The late Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard has always been mine. While I watched and dug the kitschy old original series reruns on afternoon TV back in the ‘80s, that Star Trek was ancient history to me.
When Star Trek: Next Generation came along in 1987, it was something new. It had a rocky start – the first few seasons the show wasn’t sure what it wanted to be – but it single-handedly revived the ageing franchise’s future and gave us spinoffs like Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks and all the rest.
Holding centre stage was Patrick Stewart, who seemed an unlikely figure to replace William Shatner’s iconic James T. Kirk as captain. British, balding and stern, Stewart’s Picard was no Kirk.
He was steady and firm but compassionate, a no-nonsense captain who showed what a good leader could be. (Something sorely missing in today’s world.) Stewart brought his Shakespearean background to give Picard a depth and gravitas that instantly made you want to follow him across the stars.
It’s been a terrible week for Star Trek fans, with the loss of original series star Walter ‘Chekov’ Koenig at age 90 and the unexpected death of Stewart today at age 86.
Backed up by what remains the best supporting cast any Star Trek series has had, Stewart’s Picard made Star Trek soar to new heights over seven seasons, four movies and even a late-in-life revival series, Picard, which ran from 2020 and 2023 and gave the captain and crew a welcome final sendoff.
Star Trek may seem silly to some, but it’s been a lifeline for many. “Trekkies” often get made fun of over the years, but like any fandom it’s a found family that provides a sense of belonging.
Its world is a glimpse of a future that – mostly, Borg aside – is optimistic, that promises more cooperation than chaos among humanity, the possibility of a galaxy-wide United Federation of Planets that values exploration over conquest. In the world of Star Trek, anything is still possible for mankind.
Although there’s been plenty of dystopian Trek stories, by far the best ones are those that embrace a sense of optimism. Things will be better in the future, even if there’s Tribbles and Klingons to deal with.
Patrick Stewart wasn’t just Picard – he was the only obvious choice to be Marvel’s Professor X, of course, in a series of movies that has lasted from 2000’s X-Men all the way to his appearance in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. He had a wide range – he could be great as a villainous racist in Green Room or a gay activist in the 1990s comedy Jeffrey.
But of course, Picard is what he will be remembered the most for. That’s not the worst fate – he was an actor who entertained millions, inspired explorers of all kinds, and whose character showed a way for humanity to boldly go, where no one had gone before.
“You think when you die, you go to heaven. You come to us!” – The Tall Man
Horror movies are littered with franchises that churn out endless sequels, but there’s nothing quite like the experimental weirdness of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm series, a perfect treat for this Halloween week.
The original Phantasm from 1979 remains a masterclass in creepy, slow-burn terror. Writer and director Don Coscarelli was only 25 when he created Phantasm, and the story can be seen as a young guy trying to grapple with the concept of death for the first time. Teenager Jody and his wide-eyed little brother Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) are mourning the mysterious death of one of their friends, but the funeral becomes steeped in strangeness as the mortician – a towering figure known only as “The Tall Man” (Angus Scrimm) – seems to be something less than human. Weird robed Jawa-like creatures are skittering about in the shadows. Dead people are being stolen and reanimated.
And then there’s the moment that made Phantasm iconic – in one of the most bizarrely terrifying scenes in horror history, glittering silver spheres come hurtling down the deserted mortuary hallways, spiked with knives that burrow deep into your skull, suck out your blood and kill you. Jody, Mike and their friend, balding ponytailed ice-cream truck driver Reggie, soon become embroiled in a battle with the Tall Man for their very souls.
Nothing quite “fits” in Phantasm – the story has a kind of dream logic. In the final act we learn the Tall Man may be from some other world entirely as Jody and Mike briefly fall into a vast void with scarlet skies. Phantasm feels like a clear influence on the Nightmare On Elm Street series, which turned out a much more audience-friendly, wisecrack-filled spin on the notion of a killer who can manipulate reality. I even get an echo of its liminal space horrors in the recent hit Backrooms.
You could drive a truck through the escalating plot holes in the Phantasm series, and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure what’s “real” and what’s a dream. Jody dies, but does he really? “Nothing is ever really what it seems,” a character says at one point, which sums it all up. The lapses in logic and continuity in the Phantasm franchise are less of a bug and more of a feature. A little mood goes a long way:
The first movie remains the most distinctive, but there’s enough distinctive vision in even the worst of the sequels to make them worth following for Phantasm Phans.
Even mildly successful horror flicks got heaps of sequels in the 1980s, but it took until 1988 for Phantasm II to be released. It shows the push of a major Hollywood studio to try and make it a horror hit machine like Freddy and Jason, adding in a superfluous love interest, and recasting Mike with a Teen Beat-friendly new actor. The new Mike is a sullen bore, lacking the amateurish relatability that Baldwin brought to the original, and the romantic angles shoved in here feel forced. (Suddenly Mike is psychic, and has a bond with a sexy stranger?) Phantasm II loses a lot of the ambiguous feeling, instead throwing in more gore and more guns, and the plot is even more choppy – Reggie has a never-seen family who get killed offscreen, for instance. But there’s cool expansion of the series’ opaque “lore”, gruesome uses of the spheres, and a great chainsaw battle. It also shows the franchise mutating into a kind of never-ending road trip, as Reggie and Mike begin what seems to be an infinite loop of searches for the Tall Man. Gradually, all external life for these two is stripped away – they have no jobs, no friends, no real purpose but fighting and losing to the Tall Man, forever.
Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead from 1994 swerves in yet another new direction, bringing a bit more comic tone. Phantasm II’s love interest is swiftly, nastily dispatched in the opening scene and never mentioned again, and A. Michael Baldwin returns as the original Mike but is almost immediately sidelined for most of the movie as a prisoner of the Tall Man. Instead, it becomes Reggie’s show as he sets out to find Mike. Fortunately Bannister has enough everyman charisma to carry the franchise, and he’s quickly saddled with a homicidal child sidekick and a smack-talking Black woman partner. To top things off, Mike’s brother Jody, apparently dead since Phantasm, returns somehow reincarnated as one of the floating spheres, which now can talk. Yeah, it gets weird. That’s Phantasm for you.
“My name is Reggie. I was an ice cream vendor by trade. Now, I am a soldier. A soldier in a war against his army of the living dead.” – Reggie
After the middling Phantasm III, I was surprised by how decent Phantasm IV: Oblivion is, combining the chilly menace of the first film with some amusing set pieces and giving us far more of the Tall Man than we’ve ever had before, digging into his mysterious origins with some time travel and dimension hopping. There’s some inventive gore, particularly a scene involving a female traveller Reggie hooks up with and a novel use for those deadly spheres. Mike attempts to learn more about his strange bond with the Tall Man while Reggie hunts for him (again!). Much of Phantasm IV takes place in the desert, which gives a welcome new look to the series, instead of being set in mortuaries and shadowy darkness. Angus Scrimm gets to do a bit more than just growl menacingly, as we discover he was once a scientist in the 1860s trying to discover more about reality who became transformed into the Tall Man. Several deleted scenes from the original Phantasm are merged seamlessly into the narrative here, making it feel like everything’s come full circle. As always, plot threads are dangling and things left unexplained (Phantasm specialises in fake-out twist endings that never quite get resolved) but at this point, you like it or you don’t.
It took 18 years for the final Phantasm movie, 2016’s Phantasm: Ravager, to be released – and it wasn’t really worth the wait. It’s the only one not directed by Coscarelli, who co-wrote the script. It’s a messy hybrid of SyFy Channel-level production with a few decent ideas, but ultimately it just feels like a sketchy coda to the main story. We pick up years after Phantasm IV with a battered Reggie emerging out of the desert (what’s he been doing? who knows!), still searching for Mike and chasing the Tall Man (a clearly ailing Scrimm), but then it abruptly switches to another timeline, where an elderly Reggie is battling dementia in a nursing home, and a third timeline in a post-apocalyptic future where the Tall Man has mostly destroyed the world as an armed resistance fights back – Terminator meets Phantasm, if you will. Director David Hartman’s cheap approach strips away gravitas in favour of splattery shocks (if you’ve ever wanted to see a sphere kill a horse, this is your movie). Special effects that would’ve looked cheap on a PlayStation 2 don’t help the overall feeling that this is a fan film that’s broken containment.
It shows how much Coscarelli’s unique style and voice matters to Phantasm, and once you strip it away you’ve got just another generic horror franchise. It does give us a chance to say farewell to Angus Scrimm, who died shortly before its release, and Reggie (Bannister himself died just this year). But at this point after five films, the endless twists in reality and lack of narrative closure feel kind of exhausting. Is the entire series just a dream of a dying man in the end, or does the battle go on forever? Phantasm: Ravager tries to have it both ways. I’d prefer to think of Phantasm IV as the end of the series, and this as a kind of misguided tribute. It’s also cool that Scrimm, Bannister and (mostly) Baldwin remained the stars of the series for its entire 37-year run.
The Phantasm series is schlock, but to me, it’s evocative schlock. For all its silliness and flaws, Phantasm seems to strive to be about something – the unstoppable nature of death, the void we all face wide awake at 3am – rather than just an escalating gory body count. The Tall Man is Death itself, implacable, unbeatable, and always there, waiting to reach out for all of us. Now that’s scary.
Gimmicks have always been a thing in comic books, but for my money, only one ever really succeeded.
The only gimmick that ever really grabbed me was the one I discovered in a copy of Mr. Monster’s 3-D Hi-Octane Horror from 1986, the very first 3-D comic I ever saw and one of my favourites from a very good year for comics. I’ve always loved Michael T. Gilbert’s spunky Mr. Monster, and this one-shot featured Mr. Monster “introducing” a series of ‘50s horror reprints.
I put on the red-and-blue cardboard glasses that came with the comic and felt a wee bit of vertigo, as my eyes adjusted, and then a sense of wonder – the word balloons appeared to float, eerily, over the artwork, and the panels revealed hidden depths – sound effects danced off the page, fists and knives hovered over the backgrounds. One character even played with a paddle ball that seemed to be springing off the artwork. It was an experience that felt both intimate and cosmic, back in the day.
I was entranced, even if it was just the simple trickery of splitting the images into two fields and wearing glasses that made them seem to pop.
The ‘90s saw a flurry of strange gimmicks – gaudy foil and barely visible “hologram” covers, covers with bullet holes shot into them and a terrible gimmick in an Eclipso comic which had a plastic diamond glued to the cover, which immediately damaged any comics stored with it. None of that compared to a 3-D comic done well.
Back in the Eisenhower era, 3-D hit its brief cultural zenith. There was quite a fad for a while as 3-D movies like Creature From The Black Lagoon dazzled crowds of kids, and it carried over to comics. 3-D comics first emerged in the 1950s, with the legendary Joe Kubert one of the pioneers behind them with titles like Mighty Mouse 3-D and Superman 3-D. Jack Kirby dove right in with Captain 3-D. But along with the broader 3-D movies fad, it all pretty much faded out by the late ‘50s.
There was a brief vogue for more 3-D comics back in the ‘80s, around the time 3-D movies also made a little comeback with schlocky flicks like Friday The 13th 3-D and Jaws 3-D. It rapidly turned into a glut, with small black-and-white publishers churning out dozens of poorly done books (was anybody really asking for Hamster Vice 3-D or The California Raisins in 3-D?).
For a quality 3-D comic experience, be sure to look for the name Ray Zone. The late Ray was the king of 3-D, and any comic book he touched is far more immersive and interactive than those done by lesser converters. Back in the ‘80s he did it all by hand, painstakingly splitting the images with X-acto knives to achieve the effects he wanted.
The “big two” Marvel and DC didn’t really touch 3-D, other than a quite well-done Batman 3-D graphic novel by John Byrne towards the end of the ‘80s fad. (Weirdly, Marvel had a C-list hero called The 3-D Man who appeared in a handful of solo adventures, but nobody seems to have ever thought about actually publishing them in 3-D!)
Despite the dross, there were some solid gems out there. Eclipse Comics generally were quite good value with their 3-D publications – two issues of Seduction Of The Innocent reprint gory ‘50s crime comics with some excellent 3-D, and they produced what I’d probably say is the best 3-D comic I’ve ever seen, Scott McCloud’s amazing Three-Dimensional DESTROY!!
McCloud, the creator of Zot! and Understanding Comics, drew DESTROY!! as a goofy lark – “filled with nothing but pure senseless violence from beginning to end.” The only plot is two muscle men beating the crap out of each other for 30 pages. It’s delightfully stripped-down primal comics, published as an oversize mag and as a special 3-D version, which is utterly fantastic. Bricks float in the air as the heroes clash, shouty word balloons ripple off the page, and the escalating carnage of the story proves a perfect vehicle for showing off 3-D.
The 3-D in that was of course done by Ray Zone. The handful of non-Ray Zone 3-D comics I have are notably less well done, and just seem like gimmicky pop-up books. And you’ve got to have a good print job – a cheap Freak Brothers 3-D comic I’ve got is a sludgy mess, while what should’ve been a cool Aardvark-Vanaheim 3D special comic with the adventures of Cerebus, Ms. Tree and the Flaming Carrot is printed so badly it’s actually more readable WITHOUT the glasses.
There are downsides to 3-D. It can be difficult to focus correctly to get the intended effect. As I get older, 3-D is a little harder for me to tolerate for too long – it’s a young man’s gimmick, really. It’s not very amenable to people with vision problems and being a little bit colour-blind myself the red-green variety has never worked well for me (I’m fine with the more common red-blue, though). 3-D comics don’t seem to be made for hours of leisure reading as they usually give one a headache after a few reads, probably part of the reason they’ve always remained rather niche.
From what I can tell 3-D comics basically vanished again after their ‘80s boom, and not even the mega-success of Avatar in 2009 and the brief glut of 3-D movies it created could really revive them. There’s been a couple attempts, like the super-groovy Madman: In Your Face 3-D Special circa 2014 starring Michael Allred’s loveable oddball hero. I’d imagine putting on dorky cardboard glasses to see images leap out of the page seems painfully low-fi in an age of CGI and AI.
Yet, despite its kind of awkwardness, I’ll always be a bit fond of those great Eclipse 3-D comics of the ‘80s like Mr Monster and DESTROY!!, which were a bit magical to me. Most comic book gimmicks were just that – gimmicks.
But 3-D, when lovingly handmade by dedicated folks like Ray Zone, felt it was trying to truly take comics to another dimension. It could never entirely succeed – but it was worth the try.
I’m once again in one of my Rocky phases, sparked by reading Sylvester Stallone’s excellent new memoir of his grim childhood and early career struggles, The Steps.
As I’ve written before, I’m always going to be a Stallone Stan, and the Rocky movies are comforting old friends to me that I pop on every few years.
I’ll go to the mat in particular for 1982’s Rocky III, where the downbeat realism of Rocky I and II and the gung-ho excess of Rocky IV combine for a vastly entertaining punch-up that hits the heart and the solar plexus equally. I like all the Rocky and Creed movies – yeah, even Rocky V, kind of – but in my heart of hearts Rocky III will always be my favourite. And a good bit of that is due to Mr. T’s menacing villain, Clubber Lang.
Clubber Lang is a mystery – the contender who emerges, glowering and angry, in several crowd shots before loudly challenging Rocky to a title fight in public. He’s pure rage, even outside the ring (he indirectly causes the death of poor old Rocky’s coach and father figure Mickey), and no motive is given for his temper other than a burning desire to win, to be the champion. He obeys none of the polite rules of boxing or indeed, civilisation.
Lang bursts on the scene with a snarl and never lets up for the movie’s entire runtime. He beats Rocky in one of the series’ grimmest battles, giving the egotistical champ a much-needed reality check, and then is beaten himself after Rocky trains up with former foe Apollo Creed to the impossibly catchy refrains of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” It’s a simple rise-and-fall-and-rise story that almost all the Rocky movies follow, but it’s perfected to a glossy shine here.
Every word out of Clubber’s mouth is an attack or a brag – “I’m gonna torture him. I’m gonna crucify him.” Mr T’s most famous quote – “I pity the fool” – is heard here first, not in his later turn as a slightly gentler hero in TV’s The A-Team. Rocky III is by far Mr T’s most iconic performance, before his image got softened up in cartoons and anti-drug ads.
Clubber Lang appears to have no family, no friends, no outside life at all – we get quick shots of him training ferociously alone in grubby rooms, and the ringside crew we briefly see act like hired guns who probably can’t stand the man. He has no calm dialogue with any of his peers, no references to anything but his own grinding ambition. He’s the boxing equivalent of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, riding into town to stir shit up.
(Of course, because fandom is a thing, the later book Rocky: The Ultimate Guide sketches out a childhood of orphanhood and jail, and apparently an early script for Rocky Balboa, aka Rocky 6, would’ve had Lang make a cameo as a ringside announcer who’s become a born-again Christian. None of that is necessary, to be honest. Leave Clubber’s canon alone!)
When you watch a movie heaps of times over the years, you start to dissect it more. I wondered if Clubber Lang is too much of a racial boogeyman, all the vile stereotypes of the “black menace” brought to life (particularly a scene where he makes a crude pass at Rocky’s wife).
Yet generally, the Rocky series has always been fairly racially even-handed, with Carl Weathers’ outstandingly cool, confident Apollo Creed (I’d endlessly argue he deserved a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work), Michael B. Jordan in the Creed movies, Tony Burton’s trainer Duke and a variety of other well-drawn Black cast members giving some balance.
Clubber Lang is a wounded beast, lashing out – I’m sure he was the victim of racist treatment many a time – and he simply has become who he is, all predator, never prey.
Few other Rocky villains achieve the primal power of Clubber Lang – Apollo Creed is just too darned charismatic, while Ivan Drago is awesomely swole but a little cartoony, and honestly few of the other Rocky or Creed boxing villains are all that memorable.
The Rocky movies would try to give Rocky’s opponents a little more depth, notably Apollo Creed whose legacy became the hook for a whole new trilogy. Even Russian super-boxer Drago got a little redemption in the surprisingly great Creed II, thanks to a terrific weathered performance by Dolph Lundgren returning to the role as a man beaten down and haunted by his loss to Rocky.
Other Rocky antagonists, like the sleazy, misguided Tommy Gunn in the misfire Rocky V or the young champ Mason Dixon in Rocky Balboa, tend to be a little more human.
Not Clubber Lang, who has no apologies, no quarter given. When he loses, he might as well dissolve into the mist, as Rocky III doesn’t even give him a momentary twinge of acceptance, no shaking hands with the new champ. He’s last seen groaning on the canvas, face still twisted with rage. Fans have fantasised about more Clubber Lang for years – Rocky rematches and such, but honestly, his story was one and done.
There was an echo of Clubber Lang in 2023’s Creed III, the last (for now) Rocky universe film. Jonathan Majors’ Damian Anderson is an intense ex-con frenemy who beats Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed to a pulp (and this being the Rocky-verse, is himself of course beat down in the end). There’s hints of Clubber here, the angry outsider who takes on the king. But Majors – whose personal and career troubles are well-documented – gets the backstory Clubber Lang was denied (troubled youth, jail, desire for revenge, etc), and the slightly undercooked Creed III doesn’t quite sell his rise and fall and redemption arc. Unlike Clubber Lang, we’re asked to care a bit about Anderson, and it’s hard to do that with Majors and his baggage in the role.
Clubber Lang has no backstory. He doesn’t need one.
He simply appears, sneering, from the shadows, and in the end goes back to them exactly as he always was, unredeemed, unrepentant, ultimately, in a strange kind of way, undefeated.
Writer Gerry Conwaydied earlier this year after a stellar career in comics. Famously, he began writing Amazing Spider-Man at just 19 years old and immediately killed off Gwen Stacy and introduced The Punisher, shaping Spidey stories for decades to come. He was always a pretty reliable journeyman in comics, writing everyone from Batman to the Fantastic Four, but one of my favourites is less of a household name – his nuclear-powered teen superhero Firestorm.
Firestorm is actually two people in one – teenager Ronnie Raymond and physicist Dr Martin Stein, who are caught in one of those only-in-comics nuclear accidents that gave them the ability to merge into the being called Firestorm, who has the almost infinite abilities to reshape molecules into nearly anything else.
I do love to stick up for the oddball superheroes like Black Goliath, the Man-Wolf and Omega The Unknown. Unlike those C-listers, Firestorm is probably a solid B-lister, who’s served in the Justice League and was enjoyably portrayed in the late, great Legends of Tomorrow TV show. Conway and artist Al Milgrom co-created Firestorm in the late ‘70s, and he went on to star in a 100-issue solo series The Fury of Firestorm and still bops around the DC Universe to this day.
Yet he still feels somewhat underrated, and there’s a lot of potential in the nuclear man yet to be tapped.
Firestorm was Conway’s obvious attempt to replicate the energy of Spider-Man’s teen superhero magic, but the most interesting thing about it is how it also subverts expectations. Ronnie Raymond, as originally portrayed, was a kind of dumb jock who was bullied by the class nerd (!), while Martin Stein is a misfit genius who struggles with alcoholism and his career.
Of course, Peter Parker doesn’t share his superhero headspace with Uncle Ben. The idea of having two personalities trapped in the same all-powerful superhero is Firestorm’s big hook and paid off in a lot of fun stories in Conway’s original run, as a high school kid’s flightiness clashes with Stein’s adult world and troubles. Throughout Conway’s issues, Firestorm was good solid superhero comics. He was also great when added to the classic Justice League of America team as their youngest member, giving an eager outsider’s perspective to a group of iconic gods and aliens.
A big part of Firestorm’s appeal for me is his delightfully garish costume, a kind of spandex disco inferno that despite occasional redesigns has never really been bettered. Bright yellow and red with puffy sleeves and an eye-catching flaming head of hair, it’s way over the top but somehow works for the dude. A good costume goes a long way.
The concept has been reimagined quite a lot over the years with multiple other Firestorm hosts, most successfully by Suicide Squad and Spectre writer John Ostrander who took over the flagging original Firestorm series after #50. Ostrander reinvented things by breaking up the original Raymond-Stein combo and bringing in a Russian, Mikhail Arkadin, who accidentally ends up merged with Raymond to form a new Firestorm. This run balanced some cool Cold War paranoia with an increasingly cosmic bent as Firestorm’s powers and outlook expanded to new horizons. When that series wrapped up with #100, Firestorm went back to mostly cameos and guest-star appearances for many years.
I had high hopes for the current ongoing new Fury Of Firestorm revival miniseries written by Jeff Lemire, but despite some mighty pretty art, so far it’s been a bit too self-serious of a tale that once again makes the perpetual modern mistake of taking an interesting character and making him “dark” and troubled. It’s not terrible, but it’s a little cynical and there’s no fun in it. I’m hoping it gets better.
There’s a lot of potential in the idea of multiple personalities clashing inside an all-powerful superhero, but there’s also a lot of escapist joy in the idea that Conway and Ostrander’s original ‘80s run successfully mined. He was a kid who was still learning and made a lot of mistakes, but not a total incompetent, either.
Subsequent writers have often erred by just making Firestorm a constant screw-up or an out-of-control madman. Firestorm is at his best in his disco-kitsch original uniform, with a fumbling teenager and a troubled mentor forced to work together to control some mighty cool superpowers. Together, they’re better than they are apart. I reckon you could still have a great Firestorm modern book that plays with the duelling voices of youth and age, great powers and limited experience, and yet enjoys itself a little, too.
The original Fury of Firestorm run may never be spoken of in the same breath as Watchmen and Dark Knight, and most of it has still never been collected. Still, it’s a somewhat underrated dollar-bin find amongst the creative, bustling world of DC Comics in the ‘80s and at its heart embraces the most enduring idea behind superheroes – a sense of wonder.
“That’s the one thing that I’ve taken from this programme is that my story is special because it’s been seen. Not because it is special, just because it’s been seen. How many people can say that, their story from 7 to 70, has been on television?” – Symon
In the end, there’s nothing better or more complicated to try to explain than an ordinary life, I think.
The recent release of 70 Up brings to a close the greatest documentary series of all time, capturing the lives of more than a dozen people from the age of 7 to 70, stretching from 1964 to 2026. It’s a masterpiece, and it breaks my heart a little bit, but also leaves me feeling a lot better about our troubled human species, too.
Over the years, the ITV British TV series has followed 14 British children turning into teenagers, adults and now old men and women. You watch the entire 10 films and gradually Neil, Tony, Jackie, Nick, Sue, Paul, Bruce, Symon and all the rest start to feel a little bit like friends. They’re not influencers or celebrities – they’re profoundly ordinary despite the differences in careers and income.
70 is probably a good place to stop, creating a nice synchronicity with the first film 7 Up, and leaving our cast before they all get too old and infirm. Two of them have already died – children’s librarian Lynn in 2013, and physicist Nick in 2023. Director Michael Apted shepherded the series from 14 until his own death in 2019, and director Asif Kapadia has done a marvellous job bringing the series full circle and keeping Apted’s distinctive tone with 70 Up, which feels like a natural ending and an elegy for the whole ambitious project.
The Up series started out trying to make its cast fit set roles – the stuffy Tory, the loud Eastender, the young Black boy living in a care home, the chilly rich girl. Yet over time, you realise none of these people were entirely the stereotypes the director may have thought they were.
“I think it’s now, it’s a film about living a human life.” – Peter
Up explodes the idea that people are just one thing – barrister John with his tailored suits and sniffy youthful pronouncements was arguably set up as the “villain” in the earliest instalments, yet we learn as the years pass he’s actually a warm, caring fellow who’s spent much of his life advocating for Bulgarian orphans, and is hardly the selfish toff he first appeared to be.
Each member of the cast has a story to tell, some perhaps more interesting than others. Wealthy, comfortable lawyer Andrew and his relatively uneventful life takes the prize for most boring member, while Neil, a bright-eyed chipper chap at age 7, went through a roller coaster of undiagnosed mental health crises, homelessness and wandering before coming out of it all to become a capable local body politician. Neil’s story shows us that life doesn’t always fit imagined paths.
It is hard, of course, to watch them all grow old, bald and grey, but we all do in the end, and while there’s certainly a bit of bittersweet sadness in 70 Up, there’s also a lot of joy and acceptance, something we could all do our best to hang on to as the years pile up.
Many of the series’ participants proved very ambivalent about taking part – some vanished for an instalment or two, a couple for decades. (One of 70 Up’s genius movies is even bringing back long-lost Charles, who utterly disappeared after a falling out with Apted around 21 Up, for a brief cameo.)
Apted was on the record saying he wished he’d chosen a more diverse cast – the series had only one non-white child, and just four women. But it’s still an invaluable snapshot of lives lived during the last 70 years, and how society has changed.
As the series went on, too, it interrogated Apted’s motives and questioned a lot of the haughty assumptions the film was making about poor people and rich people. The interviewees pushed back, none more than spunky Jackie, and the ongoing dialogue between intention and reality was fascinating. A documentary can never really capture all of a person’s facets. The Up series acknowledging that just makes it all stronger.
“A part of my little life story, and I’m a nobody, I’m just a normal person, and my little life story’s on film forever.” – Sue
There are so many little moments of grace in 70 Up that make you feel grateful to be human – take Symon, the Black participant who never knew his father, struggled through a failed marriage and menial jobs, but in the end with his second wife has formed a beautiful family and most astonishingly, they’ve been foster parents for over one HUNDRED children from Africa, the Caribbean and all over the world. The lonely kid we saw in the care home at age 7 has become a father figure to dozens. Now that’s a good life well lived.
The Up series is not flashy, like a lot of reality shows with their incessant jump-cuts and bombastic music and manufactured conflicts. And binge-watching the entire series in one go isn’t really recommended, as there’s a lot of repetitive clips shared over and over again (drink every time you hear teenage Tony’s discourse on how to treat women, or see Neil walking along lonely landscapes in Scotland).
While we did rewatch a lot of the series this week before the grand finale 70 Up, the best way to watch the Up saga ideally was to catch it every seven years, and savour the feel of the calendar pages flipping over in real time.
But most of all, the Up series gets you thinking an awful lot about your own life as it unspools. What would a 14 Up, a 28 Up, a 49 Up have said about me? I look in the mirror and would like to think I’m the same person I was at 21, but what would the camera truly show, in seven-year increments – and the choices we make and the things that happen to us?
The late Nick Hitchon might have been my favourite of the cast – the clever, philosophical farm boy from the Dales who became a highly regarded international physicist and teacher, defying Apted’s ideas that class background is everything. He battled throat cancer for years, and it’s unbearably sad to see him so shrunken and in pain in his final interview, recorded just three days before he died in 2023. And yet it’s profound, too, because Nick was always good at seeing the bigger picture of what Up was trying to accomplish, with his scientific eye. He is scared, but he is grateful.
“You know how you see this time-lapse photography of a flower, and, you know, it blossoms and then fades away and so on? And it’s amazing to see a flower grow and then decay in a couple of minutes.
“Well, seeing that with a person is also amazing because we don’t see that. We’re so busy seeing the day-to-day life of a person that we don’t see the big picture of how they change over time.” – Nick Hitchon
The Up series has given us a dozen or more human flowers to follow most of their lives, and for that, I’m glad. I can’t imagine we’ll ever see anything else quite like it again.
You can take your Bigfoot and your wendigo and your Jersey Devil, I’ll stick with my jackalope.
A jackalope, for those not in the know, is a tall, sleek jackrabbit, but one with a perkily impressive set of antlers, an all-American critter that leaps and bounds across the wide open plains of Wyoming and Nevada and elsewhere.
They are rare, it’s true, but their unique evolutionary niche is a special one to many folks in America’s western states.
Jackalope-ology is also a bit of a throwback to the days when conspiracy theories were, well, kind of fun, as opposed to a sleazy collective of nihilistic grifting and all mankind’s nastiest impulses. I miss silly conspiracies about aliens and sasquatches and Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of. The internet’s kind of ruined that world for us.
On my last visit to the US, I stumbled across a paperback of Michael P. Branch’s exceptionally deep dive into the long-eared weirdness of it all, On the Trail Of The Jackalope. I had no idea this book existed and it fills a hole in my soul I didn’t know was there.
Branch, a jackalope obsessive, heads out on a road trip across the western USA to interview jackalope makers, worshippers, myth spreaders and more, and in the process drafts a nifty little alternate history of the Wild West.
America’s long-standing love for the cryptid – enjoyably explored in thorough detail in another groovy book, J.W. Ocker’s The United States of Cryptids, feels less toxic than many other obsessions are in these twisted times.
A jackalope won’t give you cancer, steal your retirement money or be co-opted for racist and sexist lies – it’s just a darned funny bunny with a big set o’ antlers.
You will find jackalope heads mounted on walls throughout the American west, testament to a dying breed of beast, perhaps, or possibly just a really wacky souvenir.
Way out in South Dakota at the famous Wall Drugstore, an entire wall of faux jackalopes are mounted and available for purchase, as well as all kinds of kitschy jackalopiana – t-shirts, snow globes, shot glasses, posters, keychains, beer, you name it. (I wish now I still had my bumper sticker I bought there back in ’06.)
Are they real? That depends on your point of view.
It’s all exploded from a quirky obscurity to a bona-fide subculture, which Branch’s book very entertainingly dissects. Jackalopes became hipster fodder somewhere along the way, and Branch even takes part in a sold-out class of taxidermists in San Francisco all learning to make their very own jackalope.
I think I first encountered the jackalope in cartoon form – a local cartoonist in the Northern California town where I grew up, the great RL Crabb, frequently drew a gangly anthropomorphic jackalope named Junior, who starred in his own seven-issue comic book series back in the 1980s. Somehow I stumbled across a copy of Tales of the Jackalope and its witty Americana satire (you’d better believe Bigfoot makes an appearance), and the jackalope always stuck in my head. For a little while, I wasn’t sure if it was all a joke or not.
Then I realised that doesn’t matter. Branch’s hugely fun book takes a wild whopper of a folk tale and gives it another round of life. He even looks at the real-life inspiration for jackalope sightings – rabbits who were infected with a kind of papillomavirus that causes horny deformities growing out of their skulls. Those jackalopes aren’t so cute, to be honest, but a really interesting nugget of information in Branch’s book is about how the study of that virus has helped develop vital anti-cancer treatments for humans.
The jackalope is my kind of great American myth – not one about swaggering superiority or harsh domination, but one about a spunky little battler who keeps carrying on despite the odds against them. They’re silly, but they also offer us a slight promise of mystery that might still be out there hopping across the western plains.
The jackalope is a “trickster god,” Branch writes, bounding back and forth between real and imagined worlds. Throughout his travels, he keeps asking people why they love jackalopes.
“I’m always hoping they are real – that there’s something magical hidden around the corner,” Sarah of South Dakota tells Branch. “A unicorn or a centaur, probably not. But a jackalope? That’s something that could be real.”
Jackalopes might not technically exist, I guess, but I still believe in them all the same.
Godzilla has been smashing buildings and blasting fools for more than 70 years now, but in my heart, I still consider him to be kind of a giant green goofball.
Godzilla certainly can be used seriously – in the unbeatable stark Cold War paranoia of the 1954 original, or the Oscar-winning kaiju-as-art masterpiece of Godzilla Minus One, for instance. But the Godzilla mythos is at its heart a world of monsters and men and aliens, the weirder the better.
The original Showa Era films through the ’60s and ’70s settled into a kid-friendly monster mash of Godzilla tossing buildings at King Kong, battling smog monsters and giant robot versions of himself. They were colourful pulp kaiju delights. Later Godzilla movies on into the 1990s and early 2000s would get slightly less silly, but for every too-serious take like the 2014 Godzilla reboot, there’s been a Godzilla Vs Kongwith monsters punching each other out on aircraft carriers.
Over in comic books, Godzilla has been taken to many strange new worlds and lately it’s gotten more bizarre than ever, with things like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic antihero Jay Gatsby bulking up and leading an anti-Godzilla task force. I’m here for it.
Godzilla’s first extended stay in the comics was the very fun 1977 Godzilla, King of The Monsters which ran 24 issues with classic Hulk artist Herb Trimpe drawing the big dude bashing his way around the Marvel universe. As the series went on, Godzilla took on the Avengers and Fantastic Four, got sent back in time to meet Devil Dinosaur and, in quite possibly his finest hour, was shrunk down to mouse size by Pym Particles.
That storyline was capped by the unforgettable spectacle of a slowly growing man-sized Godzilla in a trenchcoat, hissing his way through New York City alleyways. It’s a darned fun series that might be my highlight from the mighty Marvel age of licensed comics.
Another epic slice of kitsch was the 1990s one-shot Godzilla Vs Barkley, which yes, had Godzilla playing basketball against an embiggened Charles Barkley. Weird Godzilla comics went kind of dormant after that, but the success of the Monsterverse and Japanese Godzilla movies means new Godzilla comics have been flying out faster than Godzilla’s nuclear breath.
I’ve usually been a bit bored by more traditional Godzilla comics. Watching two monsters bash each other on the printed page can’t be as explosive as seeing them on the screen, really. The best Godzilla comics for me have always been the ones that have taken our lizardy hero and thrown him into all kinds of silly hijinks.
The newest Godzilla comics being published by Marvel aren’t quite masterpieces, but I’ve admired their all-in excess as Godzilla progressively smashes everyone in the Marvel Universe, then breaks out across the cosmos in a multiverse-spanning insane war for the fate of existence itself. I’m pretty sick of multiversal shenanigans like everyone else these days, but I forgave it all when I gazed upon the campy delight that was a Wolverine-Godzilla mash-up … who rather stupidly is called “Weapon’Zilla” when “Godzill-verine” is RIGHT THERE.
The Justice League has also fought Godzilla, of course, and the Avengers, X-Men and Hulk have all taken on Godzilla and other monsters in the past few years. The quality of these stories is all over the place, but I generally admire their sense of play. In a comics ecosystem where I’ve gotten pretty tired of endless “dark” reinventions of Spider-Man and Batman and the like, I’m quite game for seeing King Kong battle Batman.
I can’t even keep up with the flood of Godzilla comics these days, but I like sampling the particularly offbeat ones, like James Stokoe’s magnificently drawn eerie Godzilla In Hell. Godzilla Heist adds the monster to an Ocean’s 11-style romp, while Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons does a cool little riff on the monster’s appearance in the 1500s during the age of exploration. Not all of these are played for laughs, but they play with the concept of Godzilla in fun new ways – after all, the big guy might well have been around for centuries, eh?
The highlight for me is the delightfully insane Godzilla’sMonsterpiece Theatre series spearheaded by quirky indie comics creator Tom Scioli, which has pushed Weirdzilla Lit as far as it can go – did you ever wonder how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby might change if you tossed in a kaiju to add to Nick Carraway’s poetic jazz age musings, and while you were at it, perhaps added in Sherlock Holmes and a cyborg version of Jules Verne to the mix?
Other recent Monsterpiece crossovers have included Dracula, the Odyssey, the War of the Worlds and perhaps my favourite, Romeo and Juliet and Godzilla. Forsooth! What kaiiju through yonder window breaks?
It’s immensely silly to drop Godzilla into William Shakespeare, of course, but that’s kind of the point – the monster is the x-factor, sent to Dracula’s Transylvania or meeting Robin Hood and seeing what happens.
The joke is dangerously close to being pushed further than it can bear, I guess – “Godzill-verine” might be a kaiju too far – but in a time when comics are constantly cannibalising themselves and their history anyway, having a little random giant lizard action in that churning content machine gives me back that sense of fun a lot of current comics lack.
The next Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre book is called “the Kaiju Of Oz.” You’d better believe I’ll be there, just to see what kind of havoc Godzilla wreaks on that old Yellow Brick Road.
When talking to people, it doesn’t take long before I get asked where I’m from. My thudding American accent, still firmly attached after nearly 20 years in New Zealand, gives it away.
“California,” I’ll usually say, which will typically bring up talk of Hollywood, skiing, surfing, Disneyland, or all of the above.
But I’m also from Mississippi, which often gets a very different reaction when I say that – a slight twist of the lip, widening of the eyes. Mississippi is a word which feels haunted, slippery with meaning. There’s no more evocative American state name, with all that entails.
I visited Mississippi last month for the first time since 1999. It seemed much further from New Zealand than California where most of my family and friends live, and yet in the last year or two I’ve had a hankering to see those Southern skies again, to visit the friends and relatives still scattered around Mississippi, to get back in touch with a important chapter of my life that had started to seem so very distant.
The roots of my family run deep there. My grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there, in a quiet cemetery tucked away down shadowy side roads.
I lived there myself from the ages of 18 to 25, from a freshman in college to a fumbling young working journalist. It’s a formative time in anyone’s life when you start to figure out who you’ll be.
Oxford, Mississippi is where I became a writer, where I went from being one of those people who’d talk about being a writer to someone who actually got paid cash money for stringing words together. I was a performative oddball California kid dropped into the Deep South.
At Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, I discovered more than the science fiction and fantasy that marked an awful lot of my reading through high school. My professors introduced me to everyone from James Baldwin to John Updike to Donna Tartt to Flannery O’Connor. I read widely, Southern lit and non-Southern lit. I wrote for a daily newspaper for the first time and I had my first paying journalism jobs there, and began avidly scribbling comic books and even a daily comic strip on the side.
When I lived in Oxford in the 1990s I was at the end of eras, although I didn’t know it. Stark, raw Delta bluesmen like RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough would play to beer-addled frat boys, who didn’t know or care they were the last of their kind. At the local townie bar City Grocery, whiskey-soaked writing legends like Willie Morris, Larry Brown and Barry Hannah would hold court – they’re all gone now, memorialised by little bronze plaques on the bar. I took Hannah’s short story class at Ole Miss and churned out some pretty godawful tales before I realised journalism and comics were probably more my speed than great Southern literature.
With my good old Oxford friends Bruce and Rebecca in Oxford, Mississippi, August 2026.
This year, I had a wonderful time returning catching up with old friends, mentors and co-workers, and despite the nearly 30 years that had passed in some ways it felt like yesterday that I had sat at the bars, that I’d browsed at Square Books and coffee’d up at Bottletree Bakery. Mississippi is a hell of a fun place, really.
But of course, it’s also full of shadows.
Every place on Earth has a tragic past if you dig far enough, but Mississippi is unique in its stains and glories. I can think of nowhere else I’ve lived where the absolute worst and the shining best of a place are so deeply intertwined, where one seemingly cannot exist without the other.
The horrors that were visited on the Black population in the 20th century still turn my stomach, the suppression, cruelty and casual dehumanisation. The story of Emmett Till – a 14-year-old boy tortured and murdered by white racists in 1955 for allegedly daring to whistle at a white woman – is as good as any to illustrate how horrible things could get.
My mother was just about the same age as Till and lived an hour or two away from where his blood was spilled. But she knew nothing about it at the time, until many years later when the story began to seep out into the wider culture. I often think about this, the two people of similar ages and totally, totally different worlds. The South endlessly romanticises itself, which can create both great stories and cover up hard truths.
White Mississippian Wright Thompson, in The Barn, his masterful analysis of the Till killing, what led to it and the long suppression of it in history, tries to unpack the mysteries of an atrocity.
He writes that the more he looked at Till’s 1955 death, “the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view.”
And yet, from that bloody soil has sprouted the seeds of change and art. Coming back to Mississippi, I felt loved by the Southern charm, the humidity and weedy kudzu (an invasive vine) carpeting everything, and the stories everywhere, the stories that inspired me and so many others. So much fine art and literature comes from there – William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, younger folk like Jonathan Miles and Kiese Laymon, music from Elvis to BB King that changed the world.
The best of its authors are constantly questioning Mississippi, instead of glorifying some lost cause endlessly. “Mississippi’s not an easy place to love,” Ralph Eubanks writes in Ever Is A Long Time, his excellent, deeply thoughtful memoir of growing up Black in small-town Mississippi and learning how the government actively spied on Black citizens.
A place can have a terrible past and yet still have things to admire and love; in our everything-is-good-or-evil digital world that stokes perpetual outrage, it can be hard to explain a place that is full of troubles and pain, and still working hard to be better, and can be full of kindness, hospitality and talent. Mississippi is complicated. Isn’t everywhere?
“It is not hard to understand the fierce chauvinism of Mississippi patriots,” the late Stanley Booth wrote in his book of essays on Southern music, Rythm Oil. “To stay there, you would have to convince yourself you loved it.”
My time at Ole Miss in the 1990s was marked with endless wrestling over race in what we’d now call “culture wars” – over whether the anthem “Dixie” was racist, over the university’s white throwback plantation owner mascot Colonel Reb, over the Black editors at the Daily Mississippian and the waving of the Rebel Confederacy flag. It draws a fierce pride and at times defensiveness – lord knows I’ve had to defend Mississippi some over the years against the statements of people who’ve never been there.
The Mississippi I visited last month felt like it was inching forward still with reconciling that past – the campus of Ole Miss was now dotted with prominent signs about the historic racial terror, and the looming town courthouse, as Southern an icon as it gets, now also features an account of the lynchings in Lafayette County. A monument to James Meredith, who became the first Black student at Ole Miss after bloody, fatal protests in 1962, now stands proudly beside the campus library. It says “courage,” in bold letters.
Faulkner famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” and while that’s slipped into the realm of cliche, that’s still as Mississippi a thought as you can get.
Despite what some folks running the country these days like to think, coming to grips honestly with the past doesn’t make you weaker. It takes, like the Meredith monument says, courage.
“Confronting its many imperfections, rather than hiding from them, makes it easier to love,” Eubanks writes.
I’d much rather have a Mississippi that accepts and interrogates its past, rather than longs for imagined perfect glory days. I lived in Mississippi, loved a lot about it, grimaced at some things, and learned so very much about stories, writing and myself that I was happy to revisit for a few sultry August days and nights.
It is still not quite like anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without a little Mississippi in my blood.
Tim Curry had a wonderful career full of offbeat acting, but for many of us, he’ll always be Dr. Frank N. Furter.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show just marked its 50th birthday last year, and what many fans may not realise is it’s got small-town New Zealand embedded deep in its DNA, thanks to its creator and co-star Richard ‘Riff Raff’ O’Brien. O’Brien emigrated to New Zealand from the UK as a kid and grew up around Tauranga and Hamilton, and the kind of greyish conformity of life down under in the 1950s is exactly what Rocky Horror is rebelling against.
Tim Curry had been in poor health for years, but his leaving recently at age 80 still hit hard. I went to a memorial screening of Rocky Horror on the weekend at Hollywood Avondale – the midnight showings there in the ‘70s and ‘80s are apparently still New Zealand’s longest running movie of all time. It’s the spiritual home of Rocky Horror in Auckland – my last time seeing it on the big screen there about six years back featured Richard O’Brien himself telling stories and introducing the movie, which was a rare treat.
I’m somewhat impressed by those who can watch it every week in their own personal mad carnival, but I find catching a live Rocky Horror every 5 years or so is enough for me. I have to overcome my natural aversion to people yelling out shit in movie theatres, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Some jokes will land with an escalating wave of laughter, others will belly-flop to little notice. There is self-policing – at one screening, a guy who just started shouting gross obscenities every time Janet appeared on screen quickly got shushed up.
But I get a kick every time out of watching the joyful carnage of a good Rocky audience, dancing to the “Time Warp,” of the celebration of life itself. Whatever you want to be is OK here.
I have a different favourite Rocky Horror song all the time – I love Barry Bostwick’s stiffness in “Dammit Janet,” Susan Sarandon’s brazen awakening in “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me”, Meat Loaf’s swagger in “Hot Patootie,” O’Brien’s sinister slinky menace in “Time Warp” – but the last time I saw it, the dreamy haze of “Don’t Dream It, Be It” stuck with me the most.
Be what you want to be. Make it happen.
The first time I saw Rocky was in high school, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It wasn’t a chaotic screening, but there was a lot of yelling and throwing toilet paper and rice around. Yet something about it grabbed me – Curry’s beautifully odd Frank N. Furter, the cast of hunchbacks and nerds, and the ultimate beautiful message of letting your inner freak flag fly.
I copied a friend’s cassette of the movie soundtrack and listened to it endlessly, “Sweet Transvestite” and “Science Fiction/Double Feature” playing on a loop. I was boringly hetero and conventional in a lot of ways, but I also was an awkward weirdo, performing too often as the class clown and getting called a “fag” a lot by the jocks and assholes, and my heart was always with the theatre kids and the punks even though I never really dressed as cool as they did.
Curry’s defiant outcast who refused to be cast out was the patron saint for anyone who felt trampled on by dull conformity.
It wasn’t for everyone – I remember an attempt by me to impress a girl in college by popping a VHS tape of it on only to have it greeted with an increasingly chilly silence. (To be honest, watching it on home video for the first time is a rookie mistake.)
Curry, of course, is the beating heart of Rocky Horror – while O’Brien’s songs are terrific, the movie itself kind of sputters along in low gear until Frank N. Furter’s dazzling entrance, still one of the most captivating character introductions of all time. His big mascara’d eyes pulse out of the screen like laser beams, his swaggering self-confidence, booming singing voice and purring line delivery redefined the straight world’s notion of beauty.
Sure, Rocky Horror has become big business over the decades – it was featured on Glee, for crying out loud – but still, the essential strangeness of the original movie remains intact. It’s, objectively, not a perfect movie, perhaps – the narrative is wonky, the filming sometimes painfully low-fi, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.
What always gets me about Rocky Horror isn’t so much the manic audience interaction, the costumes and the campiness – it’s actually the rising melancholy that slowly comes into focus, the loneliness of Frank N. Furter we start to see. For all the partying it’s a movie that ends with its star dead, its young romantic couple seemingly dead or dying and the “bad” guys getting away. It lulls you with catchy songs and then breaks your heart a little bit.
It says something about RockyHorror’s essential power that it still feels all like a triumph somehow, and that Curry’s beautiful, doomed decadent genius remains a shining light for so many people, and probably will for as long as we still watch movies.
