What is best in life? Conan, obviously.

What is best in life? Holy Moley, there's some new Miracleman coming out!

I came to Marvelman so late, he will always be Miracleman to me. Warrior never made it to my corner of the world in the 1980s, and it took me damn near twenty years to get all the Eclipse back issues. The first one I bought brand new, off the shelf, was Miracleman #24, the second part of the Silver Age.

It was a cracking set-up for the next phase of the Age of Miracles, and then the next issue was delayed, and delayed, and delayed, and just faded away in the end.

And then Marvel somehow sorted out all the rights a few years back, and started republishing all the wonderful Moore/Gaiman issues, with the express promise that the story would be properly finished this time.

And now, after 25 goddamn years, they have finally caught up, and the new stories are coming soon.

It's weird that Marvel hasn't made more of a deal about it. After flooding the shelves with reprints of the fifties stuff that absolutely nobody demanded, and then stringing out the Moore/Gaiman issues through a series of interminable backmatter pages and outright fuck-ups, they're actually at the interesting part, the new stuff, and I only noticed it buried in the back of the Marvel section of the Previews catalogue.

I would have thought it would be more heavily promoted, because after all this time, this is the stuff people are actually waiting for, but there is a much bigger deal made about the return of the bloody Micronauts in the new solicitations. I always hated the bloody Micronauts.

I'm glad I spotted it hiding there in the solicitations, and even gladder that this long, rambling story is finally coming to an end.

I'm not expecting many surprises - a fairly detailed timeline was written for the Miracleman universe 30 years ago, and Gaiman has often mentioned where his last episodes of the saga were heading - but it's nice that this 25-year wait is just about over.

What is best in life? The extraordinary artwork of Barry Linton

New Zealand artist Barry Linton has been killing it with his idiosyncratic comics and eye-catching gig posters for decades now, and remains a vital slice of Kiwi pop culture.

I was first exposed to his work at a very young age - one of my cool uncles liked to collect Linton's comic work in Strips and other mini-comics in the late 1970s - and it was my first ever exposure to a non-mainstream comic. I was only five or so at the time, so his gleefully adult comics creeped me out a bit, and I couldn't get my head around his use of phonetic language, but his goofy figurework and sheer energy have always been an attraction.

Barry is still producing his own comics, usually set in the distant past or far future, and an excellent look at his career has just appeared on NZ music archive website Audioculture here 

His comics still creep me out a bit, but there is no denying that he is a dead set legend.

What is best in life? Paul Chadwick's 100 Horrors!

Paul Chadwick's 100 Horrors short comics, which used to run in the back of his Concrete books, never got close to the magic 100 numbers before the artist moved on, but they were suitable eerie, with some nightmarish and simple tales of terrible things happening. And sometimes they were just bloody funny, (the one with a falling star is a cracker).

This one was always my favourite, and still sticks in my mind as a particularly dreadful way for the human race to go out. (Click on the images to actually read the darn thing.)

What is best in life? Dani Moonstar and her Valkryie sisters

One time I got some terrible food poisoning while travelling on the edge of the Gobi Desert in outer Mongolia. It was survivable, but not pleasant, especially when you're camping in a place that is 300 miles away from the nearest proper toilet, in a country with no roads.

There was only one real bad night, when I was puking and feverish and lying on the hard ground in a shitty tent, drifting in and out of consciousness.

And at one point in the night, there were some wild horses running around outside my tent - which is really no surprise, because there are wild horses running around all over Mongolia - and I had a moment of clarity when I knew with absolute certainty that the horses were being ridden by Dani Moonstar and her Valkyrie sisters, coming to take me away to Valhalla.

It's both comforting and extremely embarrassing to realise that even if my most fucked-up moments, when I'm totally out of my skull with fever, the first things that always come to mind are the comic books I read when I was 14.

What is best in life? Il Maestro!

It's the year 2016, and Ennio Morricone is still creating kickass music for kickass movies.



All is right with the world.

What is best in life? Not bothering.

Ever since I first looked at a review of a Superman comic in late 1995, I've been a voracious consumer of all kind of nerdy news on the internet, gladly hoovering up comic book solicitations and horror movie reviews and in-depth essays about Ambush Bug.

I still have that first web generation mentality of thinking that I have to look at it all, but my online life got so much better when I realised I didn't actually have to look at some things.

I don't need to read any well-intentioned think-pieces about the intentions of somebody who is going to be writing Doctor Who in 2018, and I don't ever have to read any soul-despairing movie trailer breakdowns. (In all media, this is probably the second worse job in journalism - writing down a description of everything that you can already see in  a one minute and forty five second clip, followed by blind speculation about what it all means. The worst job in journalism, of course, is doing a live piece to camera in the middle of some terrible storm.)

And I don't have to bother with the tedious nitpicking of those 'Everything MOVIE X did wrong in 90 seconds' or 'Honest Movie Trailers'. There are better things to do with my time than watch these things, dedicated to crushing any life out of a movie story by pointing out plot holes you didn't care about and making fun of you for liking something that might be a bit cheesy or fun.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realise all this. I am a thorough man, but I am not a smart man.

What is best in life? Walking the earth like Doctor Strange

And when I'm 15, and listening to Sergeant Pepper on the shitty tape player on my goddamn alarm clock, I decide that if I haven't figured out the meaning of life by the time I'm 42, I'm going to have to drop everything and go walk the earth like Doctor Strange.

It all makes sense - I'll go off to Tibet or some shit, and learn the great mystical secrets of the universe which are obviously hidden in some bloody monestary somewhere, and then I'll be able to figure out what it's all about, and I won't have to worry about death or oblivion or anything like that, because I'll be able to do funky light shows with my fingers.

I just turned 41 last week, so I better get my fuckin' arse into gear.

What is best in life? The trailer for Casino!

When I first videotaped the trailer for Martin Scorsese's Casino from an episode of Entertianment Tonight in 1994, it looked like the most amazing film that had ever been made. The haunting start of Gimme Shelter echoing out as the camera zooms across the desert, the quick cuts away from the violence, the way that one guy say "I can't make it any clearer, I would just get out", which still bounces around in my skull every goddamn day.

In the end, the film itself was far too long and far too loud. It's still a great movie, even if it is nowhere as good as Goodfellas. But that trailer still gives me goosebumps.