Uncanny X-Men: Couldn't hardly do worse.

- Uncanny X-Men Annual #14

Pencils by Art Adams 

Inks by  Dan Green, Bob Wiacek, Al Milgrom, Art Thibert, Steve Mancuse 

Words by Chris Claremont

Colors by Brad Vancata 

Letters by Tom Orzechowski

There is only now

Live in the moment, they tell me. You can't do anything about the past or the future, but you can deal with the now.

I hear this, but it hits particularly hard when you have kids, and you try to hold onto these moments of pure fucking joy and happiness, and they all slip away so fast when you're dealing with their latest tantrum or injury or hurt feeling. And sometimes the worst thing is that you know you're not appreciating these times because you're trapped in the miniature of everyday life, and all the chores and tasks that need doing, even as they slip through your fingers like wet sand in the water.

I want to live in this eternal now, and maybe I do. I just really need to stop and smell the roses, and enjoy the sound of laughing children while it's everywhere.

I'm finally dancing to the old musicals

I was never a theatre kid, and never watched musicals when I was young. They didn't have lasers and robots and time travel, they just had loads of people singing songs. My sisters watched things like Grease a lot, but the first musical I ever fell in love with was the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Rocky Horror legit made me a better person, but was strictly one of a kind, and the musical genre was largely a mystery to me. And by the time I grew up into something resembling an adult, I was more interested in movies about gangsters and serial killers and shit like that.

And then, a few years ago, in a bid to widen my cinematic diet a little, I decided to check out some of the musicals that everybody agreed were the best of the best, and was delighted to find that everybody was right. Singing in the Rain really is very, very good.

I also, unfortunately, watched La La Land a few days after seeing Singing in the Rain, and the modern shoe shufflers do their best, but look like pale imitations compared to the eternal vigour of the old masters.

And now I love watching the old stuff with the kids, and find many of them have dated quite well - the unreality of people bursting into song is strangely eternal, and Donald O'Connor is literally still making 'em laugh, with his goofball antics.

I'm really not inspired to go out and see the Wicked movies or anything, it's just the old films I'm interested in. I feel like there's a strange kind of full stop with All That Jazz, and once you've got to that, what's left? Xanadu? 

I did try Xanadu because I have now become a bonafide Gene Kelly fan, and will watch any of his movies, because even if the plot is dull and predictable, the movies are always full of gorgeous, stylish  people doing remarkable things with their feet

Maybe when I get older I will get more into the modern musical, but will take the original West Side Story over Spielberg's overly slick remake, it's just got more snap, and more pizazz.

After all, we could all use a bit more pizzaz, and movies that were made nearly a century ago sill have that as they tapdance into my heart.

To keep Bond alive, you've got to learn to let go

There is something darkly hilarious about the conundrum that the new owners of the James Bond franchise are struggling with, where they don't know how to relaunch the movies after killing off Daniel Craig's Bond at the end of the last movie.

As if it bloody matters! As if it ever bloody mattered. The next guy can just roll in on his own charm, looking sexy as fuck, killing the bad guys, and literally nobody will care that he blew up at he end of the last film. 

It was a bad idea to kill him off in the first place - absolutely nobody wants to walk out of a Bond film feeling teary-eyed about his noble sacrifice, they want to walk out humming the Bond tune and talking about how neat it was when he shot that dickhead in the kneecaps and jumped off the tallest building in Thailand. 

But even though they had an extraordinarily long time to think about this - No Time To Die was in the can for ages before it appeared at the movies, which raised false hopes that they really had considered all this - the filmmakers still killed Bond off, and are now fretting about how to carry on. 

What it does remind me of is the way DC Comics can't let go of its history whenever it restarts its universe. It makes a big deal about the fresh start with every reboot, but can't concede that recent events in Superman or Green Lantern comics 'don't count' anymore, so they twist their existences into knots to make everything fit.

The post-Crisis DC universe was doomed because some things happened and some didn't, and nobody was sure what the fucking deal was with Hawkman anymore.

Comics lead the way in mass mediums, making mistakes that the rest of the entertainment industry only pick up decades later. But there should be no pride in coming first in this race, because it's still stupid as hell.

The Daniel Craig films have their faults, and doubled down on them through the years, but they were a specific era. So have the new guy come out and beat up people on a beach, wink into the camera, and then get on with things. It's how Bond rolls.

No wages, no fear

I do think less of them when I read interviews with terrific writers and film directors who admit they haven't seen one of the great movies, like The Outlaw Josey Wales or Dr Strangelove - but I really, really shouldn't, because I've never seen the Wages of Fear.

I always wanted to, I know it's a masterpiece of tension and I have seen things like the bridge scene a dozen times. So I have had an eye out for it for decades, but it was never on television - even the dedicated movie channels - and I never saw it at any of the dozens of video stores I frequented, and was never able to get to any screenings at cinemas or festivals.

The way the universe works, I'll probably end up seeing it next week, and that's okay, because there's plenty of other cinematic wonders I still need to get to. I haven't seen Sorcerer either. 

Completing a New Adventure at the big book sale

Even though I am struggling with the existential dilemma that I now own more books, magazines and comic books than I could ever hope to read before I get to the end of this mortal coil, I keep going to get more.

I've been obsessed with big charity book sales for a long time, but had no idea the local 24-hour sale was on until my pal Nik mentioned that he was off to it. I ended up going in the quiet time on a Saturday night, (although I felt a little put out that it was strictly a 24-hour sale, since there was a break in the early morning hours, there is a very particular vibe about book sales at one in the morning).

Anyway, I'm glad I went, for the bargains were tremendous during my brief browsing time -  a couple of hardback graphic novels about crime and Rasputin; some Love and Rockets chunkiness that I found in the kids section and really had to get out of there; an illustrated lesson on the story of the blues; a classic Monty Python book from back in the day that I once read when I was seven and it scared the shit out of me, so that'll be fun to get back to; some kind of Goodies boxset which I am also slightly dreading because I also haven't watched them since the early 80s; some books about war and NZ's drinking culture; and some Dr Who annuals - all for a couple of bucks each.

And then I went to another one on a Friday afternoon, and it was another excellent Nik-pick, because I stumbled across an unimaginably good score - a small box full of the Benny Summerfield Virgin New Adventures books for $25.

I completed a collection of the Doctor Who books in the series a few years back, and have had some books in the Benny series after they lost the Who franchise since I got them off the shelves in the mid 90s. But I've always been on the lookout since and if I was lucky I found a new one a year, and I still had more than a dozen to complete the set, until last Friday. 

I was all always looking because Professor Bernice Summerfield is legitimately one of the top five characters in all of Doctor Who, and while I lost track of her various adventures - I only know about her escapades with the Unbound Doctor from what I see in the reviews in DWM -  I have only read six or seven of these Virgin books (all by trusted authors), and want to see where Benny goes next, and now I can, because they were just giving them away at the Rotary Club Book Sale.

I'm currently reading all the Doctor Who New Adventures, one a month, and am just about up to Happy Endings, so the end was in sight. This means I'm going to have to spend another couple of years reading Benny's adventures every month, which doesn't sound so bad.

I literally have dreams about a nerd score like this, so it feels a bit unreal when you see a box of those familiar spines in the corner of the room containing the kids books. I thought I was dreaming when I saw them there, and I'm not entirely convinced I'm not still in that dream.

The Christchurch mission

When me and my mates all left school and started getting jobs and money, but hadn't yet moved out of home or really fallen into the full-time party mindset of high youth, we would spend our money on weekend shopping and movie trips to Christchurch, and we got it down to a fine art.

Christchurch was just up the road from where we grew up, and was the closest proper big city, with a population of about 300,000. More importantly, it was the closest place for decent comic shops, and record parlours, and book stores. It was the only chance to see a lot of movies that never made it to our neck of the woods, and for a couple of years, we were heading up SH1 at least once a month to go check them all out. 

It was the freedom of the thing, we all had our driving licences and access to cars, and we had properly disposable income for the first time in our lives, before we had to worry about rent and bills. It only lasted a couple of years, because then there were all the booze and drugs in the world to sample, and general life expenses, but there was this brief window of complete and utter nerdom.  

We'd head off at 8am in the morning, because it was a two-hour drive, and then always parked in the same parking building in the same place, and its highest we called it point zenith, because that's the sort of thing you do when you grow up in a town where nothing is taller than two stories.

We'd always hit Comics Compulsion first and load up on Hellblazer and Love and Rockets comics, before heading to Echo Records on High Street for a tape to play in the car on the way home (this is where many of my movie soundtracks came from), then this little bookstore owned by this grumpy old dude named David, who had by far the best back issue selection in town and I could get a first printing Killing Joke for $20, and then Scorpio Books for something pretty.

I would spend hunderds of dollars on this crap every visit. I would come back with a back seat covered in John Byrne Alpha flight and Giffen/Demaatties Justce League comics, and I still own a lot of those comics - I still got the JLI, I got the Hellblazers and the L&R. I still got the Killing Joke. 

After that, we'd get some food, usually from a central city supermarket or just the KFC on the corner in the middle of town - even being let loose in supermarkets to buy anything we wanted was mind-blowing freedom - and would sit down for picnic on the Avon.

Afternoons would be a round of half a dozen second hand bookstores around town - there used to be so many, it would take hours, and you'd always miss a couple - and maybe a run along the beach out at New Brighton to get rid of the energy, 

Then hit the movies, or go to a show, and when the films were things like Reservoir Dogs or Once Were Warriors, you could catch one at the late screening, and would drive back at two in the morning, because you can do that when you're 18. The route between Temuka and Christchurch literally has about 20 bends in 200 kilometres, and is mostly a long, straight line. Sometimes on those long drives home, it would be hard to stay awake, and all you could do was wind down the windows, turn the music up loud and howl at the moon. Sometimes I think I'm still on that long drive at 3am on a Sunday morning, in the darkness near Rakaia, trapped on long straight roads with dark woods on either side.

We didn't have much to do in small town life, there were no bands coming through, and no big shows, but we had the Christchurch mission.

Needless to say, it's almost all gone. The devastating earthquakes that hit the city in 2011 destroyed so much, Comics Compulsion moved out of town before slowly fading away, almost every single one of the old bookstores had to move out of their grotty premises, and even David's Bookstore has shut up shop. There is no Echo, no KFC on the corner, and even the huge movie theatres crumbled into rubble.

It's becoming a new city, very slowly. The middle of town has filled with interesting architecture, some actually wonderful art installations, and almost no interesting little shops, and if it's the same stuff you can get at the mall, why bother? 

Scorpio Books is still there, I still go there to get something pretty. And the few remaining second hand shops have some excellent selections. But that's it in town. I'm not on that mission anymore.