Deciding on the best Ennis

The ongoing mission to put more of my comics into storage hit a significant bump last week, when I slammed straight into the Ennis comics, and I had to decide how much Garth I needed for the next couple of years. 

I've been reading Ennis comics since he was a goddamn teenager, and have a sizable chunk of his output. And I'm obviously keeping the best close by, because I never know when I want to Hitman, or feel the nostalgic burn of the Preacher, or even take a glimpse at the bottomless void inside the human soul that is his Punisher Max comics.

But I've also grown an unnerving fondness for the most unloved of his comics, the dopiest shit he writes, and I don't know how much of that is going into storage. I never know when I might need A Train Called Love or Dicks.

These comics never seem to get much love, but there is always something appealing to me about the stories that embrace the dumbest sense of humour, like Ennis clearly relishes doing. His dopey comics are almost always punching up, while occasionally slapping sideways, and sometimes lean so heavily into ironic stereotypes that they come out the other side, but I dunno. He still makes me laugh.. 

Dicks is still the most puerile, silly and offensive he's ever done, and yeah, that's the point of the whole thing. If you're going to have a wanker, it might as well be the biggest wanker in the whole world.

It's been there since the start. The man himself might vigorously denounce Time Flight, but the bit in the first episode where the Nazi guard blurts out 'When Will I Be Famous', and then goes straight faced stone dead, that shit still cracks me up.

I still like his mean and moody War Stories - the 'come fight a gurkha!' part in his recent Lion And The Eagle series was as good as anything he's ever written - but maybe I need more dumb humour in my life, not less. Maybe I shouldn't be locking away those laffs into storage. 

Asteroid City: I still don't understand the play

I fucking loved Asteroid City, and even though most of the characters are stuck in place to an existential degree, I still feel it has that potent Anderson sense of speed, with plot and backstory rapidly flying by, to the point of gorgeous absurdity.

That said, I honestly can't believe nobody went up that bridge to nowhere and flew off the end. That really felt like a missed opportunity.

Mission Impossible v Twister: Style always wins

I've been to the movie theatre half a dozen times in the past couple of months, and my faintly beating cinematic heart is stoked by that. That heart's fierce burning to see as many movies in the theater as humanly possible really shined when I was 21, and I know it was at its brightest then, because that's when Twister and the first Mission Impossible came out.

I saw each film more than half a dozen times in the winter of 1996. They weren't the only movies that I saw more times than I should - there was, unfortunately, lots of Escape from LA - but these other two blockbusters came out at the same time, and when I was at my deepest in my movie obsession, they were both playing at the multiplex just down the road.

Look, I had loads of disposable income and free time, and I just wanted to spend vast amounts of both at the cinema. It was just so easy to fall into the habit.

So I saw both of these movies half a dozen times each, and I was getting bored of Twister's tricks by the third or fourth time (I still went, because what else was I gonna do, get a life?), but I never got sick of the tension of the raid on the CIA headquarters, or the madness of the train sequence.

Even at such a young age, I was always a DePalma kid. I just dug his moviemaking balls. Why not have extreme close-ups and zooms and split screens and everything? What use was being a filmmaker if you didn't try all the tricks, and come up with some new ones of your own?

I'm still hugely impressed with his slick and mean early 90s work like Raising Cain and Carlito's Way, and it made perfect sense to me that he'd be rebooting the dusty old MI template.

(Carlito got no love at the time, but its critical reputation has grown over the years, once you get past Viggo's outrageous accent. But holy shit, I've always thought that ambush in the pool hall is a top 10 movie scene, and nobody does sadness in the rain like Pacino.)

So Mission Impossible just had more style, had more slickness to it. Twister the sure hand of a solid director in Jan de Bont, an immensely charming cast - Paxton should have had way more leading roles -  and had a lot of new special effects that still actually hold up pretty well, but it was the stodgiest story of reunited loves and the pains of hubris.

While Mission Impossible was about jumping off an exploding helicopter onto the back of a speeding high speed train inside a cramped tunnel, and despite all the tricks and twists, it was only really ever about that.

They're still talking about a Twister sequel, and that might happen, but it's not surprise that there have been seven MIs and one Twister. I could see that coming in the dark Dunedin winter of 1996.

Mickey's spaceship was always parked up in my head

Nobody can remember everything, and most of the things that go through the slush pile in our heads roll right out again. Ask me what I had for dinner last week, and I might remember some fucking tasty enchiladas that I made one night, but that's about it.

And then there are also parts of the brain that retain stuff for decades and decades, without ever really knowing it, until it's there in your face.

I've had tens of thousands of books and comics and magazines flow through my possession. It's constantly surprising to me how I remember owning, and I can still remember exact panels from comics I haven't read in 20 years, and I'm obviously quite distraught that all this incredible brainpower was put into, I dunno, cancer research or some shit.

And I still remember all the Little Golden Books I had when I was five years old. For such tiny and thin books, they were always hugely popular. I still remembered things like the Sesame Street ones, and have been more than happy to introduce the next generation to the joys of Big Bird's Big Red Book and Grover's eternal quest to avoid the Monster At The End Of This Book. (The four-year-old is also particularly fond of a couple of Star Wars and Star Treks ones I got.)

But I thought I had completely forgotten the one where Mickey Mouse builds a spaceship and soars into the stars, until I saw it on the shelf at Auckland's best second hand bookstore.

And while the details of the book meant nothing to me now, the thickly painted pictures of Mickey and Donald heading into the infinite were deeply familiar.

Somewhere, deep inside my head, there was retained the image of this spaceship being wheeled out of a barn, or the Beagle Boys getting up to mischief in the vacuum of space. It was all so familiar.

Even after all the booze I drank and all the dope I smoked, even after hitting my head repeatedly over the decades. Even after cramming in the details of a million other comic panels, and book illustrations, and all sorts of other nonsense, there was still a part that retained these images, for no good purpose.

Maybe it is just a pile of sludge in our ears, fooling itself into some kind of consciousness, but it is truly remarkable how some things stick, all through the years, without you ever knowing.

Who was Who in the DC Universe: Old school is the best school (part 2 of 2)

Art by Ty Templeton

Art by Norm Breyfogle

Art by Ken Hooper

Art by John Higgins

Art by Jim Aparo

Art by Hilary Barta

Jim Aparo should have done a lot more Mr Miracle - the few times he appeared in Brave and the Bold were just not enough - and judging by this and the few covers he did for Swampy back when absolutely nobody was reading it, John Higgins should definitely have done way more Swamp Thing. That one was a fucking no-brainer.

She's practising the clarinet!

It's not fair. The kid picks up a figure of the Baroness in all her tight leather and evil hotness and declares 'Mum!'; and the only action figure I ever got compared to by my progeny was Miles fucking Mayhem from the MASK toys.

Thanks, young 'uns.

The headphones put me in the Floyd hole

I'm always a bit surprised when I go into any kind of tech store, and see the amount and variety of headphones they have on offer. But I shouldn't really be, because having your entertainments blasted directly into your earholes remains the one of the most immersive experiences you can have with art.

You don't need any kind of VR kit to give you an overload of sensation, just put on some headphones, crank up the sounds and close your eyes.

Right about the time I started taking music really, really seriously - like we all do when we're in your early teens and grasping for some kind of identity to call our own - I was into Pink Floyd. They were terminally uncool at the time and were for many years afterwards, (I disavowed my Floyd love for years until I got over myself,) but they will always be my first great musical love.

So after having my mind totally fucking blown by The Wall, I made sure that the first time I dived headfirst into Wish You Were Here, it was under optimum conditions. I got hold of a cheap vinyl copy - fuckin' nobody was buying LPs in the late eighties, so you could easily pick up classic albums for less than five bucks - put it on our shitty little stereo system, and put on my headphones.

The headphones I used were cheap crap from the local store, but they dragged me all the way into a Floyd hole that I've never really come out of.

I think it was that chortle that seems to come from right behind your ear, just as the lyrics for Shine On You Crazy diamond kicked in. I genuinely thought there was somebody behind me when I heard it, and felt the real power of true immersion.

It was just so easy to block out the whole fucking world, and just groove on the awesome thrill of music, where everything in the universe fades into nothingness next to the charge of the next chord change.

(This immersion is also part of the reason I also get so much more emotional watching films on planes, with the dialogue , music and sound effects bouncing around in your head.)

For years after that LP experience, I didn't go anywhere without the walkman and the headphones, and had that soundtrack to my mundane life blasting away. I don't do it so much when walking around anymore, and tend to listen to podcasts in one ear, with more interaction with the world. 

This isn't just because I'm trying to heed the lessons Kurt Vonnegut once taught about going to buy an envelope, but because I live in a big city with crazy drivers who you really do need to keep an ear out for.

But every now and then, when I've got some time and space to really and truly relax, nothing beats just putting on those headphones, playing some fave music and going inside my head again. It can be a happy place in there.

Kill your heroes, and love the superposition

There a bit towards the end of From Hell, in the Dance of the Gull Catchers epilogue, when writer Alan Moore admits that it doesn't matter who Jack The Ripper is. Because he's a super-position, far bigger than the physical space of the actual murderer.

This is always forefront in my mind when another personal hero turns out to be just another arsehole - when it turns out that a writer I admire is a selfish, narcissistic fuckwit, or a director turns out to be fully abusive.

It used to be so disappointing, and I would be crushed when somebody I'd so admired had feet of shit. And it's a major reason why I don't have many heroes anymore, because I finally figured out that they're all human beings.

Humans, even the greatest of us, can still be mean and spiteful, or you could just catch them in a really bad mood. They can say inappropriate things at the exact wrong time, and support people and ideals who are morally repugnant.

I do have super-positions that I admire though, beyond the frailties of human complexity. The ideals they pass on, the way they see the world at its best, away from the mess of their last divorce, or the way they turned into a deadbeat dad.

I wouldn't ever want to be a superposition myself, it's not exactly aspirational. Because for all the complexities of it, it's still just the shadow of the intricacies found within every human soul.

Still, if Tom fucking Hanks turns out to be an actual dirtbag, I am giving up on life.

I never get sick of this

Empire Magazine, on a set visit for a forthcoming blockbuster: You might think that the director is a hack, but their new movie/TV show promises a worthy look at an important issue, full of diversity and representation without being patronizing, while still delivering giant thrills and emotional highs that can only be found on the altar of the screen, and points to a bright and glorious future.

Empire Magazine's review of the same movie, two months later: Kinda lame. Three stars. 

(It's almost as funny as the long-running gag where they promise that maybe this video game adaption will be the one that's actually good, and it never, ever is. No, not even The Last Of Us.)