All the time in the world when you're unemployed

I haven't been properly unemployed for years now, but there were a couple of times when I was younger when I just could not get a job and I remember how much it sucked, so I'll be doing all I can to ever avoid being in that kind of situation again, especially when I have actual dependents in my life now. 

I was out of work for about four hours the last time I quit a job due to pisspoor management, and had two different offers in those few hours, so I hope I'll be okay. 

While there was some freedom to being free of the various obligations of employment, it fucking sucked. It sucked how much you had to scrape through every day with the barest of sustenance, and it sucked how much you were forced to rely on the generosity of family and friends just to pay the fucking bills. It sucked that you couldn't watch or read all the things you really wanted to, and you certainly couldn't go out at night, because there was no spare cash by the time the dole came through. 

The only thing you did have was free time, just acres of it, and I always managed to fill it out with endless books and movies, and so much of the film and general geek knowledge and experiences I have now is a result of the months when I had nothing better to do, so many years ago.

I didn't have the endless options of today, where you could spend all day on free streaming sites and never get bored, but I could hire eight movies on video tape out for a week for $8, and might even watch some of them twice. And when you're burning through so many films on grey Tuesday afternoons, it forces you outside your comfort zone, inspires you to try something different, and that leads down all sorts of wonderful paths.

And when I got bored of the movies, there was always books, and I would haunt the local library and again, try out novelists I wouldn't ordinary bother with. During my last extended period of homelessness, I started looking for older, classic books, and fell into an exceedingly pleasant Graham Greene wormhole.  

And when that also got a bit much, I could always try some writing myself, and churned out hundreds of pages of unreadable prose, trying to find some kind of voice.

The only other thing I would do is walk, a good walk never cost anything, is good for the health and the soul.

That's how I got through the day when the days got too long, and I didn't have any work to fill them, and there was some pleasure in it. It still sucked like nothing else sucks when you're an adult, but there was some light in those endless days.

Fury - My War Gone By: He wants to keep on fighting

- Fury: My War Gone by #3

Art by Goran Parlov

Words by Garth Ennis

Colours by Lee Loughridge

Letters by Rob Steen

Rock history always makes my day

There was a joke article in a 90s issue of the NME, where it was the secret diary of Henry Rollins, and it was just day after day of pain, misery and push-ups, and then he got laid and everything was lovely and fine. 

I always thought that was pretty funny, and I honestly think the closest I get to feeling like that is when a new episode of Andrew Hickey's A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs comes out, and another cold, grey day is full of sunshine and roses and some very big thoughts about rock music. Life really is a little brighter with that in my ears.

The Ballad of GI Joe: Do I really have any friends who love me for being Zartan?

The whole concept of GI Joe, of rampant American militarism running riot around the world, feel a lot sharper than it used to. The only way they can do GI Joe comics these days is by leaning heavily on the irony, or getting the Transformers involved somehow.

I do like the idea that they've talked about in the recently announced movie, which seems to latching onto the concept of Cobra emerging from small-town America, and all the fake picket-fenced suburbia with missile silos hiding under the elementary school. Larry Hama was really onto something when he was digging into that vein of ideas in a dumb comic about war toys.

But I don't know if my kids will get into GI Joe like I did in the 80s. They were the best action figures, and the coolest comics - but they have a lot more toy options to choose from, and I don't want them to just follow my nerd path, I get my kicks from seeign what roads they forge for themselves. 

Still, I do need to hide my most precious Joes away on high cupboards so they don't get broken by the vigoroius play of the young. I don't want my original Cobra Commander in battle armour to lose any more limbs, he's already got one of Zandar's legs. 

And the kids have already been exposed to GI Joe in the most gentle manner properly, because they freaking love the Funny or Die video about the Joes and Cobra living their best lives after hours. A lot of the films made by that crew are purely ephemeral, already vanishing into the ether.

But some of the them stick around, and I will never get sick of this tune, and the gentle ballad of  ninjas taking out the trash, mortal enemies talking on the CB radio, and Destro and the Baroness, practicing their clarinets. 

They're practicing their clarinets! That's a much better use of their time than using the Terror Drome to fuck up the world for everybody. Yo Joe!

No more than a movie

Some movies don't need any kind of sequel, and many of them really do not need it to be multiple hours of television.

The phenomena of the unwanted sequel is still with us -  where one movie is perfectly good enough, and the follow-up can't help but disappoint. We all saw it recently when Ready Or Not 2 came out to a critical and commercial shrug, because that movie made its point pretty fucking well in the first one, and there really wasn't much more to add, except for mindless escalation.

And now we get the unwanted TV remakes, prequels and sequels, and they're not only unnecessary, they stretch out for hours and hours and hours.

They keep trying to sell me on the new Man on Fire, and while the original movie does have a much better reputation than it did at the time (critics always got dazzled by the style of Tony Scott films, and were blinded to the substance that could lurk beneath his glossiest of surfaces). But even with a fine cast in the TV version - that lead dude in the new series is usually pretty excellent - there's no Tony Scott, there's no Denzel, there is no way many hours of the new thing is going to be better than two hours with those deadset champions.

Now there is a long remake of Cape Fear, and lots of people I trust say it's actually pretty good, but I just don't want to spend 10 hours in that kind of nightmare. A tight two hours and eight minutes with prime Marty Scorsese was enough for me. 

There is so much out there it's easy to ignore a lot of it - there's no need to bother with the forthcoming Harry Potter (and when the creator is using the cash it gives her to cause real harm to real people, it's a moral imperative to shun it and you can rest assured it will never be mentioned on this blog again); it did take me two seasons to realise the new version of Interview with a Vampire is really not my bag; and I never had the slightest interest in seeing that series about a young Nurse Ratchet.

Because it doesn't feel like it's not being added to, it's more like it's being leeched off. It's a dilution, not a construction.

I'm such a fucking film snob. Even after all sorts of televisual brilliance over the years.  After a catastrophic failure of my movie cataloging for this year, I've been catching up on TV series and some of them are great and some of them are okay and all of them would be better as a two hour movie. If you can't tell a story in 120 minutes, maybe you shouldn't be telling a story, and not everything needs to be 10 hours.   

This is obviously not a hard rule - get some Dekalog into you, that shit is aces, and there is always the exception of Twin Peaks - but when so much talent so sucked up into a story that was already told with a lot more efficency, it all just feels so pointless. 

Hail Satan

A friend of mine occasionally sends me out of context comics panels from Jack Chick comics, and this one is definitely my favourite so far.

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