Going Mongo

The Tearoom of Despair is going on another regrettable hiatus, as the proprietors are buggering off to Mongolia for a month to visit places that sound like they were named by Klingons. The lovely wife is glad we’re going to a country where I won’t spend half the time in bookshops, but she doesn’t know I’m determined to come home with a Mongolian comic book. Even a translated issue of Archie will do.

Normal service will resume on September 1. Expect woeful tales of Vertigo comics that made me cry and some Liefeld love.

Fortunately, there are shitloads of good comic blogs and websites to go to instead. Go look at Dylan Horrocks' site, where he’s started putting up regular comic pages again, or read Sean T Collins’ brilliant essays on Batman RIP and David Lynch. The Savage Critics are a bunch of lazy arses, but are always worthwhile, and ex-2000ad editor David Bishop shows how hard it is to break into UK television writing while making a solid and professional living as a writer.

Tim O’Neill is often wrong and I always like it when he argues the point, while Andrew Hickey is always wrong , but his arguments are irrefutable. Fear for Spatula Nik – he is starting to realise how much American comics cost when they arrive at the bottom of the world. Love Dirk Deppey – he knows what’s good.

And so do Mike Sterling, Dorian Wright and Alan David Doane. And so do The Stones, Paul O’Brien, Grant Goggans and the mighty J Caleb Mozzocco. And dozens of others that talk about great comics and terrific movies and wonderful television and I just love it all.

I don’t know what internet access in the Gobi Desert is like, but I’m about to find out. You lose track of everything when you’re travelling, but that just means there is a whole bunch of good stuff to come back to when it’s done.