The cars of Star Wars

There is a small bit of motorway in the centre of town, where the road goes underneath four or five others, in a sweeping turn in a suddenly dark tunnel area, and every single time I drive through it, I sing some John Williams Star Wars, and pretend I am chasing down TIE fighters. 

Sometimes I have to whisper it to myself because there are other people in the car and I don't want to look like a total idiot, and sometimes I blast it out at full throttle, but it's always there.

Da da! dad da! Da da daaa daaa daaa daaa!

The Mazda Axela might be light years away from a X-wing, but it's as close as I'll ever get. I remember when my Aunty Anne bought the first Japanese import car I'd ever seen in the early eighties, and it had so many glorious knobs and switches and buttons, it really felt like I could use it to fly off to the outer limits of the galaxy.

The life of Judge Beeny

I was explaining the history of Judge Beeny to a long-suffering friend in a café recently, and had to stop halfway through and take a breath, because I was literally getting too emotional about the backstory of a fictional character to continue.

But I really do care about Beeny and her life in Mega-City One, and she might just be my favourite single character in modern comics, because her history and circumstances give her all the excuses in the world to be a truly terrible person, and she uses them to be something better instead.

It's always the secondary characters in long-running comics that I end up emotionally attached too. It's rarely the main character, they're always the focus anyway, it's the people around them that are always most interesting (anyone who thinks the man called Judge Dredd is the best thing in the strip called Judge Dredd does not understand Judge Dredd at all). I care about Doyle more than I care about Hopey, I adored what they did with Howards in the final phase of BPRD, and Judge Beeny actually gives me hope for humanity.

Because Beeny had the roughest of starts - her very existence is problematic, with her father appropriating her mother's body without consent, and using it to create a virtual clone. Her mother was a murderously idealistic democrat who only ever appeared in one story (although that one story is arguably the single greatest story in the history of Judge Dredd), and the poor kid was shunted off the the Academy of Law without any choice.

With a background like that, she has the stones to be one of the great Dredd villains, but when she came out of the brainwashing academy after years of real-time indoctrination, she proved to be a new kind of judge - still hard on the letter of the law, but with a compassionate side that is rarely seen in this future nightmare.

(It should be noted that while a lot of her characterization has been the work of the peerless John Wagner, America co-creator Colin MacNeil has drawn many of the stories focused on Beeny, and his smooth lines have sold her easy charm as much as any of Wagner's words.)

She has been mentored by the hardest man who ever lived, and is tough enough to stand up to Dredd when he needs to be stood up to. She got through the horrors of Chaos Day and follows the Dredd ethos of tough, but fair (but mainly tough).

But she hasn't rejected her drokked-up heritage, and has embraced part of it, recognizing that the judge system has to change, and that as rigid as Dredd can be, the stick that will not bend can only break.

She is part of a next generation of judges - including Rico, Giant and the late, truly lamented Maitland - that are still upholding the system, but recognizing that it might not need to be as harsh as it currently is. In a relatively short period of time, Beeny has already made into onto the table of the Council of Five, and will surely make the best chief judge Mega-City One ever has, if she can survive the mean streets of the big meg and doesn't get the same sudden bullet so many other great characters end up getting.

She more human than Hershey, more stolid than Anderson, and a new kind of judge for a new future.

Judge Beeny never met her mother, and would probably still slam her in the cubes for the things she did. But she has taken what she needs from her own history and made it a part of her character, and she will, if given the chance, genuinely change the world for the better. America would be proud.

The rogue Cyclon

Nobody tells you about the weird shit that happens when you have kids. The strange and occasionally creepy things they come out with, I swear they give me the absolute shits.

Most of it can be chalked up to overeager imaginations - I hope so, anyway, because I really hope there isn't an old man with a hook nose standing behind me when I put the kids to bed, like they've often told me there is. But sometimes you get tangible proof of something weird, like these little champion of the strange - 

It is, of course, a Cylon action figure from the original series of Battlestar Galactica. I found this example in the back seat of the car and literally have no idea where it came from. It just appeared under the kid's car seat, like it had always been there.

And I know exactly what it is, because I was given the same figure when I was six, and I had it for years and years until it vanished a long while ago. It can't actually be the same figure I had for all that time, because that one's left arm broke off two weeks I was given it, and it was a one-armed robot for most of its life in my possession.

So where did this little guy come from?

I still have a handful of my first action figures. A couple of the original Star Wars figures, including my little sister's Princes Leias, which are definitely in the best condition. I still have three from the first Star Trek motion picture - these are fairly boring Spock and Kirk figures, which I didn't play with much, so it's no wonder they are still hanging around, while the awesomely detailed Klingon figure I remember getting disappeared somewhere around 1985.

The ones that have survived this long get fairly busy use from the kids, so I highly doubt they will make it down to any further generations. 

But this guy, this Cylon, he is most definitely not one of the old crew. One of the kids has obviously grabbed it from somewhere, but I have no idea where they would even have had access to antiquated toys like this.

So I can only assume it's fallen through some kind of space/time warp from the early 80s, zeroing in my blatant nostalgia for the good ship Battlestar, and the action figures it spawned. It's not the kind of weirdness I expected to have a parent, but it's the kind of weirdness I got.

Fighting with Frank (part 11 of 13): I won this fight before you got out of bed.

- Jupiter's Legacy #5 

Art by Frank Quitely 

Words by Mark Millar 

Colours and letters by Peter Doherty

Maybe, with good luck, we will find what eluded us in the places we once called home.

 

Jeffrey Wright is a magnificent actor, a deliciously smooth speaking voice that can convey such a breathtaking range of human emotions, but it is startling how long it took for him to appear in Wes Anderson films, because he was made to speak that kind of erudite dialogue. 

He's a regular in the group of players who now regularly convene for the next Wes, but he should have been in there from the start.

Haunted by the Macca

It's a ridiculously dumb thing to say about literally one of the most famous people to ever walk the earth, but I feel like I've been haunted by Paul McCartney lately. He's been regularly popping everywhere in my zone of awareness for the past few weeks, but it very specific ways. 

I have randomly heard Live and Let Die at least five times on the radio this month, and a Beck remix of a Macca song will not dislodge itself from my suggested links. His face has appeared in a large amount of magazines that I've read recently, and even his brother unexpectedly showed up as a historical figure in an episode of my favourite podcast that I was listening to yesterday.

It's partly my own fault, I am still slowly watching Get Back at a glacial pace, so every few days watch another five minutes and get another dose of Prime McCartney. But there he is, beaming away through the decades, everywhere I look.

It's like being aware  of a number, and then noticing it everywhere - the 23 phenomenon - this man has always been a part of modern culture for more than a decade before I was born, of course he's going to be everywhere if I actually look for him.

But I also feel like it's some kind of acknowledgement that the big man should be celebrated more. If only for creating such wonderful music, and for not being a monster like so many of his contemporaries were, for just being a good guy making sure everyone is having a good time, and that's all you need, because that is everything.

Anyway, when the universe tells me to listen to something more, I always go do down the long and winding road.

Nobody is telling me about the movies I want to know about

The internet wasn't really a thing when I first became properly obsessed with movies, and I would only find out about new films through three-month-old magazines from the US and the UK, and going to the local library to read the newspapers and and actually seeing what films were playing in the big cities. 

I would drive for two hours to see Slacker or Short Cuts or Pulp Fiction (twice in one day with my mate Anthony, because we were exactly those types of nerds), and all I had to go on was the copies of the Christchurch Press that the local polytechnic got for their library. 

What there was, however, was advertising. Loads of it, in all the printed media, and in every advertisement break on the television. When a big film was coming out, there was plenty of hype. Something like the Batman films would have way more buzz than substance, and that's a template that has been regularly followed ever since.

The entire cinematic medium has changed a lot since those days, but sometimes I feel like it's still fucking 1992 again, because I only find out that some movies are out there in the world when they're at the actual cinema. 

It's even more awkward, because instead of having everything laid out on one page of a newspaper for easy perusal, I have to go to multiple websites to see what's playing at the various theatres in town. And the online PR push for movies seems to slide right by, because there is so much digital noise out there, and no decent sites with straight news instead of algorithm-driven drivel. Way too many no-name influencers in the hype cycle, and not enough fact. 

I only saw posters for the excellent Sinners on buses a week after it had been out - and that was it! -  and saw absolute nothing for Warfare, and almost missed the while thing.

The big promise behind the loss of online privacy is that your personal data was needed to give you advertisements that would be tailored to you, but that isn't happening. Going to the movies is something I actually want to spend my money on, but I'm not getting the information to do that.

There is a lot of talk about box office takings and how the marketing budget has to be taken into account, because that alone could double the cost of the movie's production. But I don't know where all that money is going, because I don't see shit I am actively looking for. 

The Duck Song: Look, this is getting old

This is just another case that if I have to have this song about a fucking duck and his fucking grapes rattling around my skull every hour of every day because my kids love it and demand it on repeat, so should you. 

I got busted singing the 'and then he waddled away' while inadvertently walking into a very serious meeting the other day. 

But also, I have now watched all of the Duck Songs videos multiple times, and feel the duck is some kind of Doctor Who figure, an agent of chaos who comes into peoples lives and is operating on a level they never really understand, until they realise he has made their lives better, with love, marriage and a brand new business plan.

You always know when the lettering is wrong

Comic book lettering is something that is so easily taken for granted, but when it's done wrong, it's fucking awful and can ruin the whole thing. 

You can spot it straight away when it's not right, even if the only way to describe it is that it 'looks a bit wobbly'. Sometimes you get something like '80s John Byrne lettering his own work, and it's legible enough, but just doesn't work. 

There must be a solidity of font, a rigidness that can be hard to articulate, but always clear when it's done wrong. I always took the lettering seriously, before almost anything else - I could never read a comic where the lettering was done in some kind of typeset, because it felt hideously impersonal. It always had to be done by hand

I will always love and respect the long-game effects of decades of comics by dudes such as Ben Oda on DC's comics, or Tom Orzechowski's vital efforts on the X-Men, or the great Tom Frame and the absolutely splendid Annie Parkhouse on 2000ad.

Most of those creator's brilliance is invisible, and you only notice it when it's wrong (you can always spot a last-minute dialogue change because of the sudden drop in font quality), but there is also room for the ways Todd Klein and Dave Sim clearly enjoy showing off with their efforts, while comics from writer/artists as idiosyncratic as Eddie Campbell, Dan Clowes, Derf Backderf and Jaime Hernandez would literally not be the same with their words written in a different hand.

There are now lots of computer fonts that go to extreme levels to ape the hand of an actual human being, and I'm not that much of a font nerd to really notice the difference. But I still see lettering choices that are unmistakingly wrong, because you can always tell.