Seen it a thousand times

I hunger for good television to indulge in - some strong long-form story that gets deep into character and plot is always good for the soul - and I keep getting told I should watch The Bear, but that's not for me.

I understand the appeal. It's a glimpse into a high-stakes world where a meal is a metaphor for everything, but I can't be clearer about this - I don't give a shit about great chefs because most of them appear to be complete fucking arseholes. 

I appreciate their work, and thanks to the wife's gastronomical adventuring, have racked up a few Michelin stars, and it's always been an absolute pleasure. But I truly don't care about the story behind the kitchen doors, and have no interest in any movies and television set in the great kitchens of the world.

They're always just full of people treating other people like shits, as they propagate the myth/cult of the head chef, with a heavy dose of the 'oh my god this meal is the most important thing ever' when it's just another fucking meal that will be reduced to poop in a few hours.

'It's like a 45-minute anxiety attack' they keep telling me, like that helps.

I'll watch any old trash if it's in a movie, but I am grossly snobbish about the time and effort in watching a TV show, and it doesn't take much to not bother in the first place. I stopped watching cop shows a long time ago, even with a high hit rate for that genre, because I just couldn't reconcile the 'good men in the bad system' of the fiction, with the brutal realities of police actions in the real world.

I also haven't watched a single show set in a law firm since LA Law's fourth season, because fuck lawyers. and can't do any kind of medical drama. The Pitt is another one that often gets recommended, but they all look the fucking same to me.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of good TV that doesn't feature chefs, doctors, cops or lawyers in the lead role, far more than I'll ever get to in a single lifetime. I'll take any kind of excuse to thin the herd, in an effort to find the good stuff.

Star Wars: All Williamson, all the time

I occasionally check in on Marvel's Star Wars comics, but there are so fucking many of them that I only read a fraction of the content that is put out there (and I ain't touching that High Republic stuff). I generally only pick them up for the art, but they mostly just reinforce my deeply held belief that Al Williamson Star Wars comics are the only real Star Wars comics. 

His work had such an exact tone, perfectly capturing the features of those instantly recognizable faces without relying on photo-realism, but also coming dynamic action and incredibly moody shadow work. I first saw his work in a paperback-sized edition of Empire Strikes Back, and even in that reduced format, his art looked bigger than the galaxy.

Captain Pike is my favourite now

The eternal geek argument over who was the best Star Trek captain - Picard or Kirk - will never be truly settled. And since I have gone back and forth on the question myself far too many times, I'm glad there is a new option in the oldest Trek captain of them all: Captain Christopher Pike in Strange New Worlds. 

It's not just because of that astonishing head of hair and the quite astonishing charms of Anson Mount, although those are certainly major factors. It's because he's decent and square and happy to take advice because he knows he's got the best team in the universe standing on the bridge with him. 

He's a great cook and a stern leader and an empathetic soul who can also admit when he is wrong, and even though he knows his own future, and how horrible it is, he still has hope, and doesn't let it stop him being his best self. Just because it's going to be dark doesn't mean you can't bathe in the light while you can.

There is a lot of talk around toxic masculinity, because it is an actual thing that needs to be sorted out before it kills us all, but Pike is the opposite of that. He is a kind of antidote masculinity, a role model that is worth following because fuck it, the world is a little short of the required kindness right now, and we could all use some more examples.

You know it probably won't end well for those characters who don't have a further destiny aboard the Enterprise, but they also slowly getting the classic gang together - Spock, Uhura and Scotty are all accounted for. And the series they all feature in has a definitive end, announced recently. But I could watch Pike and his crew bring a steely kindness to the universe forever.

Fear of a mushroom cloud

There is this typical Judge Dredd story, less than five years into its run, where a pirate with robot dreadlocks takes the Mega-City One hostage, until Dredd has to go and kick his drokking head in. It's a fairly standard Dredd of its time, and in the middle of it, a nuclear bomb was actually set off in the city, and everything suddenly became incredibly horrific:

Nukes were a constant fear in early 2000ad, because Wagner and Grant and Mills and co were always riffing on current affairs, and there was a very particular dread of nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, and that seeped through to the galaxy's greatest comic and directly into the brains of the nine years olds that were reading it.

Soon after Captain Skank got fed to his own mutated giant squid, hundreds of millions of citizens were killed in the Apocalypse War. In the very first prog, a nuclear bomb destroys a major British city, just to show the Volgs aren't fucking around; and Strontium Dog starred characters mutated by fallout who were forced to fight for their right to exist.

Somehow, this intense megadeath was occasionally used for laughs, as one last awful punchline before annihilation, but the stories also never flinched away from the awfulness of these weapons.

I was reading this when I was 9 or 10 and it was giving me the proper shits, even though we lived on the arse end of the world. When I'd travel to the great cities of the world as an adult, I was always acutely aware of the missiles aimed directly at my head, and I don't know how so many millions deal like that every day.

While I was reading the nukes flying in from the East Megs and liquifying human beings, there was also The Day After on TV, and a school showing of Threads at a much too young age, and I've never been prouder of being a New Zealander than we told the world to fuck off with its nukes.

I think everybody should read Barefoot Gen to see how absolutely fucking terrible the nuclear flash is.

I am physically and morally repulsed by people who say nukes should ever be deployed, thinking they are going to instantly vaporise the unwanted masses, and not melt the skins off babies. I've heard all the arguments that nuclear deterrents have helped keep the peace for decades, but I've also heard the stories about flocks of seagulls and weather satellite rockets that have almost triggered Armageddon. 

No nuclear weapon has been used since 1945, and thank fucking god for that. The horror of the bomb falling on Sector 403 and the poor people of Bob Oppenheimer Block was enough.

My 100 favourite 2000ad covers (50-41): I'm too late!

50. Prog 1821 - art by Brian Bolland

49. Prog 595 - art by Steve Yeowell

48. Prog 215 - art by Brian Bolland

47. Prog 2078 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

46. Prog 2407 - art by Paul Williams

45. Prog 1837 - art by Chris Weston

44. Prog 132 - art by Mike McMahon

43. Prog 1544 - art by Henry Flint

42. Prog 2136 - art by Tiernan Trevallion

41. Prog 1238 - art by Simon Fraser

Familiar names in the CBeebies credits

The kids are aging out of the CBeebies era in our lives, which is disappointing, because I think I'm going to genuinely miss the noisy charms of Hey Duggie, and Sarah and Duck. 

I'm also going to definitely miss seeing familiar names from British comics and nerd culture in the end credits of these strange UK shows, and wondering if and how they're connected. They're mostly not connected in any way - I was slightly gutted to figure out that the Ben Cook responsible for the glory of Sarah and Duck isn't the same Ben Cook who printed his emails with Russell T Davies while he was writing peak Doctor Who, and somehow creating the best book about writing I've ever read.

But it also isn't surprising when you see somebody like Steve Roberts appear behind the surreal goofiness of Twirlywoos and confirming it is the same Steve Roberts who did some vey idiosyncratic comics for 2000ad. He did a great Cursed Earth, was an excellent artist for some comedy Sinister/Dexter strips, and was slightly wasted on the banal Bec and Kawl, and it's little surprise that he's moved onto entertaining the kids in a new and odd way. We should all be so multi-skilled.

The eyes of Michael Madsen

There are some actors who were born to act in Tarantino films, who can get their tongue around his stylized dialogue and make it sing. The director's words always sound best when coming out of the mouths of Samuel L Jackson, Christoph Waltz and the late, great Michael Parks.

But the main appeal one reoccurring actor wasn't about the dialogue, because all the soul in the world could be found in Michael Madsen's eyes.

It was deeply sad to hear that Madsen had passed away recently, because he was a fantastic actor, who would appear in all sorts of rubbish, but then get the call from Quentin and produce something mesmerizing for the director.

Madsen always did something soulful, and was always the best at expressing a specific type of macho heartbreak. Right from the start, you actually feel sorry to see him blown away in Reservoir Dogs, even though he had just tortured somebody, because Mr Blonde had some kind of black heart to him.

His few scenes in the Kill Bill movies are so good - the way he eats shit at the strip club, even though he knows he could murder everyone there with the slightest of effort, but also knowing that he deserves to eat it, for all the terrible things he has done. When he tells his brother that the Bride deserves her revenge, and they all deserve to die for what they have done, you absolutely believe it.

And he was wonderful in the Hateful Eight, even just sitting in the corner, writing some shit down and chewing on some nuts. He looks genuinely hurt when accused of being a bandit - even though he quite clearly is - and when it all finally reaches a crescendo, he moves like a dancer when he reacts, kicking away the chair with such grace to take his shot.

It's a tragedy that we won't see that collaboration again, because those eyes of Michael Madsen were made to look out of those movies.

No reboot for the Who

While I remain perfectly happy to stay well away from any hot takes around the current state of Doctor Who - still the best television show in the history of the medium - some of it is unavoidable, and I did recently see someone advocating for a full reboot of the Who.

This is, obviously, a terrible bloody idea. 

Beyond the sheer appeal of a vast sprawling narrative where everything is as canon as you want it to be, I couldn't imagine anything more boring than endless reiterations of things we've already seen before. There would obviously be all sorts of new ideas, themes and monsters, but also reintroductions of things we already know about. 

This would, crucially, put the audience ahead of the good Doctor, which is not the order of the universe. And you'd lose so much story time to the Doctor getting his head around things instead of barreling forward. We don't need the Doctor to learn the Daleks are bad, actually, and no amount of of ironic subversion of tropes is going to gloss over the fact that we've seen it all before

And there is no way it could last, because any bold new direction will be inevitably retconned back into the narrative that has been running for more than 60 years now. Nobody would be able to resist bringing back David Tennant for the next big anniversary (and Tennant would never say no). And it'll be all one big story again, all adventures in time and space.

And ultimately, there is just no need for a full reboot of Doctor Who, because the kind of thrill you get from starting over again is already baked in to the concept. That's what happens every time you change out the lead actor, and it always feels new and refreshed, every few years.

The little chatter that has broken through my self-imposed media fog suggest that there are a lot of people concerned about the direction of Doctor Who, and they all have ideas on how to keep it going. But going back to the start again is boring and unnecessary, and those are two things lethal to all things Who.

Should you choose to accept it?

While I do feel a bit like Alan Partridge choosing 'Best of the Beatles' as his favourite Beatles album, one of my favourite bits in every single Mission Impossible film is the opening credits. 

You've got that eternally astonishing theme tune, remixed for the most modern of ears, a lot of flashy graphics, and a bunch of clips from the film you're about to watch, just in case you forgot how exciting it is all going to get. 

It's an opening that tells you to strap in and hold on, and usually delivers on the promise of thrills.

Skinamarink: Looking too hard into the evil gloom

It took me a while to get to Skinimarink, partly because it was never easily available anywhere near me, but also because it sounded truly unsettling in a way I knew I would find hard-going, even if it proved to be ultimately rewarding. 

This certainly turned out to be the case when I watched it last week. It gave me horrendous nightmares and genuine fears. I could only watch it for 20 minutes at a time, because the only time I could watch it was late at night, and houses full of sleeping people make all sorts of weird noises in the dark, and it was really fucking freaky.

I'm still not sure what actually happens in that movie, mainly because it's very busy breaking all the rules of film grammar to get across a deeply creepy vibe. It gave me the metaphysical shits to watch these glimpses of kids going through hell in their darkened home, and the film's refusal to adhere to the normal rules of film-making just made it all the more unsettling.

This is, to be clear, a good thing. I told the wife about how anxious it made me to watch this movie, and she really didn't understand why I'd voluntarily do that to myself. But the more abstract the film got, the more intriguing it felt. When so many other films insist on spoon-feeding the audience with the easiest-to-digest slop, something as baffling as this movie feels properly invigorating.

I could not anticipate where it was going to go, and would stare into the grainy darkness of a blackened doorway with way too much intensity. I could hardly bear the fear in the children's' voices calling for help, and the way the story is told through sound design is vital.

I can't recommend this film to anybody else, because it's easy to see why it drove some viewers crazy, but I can eat this kind of awesomely disturbing cinematic meal all day long.

Remnants of an early internet

There was no such thing as the internet when I was a kid, and I didn't get properly online until I was 20. This was the mid-nineties, and online culture was breaking out from the initial chat rooms into something more mainstream, and I jumped on board the information superhighway with everybody else, even if we were driving virtual jalopies to get there.

Thirty years later, and I can still see echoes of those earliest internet presences out there. Some of them have evolved into whole new things (almost always not for the better), a lot of them are only there on the wayback machine, and some of them are as beautifully unchanged as the Space Jam website.

The first time I saw the internet in action was when my mate Karen downloaded the trailer for Stargate at the computer lab in her university. It was amazing, it only took six hours to download a tiny pixelated video, but that was enough to see the future, and that website that gave it to us is long, long gone. 

The first thing I ever found for myself online was a review of a Superman comic that had only been released the week before, and I'm also not sure where that actually was, although I have memories of something called Mania or something like that, which updated its site every week! But I soon stumbled across the earliest versions of sites like Newsarama, and Comicbookresources, and they're still around today, even if I rarely bother to check them out. 

It hurts more to look at CBR there days, because that was my first proper home, and the first place I made proper friends, and I barely recognise the site now, and desperately miss that orange and purple word balloon wallpaper. I first visited that site when it had only just evolved from a Kingdom Come message board, and started getting a little bit too much into the fan fiction.

It's still hanging in there, even if most of the articles it publishes these days maddingly disinterested in actual comics. There's a message board system still there, but it's not the same without a NEB, or a fly on the wall. I have used the wayback machine to look in on 1997 and see what I was doing on the site, but it's only a tease - it only captures the titles of message threads, so I can see that I had very strong opinions about the second year of Morrison's JLA, even if I can't actually see what they were.

Some of that original group from CBR still host lively role playing sessions on a semi-private message board. I don't join in, but it gives me a sense of enormous wellbeing to see them still at it.

I have less feelings about seeing that Ain't It Cool still exists, even if it seems to be another hollow shell of a site now. I have followed a couple pf the writers from that site on their various endeavors over the years and I wish them well, but like everybody else, I don't give a fuck about Harry anymore.

Sometimes I get grossly nostalgic for those younger days, and will suddenly remember something I haven't thought about in years, or even decades, and I'll go out there and discover to some surprise that Alvaro's message boards is still a thing. And I still occasionally drop by the SOI Hyperchat page, because that's the most 1996 thing in the world to me. And The Comics Journal still has a web presence, although it is nothing like the days of its very pumped up message board.

The early internet rapidly evolved, moved away from message boards and into the world of blogs, and fanboy rampages, progressive ruins and factual opinions. That all died off even faster - although some lunatics still do things like daily blogs like a fucking meathead - once social media came along.

Digital decay is a real thing - trying to find information about comics and music and movies from the late '00s is astonishingly hard - and so many of the sites I spent years visiting and reading and interacting with are just gone. But sometimes I still go looking for those early remnants of a digital life, and sometimes I even find some of my past.

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (60-51): Where did she go?

60. Prog 632 - art by Simon Bisley

59. Prog 1450 - art by Jock

58. Prog 2250 - art by Mike McMahon

57. Prog 537 - art by Steve Dillon

56. Prog 2027 - art by Matt Ferguson

55. Prog 376 - art by Halo Gibson

54. Prog 262 - art by Robin Smith

53. Prog 1664 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

52. Prog 2321 - art by Jock

51. Prog 420 - art by Glenn Fabry

Even Boba Fett is a Ghostbuster now

The four-year-old has discovered the box full of my old action figures from when I was a kid, and has claimed them for his own. All the old GI Joes and Star Wars figures, they're his now. And they're all Ghostbusters.

He's only four, so he obviously hasn't watched the whole Ghostbusters movie, but is obsessed with the immortal theme song, and has to watch the music video that comes with it every day. He made a power pack out of his school backpack and even attached his own version of a ray gun, and now runs around the house zapping ghosts.

All his heroes are Ghostbusters now, and Cobra Commander in Battle Armour and Luke Skywalker (Endor outfit) have been drafted in to fight phantoms. Whatever works. There is some breakage of ancient toys, but they're alive agin, battling the spirits.

Pulped!

The first CD I ever bought was Pulp's Different Class. I'd held off on getting a CD player for years because it was the early 90s and they were expensive as hell, and because I had a sizable tape collection that would instantly be obsolete.

But then I came home pissed from the pub one night, and my usual wind-down activity after a night out would be watching the random music videos that played on a couple of TV channels overnight. And I saw the video for Disco 2000 and it was the coolest fucking thing I'd ever seen, and then I listened to the whole album on the listening post at Echo Records, and made the decision to upgrade right there.

I got a free tee-shirt with the CD as well, and it was only a cheap thing with the shiny Pulp logo on it, but I treasured it. I spent the next few years listening to Different Class and This Is Hardcore and all the rest, and while it was immeasurably sad to see the band fade away in the early 21st century, it still felt like a good time to go.

And now they have a new album out, and I bought the CD because I like to have the thing, and to play it on the old stereo in our car, and now I'm driving around town singing badly to Pulp songs like it's 1996 all over again.

It's easy to do because it does feel like a classic Pulp album in the way it's paced - a few rockers, a couple of meandering tunes, and finishing on a high - I think the last song has some of the best lyrics Jarvis has ever done. 

It sounds wanky, but I do think they are missing something with Steve not around anymore, just the crunchy bite he could bring to things. And writing songs about an imaginary relationship with a girl who doesn't know you exist was awkward when Jarvis was in his 20s, but now seems very creepy coming from a guy in his 60s. 

So not the greatest of their albums, but not a nostalgic cash-in either, because they're still putting it all out there, and I'll gladly take it all. I do have vague hopes they might do a world tour, and I'll see one the one great band I've always wanted to see. But I'll take a new record for now.

I've still got that first CD and that tee-shirt. And I've still got a lot of the cassette tapes I thought would be obsolete, all those years ago. And I still a have a fierce devotion to Cocker ad his crew, doing their best, and laying their hearts bare. 

Embarrassed by comics again

I've been busted by friends and workmates on the way back from the library with an armful of comic books lately, and they've asked me what I'm reading - and I really, really don't want to show them.

Because while I get my own kicks from these things, some of them are ugly as fuck, if only on a purely design level. 

I have no shame about reading modern comics as an adult, I got over that kind of adolescent embarrassment decades ago. But so many of them are just ugly to look at, and I don't want to encourage anybody else to subject themselves to that.

Sometimes I might be lucky and have a Chris Ware book or something when I'm stopped, and it's an objectively impressive piece of art, but most of the time I'm taking back some new Superman or X-Men comic, and they are just awful.

The current designs for the X-books are genuinely off-putting. They look empty and vapid. I look at the things that used to get rejected by Carmine Infantino in the 70s, and am actually appalled that today's editors think some of the things they slap on the cover are worth the efforts. They're figures hanging in space, grimacing at some off-screen menace, with no backgrounds so it's a timeless void, and washed-out colour that mutes any excitement in the line.

So I'm getting better at laughing it away when somebody asks me what I'm into. I never thought I'd be so shamed to be seen reading comic books again, but ugly art and lazy design will do that. 

The Jungian thing, sir!

R Lee Ermey rightly stole Full Metal Jacket by skull-fucking it through sheer force of personality, but my favourite line delivery in the entire river of marine shit is always going to be the colonel's slight pause, followed by 'whose side are you on, son?'. Just immaculate.

28 Years Later: The gore is acceptable now

It's extremely unsurprising to me that 28 Years Later is easily my favourite film of the year so far. The original is one of the most beautifully intense films I've ever seen on the big screen, and I am very much into the pastoral horror thing, where the camera lingers on this lush and verdant fields, with something absolutely horrible on the edge of things. 

It's also got an amazing soundtrack, and another absolute gold-standard Ralph Fiennes performance, and - most of all - goes to some truly unexpected places, especially when they get to the life's work of the good Dr Kelson, and an ending with a tonal shift so vibrant and unsettling that I am aching for the next film in the series.

The movie felt like a constant surprise, but the most surprising thing of all might be the film's rating in many countries, because it wasn't the hard R that these sorts of films have traditionally earned. 

It does start with a bunch of kids getting horribly murdered, but it's just off screen - which can make things worse, but it is a genuine relief that we don't see it. And the giant massive cock on the primary monsters is just artfully obscured enough, while also being happily blatant. 

The kind of fake movie violence seen in movies like this would have once got the film in some very big trouble with the censors and other assorted prudes in the past. Now it feels like we've seen it all before, with the various Walking Dead TV series in particular doing just about everything you can do to a decaying human body.

It's just very funny to me that gore effects don't provoke the moral conniptions they once did, especially when I've spent the past few weeks reading old horror movie magazines from the 90s that breathlessly report on the seconds of footage snipped from Italian zombie epics. There have been way more words spilt on that prosthetic penis than the heads getting ripped off, which says something about the 

I'm just here for the ride, and stopped caring about rating systems the day I got old enough they don't matter. But if it's a small weight off the back of my favourite filmmakers, and they can make things as intense as they like without worrying about the killjoys, it must make for better movies.

Blogging about blogging: This is how it works

I've explained why I do this blog several times, and the simplest explanation is that I spend a lot of my life writing straight news stories with no fat or bullshit on them, and this is where I get to unload of lot of absolute bollocks out of my head, and use as much swearing and unnecessary adjectives as humanly fucking possible. 

But I haven't really talked about how I do it, because it's evolved into a weird process that works for me, and I don't expect it to work for anybody else. And while writing about writing is a sin, Martin, this is how it works.

When the Tearoom of Despair started in 2009, I spent the first decade or so writing two or three blog posts a week, trying to break the 1000-word mark. This meant I got into the habit of rambling too much, and conflating too many things, and always trying to find a viewpoint worthy enough of all that time and effort. It was getting harder and harder, and then I went daily, and it's proven so much easier, because I can get to the goddamn point a lot faster.

To keep up that pace, I do follow a vague pattern, which makes it easy to come up with a week's worth of posts - Monday is usually something personal; Tuesday is more of a review of a great comic or movie I've seen recently; Wednesday and Saturdays are low-content days where I'm happy to post an image or video, stick a paragraph or two on it and call it a day; Thursday is when I have a good moan about something, because we all like to get this shit off our chests, Friday is movie or music night; and Sunday is some kind of comic art, usually as part of an ongoing series of posts.

None of these are set in stone - sometimes I just cannot deal with a bitch session, no matter how much it itches - but they provide a good guideline

I generally write a week in advance, it's only just turned July as I write these words. There is one first draft to smash everything out, a longer period of putting it in order and finding some kind of hook or theme, and then a short look over it to make sure all the formats and images don't look like shit.

I don't know if this is working for anybody else, and please don't try to tell me because I never read the few comments left here. Sorry if you've ever said something illuminating about something I've posted, but I haven't looked at those things in three years or so. Social media is the place for dialogues, this is Monologue City.

I don't even know what the audience is, the past couple of months have had some extraordinary visitor numbers for this blog - I cracked a new record monthly mark in June. But I don't believe any of it, and since it is never one big post getting all the numbers, but a bunch of them getting relatively smaller numbers, so I assume it's all some kind of AI scraping, which is reason #723 why AI sucks shit.

But I'm not doing this for the audience, or to make money from it, or raise my profile. I do it because it's fun, and that's the main reason I sit down and spew all this out. That's how I do it, it's as simple as that.

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (70-61): Can I tell them, Pa?

70. Prog 468 - art by Brett Ewins

69. Prog 1654 - art by Paul Marshall

68. Prog 160 - art by Mike McMahon

67. Prog 2295 - art by INJ Culbard

66. Prog 555 - art by John Higgins

65. Prog 1979 - art by Simon Davis

64. Prog 464 - art by Brett Ewins

63. Prog 1912 - art by Paul J Holden

62. Prog 109 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

61. Prog 2393 - art by Lee Carter

Lost in the library (part 13 of 13) - Batman/Dylan Dog

Batman/Dylan Dog 

by Roberto Recchioni, Gigi Cavenago and Werther Dell'edera

My entire exposure to Dylan Dog is a single drunk viewing of that Rupert Everett movie 30-something years ago, and flicking through a comic digest at an Italian service station years later, but that’s enough – like Batman, he is a deeply simple character that you can do any type of story with. 

But while I don’t have enough experience with the character to know if this is the style for a Dylan Dog series, this deep into the 21st century, I know enough about Batman comics to say that the energetic style of this series is something special. 

Combined with a colour palette that is often sadly lacking in many Bat-stories, this is an entertaining and vibrant effort. Maybe there are a lot of Dylan Dog comics like this, but there sure should be more Bat-comics with this kind of life to them.