Xerxes - The Fall of the House of Darius and the Rise of Alexander: Nothing is impossible

- Xerxes: The Fall of the House of Darius and the Rise of Alexander #5

 By Frank Miller 

Colours by Alex Sinclair

Justified: You pull on him....

In a world of uncertainty everywhere, and great unjustices being met with little to no consequences, there is just something very satisfying about watching Raylan Givens - as played by the immortal Timothy Olyphant - and his big hat gunning down various scum without any hesitation.

Patrick Stewart: A lifetime of great roles

We all took Patrick Stewart for granted. He was just always so good, always making whatever he appeared in so much better, and he carried so much gravitas and humanity without ever showing off, and we took him for granted.

He embraced both the serious and silly side of his profession. After a lifetime of Shakespearean magnificence, he will be mostly remembered for flying some lovely lounge suites around the galaxy, and taking over peoples' minds as one of Marvel's mightiest mutants, and he was fine with that. But he never pandered to the material, he elevated it, and he did that every week for several years on Star Trek.

Stewart's performance as Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise is still breathtaking. He made those weird onesies they had to wear look stylish, and he showed off his vast acting range on a regular basis.

There was his righteous fury at the number of lights he is being shown; and his quiet contemplation after an accidental lifetime he spent learning to play the flute; and the cold horror when he speaks as the monotonal Locutus of Borg; and the heartbreak of the confused elder of All Good Things.

Picard was also, refreshingly, not a perfect character - he had made many mistakes in his life (his biggest one was obviously messing things up with Beverly) - but under Stewart's stewardship, he also stood up for his crew all the way in the most stern and eloquent manner, he could settle wars with appeals to logic and righteousness, and he could set an ensign right with a kindly word at the right time.

And Sir Patrick brought that brilliance to everything he did, whether he was a  slimy motherfucker in ancient Rome, or an honoured knight of the round tablet. Look at the way he expresses joy when Logan walks into Professor X's office at the end of the Days of Future Past and just silently lights up, or his bellowing happiness at being reunited with his young pup Paul in the Dune film. 

And when he was a bad guy, he was still so charming that you can't really believe it. When he shows up in Green Room, he's so calm and empathetic that you almost forget he's a hateful old bigot who will kill them all without hesitation. He also managed to have two brutal face-offs with Alec Guinness' George Smiley without even using that wonderful voice.

And for all that, his greatest performance was his life as Patrick Stewart. It's only hours after the news of his passing as I write this and nearly everybody who ever met the man has some story of him being charming or helpful or kind or self-deprecating, and he was never quiet about his unwavering support for anti-violence, particularly for women and kids. It's always the man's choice to use violence and he never let anybody forget that. 

He will be remembered for his dignity and wit. He had a great sense of humor- his advocacy for Beavis and Butthead shall never be forgotten - and he was always about bringing your best and not making a fuss about it. We took that for granted, but we can appreciate it forever. 

Legends never die: Concrete, Grendel, Hellboy and the Shaolin Cowboy

I walked out of my local comic shop the other day with brand new issues of Concrete, Grendel, Hellboy and Shaolin Cowboy, so I think it's fair to say that I found my comic book tribe a long time ago, and I see no reason to abandon them any time soon.

All we need now is some Sin City - and with the generally bonkers direction of Frank Miller's work in the past two decades, I would love to see what he'd do with a new Sin City, (but I might draw the line at more of Byrne's Next Men).

It's not just that these comics I'm still getting are all published by the venerable Dark Horse, they all represent a certain kind of artist - the hardworking and consistent professional who has stayed true to their roots, still adding to vast tapestries they began weaving in the 80s and 90s, and clearly having an absolute ball doing it. They might not be seen as hot as they once were by the wider industry, but their standards of craft and sheer storytelling chops are undeniable.

They are also - despite superficial similarities - giving me different things. The new Concrete comic by Paul Chadwick is as thoughtful as ever, clear in both intellect and art. It also takes some unexpected turns - I thought the whole 'Concrete Goes Wild' thing would last a lot longer, before the story became a quiet meditation on the everyday challenges of living with brain damage.

Meanwhile, Matt Wagner's Grendel is a clear contemporary to Concrete, but could not be more different, and the latest series is as brutal and efficient as ever. However, it is also heading down unexpected paths - I really thought Wagner might kill off Prime in the latest issue, but he just wiped out all the wonderfully-designed Grendel elders instead.

And Shaolin Cowboy is as insane as ever, shots of philosophy coming at you like liquid bullets. Geof Darrow's detail work is still as intoxicating as ever and there is a dark and sick humour behind the whole thing, background characters spitting out bits of political bile that can sometimes resonate hard.

All of these series have gone away and come back again, often after years of dormancy, but there has always been Hellboy. While I still think about the end of BPRD every day, I haven't really been able to keep up with everything in that crooked universe since then, but I am getting the current Hellboy in Hell issues (generally the only ones I bother with are the ones where Mignola doesn't use a co-writer) and it's as moody and twisted as ever.

So even though there are superficial similarities - and yes, they are all written and drawn by old white guys - they are all very different books, and I do feel like I'm getting a varied diet, and have been for 30 years now. I'll keep following these comics for as long as they make them.

Sparks aren't a real thing

There is some part of me that still believes that the band Sparks are some kind of massive practical joke at my expense, because even though they apparently had a long and distinguished musical career, I had literally never heard of them, and then suddenly they were doing the music for a Leos Carax film, and Edgar Wright was doing a documentary about them, and while they are obviously legitimate, I will not be surprised if Ron Mael takes off his post-Morrison fiction suit one day and turns out to be Andy Kaufman all along.

I'm sure that if I go back through my beloved Q and Mojo magazines from the 1990s they will be rife with Sparks, and there is plenty of evidence that they are an actual thing, and that they just never registered with me for some reason. But I prefer the harmless conspiracy theory that everybody is in on the joke except me.

Judge Dredd and the beat before annihilation

It's arguably the biggest moment in the history of Judge Dredd. It's the climax to the Apocalypse War, and the only way Dredd can save his beloved Mega-City-One requires the annihilation of half a billion souls. And he doesn't hesitate, replying to the poor Sov begging for the lives of his countrymen for some mercy with a terse 'request denied!'. And then he pushes the button, and murders 500 million people. 

This was in a kid's comic, and I thought it was rad when I read it as a kid, and it's no less awesome all these years later.

It's a moment that has been reprinted often, and referenced even more in the strip itself - Dredd's actions have catastrophic consequences for his own city, for decades to come. In the wider context of the 50-year history of Dredd, there are no bigger moments than this one.

And the exact moment the button is pushed is also slightly remarkable for one tiny choice - that panel break between Dredd's grim visage and his finger on the button.

It's all one big picture and it's not a terribly dynamic premise, with Dredd reaching over and pushing a button. But that break into two panels gives the moment a beat, a chance for the reader to catch their breath before Armageddon reigns. It's also a moment of emphasis, drawing attention to a single finger, and the terrible power that can be unleashed with the flex of a digit.

While there is a chance that the mighty writing team of Wagner and Grant asked for this beat, it's more likely that it was artist Carlos Ezquerra's doing, because he was always pulling clever shit like this.

He did this thing where he would have one of his badasses fire their weapon, and their target exploding, and in a way that doesn't actually make sense logically, or adhering to any form of physics, and it didn't matter, because it always looked fucking awesome, and his moments of action felt right and natural, as long as you didn't think about them too hard.

I just know that one day in the early 1980s, Ezquerra was drawing this moment, and he knew it was a big deal, and it just needed a tiny - almost subliminal - touch to give it an impact, and he did it by inserting the thinnest of panel gutters right in the middle of it. It was the right thing to do, even if the vast majority of readers never even notice it, because this type of epic climax deserves an extra second. 

Planet of the shamed

I still feel bad about a bold proclamations I made about the Uncanny X-Men comics when I was 11 years old. I once confidently spun a line of absolute bullshit about the history of Rogue. I remember where I was when I was explaining how Rogue was actually a Dire Wrath (a bold misreading of something I'd heard somewhere), and I remember who I was explaining it to.

I still feel shame about that. I think back on it and hope the person I was telling about this never found out the truth, or was so bored by my bullshit that it never even occurred to them to verify it. And I still feel dumb about my arrogant stupidity, and still feel ashamed about it, 40-something years later.

Is this normal? I know plenty of other folk who can't help fixating on their moments of mind-numbing stupidity, but do most people really give a damn? Do most people just forget about it, and move on in their life?

I'm not talking about the big shit in life, like heinous betrayals or great cruelties. Just the dumb crap that absolutely nobody in the world cares about, but that you can still carry around in your heart. 

But if we can't feel bad about the small shit, it's no wonder so many people can be totally sociopathic about everything in their life, without feeling any kind of shame or guilt about it.

We do now live in a brazenly shameless world, from your loud neighbours to the heinous creatures walking the highest corridors of power, and people do extraordinarily horrible things that I would not be able to bear, just on an emotional level.

It feels like a distinctly 21st century problem, with social media pouring gasoline on the fires of human ignorance. People have no shame in showing how fucking stupid, or bigoted, or just mean they are, because it gets them more attention. And they never feel any shame about it. It's a nice fantasy that Fox News presenters go home and cry into their pillow because they're obviously making the world a worse place every single day, but they fucking don't, or they'd actually stop that shit. They're fine with it.

And how shamed am I really, when I'm still somehow bragging about how I still feel the dumbest of guilt about an X-Men nonsense? Is that even helping, or am I just showing how I am so much better than  allthe meatheads with their blithe cruelties? 

All I really know is that shame can be a crippling social anxiety for some, but it also has its uses, and I really do think the world could use a bit more shame in it.

Marvel Fanfare: Best of the rest

- Marvel Fanfare #45

Art by Art Adams, Bret Blevins, Howard Chaykin, Michael Golden, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Jim Lee, Steve Leialoha, Mike Mignola, Kevin Nowlan, John Romita Jr, Bill Sienkiewicz, Ken Steacy and Charles Vess

Colours by Petra Goldberg, Richard Ory, Gregory Wright, Christie Scheele and Steve Oliff

Dug a hole

There are many, many words about the performance - both critically and commercially - of the Digger movie going around at the moment, and I thought it was obvious why it's such a monumental failure.

I didn't see the film because I just didn't really want to watch an obnoxious billionaire yelling at me for three hours, because we have enough of that in real life, and I can only assume lots and lots of other people felt the same way.

This is a house of Bridgers

My absolute favourite album of the year is Phoebe Bridgers' Lost Weekend and nothing else comes close to it, because the whole family have been listening it constantly in the car, and we all never get sick of it. 

We also all get something different out of it. I think my seven year old just has a crush on her; her five year old brother just loves to dance to it; my lovely wife likes to belt out the big songs in the car on the way to work; and I am absolutely enamored with the songwriting and production.

We've always been a bit of a Phoebe house. Some of her tunes were big with the kids from when they first learned to stand up and boogie - a demand for 'figgy sleeping' was obviously a call for Motion Sickness, while 'figgy nana' was obviously a request for the epic I Know The End

Her songs are so inordinately charming - I've heard it said that it's hard to tell if her songs are any good at first, because her voice is so stunning that judging the tunes themselves can take some time - and they come with some real depth backing up her quietly soaring vocals. Her lyrical ear is incredible, a fun poppy song might have the most heartbreaking lines in it. 

And the new album is all of that and more, a real peak for the incredibly talented and hard-working musician. I love putting it up loud, and listening to the engineering - some of it sounds like 1980s post-Roger Waters Pink Floyd, while the luminescent As Above So Below feels like the soundtrack to a Donnie Darko reboot from another universe.

That performance of Lost Boys at the top of the post - even with the Jimmy Fallon of it all - is my favourite musical show in years, the sheer goddamn joy of the kids rockling out with a real star, glowing and talented, is everything wonderful about music. Phoebe Bridgers does that kind of thing all the damn time, and the world is so much better for it. Our house certainly is.

Doctor Who and the Whimper of an Ending

There's the usual amount of talk and speculation about the future of Doctor Who floating around the time/space vortex at the moment, so that shit is the same as it ever was. Whether it will be a full reboot - an absolutely terrible idea - or a continuation of the ongoing multidimensional tapestry remains to be seen.

But I did recently wonder why the end of the Fifteenth Doctor era continued to leave me unmoved, so I did watch the last season again for the first time since it was released. And while I am a general admirer of Russell T Davies' vision for the show, and love the fresh ideas he continued to bring to it, the climax just felt a little damp.

There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that attempts to make the show big and incredible always feel a little against the ethos of the TV show, but we're all used to that by now. Omega would have worked much better as a recognisable Shakespearean actor in a snazzy suit, instead of a big and extremely boring CGI monster, which feels light and insubstantial, when you really want gravitas and power.

And then there is another half hour after the monster has been defeated, where everybody but Ruby Sunday forgets that a little baby exists, and it is almost painful to watch.

Partly this is because every third word in the last half hour of the 15th Doctor's era seems to be the word 'Poppy!' which gets very annoying, very quickly. But it's mainly because the Doctor is clueless, right when one of his best friends really needs him to be on his game.

It's easy to explain away, as even the Doctor can't avoid getting swept up by the tides of time, but he just seems like a  a dick - Ruby is genuinely upset that the baby has disappeared and nobody is noticing, and it takes an awfully long time for the Doctor to acknowledge this, and even longer for him to try and help.

So this glorious new incarnation goes out as a bit of a dick. He came in dancing and full of new life, free of old traumas and hang-ups, and departs ignoring a crying friend. What a bummer. A lot of nerds are annoyed by the very next incarnation of the Doctor, because it's going to be a cartoon version for pre-schoolers, but at least I'm sure he won't ignore a friend.

Brain Bolland and the ugly of Hex

Brian Bolland's art has been taking my breath away since I first saw Judge Death coming down those darkened stairs in his very first appearance, and he has continued to capture that awe with a huge number of fantastic images over the past five decades.

And he's still doing it! His most recent cover for the new Jonah Hex comic is another striking image, his unparalleled eye for detail focused on the most scarred of visages. 

It's not easy to look at, as rotting parts of it flap in the air, the tears in the flesh ripping away more of his face, that hateful eyeball stares out, every line in there for you to see. It's disgusting if you look at it for too long, and beautiful in that wonderfully uncanny Bolland manner.

Bedford Street: Every house has its own stories

Walk down any dull suburban street in any boring town in the world, and pass by all the closed curtains, and you just know every home has its universe of stories behind those blinds. There are crime and romance and horror and dramas in every house, on every street, in everyday life.

Bedford Street is the latest graphic novel by NZ artist Ross Murray and it's bloody brilliant, looking inside those homes and finding all sorts of stories. Some of them are grim, some of them are funny as fuck, and some of them are genuinely moving. 

They're all human. There is no magical realism here - these are stories about the mundane life, where having an extra twenty bucks at the end of the week is a great victory; where failing to realise how much you've got more in common with your obnoxious neighbour is going to lead to all sorts of trouble; where taking care of your brain-damaged brother is a full time job, and hard every day, and still not enough to overcome the guilt.

The prologue, featuring a car and two birds in various states of mortality, serves as a broad metaphor for all the rest of the stories in the book. But Murray's dark stories  also come with the breeziest of art, clear and wide and open, with an unflinching eye. The use of the kind of static posing seen in David Aja comics makes it so readable, and all the more shocking when explodes into tiny bursts of painful violence (largely directed at a barbecue) that are reminiscent of Michael Kupperman's wonderfully nonsenscial comics.

But Murray's comics are a world away from Kupperman's absurdity. There's more sad masturbating here, and a grinding despair at the inability to just sit down and watch Love Atoll on TV.

Bedford Street is about the lack of connection in modern society, an ability to say what we really mean, to admit how we really feel about the homeless guy trying to find shelter in an abandoned house.  It's set in a tiny corner of Aotearoa, but there are stories like this everywhere, and they're all heartbreaking. 

Throwing all my problematic faves back into the sea

A fall from grace can be rapid, but it can still sting hard when you've put so much faith in comic creators and they turn out to be terrible dickheads.

It's always just a bit shattering when somebody whose work has spoken to you on some really fundamental levels is revealed to be just another arsehole. You have to bite back the urge to instantly jump to their defense, whole also holding off on any rush to judgement until the real facts come in (many, many people can't help leaping straight in on either side). 

I was never a Harry Potter kid, but if that was my foundational reading experience, I'm sure I would be gutted when the author turned into a rabidly transphobic fuckstick. But I do have my own struggles, and I feel them every time I walk past the bookshelf and see my Sandman comics still sitting there, or find my Authority issues lurking beneath a pile of innocent Hellblazer issues.

I still have a lot of comics written by Warren Ellis, even when it was made obvious that his facade of being a monstrous tyrant hid the real truth that he was actually a monstrous tyrant. While I do agree with the disdain for his recent attempts to salvage a career without really making the proper moral reparations, I also still think Supreme Blue Rose was one of the best superhero comics of the 21st century, and that the kicker on the last page of Ministry of Space is still sublime, especially in the clear light of Chris Weston's artwork.

It was easy enough to shed the lesser Ellis works - I was never really a Transmetropolitan guy, and the comics he did for Avatar were incredibly disposable. But I held onto a handful, even with all the facts about the author's behaviour became clear, because they are still fucking good comics. Planetary does have something to say about the way 20th centuries icons have been perverted in a new millennia, and those first Authority pack a real punch.

When Ellis' grievous misdoings were publicised, there was a comic critic who I greatly admire who made a point that they were ditching all their Ellis comics - like, not even selling them, just chucking them in the recycling - and I felt genuinely bad that I couldn't match that kind of moral certitude and then the other week they posted a picture of one of their bookcases online and there was a big old fuck-off Planetary edition still sitting there.

I know he's just keeping it for the Cassady art, we're all keeping it for the Cassady art. But we share that moral taint, no matter how performatively clean some hands may be.

I tell myself I'm keeping a lot of Neil Gaiman's work for the art, but it's more than that - Dave McKean's work on his graphic novels he did with Gaiman changed my whole idea of how comics could work, and still sing with enormous ambition. Signal To Noise blew my little teenage brain and Mr Punch came out the same month I left home into my first dingy flat. These things still matter to me.

The light touch and heavy themes of Sandman spoke to me like few other comics of its era, and Miracleman at its best felt like another step up from that. His Mircaleman story remains, as ever, painfully unfinished, and hell, maybe it should just sit there. Maybe Buckingham will do it, he was given a full co-writer credit in the comics that wasn't really explained - if Bucky just did it all, is it all right? He'll presumably still be following the long-term plot, and ending on that fucking beach at the end of the world, is that still okay?

And what if these dudes do come back with a new attitude, with fulsome apologies, and actually try to make it right? And what about the artists in this situation, who put years of their lives into their artwork?  Are they being punished for something they had nothing to do with, and were likely totally unaware of? What's all about?

I don't know. I really don't know. 

So many questions and I don't know any of the answers, but I'm trying, man. I'm trying. There's so many other good writers and artists who aren't total shitbuckets out there - thank god for the general nicecess of, says, Los Bros Hernandez, that I can move on from my problematic faves without much of a backwards glance, but there's a glance, all the same.

Marvel fanfare portfolios: The amazing Bill Sienkiewicz

- Originally published in Marvel Fanfare #8

Marvel Fanfare portfolios: The marvellous Norm Breyfogle

- Originally published in Marvel Fanfare #57

Marvel Fanfare portfolios: The delightful Dave Sim

- Originally published in Marvel Fanfare #25

Marvel Fanfare portfolios: The fantastic Colleen Doran

- Originally published in Marvel fanfare #38