Love and happiness forever!

It's a bit of a joke, when Ewan McGregor's insanely charming Alex makes the toast in Shallow Grave - forcing his partying flatmates to drink to 'love and happiness forever', He's being a dick about it, and it's all obviously about to go wrong and there will be corpse desecration and murder, but he's still demanding the oath. 

But I'll drink to that idea, any day. It's all everything we all need - what can be better than love and happiness forever? Maybe Nathan Barley's 'peace and fucking'.

Best dollar sale ever

I have always been a fiend for the $1 comic sale. Regular issues of American comic books are getting perilously close to $12 in local money, but give it a few years, and a lot of that stuff will end up in the cheap bins, and that twelve bucks will buy me a dozen slightly trashed old comics. 

A vast chunk of my comic collection was swept up from bargain bins, and I never miss the kilo sale at one of my local stores. But when the most excellent Iron Age Comics announced it was doing a special sale, I really did not expect it to be the best dollar comic sale I've ever been to. But that's what happened, all the same. 

It was a good sign when the first thing I see in the first box is Fantastic Four Annual #4, the one where the old Human Torch comes back - a pivotal moment in the early Marvel Universe, and it's just sitting there. It was missing a back cover, but was still a thing of beauty, in all its roughed-up glory. 

Then I found Avengers Annual #10 in there, and a bunch of other Avengers from the early seventies and many 60s and 70s oddities like ancient Justice League of America, prime Kirby Demon and loads of Marvel Two-In-One, and they're all just a buck each. 

They are, obviously, in awful condition. Some of them have been warped and torn by water damage, and some come with covers that have clearly been attacked by rodents, but a beat-up comic has just as much as charm as one that still smells like the printers. 

And if the cover is getting gross, there is so much thrills inside, so much beautiful artwork, for the cheapest of costs. Son of Satan issues and loads of terrific DC Comics Presents, including the one with the first ever New Teen Titans. A decent chunk of the post-Kirby Return of the New Gods, because why the hell not?

It's taken me weeks to get through them all, because Bronze Age comics are dense as hell, but two things are certain - short of straight-up stealing something, this is the best bang for buck in all  entertainment, and that I'll be there for the next sale, every time.

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.