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.

When Thor broke the need for everything

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.

Prism Stalker: I can do this.

- Prism Stalker #4
Art and story by Sloane Leong
Letters by Ariana Maher

The Sandman and the pissing tree

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.