Falling for the Sandman

The impact of The Sandman comic when it was still an ongoing monthly concern really feels like a forgotten dream these days. It is one of those things that has been repackaged so much, reproduced in a breathless array of formats and outright ripped off, that's it's easy to forget what hot shit it actually was, back in the day.

Now your Mum knows who Hob Gadling is, so it's probably not as cool as it once was. But when I first wandered into the world of Morpheus and chums, it felt like the coolest thing I'd ever read.

I came in late in the series - I'd seen the 'handful of dust' advertisement in Sgt Rock comics, but lived absolutely nowhere near any store that sold the series, so didn't start getting it regularly until two-thirds of the way in.

I already knew who Gaiman was, after the local library improbably ended up with a copy of Signal to Noise on the shelves, but the first issue of Sandman I ever actually read was part of a ridiculously awesome haul of cheap DC comics that I bought from the Christhurch Airport bookstore in the early 90s.

As well as a vast number of post-crisis Superman and Armageddon 2001 comics, I got my first taste of Morrison's Doom Patrol, and the last chapter of Season of Mists.

I didn't understand anything, I didn't know who the blonde git on the beach was, or what was going on in the conversation with Nada, or even what was going on in Hell. But the comic had style, and I liked this version of Loki, and how he escaped his eternal punishment. and the dialogue felt so light and effortless, even when talking about the most important of all things.

Halfway through the run of Sandman, there were already a tonne of imitators, and there have only been exponentially more since, but none of them had the wit of Gaiman's writing, none of them had the ambition.

Because that's what I really got from these first taste of Sandman - Gaiman's ambition for the type of story that could be told in the comic format was intoxicating. It was already there, in a small epilogue at the end of a larger tale, and the writer's hunger for something bigger would only become more obvious as the comic went on.

This kind of ambition was all over the place as the 80s turned into the 90s - in all sorts of different comics, in all sorts of genres - but few built up an audience like The Sandman did.   

Ramadan was the first issue I bought new, and I got it regularly from then to the end. I chased down the earlier books, the first trade paperback series I ever got, and I remember the fucking joy of being halfway through A Doll's House and realising there was a hundred pages still to go, because I was enjoying it so much.

I still lived very far away from any kind of bookstore, and it took a couple of years to track down those few books, picking each one up with my tiny minimum wage earnings, whenever I got the chance.

By the time the series came to an end, after the inevitable tragedy of the title character, I finally lived in a town in a comic shop, and got those last six issues from my first local comic shop, spread out over luxurious months - I cared not one bit about delays in some of the final issues, because like being halfway through that trade, I did not want to to be over.

A decade later, when I graduated with a journalism diploma, I came first in class and got a small cash prize, and one of the comics I bought with it - I'd been a poor student all year, and was gagging for some new comics - was the Endless Nights thing, which is still a treasured edition on the shelves.

A few years ago, Sandman came back in a series with a series of gorgeous tableau by JH Williams III, and it wasn't what I expected from a new Sandman comic at all, which is exactly what a new Sandman comic should be. 

Gaiman's work is a lot safer these days, and doesn't have the burning ambition of the younger writer's work, but it still garbs the attention. Now Sandman even a big budget TV show that looks absolutely terrific, and can be disconcertingly faithful to comics written years and years ago. 

But however well it is cast, and no matter how good it looks, the TV show will never capture that original magic for me, when there was nothing else that was really like Sandman in the world, or in any part of the Dreaming.

X-Men (Classic) by Art Adams - part 2 of 3

Art Adams is the only artist on the planet who could get me to buy a Starjammers comic.

This is my life now: Still making 'em laugh

 

When the kids are being miserable in the house, I've found one thing that always, positively cheers them up and it's Donald O'Connor, making 'em laugh by any means necessary, in Singing In The Rain.

Seriously, they love that shit. Seventy something years later, and it's still a guaranteed crack-up.

Gurning and pratfalls will always be funny, O'Connor passed away 20 years ago last week, but the way he gets his feet tangled up will live forever, man.

Kingdom of the Spiders: Absolute terror, just from the poster

What did I know about Kingdom of the Spiders? Most of it was that poster. Most of it still is.

I saw that poster hanging on a wall in Waimate. It looked really bloody scary. I didn't know what it was about, and the poster looked a bit ragged, like it had been plastered on the wall for a while. But I was 6 or 7 years old - several years after the film had been released - and that poster gave me the serious shits.

And somehow, somewhere, I saw a clip from that film. I can't remember what it was, and just have the faintest image of spiders coming in under the door of a ramshackle wooden shed, and that's it. But it was utterly terrifying.

Obviously, I hadn't seen much in the way of scary movies at that age - other than the Hammer House of Horror episodes that I would sometimes get to see when I faked being sick and stayed up later with Mum and Dad - but that idea about spiders turning on humanity and wrecking havoc looked like the scariest goddamn thing I had ever seen.

I think it really hit home, because spiders were a real thing that I saw every day. And they were already a little scary, and I'd been told how some of them could bite you with poisonous fangs. They were in the corner of my room, they were everywhere.

It's the same way the suburban horror of the 80s slasher movie would hit home so much, because they always looked like they were happening on the same street as me. A horrifying familiarity.  

I've watched other films about spiders attacking humanity, and haven't had a problem with them, but I've never been able to go back and watch the Kingdom. I know it's probably rubbish in a way I can't even imagine, but I don't want to give up the terror I still have.

No Aliens or Predators on the page

Of course the Alien and Predator films are absolute masterpieces, the first few, anyway. They're full of extreme tension and weird horror, with people pushed into ultra-survival mode. They're also disaster films masquerading as war movies that rely heavily on unspoken romance. Especially the first Predator - my god, the sexual chemistry between all those big and burly men still fucking sizzles.  

And the good vibes from watching the absolute perfection of Aliens or Predator at my mates' place on Friday nights in the 1980s still linger hard. I still watch any new entry in any series, no matter how shitty they get, hoping for one tiny bit of the original brilliance.

But I don't bother with hardly any of the comics, because while the comics medium can do everything, it doesn't mean they do them all very well.

One of the main reasons the Aliens and Predator comics - from multiple publishers - never really hit with me is that they're mainly boring, covering the same old cliches and beats, with usually lackluster artwork.

And even the best of them just felt too obvious. Each new miniseries has some new hook - this time the Predators are in the cold! this time it's a human who is the REAL predator! - and are always slightly clever in the most obvious way. Sometimes you get something fun, like a Batman taking on a Predator, or some nice art like the reliable Kev Walker on a recent Predator series, but most of the time it's strictly dullsville. 

Obviously, every now and then, you do get some idiosyncratic creator, who does something weird with the franchises. But these are always notable in their rarity.

I think the thing that puts me off the comic adaptions of these properties is the lack of movement, something unfortunately unavoidable in the medium. Both alien creatures move in distinctive, exact ways, and it's always missing. Some of the best parts of those original movies come from this unearthly movement, and it's just not there on the page.

Comics are words and pictures and you can do anything with words and pictures, except movement. It's the thrust of these things that is missing, and they ain't much without that thrust.

Really too old for this shit

Today I learned that the great Danny Glover was eight years younger than I am now when he first said he was too old for this shit in the first Lethal Weapon. 

Damn.

Guess it's official. I AM too old for this shit.

Secret Wars: Coming late to the event

I was somewhere deep into Jonathan Hickman's run on the X-Men when I realised I never really saw how his earlier Avengers comics had actually finished. Using the local library system, I had read almost all the tie-in trade paperbacks, across multiple Avengers series, but somehow missed the resolution.

And then I realised it was because I'd never actually read Secret Wars, which probably explained a lot.

I knew all about the Secret Wars series when it came out in 2015, and read a vast amount of weird comics that happened around the periphery of the event. The only one I actually bought with was the Phantom Eagle one that Garth Ennis did, because Ennis treating the Phantom Eagle like absolute dogshit is always funny to me.

But I did read what felt like dozens of the side things around it, set in different parts of Battleword. I saw bits of the story, enough to know what basically happened. Flashbacks in Miles Morales comics explained how an extremely gross burger saved his family from the destruction of their universe, and that I knew that something inspired Wakanda to look to the stars.

Keeping track of superhero series can feel like a chore, with constant reboots and multiple volumes with little changes. I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing some Daredevil ,somehow. But usually I can tell if I'v read one of the big event comics.

But they still slide by, which leaves me wondering how much of an event they ever really were. To bring it back to all things X, I've been reading that Krakoa thing all out of order, and I still haven't read X of Swords, so I feel constantly behind on all the Arakko stuff.  

Anyway, Secret Wars was a lot of fun. I'm still not 100% sure why the universes kept crashing into each other, or why characters created by Stan and Jack could only come up with ultra-genocide as a solution, but any story where Doctor Doom gets everything he ever wanted in life, and realises he's a still a piece f shit because it's still not enough, is all right by me.

Plus, the art by Esad Ribić was gorgeous, the slight smear on his detailed line giving everything a hazy, unreal resolution, topped off with bone-crunching action scenes.

It might have all hit better at the time, but better late than never. I got there in the end.

The sounds of home always had flattened vowels

I didn't really leave New Zealand and go overseas until I was 32. I'd been to Australia a couple of times, but that doesn't count. That just felt like a weird suburb over the hill somewhere, full of excellent beaches, sisters that won't come home and many, many creatures that would like to kill you.

But when we did finally go overseas properly, we went all the way - Australia, Japan, the UK, all the way through 18 countries around Europe, and across the Atlantic to the States. It was almost six months. It was a lot. 

By the time we got to Washington DC, we were bushed on a molecular level. We still saw the rockets in the Smithsonian and took photos around all the monuments, like you're supposed to, but we were back in the hotel by 7pm, pigging out on Wendy's from across the road.

And that night, beaten down and weary, the sounds of home came calling again over the TV set in loudly broad tones, and I'd never heard us like that before.

There had been New Zealanders everywhere during the six months - the entire tour company crew for the Europe leg were from Wellington and Hamilton; and the one time we had to stay in a hostel and share a room with some other people, it turned out to be a lovely couple from Oamaru, a town about 40 minutes' drive from where I was born.

But I hadn't been utterly surrounded by it, while going around the world. I hadn't been totally immersed in all those flattened vowels and clipped syllables that just sound like regular folk to my ears. 

And then, there it was on the fucking TV, on primetime American television. We arrived in the States just as Flight of the Conchords was coming, and it just happened to be the night they first screened the Bowie episode, and it was fucking excellent.

Of course I knew who they were. They had been on all sorts of comedy shows, and had done some radio plays that were actually fairly mediocre. They went to uni at the same time as some of my pals, and were broadly familiar, but there they were, killing it on screen in the goddamn United States.

And when that was over, one of the pay movies on the TV was the then brand-new Death Proof. I'm a Tarantino bore to the core, and Death Proof is literally the only film of his I haven't seen at the movies. If it had gotten any kind of theatre release in the past few months, we'd missed it on our travels

But there it was, so I hooked it straight into my cinematic veins, and suddenly there was Zoe Bell with that bloody accent again, even screaming in Kiwi when she was riding that hot bonnet.

You never think you've got an accent until you hear it like that, far from home. And it's a big, big world, until you hear people who sound like your best mates on the other side of the planet.

The New Zealand accent, for that one night, felt global. 

But it didn't help poor Pedro, the manager at the Harlem hotel we stayed in the next night. He still couldn't understand a fucking word we said. Maybe he wasn't a Tarantino geek.

X-Men (Classic) by Art Adams - part 1 of 3

There's something about 1980s Art Adams X-Men that feels like the real, true X-Men, and the frontispiece art he used to provide for issues of Classic X-Men gave him the chance to portray them in their prime. 

I just think they're neat pieces of art, and am happy to showcase the best of them over the next few Sundays.