Lost in the library (part 1 of 13) - Trinity: Generation S

Trinity: Generation S 

By Tom King, Belen Ortega and Daniel Samperea

I dropped right out of Tom King’s Wonder Woman comics very early on, because it had that King thing of strong characterisation and a pleasing desire to fuck around with the craft of superhero comic books, while also being completely bloody stupid on a fundamental level. 

But these comics about the next generation of superheroics are genuinely entertaining, and fun in a way rarely seen in current DC, and they are all the more charming for giving a potential glimpse at DC’s future that isn’t a straight-up hellhole. 

Most futures go along the Kingdom Come or Rock of Ages route, where everything has fully gone to shit and it's all a bit depressing, but this is a future that - while still flawed - shows that life goes on and doesn't all spiral down into nastiness. It's weirdly subversive to treat the near future like this in a modern superhero comic, but maybe the kids will actually be all right.

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (80-71):Can I eat you?

80. Prog 1451 - art by Simon Parr

79. Prog 1111 - art by Mark Harrison

78. Prog 685 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

77. Prog 2178 - art by PJ Holden

76. Prog 1862 - art by Henry Flint

75. Prog 1391 - art by Charlie Adlard

74. Prog 2277 - art by Dan Cornwell

73. Prog 1077 - art by Jason Brashill

72. Prog 478 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

71. Prog 1634 - art by Henry Flint

Tommy, can you hear me?

Me, watching the Tommy film based on music by The Who when I was 20: This is the uncoolest shit I've ever seen in my life. (derogatory)

Me, watching Tommy when I am 50: This is the uncoolest shit I've sever seen in my life. (complimentary)

A barbarian on the roof of Apple

I've been taking so long to watch the Get Back documentary about The Beatles. I've been watching it in five minute lumps because I can only take so much musical noodling and endless cups of tea, and it's hours and hours of that, so it's taken 18 months to get near to the end of the thing.

It even got slower as I got on, because I kept getting bothered by the painfully obvious way they had great audio but no video to precisely match up, and would fudge it with the most apparent editing tricks. 

I always knew it would end with the big concert on the roof, and had that to look forward to. Out of the studio, out in the world, with the final public performance of the greatest rock band in the history of everything.

But then when it got to that point, I still found that hard going, because any sense of climax or relief that they're finally getting out there and playing their tunes is strongly undermined by the constant cutting back to the dipshit police officer sent in to shut them down.

It's obvious why it's there, creating a narrative of dramatic tension - can the Fab Four pull through? - but any sense of release, or climax, or just plain relief that the band are getting out there and finally doing it again, it's all lost.

Instead, the focus keeps going back again and again to the tit in the helmet, the barbarian complaining about noise control while the fuckin' Beatles are performing for the very last time.

"We've had 30 complaints about the noise," says the uniformed gimp, spectacularly failing to note that there are more than 30 people on the rooftop alone, having the most amazing experience of their life, which isn't as important as the fucking dipshits who want their grey London afternoon to be as quiet as possible.

The cop who steals the limelight with his gormless insistence that all fun must cease for good makes it hard for me to keep going, so even though I've got about 10 minutes to go, I should finish this doco by the end of the year.

I'm never going to Cybertron

Even when the toys were one of the hugest brands in the world, and they were freaking everywhere, I was never into the Transformers. I never read more than a tiny handful of Transformers comics, and never watched any of the cartoons, and only managed the first few 21st century movies.

Literally the only Transformers comics I've ever read are the first four issues of the Marvel series, which I had in a sweet collected edition published on cheap Australian newsprint in the late 80s. That was all the Transformer comics I ever needed, although I was sure my pal Nik was going to sneak some into a bunch of recent Daniel Warren Johnson comics he leant to me. But I remain firm in my position. I didn't need those shape-changing clangers stinking up my comics diet.

The most Transformers I've ever seen on screen were the first three or four movies, which were a terrible incoherent mess, but were still just about worth watching for the full Michael Bay experience. 

I do think a lot of this robotic apathy was because the big cool toys were always insanely expensive. The only Transformers characters I ever owned were the shittiest, smallest incarnations - an Optimus Prime was an impossible luxury.

And they were just so limited. When you can't afford every action figure in the world, you make do with what you have, and I was constantly making up new stories and characters with the Vipers from GI Joe that I had, but I couldn't do that with a bulbous robot that turned into a bulbous minivan.

I used to call all my action figures my 'men', and I couldn't do anything with the robots. For things that changed their shape, they were strictly only useful as the thing they were created to be, and there was nothing else about them to keep me enthralled.

Ghost Dog is right, none of this is important

I'm not saying I slavishly follow all the lessons laid down on screen in the immortal Ghost Dog: The Way Of the Samurai, but the one saying that matters of great concern should be treated lightly, and that matters of small concern should be treated seriously might be the unofficial motto for this entire blog.  

At the library: I don't know what I want

Now that I'm back in the big city, I've been taking full advantage of having a decent library situation again. In the past couple of months I've got out dozens of books, and have a lot more still on hold. 

Most of them have been comic books, catching up on the latest superhero shenanigans and arthouse darlings, and I'll talk a lot more about those next week, because I have many dubious opinions on the relative merits of these books.

Those books are usually the ones I've ordered, after haunting the 'new releases' section on the website, and searching the general catalogue for the usual favourite comic authors. But I still love browsing the shelves, looking for the random goodness, because the best way to find that goodness is by looking through the stacks with my own eyes.

Now, when I go to other parts of the city, I do like to check out the local library branches. There is one big library system for the whole city, so I can borrow anything I like from any of them, and they've all got something slightly different.

It's all there on the internet, but that's no use if I don't know what I'm looking for, and no algorithm knows that I might want to check out a book on unmade James Bond films, or some idiosyncratic Marvel comic from a decade ago that I missed completely. 

Every suburb used to have its own flavour of second hand bookstores, but so many of them have vanished in recent years, so now I judge neighbourhoods by the randomness of their library stacks. I always look at the graphic novels section, and the non-fiction section devoted to cinema, but I also like just ti wander. You never know what you're going to get.

Once was business columnist

I've been deep in the world of daily breaking news for almost all of my career as a professional journalist, but I have tried to specialise a few times, and learned something new about myself and the world every time. 

I did just enough sports journalism to know I could never do it forever (how do you do the same thing over and over again?); I tried some entertainment writing, only to find it took all the fun out of the fun things in life; and I did just enough full-time court reporting to build up some reporting skills and get the hell out before it rotted my soul.

I never did any political reporting. I do have some standards.

But for a couple of years, I was a business journalist, and lived every day in the corporate world. And for somebody from a working class background, I learned a lot about the executive class, and the things that matter to them.  

It was surprisingly easy to talk the talk - my boss always said it was much, much easier to hire decent journalists and teach them how to speak business talk, than teach businesspeople to write. This always makes me think about Ben Affleck scoffing on the Armageddon commentary track about it being easier to train oil drillers to go into space than train space scientists to drill, but sometimes some skills really are easier to pick up than others.

During my time as a business journalist, I did a hell of a lot of stories about the ups and downs of industry, and even wrote some columns about the sharemarket, when I never bet a dime of my own on that kind if institutionalised gambling. It was actually terribly easy, you just had to be halfway decent at pattern recognition in similar industries, and could always construct a quick narrative out of those patterns.

It also helped that I came into business journalism just as the world was recovering from the global economic meltdown of the late 2000s, since every column was about how everybody was recovering from the crunch.

My own big stockmarket tip is to look at the companies that make the products that get used in other products, because they predict the entire market. There was a company that made resin, and on the face of it, it was the most boring company in the world, but it had sales downturns three months before everybody else. It wasn't as sexy as something like the vast economic wasteland of venture capitalism, but it was obvious when you recognise it.

The other thing I learned, to my vague horror, was that the executive class were generally clueless about the work their company actually did. Just rampant base ignorance about their own business, hiding it beneath the most odious clichés, the most blatant business-speak. I'd always thought the kings of industry had got that way through sheer merit, but was constantly shown that they were usually just lucky or merciless, and could generally be outsmarted by a sausage dog.

Being an entertainment journo showed me that I shouldn't try to make a living with the things I enjoy doing the most, and being a court reporter made me cynical about the entire justice system, but being a business reporter showed me that most businesspeople don't know shit, and are alarmingly disinterested in moving past that.

Since then it's been breaking news on digital platforms for me, and I can leave the job behind when I finish my shift. But I still remember that lingering discomfort that our entire economy is run by people who are short-sighted, utterly lacking in any kind of human empathy, and just fucking dumb. 

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (90-81): You've got red on you

 

90: Prog 1727 - art by Henry Flint

89. Prog 1195 - art by Jason Brashill

88. Prog 1528 - art by Laurence Campbell and Eva De La Cruz

87. Prog 1950 - art by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn

86. Prog 766 - art by Peter Doherty

85. Prog 845 - art by Rian Hughes

84. Prog 249 - art by Dave Gibbons

83. Prog 1384 - art by Frazer Irving

82. Prog 1428 - art by Henry Flint

81. Prog 1181 - art by Jason Brashill

Keeping my four eyes clean

I've had glasses since I was 12, and have often struggled to keep them clean enough to see this weird world of ours, so it is with some authority that I can say that the best cleaning cloth for a pair of glasses is the one we got at the Edvard Munch art gallery in Oslo.

The best glasses case I ever got was from the Lazy Bear Lodge in Churchill, Canada, because cold places know how to keep things safe and clean.

I've lost both of them in the years since, and it doesn't seem illogical to travel back there one day, so I can see clearly again.

Doctor Who: No context, all feeling

I've greatly enjoyed the Ncuti Gatwa era of Doctor Who - it's been thrilling, entertaining, sad and alive, and I think I've enjoyed it for two vital reasons.

The first is the most basic - I've been watching most of it with the kids, and while I'm probably still the most enthusiastic person in the room when that immortal theme songs kicks in at the start of another adventure in time and space, the final scene of the latest episode got an excited 'WHAT THE HECK!' from the five year old and that was everything. Especially because she has absolutely no idea who Rose was.

And the second reason for my enjoyment of the adventures in the Disney era is that I've cut myself off from almost all the discourse around it, and have no idea about any of the real-world context surrounding the episodes, and can only judge them on my own reactions and feelings.

All the noise around the production and direction of the show is just so tiring, and old. I've been recently reading a bunch of DWB magazines from the late 1980s, and it's the same shit there, all the fretting over ratings, and viewers unable to watch anything without intolerable amounts of context.

It's still happening today, but it's been surprisingly easy to just avoid it all. My social media activity is very close to zero these days, and none of the nerd news sites are readable anymore, so I just didn't engage with any of it.

I did sample one old favourite Who critic, but they were obsessed with the status of the show in the real world, and kept going on about the ratings and a probable hiatus, and didn't really have much constructive to say about the actual story, so I drifted away from that too. I know nothing of the obvious metaphors in the Intergalactic Song Context, and I really don't need to hear any more about how fans were angry that a show that is constantly changing has changed again. 

It's immensely freeing. All I have to go on is what's on screen, and how it makes me feel, and it makes me feel pretty fucking good.

I would come back and read all these hot takes in another 30 years time, but they'll be gone, because nothing digital lasts. I might still have the DWBs though, so I won't ever forget how confusing Ghost Light was for everybody.

That's not the kind of Megan I want to watch

A lot of modern horror franchises leave me cold. I was never one for The Conjuring or all its many, many spin-offs, and I can see why people like things like the Terrifier movies or those Smile things, but they are awfully repetitive and predictable to me.

M3GAN didn't say anything new that hadn't been said in a hundred other films about killer dolls, and this one didn't even come with the voice of Brad Dourif. But the title character did have a peculiar and striking way of moving that carried a lot of the film's charm. 

But I don't think I've ever been quite as repulsed as I was by the trailer for the forthcoming sequel. It's not that it's gross or anything, just that it's something I would never be interested in watching. A predictable escalation of the concept, with another version of the killer doll - but this time it's upgraded! - and the villain of the first film is the only one who can help our heroes. 

Any residual charm from that gloriously freaky dancing scene in the first film evaporates when the new trailer's big money shot is this ugly as fuck robot parachuting into the villain's lair. Anything creepy is lost in something that looks like more dopey superhero shit, and while that is usually my kind of thing, the world really doesn't need more dopey superhero shit.

There are still movie trailers out there that actually make me want to see a film, but there's also an increasing amount that leave me like this, deeply uninterested in going to the cinema to see it.

Team-up books always gave the best bang for your buck

It's an ancient cliché that kids liked to read comics like the Brave and the Bold and Marvel Two-In-One because they thought they were getting value for money by having multiple heroes, but that's still why I always bought them - and continue to do so.

The only bronze age comics I still seriously collect are DC Comics Presents and Brave and the Bold. It just always felt like you got so much good value out of them. Not just because you got more characters, and some interesting mixtures of people from this vast and weird fictional world, but because you got some genuinely exceptional creators on these comics

You got titans like Garcia-Lopez and Starlin on DCP, and Jim Aparo Batman is the only one true Batman, while you also had Claremont and Byrne in their absolute prime doing Spidey stuff, and some of the most interesting Thing comics when he got mixed up with all the Project Pegasus. They were always more than just value for money.

BPRD: A most sudden inevitability

After reading all the Hellboy comics that needed reading, I had to go back and go through all the BPRD booksg - and brother, that is a lot of comics.

Fortunately they are also an excellent branch of comics, with some frequently breathtaking art - there are primary stories where literally everything goes to hell with the dense, slimy and deeply human work of Guy Davis, or the moody and thick hues of Laurence Campbell, with an incredible array of guest artists filling in the gaps.

Reading the whole saga again, free from the monthly schedule and knowing our it all works out, it is vaguely depressing - all these battles against the frogs and gods, and it's all for nothing, because the end that was promised still comes, and the world of men is swept away.

Humanity does survive, in a vast underground kingdom that is more in tune with the world around it, but all those natural glory of the world, all the mighty cities, all that great art, all the animals, all those wonderful people, they all finally fall beneath the claws of the Ogdru Jahad.

It was an ending long foretold and often shown in the Hellboy comics over the years, so it's not like it's actually a surprise, but the suddenness of the end still jars, with no real resolution for a lot of characters. Poor Abe Saipan is slapped aside by the apocalyptic Rasputin - and does give birth to the new race of people, as he was always going to - but it still feels harsh for old Abe, who we've followed in so many comics, with nobody even left to mourn him. Liz survives as an unknowable godhead trapped in amber in the new world, which feels about right.

Because most of the cast do not survive to see that new world. There are literally a handful of characters who go down into the deep - to be welcomed by Frankenstein! - but there had been so many stories that have got inside their heads, there is something of a void at the very end, a missing emotional beat - how does Fenix really feel about how it all went down?

But as weird as it was to see Hellboy back in action after his destruction of Hell, there is one final resolution for Big Red - back in the world for one last great deed, before joining with Hecate as promised, in inevitable end and beginning. Anung Un Rama, Urush Un Rama.

Abe would have been proud of his pal.

I know this isn't really the end, with several series featuring that man Frankenstein again already set after the last BPRD issue, and from what I've seen from browsing at the local store, it looks like Liz's story is far from over. And there have been a lot of comics set in the earlier years of Hellboy and the BPRD's adventures, which are all as pretty and dense as ever.

But that regular hit of modern horror action that was BPRD came to a sudden end, and that abruptness feels at odd with the slow burn of the earlier issues.

It's good because it's hard

There is no editor for the Tearoom of Despair, it's all just me. Nobody ever reads any of these words before I publish in the world, which should explain some of the more egregious typos and grammatical eras. I bash them out, I give them a single read over, (and sometimes I leave the typos in because they are funny), and I publish and be damned.

But I have worked with editors who have reigned in all my unauthorized narcissism, and helped make me stop getting high on my own supply. Unfortunately, some of the best lessons I've learned about writing as a working journalist were taught to me by the very worst people, actual sociopaths who showed me the best way to break up sentences, while also treating their staff like total dogshit.

This was not, fortunately, the case with the best editor I ever had - the wonderful Chloe Maveal, who edited some nonsenses I wrote for the Gutter Review, (although I stand by all that nonsense, and still insist that Mean Machine Angel really is just deeply misunderstood). 

After pitching a few articles, I sent off things, and Chloe - who you can currently hear doing some super hot podcasts for the official 2000ad website here - would come back with incredibly perceptive comments and suggestions, and I would be fucking destroyed.

It was hard. So fucking hard! I would spend an inordinate amount of time feeling sorry for myself, refusing to even think about the changes she'd suggested, and wondering what the fuck I was doing, thinking anybody would be interested. I'm mope around the house and inwardly moan at the great injustice of it all.

And then I just went and did the work and ground it out, and really had to put some proper fucking thought into it. Sometimes I'd have to substantially redo the whole thing and it was hard and painful and when it was done I felt like the king of the fucking world.

That's what the AI hype merchants never understand, what they always miss - the harder it is to do something, the better it is for everybody. 

It's a message little children understand - there is, of course, a very good Bluey episode about this subject - but people with billions of dollars to burn don't ever seem to stop and consider that maybe we like to push ourselves, to actually work for the results, and can stand by those results with more pride than anything else you've done, not least the mad ramblings on a blog

It's not worth anything if you don't try, and it's good because it's hard.

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (100-91): I operated on by own brian!

100. Prog 2034 - art by Brendan McCarthy

99. Prog 485 - art by Kevin O'Neill

98. Prog 326 - art by Brett Ewins

97. Prog 1395 - art by Steve Yeowell and Chris Blythe

96. Prog 1163 - art by Chris Weston

95. Prog 250 - Art by Carlos Ezquerra

94. Prog 941 - art by Mark Harrison

93. Prog 406 - art by Ian Gibson

92. Prog 1892 - art by Colin MacNeil

91. Prog 387 - art by Kevin O'Neill

2000ad has broken my heart again, but that's because I care so much. And it's enough to have me spend a ridiculous amount of time ranking my top 100 2000ad covers to share over the next few weeks. They're not the 100 best covers, that's an impossibly objective goal, but it's the 100 I like the most out of the 2400+ they've given the galaxy so far.

How to start in Bond

I've watched every single Bond film ever made - I saw Casino Royale on the day I got married and have very strong opinions about who the next Bond should be - and all that is almost entirely due to the fact that I saw the opening action scene to the Living Daylights when I was 12 years old and thought it was the most exciting fucking thing I'd ever seen in my young life. The part where the truck goes through the tight tunnel and the Bond stuntman only just avoids cutting his fucking legs off!

Bond frequently disappoints, but when it's good, it's the best thing in the world.

Friday night frights on The Dark Side

I recently bought a small pile of issues of The Dark Side magazine, a British magazine focusing on horror movies. It has been running since the early nineties and is still going strong, shuffling on with all the vigour and unrelenting inevitability of the decaying living dead. And I think it's pushing me back down a path of horror nastiness, and I'm more than willing to head down such dark roads.

The Dark Side is shamelessly gross, with more of an international slant than other horror mags, and loads of naked women. Unsurprisingly, it was one of the first magazines that I bought regularly with my own money, finding out about Umberto Lenzi films and seeing actual pictures from his impossible-to-find videos like Cannibal Ferox in the Northtown Mall carpark. 

I only got it for a year or so back in the day, as I branched out from horror films to all sorts of genres and moods, and became a proper film geek who was still a little bit embarrassed about all that lust for trash movies. I did get over that shame, but it took a while.

So I stopped getting it in 1995, but would occasionally see a copy in an airport bookstore or something, and use it to read on a long flight (after ensuring no sensitive or young souls will see the fake carnage splattered across its pages). 

And then a local second hand bookstore got in a good collection of issues a few months ago, and I've have been reading a lot of issues form the late 90s and 2000s I missed, and it's reignited that fire I always had for these awful, awful movies. 

If we can find one moment of light in this hellish year, we can find it in the accessibility of all sorts of horror films I only dreamed of seeing, so many years ago. Half of the video nasties can be found on Youttube or Vimeo, with minimal effort.  

So I've already got stuck into it again, although I have to watch them when the rest of the house has gone to bed. Starting with old favourites like House by the Cemetery and The Beyond, and wondering what Jesús Franco I should indulge in next. 

This won't end well. I know I'll overindulge in this kind of film, and get jaded about it all over again. But for now, I'm happily going over to The Dark Side every Friday night, once the kids have gone to bed.

Giving up 2000ad again: Unlimited thrillpower is still no match for late stage capitalism

I've been enjoying 2000ad since I could read, and have followed it through the decades on a weekly basis, indulging in some of the best comics I've ever read in my life, so you're goddamn right I get emotionally invested in the weekly progs.

The world is a horrible place, full of terrible people doing terrible things, but that weekly dose of thrillpower, usually read while I'm walking away from the local newsagent, is just a tiny taste of pure happiness that I could still grab onto - and even that is now being taken away from me.

Because while 2000ad is as good as it ever was - it really is! - and even though I was delighted to find a local thrill-merchant who understood the importance of the weekly hit, I'm still going to have to stop getting it because unlimited thrillpower still can't stand up to the brutality of late stage capitalism.

The first regular issue of 20000ad I ever bought cost 55c. Then it was 77c, then 95c, then $1.35, and on and on. There would be a regular increase in price of between 20 and 50 cents every year or so, and that was the price to pay.

I always thought I might give it up when it went over the $10 mark, but it quietly did that a few years ago, and I stuck with it, largely due to the entirely unexpected brilliance of late Abnett, and it was hovering over the $11 mark when I had to quit it last year due to geographical prejudice.  

It took me a while to find a place that actually still the Galaxy's Greatest Comic when I came back to the big city, but then I was sorted, and had even picked up a whole bunch of the ones I'd missed in the past year on the second hand market

And then some fucker, somewhere down the line, decided to hike the price by almost 50 percent to more than $16 an issue in my part of the world, and now I just feel like a drokking mug.

It's now terrible value for money, and it's particularly galling because the Judge Dredd Megazine remains the best value for money in modern comics, at $22 for 130 pages. I did the math - a new issue of the Meg is about eight cents a page, a 2000ad is more than fifty cents a page. That's just bad economics.

Of course I could fucking afford $16 a week - you can't even get a decent lunch for that much these days - but that's not the point. If I wait a few months, I'm sure I can get most of the missing progs for less than $5 each. I just feel like a fool paying full price when I see those kinds of deals in the following weeks and months.

It's a return to the most non-linear of reading experiences, but it's not like the regular weekly issue down the local shop is that regular anyway, it's been three weeks since they got an issue in.

I definitely don't blame my local merchant, he's as baffled by these price rises and I am, and the actual prog remains the same UK price it's been, but somewhere down the line, someone thought of people like me, regular readers who have stuck with the prog through good times and bad, and decided to ream us for all we're worth.

Sometimes it feels like the only real power you have in a late stage capitalist society is the ability to say 'no, fuck off, I'm not buying that', and that's all I've got left.

There are no other options, reading digital comics on tablets and phones just feels like work, and a weekly subscription would be more expensive, and would be less reliable - a 30-year love affair with the UK movie magazine Empire has finally come to a grinding halt this year because my regular subscription had become increasingly irregular, and it doesn't feel worth it when a quarter of the issues never even turn up anymore. 

So it's the secondary market for me, which even though stops me feeling like I'm being taken for a ride, does make me feel guilty that I'm not financially supporting the actual comic and all its great staff and creators. I'll certainly get some of the forthcoming missing issues in three years or so when the 2000ad shop starts selling them off for pence, like they always do, and I may have to get the odd digital copy just to see what Wagner is doing, or to see how the imminent Ennis/Flint Dredd v Alpha thing shakes out, or even to see what the hell is going on in the brilliant Brink.

I won't be a regular reader anymore, but I'll still be collecting the comic as much as possible. And I'll still get the Meg, until somebody starts asking $40 for it.

A wee bit of assistance?

Even the most mediocre films can have some moments of pure delight, and Cloud Atlas actually has a few of them, even if it doesn't hold together as a whole.

Maybe the entire movie doesn't reach the kind of transcendent fission it is clearly shooting for, but this plea for help from the bloody English is just pure joy, while also saying something about class, and injustice, and community, and still gives you a rogue tooth falling into your beer.

The quiet hell of Hellboy

Hellboy in Hell is literally an astonishing comic - the capstone to years of Mike Mignola's epic series that still finds new things to say at the End of All Things, and looks bloody gorgeous.

Mignola's art has always had a place in my heart since he did that interlude scene in the middle of an early X-Force comic, but his work on Hellboy in Hell is incredible. Free from having to draw cars and power lines, Mignola goes deep into his imaginations, and brings up demonic nightmares and truly grotesque monsters from the abyss. All running hard against Hellboy's brilliantly deadpan incredulity, and his willingness to beat the crap out of anything that messes with him.

And this Hell, it's something new, even as its legions of the damned have been seething underneath all of the big red guy's previous adventures. By the time Hellboy gets there, it's silent, and quiet, and dead. There are no grand dukes of the infernal, no lakes of fire. It's all dark and rundown, the rulers are torn apart by their own armies, which are in turn consumed, and there are no politics there anymore.

There are still some talkative ghosts and vengeful vampires, and far more puppet shows than are really necessary, but Hellboy was brought into existence to end the world, and that's what he does to the place he was named for. The city Pandemonium falls, and falls again, until the dark lake at the center is still and dead.

And then you have a massive Hellboy striding through the quiet darkness, the pure creature of Apocalypse he was always going to be, the Armageddon that was promised, finally delivered to the infernal realms. 

But in all this darkness, there is something new, glimpses of something Hell could become, not beholden to millennia of dark tradition. No pacts, no wars, no empires. No courts of diabolical intrigue, just a taste of hope, as the world turns anew. There will still be snakes, but they will be a new kind of nemesis.

Hellboy in Hell might be my single favourite comic of the 21st century so far, because it's deep and dark and beautiful, in ways only the best comics can be. 

I was a teenage shoplifter

Most of them have longed faded into retail oblivion, but there are still some bookstores that I buy stuff from because I am still guilty about stealing comic books from them more than three decades ago.

I never got caught in my short and regrettable career as a teen shoplifter, although I came damn close, and would have got in so much fucking trouble if I had been. I only did it for a year or so, but that was more than enough.

I only ever stole comic books, because they were so expensive, and every spare cent went into snapping up every Marvel and DC comic I could get, but that wasn't nearly enough. They were also easy to tuck away under a shirt or in a bag, because they were so thin and flat.

Some of those comics still linger in the collection, and shame me every time I see them. I really thought it was worth it to get hold of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition (1989 update), but I could have just waited and bought them like a normal person later on.

As deplorable as all this was, I still had some limits. I never stole money or anything like that, just chipped away at the livelihoods of booksellers who were only providing me with the best things in life. I also weirdly never stole an issue of 2000ad, probably because it was cheap enough, and I could always scrounge the 77c I needed, but also because didn't want Tharg to hit me with the Rigellian Hotshot.

I also never stole from the local bookshop that supplied the majority of my teen comic thrills, because I didn't want to mess up a good thing. 

But most of the stores I stole from were small owner-operator joints, which increased the guilt that followed down the years. It was just so much easier to disappear a comic when the only person working in the store was dealing with another customer or something.

I eventually stopped when a classmate at school offered to pay me five bucks to get a motorcar magazine. I wasn't risking everything for five bucks, I was risking everything for a 10-year-old issue of Fantastic Four, but I also didn't want a reputation as that kind of person. What would Batman say?

Besides, I was starting to get money from actual jobs like mowing lawns and babysitting, and that was so much less stressful that the five-fingered discount. And so much of the money I've earned in the decades since have gone back into those shops, while they still lasted. 

I never paid off the guilt though, and I never will. It just wasn't worth it.