Easter time is for all time

Every year, I am surrounded by people bitching and moaning that Easter-related products are going on sale too early, and how it's such a bloody travesty. Well, I'm all in favour of chocolate and hot cross buns and pure fuckin' happiness, so the sooner Easter starts the better, as far as I'm concerned.

I think Easter season should start in June.

Christmas should just be a two-week blast at the end of the year, though. Society can only handle so much tinsel and goodwill to all men.

My favourite Ditko

This is my all-time favourite Steve Ditko panel - the velocity of the superheroes smashing in from either side, ready to collide with the hapless Beetle, who has all the time in the world to see the hurt coming down on him. Sheer bloody perfection.

The Beastie Boys Book: They still got it going on

There are two obvious ghosts hovering over the recent Beastie Boys book. One is the tragedy of Adam Yauch's early death, and the surviving Beasties barely get through a page of this huge book without dealing with that grief, something they do with love and humour.

The other thing haunting their long career is their own youthful stupidity. We were all young and dumb once, but most of us didn't do it in front of millions of people, and they can't just sweep it under the carpet like the rest of us.

And to their credit, they own up to it all as they tell the story of making music as young men in 1980s New York. They don't absolve themselves of the deeply shitty way they kicked Kate Schellenbach out of the band, and they know that while they were desperately trying to be ironic when they played beer-swilling meathead frat boys, anybody who plays that role becomes that role to most people watching them.

Still, they've constantly apologised for their shitty treatment of women, and of their lyrics and language that could be heavily sexist and unthinkingly homophobic. At some point they move on, and so should we.

It's a massive book, but it isn’t a daunting process getting through it, even though it’s hundreds of pages long. Like their music, the writing from Mike D and Adam H is free-wheeling and witty and introspective and funny as fuck. Brief interjections from famous friends, including a Major Writer or two, try to capture that same tone and fail completely, and show something else their writing has in common with their tunes - it looks so easy to do it, but it ain't.

They’re just really good at telling anecdotes and stories about some crazy fucking times in their lives, and are always honest about facing up to their own stupidity and ignorance, and that makes it one of the few music memoirs worth spending time with.

Oh God, I'm a firestarter! A twisted firestarter!

Jason in the water

All the cool cine-kids I knew used to rave about the hand coming out of the ground at the end of Carrie, but for sheer visceral shock value, Jason coming out of the lake at the end of the first Friday the 13th always gave me the shits way more. It's a jump moment that is often imitated, but never beaten.

He's a false Creed!

There's something wrong with a Rocky movie when the giant white trash bad guy from Russia is fighting for something bigger than the American champ, but that's still what happened in the last one.

Michael B Jordan is a fantastic actor, who sells the hell out of his emotional anguish in the movie, always giving it his all, but his character is still living in a gorgeous apartment, with the luminous Tessa Thompson at his side and a baby that is cute as shit (attempts to sell the kid's deafness as a quiet tragedy fall flat). Meanwhile, the Russian bruiser is working in a cement factory and living in a crappy apartment with his broken-down Dad, with a Mum who walked out on him and nobody to cuddle. The poor bastard deserves a break.

And the only emotional beat that really works is on that side of the fight, when Dad throws in the towel, because he knows his son will have to be killed before he gives up. That's even more powerful than the moment when the Rocky theme kicks in and Creed gets his shit together, so something is definitely wrong here.

It certainly undercuts the racial aspect of the overall story - Creed the Younger is still battling with institutional racism as much as any beefy fucker in the ring, but when he's Superman, his natural superiority over everybody doesn't help with any empathy or identification.

Still, while Drago II loses the fight like we all knew he would, he still would've got a massive payday from the effort, and has only just started on a lucrative career, so he should be able to stop working at the cement factory. There's no sad endings here. Everybody still gets paid.

Science fiction horror show

It's the year 2019, which is the go-to for a large number of science fiction futures, and while there are astounding displays of technological prowess every day, I still spend a lot of my time cleaning the trash before it goes to the recycling, where it might get shipped off to Malaysia and illegally burned, poisoning the local environment and harming the people who live there.

I dunno man, I just really thought we'd have this shit sorted by now.

Nobody talks like that

After years of listening to true crime, movie reviews, historical deep dives and general comic talk, I recently tried a couple of fictional podcasts - horror stories which mimicked the form and format of their non-fictional counterparts. And they were uniformly terrible.

They certainly had good, creepy ideas and scenarios behind them, but it was the dialogue that ruined them. After years of the real world version, all the dialogue in the interviews and monologues felt forced and fake. It was all so clearly created and rehearsed and recorded multiple times to get the right take, and while it would be hard to pinpoint the exact wrongness of it all, it's definitely there.

Dialogue isn't the same as real speech, and doesn't have the weird trailing off, slip-ups and repetition that we're all guilty of in our daily talking. When podcasts are nothing but somebody's voices in your ear, it's always going to sound fake if it's not immediate and natural.

Look at the way Alan Moore's poetic dialogue on the comic page sounds fairly awful when transposed word for word by an actor in one of the various adaptations (although a talented actor can sometimes sell the big lines), or the way Tarantino's dialogue always requires a heightened performances, something his regular company of actors generally sell quite well.

But it just didn't work in the podcasts. The dialogue never let you forget that it's all fake, so I'm going back to the real world.

Long live the Legion

Even though the only version that really matters to me is the 5YL crew, it's still weird that DC hasn't published a Legion of Super-Hero comics in years. How hard can it be to get super-kids in the future right?

The editors have made it clear that they're struggling to come up wth a decent hook for a new comic. There have been at least three reboots of the whole thing in the past 20 years, which hasn't helped. Especially when each one eventually ran out of energy, and usually end up regurtitating LOSH stories from years ago in the most generic way possible.

But if they want to take the Legion forward, maybe they should stop with the sprokin' reboots and take things forward. Set up a whole new Legion another thousand years down the line, in the 40th century, where a new generation aren't just competing against the golden age of the 20th century, but the legacy of the original 30th century crew.

Legion comics have been spinning their wheels for years now, continually messed up by timeline shnanigans in the wider DC Universe, and is continually stuck in the pattern of doing the same Earthwar/Mordru/Great Darkness stuff, over and over again. Taking it forward might be the only way to get something new out of it.