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.

Alan Moore, gods and AI

Alan Moore reckons this is the most important comics panel he ever wrote, because as soon as he wrote it, he realised it was absolutely true, and much of his work since has been unpacking this strange, wonderful and utterly honest idea. 

It's also the first thing that always comes into my mind when somebody writes an article about some AI bullshit achieving sentience, because it's replied to some random prompt with something that sounds a bit human. The only place these things are alive are in the minds of dipshits who think they are alive.

Alan Moore knows the score, but I bet even he would be surprised by how fucking stupid some people can still be.

Mad Men: A place where we know we are loved

I've burned through much of my collection of movie DVDs as background noise while I worked at home over the past year or two, but this year I'm focused on the TV, and have started the year with some Mad Men.

It took me a few weeks to get through it all, but my extremely inane opinion is that it is still very, very good. It's the kind of drama that cuts to the soul, even if you don't have anything in common with these strange and ancient people who believed such weird things like smoking indoors. Sometimes you see their real selves - and they see it themselves - and it's devastating.

It's also incredibly funny - the lawnmower episode is an all time great and the scene where Roger gets to fire Burt for a second time is fucking hilarious -  as we watch these generally appalling people try to make a connection with others among the skyscrapers of the modern world. And occasionally uplifting, with the rise and rise of Peggy and Joan against a society that is full of nothing but old boys.

I've long thought that one of the greatest strengths of Mad Men is that no matter how much you hate Don Draper for the bullshit he pulls, it is infinitesimal compared to how much he hates himself - Jon Hamm's acting in the moments where he cracks and turns into Dick Whitman are actually heartbreaking.

But I've also always said Deadwood was my favourite show of that golden era of US TV because it was the one prestige show that wasn't about the death of the American dream, it was about the birth of it, as terrible people try to change to build something together, almost forming a civilized society by accident.

And Mad Men is set in the height of America, and the big twist is that it's not really a golden age, because the cracks are there, and a hell of a lot of people fall through them. It was a fine time for old white men and completely ratshit for absolutely everybody - anybody who doesn't fit the mold is kept away from any kind of power - and there are things that are taken for granted that are properly startling to the modern viewer. The most shocking thing in the whole series is still the moment where they have a roadside picnic, and then leave all their rubbish on the side of the road and just walk off.

It's the ideal of the American dream, and it's all fake ideals created by fake men, and sometimes you see the real human being beneath the suit or beehive hairdo. And al the powerful men are really scared little boys behind their wealth and influence, but at least the offices they work in and the clothes they wear are stylish enough to hide their pain.

Twin Peaks makes the top five

Deciding on my list of the top five movies ever made is something I take far more seriously than is warranted. Nobody else cares, or should, but I have thought about it a lot over the years, and have become certain in my verdicts. 

They say your tastes are defined by a very specific age in your life, when you're a very young adult and figuring out what kind of person you are going to be. And they're right because my personal list of the top five favourite films hasn't changed in decades. It was always an easy list to decide upon and has been the same since the 1990s.

(The top 10 is much more flexible and has never been set in stone, Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later come in and out, and Rocky Horror Picture Show and Die Hard have always been floating around in there, along with the best westerns. It's a fluid list.)

O Lucky Man! usually tops my top five, because it's always nice to have an absolute favourite film that is slightly unique, and I watched it again last year and it's still fucking awesome in what it says and sings; I have never got over the buzzing feeling of transcendence that I've got every time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey; Withnail and I has the best quotes of any movie ever; and the original Dawn of the Dead warped my mind right at the moment it needed to be warped.

The last spot was slightly flexible, but was always a western and usually a Clint. It was mainly The Searchers for the moment where the Duke's voice cracks at the end, but on any different day it could be the Outlaw Josey Wales for the words of iron speech; or Unforgiven for the final 20 minutes of wrath; or the Good, The Bad and the Ugly for its soaring magnificence.

But I've been thinking that list recently, and have come to the inescapable conclusion that while the westerns are all brilliant and still lingering in the more vague top 10, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is most definitely enshrined in that top five.

I saw it soon after it came out, and it's always spoken to me. It would be another five or six years before I actually got the chance to watch the TV show, and I was frequently lost by the dense plotting of the feature film. But it was such an intense experience it felt intoxicating, and I was greatly unimpressed by the critical indifference at the time (Kim Newman was the only writer I ever saw who captured what I felt about it).

I had that soundtrack on my walkman as I walked around town at night for years and years, and I got a real indication of a life in that darkness. I watched the film over and over, and can quote an embarrassing amount of it, and I finally saw it on a cinema screen for the first time last year.

It was the brilliance of that screening, and the full body chill that it gave me, that has now cemented it in my top five forever. A lot of the original show and The Return are staggeringly brilliant, and Fire Walk with Me is part of a vast tapestry of twisted genius, but it's also a genius work of cinema on its own.

I'm never gonna get vox popped by Letterbox, and that's fortunate because I'd be fucked if they did because they only want four films and I can't get it down that to just four. But those two hours in the town of Twin Peaks will always be one of them.