2001 - A Space Odyssey: The last frontier of reality!

- 2001: A Space Odyssey #5 

Drawn and written by Jack Kirby

Inked and lettered by Mike Royer

Colored by Glynis Wein

Getting ready to get Pulped

Pulp were my Britpop of choice, and one of my last great bucket list bands - and they're coming to New Zealand early next year, so it only took a few seconds to buy tickets for that show. I'll just have to listen to this tiny desk version of This Is Hardcore to keep me going until then.

After a couple of years without going to a big gig, we're going to that and Garbage in the next few months - because we figure there will be eight or nine songs at Garbage that we forgot about but will instantly recognise, and because we are eternal children of the 90s.

Paying for the Peppers

One of my absolute favourite jokes in The Good Place - and there are a few good ones in there - is that one of the criteria for getting into paradise is that you haven't paid any money to listen to music by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 

You could still enjoy it, but financially contributing to the group's success was a black mark against your soul. Which was very harsh to the Californian funk rockers - but also fair, and of course I would say that because that's one sin I've managed to avoid. 

I still like a lot of their music when it comes on the radio, or is used in a movie or something. I've never seen them live or bought any of their albums, but I danced badly along to their version of Higher Ground with my teenage mates; and Under the Bridge will always be a banger, under any circumstances; and I have been unexpectedly moved by some of their lyrics - the 'more I like to let it go' part of that Hey Oh song has an idiotic simplicity that cuts through to the soul.

But I wouldn't call myself a fan -  the few times I sampled a full album, it was always a couple of killer tracks and a lot of aimless filler, and I was always more than happy to stick with the many, many tunes coming through a lot of different radios over the years.

My only hot take about the band is that while the focus is usually on that jumping rhythm section and Kiedis' vocals and frontman antics, the only worthwhile Chili Peppers is when John Frusciante is involved, and his light touch on the guitar strings carries a lot of heft.

If I'm going to hell, it'll be for other sins - pride and gluttony have always been issues - but I got plenty of other things to give my money to. I'll still sing along in the car on a road trip as much as anybody, but that's as far as I go.

Road rage!

I try to be chill about most things in my personal life. I still rage about the great injustices in the world, but do my very best to keep my cool in most of my daily dealings. But the only things that get me properly angry are computers that won't do what they are bloody well told, and bad drivers. 

I've never actually got into a face to face confrontation with another driver, but I'm frequently cursing out the window, and really have to watch my language when the kids are in the car.

There's just something about the breaking of the social contract that is really fucking irritating about terrible drivers. The only way any traffic system works is because we all agree to follow the rules, stick to the right side of the road, give way when we should, and generally be aware of your surroundings.

People who ignore these rules, who bring six lanes of traffic to a halt because actually they really need to go this way, are a metaphor for all the selfishness of modern life. If you can't give way to a bus pulling out, or slow down for every pedestrian crossing, what are you even doing out in society? Go live on an island or something and stop putting the rest of us at risk.

If you're driving 20 kays under the limit, or not moving out into a busy roundabout when the way is clear, there is a very good chance you are a blight on all modern society. Fortunately, most of us follow the rules, and the system rolls along, more or less, but that majority are all cursing the person who zooms ahead in the wrong lane and cuts in front of everybody. We all hate you. 

I don't care how big your sandwich is, if it's full of lettuce

My holy place is in the quiet before the movie starts, and it's currently being despoiled by a Subway ad that is playing before every fucking film I see.

I hardly eat Subway anyway, it's always the absolute last option (which it sometimes is), but there is an ad they play before every movie I go to which is a large subway sandwich and a big mac burger, and they're talking to each other about their relative sizes - even though the subway is only big because it's crammed with tasteless salad - and the ad goes on forever.

This might be the most first-world problem I've ever bitched about on this blog, but it's fucking with one of my true pleasure in life. It's just so crass and dumb and one big dick joke, and it sours me on Subway, and going to the movies, and life itself.

Paxton was the bomb

While watching Predator 2 for the first time in ages recently, one thing became absolutely clear - Bill Paxton was a golden god, and the world of acting is a poorer place without him. 

Paxton was so good in the 1980s, and made everything better. It didn't matter if he was in films by one of the greatest action movie directors ever, or low budget trash made by his pals, he was always magnificent, and always so magnetic. 

From the first time I saw him in Aliens, I thought he was the absolute greatest. He's a blowhard who loses his shit, but you still always like the guy, and you're sad when he goes out, but you're still glad he died a hero. It's the best possible fate for this wonderful turkey, and I quote the gospel of Hudson on a daily basis. 

In Near Dark he steals every scene he is in, even when surrounded by some truly terrific co-stars, and then he does it again in the second Predator film. He's a rare actor that can be funny with his arrogance, with that awesomely goofy grin. Because when it all gets stripped away, you can really see the fear in his eyes, and he feels like a real person. 

He did chill out a little as he got older, and never really captured that early charm again. His one big leading role in a blockbuster was in Twister where he was terribly restrained, and there was no sign of that cocky smile in Titanic (he is, of course, great in True Lies, with one of the great pissing yourself scenes in cinema history).

There was  a good middle aged period, where the arrogance was stripped away and there was more fear in those eyes, but he was still a charming motherfucker, you could believe he could handle multiple wives in that Big Love thing. 

It's an outright tragedy that we will never get to se him in the old man roles he was destined for, but the light and enthusiasm and soul he always bought to all of his roles will shine forever.

More comics, more story

It's been my medium of choice since I was a little kid. I love movies, and music can make me feel some extremely unique emotions, and a monumental amount of my life has been spent watching the daftest fucking TV shows. But I'm always, always about the comics.

I got hooked on them at a young age, and never fell out of love with this unique combination of words and pictures. I've bought, sold and traded tens of thousands of individual comics over those years, and despite some lacklustre attempts to dampen down the addiction, I still get a charge out of walking into the local comic shop every week, to see what new beauty they have.

And there has been a lot of beauty. I've been constantly exposed to incredible art in all those decades, pencils and inks and paints that are achingly gorgeous, extremely stylized and downright exciting. I never get tired of finding a great new artist whose work doesn't look like anybody else, and I deeply appreciate those who have built on the work of earlier generations to create something that still looks fresh and new.

The relative cheapness of the format has also kept me going - while there is significantly less bang for your buck in individual issues of many mainstream comics these days, there are things like some modern trade paperback programmes that give you a ridiculous amount of comic goodness for a cheap price.

But I honestly think the main thing that has kept me in comics is the sheer amount of story I get from the medium, and the bewilderingly different kinds of tales I have been exposed to. 

Mainstream comics are obviously stuck with some very particular genres taking up all the attention, but in terms of the sheer number of stories, I've read far more in comics than in novels or anything else. Not just superhero angst, but historical fiction, stylish biographies and innumerable slice of life stories. I read all sorts of things in the comics format - non-fiction data dumps, mindless slugfests and poetic musings about life, the universe and everything. 

And with the images doing so much of the heavy lifting, the format is so easy to get through, and you can get through a tonne of material very quickly - I can read through half a dozen trade paperbacks paperbacks collecting the latest X-Men stories in a lazy afternoon, and while I might be skimming some of the inevitably verbose text, I will still be taking the story on board. It might take me a couple of weeks to get through a chunky prose novel, but I could do any graphic novel in a day. I did all of Jeff Smith's Bone one Christmas afternoon.

So in the end, I've read far more stories in comics than I have in any other medium. If I am truly devoted to experiencing as many stories - as many points of view - as I can in my life, it would be remiss of me to avoid comics. They're just words and pictures, and you can do anything with words and pictures. You can get through it quickly, and you can read about everything in the world.

Doctor Who - The Iron Legion: They're coming!

Doctor Who - The Iron Legion 

Art and lettering by Dave Gibbons 

Story by Pat Mills and John Wagner

DeviantArt has rotted away

For many years, I've enjoyed ducking into the DeviantArt website for a look around now and then. There was always some freaky shit going on there, as people let their artistic freak fly, and I saw some genuinely beautiful artwork, and a lot of desperate attempts to create a personal vision.

But the last few times I've been there, it's just full of horrible, soulless AI-generated art, with dead-eyed versions of Harry Potter characters and vast amounts of pastel anime nightmares. I don't know if the people who used to put their blood, sweat and tears into their artwork are still there, but they've been swamped in an ocean of sludge, and I don't think I'll be checking in on that website anymore.

Nothing to say about most films

After a slow start to the year, I've just cracked the 200 mark in the number of films I've watched in 2025, and while my cinematic diet is more like a huge buffet, I really have nothing to say about the vast majority of them.

Some are obviously less noteworthy than others. I went through a regrettable stage of watching a lot of Adam Sandler movies recently, because I just wanted to watch something brainless and fun, and that's pretty much what I got. (Although I do think there is genuine chemistry between Sandler and Jennifer Aniston when they team up, it would be ridiculous to deny that.)

But there are just so many films that I have nothing to say about, or that I need to think about over a long period of time before I have something to say that isn't the usual hivemind cliches. I've watched dozens of straight-to-streaming action films that all kinda blur into each other, and I do like watching the big companies burn insane amounts of money on films that look like 1980s TV. But so does everyone else.

And it's not just the brainless action and the dopey comedies, there are legitimately great films that I have nothing to say about. I really liked the Brutalist, but it's for all the same reasons everybody else liked about it, and I genuinely loved I Saw The TV Glow, and was extremely impressed by some of the things it was saying, but nobody really needs this cis white guy's deep takes on those things.

Which is fine! Some things don't need to be endlessly examined and just be what they are, and sometimes it's just nice to keep something to yourself, to wrap it up in your own heart and not share it with anybody.

I'm well into the second decade on this blog, so I'm probably the last person to listen to when it comes to oversharing and talking about the same things that everybody else is talking about. And while it's been a daily effort at the Tearoom for some time, I don't think I'll ever have to say anything about Hubie Halloween to fill the space.

Superman doesn't turn back time

The first Christopher Reeve Superman was the first movie I ever remember seeing in a cinema, and a lot of it has still stood the test of time - Reeves has oceans of charm, and the special effects that send him soaring into the sky still look pretty good.

Some of it hasn't aged that well - there is a particularly 70s corniness it can't shake - but I have never bought the idea that it's ruined by the bit where Lois dies, and Superman turns the earth backwards by flying really fast, and turns back time.

Linear time doesn't work like that, say smartarses. That breaks almost everything we know about the laws of physics, they say.

But I never interpreted it that way - that he's turning the Earth around. Since the day I saw it, I didn't think he's turning back time and reversing anything. It's all from his perspective, and he's travelling back in time but going so fast he breaks the time barrier and going back to save his loved one.

This is something that is totally possible according to the sacred time travel texts of Back to the Future and Star Trek, and it was something Superman did a lot in the silver age - travelling to the 31st century every month to hang with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

It feels extremely silly to be so defensive about a movie that is almost 50 years old now, but I still see people complaining about how the gravitational forces of turning the planet around would be astronomical, and they probably would be. 

But we're seeing those rocks fly up the clifftop because that's what Superman sees, not because time is actually turning backwards, and that's been a part of Superman lore forever.

But the part in the second movie where he pulls off the emblem on his uniform and it turns into a giant piece of indestructible cellophane? That really is just dumb. 

I always like more fact than fiction in my music stories

I'm am always a complete sucker for any documentary feature about a musical band, especially if I know very little about them. You can't keep me away from long docos on Devo or the Sleaford Mods, and why not? At the very least, I will undoubtedly have more of an informed opinion of their work after seeing behind the curtain like that.

On the other hand, my absolutely least favourite genre of movie is the biopic of a music star, boiling all the complexity of a music career into the usual highs and lows - keen young thing finds fame, gets really fucking high, and then usually gets over it. I'll take the fact over fiction any day of the week.

My current podcasts of choice

Some of my favourite regular podcasts faded away a couple of years ago, and I've been in an auditing phase ever since, trying out a lot of new regular ones. And I'm rarely going past that first taste, because I get put off by baying laughter, stupid accents and other unimportant bullshit (like being unable to download an episode onto my hard drive, because my podcast habits don't extend to streaming, I like to save the audio and have it available anytime).

But I still need something to listen to when I'm cleaning up the house (often in six minute chunks) or when I go on long walks, so I keep trying, and have found some new faves. A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by the splendid Andrew Hickey remains my top pick - recent episodes have been getting into Led Zeppelin and Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the series remains intellectually informative and emotionally moving. I've even signed up to the Patreon for the bonus episodes, and have almost caught up on them, even as the supposed 10-minutes bonuses get longer and longer (this is very much not a complaint).

Hickey's podcast is the peak of informative shows, filling my brain with loads of interesting facts. I also went through all the Cocaine and Rhinestones episodes for all the stories behind country music, and for movies, the best podcast for straight up trivia is What Went Wrong. Most movie podcasts are much more about how interesting the host is, but this one has Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer bringing a tonne of facts to each episode, while still placing events in their proper context, and calling out injustice when they see it.

The only other movie podcast that I never miss an episode of is the sublime hot takes of Lexg, and I only really listen to the Movies that Made Me, Brett Goldstein's Films to Be Buried With, or the Team Deakins depending on what guest they are getting in. That's usually the case when it comes to podcasts focused on interviews - although I will listen to any of Adam Buxton's interviews, especially when I have no knowledge of the person he's talking to, because his ramblechats are always fun - but even  interview with comic creators, like SKTCHD  and Dollar Bin Bandits, depend on the guest. (I will always go for any show that interviews Evan Dorkin and Grant Morrison.)

I also like podcasts about Grendel and 2000ad, and very occasionally I get sucked in by the sheer enthusiasm of Rob Liefeld (and his incredible gossip about the highs of 90s comics). I also enjoy in-depth podcasts about history, but my two faves - Fall of Civilization and Hardcore History are about a year between episodes at this stage.

And that's all I'm really listning to at the moment, although that is enough to get me through the dishes. Some podcasts have faded away, some entire websites have shut down - I went back to listen to a Comic Books Are Burning In Hell episode, only to discover the entire Factual Opinion site has disappeared - and while there is no shortage of interesting people rambling about interesting shit, I'm always looking for more. 

The lost shops of Temuka

The last time I was in my old home town of Temuka, the local shoe shop on the main street was closing down. I've never given a damn about shoe stores - some of the most boring times of my life have been spent in them - but I was still sad to see it go, because now I don't think there is a single shop on that main street that is still what it was, back when I lived there as a teenager.

The death of the main street is everywhere in western civilisation - the suburban malls dragged away the customers from the city and town centres, and now the convenience of online shopping has further destroyed the small independent shop.

Temuka is a town of just 3000-4000 people, but the main street used to have loads of good stores, and they're all gone now. Some of them have been totally demolished, most have been repurposed into something else, and a sad amount are just sitting empty, but what is left bears little resemblance to the town I used to live in.

The hardest loss was obviously when Bairds Bookshop closed down, because that was my primary source for comic books for years, during my prime 2000ad and X-Men periods. But even Temuka Stationery, where I got things like the first issue of the Infinity Gauntlet or the adaption of House II: The Second Story, faded away a while ago.

So there's no bookshops, and I also still only see echoes of all the places I used to get my movies from. There is Sullivan and Spillanes, an appliance store where I used to rent video tapes, not because they had a great selection, but because they gave us 50 free hires when we bought our VCR machine from there. Later it was a primary source of the blank cassette tapes I filled with Pink Floyd and Beatles albums. Even later, I went for a job interview there, but I'm still convinced I didn't get the job because a teacher who was friends with the boss was convinced I should go to university. I showed him but not going to university and working in a fat factory so I could afford to buy essential comics like Eclipso: The Darkness Within. I showed him.

That store was full of old crappy furniture for more than a decade after the appliance trade moved out of town, but has now stood empty for ages. Next door, the place I haunted because I couldn't stop looking at the cover of the Dawn of the Dead tape they had (and also did the best hot chips in town), is now a vape store.

There's the shop where I bought Jan Strnad and Gil Kane's Sword of the Atom, and was later a video store where I hired out dozens of films around the turn of the century. It's a real estate office now. Across the road, the first dedicated record and video store in town - and the last, to be honest - has been a pet store for decades now, but I still remember long hours reading the back of vinyl albums to understand lyrics, or going through the horror movie selection on endless Friday nights until we decided to hire out Zombie Flesh Eaters. That place hasn't existed in a long time, but I still remember what it smelled like.

Even great bakeries are now second hand stores, and the old library where I got my first James Bond and Tolkein books from passed into private hands long ago. They're all gone now. Even the shoe shops.

It is certainly something to be expected as you get older, and I can't be the only person who goes back home and sees the ghosts of the past. I'm just not sure so many people see as many echoes of old comic books as I do. 

Decorum: That's all I have.

- Decorum #4 (2020) 

Art by Mike Huddleston 

Words by Jonathan Hickman 

Letters by Rus Wooton

This path was always obvious

I'm surely not the only person in the world who sees people sell their souls for a quick buck, or set out to cause harm to other people for no reason other than bigotry and ignorance, and maybe suffer a tiny bit of consequences, and think about Anton Chigurh, asking quietly what use are the rules you follow if they bring you to him. 

It's pretty fucked up that this comes to mind every single fucking day right now, but also that it is not happening more often.

These are all the tapes I still have

I bought my last cassette tape more than 20 years ago now, but it was my primary method of listening to music for a good decade. Everybody had their own tape deck and everyone had their own collection of tunes on tape, and some people have held onto them, even as the medium of listening to music has gone through several huge evolutions.

I don't know why I still have this handful of music, or why these tapes survived when, say, DAD's most excellent No Fuel Left For The Pilgrims disappeared long ago. The covers are all scuffed up because they have spent most of their existence getting shoved into glove boxes of various cars, and while the tape covers were tough, they could only take so much.

We sold our last car with a tapedeck a decade or so ago, but I was still listening to The Cure's Mixed Up album on tape well into the 21st century. My mum bought that tape for me for my good school cert results when I was 15, and last year it got chewed up in an old tape player, but I've still kept that tape, because I got very, very good at repairing broken tapes back in the day, and have no doubt I could do it again.

There are another 80 or so where the case hasn't survived, and I still have the tape, and the name of the artist has long worn off, so there are just dozens and dozens of the things with blank surfaces.

My main takeaway from looking at what survived is that I really liked soundtracks - my peak tape buying period was also the moment when I really fell hard for movies, (all kinds of movies, not just the horror and science fiction and action adventures I had been inhaling), and buying scores and compilations was a major part of that obsession.

I am genuinely surprised that Pulp Fiction survived. I probably listened to that more than any other tape in history, and once almost dropped it in the sea while dancing on a midnight rock at the edge of the world, but it's still there.

My other main takeaway is that I really had the most heterosexual tastes in music as a teenager. The gayest thing in that lot is probably The Doors, because everybody had a crush on Jim Morrison at one point in their lives, but the rest of it was cis as fuck. 

I like to think my tastes have broadened since then, but I can't escape the past when it's sitting there in chunky plastic, and still complete in the case.  

Prince of Darkness: You will not be saved by the god Plutonium

The thing I always liked most about John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness - apart from the obvious things like the bizarre message from the future and Alice Cooper as a demonic rough sleeper- is that it's got a very complicated deal that I still really couldn't follow.

It's almost the opposite of a high concept. Most horror films have an easy hook, and often have a simple, easy premise, but I've seen Prince of Darkness a dozen times over the years, and there is a fuzziness to the plot, and some strange over-complication - so much that I still find it difficult to follow.

Any other John Carpenter film I could explain in 25 words or less - New York is a prison, someone has to get the president; Michael Myers just wants to kill everybody; the Ghosts of Mars are very pissed off - but even now I struggle to explain what is going on in that weird church in the bad part of town.

I just don't understand why the green goo is actually the devil, and why it targets certain victims and leaves other heroes alone. I don't know what the deal is with the homeless zombies, or why Carpenter thought his hero should have a moustache like that.

I just find the whole thing befuddling, and I have to be absolutely clear that I think this is a good thing, and the main reason I've watched it so many times over the years. Sometimes I get a better picture of the plot, some times I'm as baffled by the end as I always have been. 

The whole film is like that message from the future, incomprehensible and vague, and only slightly in focus, but all the more terrifying for it.

It's all right.

I've never had a firearm shoved in my face, and I hope I never will. But if I do, my absolute role model for what to do in that situation will be this dude from the excellent Kill Your Boyfriend by Grant Morrison and Phillip Bond. He's so calm he's stuck in my head for thirty years.

Just back off, give them what they want, and tell them it's all right. Be a reasonable bloke, not a dead hero.

My five favourite gags in Anno Dracula

I remain convinced that Kim Newman's Anno Dracula books are the most entertaining series of novels I've ever read. Newman's world is full of all kinds of monsters from novels and movies, are tremendously exciting, ridiculously clever and often very, very funny. Listing all the easter eggs and in-jokes in the series so far would take a very, very long time, but I can easily name five off the top of my head that still make me laugh when I think about them. (The one that just missed out was the Poe/Kafka team-up, but I already had two other jokes from the second book in there.)

These are obviously all huge spoilers, but if you haven't read any of the books in the series, you are really missing out. Go do that and come back afterwards.

1. Jack the Ripper really is a Jack

The entire first book in the series is based around this great gag - I read this not long after it came out, when Coppola's Dracula film was still very fresh in the memory, and it was uncomfortably easy to imagine Richard E Grant stalking the streets of Whitechapel, a silver scalpel in his hand.

2. Biggles walks out of no man's land

The WW1 fighter aces in The Bloody Red Baron come from all levels of fiction, but James Charles Bigglesworth is still the top dog in the English barracks. And then he disappears halfway through the book, falling to his doom over the battlefield after his kite has been torn apart by giant vampire bats. It looks like it's all over for the aerial ace, and then he just walks out of  no man's land at the very end of the book, after having his own adventures in the vampire-strewn warzone. Biggles always comes through!

3. Alas, poor Bela

Sometimes you wonder when somebody obvious is going to show up in these books, especially in certain time periods, but the great Lugosi's sad appearance at the end of the WW1 book was definitely a surprise the first time around, while still making the best use of Dracula by keeping him off the central stage entirely. 

4. James Bond turns from Sean Connery into Roger Moore

It's not really James Bond because he's still in copyright, but it's also obviously James Bond hanging around in Dracula Cha Cha Cha, and he's just as brutal and nasty as he should be. He's just a tool for the main villain in the end, but the story does take the time to note that Bond is suddenly expressing too much with his eyebrows, and his Scottish accent is fading, as he becomes less of a human being, and more of a shallow role.  

5. Popeye the Sailor Vampire 

It doesn't take long to figure out who the dude with the hideous grimace, massive forearms and corncob pipe is. It's still a great gag when Popeye the vampire figures out that it's really the iron in the blood that he needs, and that he can get a burst of energy by eating spinach with its high levels. It's probably the dumbest joke in the whole series, but it's still an absolute cracker.