Thrill-Power Countdown #17: Judge Dredd Annual 1988

We have some familiar faces  behind the art of this late annual - Mark Farmer does another slick Judge Anderson story, and the main tale is drawn by John Higgins in his absolute prime.

As noted earlier, Higgins is still an A+ artist today. His line has got a little softer in the past few decades, but in the mid-eighties is was sharp enough to cut your throat. His painted work is remarkable - check out World Without End, one of his few American efforts. I still don't understand it, but know it looks gorgeous. His Razorjack comic is fucking fantastic - there was even a crossover with the main Dredd strip a few years back - and I just read his latest Dredger comic last night in the latest Actin special and it was absolute aces.

In this annual he's in the Cursed Earth, and it's another fairly rote story for that setting. It's surprisingly brutal, with a lone female judge's horrific death setting off the plot, with some doses of dark humour - the villains are literally named the Bad Guys, with an army of creeps with names like Rough Guy, Tough Guy, Little Guy, Little Little Guy, Titchy Little guy and Girl Guy. Higgins' painted pages sell that absurdity, and the blasted wasteland of the Cursed Earth never looked shinier or sharper. 

It's a solid annual of its time, but does lose points for trying to use Bolland's single page that he did for prog 500, but was rejected because the artist dared to spend his page asking here the money from all the merchandise featuring his art was going, and it's been re-lettered here to say Bolland was 'bored stiff' of drawing Dredd so many times. It's a blatant grasp for some Bolland material, but definitely leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Thrill-Power Countdown #18: 2000ad Annual 1982

We're in the period of great Bolland covers - and this is another fine effort - with the artist also producing some rare inside pages, and obviously enjoying his opportunity to draw some extremely goofy alien monsters, as Dredd deals with carnage at an alien zoo (even going down the throat of one of them to get his man).

It's also the period of Alan Moore doing all sorts of odd things for 2000ad, including a bunch of small short stories. His Ro-Busters story in this edition is obviously Moore - a little sad, a little whimsical, a little edgy - and has some wonderful art by Steve Dillon (more on the tragedy that there weren't more Moore/Dillon collaborations in a later annual).

The memory banks of 2000ad are raided for some Mach One, which only shows how much the comic has evolved in the few short years; the seemingly obligatory Flesh; and some groovy early Dredd. There's still too much filler, and way more Tharg than anybody needs, and the Strontium Dog story again shows how weak it can be when Carlos Ezquerra isn't involved. At least the always welcome Colin Wilson produces some fine line artwork in a short story.

There is not much else to say about the 1982 effort -  the 2000ad annuals are getting better every year, and still not near the heights they will reach in a couple of years, but they are in sight. 

Thrill-Power Countdown #19: 2000ad Annual 2026

The return of the annual in the past couple of years has truly filled my heart with joy, which is why this annual may be rated a little higher than it deserves. I might be paying almost 20 times the amount I paid for last year's effort than I did for the annual I bought in late 1985, but the reemergence of the annual has strengthened my belief that this is the best format for pure thrills (especially when I've given up on the weekly prog due to international distribution nightmares.)

Like all comics in this day and age, it has to come with a bloody variant cover, and Simon Bisley produces something quite strange for the webshop-only edition, but Ladronn's cover is so beautifully stylized that it still feels new and bold, even if it's just Dredd and chums standing around.

Inside those thick covers, it's an eclectic mix of reprint - Steve Dillon is represented with some unseen Hap Hazzard (although there is some shameful modern colour work on it - Steve's stuff always looked better with flat colours); the late, great Marty Emond's Chopper story is still breath-taking; there are some short doses of Glenn Fabry and John Hicklenton (the latter is far more appreciated these days, to the point that they are now reprinting a typically dire comic script written by Jim Alexander). 

The largest chunk of reprint is the Satanus Unchained story from 2001, which has some of the usual lovely art by Colin MacNeil, but the story is still more famous for infuriating Satanus creator Pat Mills (to be fair, it doesn't take much to infuriate Pat.)

The new stories are also a mixed bag, but giving Joe Currie two Dredd strips to draw is a great idea - Currie is one of the current stars of the weekly prog with some wonderful and extremely idiosyncratic work on the vampires v aliens Silver strip. But the final story in the book only has Currie's art going for it, because the script is literally incomprehensible, to the point there is a Tharg note explaining this is a "different Mega-City One". 

Currie is really good, though, even if the story doesn't make any kind of sense, the part where the Dark Judges run riot is properly horrifying. Also, Staz Johnson is an excellent Rogue Trooper artist, with the right dose of gritty detail on his story.

So we're far from the heights of the great annuals of the past, but it's an interesting step forward. The line-up for this year's effort has recently been announced and looks like it's going to be an absolute cracker, and worth paying 20 times over.

Thrill-Power Countdown #20: 2000ad Annual 1989

While the annuals tend to be, by nature, stand-alone efforts, the stories in the 1989 annual require a fair amount of knowledge of what has been happening in the ongoing sagas of the various characters.

Slaine is off on a mystical quest that he's been stuck on for a long while (with some welcome unusual art by Steve Parkhouse); Ace Trucking Co sees Garp the Barp from Parp return to his home dimension after some doppelganger shenanigans (with annual MVP Belardinelli) but comes with a weirdly grim ending, and a Bad Company  by the original BC crew fills in some backstory in the original tale.

The Dredd isn't as dialed in to the vast continuity of the main strip, although it is another comedy musical - Wagner and Grant were very good at this kind of thing, but they did do it a lot. What it does have  is art by John Higgins, who was amazingly shiny at this stage. Higgins is still doing Dredd material today - his Dreadnaughts is really great - and he does some remarkable gore, showing the impact of bullets of fragile human bodies. But this is a trippier Higgins, with some gorgeous neon pastel colour work; while Ewins and McCarthy are also letting their freak fly with Kano and co.

There is a lot of Flesh in the reprint - the hunting dinosaurs kind, not the porn kind - which is always entertaining. But there is a real sense that the best days were in the past, and it's little wonder that so much of this annual is looking back on it with such fondness. 

Thrill-Power Countdown #21: 2000ad Annual 1987

The reprint material was definitely the weakest part of the early annuals, because they had to resort to pre-2000ad material. But by 1986, there is a wealth of material in the Command Module's archives, and sometimes it outshines the new stuff.

This annual is a little disappointing, and the weakest of 2000ad's golden age. The cover is a lame Robin Smith effort - Smith was a fantastic designer, but his finished work always looked stiff and stilted. There is a Grant Morrison strip, but it's the lamest of all his meta efforts, with a writer's submission to a sci-fi magazine travelling all over the universe and causing all sorts of carnage before ending up rejected by a publisher.

There is some really nice art on a couple of strips - Jose Ortiz's work on a Rogue Trooper story comes with some rare colour that is startling to see on the usual monochromatic artist, and Bryan Talbot turns up to do a Dredd story. Talbot does a great Dredd - his story in the first issue of 2000ad Diceman has the best appearances of the Dark Judges not drawn by Bolland - although the story in this annual of a judge dressing up as a woman to catch a perp is just as problematic as you'd expect (even with a Girl Power! ending).

But Kim Raymond's efforts on a colour Strontium dog story are dire. While I'm more fond of Raymond's gooey Dredd than Wagner and Grant vocally were, it doesn't work at all here

So the highlight is the reprint pages, which get into the full Terra-Meks story from Ro-Busters, and it's just page after page of Dave Gibbons drawing giant robots beating the circuits out of each other, while getting in some blatant social commentary about class warfare. It's top stuff.

2000ad had been around for 10 years at this stage, and while it doesn't hit the target all the time and is starting to flail as its best creators look across the Atlantic, but there is joy in the comic's own past, especially when it's a slick as this.

Thrill-Power Countdown #22: 2000ad Annual 1978

The very first annual that 2000ad ever produced, just a few months after the comic was launched, shares many of the flaws of the earliest books. But it also has one advantage that came with the very first progs - Pat Mills' eye for a great artist. 

Mills put a lot of time and thought into the creation of 2000ad, and finding the creators that would fill the pages of the galaxy's greatest comics, and original stars Mike McMahon and Massimo Belardinelli are both heavily represented in the first annual, with a bit of Kev On'Neill thrown in for kicks, You even get the secret origin of Shako, the only polar bear on the CIA's death list. 

There is still a load of filler - a strip called Death Bug was an aborted serial for the prog, not good enough for weekly consumption, but good enough to fill in the last few pages of the annual, and there are some short stories that are only a tiny bit better than the ones seen in the next few years. And it's got the most 'that'll do' cover to any of the annuals, with Dan Dare posing awkwardly with a green ghost demon thing. 

But the use of those original artists still made it the best of the early years, and set a standard that the next few years of annuals did not quite manage to live up to, but would be easily surpassed within a few short years.

Thrill-Power Countdown #23: Judge Dredd Annual 1990

There are only a few less Judge Dredd annuals than 2000ad got, but they are generally of a higher quality, probably because of that tighter focus. This is still the weakest of them, even with a bitching John Higgins cover (more on Higgins later), but the thrill-power is starting to kick in.

There is some terrific art at this stage of the comic - Arthur Ranson never looked better than on the sharp white paper of these hardbacks, and if anybody needed Jamie Hewlett's portrayal of Max Normal (I certainly did), that's here in a Pete Milligan text piece.

There are some fairly forgettable stories with art by Jeff Anderson and Mark Farmer. Farmer is more well known for his inking, and while he is also strong and slick penciller, he is wasted on a slight story with a very clumsy ending ("These guys are actually alive after plummeting from a great height!").

Some of the nicest art is in the reprints - Ian Gibson's daily strip full story about a mad vigilante is cramped but super efficient, and there is a reproduction of the fine three-part A Question Of Judgement stories from Ron Smith, the first to really dig into the idea that Dredd can have doubts, and the first appearance of his tight boots solution. 

That particular reprint does lose points in this annual for being printed out of order, which feels like Tharg isn't paying that much attention anymore. And the Dredd annual might be a nice package, but  doesn't feel like a big deal as it once was, just as the Judge Dredd Megazine is about to come along to give the thrill seeker far more the Dredd than they'll ever need.

Thrill-Power Countdown #24: 2000ad Annual 1981

The weekly prog in late 1980 is really starting to take off into the stratosphere - Dredd and Strontium Dog are well established, almost perfectly formed, and Nemesis The Warlock and Rogue Trooper are not far away. But the annuals are still struggling to keep up.

Beneath the 1981 annual's Dave Gibbons cover - with a rare Gibbons Johnny Alpha - there is some of that edge to it. The Ro-Busters story starts with a cute kid falling into a chasm caused by an earthquake (this is the sort of thing I thought would be a real concern in my life, thanks largely to 2000ad), and the Dredd story by Brett Ewins (apparently the first ever full-colour Dredd strip) has a fantastic 'EAT JUDGE BOOT, LAWBREAKER!' panel.

It also has one of the always fascinating behind the scenes features that shows how the comic is created, through the way a page of Bolland Dredd was scripted, drawn and lettered, which always a good value for those who like to see how the sausage was made. And there is a Tharg-related story that isn't totally repellant.

But there is still too much Phantom Patrol and Guinea Pig, as well as another tedious reprint in something called Smokeman, which I re-read 10 minutes ago and have already forgotten everything about it. And the paper stock is still cheap and nasty, which never does the art any favours. 

The 2000ad annual is definitely reaching the stars, but it's not quite there yet.

Thrill-Power Countdown #25: 2000ad Annual 1991

It's the era of the credit card logo, and the highs of the 80s annuals have worn off.  And the last hardback annual of the 20th century, before the move to the dreaded yearbooks, goes out on a weak note, when it really needs a power chord. 

At least the reprint material is now deep into the good stuff, with some high-quality Cam Kennedy Rogue Trooper, (Kennedy's aliens also come with real weight). The new stories also feature work by some of the most underrated artists of the period, like Paul Marshall and Kev Hopgood. 

But they don't have access to most of the great 2000ad artists anymore - Belardinelli puts in a welcome appearance, even if it is wasted on the terribly average Moon Runners - and there is the slightest hint of flop-sweat around the whole book, trying so hard to recapture the glories of just a few years ago. 

There's an interesting Strontium Dog story with Johnny Alpha at the end of the world that desperately need some Ezquerra magic - artist Keith Page is certainly talented, but the wrong choice for this story. At least there is a fun Tyranny Rex text story by Smith/Fegredo - when the comic is trying so hard to be cool, some can still do it effortlessly.

Thrill-Power countdown #26: 2000ad Annual 1980

An improvement on the previous year, but 2000ad still hasn't found its groove yet, and the reprints continue to drag things down - there's still far more Phantom Patrol and Guinea Pig than anyone really needs. 

Some of the text pieces get a bit too excited about jet planes and submarines, but there is also a historically interesting piece on this new fangled video recorder technology that multiple companies are trying to put into peoples' homes.  

The biggest disappointment is that there isn't any of the great 2000ad artists involved - Bolland makes his first appearance in an annual, but it's one panel ripped from a strip in the weekly prog, used to illustrate a mediocre text story. The art in story after story is by artists nobody ever hears of again, and filled with their amateur traits of clumsy staging and abnormally large heads.

There are still too may weird little one-offs, and they are still not brave enough to call them Future Shocks. Ro-Busters and Judge Dredd are getting closer to their final form, but Dredd still has a long way to go. If he's not musing on wearing a tropical version of his uniform the next time he's in Mega-Miami, he's letting Walter the Wobot get away with an egregious and extremely illegal betrayal.

The weekly progs in the very late 70s were already singing a song of pure thrill-power, but the annual presentation remained lackluster.

Thrill-Power Countdown #27: 2000ad Annual 1979

All of the 2000ad annuals have some kind of thrill-power, and there are still some sparks of it in the second big book that 2000ad produced back in the late 1970s. There is some very early Brett Ewins/Brendan McCarthy comics, which look sharp and modern, even if they still have the unavoidable clumsiness of youth. And there is a typically shiny and sharp cover from the truly mighty Kevin O'Neill.

But much of the comic material in this annual is dire, with artists who are clearly not ready for prime time on established strips like Dan Dare, MACH 1, Harlem Heroes and Invasion - the indispensable Barney database doesn't even know who did much of the art for this annual, and the stories are just as forgettable. The successful formula that 2000ad will lock into in the early 80s isn't quite there yet, and the annual is full of short stories that they can't even bother calling a Future Shock.

There is also a load of reprint material, and because company policy was to not reprint anything too recent, it's all from the pre-2000ad days and dull, like they escaped a 1966 Lion annual. The Phantom Patrol is a lot of empty sound and fury that goes on forever, although The Guinea Pig is almost charming with some bonkers ideas (why not float all the way to the moon in a space suit?) And some Dr Sin is always welcome. 

But it's easily the poorest of all the annuals. Maybe some kids in the dying days of the late 70s got their thrills out of this thick collection, but the future could only get better from here.

Another Thrill-Power Countdown: Ranking all the 2000ad and Judge Dredd annuals

The Tearoom of Despair is all about staying on top of modern comic book trends, so of course I'm going to spend the next few weeks writing about 2000ad and Judge Dredd annuals from the 1980s.

The old British hardback annuals are my platonic ideal of the perfect comic, a done-in-one package loaded with great art and stories, in the chunkiest and most durable of formats. They are also full of reprints and filler material, and the best of them are notable for being edited by somebody who deeply cares about giving the kids the best bang for their buck.

The 2000ad annuals do vary wildly in quality, and while there are obvious golden periods like the 1980s, some are most definitely more strotnig than others.

So every day for the next month, I will be ranking all of these annuals against each other, all judged by my own inscrutable standards (spoiler - it's all about the art).  Just the 2000ad and Judge Dredd annuals, no Star Lord annual and definitely none of the yearbooks, because they are a whole other level of dire comic.

Sometimes this is easy, the very best and the very worst are blindingly obvious (and the most disappointing are mostly the earliest or latest of the annuals). But there are also four or five years of Dredd annuals that are total Ezquerra lovefests and while this is obviously fantastic, it's really drokking hard to rate one over the other.

But that's what subjective lists are all about. And if all the best things in life can be rated, so can 2000ad annuals. 

Jonah Hex: So long, bounty hunter!

- Jonah Hex #73 

Art by the mighty José Luis García-López 

Written by Michael Fleisher 

Letters by Ben Oda 

Colors by Bob LeRose

Too much pizza!

It is my experience that most people strongly overestimate how many slices of basic pizza that they can eat. I've had people swear to my face that they could get five whole pizzas down their gob, and I absolutely call shenanigans on this.

Because when I was young and living with uni students who saw any money they spent on food as money they were not spending on booze - and so were often ravenously hungry - we would go to Pizza Hut, which at that time had an all-you-can-eat buffet. And some of the hungriest people I've ever met in my entire life could not get above 30 slices. My own record was a paltry 23, which isn't even three pizza.

So when I hear any claims of being able to deal with the 40 slices that would come with five pizzas, I feel I can easily dismiss these boasts. People always think they can eat more pizza than they really can. It's a scientific fact.

Music critics have it hardest

In the every decreasing world of entertainment reviews, I still think the poor folk who try to review new music have it the hardest.

You can watch a movie or a TV show, read a book or comic or novel, and if you have to write words about it, you can probably do it with one viewing or reading. Do it for a short while, and you will probably have the angle for your review already settled by the time the credits roll.

(I tried movie reviewing for a couple of years when I first became a journo in the mid 00s, and gave it up because it really wasn't much fun as I thought it would be, and it was ruining my experiences of watching a movie for fun. I found some of those old reviews on our dying PC the other day and they were slightly interesting - I had the knowledge to write with confidence, but was so fucking pretentious).

But it's a different tune for the music reviewers. Never mind the fact that there is so much of it - dozens of albums are released around the world every week, and it is literally impossible to keep up with all the new music that gets up loaded to something like Youtube every single day.

But it also takes so long to figure out if you like a song. I have to listen to something a dozen times before I can come to a decision about it. To see if it has hooked me, has something properly unforgettable to it. Sometimes it takes that long to discover how annoying something is.

Sometimes a song can hit you out of the blue on an instant listen. But that is truly rare. It is only with real immersion into the song that you can find the heart of it.

And musical tastes change over the years, I am far more forgiving of pop music nonsense than I was when I was a teenage metaller, or slightly older raver. So much of the stuff I loved as a young perosn now sounds hopelessly adolescent, and I've always got an ear out for something new.

The only music I write about here is the stuff I have been listening to for years and years, and have some very definite - if occasionally fluid - opinions about it. But to write about everything that is coming in the deluge of the new, that's a real talent.

Commanded and Conquered: I think I'm in an abusive relationship with a 26-year-old video game

I really have to stop playing the old games so much, but I do keep winning. 

For a large part of the early 21st century, I was 10 years behind on my video games. It would take a decade before the games I played became cheap enough, or the computers I owned were grunty enough, and I would be clocking up GTA IV while everyone else was on V.

The situation has become inevitably worse, and I'm still plying GTA IV while everybody else in the world is frothing for VI, and I'm still playing the Command and Conquer games that came out 20 years ago.

I lost track of contemporary games when they all went online, and I have no interest in playing with other people, I just want to tackle a game without the randomness of the human factor. So I'm still playing the games that came out just after the turn of the century, and they have all the complexity I desire. I don't care if the graphics aren't as high def as the more modern versions, I was never into games for the visuals.

I always liked the Command and Conquer games, they appealed to my sense of tactics and strategy. I don't even know if they still make them, but it doesn't matter if they do, because I'm still happy with Red Alert 2 Yuri Revenge.

My main issue is that I get stuck on particularly hard levels of particular games, and just want to play them over and over until I master them. I can't stop, even when it gets majorly infuriating, or my back aches from sitting down for too long. 

I broke the habit last time by losing the disc I had of the first decade of C+C games, somewhere in the pile of old Uncut music CD compilations. But then I rediscovered that disc recently, and holy shit, it still works on our aging PC. Kinda.

I could play one of those addictive levels just fine (it's the last stage of the Chinese campaign on Generals, which is still fucking hard to win, even with a strategy I'm still working on), but my favourite level of C+C to ever play is the skirmish on on Red Alert 2 where you're facing off against seven other brutal enemies, all out to get you.

And while I can play that level, it does keep crashing on me, and I have to shut down the whole thing and start again.

It's a well-known software problem, something to do with the graphics falling over when confronted by the might of Windows 10, and I tried all the patches and none of them work.

But I still play it, it takes a lot longer because I have to manually save it every 30 seconds, and it keeps crashing. Sometimes it lasts for 10 minutes before crapping out, sometimes it crashes out in less than a minute, but I do keep winning.

I do win! And I wanna keep on winning, so I keep playing it and learn to live with the random shutdowns during crucial stages, and then it fucks me over in new ways, like just showing a black screen if any kind of notification comes through, and I still keep playing and I do keep winning, even when it feels like it's abusing me for fun. 

I do keep winning.

Crashing on the way to a Star Wars

I went to the first midnight session of The Rise Of Skywalker, driving there through the empty streets late at night, when I saw a guy on a moped take off through a red light and get knocked over by a car. He looked all right, but I was right at the front of the intersection, so I knew I had to get out and help deal with it, and would probably miss the start of the movie. So it goes.

And then I saw some flashing lights and realised there was a cop in an unmarked car on the other side of the intersection, who could take charge of the situation, and they immediately waved me through, so I got to the Star Wars in plenty of time.

Before the movie started, I thought it was a sign that I was destined to be there. By the time it had finished and I realised it was a chaotic and cowardly mess of a film, I thought it was a different kind of sign altogether. 

Eighties comics on the new release shelves

There was a sense of anything could happen in late 80s mainstream comics, after the big hits of Watchmen and Maus and the Dark Knight Returns and so on, anything could come along. Creator-owned work was at a peak, and mainstream comics were making a real quantum leap in quality and craft.

That feeling of innovation and thoughtfulness - for me - has largely faded away over the years, although there will always be pockets of breathtaking creativity in the weird and wonderful medium of periodical comics. And it is deeply reassuring to see some of the old dogs of that era still doing the work.  

Because now there are new Grendel and Concrete comics coming out in the next few months. A Swamp Thing issue from 1988 has just been released, complete with a Johnny DC column and vintage ads for comics that were on sale three decades ago.

(I picked up the Swamp Thing comic for the novelty of it, and enjoyed it more than I thought. I found most of the Veitch run fairly average, but #88 was pretty good in the end. It's so far from controversial though, that it really show what true cowards were at the time - and can still be.)

Obviously the world has moved on, the entire readership and industry has changed. But the pages of Grendel will feature Christine Spar battling evil vampires, and Larry is no doubt doing something dumb in Concrete, so how much has really changed?

I've been a Grendel fan since back in the day, and have all the Concrete that Paul Chadwick ever produced, so I've already got my orders in for the new comics. I doubt they will be able to capture the fire for comics that I had when I first starting reading their adventures so long ago, but I can only hope they spark something new. 

The day CHiPs came to Timaru

It's almost impossible to contemplate in an age of unending streamers, but we only had two TV channels to choose from when I was a kid. This meant you watched a lot of crap, but it also meant everybody you knew watched the same crap.

So when a TV show was big, it was properly big. Everybody watched it because everybody was watching the same thing, there was no other choice.  Sometimes this led to some tiny tragedies - my Nana would want to watch Coronation St and I would miss the latest episode of the Hulk, and I can still feel the echoes of the despair at missing A Night To Remember one Sunday afternoon, because I was such a huge freak about disasters.

We didn't even get our first video player until I was nine, and that changed everything. But before that, I was at the whims of adults and TV programmers.

So everybody watched Happy Days and M*A*S*H. Everybody watched the Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider and the A-Team. And you can bet your butt that everybody watched CHiPs.

It's such blatant and obvious copaganda to my old and jaded eyes, but I dearly loved CHiPs as a kid. They were almost like superheroes, with their flashy boots and helmets, and almost science fiction with their sleek bikes with all the latest technology. Erik Estrada was so ridiculously handsome, he may have been my first crush on a man. 

And I know I wasn't the only one, because the first time I got freaked out by the size of a crowd was when CHiPs came to town. It wasn't Jon or Ponch or anybody like that, just two random guys from the real life highway patrol, but the main street of Timaru was packed out in excitement, I didn't even get close to those men in tight light brown uniforms.

It was probably only a few hundred people in a small town on the arse end of the world, but it was still a big crowd, and a big crowd that came out to see some traffic cops. Everybody loved CHiPs, and I think everybody loved those boots. 

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright: Not now, Luther!

- The Adventures of Luther Arkwright #7 

Written and drawn by Bryan Talbot 

Letters by Steve Haynie

When the six eyes of Triad are on you

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.

You're a fucking weapon

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 Boys: All you ever needed was love

While I have fallen very behind in watching The Boys TV show, one of my favourite things about it is seeing fans of the live action version discover the comic and how horrified they are by how crass and silly it is. That always makes my day.

I know enough that the TV show has just ended, so it seems a good time to republish this post I wrote - fuuuuck me - 16 years ago, about the ending of the comic series, and how it was a big old soft romance beneath all that superhero decadence. 

I still stand by this ancient opinion, even if I really failed to get into the bromance side of things. It's also one of the few things I've written for this blog which now somehow has a sensitive content warning on it. Must be the bit about the gerbil up the arse. 

“’Cos all that macho shit – that gunfighter, Dirty Harry bollocks – it looks tasty, but in the end it’s fuckin’ self-defeatin’.

"It just leaves you with bodies in ditches an’ blokes with headfuls o’ broken glass.

“Men are only so much use, Hughie.

“Men are boys.”

Some people say there are no such things as romance comics any more. That there haven’t been any romance books ever since titles like Young Love and My Romance disappeared from newsstand shelves. I say these people haven’t been paying attention to the alternative comic world, where there are loads of unashamedly romantic comics.

I also say these people haven’t been reading the Boys. Because The Boys was as romantic as fuck.

A lot of people could never see behind all the buggering jokes that Ennis and his artistic collaborators rammed into each issue. A lot of readers understandably didn’t find the idea of gerbils up the arse that funny, actually, and who can really blame them?

But there were moments of actual tenderness and intellectual thought, in there amongst the superhero decadence. Somewhere in there, hidden behind elongated cocks and bright red gore, The Boys had some interesting things to say about the extrapolation of power, and the pointlessness of violent revenge.

The reader didn’t even have to look hard to find this stuff. Each issue of The Boys was so narratively stuffed, there were pages and pages where James Stilwell, the ultimate villain of the series – who also happens to be a straight businessman who doesn’t even really pay for his innumerable crimes – clearly explains everything.

This was, incidentally, the scariest aspect of power that The Boys ever touched upon. Sure, the Homelander could devastate entire cities with his psychopathic hissy-fits, and terrible men did terrible deeds to keep the status quo going, but the big bad guy is just a corporation in human form.

(I read every single issue of The Boys, and I can’t even remember his fucking name until I made the effort to look it up, which is kinda the point.)

The corporation that is responsible for the vast majority of horror in The Boys is still there at the end of the series. There have been scapegoats and witch hunts, but the same hands are on the same reins of power.

Because corporations don’t really care about ideologies, and you can take down the people involved, but they will usually be fall guys, and others will take their place, and business goes on. It’s more threatened by Bad Product than anything its enemies could do to it.

This behaviour can be changed – you just have to prove to the corporation that a mode of thinking is unacceptable, and not worth the cost or effort. But it’s a type of modern thinking that can’t really be beaten.

The series could have ended with this down note, but there was more to come. Most of the silly superhero stuff was dealt with in the penultimate story arc, the final story was all about consequences, and revenge, and love.

And yes, it was still taking the piss out of super-heroes, as well. The final issue comments on attempts to strip superheroes back to absolute, blank-page basics, without actually changing anything fundamentally different, and laughs at this particularly super-hero misfortune.

The whole series did spend a lot of its time gleefully ripping into many of the core ideas about superheroes. Ennis isn’t against the fundamental idea behind superheroes – he does a terrific Superman, but he hates the way they became the end-all of comics in most peoples’ minds. And since he has no nostalgia or warmth towards the concept, he rips into them, usually to the point of absolute silliness.

And then there were a lot of moments where the silliness got sublime (especially in the excellent Frenchie issue, or the part when representatives of all the big Allied countries teamed up to kick the fucking shit out a Nazi cocksucker).

But the most successful moments in The Boys weren’t the silly bits, or the parts where a superhero cliché was thoroughly desecrated, they were the moments where somebody shows somebody else a little kindness, or a little compassion, or a little goddamned human feeling, when they have no reason to.

After all, the main character in The Boys wasn’t a brutal butcher, or a big mother’s boy, or a super Aryan nightmare, it was wee Hughie, a little fellow from Scotland.

When Hughie saves the day at the finale of The Boys, he doesn’t do it with violence or anger. He still gives it a go, but he’s totally useless at it. Instead, it’s the fact that he’s a nice guy, that he’s always been a nice guy, that saves everything.

Hughie was – by far – the least violent character in The Boys. Towards the end of the series, he got the revenge he was after since #1, but he just felt a bit sick afterwards. Hughie never gets off on the violence.

At the end, Hughie does stop Butcher from doing something monstrous, and saves the world with blind good luck, and the fact that he's a nice guy, who Butcher can't let fall to an idiotic death.

Even though Hughie does lose his shit at the end (and it’s over his parents, who he also moaned and groaned about, but was finally driven to a murderous rage by the thought that something terrible had happened to them,) and even though he still plays the little political games in the final issues, and even though everybody else in the series spent half their time making fun of him, Hughie's lack of violence and anger does win out.

Because all that macho bullshit didn’t mean anything, and just ruined a lot of peoples’ lives. Hughie is one of the only characters who bothers to sit down and actually talk to people, rather than order them around, or threaten them, like everybody else does.

And by the end of The Boys, it's clear that the old ways of vengeance and blood are just going to lead to more and more bloodshed, and that it's not good enough anymore.

And the thing that saves wee Hughie, when he could have gone as dark and horrible as everybody else, is love.

His relationship with Annie has been crazy, light, funny and genuinely warm, and for the series to end with them in each other's arms is just the perfect way to cap it all off. They sort their shit out and move on together as a proper couple, and they live happily ever after. (It's notable that the phone call where they actually figure it all out for the final time isn't shown in the comic, because it's none of our bloody business what they actually say to each other.)

The Boys had plenty of empty and cruel sex, and showed that without love, men will let hate rule their lives. Ultimately, the comic takes a romantic path into the future.

And despite what all the old comics used to say, romance isn’t just flowers and dancing and restrained tears, romance is about wanting to be with somebody all of the time, and wanting to protect them, and being terrified of losing them.

Romance is hard and scary, and the comic does end with a quesy fear that something terrible happening again. (But it doesn’t. Not today.) And it's totally worth it. It's always worth it.

And seeing this comic finish with a loving embrace beneath a rebuilt bridge is one last reminder that The Boys was more than just a comic about fucking superheroes.

How many decisions can you make in a day?

When I was a teenager and was thinking far too much about how the world works, I tried to count how many decisions I made in a day. I tried to add up all the tiny things, like deciding to stand up and walk, or pick up the dirty clothes on the floor, or grab a snack, or go out into the world. anything.

Not the unconscious things, like the decision to keep breathing, but all the yes/no binary decisions that we all make every day. 

I instantly found out that just thinking about this shit inevitably led to paralyzed inertia, and I didn't even get out of bed. Best just to go with the flow, really.

Absolutely the same old thing

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.