Fighting with Frank (part 1 of 13): Step aside.

- Batman and Robin #3 (2009)

Art by Frank Quitely

Story by Grant Morrison

Colors by Alex Sinclair

Frank Quitely's gorgeous art takes him forever, but the results are always worth it. That shakily detailed line, the stunning use of perspective and balance, a healthy dose of a very wry sense of humour and a general sense of inventiveness. He's a thoughtful, meticulous artist, and he's also excellent and drawing fight scenes, putting the human body in outrageous poses that have a scream of truth to them, full of incredible acrobatics and real force behind the atomic punches. It's a delight to highlight 13 of my favourite fight scenes by Frank over the coming few months of Sundays.

The paths that people make are the best paths

One of my favourite little things about exploring modern towns and cities is something I just found out is called desire paths, where a concrete path goes around a piece of grass, but the grass is worn away by people taking shortcuts across it, flagrantly disregarding the authority of the concrete.

I know it's unsightly and all, but these are it takes thousands of feet to get that result, all seeking to save a few seconds, all finding the most efficient path.

They're ghost paths, liminal walkways, and a physical reminder that people won't always be pushed in the direction they're told to take, and I love them for that.

This is the Tearoom of Despair. Crap metaphors are what we are all about.

A murder is happening right now

I must have read tens of thousands of back covers for video tapes at rental places during the age of the video store. I used to spend hours browsing for the right movies, and would frequently judge them by their covers, because that was the filmmakers' one big chance to get your average punter to fork out the money for an overnight hire.

And I can't remember the vast, vast majority of them, because they got deleted from the short term memory as soon as I put the tape back on the shelf, but some stuck in the mind, especially when they made you feel like a goddamn murderer.

That's what the back cover of The Killing of America did to me. The 80s documentary was in a long line of mondo films featuring raw footage of death and carnage, and for all my love of horror film gore, I didn't really want to sit and watch the real thing for entertainment purposes. I never bothered with any of the Faces of Death, and the only thing I really saw was something called Inhumanities, one that my mates insisted we get out one Friday night, and was just full of grim war footage and gross animal mutilation. (A shock cut of some penis mutilation was the big hit from that.)

So I didn't want to watch these things, but I still read the back covers of everything, and while I haven't seen a copy of The Killing of America on the shelves in decades now, I still remember it's stark notice that in the time it took me to read the blurb on the back, another American had been killed.

I was only 11 or so when I saw that and could not get my head around it, that an entire life could be snuffed out in the brief moment I was reading that back cover. I have no idea if the claim was even true, but it was enough nightmare fuel for years.

And while I know this is nothing I can't find on the internet with two minutes of searching, but that creeping horror of all those deaths, and I felt it just by looking at the back of video tape.

Look at the plastic bags: Change is never as hard as it looks

I do miss the weird wonder of a plastic bag blowing around in the wind like that bit in American Beauty -  it's so easy to be a cynic about it, but it really is the only part of that movie to still hold up - but that's all I miss about them

The world changes every day, and while unfortunately a lot of those changes are for the worst, there are bright spots out there, where things are actually getting properly better.

Take the issue of one-use plastic bags. They were banned a few years back around here, and there was so much deep concern about what this meant, and how it was the nanny state run wild, and people would now face the massive inconvenience of having to remember to bring reusable bags. 

And it all turned out to be fine. It's not hard. All the whining and worrying was for nothing, people adjusted easily enough and remembered to bring their bags next time they went shopping. And if they forget, that's okay, because there are all sorts of environmentally friendlier options, and that's a tiny price to pay to keep decaying plastic bags out of every gutter.

I had to get out a bunch of Christmas decorations recently and they were in bags that were just a few years old, and they were nasty as fuck. I don't miss them at all.

This is not going to change the world, it takes far more than any one gesture, it's a grand effort. The actual environmental impact of all those bags might be little more than greenwashing, but it does make the world a slightly better place, and maybe we could all use a few more tiny inconveniences to get our arses into gear.

Nobody was ever cooler

For all the vodka that we drank that night, it was a deeply sobering experience. Because I was 21 and saw Geena Davis do that shot glass thing in The Long Kiss Goodnight and that was when I realised that no matter what I did in my entire life, I would never, ever do anything anywhere near as cool as that.

Slipping away from the Seto Thargo

It was nice while it lasted. A few years ago, I achieved a life-long goal of collecting every single issue of 2000ad, all 2000+ progs. And for a short while, I had them all, and was truly Seto Thargo.

But only for a short while, because last year I moved to a town where you couldn't get the Galaxy's Greatest Comic anywhere, so that immediately created a gap of almost 50 issues. I only got six progs at other bookstores around the South Island during the year, but with 2000ad coming out relentlessly every week, I was coming up well short.

And now I can't fucking find them on the shelves anywhere in a city of 1.5 million people, which feels wrong on a quantum level. Because 2000ad used to be everywhere - every corner dairy, every bookstore. It slowly faded away from all of these places over the years, and for the past decade or so, I knew of only two shops in all of Auckland that were selling it, and now that I've returned from a Southern odyssey, even those two places don't get it anymore.

Reading the latest issue of 2000ad while working back to my work or home is one of the great small pleasures of my life, and it's s shame to give it up. It's such a primal experience for me that I could never replicate with a digital subscription to the comic - the tactile nature of the thing plays a huge part in my enjoyment of it, along with being out the world with it.

And getting a mail order subscription is prohibitively expensive, and I have no doubt that many progs would go missing every year on their journey to the other side of the world (I have a monthly subscription to Empire magazine, and at least two of those go missing every years, to the point where I've stopped complaining about it.)

So I'm still looking for a regular source, and will pick up the missing back issues when they become available in some way, but I bet I miss a few. There's already at least one issue from the past few months that is sold out on the 2000ad website, and if you can't get it there, you can't get it anywhere.

I really need to stress that I am not complaining about any of this. This is the way I've read comics my whole life, in non-linear fashion, and the hunt is the thing. Now I'm looking in every random bookstore (half the progs I managed to scrape up last year were in a chain bookstore in a town of 7000 people), and that's genuinely fun.

The one thing I do regret is that I have no idea what's going on in my favourite strips, I've missed a lot of the brilliant Williams/Wyatt/Flint Dredd stories in recent months, (although they are all, of course, thoroughly spoiled). And I remain absolutely fascinated by the late-career brilliance of Dan Abnett - always a good writer, but a truly great one in recent years with Brink, The Out and Lawless, and he has even evolved hoary old Sinister Dexter into something spectacular.

I'm not totally bereft of thrillpower - you can still get the Judge Dredd Megazine in multiple places, probably because the newsagents selling them get a higher return on their shelf space from it. The Meg is still superb value for money, so there's still some thrillpower coming through, just not that weekly dose, the one I've been craving since 1982. 

This is 50?

It doesn't feel any different, turning 50. Not as much as I thought it would. It's a big number, but it's not the milestones that grind you down, it's the ongoing slog through life.

I did get a nasty cold just before my birthday in January, and a cough lingered on for weeks afterwards, which means that so far my fifties have been one of fever and hacking. But other than that, I still feel like the same idiot I've been for decades now.

I know in my brain that I'm a very different person from the young fool running about in the 90s, smoking away his 20s in a haze before actually doing something with my life. Everything good that has happened in my life came from the decision to go to journalism school when I was 29, but even that is more than two decades ago now.

I thought I was supposed to be getting more conservative as a I get older, but that hasn't happened. Maybe it's because I've been locked out of any generational wealth, still living on every paycheque and still nowhere near owning my own home, but it's mainly because my hatred of bullying and injustice has only got more rock solid over the years, it hasn't been eroded away by fear and loathing.

I may have lost some of the enthusiasm for the media I consume, not as all encompassing and it's taken me a while to figure out I don't need to rage about the most superficial of things, but I think I'm getting there.

And that undying love for a good comic book or movie or tune, it's still there, I still get so happy finding  a book I've been looking for, and some I've been hunting for decades are still out there somewhere (I will have you Lovely Biscuits, oh yes, I will have you). 

The moments when I walk into a random store, and see the Superman v Flash treasury edition going for a song, or finding that one Shooter/Byrne issue of The Avengers that I've been after since 1979, that's when I feel like the same old nerd I always was, and probably always will be.

Here's to the next 50 years, right?

Darwyn's DC: Not always what you expect (part 2 of 2)

 

Darwyn's DC: All superheroes should look like this (part 1 of 2)

I am ideologically opposed to variant covers on comics in almost every case, but that one time DC had the bright idea of letting Darwyn Cooke do whatever he wanted for the covers for one month almost makes it all worthwhile.

It's still very weird to think that Cooke isn't with us any more, these covers alone are so full of wit and momentum and love and grace and power and friendship and life. We should have got another 40 years of this kind of beauty, but will have to be content with the brilliance that we got.