New Warriors: Looking good in the 90s

I was the same age as most of the New Warriors when they started in the very early 1990s, and even though I quickly aged past them, I still have a huge amount of affection for the original crew. It's partly because of Fabien Nicieza's radical dialogue, partly the focus on the heroes' personal lives, and partly the shiny artwork of Mark Bagley and Larry Mahlstedt.

And it's the costumes - constantly evolving over those first dozen issues. Firestar, Namorita and Marvel Boy and Nova all keep the same basic uniform, but they are constantly evolving, as real people do with their clothes. Different types of masks, subtle alterations to the skin-tight look. Variations on a theme, always recognisable, but never sticking with an absolute look.

Speedball remained Speedball, which is some kind of tribute to Steve Ditko's designing skills, and Night Thrasher kept his look for most of the first couple of years - even that groovy red cloth tied around the thigh - but the choice to keep the costumes changing for the New Warriors felt like a true thing, in these most flashy of comics. 

Lost in the romance of Lost

I watched the end of Lost again last week, and I'm still an emotional wreck about the whole thing. 

This was the third time I watched the entire series, after watching it week by week the first time, and then binging it all again about 10 years ago. I started watching it again in February this year because it was good background noise while I worked, and there were dozens of episodes I could pay the smallest amount of attention to, because I already knew how it was all going to work out.

There's so much of it - it's one of the last examples of a great TV show that did a lot more than 12 episodes a season - so I started barely watching it as I ploughed through the episodes, although I seem to speed up when I got close to the season endings.

But then, by the time I get to the climax of the whole thing, I'm emotionally invested in this stupid show again. The creators are clearly making it all up as they go along (this is not a criticism, despite what many self-appointed storytelling gurus will tell you), but I do genuinely care about these people and the outrageous shit they go through.

That's because Lost has a lot of weird shit going on, and the most insane twists and turns, and becomes an increasingly enjoyable mindfuck as it goes on. It has an abnormally charming cast, leans heavily into any storyline that is suddenly working, and is admirably ruthless at cutting off plots that aren't. 

But, most of all, it is achingly romantic. I don't really care what the Others are up to, I just want Desmond to get back to Penny, and for Jin and Sun to reunite after so long apart.

I just want Sawyer and Juliette to have a little happiness. They deserve it.

I'll almost certainly be watching it again in another 10 years, and I know I'll be digging it. And the first advertisement I saw for something new after I watched the climax was the one for the new Josh Holloway series where he plays a charming rogue in the 1970s, and the universe is definitely telling me something there.

Because when it comes to Lost, I never really cared what it all meant. I just liked how it made me feel.

People who hate Superman are not good people

The new Superman movie looks like a lot of fun, and I'll be there opening week, because the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was the very first Superman film, and I'm always up for more.

I do have one concern about the whole thing, and it's the bit they've shown in the trailers that faithfully recreates this nonsense:

It's my least favourite Superman cover ever, and that is not because of the usual sterling work of artist Rags Morales. If anything, Morales sells the moment too well for me, because I hate those fucking gimps yelling and throwing things at Superman so, so much.

Oh, you think Superman is an evil alien immigrant or something? He's only ever done the right thing for everybody he can, but you're angry enough to bawl in his face? Who told you he was the enemy, your racist uncle on Facebook? Lex fricking Luthor? You absolute dipshits.

The real world is obviously full of these kinds of morons, making far more noise than their meagre numbers actually suggest, full of dumb fear and misplaced fury. But I don't want to read a fucking comic about these boorish arseholes.

I tried one of the new X-Men books recently, and the first half dozen pages were full of some hateful bigot being unnecessarily cruel and grossly conceited, spouting off their uninterrupted nonsense for panel after panel, and I still haven't got past those few pages yet. And a lot of superhero comics are still using the 'talking heads on TV' trope that was old when Frank Miller did it in 1986, and is now just an excuse for some  DC version of Alex fuckin' Jones (usually noted fuckwit Jack Ryder) to spray spittle all over the page

I don't watch or listen to these nimrods in real life, because fuck that noise, but it keeps coming up in the middle of the Fantastic Four or something, as if that's helpful in some way.

There is a high likelihood that the new Superman film will end with those same dipshits realising that Kal-El is truly on the side of angels after all, but if they were willing to believe Luthor's lies over Superman's obvious good, they were the main fucking problem in the first place 

Your dream is over...

Literally any time I've heard somebody in a film or TV show in the past 35 years say seriously that something is finished, and everything is over, I have the dude from Queensrÿche in my head, making me question everything.

Always in the basement with the Legion

For the first time in several years, I've got all my comics under the same roof. There is some good dry storage in the basement and that's where the bulk of them live now. About half the boxes in that space are pure comics - all the 2000ads, the BPRDs, the Justice Leagues, all the fun stuff. And all the Legion of Super-Heroes comics. All 269 of them.

While I grew up on the ironic cynicism of 2000ad, I always like the optimism of the future teens, and followed them for years. For such an easy concept, they can have surprisingly complex storylines, frequently gorgeous art, stellar design and the best costumes in modern superhero comics.

I need to hold onto a couple of hundred Legion comics, because they're everything to me, and I've had some nice moments of zen down in the basement in the past few weeks, going through all the Legion and seeing what I have actually got.

It's a wide mix, with very, very few of the post-2000 Legion comics sticking around. But this is what I need -

* Five Legion comics from the Adventure Comics era - Nothing incredibly early or important, and all in terrible condition, but they are something.

* Three issues of Valor - Because they are all tied into the end of the first generation of the Legion.

* Sixteen issues from the Grell/Cockrun era - Arguably the peak Legion era, not quite at the complications of later continuity, but the kids are older, and busting out their sexiness in some remarkable costume choices. I used to think they were the worst costumes of any Legion era, but they haven't actually dated so much, and all that skin and bellbottom pants still look groovy. 

* All three issues of Secrets of the Legion, two different Secret Files special, one crossover with Batman 66, and the immortal Subs special - While I've got all of these I'll ever need, there should have been a hundred issues of the Substitutes doing their thing.

* Three Who's Who and one issue of Legionnaires 3 - And I've been looking for the rest of those series forever.

* Twenty-six issues from volume three, the baxter era  - Almost all of them are from the start and end of this volume, where our man Giffen comes and goes, and odd issues like the one where Superboy dies, or Lauren Kent is a robot. I had such a crush on Lauren. (I also had massive crushes on Salu, Luornu, Tinya and Brin, because there was something for everybody in that sprawling cast)

* One Treasury comic, and three digests - The first way I came in to Legion history were through those dinky little digest reprints they put out in the early 1980s. There's a part of me that thinks they should all be like that, and another that thinks they should all be Treasury sized.

* One hundred and six slices of the v4 Legion - All the 5YL stuff, which is honestly some of the most complex and moving comics I've ever read in my life, and tonnes of the post-Zero Hour crew. I was reading that stuff when I first moved out of home, and I look at those covers and think of cold nights in cheap flats, and infinite possibilities. I can't get rid of any of that, although the issues after they all came back from the 20th century were not as essential

* 52 Legionnaires - See above, although there are least of the rebooted team on this side. One only needs so much Moy.

* Four issue of the Inferno mini-series from the mid-90s - There's really no excuse for holding onto this, except for the fact that Stuart Immonen was really, really good at drawing '90s teenagers.

* Twenty comics from the first great Giffen run, starting with the Great Darkness Saga - Part of the brilliant wave of glossy superheroics that crashed over the early 80s, with a far greater sophistication to the storytelling than ever before, with the solid writing of Paul Levitz. It took me years to get all these issues, but once I got the taste for Keith Giffen's Legion, I never lost it, no matter how crazy his art got. 

* All 22 issues of Bendis Legion comics - The most recent iteration of the future teen team didn't get a lot of love, but I really liked the slick art by Ryan Sook, and each issue felt like some kind of saturation, with so much going on, I'm still making vague attempts to figure out the plot. I've also been watching a lot of Robert Altman films lately, and I'm all the way here for the overlapping dialogue.

I also have about 30 post-New 52 Legion comics, but they are all in the pile of stuff to sell, because they didn't really give me anything new. 

So I don't know if I need any more Legion than this, I often get it mainly for the art - some Legion artists are deeply mediocre, and I don't really bother with them, and all those adolescents crushes have faded away.

But I'm always up for new Legion, done in some kind of style. All that optimism for a brighter future, it's got to be worth something, and it's the main reason I still have hundreds of these sproking comics.

Thank You Very Much at 4am on the telly

Sometimes there is a song that you know so well, and is so imprinted on your culture - while being completely divorced from the actual creator - that you never really think about it. It's always just been there, and it's suddenly weird to think of it as something that was created by actual people.

This happened to me very recently, when I was listening to one of the bonus episodes on Andrew Hickey's always excellent A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and he got to this song:

If you'd asked me before last week about Thank U Very Much, I would have been able to sing every word of it - albeit with some significantly changed lyrics, for reasons we will get to - but would admit that I had never ever thought about it. 

I would have assumed it was the rendition of an old folk song, or some music hall tastiness from the 1920s, or even just some advertising jingle that escaped confinement like a great meme.

It was everywhere when I was growing up in New Zealand. It might not have originated as marketing, but it was used in multiple advertising campaigns, and most notably was the key song for the TV telethons. Every few years, they'd get every celebrity in Aoteaora, rope in outside names like that guy from Coronation street and Leeza Gibbons, or Sgt Schultz from Hogan's Heroes, and broadcast the whole thing for 24 hours from multiple locations in all the big cities, raising money for some worthy causes.

There wasn't much to do in the 1970s and 80s in NZ, and the Telethon was actually a big fucking deal  TV still finished around midnight with the Goodnight Kiwi jingle, the idea of something going right through the night was actually mindblowing. And every time they reached a significant, they would crank up this tune.

It had some significantly different lyrics, no mention of the mysterious Aintree Iron, just 'Thank you very much for your kind donation' and 'you don't know how nice it all seems'. But I must have heard that tune several thousand times growing up. And now it turns out it was written less than 10 years before I was born, and created by the brother of a Beatle, originating as a message on the phone, but go and listen to the podcast to hear all those gorgeous details. That might not blow your mind, but they exploded mine.

Upon further lazy research, it was unsurprising to see that New Zealand was the only country in the world where that song got to number one, because New Zealanders really do like being aggressively polite, and love nothing more than shouting 'THANK YOU' into other peoples' faces.

The moral of this story is, of course, become a backer for Hickey's podcast, because you'll get all the bonus episodes, and it'll change how you see the world, or at least the little bit of it tied into a very, very silly song.

Fighting with Frank (part 12 of 13): You'll live.

- New X-Men #138

Art by Frank Quitely

Script by  Grant Morrison 

Inks by  Avalon Studios 

Colors by  Chris Chuckry 

Letters by  Albert Deschesne and Richard Starkings 

How to eat a sandwich

I watch every film Guy Ritchie puts out - yes, even those ones - because there is always one scene, or one performance that shines like a cinematic jewel. 

Like this scene from Man from UNCLE, a movie that was just a bit more busy than it needed to be, where action, comedy and character work are all expressed through the eating of a sandwich. So beautifully timed, so nicely played, that it's a genuine movie gem. 

At the movies with LexG

I'm still struggling to find new regular podcasts to listen to after a couple of long-term favourites faded away a couple of years ago. I definitely needed a new movie podcast, and tried out a whole lot of them, but there was just too much braying, too many bad jokes, too much outright shilling. 

My standards for a regular podcast, one that I can listen to every week, are stupidly high. I was very much enjoying one I found that really dug into movie history, but just could not get past the comedy accents the host would often use. And so many podcasts with two or three hosts invariably descend into dumb in-jokes that go on and on.

But there are still some decent ones out there, and a recent favourite is this dude LexG, who talks about all sorts of movies in a direct, funny, informative and surprisingly nuanced way.

You can find his episodes here, and I do highly recommend his stuff. I'm not just saying that because we're about the same generation, and had the same films blow our minds at the same time. He's just there to riff on movies, and their themes and suck, not just out to make shitty puns.

Like all the best critics, I viciously enjoy all his hot takes that I disagree with, just as much as it's fun to nod along enthusiastically in agreement. The riffs do go off on glorious tangents - LexG does have loads of interesting stories because he was a huge film nerd in the 1990s Los Angeles, so he's met a lot more Bond villains than I have - but that just makes it feel like you're hanging out with a good film buddy.

There's no frills, no formats, it's just some guy talking about movies. But he really does know what he's talking about, and that's enough.

I'll hot desk in hell!

I never minded working in an office. My first jobs were in factories, and I appreciate the luxury of warmth and comfort that comes with working inside on a winter's day. I like the camaraderie of the people you work with, the forever friends you occasionally make, and the weird office politics that always crop up. But I really, really fucking hate hot desking.

I have to work from home for most of the week, and the one day I do go into the office is the quietest day of the week, so there is always plenty of room. Which is good, because I've been working in the same huge room for a decade now, and I've never felt less personally connected to my workplace.

The latest fad for hotdesking is perplexing when we're still dealing with the ongoing effects of the Covid pandemic. It is keeping with the general psychopathic nature of the management caste over the past few decades - making workers more and more miserable in the pursuit of some financial bottom line doesn't work out well for anybody, even if every business school is rabid about the idea.

But just having your own space, away from home is something that that is lost now. I've had desk spaces adorned with panels from Flex Mentallo, and far too many Far Side and Footrot Flats cartoons. Small piles of strange random books that just seem to accumulate, or my own fucking plant to take care of.

There's none of that with hotdesking, none of the desks have any personality, nobody keeps there stuff anyway, and it could just be any office, in any city, in any country. Blanded down by corporate cost-cutting, quietly ruining delicate structures of small societies, instead of just buying some more fucking gear.

My last desk got cleaned out during one of my day's off, and I lost some personal items, and that was two years ago, and I'm still fucking fuming about it. I'd worked at that desk for years, and it was truly mine, that tiniest slice of space/time. I'd gone through some things while sitting there - some properly traumatic things that I still struggle to deal with - and now it's just another empty space, in a world that is fucking full of them.

The cars of Star Wars

There is a small bit of motorway in the centre of town, where the road goes underneath four or five others, in a sweeping turn in a suddenly dark tunnel area, and every single time I drive through it, I sing some John Williams Star Wars, and pretend I am chasing down TIE fighters. 

Sometimes I have to whisper it to myself because there are other people in the car and I don't want to look like a total idiot, and sometimes I blast it out at full throttle, but it's always there.

Da da! dad da! Da da daaa daaa daaa daaa!

The Mazda Axela might be light years away from a X-wing, but it's as close as I'll ever get. I remember when my Aunty Anne bought the first Japanese import car I'd ever seen in the early eighties, and it had so many glorious knobs and switches and buttons, it really felt like I could use it to fly off to the outer limits of the galaxy.

The life of Judge Beeny

I was explaining the history of Judge Beeny to a long-suffering friend in a café recently, and had to stop halfway through and take a breath, because I was literally getting too emotional about the backstory of a fictional character to continue.

But I really do care about Beeny and her life in Mega-City One, and she might just be my favourite single character in modern comics, because her history and circumstances give her all the excuses in the world to be a truly terrible person, and she uses them to be something better instead.

It's always the secondary characters in long-running comics that I end up emotionally attached too. It's rarely the main character, they're always the focus anyway, it's the people around them that are always most interesting (anyone who thinks the man called Judge Dredd is the best thing in the strip called Judge Dredd does not understand Judge Dredd at all). I care about Doyle more than I care about Hopey, I adored what they did with Howards in the final phase of BPRD, and Judge Beeny actually gives me hope for humanity.

Because Beeny had the roughest of starts - her very existence is problematic, with her father appropriating her mother's body without consent, and using it to create a virtual clone. Her mother was a murderously idealistic democrat who only ever appeared in one story (although that one story is arguably the single greatest story in the history of Judge Dredd), and the poor kid was shunted off the the Academy of Law without any choice.

With a background like that, she has the stones to be one of the great Dredd villains, but when she came out of the brainwashing academy after years of real-time indoctrination, she proved to be a new kind of judge - still hard on the letter of the law, but with a compassionate side that is rarely seen in this future nightmare.

(It should be noted that while a lot of her characterization has been the work of the peerless John Wagner, America co-creator Colin MacNeil has drawn many of the stories focused on Beeny, and his smooth lines have sold her easy charm as much as any of Wagner's words.)

She has been mentored by the hardest man who ever lived, and is tough enough to stand up to Dredd when he needs to be stood up to. She got through the horrors of Chaos Day and follows the Dredd ethos of tough, but fair (but mainly tough).

But she hasn't rejected her drokked-up heritage, and has embraced part of it, recognizing that the judge system has to change, and that as rigid as Dredd can be, the stick that will not bend can only break.

She is part of a next generation of judges - including Rico, Giant and the late, truly lamented Maitland - that are still upholding the system, but recognizing that it might not need to be as harsh as it currently is. In a relatively short period of time, Beeny has already made into onto the table of the Council of Five, and will surely make the best chief judge Mega-City One ever has, if she can survive the mean streets of the big meg and doesn't get the same sudden bullet so many other great characters end up getting.

She more human than Hershey, more stolid than Anderson, and a new kind of judge for a new future.

Judge Beeny never met her mother, and would probably still slam her in the cubes for the things she did. But she has taken what she needs from her own history and made it a part of her character, and she will, if given the chance, genuinely change the world for the better. America would be proud.

The rogue Cyclon

Nobody tells you about the weird shit that happens when you have kids. The strange and occasionally creepy things they come out with, I swear they give me the absolute shits.

Most of it can be chalked up to overeager imaginations - I hope so, anyway, because I really hope there isn't an old man with a hook nose standing behind me when I put the kids to bed, like they've often told me there is. But sometimes you get tangible proof of something weird, like these little champion of the strange - 

It is, of course, a Cylon action figure from the original series of Battlestar Galactica. I found this example in the back seat of the car and literally have no idea where it came from. It just appeared under the kid's car seat, like it had always been there.

And I know exactly what it is, because I was given the same figure when I was six, and I had it for years and years until it vanished a long while ago. It can't actually be the same figure I had for all that time, because that one's left arm broke off two weeks I was given it, and it was a one-armed robot for most of its life in my possession.

So where did this little guy come from?

I still have a handful of my first action figures. A couple of the original Star Wars figures, including my little sister's Princes Leias, which are definitely in the best condition. I still have three from the first Star Trek motion picture - these are fairly boring Spock and Kirk figures, which I didn't play with much, so it's no wonder they are still hanging around, while the awesomely detailed Klingon figure I remember getting disappeared somewhere around 1985.

The ones that have survived this long get fairly busy use from the kids, so I highly doubt they will make it down to any further generations. 

But this guy, this Cylon, he is most definitely not one of the old crew. One of the kids has obviously grabbed it from somewhere, but I have no idea where they would even have had access to antiquated toys like this.

So I can only assume it's fallen through some kind of space/time warp from the early 80s, zeroing in my blatant nostalgia for the good ship Battlestar, and the action figures it spawned. It's not the kind of weirdness I expected to have a parent, but it's the kind of weirdness I got.

Fighting with Frank (part 11 of 13): I won this fight before you got out of bed.

- Jupiter's Legacy #5 

Art by Frank Quitely 

Words by Mark Millar 

Colours and letters by Peter Doherty

Maybe, with good luck, we will find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

 

Jeffrey Wright is a magnificent actor, a deliciously smooth speaking voice that can convey such a breathtaking range of human emotions, but it is startling how long it took for him to appear in Wes Anderson films, because he was made to speak that kind of erudite dialogue. 

He's a regular in the group of players who now regularly convene for the next Wes, but he should have been in there from the start.

Haunted by the Macca

It's a ridiculously dumb thing to say about literally one of the most famous people to ever walk the earth, but I feel like I've been haunted by Paul McCartney lately. He's been regularly popping everywhere in my zone of awareness for the past few weeks, but it very specific ways. 

I have randomly heard Live and Let Die at least five times on the radio this month, and a Beck remix of a Macca song will not dislodge itself from my suggested links. His face has appeared in a large amount of magazines that I've read recently, and even his brother unexpectedly showed up as a historical figure in an episode of my favourite podcast that I was listening to yesterday.

It's partly my own fault, I am still slowly watching Get Back at a glacial pace, so every few days watch another five minutes and get another dose of Prime McCartney. But there he is, beaming away through the decades, everywhere I look.

It's like being aware  of a number, and then noticing it everywhere - the 23 phenomenon - this man has always been a part of modern culture for more than a decade before I was born, of course he's going to be everywhere if I actually look for him.

But I also feel like it's some kind of acknowledgement that the big man should be celebrated more. If only for creating such wonderful music, and for not being a monster like so many of his contemporaries were, for just being a good guy making sure everyone is having a good time, and that's all you need, because that is everything.

Anyway, when the universe tells me to listen to something more, I always go do down the long and winding road.

Nobody is telling me about the movies I want to know about

The internet wasn't really a thing when I first became properly obsessed with movies, and I would only find out about new films through three-month-old magazines from the US and the UK, and going to the local library to read the newspapers and and actually seeing what films were playing in the big cities. 

I would drive for two hours to see Slacker or Short Cuts or Pulp Fiction (twice in one day with my mate Anthony, because we were exactly those types of nerds), and all I had to go on was the copies of the Christchurch Press that the local polytechnic got for their library. 

What there was, however, was advertising. Loads of it, in all the printed media, and in every advertisement break on the television. When a big film was coming out, there was plenty of hype. Something like the Batman films would have way more buzz than substance, and that's a template that has been regularly followed ever since.

The entire cinematic medium has changed a lot since those days, but sometimes I feel like it's still fucking 1992 again, because I only find out that some movies are out there in the world when they're at the actual cinema. 

It's even more awkward, because instead of having everything laid out on one page of a newspaper for easy perusal, I have to go to multiple websites to see what's playing at the various theatres in town. And the online PR push for movies seems to slide right by, because there is so much digital noise out there, and no decent sites with straight news instead of algorithm-driven drivel. Way too many no-name influencers in the hype cycle, and not enough fact. 

I only saw posters for the excellent Sinners on buses a week after it had been out - and that was it! -  and saw absolute nothing for Warfare, and almost missed the while thing.

The big promise behind the loss of online privacy is that your personal data was needed to give you advertisements that would be tailored to you, but that isn't happening. Going to the movies is something I actually want to spend my money on, but I'm not getting the information to do that.

There is a lot of talk about box office takings and how the marketing budget has to be taken into account, because that alone could double the cost of the movie's production. But I don't know where all that money is going, because I don't see shit I am actively looking for. 

The Duck Song: Look, this is getting old

This is just another case that if I have to have this song about a fucking duck and his fucking grapes rattling around my skull every hour of every day because my kids love it and demand it on repeat, so should you. 

I got busted singing the 'and then he waddled away' while inadvertently walking into a very serious meeting the other day. 

But also, I have now watched all of the Duck Songs videos multiple times, and feel the duck is some kind of Doctor Who figure, an agent of chaos who comes into peoples lives and is operating on a level they never really understand, until they realise he has made their lives better, with love, marriage and a brand new business plan.

You always know when the lettering is wrong

Comic book lettering is something that is so easily taken for granted, but when it's done wrong, it's fucking awful and can ruin the whole thing. 

You can spot it straight away when it's not right, even if the only way to describe it is that it 'looks a bit wobbly'. Sometimes you get something like '80s John Byrne lettering his own work, and it's legible enough, but just doesn't work. 

There must be a solidity of font, a rigidness that can be hard to articulate, but always clear when it's done wrong. I always took the lettering seriously, before almost anything else - I could never read a comic where the lettering was done in some kind of typeset, because it felt hideously impersonal. It always had to be done by hand

I will always love and respect the long-game effects of decades of comics by dudes such as Ben Oda on DC's comics, or Tom Orzechowski's vital efforts on the X-Men, or the great Tom Frame and the absolutely splendid Annie Parkhouse on 2000ad.

Most of those creator's brilliance is invisible, and you only notice it when it's wrong (you can always spot a last-minute dialogue change because of the sudden drop in font quality), but there is also room for the ways Todd Klein and Dave Sim clearly enjoy showing off with their efforts, while comics from writer/artists as idiosyncratic as Eddie Campbell, Dan Clowes, Derf Backderf and Jaime Hernandez would literally not be the same with their words written in a different hand.

There are now lots of computer fonts that go to extreme levels to ape the hand of an actual human being, and I'm not that much of a font nerd to really notice the difference. But I still see lettering choices that are unmistakingly wrong, because you can always tell.