My 15 favourite Judge Dredd Megazine covers: The full force of the law

15. Issue 350 - art by Brain Bolland

14. Issue 414 - art by Dylan Teague

13. Issue 3.56 - art by Duncan Fegredo

12. Issue 429 - art by John Higgins

11. Issue 2.14 - art by Arthur Ranson

10. Issue 207 - art by Mark Harrison

9. Issue 333 - art by Henry Flint

8. Issue 221 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

7. Issue 297 - art by Paul Marshall

6. Issue 3.77 - art by Jock

5. Issue 1.15 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

4. Issue 2.56 - art by Mike McMahon

3. Issue 461 - art by Colin MacNeil

2. Issue 3.32 - art by Frank Quitely

1. Issue 4.04 - art by Jock

It's getting dark with Julia Gfrörer

All of the stories in Julia Gfrörer's World Within The World collection are excellent, because they're dense and scratchy and really disturbing, with a wicked sense of humour and some good old fashioned horniness.

But one story - Too Dark To See  - really got into my head, and inspired the worst nightmare I've had in years, and that is genuinely the highest compliment I can ever give to any piece of fiction. 

A sense of place: The geography of Die hard and Dawn of the Dead

They are both easily on my list of top 10 films of all time, but superficially, Die Hard and Dawn of the Dead look like two very different movies. One is about the desperate attempts to survive the zombie apocalypse, and the one is about a guy who just wants to save his wife from the most stylish villains in cinematic history.

They do both have lots of people getting shot in the head, and are both ruthlessly entertaining, and both happen to say something on the state of the American psyche in between all the gunplay. But the one thing they have most in common is a masterful use of geography, and a specific place that adds tension and clarity, even as the events in that space get increasingly crazy.

Both films are almost entirely set in one building, that is so large it's more of a complex, with different levels, obstacles and challenges, all clearly mapped out. When the Dawn of the Dead crew go from the roof of the mall they land on to the department store below, the viewer can follow all the different steps that need to be taken, right down to the use of a specific corridor that is later blocked off for security.

(It is interesting that it only happens in the mall in the movie, I still think it's unclear where the cops are standing outside the apartment block in the opening sequence, with just a dark glom behind them, which makes it feel like they're standing on the roof of the building they're holding siege.)

Meanwhile, over at Nakatomi Tower, the geography is tighter, just the tall skyscraper, and is just as clearly set out - there are levels still under construction, parts that are full of the latest computer and office equipment, and the roof area that plays host to several major sequences. 

It was so successful at making the geography such a big part of the movie that every action film for the next 10 years was described as Die Hard In A Certain Place, but nobody did it better than the first adventure of John McClane.

So many filmmakers get hung up on spectacle and plot that they forget about using the local geography like this, but it's a good lesson to learn. When your audience knows the setting, it doesn't get in the way of the story, or can be used to take that story down unexpected paths. When it's all about the one place, it can feel like half of the hard work of a film has already been done. 

The Fall of Skywalker

There is a perverse kick in digging something that everyone else has panned. Movies that have been given a complete critical battering, and utterly fail to find an audience, can often turn out to have unexpected delights.

But sometimes a shit movie is just a shit movie, and we're now at a stage that it can be authoritatively stated that Star Wars Episode XI: The Rise of Skywalker is complete bantha shit.

The final movie in the interminable Skywalker saga (so far) has lots of great parts to it. Even the worst Star Wars still has those incredible sound effects, there is lots of fun light sabre action and the cast of actors remain as charming and watchable as ever. Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver actually do some great work in this film.

But it's also such a cowardly movie, seemingly written by focus group and corporate synergy. Rolling back the origins of Rey to make her part of an inevitable dynasty reeks of screenwriters who put way too much faith in Joseph Campbell.

It's also guilty of half arsing Palpatine himself, and desperately clumsy in its attempts to make you think they've killed Chewbacca almost off screen, before immediately taking it back. The part where they give Chewie his long-awaited medal is hopelessly cringe (especially when the issue of the medal has been dug over so many times in related media), and the macabre use of the late Carrie Fisher's image just does not work at all.

I'm generally an advocate foe the Star Wars sequels - The Last Jedi has an equal amount of duff crap and amazing wonder, and The Force Awakens is unceasingly entertaining (its greatest sin is not making more use of the Raid crew). But there are just too many obviously bad choices in the final part of this trilogy.

The corporate overlords who own the Star Wars franchise have been more focused on TV in recent years, which has resulted in some good stuff - Andor really did go for the throat and was thematically meaty in a way most Star Wars fiction actively runs away from; and some truly awful stuff - there were scenes in Ahsoka and that Boba Fett thing that were so badly staged they are actively off-putting to the entire concept of Star Wars..

And maybe that's for the best for a while, and it's good that future films seem to be staying right away from the Skywalker side of things, because the weight of expectation can prove too heavy for some, and a film dripping in flop sweat is not better than no film at all.

The most fun part was always being the one thrown into the wall

Landlords are obviously a parasite class, feeding off the desperation of others and expecting something for nothing, just because they started with more somethings than anyone else.

But the one time I honestly feel sorry for them is when my and my dropkick mates first went flatting, and spent a lot of time pretending we were in that corridor scene in Terminator 2 and throwing each other into - and occasionally through - the nearest wall. 

It was always so much fun, and it wasn't our houses we were trashing, but I do feel bad for those poor fucking landlords and property managers who had to deal with that shit. They always kept our bonds of course, but what a fucking hassle.

Short horror that stabs you in the gut

Horror fiction is best as a short, sharp shock, getting right to the fucking point, often literally. The horror short story is one of my absolute favourite small slices of genre, after I was raised on the deeply unsettling vibes of Stephen King's short stories, and on classics like The Monkey's Paw.

The best horror comics obviously came out when I was nine years old - I was totally obsessed with Scream! and devoured endless reprints of the DC horror comics (they were also the only comics I ever saw my Mum read). I was too late to the EC ghost train, but inhaled all the endless variations that followed it.

I recently got a Treasury book of DC's Ghosts comic from the 70s, so I've been been lapping that stuff up again. The big book has terrifically huge art by greats like Aparo and De Zuniga, and there is still something charming about the clunkiness of the stories by the late great Leo Dorfman - the boy who people saw with an evil claw turns out to be *gasp* John Wilkes Booth!

I've also been trying some modern horror short stories with the Hello Darkness series by Boom Studios, and have been pleasently surprised by how nasty and fun they are. Some things really do not go out of style.

It did get grim for the short horror comic for a few years, at least in mainstream comics. Stories began getting too clever for their own good sometime in the irony-saturated 90s, and while Vertigo Comics took a good stab at it, those stories have not as aged as well as their 70s contemporaries. Too metatextual, too self important, too fucking obvious.

Hello Darkness generally succeeds the way these kinds of things always do - by producing stories from a bunch of veteran creators, mixed with some new, raw talent, keen to make their mark. Not every story hits the target - there is a lot of the obvious, with too many of them ending with a sudden grotesque monster lurking out from behind the story's main character - but some of them are properly charming, some are really fucking creepy, and some of them just look beautiful. 

The most unsettling thing in Hello Darkness is Garth Ennis and Becky Cloonan's The War, serialised across the first eight or so issues. It might the bleakest thing Ennis has ever done, as a bunch of ordinary douchebags are wiped out in a nuclear war. It's got no romance, no mutants, no hope, just bitter recriminations at all that was wasted, and a slow death from radiation poisoning. It's one of the few stories in Hello Darkness that doesn't have any kind of supernatural element, and is all the more horrific because of it.

It's hard to scare anybody with the words and pictures of a comic, but they can put unsettling ideas into your head, while showing you terrors that have never been seen before. It's an eternally eerie format, and it's good to see it being used so well.

New worlds with Liquid TV

There were only two channels when Liquid Television showed up late on Thursday nights, sometime in the early 90s, so it wasn't like there was a lot of choice. But it sounded interesting when I saw it listed in the TV Guide, and I knew absolutely nothing about it other than it was animation for grown-ups, so I tuned in and it rocked my fucking socks off.

I was 17, which might be the most susceptible age ever, but this was like a transmission from another dimension, where anything could happen, and probably won't make a lot of sense. There were the easy laughs of Stick Figure Theater and Miss Lidia's Makeover To The Stars - and later on my first introduction to the immortal joys of Beavis and Butthead - but there was also clips that bent my brain into new shapes.

The only thing I could really compare it to in recent years is the episodes of Rick and Morty that show what interdimensional TV looks like. It's strange, and doesn't make sense, but also completely familiar in the most unexpected ways.

Some of the short pieces produced for Liquid TV were pure abstraction, not worrying about things like story or character, but in the first batch of cartoons, Aeon Flux was an obvious favourite, right from the start. It was sexy and sleek and incredibly violent, but also extremely experimental in its storytelling - showing a chapter from the perspective of some poor henchman that had been mowed down during Aeon's rampage, or having the main character herself die in a really dumb, clumsy way at the climax.

And the show was my first connection to a whole generation of slightly underground cartoonists, the first time I got to experience the world view of Richard Sala, Drew Friedman and Charles Burns.

It all added up to something new and vibrant for this 17-year-old, sitting in the cold living room on the arse end of the world, feeling my mind expand as much as I was entertained, taking me to new places that were scary and discomforting, but places that I still desperately wanted to go.

There were only 22 episodes, I videoed them and watched them on repeat because we didn't have the internet yet, so there wasn't much else to do, and I watched them until the tape broke. I never tried any of the 2014 revival, because how could it possibly match the impact of the original? 

I'm sure the creators and animators of the later version were just as talented and driven, but I'm not the same person I was when I was in 1992, getting through a Thursday night in the cold winter by expanding my mind with adult cartoons.

My 100 favourite 2000ad covers (10-1): You're next, punk!

10. Prog 355 - art by Cam Kennedy

9. Prog 193 - art by Mike McMahon

8. Prog 1360 - art by D'Israeli

7. Prog 561 - art by Garry Leach

6. Prog 1291 - art by Frazer Irving

5. Prog 222 - art by Kevin O'Neill

4. Prog 302 - art by Alan Davis

3. Prog 148 - art by Mike McMahon

2. Prog 1259 - art by Frazer Irving

1. Prog 225 - art by Brian Bolland

And that's it! Sorry if I didn't include your favourite cover, but this list is as subjective as it gets, and I chose a lot of covers based on how important those individual progs were to me personally. But I could have done 1000 of the spuggers.

The coincidences are piling up again

Sometimes the universe's coincidence machine is in overdrive, and it really feels like it's piling up on you. It's the next step on from seeing Macca everywhere, only the coincidences are all so bloody mundane.

It's like movies I just watched for the first time in years showing up within a week on Framed, the one daily puzzle game I still play; or the day after reading an interview with the star of Adam Adamant in an old magazine, I hear he's just passed away. It's a million dumb things that mean nothing to nobody.

None of this means anything, but I keep seeing them. It's like how I also sincerely don't believe in jinxes, but they keep fucking happening, all the same.

All the classics, and Deadly Blessing too!

My local multiplex cinema is good for three things - it is less than 10 minutes drive away; it has some of the cheapest tickets in town; and they have a bunch of cool movie poster collages on the wall outside the theatres.

Like every other multiplex, they have the posters for all the new releases (although they are usually digital screens, which I hate because a poster will grab your attention and then switch away, just as you take a closer look just to see who is in it, or to just appreciate the poster art). 

But they also have these things that are ripped-up collages, made up of old movie posters from decades ago. 

There is usually some kind of vague theme - there are 70s and 80s ones, and one devoted to New Zealand films. They're all the usual suspects. Classics like Ghostbusters and the Life of Brian and The Shining and Jaws, and....

And...

Is that Deadly Blessing?

Fuck me, is that Alvin Purple?!?

I'm tempted to ask about the artist who created them, and why they chose absolutely nobody's favourite Wes Craven movie, or an Australian sex comedy that nobody has watched since 1973 to sit beside the usual cinematic canon. 

But maybe it's better to let that mystery be, and just enjoy the incongruity of it all. And hell, maybe it's worth checking out Deadly Blessing again. Somebody remembers it. 

When great directors get basic

Despite the millions of words spilt on the subject of the film auteur, it really is a collaborative medium, with hundreds of people contributing to the most modest cinematic efforts. But you do learn to trust the person in charge, and can expect certain levels of quality from trusted film directors.

So you can have your favourite directors - and I've certainly got a few - but it's also fairly striking when genius directors also put something incredinly basic on screen.

Even the greatest cinematic minds can make a false step, show a flaw in their film diamond. Where a decision is made, and it's clearly the wrong one, but it's still sitting there in the finished picture. A film with a delicate touch becomes immediately obvious and basic.

The greatest example comes in the final seconds of Martin Scorsese's The Departed. Marty is an obvious cinematic genius, his craft is impeccable, and he has put images on screen that remain startling and deeply heartfelt.

And The Departed is a terrific adaption of Infernal affairs, with some britlliant perfromances right across the board. It's complex and gritty and nasty and clever, and when everybody is dead at the end, there's nothing more to be said. You definitely don't need a fucking literal rat running across the bottom of the frame.

It's a sour note to end the film on, and almost inexplicable that Scorsese didn't see how silly it was, but he didn't, and there it is.

All the great modern directors do it, and even stone-cold classic movies by Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Lynn Ramsey, Quentin Tarantino and Bong Joon Ho have moments of clumsiness. Their cinematic voices soar with ambition and class, but can still hit the wrong note.

It's all the more jarring when the rest of the film is so good, but it's also reassuring that even the best of us can get it wrong sometimes. That nobody is really perfect, and that nobody can talk them out of putting a literal rat on screen.

Aparo eyebrows were the greatest eyebrows

It's the sci-fi year of 2025, and I'm still buying Brave and Bold comics by Jim Aparo like I'm 10 tears old.

I see them so rarely these days, so when a new comic seller opened a mini-warehouse in town recently, and I saw it had loads of Brave and Bold comics from the 70s, I've been slowly picking up some sweet team-ups with Kamandi and Deadman and the Teen Titans.

The best comics are the ones you read when you were 10, but these really were the best. 

Zap! Pow! The Batman TV show is still for kids

My theory about the Batman TV show from the 1960s is that it's something you love as a kid because it's bright and colourful and wholesome, and hate as a young adult because it's bright and colourful and wholesome, and then you love again as a proper grown up because it's bright and colourful and wholesome.

It was certainly my gateway drug for all things Bat, I still remember tuning in every late afternoon to see how Batman was going to get out of the latest death trap. And while I was deeply embarrassed by all things connected to it when I grew up and wanted to know why everybody wasn't taking comics as seriously as they deserved, I've managed to grow up even further and embrace it for the camp masterpiece that it is.

So when I saw a dirt cheap DVD box set of every single episode, it was an easy buy, as it was something I could watch with the kids. While they love superheroes, so much of the movies and TV shows that come out are deeply unsuitable for their young brains. (The six-year-old was keen to see the new Superman movie, but I had to check it out first to make sure it wasn't too intense, and the scene where some random guy gets shot in the head in front of Superman pushed it over the line.) 

But the 60s Batman is easy to watch, because it's super wholesome, the characters are polite and good mannered, and always just trying to do the right thing in any situation.

I did have the fudge the issue when Jill St John tumbles to her death in atomic fire - 'it's okay, kids, they took her to hospital after that - in the very first episode, but that was the only real issue. There have been conversations about the merits of punching out the bad guys, with clear lines of demarcation between 'play punching' and 'punching kids for real', but this issue is easily overshadowed by the colourful antics, and the way you should treat all people with respect. 

So we're deep into the second season now, and the kids have their favourite villains - Catwoman and the Penguin are obvious favourites, but King Tut is also somehow a winner - and while there is repetition to the death traps, they get anxious about the dynamic duo facing danger, and relief when they inevitably use their wits to free themselves.   

And I dig it, get the joke. I also still have deep crushes on the various Catwomen and many of the villainous henchwomen, who are plainly the most attractive women ever put on film, and I also get some weird thrill from the stock footage they use at the start, where the narrator introduces us to Gotham City with footage of people going about their business in 60s New York, and it fascinating to see how they lived.

This show was goofy as hell when I saw it as a kid in the 80s, and that goofiness means it has aged a lot better than superheroics produced 10 years ago. Batman and Robin will never die, not as long as they always remember their pleases and thank yous. Even kids can figure that out.

All I ever wanted was all the Target books

The most I ever got invested in entering any kind of competition was the time the local publishers of Dr Who books had one, where the first prize was a complete collection of all the Target novelisations.

I was nine years old and I was hoovering up every single Doctor who book I could get, and I could only get hold of a fraction. I had memorised the Dalek Invasion of Earth by the time I was eight, and would haunt my first libraries, especially around the Terrence Dicks section.

And then there was a cheesy TV ad that promised a full collection of every book, and that was the greatest thing I'd ever heard. I couldn't even imagine having that much Who fiction all to myself. I'd be able to read any Doctor, in any era. There were already about 100 of the books released by then, which was everything in the world.

All you had to do was answer a few trivia questions. They were quite hard, especially when most of the series' history had aired before I was born at that stage, and then were never, ever repeated again (literally in the case of too many deleted episodes).

But you could get the answers in the second trivia book. When we went on holiday and visited the first ever shopping mall I ever remember, I spent the whopping $5 that I had built up in my school bank account on a copy of the book. It almost wiped my finances dry, but I did get a copy, and spent hours and hours going through it, looking for the answers to those questions.

When I got all the answers I needed, I sent them off, confident that those Target books would be mine, and I literally spent the next year coming home from school to utter disappointment because there wasn't a box of Doctor Who books waiting at the front door.

Eighteen months after I entered, I received a piece of mail with no return address, and inside was just a laminated badge with the Target books logo on it. I assume it was something to do with the competition, but never really had any explanation. I still don't, although I do still have that badge somewhere.

I never even came close to getting a complete collection, but I still have my first copy of the Dalek Invasion of Earth and a copy of the Visitation signed by the big man Peter Davison himself. My mate Kyle has them all now, and is already working on the next step of upgrading to ones where the spines aren't so faded. 

(After years of looking, I did get a full collection of Dr Who New Adventures published by Virgin in the 1990s - and am 44 books into reading the series in order - but that's an LTOGETHER different adventure in time and space.) 

Because while it's now years and years since I spent the long afternoon trying to confirm who was the Princess of TARDIS, I'm still the same nerd, and still disappointed when I get home and don't find a bloody big box of books on the front doorstep.

My 100 favourite 2000ad covers (20-11): Have made contact with alien's facial area!

20. Prog 339 - art by Carlos Ezquerra

19. Prog 2079 - art by Mick McMahon

18. Prog 164 - art by Ron Smith

17. Prog 643 - art by Mick Austin

16. Prog 2184 - art by Steven Austin and Quinton Winter

15. Prog 1511 - art by Simon Fraser

14. Prog 797 - art by Steve Yeowell

13. Prog 405 - art by Brendan McCarthy

12. Prog 2428 - art by Joe Currie

11. Prog 27 - art by Brian Bolland

This is Evie's day

Self portrait by Evie Charlotte Smith

It's been six years of the quiet genius of Hey Duggie; way too much 'Hey, you got any grapes?'; the eternally-strong formula of Scooby Doo; grooving to House Music All Night Long; glorifying in 'I HAVE SEEN MY HAT'; having unexpected emotions with Bluey; never getting sick of Gorillaz; getting puffed out by Danny Go; the inescapability of the Care Bear stare; the gentle brilliance of Sarah and Duck; wondering when Catwoman was gonna show up in the '60s Batman TV show, laughing at very different things in Wallace and Gromit, and so much more.

It's obviously been the best six years of my life, and it remains a pleasure and a privilege.