Huh?

1) Which is more worryingly entertaining – reading about obnoxious fanboy entitlement or reading a vicious takedown of an awful comic?

2) Why does 2000ad prog 1159 have two different covers?

3) Why can’t the superheroes in the Marvel and DC universes just age slower than people do in the real world? These are worlds where super-scientists like Reed Richards can punch holes in reality itself, but they can’t do anything about the aging process. If the characters in these worlds could age more slowly, it would solve almost every continuity issue, while avoiding the need for endless and dull reboots that tell the same story over and over again. I know the rationale is that readers would find it harder to identify with an 80-year-old Spider-man than the eternal 27-year-old he currently seems to be, but Spidey can stick to walls and I can’t identify with that either, without it being a problem.

4) Shit. What was my question again?

5) Speaking of endless reboots, is the new Spider-man movie telling the whole origin tale all over again? I’ve already read about this event dozens of times and seen it on film several times, is anybody really excited about the idea of going over that same old ground again?

6) Is it possible to create a new superhero movie that doesn’t spend half its running time setting up the origin before getting to the good stuff? Origins are always the most boring part.

7) If Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four is all about new ways of thinking about old problems, why does it need to resort to killing off a member of the team to build up interest in the title? There ain’t nothing new about that…

8) Hang on, so was JMS’ Superman actually supposed to be a total dick when he went for his Walk Across America? Was that the idea all along?

9) Have the New Gods shown up anywhere since Final Crisis?

10) How come I stopped buying Hitman after #1 in 1996?

11) What was I thinking when I didn’t grab all those Hitman comics that I saw in the dollar bin at Comics Compulsion in 2001?

12) Why, oh why, has it taken me 15 years to start seriously buying Hitman comics?

13) Tom & Mary Bierbaum – hack fan-fictioners or a genuinely distinctive and pleasurable voice in comic dialogue?

14) Do many people have dreams where you find comics that don’t exist?

15) Do they feel like crying when you realise they’re not real too?

16) Nightcrawler was always my favourite X-man, so how come I was completely unmoved to learn recently that he had been killed?

17) Where's Bill Grundy now?

18) Is it possible to tell a comic story set in a prison that doesn't end in a riot of some kind?

19) Good lord, is Kenneth Anger still alive? Chalk one up for pure, unadulterated satanism!

20) Was there ever any need for so many Green Hornet comics when Dynamite launched half a dozen titles at once?

21) How come a week after I finally caved in and got the Chelo’s Burden book for $50 after never seeing it anywhere for more than a decade, it showed up at the local second-hand bookshop for $10 the next fucking week? Is the Universe laughing with me, or at me?

22) Why wasn’t the Big Book of Wild Women ever released?

23) So is that is for the print edition of The Comics Journal? Is that the end of it?

24) So is that it for the Comics Code Authority? Is that the end of it?

25) Am I the only person in the world who still occasionally uses video tape to record television programmes? It still works.

26) What’s the point of a half-arsed movie blockbuster? After watching the Lord of the Rings movies again for the first time in years, it really reminded me how big and grand and epic it was, but also highlighted the fact that other films since have completely failed to work on that kind of scale, so why bother? It’s like the uselessness of soft porn – people who love porn don’t like it and people who hate porn don’t like it – what’s the fucking point?

27) Has there been a Showcase volume for Weird War Tales released yet? I’m totally getting that.