Look, while I haven't been attracted to comic book characters since I was the same age as Kitty Pryde, I'm also saying is that there is a three-month slice of space/time where I have the deepest and most profound crush on Triad from the Legion of Super-Heroes, when she was drawn with a massive bowl cut by brilliant British artist Alan Davis. Sheer bloody perfection.
The last five minutes of Weapons is the best experience I've had in a movie theatre in years. It was just so perfect, so cathartic, so intense, and still really fucking horrible.
Once the thrills have died down, the part that resonates the most with me is the feeling that it really captures this moment in time in a way much more serious films don't.
Because it's the end result of what happens when the old are feeding off the weak and devouring them. We see them in the news every day - parasites in power who will destroy everything, if it means they can hold on to their meagre power and life for one more day.
And the grown-ups - who are neither innocent children nor malevolent elders - are just useless, they can't help because they've got their own pressures, and can even be weaponised against their own children. It's notable that the one little kid who isn't bewitched is the only one who actually does something useful and stops the madness.
But you can only push the kids so far before it all boils over, and they will come to you and tear you fucking apart.
Some movies are trying to grasp the vibe of life in the early 21st century, and so many of them are just painfully clumsy - I know enough about Eddington to know that I can never watch it, for instance. And some of them are perfect - I think of the 'people are under a lot of stress' scene from Twin Peaks The Return all the fucking time.
And then there are those tiny kids smashing through windows and coming for the old witch, not stopping for anything because things have gone too fucking far this time, and ripping the old fucker who has hurt so many people apart with their teeth. It isn't just a big fat metaphor for modern society, it's a clear warning to all old fuckers everywhere.
Age with dignity and empathy, or face the bloody consequences.
The Absolute comics produced by DC over the past couple of years have been a total sales success. The big comic companies keep trying to do stripped-down version of their most iconic characters to get a bigger audience, and sometimes they do actually resonate with a wide readership.
The Absolutes have got that audience by making their characters as badass as humanly possible, which is always an excellent short-term solution, even if there needs to be more more depth than the usual ultra-metal imagery if you're going to get anywhere.
I can understand the appeal, and some of it is genuinely inspired - the part in the Martian Manhunter story that has you looking through the page is something I have never seen in a comic before, and ripping Wonder Woman away from the tedium of Paradise Island and shoving her straight into hell is an inspired touch.
But I'm just not getting onboard this comic book juggernaut. I wasn't inspired to check them out initially mainly because many of the creators involved had already done plenty of Superman and Batman comics, and I really felt I'd read everything someone like Scott Snyder had to say about the Dark Knight.
So I read the trade paperbacks from the library and they are okay. Some really nice art, some interesting storytelling and an absolute dedication to that badass ideal, and it's all a bit familiar, really.
There is definitely some multiversal burnout - here's another version of all those characters, to go with the trillion others we've seen thrown around in the past decade. But I'm also just totally over the endless twists on the legend, cliffhanger endings that rely on someone showing up in a new guise or role, and it's only shocking because it's something familiar given a new coat of paint.
It's a brand new world where Jimmy Olsen is the Gotham Police Commissioner, or Steve Trevor is really the goddess Athena. There's always a twist on the idea of Robin, and wait until you see what spin they're putting on Lex Luthor this time.
It's easy shock tactics to shuffle things around like this, but it's not really anything new, and that newness is always what I crave in my super comics. I wish all the Absolute comics good fortune in the wars to come, but I don't think I'm ever going to fight for them.
And for a while there, I am literally buying every new Marvel and DC comic I can get my hands on. It's the early 90s, I've started working and getting a weekly pay, and my obsession with comics has never been higher. I want to buy all the comics I can.
Unfortunately, I live hundreds of kilometers away from any kind of comic store, so when it comes to new comics, I have to rely on what shows up in the local bookstores and corner dairies. I have no control on what appears on those shelves and the pickings are slim, and irregular.
It's fairly easy to keep up with the X-Men, because they're way more available, although you would always miss at least an issue a year, and sometimes you wouldn't see the New Mutants anywhere for months at a time (I miss the first Liefeld issues because of this). But I might get one of the four Superman titles (which was a bitch during the triangle era where it was all one long story) or the random issue of Star Trek or Deathlok that shows up.
Some things are there every month, more or less. I end up with things like as significant amount of the Tom DeFalco/Paul Ryan Fantastic Four, all the Dan Jurgens run on Justice League and a disturbing amount of What The-?!
But I'm just buying everything I can. I've got disposable income for the first time in my life, and my driver's licence, so I'm getting a couple of dozen comics every month.
And then, when I buy a Thor comic for $3.95 (in 1992 money) from an Ashburton bookstore, it's deeply, deeply average, and something surprisingly tiny and delicate breaks inside of me, and I realise I don't have to get everything.
More than anything else, this one issue broke some habits that were getting out of hand. I saw the next Thor issue on the shelves and I am amazed by how easy it is to leave it there. And maybe I don't have to grab everything I can get my hands on.
Then I started going further afield and going to an actual comic store where I obviously can't just buy everything, so I focus on dropping a couple of hundred bucks on Alpha Flight and Hellblazer comics instead of just grabbing what I could.
I still had a completist mentality when it comes to certain creators for a lot longer. It took me another decade before I realised I didn't need every single Alan Moore comic (I can thank the Spawn/WildCATS crossover for that particular tiny revelation), but I stopped getting everything a long, long time ago.
And all it took was a mediocre thunder god adventure to realise that.
When the last few issues of the regular Sandman comic book were slowly coming out, somewhere in the 1990s, I got into the habit of buying the latest issue, sitting under a particular tree in a nearby park, and really indulging in the final misadventures of Morpheus and his chums.
I did this for several months, and then a week before the final issue came out, I realised that tree was actually right between a notorious student pub in town and the local university accommodations, and dozens and dozens of inebriated young people were taking a piss on that tree every weekend.
Not all stories have a moral, but there's probably one in here somewhere if I look hard enough.
Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus remains a proper epic of a film - three hours of cinematic glory, full of desperate rebellion and fleeting love and blatant homoeroticism.
It has been rightly celebrated for some of the great moments in 50s cinema - the 'I'm, Spartacus' moment, which is the natural emotional culmination of the failed slave rebellion; the movement of the armies like faceless ants; the sheer cruelty of the endless crucifixions.
But my favourite part of the whole thing happens incredibly quickly, almost without explanation, and no obvious foreshadowing. It's the sequence when the title character, having endured a lifetime of slavery and degradation, sees the love of his life being spirited away forever, and realises he has just had enough of this shit, and suddenly rebels against the masters.
And he doesn't have to ask for help - his fellow slaves just pile straight into the fight without hesitation, fighting and dying for their freedom. They are not asked for help, they don't make plans, and there are no heroic speeches before the action kicks off, they just all instantly pile in and beat the living shit out of the slavers.
Some of them notably sit it out at first, but then quickly join in to smash the gates, and join the big man's army, all the way to their mutual end.
Watching the film again, there is so much in the glances the gladiatorial slaves give each other, the silent understanding that this is bullshit. And when they get the chance, they're all in, because if they had all stood back and let Spartacus impotently rage on his own, they would never have got another chance.
It's a beautiful piece of cinema, often replicated - Braveheart cheerfully rips off vast parts of the earlier film, including the moment where William Wallace snaps and rebels, and is instantly joined by his clanfolk - but it remains universal. Because we're all in it together sometimes, and might have to join in the fight without being asked.
Like everyone else in the world, I consume so much media that it's amazing that anything sticks in the brain. And sometimes it's just the stupidest and tiniest little detail that remains.
I watched every episode of the most recent Interview With A Vampire TV show because there was a good six months of my life where it was my favourite book of all time (I was, of course, 16 years old), and it was well made and acted and everything. But there wasn't a lot that stuck in my mind, except for the part where the great Eric Bogosian sneers at the idea of wearing gloves to handle a delicate and ancient journal, because he argues that any benefit from using the gloves is outweighed by the loss of sensation and the greater possibility that you might accidentally tear the pages.
And then I read a comic book all about the history of the cocktail, and that's full of historical data, but a week later, the only thing I remember - and something I'll be pulling out at parties for the rest of my pitiful life - is the origin of the word 'cocktail', and what it has to do with sticking objects up a horse's arse.
There's only so much space in my head, so I am, of course, only remembering the best parts.
Tastes in comic art can radically change with age, and I didn't really appreciate the highly stylised work of Jack Kirby and Mick McMahon until I was all grown up.
This was usually just a matter of maturing taste, but I have come to love some artists that I didn't like when I was younger because of the way I was introduced to their work, like John Bolton's art on the back-ups in the Classic X-Men comics in the late 80s.
These short stories - which filled in some background details of prime X-Men continuity- were usually written by Claremont and featured a tonne of Bolton's art, which was a subtler line than the usual x-fare, and certainly far less dynamic line than the Cockrum/Byrne/Austin art that filled the classic parts of the comic.
He was obviously a great artist, terrific with mood, (which was good because most of those X-Men back-ups were moody as hell). But the action always felt a little stiff, and none of the characters ever really looked cool in that way that 12-year-old nerds demand. Wolverine usually just look like a sad little dork in Bolton's hands (except for that one story where he is hunted in the snow).
So I never really gave much attention to Bolton's comics, and more fool me, because his painted work outside the worlds of superheroes and his tights is genuinely stunning. His art on horror and fantasy comics is gorgeous, reaching photo-realistic heights that are still clearly his own style.
Check out his Black Dragon (with x-collaborator Chris Claremont), or the unexpectedly wonderful Evil Dead comics he has done. Or his work with Clive Barker - The Yattering and Jack adaption is truly brilliant, especially when it's all confined to a boring suburban home. Even a forgotten Vertigo mini series like Gifts of the Night offer innumerable examples of his work at his finest.
While he has largely stayed away from superhero comics since Classic X-Men ditched the back-up stories, he shines when he does things with the Man-Bat or the Joker. His artwork in Alien comics is breathtaking - there is an exactness to it all, even with the fuzz of the paint.
Neil Gaiman also made a film about him once, but we won't hold that against him.
You can find a lot of his ridiculously beautiful work at his website here, but it can also be found lurking in bins of cheap comics throughout the world, and they are always worth picking up. I'm still stumbling across some of the earlier work he did for the Hammer horror comic magazines that a young Marvel UK put out in the 70s, and it's even had me going back to those x-stories. It's not the fully painted brilliance of his other work, but there are charms to be found, even in a dorky Wolverine.
When I was becoming more philosophically aware as an adolescent, I got very confused by all the talk of Ayn Rand and her very particular form of objectivism, because I kept getting her mixed up with the character of An Ryd, who was Ultra Boy's old flame and showed up in the one issue of Legion of Super-Heroes that I had as a kid and read a million times over.
Poor An is quickly murdered in an attempt to frame Jo Nah, while Ayn has inspired some of the most terrible people in the world, who have objectively made the world a worse place. Ultra Boy's old girlfriend only ever appeared for a few pages in a Legion of Super-Heroes comic, but she was probably a better source of inspiration.
For the past few years, I've been taking note of how many films I actually see every year. It was useful to look back on when people asked me what I'd watched recently (my short term memory is shot to hell, man), and to see how many films I actually watch in a single year (usually around the 300-350 mark).
It was also useful in that it forced me to watch new things, and more films with subtitles. More old films and more movies made in my own country. Less repeat watches, less franchises and sequels, and more films at an actual cinema.
This year I got off to a slow start, and by the end of April was only up to about 70 films, which means I was going to end up watching a lot less than recent years (this is a year to catch up with television). But I was tracking to see far more in the theatre, and a lot of non-English movies, and that gave me the dose of cinematic smugness I need in my film diet.
I never made a Letterboxd list, or made entries in a spreadsheet or database or anything like that. It has always just been a list in notes on my phone, and the other day I fucked it up and completely wiped this year's list.
It was shaping up so well, and it was all lost in a moment of idle bullshit on the phone. I know it was up to 70 films, but I'm fucked if I can remember all of those movies, so the list is a write-off for the year. I'll pick it up again in the sci-fi year of 2027.
But it has been oddly freeing, and my viewing habits are becoming not so rigid, so regimental, this year. I don't have to worry if a strange 69-minute doco on Tubi counts as a feature film, and if I have a mad desire to watch all the Marvel superhero films in a row, just to see how they hold up, I'm not going to fuck up the ratios. I can rewatch as many damn old films as I like.
I will start it up again, but for now, I can watch bits of movies, or the schlockiest of schlock, just because I feel like it, not because I'm trying to achieve some mad quota that absolutely nobody else in the world gives a damn about.
There might be less old and foreign films that will undoubtedly be transcendentally good when I do finally see them, but I just don't need to worry so much about that for the rest of the year.
Most kids fiction rides on the tides of fashion and whim, and the things the kids read and watch today are very much not the same things they were into 10 years ago.
But some things last for more than a single generation, especially when parents can't help introducing their offspring to the same things they loved as a kid. And some very rare things last for many decades, even though they are full of references to things from long ago.
Among the greats of children's literature is, of course, Beatrix Potter. Her ideas and concepts are still being lucratively mined, nearly a century after she died, and audiences are still responding to her gentle adventures of Peter Rabbit and chums, and the incredible artwork that depicted them.
They also, on occasion, sound completely bloody insane when you read them out loud to children.
We've had a small collection of Potter books in our house since long before our kids came along, and now they are at an age that they are suitable for bedtime reading, but then my wife hears me reading out a line like "there was no end to the rage and disappointment of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca" and she thinks I'm having a stroke or something.
The general moralising of these stories still stands up, relatively speaking, but some of the details sound like somebody completely off their tits. The kids don't mind, of course, they think the names are great.
Maybe this is one of the main reasons people still read Potter books. Not because they are timeless tales of gathering nuts and stealing veges, but for the weird little details, and strange names that still get a reaction from a modern reader, even if that reaction is likely to be 'wait, what?'. Stories have become immortal for less.
After recently watching A Clockwork Orange for the first time in years, I think I can safely say that it will be a few more before I ever watch it again. It's such an intelligent and wonderfully weird film, with an eternal score by the wonderful Wendy Carlos, some incredible slow motion work and a truckload of big, weighty themes. But it's also super fucking gross.
Everything in it is revolting - the fashion, the decor, the way Alex eats those peas at the end, the perv teacher drinking the water with the false teeth in the glass. Malcom MacDowell's smirk is deeply creepy, his singing and clumsy use of ultra-violence is off-putting and his retching once he goes through the treatment is properly appalling. That gorgeous Carlos soundtrack is the only part of the film I would ever want to revisit (I always thought it makes a great soundtrack to any writing efforts).
Kurbick famously took this movie out of circulation in the UK for several decades because he was concerned about copycat crime, but he shouldn't have bothered. Everything in the story of Alex and his droogs is awful, and there is nothing there that anyone should want to repeat.
Every now and then I check the links in the row of blogs going down the side of the Tearoom of Despair over there - the ones that play the beats I like - and I discover that another one has vanished, with just the oblivion of the 'Page Not Found' message left behind.
I lost all faith in any corporate website ever having a proper archive after just a few years, and feel this is a major contributor to the cultural black hole of the early 21st century. That hole has been fed by the failure of ambitious web businesses, and now personal sites are also fading away.
I don't blame the people who created the great comic blogs of the 2000s and 2010s for shutting up shop. It's their shop to shut, and they're well within their rights to close things down, when they realise they can't be bothered to paying the hosting fees for another year, and are happy to let their efforts evaporate into the ether.
But I still feel a notable pang of grief when I see another has disappeared. There was, for example, a tonne of great writing and some terrific podcasts on The Factual Opinion that isn't there anymore, (although you can still thankfully find old episodes of Travis Bickle on the Riveria here, and there was even a truly unexpected episode of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell the other week).
The latest one to disappear was one my of my all-time favourites from the golden age of comic blogging - Dorian Wright's postmodernbarney. I went looking for one of Wright's old FCBD write-ups, because they were truly exhaustive in the best possible way, but it's all gone. I still follow Wright on Bluesky and never tell him how much I have loved his stuff, because he does not suffer fools (and foolish nerds in particular), and I find it hard to lavish people with praise without sounding a bit foolish.
There are still some glorious personal archives out there, and I regularly read up old reviews on places like the Savage Critics. There are still some lunatics who still blog on a regular basis, and I never, ever miss a post by blogging royalty Mike Sterling, deadset legend J Caleb Mozzocco and my pal Nik. None of them seem to be going away any time soon.
I regularly back up the Tearoom, because I don't trust blogger.com, although I've been here since 2009 and it's been okay so far. But I'll also always try to keep some kind of record of all of the nonsense that I post here, for as long as I'm able, because the embarssing early stuff is part of the whole picture. I'm not letting that fade away.
There is a very specific age in life when music suddenly becomes the most very important thing in the world. It's usually around the time that puberty kicks in and there are big decisions to be made at this time - the type of music doesn't fully define who you are and who you are going to be, but it can be a fucking big signpost on that path.
I spent my childhood in bookstores, but I was always fascinated by the record shops, and the old weirdos who filled them. It wasn't as intimidating as something like the pub, where kids were definitely not allowed, but it was still a little scary - I just didn't understand all the genres and styles, and record shops were stacked with old music and weird ephemera.
It can be especially daunting when you're not sure about the music you're choosing, and you're flailing around, trying all sorts of things, and never knowing what is going to speak to you, and really get through to your soul.
My first big music love was for Pink Floyd, and I had no access to internet knowledge, or even much in the way in books, so I knew nothing about them, and that was the kick in the arse that got me going to the record stores regularly, where I would spend countless hours, trying to figure out if Relics was a 'proper' Floyd album.
They reckon that smell is the easiest way to trigger memories, and I totally believe that's true. Sometimes I smell 1995 at the cinema, and the other day I smelt a pile of dusty albums sitting in an old record store and was taken all the way back.
There were several kinds of record store - there were the big neon mega-stores, almost all gone now, and loads of middle of the road outfits, full of top 20 and not much else, which definitely did not survive. And then there was the record shops that all had the strange stuff, usually run by very surly older men who were obviously judging you just by the way you browsed.
It wasn't just the places themselves that gave me the existential shits, it was the vast amounts of unknown music they represented, and how unsure I was in my own tentative steps.
In the end, it was the grumpy guys who survived, because they provided a curation service, and while they were definitely the scariest places to start off with, they were also the ones where I later became extremely comfortable, a regular who the owner could recommend new tunes to.
It really wasn't long before I became one of those scary old crusties, and I remain one of them to this day. I just try not to judge the kids who keep coming in, looking for their path, and let them figure it out for themselves.
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