Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Phil's Tarzan did not fuck around



After many, many years of searching, I finally got copies of Philip Jose Farmer's Lord of the Trees/The Mad Goblin books - the two sequels to A Feast Unknown - and got stuck into them. And it was so goddamn delightful how much Farmer gets right to the fucking point.

I read A Feast Unknown at the perfect time in my life, wand adored the cock-crossing pulp epic, featuring thinly-veiled version of Tarzan and Doc Savage battling it out against the machinations of The Nine, the secret rulers of the world.

And while Farmer's books are reasonably easy to find, it has taken me forever to find the Doc Savage Caliban one. This has always been the way - I actually have four copies of Lord of the Trees, because I keep seeing different versions of it and buying it just in case. (I also have three different copies of the Tarzan biography, but still would do anything for the Doc Savage one.)

So now that I had both sequels, I finally got to crack into them, and I absolutely adore the way that Farmer does not fuck around in any way. 

Because Lord of the Trees starts with (not really) Tarzan getting blown out of the sky, surviving a high altitude fall into the ocean, fighting some sharks, swimming several miles to shore, finding the remains of his family's home, getting attacked by highly skilled mercenaries, killing a bunch of them, fighting some hunting dogs, getting napalmed, bringing down helicopters with a small catapult and then getting captured, and that's just the first 20 pages.

After years - decades! - of decompressed comics, telling a short story in long pages, and current trends of TV series getting multiple episodes to get to any kind of fucking point, it's still an absolute thrill to get something that is totally designed to pack as much as possible into a few thousand words.

The rest of the book has almost as much incident, but never underestimate the power of starting with a bang.




Monday, March 18, 2024

This is my life again: Library limitations



I joined the Timaru Library when I was five years old and it was the most amazing place I'd ever seen. That's where I could find the Hardy Boys books I hadn't read, and I haunted the D section, looking for them, as well as Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who books.

They also had Gerry Davis' Doctor Who and the Cybermen (aka The Moonbase) in that area, the second Doctor Who book I ever read after the incomparable Dalek Invasion of Earth, and there was plenty of new material from the imaginary Franklin W Dixon.

If course I signed back up the first week back in town. That's what I always do when I move to a new town, but it's fair to say a population of less than 30k can't compete with a library system built for 1.5 million people, and I've been spoiled by them big city collections.

For years I have used the library to keep up on all the fun in modern superheroics, all the main X-Men and Batman and Spider-Man and Justice League comics, and all the different versions of Daredevil. Entire series like Once and Future, or all the latest Image series. All the obvious blockbuster smart comics from Clowes or Beaton or whoever. And it didn't cost me a cent, because sometimes civilization works.

But now my new llbrary doesn't have that kind of budget, and I quickly drained the interesting stuff from the new shelves. It was pleasingly random, and I managed to catch up on DC and Marvel comics from a decade or so ago - Paul Cornell's Superman comics, and the Gotham Central stuff.

So instead of getting dozens and dozens of brand new books from the graphic novel section every year, I have to spend the next 12 months making do with what I can get.

But I keep finding that in an age of unending choice, it's actually refreshing to have some restrictions, and not have access to everything, all of the time.

It's forced me into sections of the library  I don't usually haunt. I have to cast a net wider than the usueal graphic novels, books about films and the shelves of new releases at the front door. and then I stumble across things like a biography of Colin Wilson, who might have been a great young existentialist, but will always be the dude from The Unexplained magazine to me

This has happened before - I picked the Timaru Library dry of all the obvious stuff in the first quarter century of my life, and before I fucked off to the big city, I was literally looking for th o ldest spines I could find on the shelves, trying to find some forgotten masterpiece. (I mainly just ended up with a lot of great Graham Greene books.) 

And even without the regular dosage of library books, I still get my comic fix, because I brought boxes of old faves with me, and it's a good chance to read things like the Nemo books from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or that last brilliant Luther Arkwright book, or a big chunk of prestige format beauties.

So I still get my kicks by taking the time to browse the library and getting what I can, and I wouldn't mind finding some more of those forgotten masterpieces, lurking on the shelves.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

This is a house of Sienkiewicz: The devil, the gangster and the assassin













I genuinely think the great Bill Sienkiewicz is one of the top three comic book cover artists of the past 40 years - capable of scratchy vitality, mad humour, blurred beauty and unworldly hues.

I had the vague idea that I could spotlight every single cover he has done here at the Tearoom of Despair, but there are about a thousand of them, so I'll settle for a mere 131 of my favourites, to share with you all over the next few weeks. 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Two things about Rick and Morty



I have two things to say about Rick And Morty, and two things only:

1) I actually like it a lot, and think it's funny and smart and more human than it has any right to be, but I don't talk about the show on this blog ever because the hardcore fans are the just the fucking worst. I've been eyebrows deep in Doctor Who fandom since I was a child, and have seen the most toxic traits displayed in discussions of the Power of Kroll, but fuck me, these guys are next level

2)  I also can not ever watch it just before I go to bed, because then I have deeply frustrating dreams about how I'd rewrite all the episodes that I just really enjoyed. This has happened multiple times and I really wish it would stop. 

Friday, March 15, 2024

Who did this jigsaw?



I invested way too much time recently into doing this giant 1500-piece jigsaw last week. It was actually quite easy, as far as 1500-piece jigsaws go, because those costumes in those glorious primary colours are seared into my fuckin' soul. I just wish I knew who did the art.

There's no credit anywhere on the box, and I can't find anything about it online, (but that might just be because Google is just really fucking useless these days), and that credit has been bugging the shit out of me, even as I spent hours solving the puzzle, piece by piece.

It's obviously a tonne of José Luis García-López in there, he's the definitive DC superhero artist of that era, literally setting the style for the entire company. But then I swear there is some deadset Dave Gibbons, and other parts that are unmistakably George Pérez (especially in the hair). But there are also a couple of faces with a definite Kevin Maguire vibe.  

Is it just one artist, aping all the greats? Is it a vast confluence of them all, the ultimate ideal of DC superhero art of the late bronze age?. 

It's going to bug me a lot longer than it took to do the puzzle. Some parts of it, like the Parademon, or Starfire's hair - which is 100 percent Pérez - were easy to figure out. An artist's line can be the real puzzle. 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Shazam was just mean



There has been a shit-tonne of talk about the box-office failures of recent superhero movies, but there are loads of reasons why nobody gave a fuck about the new Aquaman movie or that Madame Web thing. Movies, like life, are quite complex.

There's obvious aspects like the actors acting like absolute arses in real life, or the rush job on CGI worlds giving everybody a fucking headache. I still maintain that the primary reason for the recent failures is that people want to see something new at the movies, not the same old shit over and over, and if you can properly deliver on that, your work is mostly done. 

But you can also attribute it to the actual shittiness of the product, because movies that leave a bad taste in the mouth never, ever generate word of mouth, and when I finally saw the latest Shazam film, it didn't take me long to see why nobody was talking about it.

It wasn't just the extremely irritating thing where grown-ass actors playing teenagers act like freaking toddlers, or even the distasteful sight of Helen freakin' Mirren getting punched by a young white man, 

it was the way it was also just straight up mean - picking up DC's irritating DC habit of killing off vast amounts of innocent people to show that things are really, really dire.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods looks like a kid-friendly movie all the way, but a room full of museum goers are turned to fragile stone at the start, and only acknowledged once again - dozens of people, children, young lovers, they all need to be shuffled into the maw of death to raise the stakes.

Later on in the film, it's almost like it's making fun of its own meanness, with one innocent bystander narrowly avoiding a spiky death by centimetres, only to be immediately stabbed in the back by a giant scorpion monster and casually tossed through a shopfront. Tough luck, lady, but how else will these teenagers learn about responsibility and stuff if they don't have your blood on their hands?

There is always pathos in tragedy, but leaving behind a huge body count just feels mean, and if we all just want to see something new in big, goofy superhero films, there's nothing new in mean.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Doonesbury at birth


I've been told that you can see your fortune if you look back at the Doonesbury cartoons that ran the week you were born. 

I think it works. It's better than any horoscope I ever read.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Sinister Dexter: That was Downlode



After 40-plus years of weekly publication, 2000ad still has a distinct ratio of two great comic strips, two okay strips and one outright stinker. And Sinister Dexter has almost always been one of the okays.

Created and still written by Dan Abnett, it's been a continuous story running for three decades now, and lots has happened - trips to outer space, several long-running gang wars, multiple deaths and rebirths for the main characters, one decent fake-out with the Malone, and endless short stories about life and death in Downlode.

It's a comic that has always had a problem with the fact that the main characters were basically smug jerks, hitmen who insist on a code that they break whenever it suits them, and despite all their many misadventures, they largely stayed the same smug jerks all the way through.

And yet, somehow, the current direction it is taking is genuinely fascinating, and its latest iteration is the thing I'm looking most forward to in the Galaxy's Greatest Comic.

Abnett has written thousands of pages for 2000ad, but has had an unexpectedly incredible run over the past few years. Lawless with Phil Winslade, The Out with Mark Harrison, and the incomparable Brink have all been absolutely brilliant. Brink might be the best thing he's ever done, and he has done a lot (we're not even going to touch on the Warhammer here).

So it was with some disappointment when it turned out Azimuth - a new series set in a vast and weird society literally built on digital data exchanges - was actually the latest version of Sinister Dexter, with the surviving (for now) half of the duo suddenly rolling to town.

But it's also become the most interesting phase in the entire saga. For the first time in years, Sinister Dexter comic is properly surprising, and who knows where it is going? It's also amazingly well designed and drawn by Tazio Bettin, with actual stakes and mysteries, while taking the most modern ideas about an AI's impact on the world and going completely batshit crazy with it.

And then, the last episode in the annual Christmas special came with another kicker of a twist, a truly unexpected turn that still feels obvious, as the world of the ex-Downlode crashes into another long-running 2000ad icon.

Same old hitmen, brand new world, whole new thing. Abnett knows what he is doing.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Five reasons why you need 500 Songs



I've been doing this blog for years now, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I've never once talked about the best podcast in the world right now - A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey.

Hickey is a hundred and something episodes into the series, and I fell behind for a few months and that turned into year, and now I've binged on the past 12 months of absolutely brilliant music history. Absolutely delightful episodes about old favourites like The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and the Velvet Underground, and new insights into The Move and The Band that I knew nothing about.

There's five main reasons why I dig it the most, and you should too:

1. The context 

Each episode focuses on one song, produced by one artist (or a group of artists) at one time in history, but you also get everything that goes along with that - from the intricacies of the music itself, to the wider social constructs - different aspects of literature, spiritualism, modern art, drug use, and how it all fits together. 

It's all just pop music, but it's also really saying something about how human beings worked and thought in the last years of the 20th century, and I am all the way there for that. Songs don't exist in a vacuum - the episode of Hey Joe shows how things evolve through different styles and bands - and can carry greater meaning within the context of their times.

2. The respect

Every episode comes with a content warning, because there is always something fucked up going on, and giving the listener who might be upset by these things the chance to opt out is always a good idea.

Apparently, Hickey gets a lot of shit for this, and for refusing to deadname people, even if they're not with us anymore. And I deeply admire the way he doesn't give a fuck, and just thinks that showing people some respect - even rock gods and pop megastars - is a decent thing to do. 

There is so much hand-wringing about how to handle the problematic aspects of history, but Hickey makes it look easy

3. The new thing

In the vast and sprawling world of rock music, there are always new bits of trivia to dig out and let shine, and even after decades of reading and listening to stories about this stuff, I'm constantly delighted that people can still find new things to say about the Beatles, the most covered band in music journalism history.

There is always strange new unexpected connection between things, and the most unlikely people will show up in the most unlikely stories. You might be in an episode about how ELO are coming together, and then suddenly Jasper freakin' Carrott will show up. Fantastic.

4. The funny 

Rock stars are ridiculous people doing ridiculous things, so of course it's going to be funny. Hickey's ultra-dry and beautifully accented delivery just make it all the more hilarious.

5. The emotions

And yet, as ridiculous as it all gets sometimes, it can also be genuinely moving, especially when tragedy strikes and some young soul is struck down

The end of the Janis Joplin episode, and choice of song, is just heartbreaking; and the part at the end of the Otis Redding one where the ships do come rolling in is staggeringly moving. 

Even among the excess and depravity and outright bullshit of the music business, the humanity shines through, and that's more than I ever expect from a podcast, but I get it all the time from this one.