Mirage could arrest me anytime

I never really had any crush on a cartoon character - there were plenty of comic book characters that made me feel all funny inside from a very young age, including Black Cat, Huntress, Judge Anderson, Kitty Pryde and Maggie Chascarillo. But I never felt the same way about any cartoon characters on animated TV shows. I didn't even  find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played a girl bunny.

Except for Mirage, the undercover cop in the C.O.P.S.cartoon from the late eighties. While I usually had disquieting admirations for the bad girls, I also thought Mirage was the bee's knees.

I think it was the uniform. And how tough she was. Nobody fucked with Mirage.

Always time for Jason Isaacs

The older I get, the more likely I am to watch a movie just because I like a particular actor in it. While most of my life as a movie nerd has been spent in following directors, writers and cinematographers, now I'm more likely to watch something just because it has Jason Isaacs in it.

After all, there is a known quality there. His appearance in a film means that no matter how awful it might be in almost every way, at least we get some Jason Isaacs.

He absolutely fucks the screen as Zhukov in the Death of Stalin, with one of the top 10 movie entrances ever; he's so good at playing a bad guy in the Patriot and a Star Trek captain from the mirror universe, but also can just be a bloody good bloke. I watched Mrs Harris Goes to Paris last week because he was in it and found his moderate rogue (with oceans of charm) entirely palatable. He has the best mustache in cinema in Green Zone, and I only just found out he was almost in the first John Wick, which could only improve on perfection

I just like watching charming people do their charming shit on screen. I lap that up and ask for more, every time. It's the same with comics, where I barely follow any writers anymore, but have dozens of artists whose work I will always hunt down. It's the aesthetic I dig, not the clever.

The older I get, the more I just like looking at nice things. Like Jason Isaacs.

You can't kill the multiverse now

The under-performance of the new Flash movie has already been attributed to a bunch of different things, from the star's off-screen foolishness to the general fucking weirdness of the movie, but there is no shortage of very serious people pontificating about how audiences are getting sick of multiverses, and that it's time for the concept to be rested.

Good luck with that, kids. Nerds have been trying to put that cork back in the bottle for decades.

There have been a tonne of different movies involving multiversal shenanigans in recent years. The superhero movies are getting all sorts of new toys out of them, and they're winning Oscars for this shit now.

It's fitting that it's the Flash that might have tipped the balance, because this was all Barry bloody Allen's fault in the first place, crossing worlds to team up with Jay Garrick. While that soon led to annual crossovers between Societies and Leagues, and Earths 3, B and S, it was all fairly restrained, as far as these things go.

And then the 1980s rolled along and DC, in all their charming naivety, thought things were getting too complicated for the average reader, and they tried to do away with the whole thing with the biggest Crisis ever.

Cramming it all into one earth lasted for a good three months, before DC was relying on pocket universes and vibrational dimensions to paper over the cracks, and the DC multiverse has now been rebooted multiple times, and is more prevalent than ever, and just as confusing as ever.

Marvel has had its own multiverse for decades, and has become increasingly blase about oversaturating its stories in alternative versions, while still pretending that the one single 616 universe still makes some kind of sense. 

Neither of these big comic companies show any sign of dialing back on the multiverse thing, and all those who are now sniffly predicting that mass audiences are getting tired of it too may have some point, but you can't get rid of that idea so easily. It'll stick around.

I expect there will be plenty of new movies coming about another world, another life, another you. The multiverse can't die, not when a doppelganger idea from the next universe over can always take over.

Outlander is still there

I'm absolutely completely gutted that the Reader's Book Exchange is going, but at least the posters in the window of the old Majestic Theatre just up the road, with the hot video releases of 2010, are still there.

Man, I hope nobody ever takes them down. They're a goddamn institution now.

Izzat so?

My latest essay for the thoroughly fucking excellent Gutter Review argues that even though he is literally the most heavy metal character in all of Judge Dredd, Mean Machine Angel is actually a big old softie at heart.

I'm not saying I won't still get the hell out of his way when he gets his dial stuck on 4-1/2 and he goes butt-crazy, but I am saying it's not his fault.

Putting a whole life into storage

None of the comics I've ever owned - and I've had thousands and thousands of the fuckers - have ever gone into long-term storage. The collection has been scattered a couple of times when I've moved between cities, but I was never away from my precious Judge Dredd Megazines for more than a few weeks.

We got a storage unit a couple of years ago to handle the overflow of stuff that no longer fits into our small flat, and it's been useful as hell. Lots of clothes and large pieces of small furniture went in there, and I've now stored a bunch of books and magazines in there - the collection of Empire magazines has been growing since 1993, so that's almost a whole corner of the unit there.

That just meant I could fit more comics under the bed at home, so none of them had to go into the big metal box. I just never knew when I'd get the sudden urge to read Tom Strong comics again, or check in to see if I was remembering that one line of dialogue from Garth Ennis' first Punisher issue correctly. What's the point of owning them if you don't have instant access?

That has been a luxury I have clung to for the past couple of years, but now I have to face facts - almost all of it will have to go into storage for a while.

I'm going to have to put most of my comics into storage for 12 months or so next year, and while I know they'll be safe and okay, I'm genuinely bummed out about it.

Part of it is the paranoia that has been fed by watching far too much Storage Wars, what if I get the payments wrong, or the company fucks up somehow and they sell it all off? Literally a lifetime of collecting, sold off to fuckin' Daryl for $300? I'm going to be 1000 kilometres away, shit like that could just happen.

But it's also that I just like having it around, my own personal library, all at my fingertips. I'm just self-aware enough to recognise how fucking shallow it is to have a personality built on the piles of comics under the bed, but I'm comfortable in those shallows.

I'll still be taking a few books, of course. All the pretty bookshelf stuff, and all the things I always take with me, like the Invisibles, the early 2000ads and the Hitman. Probably Tom Strong, now that I think about it. Combined with the usual avalanche of new books to read, there will be more than enough to keep me going for the year we're planning to be away.

But a storage locker ain't no library. It's a cold place for these vibrant things, that still spark such joy and wonder in me, even if I've read them a hundred times before. That's why I keep them, after all. And that's why I always want to keep them near.

Who Was Who in the DC Universe: I'm that bad type (part 1 of 2)

The Penguin by Jim Aparo

Ares by Cynthia Martin

Silver Banshee by Dusty Abell and Terry Austin

Chronos by Gil Kane

Magna Khan by Joe Phillips

Sundays at the Tearoom of Despair have been a Marvel day for most of this year, showcasing some of my favourite art from the back pages of Marvel Fanfare. So it's only fair to head across the road to the Distinguished Competition for a while, and highlight some more of my favourite profile pics from DC's Who's Who portfolios from the early 90s.

Because when it comes to DC, my greatest enthusiasm for their comics was at this time, and they were producing some sweet, sweet art.

This is my life now: This time for Africa!

 

I knew that parenthood would involve me doing a lot of seriously dorky shit - it goes with the job - but I seriously did not think I would spend so much time happily dancing badly to a Shakira song about Africa, and the dance moves of a man called DJ Raphi. But that's what the kids like, and I really can't say no when they tell me to get up off my fat arse and boogie with them.

I still have weird trouble doing that fist bump move, though. I'm working on it, kids. I'm working on it.

Avon would have kicked Ming's arse

I saw both Flash Gordon and Blake's 7 at a very young age, and god bless my parents for letting me, but I'm not sure this was a very good idea, because they both had some very serious ideas floating about, and were both very, very sexy things to watch.

Crucially, I saw them at a time just before home video recorders became a thing, so after seeing them at that young age, I didn't see them again for another six or seven years, which is half of my damn childhood. By the time they were repeated on television, I was a teenager, and was able to clear up some misconceptions - including the fact that I always thought they took place in the same universe.

Basically, I thought General Kala, one of Ming The Merciless' top henchpeople, was a mutoid, one of the soulless soldiers of the evil Federation in Blake's 7. The mutoids only appeared in a couple of episodes, but I never forgot them, largely because of an intense dream I once had about falling through the universe with them.

But they were dressed in black uniforms, with a weird and ornate headpiece covering much of their skull, and my childhood memories confused the two, and the only way I could reconcile them is that they took place in the same universe.

When I saw the film and TV show again, and got to read some comic adaptions of the properties, one of the first things I noticed is that they don't look anything alike at all, other than they wore tight black  uniforms and were generally evil.

(I'll leave the psychology about my youngest self's small obsession with these evil women to the Freud fans, but it's all still kinda obvious. See also: Women, El)

So I know there is no connection between the two - although with Flash filmed in Britain, they undoubtedly shared some of the same movie craftspeople and SFX gurus - but I still think of them as connected, deep down in my soul. And while the cynical and ruthless crew of the Liberator might have ultimately failed to bring down the vast bureaucracy of the Federation, they could have booted Ming's ass back to Mongo.