Aprils Fool's Day: Always a day behind the bullshit

I've always hated April Fool's Day. Right from the start - I hated getting tricked as a kid. I thought it was dumb.

I particularly hate April Fool's Day now as a journalist, because even with all the evidence you can gather, you ultimately have to trust people at their word, and can be severely fucked if they go back on it, and there is just one day in the year where you can not trust any motherfucker.

And I very much hate it in the internet age, because I have been tricked a number of times on April 2, when people on the other side of the world are still playing the fool, while the rest of us have moved on.

Who is more foolish - the fool, or the person being fooled? It's the fucking fool.

Project Hail Mary: You look pretty good down here

Project Hail Mary is a movie about how the need to help other people is a universal constant, even if those people look like rocks and don't have a face, and that's just the kind of message I need to hear more often right now. And judging by the audiences it is getting, I'm not the only one.

It's grim times around the world, and I see people doing the most abhorrent things to their fellow humans on a daily basis. You don't even have to be a full-time doom-scroller to see how nasty people can get out of there, with violence and brute ignorance running rampant.

So any kind of film that offers something resembling hope is always welcome, no matter how fantastical. (I mean, I could handle the science fiction of the interstellar engine drive and such, but was taken aback from frequent assertions that all the nations of the world were working together to solve this problem.)

I am also in the mood for stories that don't feature being dicks or arseholes or bullies, because I don't care about these fucking dolts, even though the rules of English fiction dictate that all bullies must face justice at some point. And like The Martian, there isn't anybody like that here, and it's so damned refreshing.

Dickheads are the easiest way to generate conflict in a story - creating drama through selfishness and meanness - but I still truly believe in my heart that people want to help each other when we get the chance, and we should pay little heed to those who insist otherwise. 

And a movie with no bad guys other than the cruel indifference of the universe - where nobody is being a dick just because they can, just because the story needs it - is the type of movie I really needed right now.

Also this film has sad karaoke, and if you really want to get into the proper depths of human feeling, you can do it with sad karaoke. 

Losing track of it all

I've been trying to get the comic and movie collection in some kind of order this year, and figuring out what I've actually got, and it's probably going to take me a lot longer than 12 months. Because after decades of collecting, there is a fucking shit-tonne of stuff.

As I'm going through it, there are genuine surprises, I find copies of Flash comics from the Silver Age and random Michael Moorcock novels I didn't know I had. My memory ain't what it used to be, and I have no recollection of actually buying them at any point. 

I used to be able to confidently say exactly which individual comics I had, even when I had thousands and thousands of them. I could tell you what one issue of Jungle Action I had buried in a box, or how many issues of Booster Gold I had.

That kind of useless information has definitely been under pressure in recent years, with brainpower more likely to be devoted to things like 'making sure my kids are not playing in traffic', or 'remembering when they need to take $3 to school for a sausage sizzle'.

I do know some things for sure. I know in the room downstairs there are exactly 2351 issues of 2000ad in a number of genuinely life-threatening boxes, and that all the Hitman and Grendel and the first 25 issues of The New Warriors are carefully boxed away.

But I can be surprised by what I actually own when I crack open dusty boxes, and sometimes I just can't find very particular things that I'm sure I had.

I've totally lost track of who I've leant stuff to over the years, and sometimes I get a pile of DVDs or trade paperbacks returned from family and friends, with profuse apologies for taking so long with them, and I didn't even know they had them in the first place. I knew my boxsets of The Wire were somewhere, I just didn't know they were at my sister-in-law's house.

I know a lot of people have databases and spreadsheets to keep track of it all, but that turns it from a hobby into a chore. The closest I ever got is a list of all the individual comics I need to complete various series, still printed out on paper and shoved into my wallet for the next time I stumble across a pile of Jonah Hex comics from the mid-2000s.

In the end, I'm not actually that bothered that I can't keep track of it like I once did. I've already outsourced all sorts of things like movie knowledge to places like the IMDB and wikipedia, and I long ago made peace with the idea that I can't own everything and know everything. 

A little mystery is good for the soul, even if it's just the mystery of what I did with that issue of Amazing Heroes with the Alan Moore interview in it that I've been looking for. I'm sure it's somewhere.

The Maxx: It's not cool to hallucinate, sweetie

- The Maxx #14

Pencils and inks by the late, great Sam Keith

Words by Sam Keith and Bill Messner-Loebs 

Colors by Steve Oliff 

Letters by Mike Heisler

Waiting for Samurai Jack

Ever since I became a parent, I have been asking myself the same thing over and over: When can I watch Samurai Jack with them? Are they ready for Samurai Jack? Are they old enough for the intensity of Samurai Jack? Wil they appreciate the delicate symmetry and balls-out action of Samurai Jack? Is it time for Samurai Jack?

Nearly. It's nearly time.

I also do think they are ready to start playing Risk, the other thing I've been patiently waiting for them to get old enough for - without taking all the little pieces and flinging them around the room. Small steps, but we get there in the end.

Aotearoa in the background

It used to be huge news when films were shot in New Zealand, and something as forgettable as the Race For The Yankee Zephyr was a huge fucking deal, even if it's a film that nobody cares about today (it does have some aces helicopter action in the hills around Queenstown).

Now I can be watching some random film, and I'll recognise the hill that an action hero is hiking over as one where me and my mates got stoned in the 90s, and I never even knew it was made in this country.

It's always very clear - the rocks, the tussock and the riverbeds of Canterbury and Otago are like nowhere else on the planet, and have been in my back yard for most of my life.

It used to be an actual news story when an overseas production was filmed in Aotearoa, and then the Lord of the Rings came along, and showed that a bunch of halflings at the arse end of the world could make epic cinema as good as anybody, and a big part of that epicness was the landscape.

Now that landscape shows up everywhere, and sometimes there is no way the Ash Vs The Evil Dead TV show can convince me that the back roads of Waikato are actually just outside Everytown, USA; or that a Mission Impossible part set in the foothills of the Himalayas is actually clearly spent near Lake Wanaka.

I don't even keep track of what is filming in this country anymore, so when I see the flora of my high country, it's little surprise when I look it up and find that it was filmed a metaphorical stone's throw from where I was born.

The most recent Predator was the one of the best recent examples, because that alien landscape that the predators is stomping through is clearly around the headwaters of the Rangitata River, with a whole bunch of vivid CGI alien landscape stapled on top of it.

I used to see things like that in the sky when I took acid on those hills, so it's no surprise to see that kind of landscaping on the cinema screen. It's familiar, even if it's a million light years away.

Not everyone is as miserable as you

I used to be a whiny adolescent, thinking that we all hated it when our friends become successful, but the person who gave us a song called that turned out to be a famously miserable cunt, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it. And letting famously miserable cunts convince us how the world works can have some extremely toxic results. 

I do believe Lord of the Flies has caused some real harm in the real world, because people think that in dire situations, everyone is going to go feral. It's become a cultural shorthand for when civilisation breaks down, and that it's human nature to destroy everybody to save yourself.

And it doesn't fucking happen - when a bunch of Tongan boys were stranded on a Pacific Island for more than a year in the 1960s, they worked together, and survived as a group.  Because that's how society works, we work together to build things, and when we turn on each other, it destroys everything for everyone.

It was only recently that I found out the writer of Lord of the Flies was a raging alcoholic who seemed to really dislike people in general, and that's not really the kind of personality that you should be telling us the score.

Because the real harm came in things like Hurricane Katrina, where help was withheld because of stories of the survivors turning on each other at the arena they fled to when everything else broke down, and exaggerated stories of terrible events were used an excuse to delay that much needed assistance.

Kill your heroes, they say, because they'll always let you down - the beat generation were incredible writers and almost uniformly terrible people by 21st century standards (with some bright and notable exceptions), but you can still dig their vibes - and some people will spend their lives trying to tell us that everybody is as wicked as they are. 

But we don't have to listen, or believe them.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight: Everyone feels the festive fever

It's hard to find cheap issues of the Moench/Sienkiewicz Moon Knight series these days, they often go for quite extraordinary amounts of money. Partly because they made a TV show about the superhero, but mainly because they have some truly fucking awesome covers.

But I still grab any inexpensive issues when I see them, because they are full of lovely Bill Sienkiewicz art, and because it's always fascinating to see an artist growing into their true style.

Sienkiewicz's Moon Knight comics are full of obvious Neal Adams moments - 

 - and then in the very same issue there will be moments when the beautiful chaos of the artist's later works starts to show through, and things break down in glorious fashion -

Seeing one of the great modern comic artists discover their true self is truly a great appeal of a monthly run, especially when it's such a vivid change of style.

The Nth Man is my main Marvel expertise

I was already interested in the new Marvel Age of Comics essays - small books full of information and analysis, looking at some of Marvel's most celebrated comics, because one of them was by Paul Cornell, and I was reading his stuff in the 90s when he was doing the same sort of thing with Doctor Who.

They are great little reads, especially Cornell's extensive look at the Avengers in the 1970s. They do sometimes get a little bogged down in plot recaps and explanations, but are pleasingly full of behind the scenes information and musing on the themes and artistic goals of these ephemeral comics.

I burned through them all in a weekend, and have already starting digging back into my Shooter/Perez issues of the Avengers. I have also been thinking about what Marvel comic I'd be qualified to write about if I did one of them.

Doing something basic like the Byrne/Claremont X-Men or Simonson Thor would be right out - they're still magnificent comics, but have been covered extensively in the decades they have been published.

There could be rewards in zeroing in on something like Alan Davis' ClanDestine, and use it as an excuse to get into the whole Marvel UK thing, and the brilliance of Davis' two Excalibur runs. There would also be ample room for thoughts ClanDestine's inability to get a grip inside the wider comic marketplace.

But I'm fairly sure it would probably be The Nth Man by Larry Hama and Ron Wagner. It only lasted 16 issues and change, but those 16 issues are full of world war, ninja mysticism and a dork with absolute reality-changing powers. It's incredibly propulsive and a deep mindfuck, and while it looks a lot like Hama's GI Joe, it is very much its own thing.

I could get 10,00 words on the career of Larry Hama, and a few more on Wagner's incredibly energetic art. It has some vague connections to the wider Marvel universe - they all show up in an issue of Excalibur in between those Davis runs - but it's a rare complete story from Marvel, even as it all gets cosmically goofy by the end of things.

If they did a series of books for 2000ad like they did for Marvel, I could write a dozen longs long essays on multiple long-running series and short shocks. But the Nth Man would be my Marvel man.

Doctor Who: Something from nothing

Anybody who has spent significant amounts of time immersed in the universe of Doctor Who will have dreamt about the lost episodes. Precious dreamtime given over to sitting down and watching a TV show that literally does not exist any more.

Those missing episodes of the Hartnell and Troughton years, lost due to stupidity and deleted from the historical record, are a hole in the story that is never really going to be filled. Marco Polo and the Myth Makers and Power of the Daleks only exist in re-creation now, and as much as we yearn to see them, they are more than likely gone forever.

Many of them only exist in dreams anymore. I've seen episodes of the Macra Terror in my sleep and while I can barely remember any detail, the giant crabs aliens were much scarier in my head than they were when they showed up in 21st century Who.

I first became aware of the missing episodes in a small write-up in the seminal 20th anniversary magazine, and they all seemed lost then. There was a strange fascination with this - no matter how determined I was to see as much of the show as possible, there would always be this missing part, forever out of reach, forever mysterious, forever gone. You'd need a TARDIS for that.

I have seen the missing episodes as best I can, in fairly crude reconstructions that put telesnaps over the soundtrack, and it's easy enough to follow the story, but not enough to really get engaged. A significant amount of missing stories have also been recreated in animation form, and they do have their charms, but they do miss the crucial subtilties of Hartnell and Troughton, the strange ways they moved and gestured that were so important.

There are also some fools who have been trying to recreate the missing episodes with AI, and that's just as creatively and morally bankrupt as expected, and should be of no interest to anybody.

So the animation is probably your best bet if you want to see some version of it, and you live with this tiny sliver of void in the best story ever told. 

And then every few years, somebody dusts off some old film can, and suddenly you're watching the Doctor and Salamander fight on the floor of the TARDIS, and the dream comes true. There is nothing in all entertainment that compares with the news that they've found some of the Dalek Master Plan, and we'll actually get to see Katrina and Bret Vyon in full episodes. Nothing.

I might still dream about them, but they've also escaped out into the real world, and always bringing the hope of more.

GI Joe: Howsabout punch-for-punch?

- GI Joe #64

Pencils by Ron Wagner

Inks by Russ Heath

Script by Larry Hama

Colors by Nel Yomtov

Letters by Joe Rosen

Brian Bolland and The Invisibles: This looks -- interesting! Everything's -- ok!!

Brian Bolland's covers for The Invisibles are some of the best he has ever done, getting his finest freak on, with Morrison's stories giving the legendary artist the means to really get out there.

My favourite of all of them is the cover to the trade paperback for volume three, where he takes the 12 previous covers he did for that volume and remixes them in pure stream of consciousness fashion. Most of them are messy, some of them are even better than the original version, and several of them are funny as hell. 

They all look like dream comics, with nonsense phrases and absurd images from comics published in other dimension. Just about recognizable, but clearly untethered from our real world, just like an Invisibles cover should be. 

My least favourite is obviously the trade paperback cover with a fleshy, grotesque blob of humanity staring out at the reader. Wonderfully repulsive, especially in the proper tones, but nothing I want to look at for too long.

Still drying my eyes with The Streets

It's been more than 20 years since A Grand Don't Come For Free by The Streets came out, but I heard it again for the first time in ages recently, and it's still a banger of an album, with an emotional kick at the end that I've never felt from any other musical album - before or since.

It's in Empty Cans, the climactic track on Mike Skinner's rambling, beautiful album. The entire thing is a concept album, telling a whole story, and by the end, it's just the narrator alone with empty cans of beers, angry at the betrayal of his mates. 

His TV isn't working, so he gets a repair man in, but they get into a dumb fight and then he's left alone, stewing in his anger, and still down a thousand quid.

And then he rewinds the tape and goes back, and gives his mate a chance to help him out, and he gets his thousand pounds back, and has a party and is surrounded by life and love.

Concept albums may have huge ambitions, but there is real power in the simple lesson of Empty Cans, and the wish fulfillment of getting a second chance to do things right. I don't find that in a Pink Floyd album, as magnificent as they are.

I have - to my great regret - sometimes been swallowed by own bitterness and refused to move on from something, but I have also sometimes found forgiveness so easy to grant, and have enjoyed the results. 

It can happen to everybody, even if we don't all lose a wad of cash down the back of the telly. 

Fuck all the awards

People asked me about who was going to win the Academy Awards this year, like I could give a fuck.

When I was eight years old, I had a magazine that listed all the Oscar winners up to 1982, and I memorised every fact in that mag, taking note of all the big names of all the big films, and wondering how something called Annie Hall could have won in the year Star Wars came out.

That's about as much as I ever cared. By the time I got seriously interested in movies in my late teens, I realized that the Oscars didn't mean shit - they never recognised the films I thought were the best, and rewarded the bland over the innovative.

But there is a whole huge industry behind the awards, and a lot of people have a lot of money riding on them, so they're not going anywhere.

And putting on award shows is literally a big business, I once worked for a company that put them on for a little while, and went to several for things like appliance stores, with people getting very excited for taking the award for best store under 10,000 sqm.

The most awards I've been to are for news journalism, and the team I worked in has scooped a few of them. I understand why people get excited about them, but my main memories of those awards - apart from getting to catch up with old colleagues - is of unworthy winners and monstrous omissions. The very worst night of my professional life was spent at one of these awards shows, listening to the big boss at my work spew on about doing great journalism, while I was about to quit because every choice that boss was making was objectively making it worse.

Of course I do like it when my friends get honoured, because it does make them happy and I like it when they're happy and I'm not enough of a monster to shit on that happiness.

But I don't want awards, and I never, ever seek them out. I find vying for them distasteful, and purely egocentric. The work is the reward, I don't give a shit what baubles it conveys, and I certainly don't give a shit who wins best picture every year.

Alan Moore, gods and AI

Alan Moore reckons this is the most important comics panel he ever wrote, because as soon as he wrote it, he realised it was absolutely true, and much of his work since has been unpacking this strange, wonderful and utterly honest idea. 

It's also the first thing that always comes into my mind when somebody writes an article about some AI bullshit achieving sentience, because it's replied to some random prompt with something that sounds a bit human. The only place these things are alive are in the minds of dipshits who think they are alive.

Alan Moore knows the score, but I bet even he would be surprised by how fucking stupid some people can still be.

Mad Men: A place where we know we are loved

I've burned through much of my collection of movie DVDs as background noise while I worked at home over the past year or two, but this year I'm focused on the TV, and have started the year with some Mad Men.

It took me a few weeks to get through it all, but my extremely inane opinion is that it is still very, very good. It's the kind of drama that cuts to the soul, even if you don't have anything in common with these strange and ancient people who believed such weird things like smoking indoors. Sometimes you see their real selves - and they see it themselves - and it's devastating.

It's also incredibly funny - the lawnmower episode is an all time great and the scene where Roger gets to fire Burt for a second time is fucking hilarious -  as we watch these generally appalling people try to make a connection with others among the skyscrapers of the modern world. And occasionally uplifting, with the rise and rise of Peggy and Joan against a society that is full of nothing but old boys.

I've long thought that one of the greatest strengths of Mad Men is that no matter how much you hate Don Draper for the bullshit he pulls, it is infinitesimal compared to how much he hates himself - Jon Hamm's acting in the moments where he cracks and turns into Dick Whitman are actually heartbreaking.

But I've also always said Deadwood was my favourite show of that golden era of US TV because it was the one prestige show that wasn't about the death of the American dream, it was about the birth of it, as terrible people try to change to build something together, almost forming a civilized society by accident.

And Mad Men is set in the height of America, and the big twist is that it's not really a golden age, because the cracks are there, and a hell of a lot of people fall through them. It was a fine time for old white men and completely ratshit for absolutely everybody - anybody who doesn't fit the mold is kept away from any kind of power - and there are things that are taken for granted that are properly startling to the modern viewer. The most shocking thing in the whole series is still the moment where they have a roadside picnic, and then leave all their rubbish on the side of the road and just walk off.

It's the ideal of the American dream, and it's all fake ideals created by fake men, and sometimes you see the real human being beneath the suit or beehive hairdo. And al the powerful men are really scared little boys behind their wealth and influence, but at least the offices they work in and the clothes they wear are stylish enough to hide their pain.

Twin Peaks makes the top five

Deciding on my list of the top five movies ever made is something I take far more seriously than is warranted. Nobody else cares, or should, but I have thought about it a lot over the years, and have become certain in my verdicts. 

They say your tastes are defined by a very specific age in your life, when you're a very young adult and figuring out what kind of person you are going to be. And they're right because my personal list of the top five favourite films hasn't changed in decades. It was always an easy list to decide upon and has been the same since the 1990s.

(The top 10 is much more flexible and has never been set in stone, Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later come in and out, and Rocky Horror Picture Show and Die Hard have always been floating around in there, along with the best westerns. It's a fluid list.)

O Lucky Man! usually tops my top five, because it's always nice to have an absolute favourite film that is slightly unique, and I watched it again last year and it's still fucking awesome in what it says and sings; I have never got over the buzzing feeling of transcendence that I've got every time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey; Withnail and I has the best quotes of any movie ever; and the original Dawn of the Dead warped my mind right at the moment it needed to be warped.

The last spot was slightly flexible, but was always a western and usually a Clint. It was mainly The Searchers for the moment where the Duke's voice cracks at the end, but on any different day it could be the Outlaw Josey Wales for the words of iron speech; or Unforgiven for the final 20 minutes of wrath; or the Good, The Bad and the Ugly for its soaring magnificence.

But I've been thinking that list recently, and have come to the inescapable conclusion that while the westerns are all brilliant and still lingering in the more vague top 10, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is most definitely enshrined in that top five.

I saw it soon after it came out, and it's always spoken to me. It would be another five or six years before I actually got the chance to watch the TV show, and I was frequently lost by the dense plotting of the feature film. But it was such an intense experience it felt intoxicating, and I was greatly unimpressed by the critical indifference at the time (Kim Newman was the only writer I ever saw who captured what I felt about it).

I had that soundtrack on my walkman as I walked around town at night for years and years, and I got a real indication of a life in that darkness. I watched the film over and over, and can quote an embarrassing amount of it, and I finally saw it on a cinema screen for the first time last year.

It was the brilliance of that screening, and the full body chill that it gave me, that has now cemented it in my top five forever. A lot of the original show and The Return are staggeringly brilliant, and Fire Walk with Me is part of a vast tapestry of twisted genius, but it's also a genius work of cinema on its own.

I'm never gonna get vox popped by Letterbox, and that's fortunate because I'd be fucked if they did because they only want four films and I can't get it down that to just four. But those two hours in the town of Twin Peaks will always be one of them.

DC - The New Frontier: It has filled my heart with hope.

- DC: The New Frontier #4 

Written and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke 

Coloured by Dave Stewart 

Lettered by Jared K Fletcher

Jilted John: It's still a classic

It was the first record British superhero Zenith every bought, and we know this because he said it was a classic in a pop star profile that ran on the back page of a 2000ad in the late eighties.

I had never heard of Jilted John when I read that, and thought it must be nothing more than a joke record, because Zenith was always the great brat of 80s superheroes, and then I heard it years later and was delighted to discover it's the ultimate expression of the heartbreak of the whiny and problematic working class teenager, crying on his way to the chip shop - Gordon IS a moron! - and also a genuinely banging tune.

Zenith was fucking right! It is still a classic.

Outlander is gone now

I might have been the only person in the world who thought of an old poster for Outlander (2008) as a genuine cultural institution, so I'm almost definitely the only person who was sad to see it go, and I'm sure it's my fault.

I think I fucked up by pointing out that there were still posters for these films in a story I wrote for work about the state of the Majestic Theatre in Timaru. They were the last signs of the video rental store that used to live on the bottom floor of the theatre, put up and forgotten for more than 15 years.

I always liked to check if those posters were still there every time I went back home, because both the cinema and the video store were Very Important parts of my life at some points, and while the faded posters might look like neglect, the fact that they stayed up for years and years was always gently reassuring.

Then I only had to go and bloody point this out, and the last time I went home for a family wedding, they were gone. There's just a flyer for a beer festival down the bay now.

Nothing else has changed, there is no sign of any actual restoration of the theatre, but there are just blank windows instead of faded cinematic dreams. 

In this fucked up world, it's a stupid thing to care about, but I really did, and I'm sorry they were cleared away.

Doctor Who and the Blunted Sharpness of Media Criticism

I still read every issue of Doctor Who Magazine as it comes out, and have been doing so regularly since the nineties. I think it's a remarkable publication - more than 600 issues and decades of reviews, analysis, interviews and comics - and it's as strong as it ever was.

Having read it for so long, I do see how it has changed over the years. And there is still a lot to admire - the design team have been consistently strong, and some of the most recent covers are as striking as ever, getting a lot out of the limited number of photos of William Hartnell they might have. But the general tone of the magazine has also evolved, sometimes in strange and unexpected ways.

I'm generally on board with all the changes, the entire concept of Dr Who is built around the idea of regeneration and moving with the times. But I do wish it was a little bit meaner, like it used to be.

I do genuinely believe the publication was at its best in the wilderness years - with no TV show to preview and pore over, the magazine turned more introspective, and was filled with essays and articles about what it all meant. But it was also a time when they didn't have to play nicely with the BBC to ensure they kept up their extraordinary access to the production of the show, and could more easily acknowledge the faults of the thing they loved.

They could get particularly scathing about Dr Who's old producers, especially when they were picking away at sacred cows, and the reviews of the New Adventures books got downright nasty at times.

But then the show came back in 2005, and there was definitely more of a celebratory tone which has grown and almost calcified. And 21 years later, there is no room for rampant miserabilism any more.  They'll find something nice to say about even the worst Big Finish audio - and some of them are objectively awful - and the latest season of the TV show is always the greatest ever.  

It's not just in the rarified airs of Doctor Who fandom - all the music magazines I respect rarely give five stars to new music, but they don't get one either, it's almost all in the usual 3 or 4 stars range. And I miss the regular meanness of the Comics Journal, arguing about things that feel like dust in the wind now, but were so important at that time. While I do occasionally see sparks of the old viciousness, I still feel remorse for the fact we never got a full on scathing obituary of Stan Lee from Gary Groth. 

People are, obviously, as mean as ever, and you can see that online every day. But the more mainstream things get, the more those sharp edges are filed off, even though it's often the sharpness that make you feel something in the first place. 

The perfect Spider-Man

I was far too young for Ditko, and only knew the Romita era through reprints, but the Ross Andru version will always be the one, true Spider-Man to me. 

I got a beat-to-shit copy of Amazing Spider-Man #179 out of a dollar bin recently, and it's got everything I ever want in my Spidey stories. It's got a splash page with Spider-Man trapped by the Green Goblin, while swearing that he has to break free because Aunt May is dying and he's the only way who can save it; some beating up of some random thugs with appropriate quipping; Spidey's webbing breaking under the strain during a crucial moment; some small moments of soap operatics with the supporting cast; a last page twist about the Goblin's identity; and the cleanest art in 70s Marvel. 

It's all I ever wanted in a Spider-Man story. It's all I'll ever need.

Living for the fifth week

My local comic store started the year with a restock of its $1 comics, because they are true and beautiful people, and I saw them post about it on Instagram and I was there an hour later, and was the first to suck up the cheap stuff.

I mainly went for the Unknown Soldier comics, because I still have a deep affection for the bandaged WW2 warrior that goes back to the days when I first learned to read. But I also hoovered up some absolute mint mini-series published by Vertigo around the turn of the millennium, mainly for the Glen Fabry and Phil Winslade art.

And I also scored almost every issue of the DC fifth-week comics event that brought back the Justice Society in 1999, and that was quite a score, because I'm always trying to live in the fifth week.

DC used to have this small gap in their publishing schedules with the 'fifth week', and would fill it with some specific event full of one-shots by some very interesting creators. They only did it for a little while, and haven't really done it for years, probably because the entire distribution system doesn't work like that anymore, and almost certainly because many regular readers took it as an opportunity to save money on comics that week, instead of buying something that 'didn't count'.

Of course, the ones that aren't tied so much into contemporary continuity are the ones that age the best, and are far more readable a few decades later. The most successful fifth-weeks were the ones that had a looser connective tissue - the GirlFrenzy, New Year's Evil and Silver Age events were mainly a bunch of one-shot wonders, while those that strived to tell a bigger story like The Kingdom or the Tangent books often feel half-baked.

But no matter how well the stories hold up, they often come with gorgeous artwork - that Justice Society one alone has pages and pages of wonderful work by Russ Heath, Michael Lark, Eduardo Barreto, Chris Weston and many others, and that's always worth hunting out.

They'll never be worth any real money, and may be little more than snapshots of a specific moment in time, but they're always worth digging out of the dollar bin.

All my friends are here

I always found the easiest way to make new friends was to find my fellow dorks. Even in the tiny town of a few thousand people where I was growing up, they were there. And while it sometimes took a little while to find them, I could always track some down. The geeks were my tribe, and my people. 

We might not all have the same passions, but it was the enthusiasm that always hooked me in. People who could get loud and excited about the weirdest shit were always the people I wanted to hang around with. I could feed off their positivity, and I still do. This shared happiness makes us all feel alive. 

Not all my mates share the same kind of drive for the nerdiest things in life. There have been some who actively hate the things I love - more than a few of my dearest friends think Dr Who is the stupidest TV programme in the world and tell me this on a regular basis, and I will always tell them they're wrong

As long as I can agree on the biggest things in life - some friends took a sharp turn down Bigot Ave, and it was painful to cut them out of my life, but it had to be done - there will always be a loving connection.

I went to a concert the other week with one of my oldest mates in the world, who I have known since 1984, and he's still as wild and honest and keen as ever, and it was the first time we'd gone out to something in many, many years, but we could have been 17 again. (Although he did not fail to remind me of the Radiohead gig he and my other pals saw in 1993 that I missed out on - still one of the great regrets of my life).

My oldest and deepest friendship started with a shared bond over the Judge Child Quest reprints that Eagle put out, and has been built on a shared love of 2000ad, X-Men, cricket and Doctor Who, but he's still the most loyal and kind person I know, and that counts far more than our shared opinions on Brian Bolland.

There were still times, when I felt like the only dork in the village, and the only one listening to Iron Maiden and reading Namor The Sub-Mariner comics. Those times felt like they would last forever, but they were extremely short-term in the end, because I always find my people. 

We're everywhere, and can bond over the dorkiest shit, and can always find each other.