Just start anywhere

The few social media feeds I still follow periodically get clogged up with the same old banal arguments, and a hoary old chestnut came up again recently - is Watchmen a good place to start reading comics?

There were all sorts of good points made for and against it, but my answer is, was and always will be: fuck knows? You never know what comics is going to grab somebody's attention. Everybody is different

There is basically nobody left alive who remembers starting Superman and Batman when they first began - and there are fewer and fewer who can remember the first Fantastic Four or Spider-Man, so if you want to read any of their adventures, you just gotta jump in there somewhere. Sink or swim. 

It's not for everyone, and most rational people bounce right out of that kind of commitment, but a certain person just wants to know more. They want to know what the backstory comes from and what this all means, and they will never stop looking for those answers.

Just start wherever the fuck you want. Jumping on points get a certain audience, but there is also an audience that comes to Uncanny X-Men after sixty years and just fucking goes for it. Maybe people respond to the art, maybe they get hooked by the soap operatics, it's different for everybody.

(And it's not limited to comics, by a long shot. Where do you start with Dr Who? Wherever you like. Here's good.)

It's still a huge appeal of the medium for me, I still buy random comics of various long-running sagas and have been intrigued enough to go back and see where it all starts. Filling in the gaps is just as much fun as seeing where it goes next.

It took me years to understand the complex families and friendships in Love and Rockets. I came in years into the run, and it took me so long to track down the earlier issues, I had no idea who was related to who in Palomar, or who Speedy was. I'm still making weird connections, decades into a full Hernandez obsession.

Watchmen is a very well written and drawn comic book, it's smart and complex and very human, even if you don't know that Night Owl should be Blue Beetle. If you like it, there's lots more like that. If you don't, there's even more that are nothing like that. There are many self-contained comics, in and out and gone again, but also ones that just go for it forever. See what you like. 

Failure of a film festival fanatic

For a long, long time, one of my absolute favourite days of the year was the day the programme for the NZ International Film festival would come out. I would obsessively go through it, finding all the cinematic treasures, and making my own time-table of treats.

The first time I ever saw one of these programmes was when the festival went out to the sticks in the 1980s, and I saw one that had a write-up of the first Evil Dead film - along with a glorious black and white picture of a blood-soaked Bruce Campbell with an axe. I wouldn't see Evil Dead for years, but that one listing had a profound effect on me, in many different ways.

By the time I was a grown-up and living in the big city, film festival attendance was mandatory every year. At my height I would go a dozen or two every year, especially when they had the Incredibly Strange Film Festival running as part of the larger festival, and would bring out the weird cult films.

They were the only place to see some movies by genius directors, the festivals are where I saw my first Wong Kar-wai, or a Paul Thomas Anderson film months before it appeared in regular cinemas. The festivals are always in the dark depths of winter down here, but a screening in the cathedral of light that is great cinema lit up my world. 

The best screenings were always in the grand theatres of Auckland and Dunedin, which were usually used for big live performances, where you could get that glorious echo of a soundtrack from the vast walls. Carter Burwell's eternally roving score for Fargo all round you, or Hendrix and The Who carving it up in the Message To Love doco.

For a while, the wife and I would get a 10-ticket for it, which would force us to get out into the world and see at least five films. This was always pretty easy, because there were always two I was desperate to see because they were obviously brilliant, two that sounded pretty good and one completely random choice, like a Nigerian crime epic or something.

And then this year's festival rolled around, and after carefully going through the motions on Programme Day, I only went to one film - Hard Boiled, John Woo's 90s action classic which I'd seen a thousand times before.

The lack of film festival action was partly because I work late shifts and have other familial commitments, but also so many of the films seemed so self-consciously film festival, full of dully heartbreaking tales of real life from around the world. Even the weird section was a bit tame, and always has the lame local horror with an eye-rolling premise.

I also get skeeved out by the smugness of other festival goers, and not just the 'I have a comment more than a question' monsters. It's just the aura of sniffy culture that feels performative, with screenings full of people you never see at all the cool films.

So I'm happy enough with the classic Woo. Besides, now I can go see the new PTA at the local multiplex at a time that suits. That's more than the festival can offer anymore.

Sebastian O: Life is such a tedium

- Sebastian O #3 (1993)

Art by Steve Yeowell
Colors by Tatjana Wood
Words by Grant Morrison

Letters by John Workman

What you expect on the mixtape

I was going through another Velvet Underground phase recently, because it's been a while, but every time Heroin fades out, I always expect it to immediately launch into the operatics of Carmina Burana, because that's how the tracks ran on the cassette tape for The Doors movie soundtrack, which I absolutely slayed on my tiny stereo in the early 90s.

There are some mix tapes I made more than a quarter of a century ago, and I haven't played them in years, but I still know the order I put the songs on the tape, and when I hear something like Wilco's I'm The Man Who Loves You, the right order of things is that it should always be followed by Psycho by The Sonics.

We've all got these weird connections between songs that only make sense to ourselves, and this is the way the world should be.

Anybody who opens their eyes at me

Denzel Washington is obviously one of the great actors of our age, instantly making any film he appears in better, always bringing the swagger, charm, intelligence and raw emotion.

For all his wonderful highs, I think it all reaches a peak an hour into Man on Fire, with this one small scene. Tony Scott always got the best out of this actor - we are privileged that they made a few films together - and the part where Creasy says he's going to kill everyone involved in the death of the young girl he cared about is still absolute cinematic glory.

He's so quiet and so certain about what he is going to do, and nobody watching it has any doubt that he is absolutely going to fulfill this quiet vow. The whole film pivots on it, that sparse riff kicks in, and he's off to get his weapons and close a lot of eyes.

Denzel is one of the best physical movers in modern cinema history, he stalks through his films like a panther, and his stillness in this moment is a huge part of the appeal. But it's really all in that gentle delivery, so perfectly executed.

The rest of the film is an absolute thrill ride, as Creasy goes on his path of wreckage and revenge, and even gets some unexpected redemption at the end. But this scene is the best part, a promise of fire and destruction, in a hushed promise to a grieving mother. 

Kang is such a loser

The Marvel movies were going all in on Kang for a while there - he was their next big villain, the one whose machinations would spawn the next multi-billion dollar epic run. And they dropped that idea so fast and so completely as soon as it became slightly inconvenient, and that feels apt, because Kang was always such a fucking loser.

The most interesting thing about him is that his greatest enemy was always himself, because he was always crashing into the future face of Immortus, his youthful dalliance with Egyptian fascism as Rama Tut, and whatever the hell the story was with the Scarlet Centurion guise. Literally the only time he's been likeable was as Iron Lad in the Young Avengers, when he is at his very least Kang-ish

He conquered entire eras, and has billions of people under his boot, but he's still a loser, because he's still always unfulfilled, still always wondering if he's just acting out the role that time always gave him. Just another villainous dickhead, always losing to the Earth's Mightiest Heroes, with a personal history of entitlement and arrogance.

There have been multitudes of Kangs - sometimes literally - and I always liked what Walt Simonson did with the character across multiple titles in the 80s, squeezing and twisting the concept to all sorts of extremes. But he doesn't have the genius of Doom, or the tricks of Loki, or anything like that. He's just a dork.

So now Kang is out of the Marvel films, a footnote on the way to Dr Doom, and that seems fitting. He can scratch his name across history as the ultimate temporal vandal, but he's a nothing of a person, still a long way from the dubious wisdom of his future, and far from some noble beginners. Just another loser, lost in time.

The bulbous biceps of Bogdanove's Superman

I never really appreciated Jon Bogdanove's work when he was a regular artist on the world's biggest superhero (although - with all due respect to the great June Brigman - he was an absolutely perfect Power Pack artist). But he was also one of the rock solid pillars of the Superman comics at their early 90s heights, and his sense of exaggeration and raw power still resonates. 

At the time, around the whole Death of Superman thing, I always thought his work was just a bit too scratchy and bulbous, when compared to the sleek lines of Grummett, Jurgens and Guice on the other books. But DC knew what they had, giving Bogdanove the Man of Steel series from the start, and regularly pumping out the hits from there.

Some of those cleaner, more anatomically correct figure-work actually hasn't dated as well as Big Jon's work, which still fizzes with energy. His superheroes have fists like jackhammers, and launch across the page, and he also did a fantastically leery Lobo. Sometimes it takes a while to truly appreciate great superhero art, but better late than never.

Two out of three grails ain't bad

For the past few decades, there were always three paperback books I was looking for in every single second hand bookstore I went to. It seemed almost impossible that I'd find any of them, but I've snapped up two of the books so far, and always have hope for the future of the third.

They were my grail books, and are all out of print, and aggressively so. They might be freely available in other parts of the world, but I could never find them anywhere near me, and was devoted to the chase. 

I got the first one more than a decade ago - Marc Platt's Lungbarrow. When I was obsessed with  the New Adventures in the 90s, Lungbarrow always seemed like an impossibility, I would literally dream about finding it. I only got into the book series towards the end of the Virgin era, just before BBC Books grabbed the rights back, and those final books were only in print for a few short months before vanishing from bookshelves altogether. I did get some rarities like So Vile A Sin off the shelf at my local chain bookshop, but Lungbarrow, the one where the good Doctor finally goes home, was not one of them.

After getting the rest of the series on the second hand market, I finally found Lungbarrow a few years back in the most random store. It was still very expensive, (but hasn't got any cheaper since), but it was the one I needed for the complete set of those books, so no price was too high.

The second book was the Doc Savage biography by Phillip Jose Farmer, which I've been gagging for since reading about it in a Starlog magazine eons ago. I got all the other Tarzan and Savage books that Farmer produced, including the barely-concealed variants, but the book about Savage's life was always out of reach. I ended up accidentally buying the Tarzan memoir three or four times because I kept seeing it with different covers, but there was no Savage.

And then I found it just last week, in a second hand bookshop, just sitting in the shelves. I snapped that puppy up, and look forward to getting stuck into it, but am worried that this kind of random discovery will only get rarer, because that bookstore has an uncertain future, due to the usual 'landlord is a shithead' issues.  

So maybe it'll be straight up impossible to find that third grail book - Grant Morrison's Lovely Biscuits, a collection of the writer's prose that came out sometime in their 90s prime. And even though I know it was a tiny print run on a tiny publisher, I still look for it every time I'm in a second hand bookstore.

I could get a copy from the internet, it's just a question of how much I'll pay, but if I did that, what then? What would I look for? That would be the end of the fun, and giving into online temptation destroys that moment where I do stumble across it in some hospice store or something. 

I haven't ever seen Lovely Biscuits out in the wild, and maybe I never will, but I won't stop looking, because that's what a grail quest is all about.

Goodbye, baby rabbits

The saddest comics I ever read when I was a kid were the last issues of Master of Kung Fu and Ghost Rider. Even though monthly comic books were always stopping and starting, the end of both long-running series gave me something of a mild existential shock at the time, because I didn't think comics could end like that. There every month, and then just... gone.

Both series, which started in the 80s, had long and memorable runs. Shang-Chi and Johnny Blaze got involved in all sorts of diabolical schemes. There comics were often stylish and beautiful, and both characters had strong designs that are still being riffed on today.

But there was something about the finality of these last issues that really hit home. That there would be no more regular stories about these strange heroes, with Shang-Chi confronting his awful heritage and overcoming it, and Johnny riding off into the sunset with his girl, free of the demon within.

Nothing last forever, not even Marvel heroes. When their four-colour adventures were coming out month after month, a definitive ending to the serialisation was a shock to my young system.

(Luckily, I never read the last issue of Power Man and Iron Fist until I was much, much older. The way Dany Rand goes out is still shocking in its casual brutality, and would have been properly traumatizing if I'd read it at the time.) 

It's a feeling that only really builds up through that serialisation of fiction. It never really happens in the same way with movies (unless it's part of a long series), but I have felt the same way about the endings of the long-running TV show of my youth, like the winsome melancholy of the final episode of Happy Days, and the unspoken theme that the days of happiness were now fucking over; or the strangeness of the final episode of M*A*S*H, which made me cry like nothing else.

The greatest TV show of all time is, of course, Doctor Who, and it is always coming to some kind of end when the Doctor dies and regenerates, but this also comes with his own rebirth and renewal, and the joy of the new. I got used to that a young age.

I have also, over time, got used to long-running comics and TV shows coming to an end on a regular basis, and so many of them are unmemorable and mawkish, but I do occasionally feel it when a TV show reaches its multi-year run, and this group of actors and creators part ways.

There might be reunions and reboots, but sometimes something is just totally over, and I feel its loss, as much as I missed Johnny and Shang-Chi when they walked off the comic stage.