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

The art that inspires

All my opinions on movies, TV, music, comics and art in general are as subjective as everybody else's, but one way I judge the relative merits of my entertainments is by finding out how personally inspiring they are - that they're such good pieces of art that they want me to go make my own.

The Velvet Underground were famously the band that only a few thousand people really listened to, but every single one of them went out and formed their own bands afterwards. I didn't get quite the same drive from the first night when I heard All Tomorrow's Parties, (although I instantly knew I would never do anything in my life that would be as delicate and beautiful as Pale Blue Eyes), but I have felt it in plenty of other places, and especially in my comics. 

It's no coincidence that the most prolific I ever was at writing fiction was in the 90s, when I wrote a disturbing amount of movie screenplays that had absolutely no chance of ever getting made, and when I was deep in my fan fiction days - pumping out thousands of fairly useless words a month for J Street adventures on the Never Ending Board at comicbookresources.com - and this was also when I was getting new issues of The Invisibles every month. 

Every issue of Grant Morrison's opus was a delight, I fell deeply for it all, and every time I finished a new issue, I just really wanted to do my own, and would write mountains of extraordinarily dorky copy. If I ever started to flag, I just read the Flex Mentallo mini series again, and would get going again. 

I was also hugely inspired by the Doctor Who New Adventures in the 90s, especially the more modern takes from happily enthusiastic amateurs, and the new books from the likes of Cornell, Orman, Miles and Parkin fuelled the fire.

Some authors inspire me in different ways - Kim Newman books make me want to write stories where everybody teams up with everyone to defeat everything, and James Ellroy books make me want to cut back on all the unnecessary words in my writing, and then go even further. 

Reading something great from a talented writer makes you want to write your own view of the world. It's just the way things work.

It comes through in all media, the vast soundscapes of Richard Wright's keyboards on Pink Floyd songs want me to sail into the infinite, and seeing Van Gogh at in the flesh makes me want to look at the world differently. 

In the world of cinema, all my favourite films make me want to go out and make movies, despite a severe lack of opportunities and a gross over-confidence in my own abilities. I still want to make something great when I see a Kubrick of a Coen Brothers film. Sergio Leone films always fire me up, and Morricone music will be playing while I'm writing anything for the next month, and the exact same thing used to happen when a new David Lynch came out, and I would go full Badalamenti for a month.

The single most inspiring piece of work was probably Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, which I saw on a trip to the US and was deeply inspired by, especially by Belladonna's haircut, and had an idea for a novel that I actually went and wrote. It took five years, but the premise, late twist and ending where all figured out before the end credits of that film rolled in early 2015.

I've been stuck halfway through the sequel to that story for a couple of years now, I really need to do a PTA binge to get things going again. Some of the old favourites still get those sickly-sweet creative juices flowing, and there is always something new to show the way.

Undead ashes in the wind: Whatever happened to Marvel’s vampire sleaze?

1. Marvel’s rare lunge for the jugular

It wasn't even a decade after Fantastic Four #1, and the House of Ideas was already flailing around for any good new ones. And while it did find a whole new audience with monochromatic sexiness on the cheapest newsprint, it still seems a little ashamed of its sordid past, all these years later.

In the early seventies, Marvel was changing rapidly, because it had to. Stan had jetted off to LA to get stuck into the Hollywood deals - a process that would take 30 years to really pay off - while Jack had righteously fucked off to DC to create all new mythologies. The second generation of Marvel editors and creators were in charge, and they were young, keen, and horny as hell.

One of the attempts to hold onto a rapidly aging audience saw the company try to emulate the obvious success of publishers like Warren, and made the effort to out-Creepy the smaller company with their own regular black and white horror magazines. These mags lasted throughout the seventies and most of them are just as problematic as you'd expect to modern eyes, while still endearingly clumsy. And some of them are also some of the sexiest things Marvel ever published.

So of course the comic company was embarrassed by these comics for years afterwards and when they when they were eventually reprinted, they didn't survive the new prudishness of the early 21st century, with nipples clumsily covered up in altered art.

We're nearly 20 years on from that decision to cover it all up and it's unlikely much will change, especially when these nasty little comics are now part of the family-friendly Disney behemoth. The perv factor isn't going to come back like it once was.

But don't blame Marvel, it's probably just society's fault.

2. The horror, the horror

These black and white comics are dust in the wind now, but they were part of Marvel's publishing schedule for all of the 1970s. Over-sized black and white magazines were the natural home for properly gritty Conan adventures (it's little wonder that one lasted the longest), with Planet of the Apes, Doc Savage and slightly off-brand Hulk mags also on the shelves.

It was always a slightly seedy format, which made it the ideal home for some grown-up horror. There were several vampire comics, and other weird titles starring Satana and Brother Voodoo and other mystical miscreants.

Marvel had been doing horror comics for decades. They weren't entirely rubbish, but paled in comparison to the gleeful gore of the EC crew, or even the short, sharp apprentice factory that was DC's horror titles. But the work Marvel published in magazines like Dracula Lives!, Tomb of Dracula and Vampire Tales is among the best the company ever produced, because they're full of sexy, gory vampire action.

After all, there wasn't much sex appeal in the rotting gaze of Simon Garth, Zombie; or in the face tentacles of the Man-Thing, but the multiple vampire titles were full of the kind of sex and violence that would make Tony Stark blush.

Grand old pervs like Chris Claremont and Steve Gerber would sneak their kinks into their regular comics, but they didn't have to sneak anything into their vampire stories, and could let their freak fly. You can still smell the sweat in short comics from Howard Chaykin and Neal Adams, while grand warhorses like Tom Sutton, John Buscema and the perpetually underappreciated Tony DeZuniga produced the goods. Artists like Russ Heath would parachute in with some pin-ups that are still striking in their raw aggressiveness.

Their comics are full of the sharp breasts of ice vampires in the snow, while Blade's supporting cast includes several high-class sex workers, fitting for the objectively hottest vampire hunter in the MU. And the creators who couldn't get their sexy on in a regular monthly Fantastic Four comic could loosen up a lot on the heightened maturity levels of a black and white mag.

So they started showing a lot more than just cleavage. Dracula wasn't just an old dude in an opera cape, he was bare-chested in his vampiric youth and thrusting his fangs all over the place. Dracula is still more of a monster in the magazine stories - less of the noble sacrifices that he kept making in the colour title - and his unforgivable murders in the magazines are longer, more sensual and explicit. The seduction of Andrea in Marvel Preview #12 is full of endless nudity.

When perennial vamp artist Gene Colan went straight from the tasteful monthly carnage of the color Tomb of Dracula comic to the black and white mag version, his line immediately loosens up, and so do the clothes on his heroes, villains and monsters. They were going for an older audience, and could play less coy.

3. Gore at the corner store

For all that horniness, these comic mags from Marvel can seem incredibly chaste and naive compared to the underground comics that came out in the same decade. There was very little in the way of full frontal nudity, and the entire line has less cocksucking than one of Spain Rodriguez's tamer strips. The morals of the stories were usually as prudish as ever – pre-marital sex was still a death sentence.

But these comics found an audience, because they were everywhere.

It was the 70s, man, and things like sordid black and white comic magazines were just a part of regular society. These horny mags weren't hidden away in head shops with the other alternative comics, they were up on the shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores all over the world. They were usually shelved closer to the Penthouses than the Archies, but they were still there.

It's not hard to see why these tales of heaving horror worked. Before video tapes, you got your kicks here you could. And this was an era of free love, where porn would screen in main street cinemas, a flash of tit on the comic page was nothing.

4 There's always more money in toys

But markets and audiences change, and almost all of these black and white comics from Marvel slowly melted away in the harsh light of the 1980s. There was the notable burst of B+W independent fever started by the enormous success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but Marvel - for once - didn't chase that boom, content with going back to a basic audience of 12-year-old boys.

After years of editor-in-chief merry go-arounds in the 1970s, Jim Shooter was in charge and he knew what he wanted, and he didn't need he didn't need the freaky, weirdo stuff to get in the way of that core audience. There was more money in selling GI Joe comics than pushing the Son of Satan to middle America.

To its credit, Marvel did still try to play it cerebral and went for the art crowd with its Epic Comics, but they definitely were happy to leave all that sticky perv money on the table.

And the black and white magazines went away. Marvel still pushed out titles like Bizarre Adventures and Savage Tales for a while, but they were way more into the violence than the sex. The last ones to be printed on grotty old newsprint fizzled out in the late 80s, with Punisher spin-offs and a swathe of licensed properties like The Destroyer, Freddy Kruger and the indomitable Conan. None of these last efforts had Dracula's sexiness, or any edge at all really.

In the years since, there have been plenty of revivals of the characters and concepts - Colan was still doing tits and gore Dracula stuff for Marvel into the 90s. And there have been a number of black and white comics in Marvel's recent history, but they just don't look the same on the slick paper, without the grit of the more pulpy texture.

5. Don't look at the 70s, kids

So when the 21st century rolled around, and after a crash that brought the Marvel business to its knees, its comics returned from the dead under some surprisingly creative editorship. The Marvel Knights lads got the keys to the kingdom and used the astonishing tactic of putting great writers and artists on their comics and let them loose.

But for all their big balls talk in interviews, they were still too shy about all that icky stuff from ages ago. And at the height of the Ultimates and Marvel Knights seriousness, a Dracula and Lilith story was reprinted in an Essential volume and notably no longer featured some actual nipples, lovingly rendered by the mighty Gene Colan.

Around this time, there were many morons who had actual conniptions over the brief sight of Janet Jackson's nipple at a football game and Marvel - whose best reaction to this kind of thing is to consider that no publicity is the best publicity, summoned all the corporate courage you would expect from a 21st-century company. They redrew the art, draping some tasteful clothes and straps over the whole mess and hoping nobody noticed.

Unfortunately, it was about the time all the cool kids started blogging about comics, and plenty of people noticed the change. And it wasn't surprising, just disappointing, that Marvel didn't have the guts it once had, back in the last century.

6. No seriously, it's all about the money

But it's almost too easy to blame Marvel for it all, because for all its bluster, it's never really affected culture as much as it likes to think it is, no matter how many billions the movies make. The company has always surfed on the great waves of 'whatever works' for decades, and when western society pivoted away from that 70s permissiveness, Marvel just went with it.

Many adults in the 1980s seemed embarrassed by the 70s, and all that free love dried up in the age of Aids and unchecked capitalism.

Although there is still a maddeningly long way to go, modern society is getting some things better -and you can see that in the old comics, where casual racism, homophobia and misogyny is obvious to modern eyes. And we like to keep thinking we're better than that.

But we're also, as a society, just a little embarrassed by the flash of a little flesh, and it's easiest just to cover it up and move on.

You can't cover up the old comics, if you can still find them. These black and white artefacts still have some heat, still have the stench of hot sex mixing with the underlying stench of the undead. It's all there, no matter how many times it's covered up, for as long as the original rotting newsprint lasts.