Here comes the past #12: Mark Millar wants to know what you are talking about

 

 

- Originally published 5 July, 2018 

I thought he'd got out of the habit, but read some recent Millar comics and they were full of it. I thought about updating the list with another dozen or so examples, but I think the point has been well made.

Here comes the past #11: Wonder girls, shadow cats and magpies

I've been a news journalist for more than 10 years now, and whenever anybody asks me why I was attracted by the trade, I joke that I got into it meet girls. I love being a journalist, and I can even be quite good at it sometimes, because you get to do crazy shit and meet awesome people. But I'm really only half joking about the girls.

Journalism attracts lots of smart, literate and creative women, who are strong enough to stand up for themselves and pushy enough to get a good story. I would be lying if I said it wasn't a huge attraction of the business and, amazingly, it fucking worked, and I met my divine wife on the first day of journalism school, and we've been married nine years this week.

I've always been about the strong and smart women, ever since Karen Fox toasted me on a multiplication test at Highfield School when I was nine years old. And it certainly applied to the female characters I liked best in my comic books. They might not have been real, but I adored them all the same.

My first comic book crush was definitely Wonder Girl. Long before puberty ever came knocking, I thought Donna Troy was the bee's knees.

This was sparked largely by one of the early Best Of DC Digest from 1981, which was my first exposure to the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans, with an all-new Infantino-drawn story bringing Aqualad back into the fold, and some groovy sixties adventures, drawn by Neal Adams, Nick Cardy and Gil Kane. I read that thing a million times as a kid, and thought Wonder Girl was the best.

I still don't really know why, but Wonder Girl was always my favourite Teen Titans. She rocked that red jumpsuit, was the physically strongest person on the team, and was the team's conscience and voice for compassion. 

Comics were mainly all about the boys in the early eighties, and there weren't really a lot of great female characters. There was always Wonder Woman, but she was just a bit too chiselled and remote – Donna Troy was a cool young woman with a mean right hook and a caring smile, who loved to dance.

It didn't last, because adolescent crushes never do. Donna went off and married some wanker with curly hair and a beard, and she stopped wearing that awesome scarlet outfit, and – most importantly – her entire history got screwed around.

She was a continuity nightmare from the start – she only existed based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the original Wonder Girl stories were – and she got messed around so much, I totally lost track of the character. I still love her look, and have a lot of affection for the character, but I honestly couldn't tell you if she even exists in the current DC universe.

Donna was the first female character I really, really liked, but she wasn't the last, not by a long shot. By the time I got to my early teenage years, it was obvious that the coolest girl in all comics was definitely Kitty Pryde.

How could any 13-year-old ever be immune to her charms? She was the spunkiest character in the Uncanny X-Men, a comic that worshiped at the altar of spunky women. She was a serious nerd, but she always stood up to the bullies, even if she could be heartbreakingly nervous about it all.

Kitty wasn't afraid to call Professor X a jerk, and was always self aware of how bratty she could be. She could be insecure and shy and more than a little silly, but always strong.

By the time she joined Excalibur in the late eighties, she was nearly the perfect girl. She was tough, and resolute, and sometimes she was horribly out of her depth, but didn't let that stop her. Kitty was a part time ninja and full time geek, who could break your fingers with her eyebrow, but would rather beat your score on a video game.

Unfortunately, comic book time does not progress as fast as real world time. While I turned 15 at the same time Kitty did, she is now half my age. I haven't wanted to be Kitty Pryde's boyfriend for years, because that would be creepy and weird.

I'd still like to hang out and play video games with her, though...

In the end, Kitty's adventures were just too crazy to identify with, and she was just a bit too awesome, and when it came to unabashed affection for comic book characters, things needed to be a bit more real. No wonder I fell so hard for Maggie in Jaime Hernadez's Love and Rockets comics.

Maggie Chascarillo is an achingly beautiful character, and while she started working on rocket mechanics and dodging military coups with awkward aplomb, she was also laden with real emotions and feelings.

Jaime's eternally fluid line certainly helped with Maggie's charms, but there was that strength, and those smarts again. Maggie wasn't the sort of girl who became a space ninja like Kitty, or a demi-goddess like Donna, but she was somebody you desperately wanted to keep in touch with, right throughout her life.

Even better, Maggie has aged in a way Wonder Girl or Shadowcat never could. Maggie is now in her forties in the latest round of Love and Rockets, and as beautiful as ever.

She still has that self-awareness about her lot in life, but is a lot tougher than she ever gives herself credit for. She's seen glimpses of the darkness of the world, and has walked with graveyard ghosts, but remains beautifully true to herself, through all the ups and downs.

Hopey was super cute, especially when she was causing trouble, but Maggie's life is an epic ballad of modern life. She's settled down with Ray now, which is the best possible outcome, but she is real enough to still garner plenty of affection.

But still, even that is a youthful indulgence, because I fell in love with Maggie during the blinding summer of 1994, when I was 18-years-old, and things have moved on since then. I still love to see what she is doing, but it's like checking in on an old, dear friend.

Because when I met the lovely wife on the first day of our journalism course, all priorities changed, and when I told her I loved her a year later, I didn't need to be so emotionally invested in a comic book character. I had enough real joy to deal with.

A comic book crush is harmless enough, but it's even better when you can find such traits in the real world.

- Originally published 11 December 2015

I sleep in a big bed with my wife.

Here comes the past #10: Pulp - Catch us at it, in the front room

In the great catalogue of dodgy Britpop tunes from the mid-1990s, Pulp's two albums - full of killer beats and universal themes - still reign supreme, and are just as vital in this future world as they were way back then.

Different Class and This Is Hardcore are both as important as ever, confronting the despair behind getting everything you ever wanted, and marvelling at the sheer joy of spending the night with somebody well out of your league, and everything in between.

I always had a massive soft spot for the gruntier guitars and unashamed sentimentality of Elastica and the Manics and Supergrass, and I've recently been playing the big Oasis tunes with alarming regularity, but I could listen to Pulp forever. Anytime, anywhere, with anybody.



It always takes me ages to get behind a new technology. I was still sticking with the video tape collection until the late 2000s, and cassette tapes were still good enough for me in 1996.

But then I was at some party early in the year and it was somewhere on the wrong side of 4am and everyone was shattered and lying around watching music videos on the TV, and they played 'Disco 2000' and everything perked right up again. There was no need to sitting around and feeling miserable, this sharp, lively music was telling us all, just get out there and fucking live it up a bit.

I went out to the local record store the next day and listened to the whole album in the shop, and it sounded so bloody beautiful, I had to buy it on CD. I got a free Pulp tee-shirt with it, but had to go and buy a CD player on hire-purchase to have something to listen to it on.

The CD player spluttered and died years and years ago, but I've still got that disc. And you can bet I've still got that tee-shirt.



Unlike the vast majority of its contemporaries, Different Class isn't tied to a particular time and place, it sounds like it could have recorded yesterday.

It's slick and vibrant and energetic. The band had already put in the hard yards by this stage of their careers and were a total fucking unit, loud and fast and alive. Jarvis Cocker was the archest frontman you could ask for, doing fabulous things with his fingers, and he was backed by a crew that always delivered the lift his lyrics called for - Candida Doyle was an absolute monster on the keyboards.

And the songs finally got the full blasting production they deserve. Common People has far more meat on its bones than the previous album's Do You Remember The First Time, even though they're equally epic on a songwriting level. The whole Different Class album - even the softer tunes - had this new weight to them, and this new substance makes the whole thing truly timeless.



It helped that the whole album was so fucking identifiable, and still feels like it's speaking truths that haven't eroded in time, because we've all been there. The songs were about feeling like a misfit in the nightclub, or being lost at a giant party, or facing up to yet another Monday morning and doing it all over again. They were about this feeling called love, and about just sitting around in your underwear in somebody's else's room.
 
It's all a bit sordid, and sometimes a bit sad, but always real. I'd never been to fuckin' Sheffield - I'd never even been out of New Zealand yet - but all these feelings about this messed-up world we live in were so real and recognisable. Confusion and elation and everything in between are always universal, we all feel it.



A couple of years later, and it's all gone to shit a bit. Post-Cold War optimism is taking a weird path and souring into pre-millenial paranoia.

This Is Hardcore is a blatant plea for help. It starts with a blaring note that sounds like an emergency siren - the sound of loneliness, turned up to 10 - and doesn't cheer up much from there. The band had the success they'd been chasing for a decade, and it was just as hollow as anything else.

What do you do then?

While there is still room for a party - and still room to party hard - it's a hell of a hangover. We're all on the slow slide into decrepit obsolescence, no matter how many pills we're taking. There are a few glory days to come, but the world is moving on without us, and it's hard to hang on.



Again, we're not all rock stars, but it's music that was still speaking truths to people on the other side of the world. We might not be having an existential crisis every time we do the dishes, but it's still always lurking there in the soap suds.

And we've all had a taste of some kind of success, and had a quiet freak-out that it doesn't feel like we thought it would. That success doesn't always mean fulfillment, because where do you go when you've got everything you ever wanted? And how long will it be until everybody finds out you're a fraud anyway?



Pulp's music can make me feel lots of big, scary thoughts about the world, but they also make me want to rock out, all night long. There isn't a human emotion that you can't find reflected back at you in one of the songs on these two albums.

Who hasn't driven around town with their one mate who was into the same band as you, singing the lyrics to the big songs loudly and often wrongly, but it doesn't matter, because it's just such a fucking banger of a tune?

Who hasn't put on the title track on This Is Hardcore at top volume on the stereo and then pointed the speakers straight into their ears and screamed along? Is there a better way to cry into the void?



Both of these albums are more than 20 years old now, but I've never stopped listening to them. They're my desert island discs, and I still listen to them constantly. While other old favourites from that period come and go, Pulp is eternal.

I never saw them live - and probably never will, not if the whole band isn't there - but that's okay. I don't have to be there in person to connect to this music, I've been connecting to it for two decades now.

Pulp did some great stuff before they made a move with Mis-Shapes, and they did some fantastic work after The Day After the Revolution played out, but these two albums stand ahead and shoulders above anything else they did.

If I wanna dance, or just wallow in the futility of existence, Pulp is there, and always will be.

- Originally published 21 December 2018. 

I was lying about I was okay if I never saw them live - I saw them for the first time ever earlier this year and got to see it with that one old friends who sang along with me in the 90s.. It was goddamn magical.