Brink: Burning it all away

I don't know how Dan Abnett got so fucking good in the past few years. The writer's 2000ad comics were always reliable, occasionally dull and rarely exciting, with the endlessly unfunny Sinister Dexter going on and on and on since the 90s.

But now we're well into the 21st century, and he's doing the arguably best thing in the Megazine with Lawless, and absolutely the best series in 2000ad right now with The Out and Brink.

The Out is all sorts of brilliance, but Brink is something else again, with its slowly unfolding horror of humans in the void getting more and more intense. 

Even as the series gleefully pointed out that the deepest of conspiracy theories can sprout from the most mundane of origins, the latest volume still ended with the clear idea that there really is a beast in the darkness, a monster in the abyss. It's not just the void out there, there's something in it, spitting nightmares back at us.

With quite remarkable and vibrant art by INJ Culbard, which helps when the series features a lot of people standing around in small spaces talking to each other, the series is full of menace and threat, and then gets properly apocalyptic when it needs to. 

The climax of the latest volume is breathtakingly grim, and still finds some kind of visual poetry in the nihilism of it all. Burning skulls never looked so gorgeous, even as hope burns away with it.

Signs of the times

The sign outside the only big cinema in the middle of town - the one that is meant to be telling us all about the latest new releases on the big screen - has just been displaying this for quite some time:

And it's been like that for months! For more than 18 months, it got stuck on telling us that Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker and JoJo Rabbit were playing, long after they drifted out of the cinema, but now the sign has given up and is just screaming at us.

It's a good metaphor for the mall it's in, which once housed a decent food-court, several fast food outlets, a dozen restaurants and a four-story Borders bookstore, and is now eerily derelict

It's also a good metaphor for going to the movies in general, but that goes without saying.

All we wanted was an R2-D2

The 3-year-old doesn't care about anything else from Star Wars, not yet. She's just all about the R2-D2.

She loves the little fella, and his beeps and whoops, and almost lost her mind when she thought he had been hurt in the first film. There is just something in R2's blue and white colours, and that comfortable dustbin shape, that is eternally appealing to kids. Accept no substitutes.

We had a little action figure sized Artoo that was a cherished toy, and of course he got easily crushed behind the bedroom door. Even though he was shattered into several pieces, the kid had such faith that her dumb old dad could take Artoo away and fix him, I had to do something. 

And it was so hard. I went around multiple toy shops and department stores, but all the Star Wars toys were angry Mandalorians, not dependable and friendly droids. The cool Star Wars toys used to be so hard to find in this part of the world, but even though there are a lot more super cool armoured posers to buy nowadays, just finding a specific character was extremely difficult.

It took weeks to find a replacement, but I ended up finding one based on the Droids cartoon at a local dork store. It cost $30 and is worth a lot less now after I tore into it as soon as I got it out of the shop and gave it to the kid, proudly declaring that her dad had, indeed, fixed it.

She's still young enough that she didn't really notice that it's significantly less robust than the original, with flimsier plastic, and I don't expect it to last. Another replacement mission is inevitable.

But this might be my life now, 'fixing' broken R2-D2s. One day I might have to tell her how we sent all the broken ones to live in a Farm near Endor or something. The truth is just too mean.

What if I never read comics?

I've always been absolutely obsessed with comic books, right from the start. I was reading them before I could read, and will keep reading them until my eyes fall out. Music can make me feel things I can not find words for, and movies can thrill with spectacle and tear at my soul in equal measure, but comics are my thing. 

It's just the way I've always been. But what if?

It's taken a while, but I've come to that point in my life where I wouldn't do anything over again, because I deeply love where I'm at. And yet, I still can't help wondering how different things would be if I'd never read a comic in my life.

It's not just that horrible smug superiority that I get when I recognise the dopiest fucking characters in the background of the new Marvel nonsense (a feeling I usually keep to myself), I wonder about the big stuff, and all the dumb and obvious life choices of an ordinary person unencumbered by a comic addiction.

Unfortunately, when I think about the comic collection in this way, it's as an anchor, with the physical weight of collecting piles and piles of comics weighing me down.

I came from a working class youth, where every comic was precious, and I straight-up hoarded every one I could get for two decades, before finally breaking the habit. By the time I left home, I had thousands and thousands of comics, and dragged them around all the different places I lived. 

But maybe I would have been more willing to travel freely, to be a wanderer in the world, without this hoarding mentality .Without all those comics, I could have been free.

Maybe. Maybe there would always have been some excuse.

What I do know for sure is that without comic books in my life, I would have missed out on so many wonderful art and stories. I know the industry is a nightmare, Alan, but I've had more joy and wonder in the comic books I've read that in any other medium. Nothing is better than Jaime Hernandez's Locas comics, nothing is as monumental as Judge Dredd.

I read comics on anything and everything, and learn lots of new perspectives, new ways of telling stories, new ways of seeing the world. And I dread the thought that I could live in ignorance of all the greatness it's given me over the decades.

The idea of any change in my personal timeline is obviously horrific now, because now I've got kids that mean more to me than life itself, and no matter what mistakes and wrong turns I've made, I could never live in a world without them.

But if we are going to get all multiverse on it, there might be plenty of mes out there who never read a comic in their life, and were all the happier for it. 

I only hope that they have some kind of passion, some kind of thing to get excited about, because less people getting less passionate about the things they like makes all worlds everywhere a little more grey.

Marvel Fanfare portfolios #1: Bill Sienkiewicz

Marvel's writers and editors sure did like to choke the art with huge amounts of text in the 1980s, but good old Al Milgrom knew the value of a really good pin-up and put loads of them up in the back of Marvel Fanfare, with full blasts of gorgeous art from the likes of Mike Mignola, Ken Steacey, Kevin Nowlan and even Dave bloody Sim.

Sundays are a rest day here at the Tearoom of Despair, and for a significant portion of last year I filled that daily gap with some appallingly revealing fan fiction. But I can't in all good conscience do that to you all again, so instead every Sunday for the next few months is going to feature some of that wonderful art, liberated from the aging pages of Marvel Fanfare. I don't own this art or any of the characters in it, but just want to share the love.

And of course we're starting with Bill Sienkiewicz, because if you even can start anything with Bill Sienkiewicz, you should start it with Bill Sienkiewicz.   

Looney Tunes: Bugs in the prison pit

No, I thought. That can't be the same Johnny Ryan whose name I keep seeing pop up in the new Looney Tunes cartoons that the kids are watching.

*45 seconds of googling later*

Holy shit, it is that Johnny Ryan.

*30 seconds later*

Yeah, that makes sense.

Thunderman: Comics probably fucked your mom too

Jack Kirby: Comics will break your heart, kid.

Alan Moore: Comics will break your heart; and tear it from your chest and shit on it; and literally make you chew your own lip off; and ensure that you die with nothing left but a mountain of porn; and the CIA were behind it all anyway; and, oh yeah, that crush you had on Lana Lang - and, admittedly, all the cocaine you end up doing - will see you literally plummet to your doom; and if you try to get away from comics, Vince fuckin' Colletta will fucking murder you.

I bloody loved the Thunderman story in Alan Moore's Illuminations collection. Moore has been making me laugh since I was 8-years-old and this was just the funniest thing I had read in a long, long time. I had to explain to the lovely wife why I was literally laughing out loud and there was absolutely no way I could do that without sounding totally insane. 

(Like Hey Kids Comics, I wish he used the real names, but this is even more sordid and sick than Chaykin's efforts, and some of these people had kids, man.)

And I thought I might have issues with reading this and getting Garth Marenghi's voice stuck in my head, but the real trouble was reading some recent editions of Back Issue Magazine at the same time, with Moore's gnostically sordid cesspool of an industry butting up against fond reminisces from a bunch of old dorks. The truth is obviously somewhere inbetween, but I like to think it's closer to a Superman with a permanent lion's head than the other.

Comics! Not just for kids anymore!

Twin Peaks: What kind of world are we living in?

Six years on, and I'm still amazed by the Twin Peaks revival. It was unlikly enough that it happened, and while it was also going to be good,I didn't expect it to be so fucking amazing.

It was five minutes into the nuclear explosion in episode eight that it really became clear how uncompromisingly weird it was going to be, and how it was going to make all the other television shows doing weird shit look like total try-hards, 

Just so full of great dialogue, and great philosophies - I roll with the whole idea of 'fix your hearts or die' so hard. But also getting into the whole idea of how trying to fix things can be the noblest of pursuits, but it will also take you to the darkest of places.

I see the world in microcosm in this series, with loads of spooky surrealism to sweeten the unexpected familiarity. Janey E's speech about the unfairness of the world, or the 'everyone's a little stressed' farce that ends in so much bloodshed.

I think about it a lot, I think about the final two minutes of the show so much it leaves me feeling queasy, and there are 17 more hours that are just as rich and meaty.

Plus it was just a terrific modern variety show, with some wonderful music - NIN killing it, Sharon Van Etten doing her best Sharon, and the maestro Angelo Badalamenti finding all new depths in the richness of his Peak themes.

I dig the dream logic, the genuinely shocking violence, the refusal to cut away from the mundane. I love all the the good people who keep this world working and I'm glad they're there to stand up against the vast forces of evil, selfishness and weakness that crash over them.

Lynch is still doing his own thing, and it wouldn't be surprsiring if he never touches this world again. But it also wouldn't be surprising it was to have new wekekly dose of twin peaks again, and for it to be not just good, but transcendently awesome. 

After all, we are lucky to have lived in the same piece of space time as David Lynch and his pals, and for all the wonderful easy weirdness they gave us.

The Best of 2000ad Monthly: Ultimate thrillpower

I like to claim I've been a squaxx dex thargo for life, but it's not strictly true. 2000ad launched a couple of years after I was born, and the comic was three years into it before I first got caught in its grasp. 

I'm still there every month - I just got the latest issue off the shelves yesterday, and it had the last episode of the latest Brink and it's as good as anything else ever published in the galaxy's greatest comic.

But coming in slightly late meant that when I fell hard for it at the absolutely appropriate age of six, there was no way of getting those older issues from the first 300 progs. There were a precious few of the old Titan collections floating around, and the only one I ever saw in my part of the world was incredibly expensive, so I had to make do with the few progs I could find at the local school fair.

But then Tharg, in his mighty wisdom, started publishing The Best of 2000ad Monthly, and that was all I needed in the world. Each issue had an outstanding amount of thrill power in its 64 pages. Prime art from Brian Bolland and Ron Smith and Kevin O'Neill, in just the very best stories from the galaxy's greatest comic. 

That's where I first read Portrait of a Mutant for the first time, and where I could read all of the Nemesis. Although while there was plenty of Dredd, the mega-epics were never reprinted in the early issues of the monthly, with the American reprints from Eagle the only way to tap into that kind of mega-history.

It just seemed normal to get that kind of brilliance in such a chunk, every month. Looking back, I just did not realise how lucky I was. The best comics you'll ever read in your life are when you're 10-years-old, and you can only wonder at your good fortune when those comics also happen to be some of the actual best in the world.

2000ad is still out there, trying to snag new readers with snippets of its increasingly large pool of wonderful stories, and I hope the new version of the Best of 2000ad, with beautiful new covers and some terrific curation, finds a new audience. But they'll have to go a long way to pack as much pure thrill-power as the monthly series once did.