O Captain, my Captain.

As my friend Anthony will attest, I am not remotely a comics aficionado. I know basically nothing about the medium. I'm a total arriviste, a lowly noob, a schmuck who never paid his dues in the basements of Orbital Comics, trawling for that hard to get copy of...well, I don't even know the appropriate reference.  

That aside, where that is the admission of my total ignorance, I still can't get over how amazing it is that Joss Whedon in the first Avengers movie was able to convey the entire characterisation of several lead characters with just one line of dialogue.

I never really got Captain America until he said this (you can ignore the author of this clip who thinks it's a straight endorsement of Christian dogma):

And I likewise never got The Hulk until he said this:

As you can guess therefore, I am pretty much pathetically moist about Age of Ultron. And hanging out with Anthony again, so he can mock my ignorance... 

Parenthood Is

...the last-remaining flesh of your ego being scooped out and replaced with a tsunami of fear, love, sleep deprivation, money worries, education worries, health worries, environmental worries, zombie apocalypse worries and shopping lists.

Just saying.

Neil Gaiman's Black and White World.

Ah, Neil Gaiman: child prodigy of the comics world, cuddly, artfully tousled millionaire, open relationship renegade and Registered Trademark owner of the intriguing Byronic jacket photo.

Click to read more ...

REMOTE FUTURES.

Living in Brazil, it never sits easy knowing that you're in a country where people are poorer than their first world counterparts, yet they invariably pay more for worse. But when, as happened today, someone who doesn't have much money gives you a remote-controlled car for your little boy that she could ill afford, and it's totally dead from the get-go, plus there's no way of taking it back because you know she will have bought it from the kind of shop where they don't do receipts, it's more than just difficult, it's heartbreaking. Heartbreaking and then, after a while, maddening. I've always been a bit of a bleeding heart liberal, but it's only since coming to Brazil that I've really come to despise global capitalism for the way it's designed to petrify the structures of inequality and foreclose the futures of those huddled masses made invisible by poverty or distance.

BECAUSE SATIRE.

I've just put up something new in the prose section. It's wildly satirical and breathtakingly topical, because, you know, I'm so down. The idea occurred to me this morning after my daughter handed me a copy of Five Children and It that she picked up in the school library. I hadn't really thought about Nesbitt's story since I was a kid (when I absolutely loved it) and, looking at the cover as an adult, it occurred to me how gross It looked and how funny it would be to invade the prelapsarian world of the kids, in which the Psammead is kind of malevolent but in a strictly PGA* way, and make him really foul and offensive and not remotely age-appropriate. The jump to make this weird, bad-tempered coastal animal into a UKIP politician was the work of a moment after I remembered Douglas Carswell's defection and bunged in the recent story about Kerry Smith and his pathetic politician's excuse for his disgusting behaviour.