now and then I find a new collection of them that I genuinely had no idea existed, even though it's full of great writers and fantastic artists like JH Williams III, Greg Smallwood, Emma Rios, Kelley Jones, Nick Derrington, Sophie Campbell and many, many more.

I got a 2020 one from the library the other day, and it was full of stories I'd never seen before. Most of the writing was just a bit obvious, but there is also a beautiful array of these modern artists, letting their freak fly. I should ignore all the colour comics more often.

Comics of future past: The Best of 2000ad Monthly

I was born just a little too late to be in on 2000ad from the start. I was only two years old when it began, and even though I was reading it from a young age, I wasn't that ahead of the game.

The first ones I remember reading were three years into the comic's existence - Fiends of the Eastern Front was slightly too intense for my young brain - and I was reading it regularly by the time I was eight. But even then, I knew there had been years of thrill-power before that, and I had access to absolutely none of it.

And then the reprints started showing up everywhere, and I read all of the Judge Child Quest and the Apocalypse War in the Eagle reprints - the ones with the excellent covers, surprisingly solid color work and some effort to make it fit the dimensions of a new page.

But most of my slightly historical thrills came in the pages of The Best of 2000ad Monthly, which was just all killer and no filler. You'd get dozens and dozens of pages of of golden age Strontium Dog and Nemesis The Warlock and DR & Quinch, with some of the truly great Dredd stories - the issue that reprinted every part of the Judge Death Lives, while also giving us some relatively non-racist Robo-Hunter, was truly something to behold

It was the single most exciting comic I'd ever seen in my life. So much concentrated thrill-power in so many pages. It can't have been good to me, creating expectations in my comic thrills that have never been seen again. I was getting regular Bolland and McMahon and Gibbons and Ezquerra and Fabry and all the greats, I literally did not know how lucky I was.

It would take me a long time to get all those older issues that I missed out on, I only became Seto Thargo a few years back. So I have all those reprinted stories in their original form, but I'm also grateful that I got to read them in such a condensed form.

Each issue of the Monthly was three times as expensive as the regular prog, but was well worth the $1.65. It was quite possibly the best bang for my buck I've ever had in comics, and one I'll never have again. That level of thrill-power remains rare.

In dreams, I talk to you

Despite hundreds of books and essays on the subject, nobody really understands how dreams work, even though we all have them, all the time. 

I don't know why they happen, I don't know what is happening in our minds when we dream this stuff, I don't understand them at all. But I do know I have three kind of dreams these days. 

The first is the vast majority of them, which are the ones that instantly fade when I wake up, with residual nonsense images already disappearing from my mind. Strange people and unlikely events that are gone in seconds, even if I try to hold onto them. 

There's been a couple of times I've written the greatest book or movie script ever written in a dream, and it seems so obvious, and then it's swiftly gone in the morning. Some dreams stick around in the memory for years, but the vast, vast majority of them are already gone by the time I get out of bed.

The second type of dream is one where I am glad to wake up, because they are so horrible, or so terrifying, or just really, really annoying. I dream about car crashes and losing loved ones, and those type of dreams have certainly got more intensive since I became a parent, because I know what the worst thing in the world could ever be.

I also have dreams of my teeth crumbling to dust in my mouth, and being on planes that are going down among the high-rises of a city, and being late for vital appointments. I wake with relief, and also the lingering existential shits about how easily my whole world could turn to shit, but mainly relief. 

The third dream is one that I hate to wake up from, because it's such a good time. For most of this life this wasn't something normal like getting close and personal with some crush, or winning the lottery, or going on a magnificent holiday, it was finding a hidden stash of lost 2000ads, or a treasure trove of Best of DC Blue Ribbon Digest books. I would even think about how glad I was that I wasn't dreaming in the dream, as I pull out a digest-sized collection of Martian Manhunter comics by Alan Moore and Gil Kane. 

These days, now that I've clocked up a half century of life on this fucked up world, I don't have these kinds of strong feelings about old comic books, although I'm always glad to stumble upon some Bolland Strontium Dog that only exists in my head. 

Now I'm far more likely to wake with regret when I meet people I have loved and lost over the years, and get to talk to them, and hear their voice, and even though I know it's a dream and I'm not talking to my dear, old Dad, it's as close as I get, and I get to tell him about the grandchildren he never met.

Those dreams still break my heart, but they're still the only place I get to have a cup of tea with my Nana, or sink a beer with one of my uncles, so I still cherish them. Those sorts of dreams I never forget. Those sorts of dreams I never want to.

Mazeworld: To exit from the maze is to be reborn

- Mazeworld Book One: The Hanged Man 

Art by the extraordinary Arthur Ranson 

Words by Alan Grant

Letters by Ellie De Ville

The depths of human stupidity can always be plumbed further

- One of my favourite caption boxes of all time. It's from a Judge Dredd story, obviously - one of the 1980s annual stories by Wagner/Grant - but I also find it to still be extremely pertinent on a daily basis.

Flash Gordon: He'll save every one of us!

Queen's Greatest Hits album was the first actual LP record I ever bought with my own money, and one time at a pub quiz I proved I was the biggest Queen nerd in the room by easily naming 10 of their albums (this was before the movie, when their music found whole new audiences).

But if I had a ray gun to my head and was asked to name the best Queen album ever, I would almost definitely pick the Flash Gordon soundtrack. 

It's certainly the one I've listened to the most, on long road trips in my car, or as background noise in the house. I bought the cassette tape from the DEKA store in Timaru in 1989, and still have that tape, and it still sounds totally rad. There is a particular appeal in soundtracks that are composed entirely of one rock band's efforts - the Young Fathers' music in 28 Years Later being a prime recent example - but nobody ever did it better than Queen.

It's almost a musical - the scintillating riffs spliced with judicious use of dialogue, and you can easily follow the story of Flash and Dale and their pals overthrowing the evil Emperor.  I never get sick of hearing General Kala's dispatching of War Rocket Ajax to bring back Flash's body.

It's also got a terrific wedding march - I listened to it on the day I got married to get the blood pumping - and some moody, long bits of ambient dreaminess as they sail through the void, with the occasional thudding drums pushing through to remind us of the emergency.

And above all, the thumping, soaring theme song - with that insistent, pounding bass, and the plaintive wailing for someone, anyone, to save the world.  

I've listened to all of Queen's albums to various degrees over the years, but the Flash soundtrack is still the one I want to listen to the most. It's great for listening to during a long writing session, and it's even better when I've got nothing more to do than lie back and listen, and let Queen take me to another world.