Dunk and Egg all the way

Even with such strong source material from George R R Martin, it's been a sheer fucking delight to see how thrilling and entertaining the Dunk and Egg TV show has been. 

It has the kind of perfect casting that has been the secret strength of all the Game of Thrones shows, while fleshing out characters by seeing them sing and drink and fight and fuck - the Laughing Storm finally comes across as a real person, not just a convenient plot point.

And it's a show gets straight to the point, with a laser focus on a far smaller cast of characters than anything else in Westeros, and is all the richer for it. There are still depths, especially once they really get into the whole Blackfyre thing - there is a monstrous amount of history and battles and romances lurking behind the simple story of Ser Duncan and his squire Egg.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has already been renewed for a second season, but my hope is that they keep going past the end of the third novella that has been published so far. The large picture has been there in the various histories of Westeros for some time, enough for the television version to tell many of those stories that fill in the gaps with some certainty.

Prose is always better - I am a book man, first and foremost - but why not show what happens in Winterfell when they finally get up there; or the story of young Prince Duncan and Jenny of Oldstones; or the fight between the Laughing Storm in his rage and the Hedge Knight in his duty? Why not go and meet young Maester Aemon - arguably the greatest character in all the song of ice and fire - in his prime; or go all the way up to Dunk's final moments, saving Jon Snow's dad from the flames that consume some of the greatest of Targaryens. 

We will, of course, miss the interior thoughts and ideals inside Dunk's head that you get with Martin's marvelous novellas, but you can see it all on Peter Claffey's giant jaw, and I hope we see a lot more of it in the coming years.

The story behind the Image

I can remember where I was when big news events were happening, like the Challenger explosion, or the underarm bowling shenanigans, and I remember exactly where I was when I found out that Rob Liefeld was leaving Image Comics.

It was a few months after it actually happened, because there was no internet, and news about comic artists did not make the local papers or the six o'clock TV news. I only found out about it when I read the article in the latest Wizard magazine, a month or two after it happened. I saw the news while me and my mates were on a Christchurch mission, eating bread rolls and drinking chocolate milk beside the Avon River.

I know exactly where I was because I had been absolutely fascinated by all the stories behind Image Comics, far more than I was by the comics themselves.

I was certainly primed for Image - the Lee/Liefeld/Mcfarlane years at Marvel were all in my early teens, and I thought they were all magnificent - Jim Lee in particular made a huge impression. But I missed the boat completely when they all jumped ship and formed their own company - there was no comic shop near me, and the internet hadn't quite arrived, so all I knew about these comics were the articles in months-old magazines.

So the comics never meant much to me. I later bought the ones where they got someone like Alan Moore involved, but 95 percent of the Image output was actively off-putting by the time I saw them regularly on the shelves - they were some of the most rancid looking comics I'd ever seen.

I still think what happened at Image broke a lot of the arguments that the very smart people The Comics Journal had been making for years - that all creators needed was full control over their work and then they would produce heartbreaking art of staggering genius - and when that happened to the biggest artists of the day, they just added more guns and spikes and pouches.

So it's not like the comics meant anything to me, but the personalities behind them all were absolutely bonkers, and far more entertaining. The interviews I read with the Image founders might have been months old, but they were exciting and bold and brash.

When they ditched Marvel, it felt cataclysmic, in a way that was weirdly optimistic and earned. By then everybody knew how artists had been screwed over for decades, with the creators of Superman treated appallingly by a company that made billions out of their ideas. To see the power shift so dramatically was something to behold, and while it only lasted a few years before the big two companies reasserted their traditional dominance, this was something new.

When the first hints of them got through to me, it sounded fucking great. The trash talk of youth translated to my favourite medium. The artist taking on the suits, and starting a whole new line of comics. There had certainly been other comics publishers outside DC and Marvel, but most of them had vanished by the time the Image juggernaut got moving - Dark Horse hung in there with some excellent licensed comics - and none of them had the raw power that Image did.

All the optimism was soon tempered by generally dire quality of the comics, and the late books and non-arrivals, and the new talent they brought in to rush through the books who produced art that were mostly dire imitations of the superstars, artwork that satisfied nobody.

I bought a small handful of Image comics in the first few years, and they were pretty dull and ugly, but I never tired of that trash talk, and then some of them were sniping at each other, and then Liefeld was out, as I discovered on a Saturday afternoon by the river. The drama died down, and by the time Lee cut ties to go and do his thing at DC, most of the excitement around Image was gone.  

To everybody's credit, the company persevered and evolved over the years, and while it still makes some bone-headed moves, it has also produced a mountain of great comics in the past 30 years - less big cyborgs with guns, more heart-wrenching sagas with a very specific twist - and I've enjoyed more Image comics in the past decade than ever before.

Some of the comics are so good, I've even enjoyed them more than the stories behind the scenes, like the cheapness over a plane ticket that cost Marvel their superstar Jim Lee. But whenever a retrospective on that era is published, or one of those beautiful loudmouths gets on a podcast, I'm there to hear all the old stories of a seismic moment in the industry, when anything was possible. That potential might have failed to reach expectations, but it still gave us a hell of a lot of drama. 

Werewolf Jones & Sons Deluxe Summer Fun Annual: Hick!

- Werewolf Jones & Sons Deluxe Summer Fun Annual #1 

by Simon Hanselmann and Josh Pettinger

You think it's funny? - I hear Joe Strummer's words in my head every day

Joe Strummer was a true troubadour - he grinded new sounds out of his guitar, had a pleasing devotion to the magic of a campfire, and wrote genius lyrics that will live forever.

Sometimes he was just showing off - it's not enough that (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais soars to undreamed musical heights, it's also the story about hitting the clubs that has two pieces of lyric that are among the greatest ever written - the one about turning rebellion into money, surely the most righteous sneer I've ever heard on a record, and then he's talking about how they'd send a limousine for Hitler and it's still resonant, still smart, still so angry.

We should all mourn the loss of Joe, we can only dream of the songs he could have written about the last two decades of bullshit, but at least he left us with tonnes of small wisdom, sometimes in the same song.

Shifty: This is another story about rational control

I'm usually right on top of the new Adam Curtis films, but it took me six months to see there was a new project out there in the world. Once I was made aware of Shifty, I watched it all as quickly as humanly possible. You should too, because Curtis's films are always good.

I always think of them as essay films, with Curtis sometimes making wild leaps in deduction to bring separate events together under a common theme, just enough to push them out of straight documentary territory. But the hidden connections he finds in the world are always well argued and presented, and make some strange sense of the white noise of modern culture.

You always know what you are going to get - unearthed archive footage that is almost poetic, beams of light in dark rooms, rampant individualism making everything worse, and the great institutions of the world  giving up power to new money in the name of rational ideas, and seeing it pissed all away.

As bad as the world is now, there are also some reminders of how awful the good old days could be - the footage of the cops interrogating a rape victim is really hard to watch, because they really are unbelievable cunts. 

Some of the footage is so on the nose that it's hilarious - Princess Diana locked outside while the establishment party within; or a leering Jimmy Saville taking a bunch of quiet kids inside Thatcher's office. But it's also possible to be heartbroken by an elephant losing its soulmates, or buoyed by the fury of old soldiers who saw their complex pasts reduced to basic jingoism.

My favourite bit of film is the part where it captures all the girls looking incredibly unimpressed at the air guitar club in the 1980s. Those poor, poor girls. 

I do miss Curtis' narration, mainly because I really like the way he says 'rational' and 'control', but there is still an easy narrative to follow. And Shifty also comes with a pleasing amount of self reflection in its closing moments, admitting to the manipulation in the five films you have just watched.

Curtis is no hypocrite, just self aware enough to see what he is doing. It is informative, enraging, incredibly entertaining and occasionally moving. Just like life.

Bane is lying!

There are a lot of weird politics in Nolan's Batman films, and the relative complexity of the films are still very blunt and obvious.

But the idea that Bane actually stands for the little guy, against the corrupt oligarchy, and is a direct criticism of justifiable protest action - that one still grinds my gears. 

He's Bane! he's lying! He's using that righteous anger as a weapon, but he doesn't actually believe the shit he says. He's just another hateful ogre, using the usual brute force for his own goals, and he doesn't care who he has to sacrifice to achieve his monstrous goals.

You can't trust Bane!

The various Occupy movements were still happening when this film was released, and I can see how easy it is to see this silly Batman movie as a criticism of them, but it felt like more of a warning. Even as the protest movement's methods and infrastructure were co-opted by selfish, shallow fools, that doesn't mean their aims and goals were foolish -  making the world a better place is always a noble idea.

Politeness is not getting us far in this world, and it may take the guillotines before we get any real social change, but Bane is not doing that. He stands for nihilism and the void, and just wants to burn the world down, not build a new one. 

He had one of the great voices in modern cinema - anyone who complains that hey can't understand his mumbling is a total wiener - but Bane wasn't interested in making the world a better place, he just wanted to terrorise it. Any fool can see that.

This is the way the world works, with Tyranny Rex

2000ad has informed most of my politics over my life - much of my rage at the unfairness of the modern political and capitalist system was stoked by Pat Mills alone - and this one small sequence by John Smith and Steve Dillon, featuring new character sensation Tyranny Rex being sentenced to death for illegal cloning by a corrupt judge with a wedge of cash on his desk, informed a lot.

Much of my opinion on the modern judiciary can be traced to that last panel. 

You can't be a spectator - Thirteen observations from a Pulp concert in the year 2026

1) Jarvis has still got it.

2) Seriously, Jarvis Cocker has been getting up on stage for nearly 50 years now, and he knows how to work a crowd. He knows what shapes he can make in front of a blazing screen, he knows when to strategically deploy his arse wriggle, and the things he does with his hands can not be replicated by any other human being.

3) He can also bend like a motherfucker. 

4) I've been hoping to see Pulp live for more than 30 years ago, and they didn't disappoint, with a powerful and moving experience. It was everything I could have asked for, and so much more.

5) It was a very sensible gig - there was a 15 minute interval, and Jarvis threw tea bags into the crowd, and managed to make someone sitting in a comfy armchair look truly epic.

6) Bands that return to the stage after decades away can obviously be just phoning it in, but even with a few more wrinkles and a lot more grey hair up there, this felt like a band at their absolute peak.

7) Their brand new song - Begging For Change - was loud and fast and angry and very impressive, this is still definitely a band with something to say.

8) That new tune is coming out on a new War Child compilation, and that's the first I've heard of that, and I will most definitely be buying that on CD when I see it. That one that came out in 1995 was a game changer for me.  

9) At least half of the people who work in my office were there at the show - it's music for nerds and we are all very definitely nerds in public radio.

10) You can be 10m away from some dipshit letting off a flare in a crowded space and not even notice, because who looks backwards at a concert? 

11) There may have been a taste of AI in the background projections, especially since the band has dabbled in it recently, but it only lasted a second.

12) I was tempted by the Pulp beach towel in the merchandise trailer, but $70 was taking the piss.

13) I was not at all tempted by the white underwear under the glass. They didn't even have a price tag on that.

* All pictures taken by my mates Nik Dirga and Chris Walker, who made a great night even better

Forty hours of blank tape was the best Christmas present I'd ever got

I had no idea what I was going to do with 40 hours of blank video tape, but I was pretty sure this was the best goddamn Christmas present I had ever received in my entire young life.

When it comes to presents from Santa, there had been a few crackers in my childhood - some wonderful slot car sets, the occasional beloved Star Wars figure, some Fighting Fantasy books that got heavy use and my wonderful Grifter bicycle - but the 10 four-hour blank video tapes I got for Christmas 1988 was something special.

Blank tapes were a very important part of my life for several years. They were expensive as hell, and I made the absolute most out of every minute.  Most of them were three hours long, which was slightly frustrating when I couldn't quite get two films on a tape. 

Sometimes you'd fit two on perfectly - I did get both Bill & Teds and two Texas Chainsaw Massacres into the 180 minutes, with minutes to spare - but even if I couldn't get two films, I used up all the space with treasured episodes of TV shows and music videos.

And then it's 1988 and I was 13 and my big Christmas present for the year was a small box filled with 10 E-240 tapes. And even though I was going through the usual teenage dramas, this was proof that my parents still knew me, because this felt like a gift from heaven.  

Just a few years earlier I was spending all my Christmas money on a $15 blank tape because Star Wars was playing for the first time on TV, and I could tape it and watch it as many times as I liked, something that had been unimaginable for much of my childhood. While they were steadily getting cheaper - you could get tapes for $5.99 at the DEKA store in town - I still only had half a dozen tapes of my own when I suddenly had 40 hours to fill.

It took me a few months, but I soon managed to get copies of the best films in the world onto those tapes. With ample room for two films on every tape, I could get my own copies of 20 films, an unimaginably large amount for my young cinematic tastes. 

Most of them I taped off the TV - Psycho was one of the first films to get recorded - and then we somehow ended up with two VCR machines, and I could make my own copies of anything at the video store, and might have gone a bit crazy.

There have been several generations of new entertainment technology come and go since then, but I still have a couple of those long tapes, and the capacity to play them. I have those films in far greater quality, but there is a comfort in the warm fuzz of video tape, back when everything wasn't so sharp, and when a pile of blank tape was everything.

Sgt Rock: There he is.

- Sgt. Rock #422

Art, colors and letters by Joe, Andy and Adam Kubert

Written by Robert Kanigher

It ain't white boy day, is it?

True Romance was cool and slick and exactly what we all needed when we were stuck waiting for Pulp Fiction - the leads have never been more smokin' hot, the face-off between Walken and Hopper is so beautifully played and shot that if it wasn't for the deeply problematic conversation, it would arguably the greatest scene in history; and this is the movie where Brad Pitt became a true star without getting off the fuckin' sofa. 

But Gary Oldman's Drexl Spivey blows them all away - literally in the case of Samuel L Jackson - with an absolutely magnetic performance, and you can't turn away from watching the worst person in the fucking world go about his awful business.

In a just civilisation, there would have been 20 films where Drexl shows up, does his shit, and gets shot in the face by the main character. I can only assume we have failed as a culture and a society.

He just gets under my skin

There's something about the part in Sweatshop #5- written and drawn by Peter Bagge - where one of the miscreants in that vastly under-loved comic sets Neil Gaiman's pants on fire, and it's a moment which hits very differently in the year 2026, than when it was first published in 2003.

Gaiman's trousers are still on fire at the end of the story, and nobody seems to care, so I can only assume he's still burning away now.  

That cultural hole is getting bigger

The cultural hole around the start of this century is only getting bigger. We were all promised that once everything went online, it would be available forever, and that was such a dirty lie.

Websites go down, or fade away, and so much has been lost, and plenty of essays and articles have just vanished. There are too many stories of writers who have lost years of work because the sites they were writing for instantly vanished as the cash ran out. 

It's just so much easier to find out about comics culture from 1985 than it is for 2005. There were tonnes of professional mags and endless amounts of fanzines put out 40 years ago that are still kicking around. Ephemera that was printed out and distributed far and wide, and chucked in a box and rediscovered and kept because they are echoes of youth lost, but also filled with incidents and weird feuds and sheer data.

All that enthusiasm that went into these gorgeous little things didn't fade away, it just got given more platforms online and exploded out into the world. Instead of late night stapling parties, they're making videos for a bewildering amount of social media and working for geek websites.

And then those sites lose funding, and things on social media get drowned and forgotten (or more likely, never even seen as the algorithm continues to make horrendously bad decisions about what actually interests people), and trying to find information about things that came out 20 years ago is so much harder than finding data from 40 years ago.

So while the enthusiasms that were printed out 40-50 years ago can still be picked up for a couple of bucks at random comic stores and flea markets, more recent delights have vanished forever, and won't ever be haunting any old bookstores. The hole has eaten them all up instead.

It was a gas.

Blondie's Heart of Glass is one of the earliest music videos I ever remember seeing, and I still find it disturbing in a way I can never properly articulate. There's the sparseness of the tune, Debbie Harry's soaringly high voice, the minimal movements of the band - it all just makes me feel like a tiny kid again and truly creeps me out. 

Nobody else might be disturbed by how shiny her lip gloss is, but it takes me back to a time when the world was scary and unknowable, and I'm afraid I have not learned as much as I would like since then.

Love and Rockets: Grandma Dynamite

Maggie is getting old. 

We're all getting old, but we don't see it in the mirror, we see it on the faces of our loved ones. When you hit a significant milestone, it's no big deal, but when your little sister gets there, it's an entropic stab in the heart.

And after following Maggie and her story in Jaime Hernadez's staggeringly brilliant Locas comics for so, so long, you can see the weight of the years on her back as she sits in the doctor's office on the cover of the latest issue of Love and Rockets, waiting for some results.

She's at that age where she's wondering what's it all about, and maybe superheroes and other dreams aren't real and she just has to face life without them, but Maggie also sees an impossible figure in the clouds during a flight to see a dying parent. 

It's so far away you can't tell if it's falling to earth or rising into the sky. But it's definitely there, even if nobody else can see it. 

There's also the first mention of Penny Century in an age in this story, and maybe she finally got her wish and ascended to the heights of superpowers, and is checking in on her magpie. Or maybe Maggie is just seeing things. 

And maybe Ray and the foghorn were always meant to be together, and that's why they can't sit together for more than 10 seconds before tearing into each other. But they're meant to be together in the same way Maggie and Hopey should be, and it's just not going to happen.

There's always a lot of beautiful maybes whenever a new issue of Love and Rockets come out, and it's always worth to linger over them, especially when they never turn out like you expect.

The collection dissolves

I found another one of those existentially troubling collections at a favourite second hand bookstore recently. While they grant the opportunity to bulk out my own collection with rare delights, they still always give me the shits. 

There was a pile of The Dark Side and Fortean Times back issues, and a large amount of Edgar Rice Burroughs material, particularly Tarzan and all those various off-shots. There were a lot of early Warhammer books, and the first dozen or so Wild Cards anthologies.

It all showed up quite suddenly at the same time, and felt like it all belonged to the same tastes, slightly to the side of mine, with enough overlap to be interesting. All these books and magazines most certainly came from a distinct perspective, and the bulk of it suggested an estate sale, sold off as quickly as possible with little care for the finer details.

I've consolidated my own collection in recent weeks, and it's a lot of stuff. Vast piles of The Comic Journal, every single issue of everything from the Justice League International and Legion 5YL days. I can't help but wonder what will happen to it.

I don't care who makes money off my own collection when I leave this world. I would like to just give it all away, but I do have a family who deserve to get something out of my lifelong obsession for more nerd stuff. Even if they get cents on the dollar, I'd be glad to pass it on to them to dispose of it.

Sometimes I think... Sometimes I think I could just burn it all. But that feeling never really lasts.

Still, I did my part at the bookshop recently, and took home a few of those Dark Side and Fortean magazines to add to the small pile of other issues I have had for years, and filled some nagging holes in my Wild Cards and Phillip Jose Farmer books. 

And that's all I can hope for the issues of the New Warriors I've had in a handy box for 35 years. If they end up in a huge pile of other geek nonsense, I hope they find another home, in another collection, where they will be loved as much as I loved them.

The Witching Hour: What's going on?

- The Witching Hour (2000) #3 

Art by Chris Bachalo 

Inks by Art Thibert 

Words by Jeph Loeb 

Colours by Grant Goleash 

Letters by Richard Starkings

Valentine's Day with my boys

While I remain painfully heterosexual - I have had quite vivid dreams about getting it on with some extremely fit men which just left me cold and disappointed in myself - I can still recognise beauty in the male form, and have a few man crushes.

I have had a crush on Denzel Washington since the 80s, mainly because of the way he walks, and have happily transferred those affections on to the strut of his son. I did have a severe case of the Stathams for a number of years, but the unintentionally funnier he got, the less I was interested.

Tom Hardy is definitely a fave, but only specifically when he is tight and mean. Even more specifically, Dan Stevens is sex on legs in The Guest, and a twitchy weirdo in almost anything else. I feel stirrings down below in any film that features Scott Adkins doing one of his spinning double-drop kicks, but especially when he has a Russian accent (he doesn't kick anybody in the face in that recent film where he quite believably played Ben Affleck's brother, but he did look good in a suit).

There are dozens more - I would do anything Bruce Campbell ever told me to do, Richard E Grant could break me in two if he likes, and I'm going to my first comic convention in years soon because they've got the mighty Frank Grillo as a guest - and while I remain as boringly straight as ever, I can still appreciate the fineness.

How I deal with music festival announcements

One of the certainties in life as you get older is that you will see the line-up announcements for all the big music festivals, and you will recognise less and less of the names as time goes by, and you can feel your grip on the latest culture slipping away in real time.

It's okay. It's very normal. One day you'll look at the line-up for Coachella and be stoked that you recognise more than half a dozen names, and some festival will roll into your home town, and all the headline acts will be complete mysteries.

You can try your best to keep up with it all, but it slowly gets away on you.

I've found the best way to deal with it is to try to have fun with it, and I've found a guaranteed way of doing that - whenever I see the list of bands, I read them in my head as if they are being said by Alap Partridge.

It's very easy to do, even if the only person who can actually do the voice properly is the mighty Steve Coogan.  You can tell which ones would be read with Alan's baffled amusement, or just completely mangled by him. Even the most genuine and earnest band names can come out as hilarious with a dose of the Partridge absurdity. 

It doesn't make me any younger, but it turns a reminder of the unending grind of mortality into something a little bit funny, and I'll take that as a win.

I still have very strong feelings about Lobo

When you mix up universes, you don't get a lot of depth, but you do get some fun, and the backup stories in the recent Batman/Deadpool crossovers have been largely light and humorous affairs. There's not much more to say when you jam two characters with some vague connection - like magic or archery or being an animal - together in a five page story, other than 'look how cool it is to see these two dudes together', but at least they've got some fine artists doing their best to give you a good time.

Except for the bit with Logo - the amalgamated Lobo/Wolverine character - which was really fucking annoying, because I still have very strong feelings about Lobo.

Lobo is a heavy metal force of chaos, and the crazier his shit gets, the better it hits. I was genuinely appalled when they tried to make him more sleek and stylish a decade ago, and am happy to see they have walked Lobo back to his primal riff roots since then. 

So I'm a prime target for Lobo getting into some multiversal shenanigans in the new DC/Marvel crossovers, but then all they did was combine him with Wolverine, which is a real lowest common denominator kinda move.

For a starters, it's a stupid fucking name, which is much less wolf-ish and just makes me think of some stylised lettering. And he's really just Lobo with claws, which isn't very interesting. Wolverine is all restrained and civilised and honourable shit, and that gets steamrolled by Lobo's vicious anarchy, so it's all 'Bo and no Wolvie. (There's a reason the only successful amalgamated version of Lobo is when they combined him with Howard the Duck, because it's the absurdity, not the violence, that is the common factor there.)

And while there is little in the back-ups that resembles a proper story, the Logo bit just a gross attempt at post-credits titillation, and we all got sick of that shit a long time ago. Just have him bash against some angst ridden dweeb from the Marvel U. Don't water him down into a bad cover version.

Looks like masturbation is the winner on the day.

"Oh no! It's soft porn, the worst kind of porn of all! People who hate porn don't like it! People who love porn don't like it! What's the point?" - Wankrace 2001

The art that inspires

All my opinions on movies, TV, music, comics and art in general are as subjective as everybody else's, but one way I judge the relative merits of my entertainments is by finding out how personally inspiring they are - that they're such good pieces of art that they want me to go make my own.

The Velvet Underground were famously the band that only a few thousand people really listened to, but every single one of them went out and formed their own bands afterwards. I didn't get quite the same drive from the first night when I heard All Tomorrow's Parties, (although I instantly knew I would never do anything in my life that would be as delicate and beautiful as Pale Blue Eyes), but I have felt it in plenty of other places, and especially in my comics. 

It's no coincidence that the most prolific I ever was at writing fiction was in the 90s, when I wrote a disturbing amount of movie screenplays that had absolutely no chance of ever getting made, and when I was deep in my fan fiction days - pumping out thousands of fairly useless words a month for J Street adventures on the Never Ending Board at comicbookresources.com - and this was also when I was getting new issues of The Invisibles every month. 

Every issue of Grant Morrison's opus was a delight, I fell deeply for it all, and every time I finished a new issue, I just really wanted to do my own, and would write mountains of extraordinarily dorky copy. If I ever started to flag, I just read the Flex Mentallo mini series again, and would get going again. 

I was also hugely inspired by the Doctor Who New Adventures in the 90s, especially the more modern takes from happily enthusiastic amateurs, and the new books from the likes of Cornell, Orman, Miles and Parkin fuelled the fire.

Some authors inspire me in different ways - Kim Newman books make me want to write stories where everybody teams up with everyone to defeat everything, and James Ellroy books make me want to cut back on all the unnecessary words in my writing, and then go even further. 

Reading something great from a talented writer makes you want to write your own view of the world. It's just the way things work.

It comes through in all media, the vast soundscapes of Richard Wright's keyboards on Pink Floyd songs want me to sail into the infinite, and seeing Van Gogh at in the flesh makes me want to look at the world differently. 

In the world of cinema, all my favourite films make me want to go out and make movies, despite a severe lack of opportunities and a gross over-confidence in my own abilities. I still want to make something great when I see a Kubrick of a Coen Brothers film. Sergio Leone films always fire me up, and Morricone music will be playing while I'm writing anything for the next month, and the exact same thing used to happen when a new David Lynch came out, and I would go full Badalamenti for a month.

The single most inspiring piece of work was probably Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, which I saw on a trip to the US and was deeply inspired by, especially by Belladonna's haircut, and had an idea for a novel that I actually went and wrote. It took five years, but the premise, late twist and ending where all figured out before the end credits of that film rolled in early 2015.

I've been stuck halfway through the sequel to that story for a couple of years now, I really need to do a PTA binge to get things going again. Some of the old favourites still get those sickly-sweet creative juices flowing, and there is always something new to show the way.

Undead ashes in the wind: Whatever happened to Marvel’s vampire sleaze?

1. Marvel’s rare lunge for the jugular

It wasn't even a decade after Fantastic Four #1, and the House of Ideas was already flailing around for any good new ones. And while it did find a whole new audience with monochromatic sexiness on the cheapest newsprint, it still seems a little ashamed of its sordid past, all these years later.

In the early seventies, Marvel was changing rapidly, because it had to. Stan had jetted off to LA to get stuck into the Hollywood deals - a process that would take 30 years to really pay off - while Jack had righteously fucked off to DC to create all new mythologies. The second generation of Marvel editors and creators were in charge, and they were young, keen, and horny as hell.

One of the attempts to hold onto a rapidly aging audience saw the company try to emulate the obvious success of publishers like Warren, and made the effort to out-Creepy the smaller company with their own regular black and white horror magazines. These mags lasted throughout the seventies and most of them are just as problematic as you'd expect to modern eyes, while still endearingly clumsy. And some of them are also some of the sexiest things Marvel ever published.

So of course the comic company was embarrassed by these comics for years afterwards and when they when they were eventually reprinted, they didn't survive the new prudishness of the early 21st century, with nipples clumsily covered up in altered art.

We're nearly 20 years on from that decision to cover it all up and it's unlikely much will change, especially when these nasty little comics are now part of the family-friendly Disney behemoth. The perv factor isn't going to come back like it once was.

But don't blame Marvel, it's probably just society's fault.

2. The horror, the horror

These black and white comics are dust in the wind now, but they were part of Marvel's publishing schedule for all of the 1970s. Over-sized black and white magazines were the natural home for properly gritty Conan adventures (it's little wonder that one lasted the longest), with Planet of the Apes, Doc Savage and slightly off-brand Hulk mags also on the shelves.

It was always a slightly seedy format, which made it the ideal home for some grown-up horror. There were several vampire comics, and other weird titles starring Satana and Brother Voodoo and other mystical miscreants.

Marvel had been doing horror comics for decades. They weren't entirely rubbish, but paled in comparison to the gleeful gore of the EC crew, or even the short, sharp apprentice factory that was DC's horror titles. But the work Marvel published in magazines like Dracula Lives!, Tomb of Dracula and Vampire Tales is among the best the company ever produced, because they're full of sexy, gory vampire action.

After all, there wasn't much sex appeal in the rotting gaze of Simon Garth, Zombie; or in the face tentacles of the Man-Thing, but the multiple vampire titles were full of the kind of sex and violence that would make Tony Stark blush.

Grand old pervs like Chris Claremont and Steve Gerber would sneak their kinks into their regular comics, but they didn't have to sneak anything into their vampire stories, and could let their freak fly. You can still smell the sweat in short comics from Howard Chaykin and Neal Adams, while grand warhorses like Tom Sutton, John Buscema and the perpetually underappreciated Tony DeZuniga produced the goods. Artists like Russ Heath would parachute in with some pin-ups that are still striking in their raw aggressiveness.

Their comics are full of the sharp breasts of ice vampires in the snow, while Blade's supporting cast includes several high-class sex workers, fitting for the objectively hottest vampire hunter in the MU. And the creators who couldn't get their sexy on in a regular monthly Fantastic Four comic could loosen up a lot on the heightened maturity levels of a black and white mag.

So they started showing a lot more than just cleavage. Dracula wasn't just an old dude in an opera cape, he was bare-chested in his vampiric youth and thrusting his fangs all over the place. Dracula is still more of a monster in the magazine stories - less of the noble sacrifices that he kept making in the colour title - and his unforgivable murders in the magazines are longer, more sensual and explicit. The seduction of Andrea in Marvel Preview #12 is full of endless nudity.

When perennial vamp artist Gene Colan went straight from the tasteful monthly carnage of the color Tomb of Dracula comic to the black and white mag version, his line immediately loosens up, and so do the clothes on his heroes, villains and monsters. They were going for an older audience, and could play less coy.

3. Gore at the corner store

For all that horniness, these comic mags from Marvel can seem incredibly chaste and naive compared to the underground comics that came out in the same decade. There was very little in the way of full frontal nudity, and the entire line has less cocksucking than one of Spain Rodriguez's tamer strips. The morals of the stories were usually as prudish as ever – pre-marital sex was still a death sentence.

But these comics found an audience, because they were everywhere.

It was the 70s, man, and things like sordid black and white comic magazines were just a part of regular society. These horny mags weren't hidden away in head shops with the other alternative comics, they were up on the shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores all over the world. They were usually shelved closer to the Penthouses than the Archies, but they were still there.

It's not hard to see why these tales of heaving horror worked. Before video tapes, you got your kicks here you could. And this was an era of free love, where porn would screen in main street cinemas, a flash of tit on the comic page was nothing.

4 There's always more money in toys

But markets and audiences change, and almost all of these black and white comics from Marvel slowly melted away in the harsh light of the 1980s. There was the notable burst of B+W independent fever started by the enormous success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but Marvel - for once - didn't chase that boom, content with going back to a basic audience of 12-year-old boys.

After years of editor-in-chief merry go-arounds in the 1970s, Jim Shooter was in charge and he knew what he wanted, and he didn't need he didn't need the freaky, weirdo stuff to get in the way of that core audience. There was more money in selling GI Joe comics than pushing the Son of Satan to middle America.

To its credit, Marvel did still try to play it cerebral and went for the art crowd with its Epic Comics, but they definitely were happy to leave all that sticky perv money on the table.

And the black and white magazines went away. Marvel still pushed out titles like Bizarre Adventures and Savage Tales for a while, but they were way more into the violence than the sex. The last ones to be printed on grotty old newsprint fizzled out in the late 80s, with Punisher spin-offs and a swathe of licensed properties like The Destroyer, Freddy Kruger and the indomitable Conan. None of these last efforts had Dracula's sexiness, or any edge at all really.

In the years since, there have been plenty of revivals of the characters and concepts - Colan was still doing tits and gore Dracula stuff for Marvel into the 90s. And there have been a number of black and white comics in Marvel's recent history, but they just don't look the same on the slick paper, without the grit of the more pulpy texture.

5. Don't look at the 70s, kids

So when the 21st century rolled around, and after a crash that brought the Marvel business to its knees, its comics returned from the dead under some surprisingly creative editorship. The Marvel Knights lads got the keys to the kingdom and used the astonishing tactic of putting great writers and artists on their comics and let them loose.

But for all their big balls talk in interviews, they were still too shy about all that icky stuff from ages ago. And at the height of the Ultimates and Marvel Knights seriousness, a Dracula and Lilith story was reprinted in an Essential volume and notably no longer featured some actual nipples, lovingly rendered by the mighty Gene Colan.

Around this time, there were many morons who had actual conniptions over the brief sight of Janet Jackson's nipple at a football game and Marvel - whose best reaction to this kind of thing is to consider that no publicity is the best publicity, summoned all the corporate courage you would expect from a 21st-century company. They redrew the art, draping some tasteful clothes and straps over the whole mess and hoping nobody noticed.

Unfortunately, it was about the time all the cool kids started blogging about comics, and plenty of people noticed the change. And it wasn't surprising, just disappointing, that Marvel didn't have the guts it once had, back in the last century.

6. No seriously, it's all about the money

But it's almost too easy to blame Marvel for it all, because for all its bluster, it's never really affected culture as much as it likes to think it is, no matter how many billions the movies make. The company has always surfed on the great waves of 'whatever works' for decades, and when western society pivoted away from that 70s permissiveness, Marvel just went with it.

Many adults in the 1980s seemed embarrassed by the 70s, and all that free love dried up in the age of Aids and unchecked capitalism.

Although there is still a maddeningly long way to go, modern society is getting some things better -and you can see that in the old comics, where casual racism, homophobia and misogyny is obvious to modern eyes. And we like to keep thinking we're better than that.

But we're also, as a society, just a little embarrassed by the flash of a little flesh, and it's easiest just to cover it up and move on.

You can't cover up the old comics, if you can still find them. These black and white artefacts still have some heat, still have the stench of hot sex mixing with the underlying stench of the undead. It's all there, no matter how many times it's covered up, for as long as the original rotting newsprint lasts.