Rambo was my first grown up movie

Film classifications used to be a big concern in my life, because I was just a kid, and didn't know what real concerns actually were. But just because I didn't know what was really important in life didn't mean the entire classification system wasn't still a cause of heartbreak and sorrow.

Around these parts, it used to be G for general admission, and GY for the parental guidance thing. But it was the hard Rs that deprived me of seeing great films up on the big screen, and it could be years before I properly caught up.

Me and my mate Nigel completely failed to get into the R13 Terminator when we were 10, and I can still taste the bitter disappointment of not being allowed to see Blade Runner because I was too young, even though it had Han frigging Solo in it.

Things got a bit looser when video players rolled into town, but there were still restrictions at home. I wasn't allowed to watch Beverly Hills Cop after 10 minutes, when his boss showed up and unleashed a tirade of f-bombs, because my Dad was a pretty liberal dude, but he still had his limits.

So it was a big deal when I was allowed to watch Rambo, I was just shy of the 13-year mark, but that was close enough. The profanity was bad, and the sexual stuff was just awkward for all concerned, but cartoonish violence was still a-okay.

This kind of permission must be immediately seized on, before broader issues of parental responsibility come to mind, and we were on our way to the video store as soon as that permission was granted.

The movie itself was no big deal - I was never really into the absurdity of Stallone in the 80s, and it's fair to say that a lot of aspects to the biggest Rambo of them all have not held up well, (although it remains dumbly entertaining, and long as you don't think too hard about it).    

But it was the first taste of something that was made for adults, and a powerful symbol for the changes machine-gunning their way into my life. It's one way to do it. 

What are you shooting at, Clive?

And sometimes there is a film that is just so fucking stupid, you can only watch it in 15-minute bursts before it gets too much. You keep going, because even the dumbest films can redeem themselves, but it can be hard going.

I didn't expect Anon from 2018 to be one of those films, even though it's part of the endless waterfall of straight to streaming efforts. Writer/director Andrew Niccol had done some smart films in the past that did occasionally veer into the realm of the dumb, but walked that line with some skill.

But Anon trips up over that line, right from the start. The very concept of the film - that everybody has implants that lets them see everything anybody else is getting up to, along with helpful heads-up displays showing all the details of the shit they look at - isn't as smart as it thinks it is. For starters, it's a whole new technology that nobody can turn off, even if it's majorly malfunctioning, and everything you look at comes with grating text and a horrible digital ticking sound that would drive everybody nuts in a week.

So far, so Black Mirror, but then Clive Owen's head gets hacked, and he literally can't trust what he's seeing, and it looks like his hallway is on fire, so he pulls out his gun and starts blazing away. Even though he knows it's fake, and even though it's a fucking fire - what does he think bullets are going to do against it? And thinking somebody might be using the flames to attack them is still no fucking excuse for blind gunfire.

I had to take a break after that. That was too much, man.

And then when I get back to it the next day, Clive goes and gets in a fucking car and tries to drive around a busy future metropolis, even though his eyes are still subject to enforced hallucinations. He doesn't get past the first intersection.

I guess you're meant to admire his hard nature, but this blatant dumbarsery, and the only reason these scenes to be there in the film is so other plot elements can play off later - his poor neighbour who nearly gets shot by him is sacrificed so Clive can be framed for the shooting - which is the dumbest part of all.

I do feel foolish, ripping into a fairly nondescript film from seven years ago that literally nobody else cares about. But it took me days to get through something that should have been an easy watch, because I couldn't take that kind of stupid for too long.

Dreaming of Judge Mortis

I've been reading horror comics since before I could actually read, but one of the few to genuinely scare me were the early Dark Judges stories in Judge Dredd, and I know this because I had genuine nightmares about them for years. They were coming for me, and no matter where I would hide, they would find me.

It was only the Bolland versions that counted. Bolland's art is always a detailed delight, but that just made the horrific absurdity of Death, Fear, Fire and Mortis all the more real, with oblivion hiding in the sharpest of shadows. 

They became more of a joke, the more they appeared -  I have no such reaction to the recent muddy, overwrought versions in the Fall of Deadworld comics. But they were absolutely terrifying in their primal glory. 

I still sometimes dream of them coming down the road towards me in bright daylight, and the only way I can ever escape is by waking up.

Beyond post-irony: Heretic and Slow Horses

What does it mean when you're watching a movie or reading a book, and you suddenly start thinking about questions that the story is raising, and then the story answers those exact questions, and kinda makes fun of you for your simple queries.

I've felt like this with some stories for a while - the Buffy TV show used to do this all the time. Especially when I'd watch it stoned with my mate Geoff, and we'd have all sorts of deep philosophical insights about the nature of slaying vampires and the questions it would raise, and then the show would answer those questions straight away, like it had heard our complaints and was putting us in our place.

More recently, I felt it with the movie Heretic, which I thought was a lot of fun, but had Hugh Grant spouting some absolute bullshit. Because he's Hugh fucking Grant, it sounds refined and charming, but you're sitting there wanting one of the characters to refute his obvious bullshit, and then somebody does just that, and points out with great eloquence and passion how fucked up his reasoning is.

The Slow Horses books - which I carved through in a few short months last year - also do it all the time, with author Mick Herron constantly toying with expectations, and then blatantly violating them, and acting surprised that you thought it would be anything different. Sometimes it's the use of a jacket, belonging to a corpse at the start of one book, which then features some very blatant mentions of wearing coats; or even the way that each book ends with a member of Slough House dying in some unfortunate manner, and then in one of the latest ones, it's obviously happened again, only it turns out the character just wants to eat all the fucking chicken in the room.

It's all so clever, and is extremely hard to pull off. But it also feels like a direct conversation between author and audience, an unspoken correspondence of anticipation. It's so far beyond literary irony that we're somewhere new.  I really thought we slipped into a post-ironic age very early on in the 21st century, but where are we now? 

You may feel manipulated as the consumer of this story, but you also know you are in on the game. It  definitely makes everything feel a bit meta, seeing the man behind the curtain like that, but in an entertainment world of dumb-arse retreads and the general same old shit, this kind of post-post-post-irony is always a welcome sack of smart.

How was my 1999?

I'm 24 in 1999, which is just about the last age where I could be a total bum for a while without feeling like a complete loser and a failure at life. It was the last thrust of proper youth, the last time to be free of any responsibilities. It was a fucking good year.

Me and my mates had all been working since we got out of school, for six years straight at that stage, and just could not be fucked anymore, so we chucked in our jobs and went on the dole and lived a leisurely life of few luxuries.

And for most of the year we all just fucking chilled out, watched lots of movies, smoked lots of pot, ate lots of trash food. It was the year of The Matrix and the final volume of The Invisibles, and it felt like all the freaky weird stuff that I'd spent the decade indulging in was coming to some kind of fruition. Things looked good for the new millennium.

I wasn't getting any comics regularly - not even my beloved 2000ad, which I'd given up after some truly diabolical mid-90s progs. I would still get the latest issue of The Invisibles through mail order, and I still never missed anything to do with Love and Rockets, but that was literally it. I would see advertisements for things like Planetary, which looked sexy as fuck, but I was most bothered by the fact I was missing out on Hourman (I read it 10 years later, it was pretty good).

It was the last year of the 20th century (yes, it wasn't technically the last year because there was no year zero, but general consensus can be a powerful thing), and is rightly seen as a stunner of a year for movies. While that sometimes only becomes clear in retrospect, you couldn't walk out of the theatre into some 90s sunlight after seeing something like the Thin Red Line and Fight Club and The Matrix, and not realise it was a mini golden age for movies.

I listened to a lot of Beastie Boys and Portishead and Pulp's This Is Hardcore, and the Best of 1998 CD that Q put out, meaning the main soundtrack to my life was still a year late.

But everything was a year late, and I do wonder if part of my affection for this period is because it was the last time I was ever not connected to the world at all times. I could only get on the internet once a week, at most, and would spend that precious half hour checking out the niche message boards that my friends still posted on, before catching up on the geek news from comicbookresources.com and fuckin' Ain't It Cool, and that was it, there was nothing more.

Blogs weren't even a thing yet, there was no bandwidth for Youtube, and social media was a nightmare for the future, not an aspirational goal.

I still know I'm seeing this through rose coloured glasses. I was still five years away from properly getting my shit together, and going to journalism school, and everything great in my life has come from that decision. And yeah, it was fun times, but we weren't making any money, and couldn't go out or do anything exciting, and by the time winter started to bite, we were all back in employment, because beer doesn't come for free.

So I moved on with my life, and things changed in ways I could never anticipate, and I haven't had to go on a benefit since then. But I can still remember that thrilling freedom of the last year of my youth, before the new century came crashing in.

Fighting with Frank (part 6 of 13): Oh, shut up and stop showing off.

 

- The Authority #20

Art by Frank Quitely

Inks by Trevor Scott

Words by Mark Millar

Colors by David Baron

Letters by Bill O'Neill

The universe shrugged.

Is there a word for the feeling you get when one of your absolute favourite musical artists put out their first single in more than two decades, and it's a total banger, but also comes with a new official music video that it actively repulsive?

It's not the video embedded above - the Tearoom of Despair is, was and always will be a 100% non-AI operation - but it doesn't matter how arch and ironic they are being, reducing the exact and flowing moves that Cocker has always given us with the floating, semi-slow motion of dogshit AI is something nobody wanted.

Getting it in one frame is the best

I've given up almost all the daily word games I used to play, partly because they got gobbled up by larger entities that I am existentially opposed to, and partly because they just got a bit same old, same old. I haven't played Wordle in a year, and got frustrated by the sharp focus on US culture that made Connections impossible for anybody else.

But I have stuck with Framed, where you have to identify a movie by  a smallest number of frames, and still do it first thing every morning, and this is what my stats look like:

The number of times I have got it on the first try do look impressive, but I do think they used to be a lot easier, and I racked up most of those statistics in the first year or playing it. Since then, things have got harder, and it usually takes a couple of shots to crack it these days.

But I have seen - to use a technical term - a fucking shitload of films, thousands and thousands of the fuckers, and most of them have left some kind of cultural residue in my brain.

And I've still never failed, and have never needed all six guesses, which I am embarrassingly proud about. There is usually some slight cheating involved in all those five-guess results, they are films I've obviously never seen and will never get, but I can always recognize an actor or two, and use the magic of IMDB to find the answer.

It's a stupid thing to be doing every day, and it's even stupider to be proud about it. But these tiny daily rituals make the mundanity of existence just a little bit more bearable, and all the more so when you can show off about them a little.

The wrong annual

For many more years than I'd really care to admit, my biggest comic buying regret was getting the DC hardback annual instead of the Marvel one from the Plaza Bookshop in Timaru in 1984.

While there were always exceptions for things like the X-Men, I was mainly a DC kid in the early 80s, and when the hardback British annuals showed up every year, there was always something Batman or Superman-related.

One of those annuals that particular year was the 'Super Powers Annual'. It had the first part of the original limited series of that name, (which I always thought was Kirby art, but was actually Adrian Gonzales and Pablo Marcos doing their best imitation of the King), some Aparo Batman/Hawkman and a Superman/Green Lantern thing by Jim Starlin. 

But there was also one with the Marvel equivalent, with the first issue of Secret Wars and a bunch of other Marvel treats, including a Spider-Man/Alpha Flight story from a Marvel Team-Up Annual. That was the first place I ever saw Alpha Flight in anything and I thought they looked weird, and went for the safety of the DC heroes.

My meagre pocket money only stretched so far when I was nine, so I could only get one.

The thing is, while I always enjoyed both comics, I became a raging Marvel Universe head soon afterwards, and despite the quality of that Super Powers book, I wished with every fiber of my being that I'd got the Marvel. Especially when I've seen the DC book in second hand shops many times, but have seen no sign of the other anywhere.

I still have the Super Powers annual today, and still think it's groovy, especially the way something went very wrong with the colours on the last page of the Superman/Green Lantern story, and everybody suddenly has very weird skin. 

I got over this regret a long, long time ago, but I can still feel the taste of it, somewhere in my brain. Some heartbreaks never die, and I would buy that Marvel book in a fucking second if I ever saw it anywhere.

A lot.

Barry Lyndon × 21 Savage
"a lot" pic.twitter.com/rJd3jLCQO4

— flanthippe (@flanthippe) January 25, 2024

I have watched tens of thousands of short, funny videos on social media over the past two decades, but some of them are so perfect they stick in the head forever.

A life of Wagner

There has been no more exciting news in all of comics so far this year than hearing that John Wagner has written a Judge Dredd story called 'Death of a Judge', with the extremely capable Mike Perkins on artwork.

I honestly don't think this will be the death of Judge Dredd story that has to happen sooner or later, (I've been expecting it for a while) but having Wagner write any Dredd is such a rare treat these days, and such a provocative title is already getting the thrillpower already pumping through my veins.

Luckily, while we're all waiting, Wagner is also telling his life story in a series of incredibly entertaining blog posts on his website, and I strongly recommend checking them out. His story of freelance life in castles and writing with mates in sheds are all well documented, but Wagner is giving a seriously new perspective on the old stories.

But there is still nothing I want to read more in all comics than 'Death of a Judge' right now. Nearly 50 years into the continuing adventures of Judge Joe Dredd, and it's still the greatest thrill in the galaxy.

How to judge a movie

The worst thing to read in any piece of film criticism - apart from the outright bigotry that sometimes boils to the surface - is when somebody talks about a movie having a poor script, and then they just leave it like that.

What does that even mean? Are they talking about the plot, or the dialogue, or the characterization?  Is it just full of clichés, or just purely implausible? There are plenty of things that a script does in any movie, and it might do some things very well while falling flat on others.

I haven't done any serious film criticism in years now. It ruined my enjoyment of movies, sitting there in the dark, trying to think up a clever lede, instead of actually immersing in a story. But I still judge every film I ever see. Most of them have something worthwhile - even if its s single shot or a heartfelt performance, - and some are laughingly stupid (there is one I'll talk about next week sometime which actually baffled me with its foolishness).

And movies are complex thing, made by a shared forced consensus. Despite what a bunch of French cinephiles in the 1950s thought, cinema is the most collaborative of all the arts, and requires hundreds of people to make the most basic of movies. 

This complexity is in the work itself, and there can be many things to like in a movie, and many things to be critical of in the same 90 minutes.

But when it comes to working out if I genuinely like a movie or not, I've boiled it down to five things that I judge all films on. They are:

1. Style

It's increasingly hard to see in these days of the beige digital look infecting everything, but a movie just has to look cool. Something that makes it stand out, something that makes it memorable.

It's not just the look, it's also use of music, which makes an enormous difference. I remain baffled by the filmmakers who use music as an incidental thing, instead of a crucial component. Some throbbing synth, or strange melodies giving you a proper earworm.

But overall, it just looks good, with use of colour, and scenery, and costuming. Groovy lighting and beautiful people doing awful things. Cool shit.

2. Humor

It can be dry as dust, or screaming in your face, but a little funny goes a long way. Making other human beings laugh is a truly great thing, and I am extremely fond of terrible movies that have one genuine laugh out loud moment.

Even films that take themselves deadly seriously can have the humour of the deadpan. Anything that is truly without any kind of wit - intended or otherwise - should be easily dismissed. 

3. Charm 

It's just the smile of a good actor, or a director at the height of their powers and swaggering across the screen. You just want to hang with these people, in the dark, for a couple of hours. 

4. Tension

They say all drama comes from conflict, and it might be a knife-fight in a crowded nightclub, or the terrible emotions of a family breakdown, but a film needs a pulse, and the beats of action and thrills and sphincter-tightening provide the best throb.

All good thrillers and horrors and action films and disaster movies need it.

I fucking hate guns, but I love a good gunfight. 

5. Intelligence 

Some films make you feel smart, because they are made with obvious intelligence. Unexpected plot developments, the obvious merits of a new perspective.

And they don't treat you like a chump, and have some respect for the audience and don't spoon feed everything to you, because they know you are with you. 

6. Emotion 

It's just got to have a dose of humanity, you know? Something recognisable, something universal, something that makes a connection. 

What else are we here for?

There's obviously more to it than that. For starters, all films come with their own context - both real world and within the story itself - and you have to judge films against others of its type, not something it's not trying to be.

But it is very, rare to find a film that achieves in all of the six pillars of my own special ratings, and any film has to have at least a couple to stand out from the crowd. And if it has four or more, it's a stone cold classic.

It can feel reductive, and extremely fucking nerdy to think about movies in this way. And sometimes you just have to go with a gut feeling, and not overthink it so much. But overthinking is what I do, and I don't think I'll ever stop picking apart films like it's a goddamn autopsy. 

Fighting with Frank (part 5 of 13): Bad move, mister!

- Batman: Scottish COnnection
Art by Frank Quitely
Story by Alan Grant
Colors by Matt Hollingsworth and Brad Matthew
Letters by Bill Oakley

The goggles do nothing!

So the other week I went to get my eyes checked up, and the optometrist told me my vision was getting better and I felt quite chuffed about that, because that's the last thing you expect to hear from a health professional in the long, slow slide towards death, and they could have left it there, but no, they had to tell me that the vision was better because the slightly un-round shape of my eyeball was the thing that kept me from seeing things clearly, and as I was getting older, the back of the eyeball was starting to sag down with the inevitable force of entropy, and that was bringing things into clearer focus.

I didn't know metaphors were meant to be so fucking literal.

Loving the Arkin

Some actors just annoy the hell out of you. I know people who can't watch anything with Tom Cruise in it (which is a shame, they are missing out on some excellent Impossible cinema), and I remain deeply, deeply ambivalent about Amy Adams. They might be great actors, but that doesn't mean everybody has to like them

I discovered this early on in life, when I fucking hated Alan Arkin. I hated him so, so much, and wouldn't watch any film where he showed up.

I'm not sure what it was, but looking back through his filmography, it's almost certainly The Return of Captain Invincible that did it. This was not the first superhero film I'd ever seen, (I definitely saw the first Superman movie in the cinema), but it was the first really disappointing one. I haven't seen it in more than 40 years, but I just remember it being cheap, boring and Australian. With terrible songs.

After watching it on rented video some time in the early 1980s, I hated it with every atom in my adolescent body, would not watch anything with Arkin in it from then on. Which feels a bit mean in retrospect, I didn't hold anything against Christopher Lee for his role in it, just the Arkin. 

It took me years, but I eventually got over it, mainly because Arkin is actually a fantastic actor, with great charm and a undercurrent of shimmering rage - nobody lost their shit in the same way he did - and he always seemed to be on the verge of glorious hysteria, especially when he go quiet.

He made a terrific Yossarian in Catch-22, with a blend of sheer panic and cynical surrender; was unforgettably nasty in Wait Until Dark; and a force for good in a very dad way in Edward Scissorhands. He directed the excellent Little Murders, had a terrific late period of playing old affable duffers with a slight hint of menace, and I just discovered his middle name was Wolf. What a goddamn legend.

That weird childhood hatred is still there whenever I do see him in some old movie now, but it's been crushed by the weight of his wonderful, whiny brilliance over all those years. I didn't need Captain Invincible, not when I had all that.  

Longshot's weird adventures in the Marvel Universe

Even four decades after it was first quietly published by Marvel, Longshot is a very strange series, and still feels like nothing else being put out by the company at the time. 

It had a tone that was slightly off from the regular Marvel universe, something that was incredibly appealing in the wild days of the 1980s. It still had She-Hulk running around Manhattan in her wonderful bike pants, but there was also constant use of overlapping dialogue, and plotting that moved in deeply unexpected directions, and nightmare characters spinning between universes.

It all left the reader wrong-footed, just in the way it was a little bit off from the normal superheroics. Even the fact that the title character and many of his pals only had four fingers was a subtle sign of the weird, and his charming naivete only made him more different from self-assured Avengers.

It also, of course, has amazing pictures by Art Adams. There had been this kind of obsessive detailing in Marvel comics before, with artists like Michael Kaluta and Barry Windsor-Smith putting out some eye-catching and meticulous. But Adams had some real dynamic energy with his figurework, ands again, it all looked a bit off, a bit different from the clear, simple lines of the Romitas or Buscemas, 

While Longshot himself would soon be incorporated right into the heart of the greater universe by popping out of thin air into the Danger Room, the closest vibe to Longshot was, unsurprisingly, Ann  Nocenti, who brought a similar off-kilter perspective and odd use of the conventions of comic storytelling to her Daredevil comics.

I came to Longshot through the X-Men, where he wasn't technically a mutant, but was a core part of the team during my biggest period of X-obsession. I only picked up the Longshot series in the years afterwards, long after he'd faded from the X-books, although I was familiar with Adams from his X-Men work on covers and the art on the Annuals (every second year, for some reason). Reading the limited series in such a non-linear fashion only enhanced its strangeness, and I've been happy to have a full run of the series for years now.

It just didn't feel like a classic superhero comic, and that's exactly what makes it one of the great superhero limited series of its time. It's still very much an artifact of the 1980ss, but also timeless in a way that only the truly weird can reach.

Quicksilver in the kitchen

 

Bryan Singer's X-Men movies never really came together as complete films, and were often flabby and played so low at times that the sheer charisma of the generally excellent casts was the only thing keeping them above water. 

But they all had great individual scenes, and portrayed characters' powers in ways that were often thoughtful and interesting.  There were times they could be uninspired - they never really got hold of what Storm was capable of, and Cyclops brought nothing new to the party - but the Quicksilver scenes; or Nightcrawler in the White House; or some of the vibrant antics of the Last X-Men On Earth's fight against the sentinels in the Future Past movie, (especially Blink's teleportation holes), were memorable and rewatchable in ways most superhero films just are not.

The Quicksilver thing was so effective they did it all over again in the next movie, even as the scripts twisted themselves into knots to explain why they didn't just use Pietro to save everybody all of the time. And while that run of X-Men films has run its course, and the mutants have some kind of a MCU future ahead of them, the freaky nature of their powers in these original films still lingers.

Love and Rockets: And love is everything

I'm always been on Team Jaime, man. It's the easier option - his art has a flowing beauty that remains intoxicating after years of high-grade comics. And his Locas tales are some of the greatest stories I've ever read in any medium, and have an emotional resonance built over decades of human growth. His comics span the length of a lifetime, and can be funny and goofy and scary in a way nobody else can touch.

Whenever I get a new issue of Love and Rockets - and it remains one of life's great little pleasures to do so - it's almost always Jaime's comics that I go for first. I always get to Beto, but it's the misadventures of Maggie and the gang that I always need to mainline.

Gibert's comics are still absolutely marvelous, and the older Hernandez can do something like a Poison River or a Human Diastrophism and make it all look so easy. And sometimes, his comics are the strongest thing in an issue.

Beto's story in the most recent issue is just staggering - the sheer simplicity of it, just two people in love, wandering around a bunch of sand dunes, and so happy in the moment. It's blatantly sentimental, and all the better for it, because we could all use a little more sentiment in these bleak fuckin' times.

There is also something about the way it compliments the story behind the cover of this issue - a tribute to somebody who gave up on some dreams of art for family, and ending up raising two of the finest artists in modern comics - that comes with a real emotional kick.

Jaime's Princess Anima thing has been going on forever, and has had nowhere near the soulful resonance of the Hoppers crew, but was never intended to be. It's been a blast to read, even if I could never quite untangle the convoluted continuity of this sci-fi wonderland, and has come to a surprisingly bloody climax. It's great comics, but Beto's stuff is more haunting, and somehow more essential for these times.

Love and Rockets is still the best comic in the world. 

Do I really need all that?

After moving away for a year, putting a bunch of stuff into storage, and then coming back and moving it out again into a new space under the new house, I've been given a real perspective on how many things I actually need to hold on to.

My comic, magazine and book collection has always been an unwieldy thing, but it really does feel a bit out of control right now, and it needs some harsh pruning. I do this every few years, and it's been a while since the last time, and I'm feeling particularly ruthless with this purge.

Culling the collection, figuring out what really matters. I should not be having so much fun doing this.

But it took me years to complete a full collection of the generally excellent Shade The Changing Man comics by Peter Milligan and his pals, but do I need all 70+ issues? I'll read them again for another concentrated dose, and then they're gone. I'll shift them on in bulk, giving somebody else the chance to inhale all the Meta madness in one go.

I certainly don't need all the Kick Ass comics I have - it's some of John Romita Jr's finest mayhem, but nothing much more than that. But I'm also starting to realise that I don't need all the Groo and Sgt Rock comics I've got, even though they are all of consistently high quality. 

Because as good as they are, and they are really good, there is a certain amount of repetition. Groo really only has one joke, and it's a great joke that can play out in an infinite variety of situations, but I don't need all of it to hand, and just a few choice examples would do. I've got about half of the Groo comics they've put out, which must be well over 200 issues by now, and that's a  lot of jokes about cheese dip. 

And the mild pacifism and propelling thrills of the Sgt Rock comics have the same kind of delicious repitition, and I've got another 100 of them, and really only need a dozen. So I've gone through and picked those 12 out out, partly because they have particularly good stories, but mainly because they have nostalgic value, or just really good Joe Kubert covers.

I'm not getting rid of any of my Unknown Soldier or Enemy Ace comics, of course. I'm not crazy.

The biggest chunk of the collection that is already destined for a new home is the past 20 years of  Empire mags, as previously mentioned. I've picked some of them out too - I'm not getting rid of the one issue I got on my first ever trip to London - and my mate Kyle is getting every one with an X-Men cover, because that's his thing.

There's piles and piles of other comics that can go - I've come to the realisation that I don't need any of the Hellboy comics after his properly mythic adventures in the underworld, and I definitely don't need all those Warren Ellis comics that I thought I had already ditched.

It took me many, many years to realise I couldn't collect everything, and only needed to keep the stuff that actually met something to me, one way or the other. Sharpening your collection is surprisingly fun and good for the soul, when there is always more to cull.

Maybe I don't need quite so much Unknown Soldier.

Fighting with Frank (part 4 of 13): Must try harder next time.

- Multiversity: Pax Americana #1
Art by Frank Quitely
Story by Grant Morrison
Colors by Nathan Fairbairn
Letters by Rob Leigh

My life is my own

I don't know much about poetry, just a few lines from random epics have cling to the inside of my brain, but most of it has been pushed out by the desperate need to know who was in the New Warriors.

But the words of Number 6, and even the order he lists his demands, is seared into my soul forever, man. I don't know much about poetry, but I know it when I see it.

21st century Radiohead (through the CDs in the car)

It's taken me a few decades, but I think I'm finally ready for 21st century Radiohead.

I will always regret the fact that I missed a very early Radiohead concert at a South Island pub that all my best mates went to, but it took me a while longer to get onboard. The first album was 20 percent too whiny for me at that time of my life, and The Bends was lots of fun, but it was the eerie way that OK Computer felt like it was beamed in from the future - even with the odd duff song - hooked me in.

And that enthusiasm carried on to the next few albums, but then I dropped away, and have barely listened to the past three or four albums.

There was no conscious reason for this, I still liked the band as much as I ever did, I just never quite got around to it. I still always enjoyed the singles, but it was the full esoteric breadth of the albums that somehow put me off.

Fortunately, we still live in the 1980s here in my corner of the arse end of the planet, and still have CD players in our cars, so when there's nothing good on the radio - or when they sync up their ads to all run at the same time - we play a CD. I don't have the very modern laziness of not wanting to keep changing the discs, so if one goes on, it needs to be something I can listen to a lot, and the past few Radiohead albums are good for that

I'm also a bit over the playlist thing, and just crave full albums, and I need ones I don't get sick of after a couple of listens during the week. And I've been listening to In Rainbows, and Hail to the Thief, and even the most 'difficult' songs make an easy soundtrack for driving around town, and I can listen to them over and over again, in a way I haven't listened to albums since I was a teenager.

I still don't know what they're on about in a lot of these songs, and I'm still struggling with some of them, but I'm not skipping through anything. If I can listen to Throbbing Gristle enough times to find the beauty in Hamburger Lady, I can handle Pyramid Song.

There are rumours of a new project from the Radiohead crew, and I don't know much about that, but if they do, maybe I can get into it before we get too much closer to the 22nd century. Or maybe I'll just save it till then.

The money cliché: We're better than that

We've all got those moments in movies that hit us the wrong way  - clichés that never fail to bug you and take you out of the movie. Sometimes it's when the movie is trying to depict something you have personal knowledge of - it never fails to bother me how movies think daily news journalism actually works - and sometimes it's saying something small about the world we live in, and getting it weirdly wrong.

And while there's loads of cinematic clichés that really annoy with their ubiquity, the one that always bothers me is where someone -  usually in some kind of serious crime business - throws armfuls of money up in the air,  and everybody loses their minds trying to grab it so our protagonist can make an easy getaway.

It's like the sight of money drives people crazy, but if you drop something in real life and somebody grabbed it and walked away, you'd consider that theft, and rightly so.

Like, there might be the thrill of free money over-ruling all rationality, but it's not free, you're just straight up stealing it, and with the predominance of cameras everyhwere in your life, you could get prosecuted for a few measly bucks, which seems risky.

When I've seen people accidentally drop their shit in the street, they haven't had to scoop it all up before human vultures descend on it. If anything, the vast majority of people nearby will want to help, because they genuinely want to. That's the kind of reality I see, not this silly cliché of animalistic fervor for dead presidents in the sky.

Actually, maybe Seto Thargo can be a thing again

If this blog leapfrogs the rest of the world's AI and somehow gains sentience, it'll have some wild mood swings, because my recent wailing at the difficulty of getting the new 2000ad and keeping the complete collection going may have been drokking premature.

After looking around the whole city for a good thrillpower dealer and failing miserably, I found a bookshop 20 minutes walk away that is run by a fellow Squaxx dek Thargo who is now my regular dealer, and has even filled in a little of the gap. But he is assuring me that I'll be able to get an issue every week, and the Meg every month and that's all I want.

Now I just got to resist the urge to get every issue of The Dark Side that he gets in. I've been reading that horror movie mag since 1992 and I can't believe it's still a thing.

High on rhinestones and wearing the best cocaine

My absolute favourite podcast in the world right now is Andrew Hickey's revelatory history of rock music through 500 songs, and it is so painstakingly researched, considered and presented that it can take weeks to get a new episode.

Any and all delays with the podcast are fine by me - complaining that creators take too long to produce your favourite stuff is so fucking crass - but I need to have something to listen to while doing the housework or wandering around the suburbs, and Hickey's regular shout-outs to Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine and Rhinestones podcast made it an obvious choice.

Both podcasts end each episode by talking about the importance of word of mouth to grow an audience, and it certainly worked in this case, because I am very much not a country music person, and would not have sought out something like this on my own. 

Even though I grew up around adults that loved the twang of country, I just don't know shit about that type of music. I always appreciate the ragged cowboys like Townes Van Zandt, and immortal voices like big Johnny Cash, but my knowledge wasn't ridiculously limited

But now I'm having a great time hearing about country stars I know nothing, and their weird and wonderful stories. It's all new to me.

Fuck, isn't that what we're here for? Isn't that why we're here on this planet? To learn new things, to gather new information and throw it into the churning infinite mass of your mind, and the less you know about the subject going, the more pours into your head, and shapes who you are in tiny ways.

Plus you get to learn how fucking evil Spade Cooley was, and gather further contempt for the fools who tried to rehabilitate his image.

There hasn't been a new episode since 2022, because the older I get, the longer it takes me to catch up with everyone else. But there is plenty of listening about country music and all its mysteries before Hickey does his next podcast, and learning of the glory of George Jones while doing the dishes.

Abandoned ideas still carry weight

I might be a mature and sophisticated 50-year-old now, but I'm still quietly fuming over Yoda's 'there is no try' thing. There are a lot of more important things to worry about in this fucked-up world of ours right now, but that doesn't change the fact that I still think that that little piece of snot is totally wrong.

I like to try, and keep trying, and there are things I don't give up on, because the effort is the thing. And ideas for creative endeavors might get abandoned, but that doesn't mean they're forgotten forever.

Sure, I might not finish the ratty unfinished novel that I found in a box under the new house the other day. Any digital versions of that novel were lost several computers ago, so it only exists on the paper I printed out at my office job in 1997, but it does still exist, and it is truly terrible.

The lack of any kind of plot might be an issue. It's about someone who is walking down the street one day, and then decides that nothing means anything and goes on a roaring rampage of violence and donuts. I got to the part where the Reservoir Dogs analogues show up (c'mon, it was the mid-90s) when it stopped, but it took about 30,000 words to get that far. And I'm never going to finish that.

I found this tatty thing in the bottom of a box of stuff that I've lugged around for decades and inexplicably held onto (although I did deeply enjoy the surprisingly deep analysis of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol that I printed off that same work computer in 1997 that was slightly stuck to pages of the unfinished novel), and that box had all sorts of writings I'd done over the years

Apart from the 20 years of journalism, which is responsible for tens of thousands of stories, articles and assorted essays, I haven't been published very much, but I've never let being an abject failure of a human being stop me from trying, and I've start to write dozens of things with great eagerness, only to lose the thread and move on to something else.

There's a movie script I did about a black ops kill squad infected by empathy that will forever be two-thirds done, or the bright idea I had 20 years ago for a story featuring Hannibal Lecter in 1840s New Zealand, and never got more than a handful of pages into.

But you never abandon these ideas, they never go away. I never stopped thinking about that last one, and have recently been inspired  to actually do that last one as a rip-roaring pulp novel (the epiphany that led to this desire to finish it was that the story needed 100 percent more Wulf Sternhammer).

I still haven't given up on the sequel to The Man From LOVE - which features lots of vampires and lots of time-travel, because I like stories about vampires and I like stories about time travel. I'm almost exactly halfway through a three-novel series about the city of Auckland that might take another 10 years to finish, and I haven't added to that in a few months, but came up with another idea for a chapter for the third book at the local park the other day, and I do need to get that down someday. 

There's also unrealised ambitions to write Judge Dredd and Doctor Who stories which nobody needs to know about, and I've had plenty of ideas around that, and have been making them over and over in my head, with just a few scraps committed to the written word

Actually, my Doctor Who ideas might make a decent post for the blog in the future, so maybe I will share my thoughts on The Second Life of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Because as much as I like to abandon things, this here blog is the one creative strand that keeps on going, and keeps on giving.

And now I'm here, years and years later, and I'm still thinking about how I'd end that first novel, even though I never will write another word, I wonder where that first character went, all the way into homicidal indifference at the norms of society. My brain goes places, and sometimes I follow it, and sometimes I like to let it get away from me.

Fighting with Frank (part 3 of 13): You can probably stop doing that now.

- New X-Men #114
Pencils by Frank Quitely

Inks by Tim Townsend
Story by Grant Morrison
Colors by Brian Haberlin
Letters by Richard Starkings

There was only one Servalan in the galaxy

There is a lot of talk about how quickly the people of the Star Wars galaxy memory-hole the Jedi after the Empire cracks down on them, becoming a galactic legend with a smuggler's lifetime.

But hell, I could handle the way the entire galaxy in Blake's 7 pretends Commissioner Sleer in the later seasons isn't obviously the mighty Servalan, as if there were two homicidally ambitious women with that fashion sense and that haircut. 

I'm still a little confused why she had to go through that deception, but even in the near infinite diversity of a future civilisation, there could only ever be one Jacqueline Pearce.

If I lost you would I cry - Changing my mind on music

I used to get so mad about music, and just so very angry that the loud, intense and moody stuff I was into wasn't topping the charts.

When you're a teenager, music can feel like the most important thing in the world, and combined with all those adolescent hormones, there is always going to be some kind of audio obsession. 

I just always liked it big and loud, with the heaviest rap beats and the sharpest guitar riffs. But I came of musical age in the late eighties, and that was the era of soft and fluffy pop songs. The hardest thing you got was Michael Jackson's Bad posturing, and the only guitar bands that troubled the charts were full on hair metal.

I hated it so much, hated Phil Collins, and Sade, and the New Kids on the Block, and all of them.

It took me years to get over my own prejudices, and longer still to really see how fucking stupid it was,. Sometimes I hear those old songs on some golden oldie station playing at the supermarket, and I can't deny that it has got a funky beat. Even something I considered at the time to be the most annoying song in the world still brings joy to the world. 

And while singers like Whitney Houston and Tina Turner were obviously deadset legends - I always thought Tina was fucking magnificent in Beyond Thunderdome - their music was so ubiquitous in my corner of the world, in that space of time, that I hated it with everything I had. 

Why weren't people listening to Iron Maiden, for Eddie's sake?

As a mellower old fart, I can get past this adolescent stupidity, and see this music for the brilliance it is. There was a time in my life that if I heard Whitney's 'I Will Always Love You' one more rime, I would rip my ears off, and now it's a pleasantly bombastic ballad, while the memories of Tina Turner's music being ubiquitous before rugby league games that I can recognise River Deep Mountain High as one of the greatest songs in the history of forever.

I'm glad I grew out of that self-importance, and all that sneering, just gives me more to enjoy, and more to groove to around the local supermarket. It wasn't the music that changed. It was always great.

Sports betting needs to get away from me

I gave up reading books on futurism, because they were all convinced that algorithms know me better than they know myself, and one day they might, but today is not that day. We're not even close, and sometimes it feels like the algorithms that drive the few social channels and advertising recommendations I get thrust in front of me are aggressively running away from me. 

Because after three decades on the internet, and two decades of blogging and social media, I still keep getting served ads for sports betting, something I absolutely loathe with every fibre of my being. I've been yelling in the digital void for half my life long, and all I'm getting back is stuff I legitimately can't stand. How does that even work?

I'm not opposed to the concept of sports betting, one of the small pleasures in life is putting $20 down with your mate on a big game, giving it all a bit of spice, especially when the chances are the winner is just gonna buy beers for everybody anyway. 

But the corporate sucking up of this disposable income - promising massive riches through astronomical odds - does real harm with no goddamn benefit, and we've got enough of that in the world, right? There is a mountain of evidence that this shit does actual harm to people, but it's tolerated and encouraged, and I fucking hate it.

And yet, every second podcast I listen to thinks that this is something that I would be into, and throws it in my face in every inserted advertisement. 

I'm just not that into it. I'm just not a betting person,. We visited Vegas once and I bet $5 on a Star Wars slot machine at the airport on the way out, and that was as far as my gambling went (all that opulence, all clearly hoovered straight up out of the pockets of the marks who flocked for the cheap buffets).

The idea of targeted ads does have some appeal - maybe show me the books and movies and music I'm actually interested in buying, and might not know about. But no, instead I'm being told to constantly get my bet on, like all the other fucking rubes.

We're finished. All of us.

When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can't do that, you're like some animal. You're finished. We're finished. All of us.

Sam Peckinpah could be a mean and ornery old drunk, but 56 years ago he showed us all that he knew what had actual worth in life with a far greater moral clarity than the people who lead his dustbowl of a nation in the year 2025. Sam would curse them all to hell.

A letter to Empire

Dear Empire Magazine,

It's not you, it's me. It's been a journey, and I think it's over now, and I think it's time we went our seperate ways.

When we first met in the mid-90s, you were the sexiest movie magazine on the shelves, and you had some proper competition at that time. Movieline had the steamiest covers, and Premiere had the big stars, but Empire had the passion for good cinema, and while you still came with the patent lust for beautiful movie stars, you were the first place I heard of thousands of great films.

And I've got you every month since then, as best I could. There were the years when your Australian cousin came in and muscled in on the action, driving your right and proper UK edition right out of the local market altogether, but I've I've kept up by subscribing for more than a decade now. 

Even then, I usually miss two issues a year, and I used to complain about it and the subscription people were very nice and always sent out a replacement, but sometimes that replacement disappeared too, and that was that. There would always be holes in this long collection, as much as I've held onto every issue I ever got.

But it's always been an absolute goddamn delight when I have got my hands on a new issue. Finding out what's coming up, reading the latest reviews (and the inevitable disappointment at seeing how many promising films turned out to be mediocre), and getting some proper cinematic history - there have been some great articles about ancient Hollywood history in the past few years. I still try to guess the spine quote every time, dig the regular Kim Newman column, and always read the last scene.

And there have been things that have been annoying - the tedious podcast banter spreading into full articles, the way some reviews are relegated to online only - (I still have the issues that will tell me if 1991's Shattered was any good, but online reviews from a decade ago are pure vapor.)

I thought I could handle all that, and all those missing issues, but it's the holding onto them that has broken the magic. Hundreds of big bulky issues breathlessly excited about the latest Harry Potter movie or Star Wars TV show, and while every issue has a gem of an article or a review, it's a lot to hold onto.

So I'm abandoning most of the Empires I have held onto for more than 30 years now. I'll sell them for dirt cheap so some other young movie nerd can soak up all this cinematic data. I don't need to any more.

And I think I'm abandoning the regular issues, because I haven't seen a new one in three months now. I'm not sure my attempts to change my address have really stuck, and if nobody else cares enough to rectify the situation, I don't know why I should care about getting the magazine anymore.

It's not a clean break, I'll probably get the odd issue if I see one in a random magazine store or something (which hasn't happened in years now), and I'm still holding onto most of the 90s issues I got, because I imprinted on them hard.

I know I'm never getting rid of that one issue that was Bard Pitt's first cover. Those eyes still slay me. But it's time to move on.

Thanks for the memories, Empire.

Love,

Bob

The random bookcase

My poor wife hates moving house, she finds it frustrating on an existential level, and enormously tiring. I understand completely where she is coming from, and when she tells me how much it sucks, I still bite my tongue and don't tell her how much I find it tremendously exciting, no matter how hard it gets.

She doesn't need to hear that. That won't help anybody.

But I do secretly love it, because it's a chance to redo all the bookshelves, to sort them out in new and interesting configurations. I fucking live for that shit. 

I have put hours of thought and labout into organizing my bookshelves. I find it very calming, and very relaxing. If something isn't quite right on the shelves, if a book is in the wrong place - and it's always obvious - I have to remedy it as soon as humanly possible.  Sometimes I order them on a thematic level, other parts are by author, and most of the time it's by size, and whatever fits. 

And our recent move back to the big city has seen a complete revamp of the bookshelf space in our house, and I am very much into it. The new place has loads of storage space, so I've been able to get all my 2000ads and Empire magazines out of our rented storage unit, and air out some books that have sat in a banana box for a decade now. 

There are dozens of boxes, and I've proper fucked my arms lifting them around, but I've also stashed them all away in the old concrete room downstairs, for easy access. And I'm taking my time going through them, and deciding which of them are bookshelf worthy, and which can go back in the box.

I've got all the worries in the world hanging over my head, just like everybody else, but it doesn't matter when I'm digging out all the BPRD comics I haven't read since 2012. I have no idea what happens in each individual issue. It's all the fun of getting new books, without spending any money on them.

But I'm taking my time sorting out the main bookshelves, the ones my lovely wife got for me exactly 10 years ago. As I slowly bring the boxes up from their concrete tomb, I start by shoving all the books wherever they will fit, and slowly organising them over the next few weeks, months and years.

It's not just the aesthetics of the thing, it's the personal nostalgia, sorting out the books stirs up all sorts of terrific memories when I'm reminded of their existence - every book on that bookcase blew my fucking mind when I first read it, and I can still feel the embers of that cultural explosion in my head. It lingers.

And I'm definitely shallow enough to also have a deep emotional connection to the Alice in Sunderland and Art of Grendel books that I bought during our days of international travel. We don't travel so much any more, but those books can take me anywhere.

But I have worlds and universes on those bookshelves, that are slowly taking shape, in their right and proper way.

Fighting with Frank (part 2 of 13): I can't hear you laughing.

- Missionary Man: Bad Moon Rising

Art by Frank Quitely

Story by Gordon Rennie

Letters by Annie Parkhouse

I missed you, Jeff!

Sometimes, when you've listened to a regular podcast where the hosts talk about their personal tastes and private lives for a long time, you can feel a little bereft when it suddenly ends, and you're left wondering what happened to them, or even how they're doing, and even though the person you've been listening to for years has no idea who you are or if you even exist, you desperately want to know if they are doing okay, and while you might follow them to a substack, or on social media, those things have a habit of disappearing, and when they do, they're gone. 

And then sometimes, just sometimes, you find them on a new social media account, and while it might not be the same, it's heartening to know they're still out there doing their thing, and haven't faded away into the great tapestry of the world. 

Respect for the Beasties

The Beastie Boys were obviously a joke band., everybody knew that back in 1987.  Fight for Your Right had the adolescent glee of youth, and really felt like one of the many novelty songs of the period, certainly nothing more important than other eighties tunes like Didn't You Kill My Brother, or Shaddap You Face. A minor trifle that gives you a laugh, but certainly nothing more than that.

But the Beasties turned out to be so much more than that, of course. They quickly became aware of the fact that being an ironic douchebag is all well and good, but you're still a douchebag, and they went off in strange new directions. This was enormously successful, with some inspired lyrical wordplay, remarkable sampling and some massively fat beats.

And, most of all for me, they did something that so few people seem capable of these days, and they  admitted they had been wrong, and actually apologized for their youthful stupidity. They have said sorry so many times for the way they treated Kate S, and so they fucking should. 

It's hard enough for a loser like me to admit I'm wrong about something, it takes some fucking balls to do it when you've sold 20 million records.

Yauch has been gone 13 years now. How fucked up is that? There's been no more Beastie goodness since then, although there have been some lovely retrospectives. But the three year old in the house thinks Body Movin' is totally bitching, so while they did some dumb shit, they also made some art that lasts, man.