Drug cartels ain't got nothing on Carol Burnett

There is something so intrinsically right with the way that Saul Goodman slithers through life in both his own show and Breaking Bad, and somehow gets away with it because the people he mainly deals with are just as weak as he is, but when he comes up against the pure goodness of Carol Burnett, she is the one person he can't buy off or threaten, and ultimately brings him down.

It's not the ruthless drug cartels or the brutal US law enforcement officers that bring Saul's lawless rampage to an end, all it takes is one little old lady who is not putting up with his nonsense for one darn second.

In a world where those with power often seem to skate through life without ever facing any real consequences, it's  handy reminder that all it should take is one good person - and you couldn't get much gooder than the wonderful Ms Burnett - to say no, and all the schemes and plans come crashing down.

Murder Falcon: The road to true heavy

Almost every new comic book these days comes loaded with some kind of high concept - some crazy twist on the usual things, often with the volume turned all the way up to 11. That is all well and good, and can even be nothing more than pure entertainment, but grounding it with something real can give all that intensity a greater dimension.

That's what happens in Daniel Warren Johnson's quite wonderful Murder Falcon comic. I've liked Johnson's comics for a while - his Superman story in the Red and White anthology that came out a couple of years ago was an absolute stunner. So when my pal Nik, who has been on a Johnson kick for a while, insisted I read more of his work, I was only too happy to follow his recommendations.

So I started with Murder Falcon, and it's the most heavy metal comic possible, full of the power of the chunky riff, the intensity of a thick bass line and the throbbing propulsion of a 20-minute drum solo. It is ridiculously over the top, and with Johnson's energetic art style, full of slashing lines, eye-scorching colours and some very exact perspectives, it doesn't get much heavier

This is hardly a unique storytelling path to take - heavy metal and comics have had a long and occasionally very strange relationship - but the thing that Johnson's comics have that so many of these contemporaries lack is that it still has a foot in the real world, and that juxtaposition of the mundane tragedy of real life mixing with the insanity of interdimensional musical warfare is very tasty.

It's not just about the way the Murder Falcon with the bionic arm on top of your van is beating the snot out of eldritch nightmares from beyond the veil, it's about how someone deals with a cancer diagnosis and how they can lash out out at the people who really care about them.

These are the quiet bits between the shredding solos, and they're all the heavier for their silence.

A walking man

I recently had a medical checkup that produced some surprisingly good results, which is always nice. Despite a hideously indulgent diet - especially since I became a parent - I've not yet reached the stage in life where I have to cut back on the finer things in life, and can just barrel on ahead as usual. (The lovely wife, while obviously happy with the clean bill of health, is still hugely annoyed that I haven't learned a goddamn thing when it comes to my diet.)

It was particularly surprising because I don't really do a hell of a lot of exercise. I've never belonged to a gym of any kind, and seem to be lacking the sheer thrill of narcissism that leads to outrageous feats of physical exercise. I got too many books to read to worry about that stuff.

But I do walk. I walk a lot.

I've always enjoyed going on a good walk, every since I was a kid. I've never been much for running, but if I keep to a steady languid pace, I feel like I could walk forever. I do greatly overestimate how well I would do at the Long Walk, but sometimes I really do feel like I could walk for much longer than most people.

And I have walked for hours and hours, and not just on big hikes through the big country. Never anything competitive, and never anything organised, because that always takes the fun out of everything. Just walking for the sake of it.

Apart from the physical benefits - it really does feel the one exercise that we are evolutionarily designed to do, and I do very duly heartened after going off on a good ramble - it's the mental state of mind that comes with the slow transport of your own legs,. Having the time to actually take in all your surroundings, down to the merest speck of dirt, while also losing yourself in your own head during a long hike. 

My mind wanders far further than my legs can ever take me, as long as I'm not distracted by the burn in the thighs or anything like that. I think big thoughts and small, and sometimes I don't think about anything at all.

At least 80 percent of the ideas that end up published on this blog come from these walks - the idea for this one came while I was on the track down to Blockhouse Bay beach the other night. And the silent trod can also help get my thoughts in order about how much I enjoyed a film or book or other piece of media (one of the reasons I still love going to movies on my own is that I'm not pressured to have an opinion as soon as the credits roll, and can let things percolate).

It's a dynamite way to problem solve, and de-stress, and just feel at peace with the world around you. Taking one step at a time, every day, on this walk for life.

Fighting with Frank (part 8 of 13): Go for your guns, girls!!

- Hondo City Law: Babes with Big Bazookas 

Art by Frank Quitely

Script by Robbie Morrison

Letters by Gordon Robson

I'm always surprised by Benny Blanco from the Bronx

I've seen Carlito's Way a dozen times - with the pool hall bit, and the part where Big Al shelters under a trash can, it's a top five DePalma for me, easy - and every single time I think that this time Carlito is actually going to get on that train, and get away. 

I'm so caught up in that chase around the rail station, and the final dash to the train, I ignore the fact that you can see Benny Blanco from the Bronx running ahead of him, and he so nearly gets away from that awful life forever.

I still think that one day, one strange day, Carlito might actually make it onto that train. 

My all time top five rock concerts #5: Calling on!

It was as good as New Zealand rock music got. Right about the turn of the century -after years of nurturing local talent and competing against international behemoths - rock bands in Aotearoa had their own sounds and styles, and could stand tall against the best in the world..

Some of them were just fun - like Stellar and Tadpole and Goodshirt - but Shihad were the kings of the local rock scene, bringing absolutely mega riffs into existence for more than decade by that point. Peaking off the success of The General Electric, they were the best band to ever come to Timaru in that small and wonderful slice of spacetime.

And they came with Weta, led by the brilliant Aaron Tokona, who wrote these powerful songs that built into transcendent crescendos. Tokona had no time for the business, and never recorded as much as he should have, and passed away a few years ago. But that was all in the future, and he made a Tuesday night in Timaru feel eternal, with some chugging AC/DC shredding as they set up for their next epic.

And they also came with Fur Patrol, which was fine by everyone, because Julia Deans was unquestionably the coolest person in the country right then, and she still might be.

But it was Shihad we came for, and Shihad who delivered all the rock we would ever really need in our lives. It was before they went down the ill-fated Pacifier route, and when they ruled the country. Shihad were the band who pumped the heaviest of riffs right into your skull, and would have lyrics that could be surprisingly tender, and a band that would have a joint with you in the back alley behind the Loaded Hog. 

It was the greatest gig my home town had ever seen. All those bands had been there before and would be there again, but for one wonderful tour around the country, they were better than any other fuckers in the world.

My all top top five rock concerts #4: All the hits!

And sometimes it's just a case of getting exactly what you want, and hearing all the hits, and getting that perfect encore, and being happy, with few surprises.

Like seeing the Beastie Boys in their mid-2000s pomp - it's something I'll never have again, now that Yauch has merged with the infinite, but their performance that cool January night will stick in my head forever. Or going to Queens of the Stone Age when they were touring with NIN, and both bands were trying to outdo each other in showmanship and crowd reaction, or the time we went to Radiohead (not that one) and it was just an predictably unpredictable as expected.

I do think Alice Cooper is more of an artist than the popular perception, but an Alice Cooper show without the fake guillotine and the rubber bats, as well as No More Mister Nice Guy, wouln't feel like a proper Alice concert at all.

The only important thing is that once you've seen the kind of show, you don't repeat it. I saw Iggy Pop do his thing at a Big Day Out and it was so good, it was all the strutting and crowd surfing you could ask for, but then I saw him a couple of years later, and it was exactly the same. All the same tricks. And not quite as good, since the first time featured as many of the original Stooges who were still standing at the time, and the second time didn't.

It's like eating the best piece of cake, but then ruining it by going back for seconds, when you should have got a fuckin' sausage...

My all-time top five rock concerts #3: Against The Wall

Pink Floyd's The Wall was the very first album I ever really fell in love with, and I loved it hard. While I later turned punk and pretended I didn't know all the words for Nobody Home for a decade or so, my early teenage years were spent mired in Roger Water's lament for his dead dad, and his complaints about how hard it was to be a rock star.

Waters and the rest of the Floyd parted company a few years before that obsession really kicked in, so I obviously never got to see the legendary stage show they did for the album, but when Roger Waters came to do the show a few years ago, I was all in.

And when In The Flesh exploded on stage with all due pomp and circumstance, it was a proper overload, with lights and indoor fireworks and smoke and all sorts of things going on, and just when you think 'that's how you start a fucking show!', a goddam plane crashes into the side of the bloody stage.

It was a full-on sensory experience from there - as well as the practical effects of building the wall, the use of laser-sharp images on its blank face moved everything in whole new dimensions.

I've seen bigger shows with my own eyes - including a big Broadway hit from the front row, and the Beatles' Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas - and there was that one time I went to an AC/DC concert and could not even get my head around what I was seeing ('Oh, it's a giant inflatable sex worker on top of a full-sized replica train' I finally realized.)

But the most impressive thing I've seen in a concert was the first music I ever fell in love with, and first loves usually aren't that grandiose.

My all top top five rock concerts #2: Two-thirds of Neil

I've seen Neil Young play in real life twice, but I feel like I've really only seen two-thirds of what he can do.

One was a big festival set where he played almost all the hits (although the wife managed to straight up hallucinate one of them). It was incandescently good, I could see the music buzzing through the air when he did Cortez The Killer, and it was absolutely everything you would want in a Neil Young concert.

That's what I thought anyway, until I saw Young perform again with Crazy Horse a few years later, and it was fucking brilliant in a whole new way. He was just jamming with his mates, and the songs went on forever, and he played about three songs that everybody knew, and then a bunch  of deep cuts from decades of songs, and it was glorious in a whole new way. 

The disappointed faces of the other concertgoers who never got to hear him do anything they could sing along to - that just made it all the sweeter.

The only thing I need now is to see Neil in his most laidback, acoustic mode, warbling out Harvest Moon on a stage covered in straw. The big fella is not getting any younger, but I still have high hopes that I will get to see this Neil Young, and complete this particular circle of life.

My all time top five concerts #1: Seeing it all through another pair of eyes

As much as music ruled by life in my teenage and early adult years, I didn't actually go to my first big rock or hip hop concert until I was well into my twenties. I went to plenty of gigs at the dankest pubs in the South Island, and saw my mates get up on stage and do wonderous things, but I never got to see any of the really big international acts.

There were all well outside my reach, for starters. The mega gigs were all in the far-off big cities, and getting tickets, transport and accommodation would cost hundreds of dollars, when I was lucky to get $5 a week for the latest issue of Excalibur. The only people to have the willpower to get to the big shows were the obsessives like my mate Kaz, who went to ever damn U2 show that came within a few hundred miles. I was so fucking jealous.

But once I had disposable income of my own, and moved to the big city, I got to see almost all of the bands I grew up with, and always adored. I saw most of the Clash play with the Gorillaz, and Faith No More do their thing, and Massive Attack up close. Dozens of shows, to the point where I have to consciously remember what concerts I've been to. 

And this week, with all the horror in the outside world still pressing down on us all, I'm going to remember the five top gigs I ever went to. It's actually more like nine or ten, because I loved some very different shows for very similar reasons, but top five always sounds more appropriate.

None of them are going to be very surprising, or anyone that obscure, because it should be abundantly clear that I am the most basic of all bitches.

So of course I'm picking the one time I got to see the Manic Street Preachers. It was years after I'd been a committed Manics fan, but they did all the big parts. What made it so great was that it was the best example of introducing my lovely wife to something that meant a lot to me, because that's when I got to show her the glory of Nicky Wire.

We've been married for 20 years now, and she still doesn't give a damn about many of the things I'm into - she never got into comics, and I will never make a horror fan out of her - and that's absolutely fine, because everybody has their own things to be passionate about. But I can still slowly introduce her to the music that speaks to my soul, and she will sometimes fall for it harder than I ever imagined.

And so we are at the Manics gig in Auckland, and while we are waiting for the show to start, she wonders why one of the mike stands has an outrageous feather boa on it, and I say it's because Nicky Wire, and then she got a crash course in the eternal coolness of the bassist. Her later discovery of his love of tidying up the house only made it better.

It's happened a couple of times. Checking out the late and truly great Mark Lanegan at the Reading festival in 2012 was another bet that paid off, his stoic stage presence making another new fan with the absolute minimum of effort, and the Rammstein show we saw at another festival was most impressive pyrotechnics I've ever seen, with the flames vaporising the light rain that was falling, and burning with such heat we could feel it on our faces 50m from the stage. But the most surprising thing about that was that she immediately went out and bought every single one of those albums.

And this is a win for everybody, we both enjoy the music, and can luxuriate in it together. But there is also just something truly special about finding a new connection with the love of your life.

Big rock concerts are all about a connection on the macro level, with thousands of people all living in the same moment, all jamming to the same tune. But it's also about those tiny connections, and it's just always better when you can share the love.

Fighting with Frank (part 7 of 13): Felt that, eh?

- All Star Superman #9

Pencils by Frank Quitely

Digitally inked and coloured by Jamie Grant

Written by Grant Morrison

Lettered by Travis Lanham

It was Jim from IT all along!

I watched all of the Cumberbatch/Freeman Sherlock stories recently, and I think they did just the right amount of episodes for that series before it got to much, but one part that still fucking rocks is Andrew Scott's Moriarty, who remains incandescently good. They killed him off brutally early, but brought him back through flashback and mental mind-games and Scott fucking nailed it every time.

When I was watching the first couple of films when they were first broadcast, I was looking out for Moriarty, because he was crushingly inevitable. They already had the Mycroft fake-out, so I was waiting for the mastermind criminal, and took no notice of Jim from IT when he stumbled across the scene, because you never take any notice of the IT geek. 

In hindsight, it was very obvious. But the best twists always are.

Rambo was my first grown up movie

Film classifications used to be a big concern in my life, because I was just a kid, and didn't know what real concerns actually were. But just because I didn't know what was really important in life didn't mean the entire classification system wasn't still a cause of heartbreak and sorrow.

Around these parts, it used to be G for general admission, and GY for the parental guidance thing. But it was the hard Rs that deprived me of seeing great films up on the big screen, and it could be years before I properly caught up.

Me and my mate Nigel completely failed to get into the R13 Terminator when we were 10, and I can still taste the bitter disappointment of not being allowed to see Blade Runner because I was too young, even though it had Han frigging Solo in it.

Things got a bit looser when video players rolled into town, but there were still restrictions at home. I wasn't allowed to watch Beverly Hills Cop after 10 minutes, when his boss showed up and unleashed a tirade of f-bombs, because my Dad was a pretty liberal dude, but he still had his limits.

So it was a big deal when I was allowed to watch Rambo, I was just shy of the 13-year mark, but that was close enough. The profanity was bad, and the sexual stuff was just awkward for all concerned, but cartoonish violence was still a-okay.

This kind of permission must be immediately seized on, before broader issues of parental responsibility come to mind, and we were on our way to the video store as soon as that permission was granted.

The movie itself was no big deal - I was never really into the absurdity of Stallone in the 80s, and it's fair to say that a lot of aspects to the biggest Rambo of them all have not held up well, (although it remains dumbly entertaining, and long as you don't think too hard about it).    

But it was the first taste of something that was made for adults, and a powerful symbol for the changes machine-gunning their way into my life. It's one way to do it. 

What are you shooting at, Clive?

And sometimes there is a film that is just so fucking stupid, you can only watch it in 15-minute bursts before it gets too much. You keep going, because even the dumbest films can redeem themselves, but it can be hard going.

I didn't expect Anon from 2018 to be one of those films, even though it's part of the endless waterfall of straight to streaming efforts. Writer/director Andrew Niccol had done some smart films in the past that did occasionally veer into the realm of the dumb, but walked that line with some skill.

But Anon trips up over that line, right from the start. The very concept of the film - that everybody has implants that lets them see everything anybody else is getting up to, along with helpful heads-up displays showing all the details of the shit they look at - isn't as smart as it thinks it is. For starters, it's a whole new technology that nobody can turn off, even if it's majorly malfunctioning, and everything you look at comes with grating text and a horrible digital ticking sound that would drive everybody nuts in a week.

So far, so Black Mirror, but then Clive Owen's head gets hacked, and he literally can't trust what he's seeing, and it looks like his hallway is on fire, so he pulls out his gun and starts blazing away. Even though he knows it's fake, and even though it's a fucking fire - what does he think bullets are going to do against it? And thinking somebody might be using the flames to attack them is still no fucking excuse for blind gunfire.

I had to take a break after that. That was too much, man.

And then when I get back to it the next day, Clive goes and gets in a fucking car and tries to drive around a busy future metropolis, even though his eyes are still subject to enforced hallucinations. He doesn't get past the first intersection.

I guess you're meant to admire his hard nature, but this blatant dumbarsery, and the only reason these scenes to be there in the film is so other plot elements can play off later - his poor neighbour who nearly gets shot by him is sacrificed so Clive can be framed for the shooting - which is the dumbest part of all.

I do feel foolish, ripping into a fairly nondescript film from seven years ago that literally nobody else cares about. But it took me days to get through something that should have been an easy watch, because I couldn't take that kind of stupid for too long.

Dreaming of Judge Mortis

I've been reading horror comics since before I could actually read, but one of the few to genuinely scare me were the early Dark Judges stories in Judge Dredd, and I know this because I had genuine nightmares about them for years. They were coming for me, and no matter where I would hide, they would find me.

It was only the Bolland versions that counted. Bolland's art is always a detailed delight, but that just made the horrific absurdity of Death, Fear, Fire and Mortis all the more real, with oblivion hiding in the sharpest of shadows. 

They became more of a joke, the more they appeared -  I have no such reaction to the recent muddy, overwrought versions in the Fall of Deadworld comics. But they were absolutely terrifying in their primal glory. 

I still sometimes dream of them coming down the road towards me in bright daylight, and the only way I can ever escape is by waking up.

Beyond post-irony: Heretic and Slow Horses

What does it mean when you're watching a movie or reading a book, and you suddenly start thinking about questions that the story is raising, and then the story answers those exact questions, and kinda makes fun of you for your simple queries.

I've felt like this with some stories for a while - the Buffy TV show used to do this all the time. Especially when I'd watch it stoned with my mate Geoff, and we'd have all sorts of deep philosophical insights about the nature of slaying vampires and the questions it would raise, and then the show would answer those questions straight away, like it had heard our complaints and was putting us in our place.

More recently, I felt it with the movie Heretic, which I thought was a lot of fun, but had Hugh Grant spouting some absolute bullshit. Because he's Hugh fucking Grant, it sounds refined and charming, but you're sitting there wanting one of the characters to refute his obvious bullshit, and then somebody does just that, and points out with great eloquence and passion how fucked up his reasoning is.

The Slow Horses books - which I carved through in a few short months last year - also do it all the time, with author Mick Herron constantly toying with expectations, and then blatantly violating them, and acting surprised that you thought it would be anything different. Sometimes it's the use of a jacket, belonging to a corpse at the start of one book, which then features some very blatant mentions of wearing coats; or even the way that each book ends with a member of Slough House dying in some unfortunate manner, and then in one of the latest ones, it's obviously happened again, only it turns out the character just wants to eat all the fucking chicken in the room.

It's all so clever, and is extremely hard to pull off. But it also feels like a direct conversation between author and audience, an unspoken correspondence of anticipation. It's so far beyond literary irony that we're somewhere new.  I really thought we slipped into a post-ironic age very early on in the 21st century, but where are we now? 

You may feel manipulated as the consumer of this story, but you also know you are in on the game. It  definitely makes everything feel a bit meta, seeing the man behind the curtain like that, but in an entertainment world of dumb-arse retreads and the general same old shit, this kind of post-post-post-irony is always a welcome sack of smart.

How was my 1999?

I'm 24 in 1999, which is just about the last age where I could be a total bum for a while without feeling like a complete loser and a failure at life. It was the last thrust of proper youth, the last time to be free of any responsibilities. It was a fucking good year.

Me and my mates had all been working since we got out of school, for six years straight at that stage, and just could not be fucked anymore, so we chucked in our jobs and went on the dole and lived a leisurely life of few luxuries.

And for most of the year we all just fucking chilled out, watched lots of movies, smoked lots of pot, ate lots of trash food. It was the year of The Matrix and the final volume of The Invisibles, and it felt like all the freaky weird stuff that I'd spent the decade indulging in was coming to some kind of fruition. Things looked good for the new millennium.

I wasn't getting any comics regularly - not even my beloved 2000ad, which I'd given up after some truly diabolical mid-90s progs. I would still get the latest issue of The Invisibles through mail order, and I still never missed anything to do with Love and Rockets, but that was literally it. I would see advertisements for things like Planetary, which looked sexy as fuck, but I was most bothered by the fact I was missing out on Hourman (I read it 10 years later, it was pretty good).

It was the last year of the 20th century (yes, it wasn't technically the last year because there was no year zero, but general consensus can be a powerful thing), and is rightly seen as a stunner of a year for movies. While that sometimes only becomes clear in retrospect, you couldn't walk out of the theatre into some 90s sunlight after seeing something like the Thin Red Line and Fight Club and The Matrix, and not realise it was a mini golden age for movies.

I listened to a lot of Beastie Boys and Portishead and Pulp's This Is Hardcore, and the Best of 1998 CD that Q put out, meaning the main soundtrack to my life was still a year late.

But everything was a year late, and I do wonder if part of my affection for this period is because it was the last time I was ever not connected to the world at all times. I could only get on the internet once a week, at most, and would spend that precious half hour checking out the niche message boards that my friends still posted on, before catching up on the geek news from comicbookresources.com and fuckin' Ain't It Cool, and that was it, there was nothing more.

Blogs weren't even a thing yet, there was no bandwidth for Youtube, and social media was a nightmare for the future, not an aspirational goal.

I still know I'm seeing this through rose coloured glasses. I was still five years away from properly getting my shit together, and going to journalism school, and everything great in my life has come from that decision. And yeah, it was fun times, but we weren't making any money, and couldn't go out or do anything exciting, and by the time winter started to bite, we were all back in employment, because beer doesn't come for free.

So I moved on with my life, and things changed in ways I could never anticipate, and I haven't had to go on a benefit since then. But I can still remember that thrilling freedom of the last year of my youth, before the new century came crashing in.

Fighting with Frank (part 6 of 13): Oh, shut up and stop showing off.

 

- The Authority #20

Art by Frank Quitely

Inks by Trevor Scott

Words by Mark Millar

Colors by David Baron

Letters by Bill O'Neill

The universe shrugged.

Is there a word for the feeling you get when one of your absolute favourite musical artists put out their first single in more than two decades, and it's a total banger, but also comes with a new official music video that it actively repulsive?

It's not the video embedded above - the Tearoom of Despair is, was and always will be a 100% non-AI operation - but it doesn't matter how arch and ironic they are being, reducing the exact and flowing moves that Cocker has always given us with the floating, semi-slow motion of dogshit AI is something nobody wanted.

Getting it in one frame is the best

I've given up almost all the daily word games I used to play, partly because they got gobbled up by larger entities that I am existentially opposed to, and partly because they just got a bit same old, same old. I haven't played Wordle in a year, and got frustrated by the sharp focus on US culture that made Connections impossible for anybody else.

But I have stuck with Framed, where you have to identify a movie by  a smallest number of frames, and still do it first thing every morning, and this is what my stats look like:

The number of times I have got it on the first try do look impressive, but I do think they used to be a lot easier, and I racked up most of those statistics in the first year or playing it. Since then, things have got harder, and it usually takes a couple of shots to crack it these days.

But I have seen - to use a technical term - a fucking shitload of films, thousands and thousands of the fuckers, and most of them have left some kind of cultural residue in my brain.

And I've still never failed, and have never needed all six guesses, which I am embarrassingly proud about. There is usually some slight cheating involved in all those five-guess results, they are films I've obviously never seen and will never get, but I can always recognize an actor or two, and use the magic of IMDB to find the answer.

It's a stupid thing to be doing every day, and it's even stupider to be proud about it. But these tiny daily rituals make the mundanity of existence just a little bit more bearable, and all the more so when you can show off about them a little.

The wrong annual

For many more years than I'd really care to admit, my biggest comic buying regret was getting the DC hardback annual instead of the Marvel one from the Plaza Bookshop in Timaru in 1984.

While there were always exceptions for things like the X-Men, I was mainly a DC kid in the early 80s, and when the hardback British annuals showed up every year, there was always something Batman or Superman-related.

One of those annuals that particular year was the 'Super Powers Annual'. It had the first part of the original limited series of that name, (which I always thought was Kirby art, but was actually Adrian Gonzales and Pablo Marcos doing their best imitation of the King), some Aparo Batman/Hawkman and a Superman/Green Lantern thing by Jim Starlin. 

But there was also one with the Marvel equivalent, with the first issue of Secret Wars and a bunch of other Marvel treats, including a Spider-Man/Alpha Flight story from a Marvel Team-Up Annual. That was the first place I ever saw Alpha Flight in anything and I thought they looked weird, and went for the safety of the DC heroes.

My meagre pocket money only stretched so far when I was nine, so I could only get one.

The thing is, while I always enjoyed both comics, I became a raging Marvel Universe head soon afterwards, and despite the quality of that Super Powers book, I wished with every fiber of my being that I'd got the Marvel. Especially when I've seen the DC book in second hand shops many times, but have seen no sign of the other anywhere.

I still have the Super Powers annual today, and still think it's groovy, especially the way something went very wrong with the colours on the last page of the Superman/Green Lantern story, and everybody suddenly has very weird skin. 

I got over this regret a long, long time ago, but I can still feel the taste of it, somewhere in my brain. Some heartbreaks never die, and I would buy that Marvel book in a fucking second if I ever saw it anywhere.

A lot.

Barry Lyndon × 21 Savage
"a lot" pic.twitter.com/rJd3jLCQO4

— flanthippe (@flanthippe) January 25, 2024

I have watched tens of thousands of short, funny videos on social media over the past two decades, but some of them are so perfect they stick in the head forever.

A life of Wagner

There has been no more exciting news in all of comics so far this year than hearing that John Wagner has written a Judge Dredd story called 'Death of a Judge', with the extremely capable Mike Perkins on artwork.

I honestly don't think this will be the death of Judge Dredd story that has to happen sooner or later, (I've been expecting it for a while) but having Wagner write any Dredd is such a rare treat these days, and such a provocative title is already getting the thrillpower already pumping through my veins.

Luckily, while we're all waiting, Wagner is also telling his life story in a series of incredibly entertaining blog posts on his website, and I strongly recommend checking them out. His story of freelance life in castles and writing with mates in sheds are all well documented, but Wagner is giving a seriously new perspective on the old stories.

But there is still nothing I want to read more in all comics than 'Death of a Judge' right now. Nearly 50 years into the continuing adventures of Judge Joe Dredd, and it's still the greatest thrill in the galaxy.

How to judge a movie

The worst thing to read in any piece of film criticism - apart from the outright bigotry that sometimes boils to the surface - is when somebody talks about a movie having a poor script, and then they just leave it like that.

What does that even mean? Are they talking about the plot, or the dialogue, or the characterization?  Is it just full of clichés, or just purely implausible? There are plenty of things that a script does in any movie, and it might do some things very well while falling flat on others.

I haven't done any serious film criticism in years now. It ruined my enjoyment of movies, sitting there in the dark, trying to think up a clever lede, instead of actually immersing in a story. But I still judge every film I ever see. Most of them have something worthwhile - even if its s single shot or a heartfelt performance, - and some are laughingly stupid (there is one I'll talk about next week sometime which actually baffled me with its foolishness).

And movies are complex thing, made by a shared forced consensus. Despite what a bunch of French cinephiles in the 1950s thought, cinema is the most collaborative of all the arts, and requires hundreds of people to make the most basic of movies. 

This complexity is in the work itself, and there can be many things to like in a movie, and many things to be critical of in the same 90 minutes.

But when it comes to working out if I genuinely like a movie or not, I've boiled it down to five things that I judge all films on. They are:

1. Style

It's increasingly hard to see in these days of the beige digital look infecting everything, but a movie just has to look cool. Something that makes it stand out, something that makes it memorable.

It's not just the look, it's also use of music, which makes an enormous difference. I remain baffled by the filmmakers who use music as an incidental thing, instead of a crucial component. Some throbbing synth, or strange melodies giving you a proper earworm.

But overall, it just looks good, with use of colour, and scenery, and costuming. Groovy lighting and beautiful people doing awful things. Cool shit.

2. Humor

It can be dry as dust, or screaming in your face, but a little funny goes a long way. Making other human beings laugh is a truly great thing, and I am extremely fond of terrible movies that have one genuine laugh out loud moment.

Even films that take themselves deadly seriously can have the humour of the deadpan. Anything that is truly without any kind of wit - intended or otherwise - should be easily dismissed. 

3. Charm 

It's just the smile of a good actor, or a director at the height of their powers and swaggering across the screen. You just want to hang with these people, in the dark, for a couple of hours. 

4. Tension

They say all drama comes from conflict, and it might be a knife-fight in a crowded nightclub, or the terrible emotions of a family breakdown, but a film needs a pulse, and the beats of action and thrills and sphincter-tightening provide the best throb.

All good thrillers and horrors and action films and disaster movies need it.

I fucking hate guns, but I love a good gunfight. 

5. Intelligence 

Some films make you feel smart, because they are made with obvious intelligence. Unexpected plot developments, the obvious merits of a new perspective.

And they don't treat you like a chump, and have some respect for the audience and don't spoon feed everything to you, because they know you are with you. 

6. Emotion 

It's just got to have a dose of humanity, you know? Something recognisable, something universal, something that makes a connection. 

What else are we here for?

There's obviously more to it than that. For starters, all films come with their own context - both real world and within the story itself - and you have to judge films against others of its type, not something it's not trying to be.

But it is very, rare to find a film that achieves in all of the six pillars of my own special ratings, and any film has to have at least a couple to stand out from the crowd. And if it has four or more, it's a stone cold classic.

It can feel reductive, and extremely fucking nerdy to think about movies in this way. And sometimes you just have to go with a gut feeling, and not overthink it so much. But overthinking is what I do, and I don't think I'll ever stop picking apart films like it's a goddamn autopsy. 

Fighting with Frank (part 5 of 13): Bad move, mister!

- Batman: Scottish COnnection
Art by Frank Quitely
Story by Alan Grant
Colors by Matt Hollingsworth and Brad Matthew
Letters by Bill Oakley

The goggles do nothing!

So the other week I went to get my eyes checked up, and the optometrist told me my vision was getting better and I felt quite chuffed about that, because that's the last thing you expect to hear from a health professional in the long, slow slide towards death, and they could have left it there, but no, they had to tell me that the vision was better because the slightly un-round shape of my eyeball was the thing that kept me from seeing things clearly, and as I was getting older, the back of the eyeball was starting to sag down with the inevitable force of entropy, and that was bringing things into clearer focus.

I didn't know metaphors were meant to be so fucking literal.