At the library: I don't know what I want

Now that I'm back in the big city, I've been taking full advantage of having a decent library situation again. In the past couple of months I've got out dozens of books, and have a lot more still on hold. 

Most of them have been comic books, catching up on the latest superhero shenanigans and arthouse darlings, and I'll talk a lot more about those next week, because I have many dubious opinions on the relative merits of these books.

Those books are usually the ones I've ordered, after haunting the 'new releases' section on the website, and searching the general catalogue for the usual favourite comic authors. But I still love browsing the shelves, looking for the random goodness, because the best way to find that goodness is by looking through the stacks with my own eyes.

Now, when I go to other parts of the city, I do like to check out the local library branches. There is one big library system for the whole city, so I can borrow anything I like from any of them, and they've all got something slightly different.

It's all there on the internet, but that's no use if I don't know what I'm looking for, and no algorithm knows that I might want to check out a book on unmade James Bond films, or some idiosyncratic Marvel comic from a decade ago that I missed completely. 

Every suburb used to have its own flavour of second hand bookstores, but so many of them have vanished in recent years, so now I judge neighbourhoods by the randomness of their library stacks. I always look at the graphic novels section, and the non-fiction section devoted to cinema, but I also like just ti wander. You never know what you're going to get.

Once was business columnist

I've been deep in the world of daily breaking news for almost all of my career as a professional journalist, but I have tried to specialise a few times, and learned something new about myself and the world every time. 

I did just enough sports journalism to know I could never do it forever (how do you do the same thing over and over again?); I tried some entertainment writing, only to find it took all the fun out of the fun things in life; and I did just enough full-time court reporting to build up some reporting skills and get the hell out before it rotted my soul.

I never did any political reporting. I do have some standards.

But for a couple of years, I was a business journalist, and lived every day in the corporate world. And for somebody from a working class background, I learned a lot about the executive class, and the things that matter to them.  

It was surprisingly easy to talk the talk - my boss always said it was much, much easier to hire decent journalists and teach them how to speak business talk, than teach businesspeople to write. This always makes me think about Ben Affleck scoffing on the Armageddon commentary track about it being easier to train oil drillers to go into space than train space scientists to drill, but sometimes some skills really are easier to pick up than others.

During my time as a business journalist, I did a hell of a lot of stories about the ups and downs of industry, and even wrote some columns about the sharemarket, when I never bet a dime of my own on that kind if institutionalised gambling. It was actually terribly easy, you just had to be halfway decent at pattern recognition in similar industries, and could always construct a quick narrative out of those patterns.

It also helped that I came into business journalism just as the world was recovering from the global economic meltdown of the late 2000s, since every column was about how everybody was recovering from the crunch.

My own big stockmarket tip is to look at the companies that make the products that get used in other products, because they predict the entire market. There was a company that made resin, and on the face of it, it was the most boring company in the world, but it had sales downturns three months before everybody else. It wasn't as sexy as something like the vast economic wasteland of venture capitalism, but it was obvious when you recognise it.

The other thing I learned, to my vague horror, was that the executive class were generally clueless about the work their company actually did. Just rampant base ignorance about their own business, hiding it beneath the most odious clichés, the most blatant business-speak. I'd always thought the kings of industry had got that way through sheer merit, but was constantly shown that they were usually just lucky or merciless, and could generally be outsmarted by a sausage dog.

Being an entertainment journo showed me that I shouldn't try to make a living with the things I enjoy doing the most, and being a court reporter made me cynical about the entire justice system, but being a business reporter showed me that most businesspeople don't know shit, and are alarmingly disinterested in moving past that.

Since then it's been breaking news on digital platforms for me, and I can leave the job behind when I finish my shift. But I still remember that lingering discomfort that our entire economy is run by people who are short-sighted, utterly lacking in any kind of human empathy, and just fucking dumb. 

My 100 favourite 2000 covers (90-81): You've got red on you

 

90: Prog 1727 - art by Henry Flint

89. Prog 1195 - art by Jason Brashill

88. Prog 1528 - art by Laurence Campbell and Eva De La Cruz

87. Prog 1950 - art by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn

86. Prog 766 - art by Peter Doherty

85. Prog 845 - art by Rian Hughes

84. Prog 249 - art by Dave Gibbons

83. Prog 1384 - art by Frazer Irving

82. Prog 1428 - art by Henry Flint

81. Prog 1181 - art by Jason Brashill

Keeping my four eyes clean

I've had glasses since I was 12, and have often struggled to keep them clean enough to see this weird world of ours, so it is with some authority that I can say that the best cleaning cloth for a pair of glasses is the one we got at the Edvard Munch art gallery in Oslo.

The best glasses case I ever got was from the Lazy Bear Lodge in Churchill, Canada, because cold places know how to keep things safe and clean.

I've lost both of them in the years since, and it doesn't seem illogical to travel back there one day, so I can see clearly again.

Doctor Who: No context, all feeling

I've greatly enjoyed the Ncuti Gatwa era of Doctor Who - it's been thrilling, entertaining, sad and alive, and I think I've enjoyed it for two vital reasons.

The first is the most basic - I've been watching most of it with the kids, and while I'm probably still the most enthusiastic person in the room when that immortal theme songs kicks in at the start of another adventure in time and space, the final scene of the latest episode got an excited 'WHAT THE HECK!' from the five year old and that was everything. Especially because she has absolutely no idea who Rose was.

And the second reason for my enjoyment of the adventures in the Disney era is that I've cut myself off from almost all the discourse around it, and have no idea about any of the real-world context surrounding the episodes, and can only judge them on my own reactions and feelings.

All the noise around the production and direction of the show is just so tiring, and old. I've been recently reading a bunch of DWB magazines from the late 1980s, and it's the same shit there, all the fretting over ratings, and viewers unable to watch anything without intolerable amounts of context.

It's still happening today, but it's been surprisingly easy to just avoid it all. My social media activity is very close to zero these days, and none of the nerd news sites are readable anymore, so I just didn't engage with any of it.

I did sample one old favourite Who critic, but they were obsessed with the status of the show in the real world, and kept going on about the ratings and a probable hiatus, and didn't really have much constructive to say about the actual story, so I drifted away from that too. I know nothing of the obvious metaphors in the Intergalactic Song Context, and I really don't need to hear any more about how fans were angry that a show that is constantly changing has changed again. 

It's immensely freeing. All I have to go on is what's on screen, and how it makes me feel, and it makes me feel pretty fucking good.

I would come back and read all these hot takes in another 30 years time, but they'll be gone, because nothing digital lasts. I might still have the DWBs though, so I won't ever forget how confusing Ghost Light was for everybody.

That's not the kind of Megan I want to watch

A lot of modern horror franchises leave me cold. I was never one for The Conjuring or all its many, many spin-offs, and I can see why people like things like the Terrifier movies or those Smile things, but they are awfully repetitive and predictable to me.

M3GAN didn't say anything new that hadn't been said in a hundred other films about killer dolls, and this one didn't even come with the voice of Brad Dourif. But the title character did have a peculiar and striking way of moving that carried a lot of the film's charm. 

But I don't think I've ever been quite as repulsed as I was by the trailer for the forthcoming sequel. It's not that it's gross or anything, just that it's something I would never be interested in watching. A predictable escalation of the concept, with another version of the killer doll - but this time it's upgraded! - and the villain of the first film is the only one who can help our heroes. 

Any residual charm from that gloriously freaky dancing scene in the first film evaporates when the new trailer's big money shot is this ugly as fuck robot parachuting into the villain's lair. Anything creepy is lost in something that looks like more dopey superhero shit, and while that is usually my kind of thing, the world really doesn't need more dopey superhero shit.

There are still movie trailers out there that actually make me want to see a film, but there's also an increasing amount that leave me like this, deeply uninterested in going to the cinema to see it.

Team-up books always gave the best bang for your buck

It's an ancient cliché that kids liked to read comics like the Brave and the Bold and Marvel Two-In-One because they thought they were getting value for money by having multiple heroes, but that's still why I always bought them - and continue to do so.

The only bronze age comics I still seriously collect are DC Comics Presents and Brave and the Bold. It just always felt like you got so much good value out of them. Not just because you got more characters, and some interesting mixtures of people from this vast and weird fictional world, but because you got some genuinely exceptional creators on these comics

You got titans like Garcia-Lopez and Starlin on DCP, and Jim Aparo Batman is the only one true Batman, while you also had Claremont and Byrne in their absolute prime doing Spidey stuff, and some of the most interesting Thing comics when he got mixed up with all the Project Pegasus. They were always more than just value for money.

BPRD: A most sudden inevitability

After reading all the Hellboy comics that needed reading, I had to go back and go through all the BPRD booksg - and brother, that is a lot of comics.

Fortunately they are also an excellent branch of comics, with some frequently breathtaking art - there are primary stories where literally everything goes to hell with the dense, slimy and deeply human work of Guy Davis, or the moody and thick hues of Laurence Campbell, with an incredible array of guest artists filling in the gaps.

Reading the whole saga again, free from the monthly schedule and knowing our it all works out, it is vaguely depressing - all these battles against the frogs and gods, and it's all for nothing, because the end that was promised still comes, and the world of men is swept away.

Humanity does survive, in a vast underground kingdom that is more in tune with the world around it, but all those natural glory of the world, all the mighty cities, all that great art, all the animals, all those wonderful people, they all finally fall beneath the claws of the Ogdru Jahad.

It was an ending long foretold and often shown in the Hellboy comics over the years, so it's not like it's actually a surprise, but the suddenness of the end still jars, with no real resolution for a lot of characters. Poor Abe Saipan is slapped aside by the apocalyptic Rasputin - and does give birth to the new race of people, as he was always going to - but it still feels harsh for old Abe, who we've followed in so many comics, with nobody even left to mourn him. Liz survives as an unknowable godhead trapped in amber in the new world, which feels about right.

Because most of the cast do not survive to see that new world. There are literally a handful of characters who go down into the deep - to be welcomed by Frankenstein! - but there had been so many stories that have got inside their heads, there is something of a void at the very end, a missing emotional beat - how does Fenix really feel about how it all went down?

But as weird as it was to see Hellboy back in action after his destruction of Hell, there is one final resolution for Big Red - back in the world for one last great deed, before joining with Hecate as promised, in inevitable end and beginning. Anung Un Rama, Urush Un Rama.

Abe would have been proud of his pal.

I know this isn't really the end, with several series featuring that man Frankenstein again already set after the last BPRD issue, and from what I've seen from browsing at the local store, it looks like Liz's story is far from over. And there have been a lot of comics set in the earlier years of Hellboy and the BPRD's adventures, which are all as pretty and dense as ever.

But that regular hit of modern horror action that was BPRD came to a sudden end, and that abruptness feels at odd with the slow burn of the earlier issues.

It's good because it's hard

There is no editor for the Tearoom of Despair, it's all just me. Nobody ever reads any of these words before I publish in the world, which should explain some of the more egregious typos and grammatical eras. I bash them out, I give them a single read over, (and sometimes I leave the typos in because they are funny), and I publish and be damned.

But I have worked with editors who have reigned in all my unauthorized narcissism, and helped make me stop getting high on my own supply. Unfortunately, some of the best lessons I've learned about writing as a working journalist were taught to me by the very worst people, actual sociopaths who showed me the best way to break up sentences, while also treating their staff like total dogshit.

This was not, fortunately, the case with the best editor I ever had - the wonderful Chloe Maveal, who edited some nonsenses I wrote for the Gutter Review, (although I stand by all that nonsense, and still insist that Mean Machine Angel really is just deeply misunderstood). 

After pitching a few articles, I sent off things, and Chloe - who you can currently hear doing some super hot podcasts for the official 2000ad website here - would come back with incredibly perceptive comments and suggestions, and I would be fucking destroyed.

It was hard. So fucking hard! I would spend an inordinate amount of time feeling sorry for myself, refusing to even think about the changes she'd suggested, and wondering what the fuck I was doing, thinking anybody would be interested. I'm mope around the house and inwardly moan at the great injustice of it all.

And then I just went and did the work and ground it out, and really had to put some proper fucking thought into it. Sometimes I'd have to substantially redo the whole thing and it was hard and painful and when it was done I felt like the king of the fucking world.

That's what the AI hype merchants never understand, what they always miss - the harder it is to do something, the better it is for everybody. 

It's a message little children understand - there is, of course, a very good Bluey episode about this subject - but people with billions of dollars to burn don't ever seem to stop and consider that maybe we like to push ourselves, to actually work for the results, and can stand by those results with more pride than anything else you've done, not least the mad ramblings on a blog

It's not worth anything if you don't try, and it's good because it's hard.