That cultural hole is getting bigger

The cultural hole around the start of this century is only getting bigger. We were all promised that once everything went online, it would be available forever, and that was such a dirty lie.

Websites go down, or fade away, and so much has been lost, and plenty of essays and articles have just vanished. There are too many stories of writers who have lost years of work because the sites they were writing for instantly vanished as the cash ran out. 

It's just so much easier to find out about comics culture from 1985 than it is for 2005. There were tonnes of professional mags and endless amounts of fanzines put out 40 years ago that are still kicking around. Ephemera that was printed out and distributed far and wide, and chucked in a box and rediscovered and kept because they are echoes of youth lost, but also filled with incidents and weird feuds and sheer data.

All that enthusiasm that went into these gorgeous little things didn't fade away, it just got given more platforms online and exploded out into the world. Instead of late night stapling parties, they're making videos for a bewildering amount of social media and working for geek websites.

And then those sites lose funding, and things on social media get drowned and forgotten (or more likely, never even seen as the algorithm continues to make horrendously bad decisions about what actually interests people), and trying to find information about things that came out 20 years ago is so much harder than finding data from 40 years ago.

So while the enthusiasms that were printed out 40-50 years ago can still be picked up for a couple of bucks at random comic stores and flea markets, more recent delights have vanished forever, and won't ever be haunting any old bookstores. The hole has eaten them all up instead.

It was a gas.

Blondie's Heart of Glass is one of the earliest music videos I ever remember seeing, and I still find it disturbing in a way I can never properly articulate. There's the sparseness of the tune, Debbie Harry's soaringly high voice, the minimal movements of the band - it all just makes me feel like a tiny kid again and truly creeps me out. 

Nobody else might be disturbed by how shiny her lip gloss is, but it takes me back to a time when the world was scary and unknowable, and I'm afraid I have not learned as much as I would like since then.

Love and Rockets: Grandma Dynamite

Maggie is getting old. 

We're all getting old, but we don't see it in the mirror, we see it on the faces of our loved ones. When you hit a significant milestone, it's no big deal, but when your little sister gets there, it's an entropic stab in the heart.

And after following Maggie and her story in Jaime Hernadez's staggeringly brilliant Locas comics for so, so long, you can see the weight of the years on her back as she sits in the doctor's office on the cover of the latest issue of Love and Rockets, waiting for some results.

She's at that age where she's wondering what's it all about, and maybe superheroes and other dreams aren't real and she just has to face life without them, but Maggie also sees an impossible figure in the clouds during a flight to see a dying parent. 

It's so far away you can't tell if it's falling to earth or rising into the sky. But it's definitely there, even if nobody else can see it. 

There's also the first mention of Penny Century in an age in this story, and maybe she finally got her wish and ascended to the heights of superpowers, and is checking in on her magpie. Or maybe Maggie is just seeing things. 

And maybe Ray and the foghorn were always meant to be together, and that's why they can't sit together for more than 10 seconds before tearing into each other. But they're meant to be together in the same way Maggie and Hopey should be, and it's just not going to happen.

There's always a lot of beautiful maybes whenever a new issue of Love and Rockets come out, and it's always worth to linger over them, especially when they never turn out like you expect.

The collection dissolves

I found another one of those existentially troubling collections at a favourite second hand bookstore recently. While they grant the opportunity to bulk out my own collection with rare delights, they still always give me the shits. 

There was a pile of The Dark Side and Fortean Times back issues, and a large amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs material, particularly Tarzan and all those various off-shots. There were a lot of early Warhammer books, and the first dozen or so Wild Cards anthologies.

It all showed up quite suddenly at the same time, and felt like it all belonged to the same tastes, slightly to the side of mine, with enough overlap to be interesting. All these books and magazines most certainly came from a distinct perspective, and the bulk of it suggested an estate sale, sold off as quickly as possible with little care for the finer details.

I've consolidated my own collection in recent weeks, and it's a lot of stuff. Vast piles of The Comic Journal, every single issue of everything from the Justice League International and Legion 5YL days. I can't help but wonder what will happen to it.

I don't care who makes money off my own collection when I leave this world. I would like to just give it all away, but I do have a family who deserve to get something out of my lifelong obsession for more nerd stuff. Even if they get cents on the dollar, I'd be glad to pass it on to them to dispose of it.

Sometimes I think... Sometimes I think I could just burn it all. But that feeling never really lasts.

Still, I did my part at the bookshop recently, and took home a few of those Dark Side and Fortean magazines to add to the small pile of other issues I have had for years, and filled some nagging holes in my Wild Cards and Phillip Jose Farmer books. 

And that's all I can hope for the issues of the New Warriors I've had in a handy box for 35 years. If they end up in a huge pile of other geek nonsense, I hope they find another home, in another collection, where they will be loved as much as I loved them.

The Witching Hour: What's going on?

- The Witching Hour (2000) #3 

Art by Chris Bachalo 

Inks by Art Thibert 

Words by Jeph Loeb 

Colours by Grant Goleash 

Letters by Richard Starkings

Valentine's Day with my boys

While I remain painfully heterosexual - I have had quite vivid dreams about getting it on with some extremely fit men which just left me cold and disappointed in myself - I can still recognise beauty in the male form, and have a few man crushes.

I have had a crush on Denzel Washington since the 80s, mainly because of the way he walks, and have happily transferred those affections on to the strut of his son. I did have a severe case of the Stathams for a number of years, but the unintentionally funnier he got, the less I was interested.

Tom Hardy is definitely a fave, but only specifically when he is tight and mean. Even more specifically, Dan Stevens is sex on legs in The Guest, and a twitchy weirdo in almost anything else. I feel stirrings down below in any film that features Scott Adkins doing one of his spinning double-drop kicks, but especially when he has a Russian accent (he doesn't kick anybody in the face in that recent film where he quite believably played Ben Affleck's brother, but he did look good in a suit).

There are dozens more - I would do anything Bruce Campbell ever told me to do, Richard E Grant could break me in two if he likes, and I'm going to my first comic convention in years soon because they've got the mighty Frank Grillo as a guest - and while I remain as boringly straight as ever, I can still appreciate the fineness.

How I deal with music festival announcements

One of the certainties in life as you get older is that you will see the line-up announcements for all the big music festivals, and you will recognise less and less of the names as time goes by, and you can feel your grip on the latest culture slipping away in real time.

It's okay. It's very normal. One day you'll look at the line-up for Coachella and be stoked that you recognise more than half a dozen names, and some festival will roll into your home town, and all the headline acts will be complete mysteries.

You can try your best to keep up with it all, but it slowly gets away on you.

I've found the best way to deal with it is to try to have fun with it, and I've found a guaranteed way of doing that - whenever I see the list of bands, I read them in my head as if they are being said by Alap Partridge.

It's very easy to do, even if the only person who can actually do the voice properly is the mighty Steve Coogan.  You can tell which ones would be read with Alan's baffled amusement, or just completely mangled by him. Even the most genuine and earnest band names can come out as hilarious with a dose of the Partridge absurdity. 

It doesn't make me any younger, but it turns a reminder of the unending grind of mortality into something a little bit funny, and I'll take that as a win.

I still have very strong feelings about Lobo

When you mix up universes, you don't get a lot of depth, but you do get some fun, and the backup stories in the recent Batman/Deadpool crossovers have been largely light and humorous affairs. There's not much more to say when you jam two characters with some vague connection - like magic or archery or being an animal - together in a five page story, other than 'look how cool it is to see these two dudes together', but at least they've got some fine artists doing their best to give you a good time.

Except for the bit with Logo - the amalgamated Lobo/Wolverine character - which was really fucking annoying, because I still have very strong feelings about Lobo.

Lobo is a heavy metal force of chaos, and the crazier his shit gets, the better it hits. I was genuinely appalled when they tried to make him more sleek and stylish a decade ago, and am happy to see they have walked Lobo back to his primal riff roots since then. 

So I'm a prime target for Lobo getting into some multiversal shenanigans in the new DC/Marvel crossovers, but then all they did was combine him with Wolverine, which is a real lowest common denominator kinda move.

For a starters, it's a stupid fucking name, which is much less wolf-ish and just makes me think of some stylised lettering. And he's really just Lobo with claws, which isn't very interesting. Wolverine is all restrained and civilised and honourable shit, and that gets steamrolled by Lobo's vicious anarchy, so it's all 'Bo and no Wolvie. (There's a reason the only successful amalgamated version of Lobo is when they combined him with Howard the Duck, because it's the absurdity, not the violence, that is the common factor there.)

And while there is little in the back-ups that resembles a proper story, the Logo bit just a gross attempt at post-credits titillation, and we all got sick of that shit a long time ago. Just have him bash against some angst ridden dweeb from the Marvel U. Don't water him down into a bad cover version.

Looks like masturbation is the winner on the day.

"Oh no! It's soft porn, the worst kind of porn of all! People who hate porn don't like it! People who love porn don't like it! What's the point?" - Wankrace 2001