I try not to feel either way if I can avoid it. I’m married to a woman eleven years my junior for a start, so it’d be a sure recipe for disharmony and depression, and that also means I have daily reminders of how very much more grown-up than me younger people can be.

But it’s there, a fairly constant part of existing and getting older, that you’re always processing the passage of time, and measuring yourself against your environment. Finding new ways to look at the world.

One perspective that hadn’t occurred to me until the other night, at a friend and colleague’s 23rd birthday – or at least that I hadn’t thought about in a really long time – was that most of the people I know today, either online or off, aren’t old enough to really remember any news or media in the UK before Princess Diana died.

We do this thing constantly – and everybody does it once they’ve hit the point where they start to really be aware of the long passage of time – where when a huge event or popular song or movie from the past comes to mind we’re suddenly shocked by how much time has passed. I think it’s a pretty abstract moment for most, but it can be bracing and feel meaningful, like looking at a particularly high fatality statistic after a disaster.

And another thing we do as a society – especially online – is measure how our culture has changed primarily through technological advances, or those big crunch where-were-you-when moments. Both of these behaviours make perfect sense as coping mechanisms for the world around us.

There’s truth in those numbers, and more truth in the observation that technology or trauma can change a culture, and I’m not remotely the first or even nearly the smartest person to say it.

Diana dying was a catalyst for changes that had already been brewing in the way media worked, and the way the British population interfaced emotionally with each other and the media, but that were suddenly normalised and formalised by the intensity of that event. Before Diana died, news outlets were already starting to push the human interest aspect of news items forward, and the population was already starting to demand it, and feel like it had a – ill-informed, often illegible and confused – voice in the media – but that ex-Royal car-crash was the point were both the news media and the public’s push in that direction got validation.

It was suddenly okay to travel hundreds of miles with a bouquet of flowers so that you might be seen to be mourning someone you’d never met. Normal people were now comfortable with deciding how other people – in this case the Royals – should be feeling emotions, and telling the world about it, and it was now okay for the news media to give those normal people a platform.

People have always had it in them to be busy-bodies, and to pass judgment on others or enforce their values on them. Until then, however, it had mostly been a behaviour that was kept in check, in mainstream Britain at least, by the cultural understanding that it might be human nature, but it wasn’t one of our more admirable traits. Of course, the tabloids always provided a pressure valve on that side of our character – The Day Today wasn’t just prescient, after all, it was satirising stuff that was already happening in news media – but it wasn’t yet the whole conversation.

Diana broke all that, in much the same way that the World Trade Center attack broke a similar but less trivial part of US culture. Suddenly, being an outspoken idiot on TV wasn’t just a fringe behaviour, it was the way we now did business.

We had the internet back then, but we didn’t have Twitter yet. Facebook wasn’t a thing. Blogs as we know them didn’t exist yet. The idea of a dynamic, user-generated web, where everyone has a voice, was in its infancy, and inaccessible to most.

But Diana dying was still a cultural clusterfuck of clamour and public displays of who-can-cry-the-hardest=who-cares-the-most, the like of which detractors of social media blame on the technology. The social web was probably on its way technologically already, but the culture was already in place, impatient, waiting for the tech to catch up.

None of which are new observations, as I’ve said, and if I seem to not be making a point that’s because this is mostly a meander on my way to one. And it isn’t even a particularly big one.

(…is probably what she/he said.)

What occurred to me in the middle of a conversation about this stuff the other night is that it isn’t important that most of the people I know weren’t there to see these changes, or even got to see what it was like before – as I’ve said, this was already on it’s way to happening, and was probably inevitable for decades – but that they don’t really have anything to compare where we’ve been since to.

For them, as long as they’ve been aware of the news and media – let’s say most people really start processing this stuff properly in their late teens – it’s been like this. The first time a lot of people even pay attention to the news is around these big stories, so for a lot of people the Diana coverage will have been the first news story they really noticed.

Diana died fifteen years ago. That means pretty much anyone under thirty now, and probably quite a few people in their thirties, don’t really know any different. This is just how the news is.

(Education exacerbates this. A lot of Higher Education providers in the UK are more focussed – often forced by external forces – on employability than academic or intellectual pursuits, and this means that often students are being trained to hold down a job in the current status quo, with aspirational subjects like ethics or the philosophies behind a subject being covered on the periphery. In journalism, this means training people to cover news the way it’s being covered right now, not encouraging them to aim for something better.

This doesn’t mean academics and students aren’t aware of how awful things are, but it does mean that where there could be anger or aspiration there is more often resignation.)

This is how things get bad. Not with people thinking things are bad, but by them never having known a time when it was better.

SO ANYWAY here’s the point. What all of this fidgetty, ill-informed pontificating has made me realise is that I’m maybe too hard on people like Laurie Penny. They’ve never known a time when stories – worthwhile or otherwise – were covered any way other than they are now, from a single emotional viewpoint, with an unashamed ideological bias and an avatar for the human interest element at the center – either someone who needs speaking for, or the author themselves in a pinch.

It’s hard to understand, post-Diana, that there used to be a more distinct line between journalists and columnists. Maybe not in the tabloids, but even the people working for the tabloids pre-Diana would have probably told you that a day when their way of managing the conversation became the way of managing the conversation would be a grim day indeed.

Fuck only knows how pre-Diana documentary makers feel these days.

So authors like Penny – who at least has a good way with prose – can’t be blamed for reducing the level of the conversation with rhetoric, agenda and cult of personality. The culture was broken when they got here, and they were shown the way by arguably the biggest cult we’ve had. Diana – the one that showed us that it didn’t matter what you had – or didn’t have – to say, as long as your heart was in the right place. Or at least on your sleeve, and bleeding.

Just because there are so many writers covering subjects that they are emotionally or ideologically invested in while still managing to scrutinise their own arguments and information, doesn’t mean I should hate the people who can’t pull it off or don’t see it as a priority. I should be happy to see the former writers as exceptional thinkers breaking through a near ubiquitous overcast cloud of mediocrity, and just not read the others.

Johann Hari had no fucking excuse, mind.

(To clarify: I don’t have a problem with authors who mix up current affairs, anecdote and ideology, and there’s a place for rhetoric and rants – this is one, after all, and I’m not even claiming to cover new ground here – but being an activist or opinion-former AND a journalist should be really tricky ground to navigate ideologically and practically, and I think it’s become far easier to stomp all over that line without applying journalistic rigour, or holding yourself to a higher standard than your subject, than it may have been in the past. You don’t get to present yourself as Nelly Bly without being an awful lot more like Nelly Bly.)

Girl and Boy by Andrew Tunney

If you’ve been anywhere near the comics internet over the last few days, you already know about “Before Watchmen”, DC’s long-expected capitalising on their ownership of the classic comic book, and the one news story that ensures that we in the comic sphere will only be talking about superhero comics from now until the books are released.

Over at MOMBcomics.com, we decided to dodge the particular bullet on the subject – that bullet, by the way, is one that hits you square in the entitlement, and creates a time-sucking attention-wound – and instead of putting our swiftly growing brand* behind one opinion, we asked our friend the Internet for their opinion. This didn’t really achieve quite the broad spread of targets we might have hoped for – there wasn’t exactly a consensus opinion, but there weren’t as many anti-Before Watchmen opinions as would perhaps have been representative of the rest of vocal comics fandom.

The one conclusion I have come to out of the debate and the exercise at MOMBcomics was that people are conflating an awful lot of different threads to make arguments stick. There are three distinct strands to this, and they aren’t as compatible as most of the debaters seem to think. There’s the legality of the move, the creative ethics (a spurious construction if ever there was one) of the work, and the artistic merit of it. Personally, I think the former is covered ably by the words of Gibbons and Moore themselves, the second is an always important area to consider but isn’t black-and-white enough to justify the violent rage it seems to invoke, and the third becomes meaningless and potentially destructive if we become definitive about it, start claiming there are “rules”, but that the exact details of those rules are subject to change depending on the tastes/opinions of the speaker or the original author. (It’s also largely irrelevant when we are talking about it as a metric in the decision making process of a mass-producing industry, but that’s a whole other wrinkle.)

Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks

These are ALL areas that are worth discussion – everything is always worth discussion – but for the discussion to stay smart we need to try to keep the distances between those strands in mind when we discuss this – and to be frank most other – areas of fandom. Conflating them makes for dumb discourse, no matter how big the words you use are.

My own contribution to the post was a particularly huge disappointment, not least to me, in that it meant that what was as much as anything a manipulative suggestion on my part to minimise the amount of time and effort I put into thinking about the subject became an all-consuming wasted hour of brain-splurge. I ended up spending as long on trying to cut my ranting down to a vaguely fair three paragraphs as I did on writing it.

Enigma by Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo

For the purposes of posterity – which is the act of saving anything that comes out of one’s posterior for examination by future generations – I’m putting the original blah here. It should be obvious throughout that I’m at war with myself, desperately trying not to go on, and failing, and this may explain lack of lucidity.

It should also be considered throughout that my real-world position on Before Watchmen is actually exactly the same as my oft-stated position on the DCNew52: DC are well within their rights to do it, it is possible that some good, functional art will come out of it, and short-term they will make a lot of money out of it regardless of the whinges of whingers, but backward-looking creative direction, link-baiting initiatives and hype-cycle pandering is ultimately feeding into the slow-death of mainstream comics. If DC were doing this, or had done the DC52, while also being successful financially on other comic fronts, and we were able to discuss this without the underlying tinge of desperation that everything they do is a step in the wrong direction from a fast eroding cliff, I’d be like “follow your bliss, DC dudes!”, but as it is I’m totally like *rolls eyes* “hey Detective Comics peoples, buy a clue!”. Or whatever else the kids are saying.

Anyway, this is what I would have said, if I wasn’t allowing myself to be drawn on the “rightness” of all this, but was secretly feeling myself pulled in anyway, but was really trying to fight it, and had unlimited space:

Too Much Sex & Violence by Rol Hirst et al

If I was going to allow myself to be drawn out on this, I’d say that there’s no practical, pragmatic reason why DC shouldn’t do this. I’d say there’s something particularly self-righteous about anyone judging any freelancer who takes this job, or anyone who takes any job, when the only real skin you’ve got in the game is based on personal opinion. I’d say that though I have loved most things about Alan Moore, people defending his corner have had far more to do with my diminished view of Watchmen than any should-have-gone-straight-to-DVD novelty movie ever could have, and that I would hope that he would feel embarrassed, rather than vindicated, by the recasting of him as one of the comic medium’s great martyrs. Because Alan Moore, more than the outraged fraction of the internet, is smart enough to know that he is not Kirby, or Siegel, or Shuster. I’ve always been in love with the Alan Moore who talks about Ideaspace, and something really fundamental about the idea of stories as an avatar for life, ideas and something more doesn’t really gel for me with aggressive protection of the perceived integrity of his texts.

Video Nasties by Chris Doherty

I’d say that if your argument is that legally, or from a business perspective, DC shouldn’t do it, that’s not strictly accurate – and it’s worth noting that if you are in one breath talking about how popular Watchmen has always been, and in another talking about how DC have kept it in print to spite Moore/Gibbons, that there is cognitive dissonance. A business that doesn’t work within the bounds of their legal obligations to make money isn’t a very smart business. The suggestion that they a publisher is legally following the course of action that is most profitable for them just to spite creators is broken. Are all of DC’s dealings with Moore clean? Is it a bad thing that the prime gatekeepers to our favoured medium are corporate bodies? Those are both discussions worth having, but they aren’t this one, although if everyone starts talking smarter, maybe this’d be a good way into them.If your argument is that ethically it is wrong to work on a book where the ownership of that book is in dispute or being exploited by a publisher, Moore must be taken to task for his seminal work on Superman, or, for that matter, Batman, both of which have been the site of ongoing disputes over ownership. It can be argued that this situation is different, and it is. But it’s different for as many reasons that go against Moore as there are that support him.

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly & JM Ken Nimura

If your argument is that it’s ethically wrong to create an adaptive work that is in direct conflict with the intentions of the original author, or handle a property in a way that may pollute earlier work for some readers, than I’m sorry, you don’t get to pre-emptively dismiss anyone who mentions League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Lost Girls. Whatever Moore’s skill or secret genius plan – or other reason that allows one to at will change the parameters of a rationale – he has fundamentally changed any number of characters in a way that will forever adjust the interpretation of those characters, for anyone not able to compartmentalise their perception on such things. It is wrong to think that everyone who raises those books has a problem with that aspect of Moore’s work. In my case, I happen to love the idea of iterative fiction. I think it’s something that comics do particularly well. It makes a mockery of the idea of canon, in a medium where canon is a disease.I’d also say that while I don’t think that narratively there’s anywhere to go with Watchmen, I responded to the news of Before Watchmen with something like existential relief, that before long we won’t have to have this particular version of this repeated conversation any more. If there was something to be changed about how comic creators are legally treated, that would be one thing, but that isn’t the case here.

West Vol 1 - Justice by Andrew Cheverton & Tim Keable

Whatever other issues Moore had with DC, the terms of his and Gibbons’ contract on Watchmen are pretty clear, and DC haven’t acted in bad faith, unless there’s more to the promises made than the creators have said themselves. If it’s about what rights the audience has to not have their classic polluted, well, that’s a matter that’s always up for debate. What I mean by “up for debate” is that there is no definitive answer. I mean, outside of one’s own house, among a community.But what I really think is that the big problem here is that Watchmen is even still relevant to this extent. When Moore suggests that nothing of significance has happened in mainstream comics since Watchmen, he’s exposing himself as being taken in by – or happily ignorant of – a huge lie about the comic medium and the industry, but sadly it’s one that the audience, and the prime publishers, are happy to swallow too. Less than six months ago, DC proved they half believe it by trying to grab backwards for some imagined zenith, throwing a lot of great work and a lot of great creators under the bus in the process – work and creators that Moore also discards with his statement. A lot of the people cheerleading DC then, and the people cheerleading Moore now, are tapping into that same vein. Comics should have moved on from Watchmen, but here we are, circling it again. And Moore and his career haven’t been able to avoid, or showed the will to avoid, being pulled in by it.

Hitman by Garth Ennis & John McCrea

And don’t get me started on the retailers.

There’s a tepid undercurrent of conservatism in how everybody is treating comics, that Watchmen prequels are just a symptom of, and the arguments for and against it are symptoms of, and now again, everyone is arguing about what they don’t want, and creators with vision at DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse and any number of other indie and small-press publishers can’t get their books in front of readers. Can’t even get them to torrent their work except by accident.

We have to be better than this. That’s what I want to say, if I can avoid being drawn on the other Before Watchmen nonsense. We can’t keep blaming DC for doing whatever it takes to stay afloat, when we could just let them sink and conserve our energy to help build whatever comes next.

See? Demented, but well-meaning. It was late.

The only thing I’d add to it is this: at a cultural level, the ownership of art – even/especially art created within a corporate or commercial framework – is not a fixed or objective thing.

A formative part of it – the core of it, the intended platonic ideal being presented at source – still belongs to the creators, and the tangible, tradeable ownership of the work – what can be reproduced, sold, adapted – is a legal matter, usually negotiated/decided/fought over before or soon after creation, and then apparently not being directly publicly discussed during any of the disputes afterwards.

American Elf by James Kochalka

But once that art is out in the world, the most significant part of that work belongs to anybody who sees it, and is moved one way, or another, a lot or not at all, by it. No matter how rigid the intention of the original work, it means something different to each person who encounters it. That’s the beauty of creativity – the innate magic in it, and the central, wonderful frustration of it. The better the work, the more complexity there is in the relationships between how each person sees it. Good art – and at one level any art we want to talk about is good art – tells us how we’re similar, but also how we’re different. Art is not concrete. There is no consensus in art. That’s kind of the point of it. It’s the other guyswho decide what should and shouldn’t get made based on their personal feelings and relationship with the world. Once you go down that road, that’s religion you’re talking about.

Alan Moore, when he’s engaging with or talking about creativity – which is when I think he’s really a genius, and truly alive – rather than past legal frustrations, understands this. His work, to my mind, is often about this. This is why it is perfectly justifiable when he uses other people’s creations or ideas in his work, and this is probably why the more thoughtful of the people who mention his post-modern use of other people’s characters are mentioning them.

Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Moore takes pride in seeing the Guy Fawkes mask in popular use within protest movements, even though its use was sparked by a pretty weak movie adaptation which he had cut himself off from, rather than the work he is willing to take responsibility for. There’s no hypocrisy in this because he is an important part of a process that started with Guy Fawkes, wearing the face and failing at the terrorism, and went through Moore, by way of Lloyd, and onto the screen via a creative process that we shall pretend doesn’t involve any production designers or prop creators, and into shops via a manufacturing and distribution process that we’ll put even less focus on, to eventually be taken up by an angry, disaffected population that Moore and many of the rest of us can only pretend to understand. However, that’s still a dilution of Moore’s work – which was a dilution of Guy Fawkes’ work – that could forever alter one’s perception of the original V For Vendetta comics if one let it.

It wouldn’t have happened without the pointless corporate exploitation of a work that Moore refused to support. That doesn’t make the corporate exploitation any less pointless. It doesn’t make any actual breaking of contractual terms that may have occurred to make that movie happen okay. But it does speak to the cultural value of any argument that says that a mature audience has any right of ownership to a piece of art that is frozen in amber at the point that they first encountered it.

Fuck. I may have just argued against my stance on the Star Wars Special Editions. Wait, I know: it’s DIFFERENT, okay? It just IS. WE WERE KIDS AND WE TRUSTED YOU, LUCAS, HOW COULD YOU??

Brooklyn Dreams by JM Dematteis & Glen Barr

Anyway, so. Scattered about this piece are works in the medium that I happen to love, all of which I want to reread sooner than I do Watchmen. All but three of them have nothing to do with DC or Marvel, and of those three, one of them has reverted back to its creators and is now out in a beautiful volume from IDW – it’s to the left of this writing.

We need comics. We don’t need the comic mainstream – certainly not as much as it needs us. And we wouldn’t even be having this argument about Watchmen if that book wasn’t part of that industry. It couldn’t have existed without it, it wouldn’t have been relevant without it, and most of us wouldn’t have even had the chance to read it without it.

We don’t have to give a shit about Watchmen, or Before Watchmen. We choose to.

We don’t have to fight about issues that we really have no skin in. We choose to.

We should really grow out of it.

If you want to comment on any of this, please feel free to use the comments section below. I appreciate that it’s probably hard to pull much meaning from such an unstructured mess, but please turn your reading comprehension up to at least 8.5 before jumping down my throat. Also, make an effort to not jump down my throat over any words I’ve misused – this was mostly written after midnight, and like everyone there are terms I’ve picked up over 38 years that I might not be using quite right. If you can understand what I meant, go with that, if you can’t, clarify. It probably isn’t clear from my tone, but as passionately as I feel about this, I take conversation as an opportunity to develop or change my viewpoint, and I’m grateful for anyone who wants to school me on anything I’ve said here – I might even learn something! – but if you come at me with rhetoric**, are just rude, or don’t seem interested in anything except telling me I’m wrong without forming a coherent argument that says why, it’s possible that I won’t treat you with the respect that you feel entitled to.***

*Stagnant brand
**The nature of argument on the internet is to numbly spout rhetoric into the virtual faces of other people. I’m not interested in arguments, I am interested in discussion. The nature of discussion on the internet is to try to apply science, history, or considered supposition into the virtual faces of other people, and if that isn’t quite good enough, to then turn to rhetoric. It’s a matter of putting that little bit more effort in.
***It is almost a certainty that I won’t treat you with the respect that you feel entitled to.

This wasn’t a straightforward situation. David understood that we might not want to touch the story with a bargepole. We’re not a particularly serious site, and while David was badly mistreated by staff at MCM, the truth is crusading journalism is something that requires more diligence than we can normally pull together between us Monkeys. David is a friend of MOMB, and we want to support him, but at the same time throwing in on a fight between a creator and a pretty well-established and corporate convention is something that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

Anyway, after a bit of discussion we found a way that we could give David a podium without showing any real bravery on our part. A bit of craven back-footing on a blog-post hosting David’s commentary, and we were golden.

However, not being a rabble-rouser by nature – I know, right? – I was still a little twitchy about the post.

So then I get a tweet from an account that I didn’t recognise, but one apparently belonging to a convention organiser, asking me to send them an email, because an old friend wanted to say hello.

I’m not a naturally suspicious person, but in the past I’ve experienced the dodgy side of the comic industry, and if you’ve heard David’s story from Sunday you’ll understand why there was a slither of uncertainty about that tweet – while the jury is out on MCM’s policy-makers, there are clearly some quite bullish characters working for them.

And, y’know, I’m a pretty cantankerous fuck – you’d have to go pretty far back to find an “old friend” who didn’t very deliberately choose to be that way.

Meanwhile, JM DeMatteis – a writer whose work I have admired for decades – was tweeting about a Stephen King time-travel story, related to JFK. I have my own take on time-travel stories, and how they pertain to the big historical travesties. In fact, I’ve written a story specifically about that. It’s called “The Obvious Ethical Question”, and it’s about killing Hitler – you can read it here.

So anyway, I do this thing sometimes, which is almost like self-promoting, except… no, it’s basically exactly like self-promoting. If I’m following someone, and it’s someone I think is awesome, and they mention something which relates somehow to something I’ve written that I like, I’ll tell them about it. It’s kind of shilling, but it’s also sufficiently similar to how Twitter is supposed to work that I don’t feel too weird about it. I don’t ask for or expect a retweet – that isn’t the point of talking to people person-to-person – and I don’t really hope for a critique. Actually, so many writers have to adopt a personal policy on not looking at civilian stories out of self-preservation that I don’t even take it personally if they don’t read it or respond.

But the truth is, I don’t think, in the half dozen times I’ve done this, I’ve had a writer who didn’t at least take an interest. And of course, when I linked Mr DeMatteis to my time-travel story – not the only one I’ve written, as it happens – he was very kind indeed.

I took the opportunity to tell him how huge an impact he has had on me, in terms of how I read and write, but also in how I look at the world. Actually, I didn’t tell him most of that. I just told him the non-creepy bit, about my writing. We talked a little about writing, and though I already know the basic reasons why I’m failing to produce, I still absorbed his advice.

The thing is, where most people learned that comics could be more than just iterative spandex power fantasies or visceral genre fiction from people like Alan Moore and Frank Miller, or Eisner or Pekar or later on Neil Gaiman and the rest of the Vertigo crew, the first works that really opened my eyes to what was possible in the medium were both written by JM DeMatteis and published out of Epic, the auteur arm of Marvel.

One was Blood – a beautiful and poetic four-part series about love and loss and sacrifice and vampires, fluid and evocative, if occasionally, looking back, a little obscure. The whole thing was painted by Kent Williams – side-note: This was when I started my long love of that artist’s work, too – and amazed me in the way that the writer managed to juggle the mythic and ambiguous elements of the setting and story with what felt to me like totally natural dialogue, and believable and broken characters.

The other was Greenberg The Vampire, one of a line of one-off graphic novels that Marvel published during that period. This was something else again, with expressionistic but funny art by Mark Badger, and a New York setting and cast straight out of Neil Simon. I’m blagging the Neil Simon thing – I only really know Biloxi Blues and Radio Days – but Woody Allen would have been too easy a throw, and doesn’t tell the whole story. As in Blood, the characterisation in Greenberg felt totally real to me, but this time we were dealing with absurd but authentic family drama. If you ignored the fact that he was a vampire, Greenberg was just a normal everyman writer-protagonist, with the sort of ridiculous Jewish family that any first-generation immigrant can relate to, but that didn’t to my knowledge exist anywhere else in comics.

(This is all without mentioning Brooklyn Dreams, which I know for a fact broke my heart again and again when I read it, but doesn’t fit the story I’m telling, but that might include the amazing Spider-Man and JLA stories that the man worked on, though I’m not entirely sure of the timing.)

The upshot of all this is, when I discovered prestige format comics, adult situations in comics, and basically all these other mind-blowing things that didn’t come easy to a teenage boy in the pre-Deadline Magazine eighties, is that DeMatteis was the writer who truly blew my mind first. I learned from him something that I’m sure is a gross oversimplification that he’d dispute; that if you could make an idea work, no matter how rooted in reality, in surreality, in the mundane or in the totally out there, you could put it in a comic.

And the place where most of these discoveries happened were round at a friend’s house. I’d been reading comics scavenged and scraped from various second-hand sources since I was a very small child, but this particular friend was the first I’d had who liked comics – and computer games, for that matter – as much as I did. And though we discovered our first comic shop at around the same time, he had a little more freedom to get there than I did, so he had a shitload more comics than I did. He was, back then, discovering all sorts of cool books, too – I have a specific memory of reading Mike Grell’s The Longbow Hunters in his bedroom.

We’d sit around for hours in near silence reading comics or later on playing computer games, and then chatting about them. Basically, I think if you’re a particular sort of geek, this is the sort of ideal relationship you spend your entire life remembering but hardly ever quite getting again in quite the way you did when you were a kid, and weren’t totally obsessed with girls.

Then I moved away, and though we kept touch for a long while, another move made that harder, and then I think he was off to university, and I lost contact. That’s around twenty years ago. But thinking about JM DeMatteis comics always takes me back that far.

A quick aside before we get onto the really cool part is that while I was getting potentially suspicious tweets, taking my place in unfolding controversy, and talking to one of my writing gods, my wife was – for only the second time ever – deciding to make a chicken biryani for dinner. The last time it had been tasty, if a little dry, but significantly, it gave me a sense memory of the food that the mother of my comic-reading friend had always made, when I had stayed for dinner. I believe the family was from Pakistan, though I’m not exactly sure – whatever the case, the food I ate there was absolutely amazing, and not quite like anything I’d eaten since.

SO ANYWAY, I wrote to the author of the suspicious tweet. Because I just don’t care, me. I was a little nervous that I was giving some nefarious underworld figures who make their millions off running exploitative conventions my actual email address, but then realised that due to one buy-out or another, the email addresses that I used to use to keep myself insulated are now tied into some pretty public and mission critical services I use by default – YEAH THANKS XBOX LIVE.

It was a bit of a surprise when the friend that I hadn’t talked to in over twenty years emailed me back. He’d read the post about David Wynne’s Expo exploits, and then had spotted my surname somewhere – it’s one of those surnames that catches the eye – and that’d triggered off a desire to communicate. We confirmed that we are who we thought we were, and now there’s a “so where did you end up?” email sitting in my inbox, waiting for a reply.

None of which is weird, really, you know? With all of the different ways of bumping into people that technology has allowed us, plus the fact that he now lives back where we used to and my sister is in the same town, or the fact that we both still read comics and there are only so many communal places for all those people to end up in this country, it’s almost weirder that we didn’t bump into each other before now. After all, for the last two years I’ve been co-host of the best podcast about comics recorded in Southampton on a Thursday night, and that’s halfway famous.

And I’ve been following Mr DeMatteis for a little while, now. I was going to have a conversation with him eventually – that’s just the way Twitter works.

I don’t really believe in coincidence, or happenstance, or any of that stuff. I do believe that our brains are pattern recognition machines, and that makes it easy for us to believe almost anything. But what I do think is, any time in your thirties that you remember something cool about your teens, it’s a great thing. And if two of those cool things intersect in an unexpected way, that’s noteworthy.

If when you get home to tell your wife about both, she’s totally nailed, on her second try, a meal that sends you right back to that same time and place, well, more spiritually minded people than I have built whole religions – we call the ones that are that small and one-issue cults, mind - out of less immediate and bewildering a cluster of emotional reactions.

Basically, what I’m trying to tell you is that it turned out to be a pretty interesting day.

There are already a couple of ways to show solidarity with Mr Chambers, but it has been suggested that politically and societally speaking, nothing shows actual investment in a cause, and a desire to state your case, as well as a letter or email to one’s MP. A million tweets are as easy to ignore as one tweet, if you aren’t engaged with the media, but even a few dozen messages in an actual politician’s inbox are much harder to ignore, and carry a greater weight in the real world.

My friend Steev Bishop – steevbishop on Twitter – has written to his MP, and has allowed me to use his letter as a basis for my own. He’s also allowed me to share it with the rest of you, so you can use it too (disclaimer: My cousin George London did this already on Facebook, but I hate Facebook. I actually want to blow Facebook up). If you care about this case, you should copy and paste the following message into an email, and mail it to your own MP – you can find them by putting your postcode in here: http://findyourmp.parliament.uk/.

BTW, this site makes it easy to find your MP and write to them in one go: www.writetothem.com

(If you don’t care about this case because you don’t really know anything about it, but do care about freedom of expression, you should read up at some of the links that Steev put at the end of his message, down there at the bottom.)

If you want to make changes to the mail, you should of course feel free to. At this point I should mention that from “Also of considerable concern…” to “…with the support and respect of the people.” was all me. Your MP will only act or respond if you are in their constituency, so you should give your address/contact details at the end, as you would a normal letter. (Yes, I had to check that myself. I am an idiot.)

[edited to fix date of appeal being heard. My mistake, not Steev's, sorry! Also, to add "Write To Them" link]

Dear MP,

I am motivated to write to you in the wake of a man getting a criminal record this week for making a flippant remark on the social networking website, Twitter.

In January this year Paul Chambers made an innocuous, arch comment in frustration when he found out his local airport was closed and he couldn’t travel to Belfast to visit a young woman he was anxious to meet as their friendship had flourished online.

He said: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

This comment was intended for Twitter users who had chosen to follow him but was published openly on the service for all to view. If they could find it amongst the thousands of tweets (messages on Twitter) posted every minute.

By chance, a few days later, the airport’s duty manager found this tweet and notified airport security. In turn they notified the police and Paul Chambers was arrested. This was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service who, after ruling out the Criminal Law Act 1977, deemed parts 127(1)(A) and (3) of the Communications Act 2003 were infringed and this then became a matter for Doncaster Crown Court.

In May 2010 Paul Chambers was found guilty of sending a menacing message via a public telecommunications network. The appeal was heard on 11th November and rejected. Paul Chambers has been fined and worse has been given a criminal record. He has lost two jobs and will now find it harder to get another.

While his life has now been made far worse for broadcasting a facetious comment any one of us could make and not actually mean it, we now have a dangerous, documented precedent set limiting our freedom of expression.

We have a CPS and a judge that appears to have robotically adjudicated without the application of context and without considering the existence of the many facets of humour that the British are renown for: irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, sub-text, subversion and more I cannot think of. We also have an Act of Parliament that allows the prosecution of an individual without the burden of proving intent.

Do we now live in a United Kingdom where we cannot speak freely? Do we now live in a United Kingdom where not only must we be overly nervous of causing offence when engaging with humour we now must be cautious of prosecution?

Judge Jacqueline Davies determined the message contained “obvious menace” and that “anyone in this country in the present climate of terrorist threats, especially at airports, could not be unaware of the possible consequences”.

“Anyone in this country” is quite an assumption to make, but then “anyone” could make such a comment but expect people to understand the context in which it was made.

Also of considerable concern to me is that the record shows at various points in this case that the police have made statements and behaved in ways that clearly suggest that they did not believe that there was ever any intended menace, or that Paul Chamber’s comments were intended as anything other than a joke, and that their testimony, and reticence in treating this case as a credible threat has been summarily ignored by the Judge’s ruling and closing statements.

If we are to take the stance that we must ever be vigilant to the threat of terror, particularly in the “current climate”, we should be chilled that so many of the resources meant to be being used to keep us safe and secure are being spent instead on chasing spurious convictions, against the protests and better judgement of our police. Not only do such rulings erode at our rights, and at the parts of our national identity that we can actually be proud of, they also make it far harder for the police, our legal system and our government to do their jobs, with the support and respect of the people.

I believe the judgement was wrong. I believe the judge acted too sensitively to the climate of fear stirred by terrorist alerts and did not fairly consider the context and the method of communication used. I believe we have a CPS incorrectly prosecuting and a broken Act able to target anybody with a clunking fist. I believe if somebody did more than just their job and realised the situation was ridiculous this never would have got as far as it did.

Freedom of expression died a little this week (on Armistice Day of all days) and the terrorists we are so determined to defeat have limited our liberty yet again without lifting a finger. I am saddened and ashamed by this and I implore you to ensure that if the Paul Chambers decision cannot be challenged that nobody else falls foul to such short-sightedness.

Yours sincerely,

[Your name goes here]

[Your address goes here]

–

Further reading:

Report from The Guardian website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/11/twitter-joke-trial- appeal-verdict

Key blog post from David Allen Green, a lawyer working pro bono for Paul Chambers: http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/09/appeal-of-paul-chamb ers.html

Other posts from David Allen Green:

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/05/paul-chambers-bad-joke-and-bad. html

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/05/paul-chambers-disgraceful-and-i lliberal.html

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-paul-chambers-case-matters. html

Oh, yeah, I forgot… Previously on Lost, three beloved characters got obliterated. One literally, and two disposed of at the bottom of the ocean, where their bodies won’t ever be retrieved. Sigh.

So, we start on Jack’s eye – this shot is a favourite convention of the show, and if somebody hasn’t already compiled all of them together, somewhere, it’s bound to happen soon enough.

He’s bleeding inexplicably from his neck again – this time, it’s a pretty serious wound, and it sticks with him once he leaves the mirror, still visible at the breakfast table later on.

Claire is staying with him and his son, and she’s there when Desmond, pretending to be someone from Oceanic, calls to tell Jack that they have found his father’s body, lost at the beginning of this season.

It’s a ruse! Desmond is clearly trying to get the Lostees in the parallel together at LAX. FOR HIS OWN NEFARIOUS PURPOSES!

Jack’s son mentioned his concert later today, and Jack promised that he would attend. Is it cynical to think that he probably won’t make it?

Back on the island, Jack is trying to clean up Kate’s wound. IT HURTS. Kate figures distracting herself with the pain of Jin and Sun’s dying will be a good way to ignore the pain.

Jack and Kate agree that Locke – nonLocke, of course – will have to die for what he did.

Looking at Sawyer now, it’s weird to think that it was only a few story days before this that he and Juliet were loving life as part of the Dharma initiative.

Desmond watches Locke return to work, and Benjamin Linus catches him, trying to make a citizen’s arrest. Desmond beats the hell out of Linus, and at the same time gives Linus a flash-insight into the other parallel. Which is interesting – so far, I think Ben is the only person incidental to the Oceanic flight in the LAX parallel who has been included to such an extent in the off-island/on-island stuff. Desmond, who can remember all iterations, gives a greater beating than is entirely necessary – he’s obviously punishing this Linus for the crimes of the other one.

There’s a great scene with Richard Alpert, Benry and Miles, as they look for the Dharma village… Miles makes reference to the time dilation thing I mentioned in reference to Sawyer, by referring to his time with Dharma as being 30 years before Benry lived there, otherwise known as last week. Benry is back on form while taking charge, as he guides the other two to where he has explosives hidden – there is some marvellously sniffy banter about C4.

Once they get to the village, though, things change, as Miles starts to have a weird reaction with all the deadness around. It’s Benry’s daughter Miles is responding to – after she was killed, and Benry left the island, Richard buried her.

LOL… “what’s that… a secret-er room?” Oh, Miles!

“Are we looking to cripple the plane, or blow it to hell?”
“Blow it to hell.”

Woah, Jim Robinson is at the village. This scientist woman of his is all over the place, isn’t she?

I’d almost forgotten the antipathy between Benry and Widmore. When Widmore left the island, it seemed to be Benry who was in charge, but Widmore has taken the edge in the intervening years. Apparently Jacob came to Widmore after Widmore’s freighter was destroyed. And now, Widmore seems to be entering end-game mode – he rigged the plane, and tells his assistant to sink the boat they came to the main island on.

She sees that nonLocke is coming, at which point Widmore tells Benry et al to hide. Like big girls.

Back in the parallel, Dr Linus explains to Locke what happened to him, as the school nurse fixes him up. What does it mean for Locke to “let go”?

Desmond turns himself in to Sawyer and Miles for what he did to Linus and Locke… which gets him put in a cell with Sayid and Kate. I’m loving Desmond’s cockiness in this parallel, but I can’t help but think it’s building up to something pretty nasty. Also, Miles mentions his father’s work at the museum – we’d seen him previously announcing Hurley at a benefit – and Charlotte is going to be there. There’s a benefit concert at the museum, and I guess that’s probably where Jack and his son are going to be – so I guess he might make the gig after all. I wonder whether Dogen will be in attendance as well?

Sawyer has his guilty moment, and Jack could be a dick about it, but instead he absolves Sawyer completely. However, I figure that won’t be enough for Sawyer.

Baby Jacob steals Jacob’s ashes from Hurley, and leads Hurley to ghosty Jacob, sitting at a fire.

Ghosty Jacob tells him that his ashes are in the fire, and when it burns out, Hurley will never see him again. Which is all mumbo-jumbo spiritual nonsense, of course, but it tallies nicely with the other fantastical elements of Jacob in this world, like the lighthouse that looks out onto distant places and… well, all that stuff.

He says Hurley should go and get his friends, because the end is very near.

“There are both great plans, but I’m going to go with surviving. If you need us, we’re going to be running through the jungle.” Miles is awesome.

Jim Robinson wants to hide from nonLocke, but Benry wants to go out and face the inevitable.

Miles wants to run, and Richard Alpert wants to try to convince nonLocke to leave with him. He says that all nonLocke wants is for Richard to join him.

What appears to happen instead is that nonLocke – as Smokey – instantly and brutally disposes of Richard.

Benry, witnessing this, calmly goes and takes a seat, and waits for nonLocke. When nonLocke appears, you already know this is going to be a great scene.

He offers Benry a trade – a whole bunch of murders for ownership of the island, once nonLocke has gone. Benry gives up Jim Robinson in a second.

Aww, Alex! And there’s Rousseau, who is marginally less crazy, and lots cleaner, in this parallel. They take the knackered Dr Linus home for dinner – he hasn’t met Alex’s mother before, and she tells him that he is the closest thing to a father that Alex has ever had.

It makes him a little teary, the big girl.

Back on the island, it’s hard to imagine that Benry, who seems to be giving up Jim Robinson and his scientist with actual relish, isn’t running some sort of game.

NonLocke dispatches Zoe without blinking, and then bargains with Widmore for the life of Widmore’s daughter.

Widmore says a thing or two about bringing Desmond to the island as a last resort, due to his unique resistance to electro-magnetism, and then Benry kills him. His argument, when nonLocke confronts him about it, is, “he doesn’t get to save his daughter.”

Then Benry quite deliberately reminds nonLocke that he had mentioned some other murders that Benry had to commit.

Everyone else meets Jacob, and to Hurley’s surprise, they can all see him. Kate confronts Jacob about his list, demanding to know why Sun and Jin and Sayid and everybody else had to die.

Then Jacob actually says the name of the episode! He promises that by the time the fire dies out, they’ll all know everything they need to, and that by then, one of them will take over protection of the island.

Locke visits Jack, and lays out their arc in the LAX parallel to date. It all sounds a little contrived when you lay it out like that, Locke!

(No, it doesn’t… Locke’s mistaking coincidence for fate, but it’s actually quite a lovely, warm scene, actually.)

Jacob talks about a mistake he made a long time ago that could cost the lives of everyone that they’ve ever met. He’s talking about what he did to his brother.

Sawyer tells Jacob that he was doing just fine before he was plucked from his other existence, at which point Jacob bluntly lays out that Sawyer wasn’t, that none of them were. He tells them what we already know – that all of their lives were shit well before Jacob pulled them out of them.

Kate’s name was crossed out because she became a mother? Hm… and Jacob utters one of those perfect lines, that the writers must have wryly smiled themselves stupid about when they came up with it:

“It’s just a line of chalk in a cave – the job is yours if you want it, Kate.”

Lol… there is a light that never goes out.

Jacob wants them to kill the monster.

Jacob isn’t going to pick the candidate… they have to choose themselves – he says he wasn’t given a choice, so he wants to give them one.

And Jack doesn’t even give anyone else a chance – he’s up there, volunteering! Of course he is. My guess is, he doesn’t get to be the one who protects the island. It’s been chosen too far from the end of the season, and nothing’s ever easy in this show.

I think Jacob just made Jack immortal. Jears 4 EVAR.

LOLS Desmond only got himself into prison so he could break Sayid and Kate out!

Tonight there’s going to be a jail-break, somewhere in this town… Uh… probably at the jail.

Oh, Ana Lucia, you are such a crooked bitch. And yay! Hurley!

Heh… Hurley recognises Ana Lucia, but Ana Lucia “isn’t ready yet.”

Desmond wtf. Mind you, he’s got good taste, getting Kate to put on a little dress and go to the concert with him.

NonLocke walks because he likes the feel of the ground under his feet. It reminds him that he was once human. The big softy!

NonLocke isn’t fussed that Desmond isn’t in the well. He says that Desmond was Jacob’s failsafe – in case his precious candidates all died. Is he saying that Desmond wasn’t a candidate? He says that Desmond can help him destroy the island.

And that’s that. Penultimate episode, done. Finale here I come…

So Jack saved Locke, and he thinks he’s a candidate for a surgery that Jack is developing. John Locke doesn’t want to be a candidate, though. He seems to recognise the phrase. Jack could do with having House MD on his side.

Jack wakes to Sayid telling him that they’re on Hydra island. Sayid even makes a joke. Actually, I reckon Sayid might be back on the turn again.

Jim Robinson was totally about to pop a cap in Kate’s head, then. I don’t like the way people keep pointing guns at Kate, with a clear willingness to pull the trigger. It makes me think something bad might happen if people keep doing that. Her name isn’t on that list – people keep saying so, dammit.

Bernard was Locke’s doctor, back in the alternate. Jack is totally on the case, trying to find out how Locke lost the use of his legs. He is totally up for invading the crotchety old cripple’s privacy, yo.

Sawyer and Kate are back in the cages. Last time they were in there, they were snogging, you guys.

Ut-Oh… the generator is totally down at Camp Widmore… and now here comes old Smokey. He likes to kill people, remember?

It’s weird that in both universes, Jack and Locke/non-Locke have this weird connection – at the beginning, they butted heads constantly.

John’s father is a vegetable. Total vegetative state, y’dig? He looks all broked.

All the Lostees are together, about to stage a final assault on Widmore’s submarine.

…And non-Locke is being surprisingly magnanimous about Claire’s betrayal.

(Hn. When was the last time we saw Rose and Bernard? I guess Jack could always hook up with them, if he stuck around on the island.)

Um… what makes these guys think that Jim Robinson won’t have rigged the submarine up the way he did the jet? Dude is crazy!

OH SHIT YOU GUYS KATE IS DOWN.

And of course, Jack has to go on the sub now, cos he’s the only one that’ll be able to save her.

Non-Locke has clearly done something with the C4, hasn’t he? Left it on the sub as insurance. OH OF COURSE. This is the most MacGyver this show has ever been. The Lostees trapped on a sub with a block of C4 and a ticking clock. OH FUCK OH FUCK.

Oh Sayid. When someone blows up so definitively in this show, it normally means they’ve just died for reals. He totally sacrificed himself for the rest of them. If this was 24, the final pips at the end would totally be missing. And bloody blimey, Sun is stuck under something very heavy, so it’s quite possible she’s a dead un as well.

I am totally freaking out here.

Did… Lapidus got killed too, right? By exploding door? In an eighties disco?

I am totally making sadface right now.

Jack put it all together, didn’t he? We already knew that non-Locke couldn’t kill the Lostees, but I totally hadn’t realised the whole POINT of his scheme was getting rid of them, I just assumed he’d do it later. Now Sawyer gets to carry around the same guilt that Jack has been for ages, because for just this once, Jack was right, and Sawyer was wrong, and pretty much every cast member got blown up because of it. I’m very upset. Like I said about the previous episode, every event is full of meaning and consequence by now, and this is truly perfect TV.

So Hurley, Kate, Jack and Sawyer on the beach. Lapidus, Sayid, Sun and Jin in the sub. Yeah, you should cry, Hurley. Just this once, I’ll even allow a few Jears. That’s almost half of the meaningful surviving cast wiped from the slate in one go. And it’s possible Hurley won’t see the upside to the sudden boost in numbers of potential voices in his head.

And finally, there’s non-Locke, pissed at the fact that there are survivors, and set to finish the job. Thinking about it, I think Claire might be set to turn against him when she works out what he’s doing. Come to that, she must be on the list of people he needs dead too, huh?

Jack’s sweetest moment in ages was last episode, where he deferred to Hurley. Now he asks Hurley’s permission to go and talk to non-Locke. It is a lovely moment.

And now non-Locke admits what we had already worked out – that he was the vision of Jack’s father from way back in that first or second episode. He says it was because they needed to find water. And that makes a certain amount of logical sense, but it’s difficult not to see that it was a pretty cruel choice to make on non-Locke’s part.

Back in the parallel, Benry’s being very kind to Locke in the back of an ambulance. Sun and Jin are arriving at the hospital at the same time, and Sun recognises Locke and is afraid of him… whether it’s because she’s got some innate instinct, or because she’s in extremis, it’s difficult to tell.

Claire has an awkward but oddly sweet moment with her half-brother Jack in the jungle.

However, back in the clearing Sawyer and Kate are telling Hurley and Jin about their escape plan, and that’s putting further division in the newly reunited group, because Claire and Sayid aren’t invited.

Sayid has gone to the dark side, but Hurley believes that you can always bring people back from the dark side.

In the parallel LA, the pieces are starting to come together – Sawyer is talking to Kate, in captivity, when he and Miles get the call to go out to the site of Sayid’s unwitting rescue of Jin.

(Still find it interesting that Miles and Hurley in the parallel don’t seem to have their powers… but that adds to the likelihood that this isn’t really an actual, genuine, alternate reality… In Miles’ case, I suppose it might be because he wasn’t actually born on the island in that iteration, but what about Hurley? Maybe he just hasn’t known anybody who died there, yet?)

Um… At this point, Desmond is maneuvering the Lostees back in LA in a very similar manner to the way Jacob and the man in black have been doing. It would seem to be positioning him as the natural replacement for one or the other of the two ancient island geezers.

Non-Locke is about to go to war with Widmore, after a show of strength by Widmore forces his hand. This pushes Sawyer to put his own plan into action, but it’s possible that trusting Jack to help with a plan that abandons his newly rediscovered sister Claire to fate isn’t such a great idea.

Non-Locke has promised Sayid that he can be reunited with Nadia if he just keeps on killing people on non-Locke’s behalf. This puts him at the top of the well that non-Locke dumped Desmond in – a well that doesn’t look nearly as deep now as it did in the previous episode – with a loaded gun aimed at the still alive Desmond.

Back in the alternate LA, Sawyer and Miles have just arrested Sayid.

And on the island, oh dude – Sawyer’s plan also relies on Kate betraying Claire, and that seems like one badly judged choice too many on Sawyer’s part. That isn’t like him at all.

You know, I actually feel for Claire – I mean, everybody keeps leaving her. Everybody.

(Also, I feel for Claire because, well, she’s a bit sexy.)

Heh, Ilana looks better as a lawyer than she does as a… whatever she was. Her people have been looking for Claire for a bit, over in parallel LA.

OH SHIT CLAIRE HAS A GUN ON KATE OH SHIT. She’s mental, so anything could happen. Anything. ANYTHING.

Oh, she’s let Kate have the gun. Phew.

Hn. I guess Ilana was looking for Claire to attend the reading of Dr Shepherd senior’s will. So here’s Jack and his son. Jack, who didn’t know that Claire was his half-sister. Desmond is a little tinker for putting them in a room together like that, isn’t he?

At this point, every scene is so layered with meaning and history that it doesn’t even really matter where the thing is headed. I know I keep saying that, but it’s because I feel like this – this show is nothing more, and nothing less, than the greatest soap-opera there ever was.

When Jack decides to jump off the boat, you know it probably won’t ultimately make any difference – Jack is always doing shit like this.

And when Jin and Sun are finally reunited, you can’t help but feel a little sentimental, knowing that it’s been so many years – both narratively and in viewing time – since they’ve seen each other, even though you know that you’ve been manipulated into feeling that way.

The end-game in the alternate LA is also allowing them to pull off some perfectly cheesy moments of happenstance, to the extent that Sawyer in particular even comments on it this episode, culminating in Locke’s appearance on Jack’s surgeon’s table. In the LAX waiting room, Jack had intimated that he’d like to try and fix Locke’s paralysis, and I won’t be surprised if an upcoming episode sees the parallel Locke on his feet again.

Course, the average soap-opera doesn’t end an episode with Jim Robinson’s people dropping artillery strikes on the unreliable older brother out of Party Of Five, which is what makes Lost the absolute greatest. For sure.

(Watch non-Locke in the bottom left of the frame. Doesn’t. Move. AT ALL. Non-Locke is a bad-ass.)

Maybe it’s because it’s late, or maybe it’s because I’ve had a lot going on and am feeling tired and emotional, but right now I’m not even trying to theorise what it might all mean, because it almost feels like most of those questions keep being answered, but the answers just aren’t as complicated or complete as we were hoping they might be. I am just enjoying the ride, dudes.

(Oh, but one last thing that resonated with me – when Jack tells Sawyer that leaving the island is wrong, and explains how he felt the last time – as much as it seems to be the sort of confused emotional back-flipping that the character has always been prone to – it felt evocative of the scene last episode, where Michael tells Hurley that the whispering voices are the people who died but could never leave. It’s also interesting that for the first time, Jack’s major malfunction – that he won’t be told what to do, to a fault – is being explicitly voiced by other characters, and mirrors perfectly the original John Locke’s personal, rebellious mantra of “Don’t tell me what I can’t do”.)

Angry Mob – “You Can’t Talk About Immigration”:

I was pretty certain that the Daily Mail runs huge amounts of stories about immigration, as does the Express, the Sun and other tabloid newspapers. These tabloids and some of the broadsheets also point out that if we reach a population of 70million because of immigration bad things will happen and life in Britain may well end. Immigration, immigration, immigration. One of the key issues of this election. Everyone is talking about it. When prospective and current PMs go on Radio 1 it is the main issue that young voters want to bring up. As far as I can perceive: everyone wants to know what is going to be done about immigration, and they are not shy to talk about it.

Yet it turns out I am badly mistaken, because of course ‘You can’t talk about immigration.’

Elmyra – “I Am An Eastern European”

At that point I completely lost it. I’m not sure I can explain how this whole sordid affair makes me feel, but let me try.

Anger. Anger at Gillian Duffy, anger at all the people who weren’t willing to stand up to her.

Shame. Shame at the realisation that I had only allowed myself to feel this anger after I had been “given permission” by the comment from the native British person who stood up for me. Blaming myself for not standing up for myself earlier, more forcefully.

A desperate need to justify myself. I pay higher-rate income tax. I contribute to the UK economy, I contribute to UK society. I probably pay into the tax system more than I get back out of it. Extending that justification to other immigrants – parts of the UK economy probably would collapse without immigrant labour; I wonder how much immigrants contribute in total to the economy; we all come here to work, and we work damn hard. A range of other economic arguments, all around contribution, all around this incredibly Tory notion of my money being the only thing that entitles me to anything like decent treatment from this society.

More anger. This time at being disempowered and disenfranchised; at being a cheap target for political point scoring because Gillian Duffy and the 60 million people like her have a vote, and I and the couple of hundred thousand people like me don’t, and therefore she will always get a grovelling apology from the Prime Minister, and we won’t.

Mili’s post is well-written and quite sad, and while I think that a lot of people over-reacted to the situation yesterday, I should state right now that I entirely understand why she, as an immigrant, and one from the same group that was mentioned so often yesterday, might feel marginalised or upset by the situation, or more accurately by the fallout. But I have to say that my experience on Twitter yesterday was, barring one particular exception, completely opposite to hers. I found there was no shortage of people attacking Duffy, or defending Gordon Brown. Actually more common in my timeline was people attacking Duffy and attacking Gordon Brown!

Personally, I think that, while people’s feelings on both sides of this furore are understandable, it’s a giant nothing story – and yes, I’m aware that it’s one that I’m adding to. Mrs Duffy’s comments weren’t particularly controversial – they edged into areas that many of us aren’t entirely comfortable with, but after a couple of decades in the UK you start to learn the difference between the casual ambient xenophobia that you get everywhere, and actual boot-heels and beatings racism. You accept that, as guided by some areas of the media, Mrs Duffy and people like her see problems around her, and blame whichever Other there happens to be around, and if it wasn’t Eastern Europeans – who she only mentions briefly as a touchstone – it would be somebody else. And if there weren’t immigrants, it would be gays, and if it wasn’t gays, it’d be teenagers.

And if there weren’t teenagers, it’d be Southerners, or the bastards down the road in Brandlesholme or Bury. Or, as seen in the awesome 3d spectacle “Clash Of The Titans”, the gods. It’s a natural human instinct and coping mechanism to place blame elsewhere.

Brown’s reaction, while superficially sounding quite harsh, is exactly the sort of reaction you’d expect to hear from anybody who, in the course of their job, found themselves having a meeting with a customer or colleague who is outspoken and one-note, who speaks over them without really saying anything, and who won’t respond to any counterpoint offered, but who they can’t speak to too directly for reasons of diplomacy. If you’ve never found yourself so frustrated by a conversation that you’ve professionally had to take part in that you felt the need to sound off when you thought you were in private later, you’ve only had the most wonderful of jobs. That the word “bigot” is getting so many Brits in a froth is embarrassing, when you consider the words most of us would tend to use about someone moments after having them essentially bellow in our face for ten minutes.

(Ok, we should be able to expect better of our Prime Minister, but it isn’t their lack of a personal opinion we’re entitled to; it’s the hope that we’d have people in charge capable of avoiding such technical wardrobe malfunctions. I think discretion is the most important thing we can expect of our government’s behaviour, and discretion isn’t the absence of bad behaviour; it’s the sense to know where and when it’s politic to indulge in it.)

My only real problem with the way Brown carried himself yesterday is that, like Mili, I was disappointed that he apologised. That he addressed the situation when asked directly is his job – I’d have expected a curt if diplomatic response, such as him stating:

“It was frustrating that during our conversation, Mrs Duffy didn’t allow any responses I gave to her concerns, and made inaccurate claims about immigration that I felt couldn’t be answered appropriately at that time. My response in private was ill-considered and born of that frustration. That that private and informal reaction was broadcast is regrettable.”

…without personalising or defining the regret. I’d think that’s as much direct personal consideration, if not more, than any one individual citizen can expect in a country with 60 million souls, and it also serves the purpose of not being interpretable as backtracking on an opinion.

But a lengthy and craven wringing of hands, complete with home-visit, was a waste of a world leader’s time, and it’s something that this country has demanded, and Gordon Brown has bent over for, far too often. I’ve come to know Brown as the Apologising PM, and I think paying this much attention to any one individual’s bruised ego is not a worthwhile use of however small a portion of my taxes go toward paying for this government.

However, I was more uncomfortable with the micro-culture-war that the situation seemed to trigger off in my Twitter Timeline. Considering Mrs Duffy’s comments were, at best, the result of a vague and directionless frustration and ignorance – that a solid proportion of the population, on any side of any argument, can be guilty of at times – and at worst a gentle background xenophobia – that again, everyone is capable of, one way or another – the anger and bile directed at her was disproportionate, and discomforting. There was some humour in some of the pastiches and digs, but most of it – culminating for me in the “bigotedwoman” Twitter account – was the comedic and commentating equivalent of sticking your tongue in your bottom lip, adopting “spastic” voice, and saying “I’M GILLIAN DUFFY AND I’M STUUUPID!”

It was bitter and hard, one-note, and more distasteful than any mild ground-level xenophobia, because – and here’s where my own middle-class inner-snob comes out a little – it was mostly coming from people who are supposed to be better educated, and think of themselves as more tolerant and little-L liberal. Apparently, racism is bad even in its mildest forms, but bigotry against stupid people is perfectly fine.

Gillian Duffy is the political spitting image of Susan Boyle – both have the defining characteristic of being entirely unexceptional, and both very slightly exceeded the super-low expectations of the dignitaries they were paraded in front of – in one case, by not having a voice that sounded like total shit, and in the other by not having the social inhibition to partake of polite discussion – and the surreal ascension of both to intense, divisive talking-point status because of the bewildered responses of  the “Important” people they brushed against is bizarre, and exposes some pretty schizophrenic glitches in British culture and society.

(For clarity: I’m not a political correspondent or a sociologist, or anything – This is just, like, an opinion, and one that’s subject to change, if argued well enough against. Like, in the comments!)

Anyway, here are my responses. Feel free to steal this and use it for yourself, and if you remember, send Ryan a link to it, as he’s interested!

1-Did you read comics as a kid?

Yup… From pretty early on, actually. Not sure if I was reading comics as soon as I was reading full-stop, but near enough. My paternal grandfather was, I think, of a generation that just read comics as a matter of course, and he still did, so I remember getting old Harvey and Laurel And Hardy comics from him.

Later on, on a wet holiday in Wales, some friends of the family took pity on me and brought a giant stack of Marvel reprint comics over for me, which I devoured. I got to keep them, and some of them are probably still around somewhere. I reckon I’d read some old Lee/Kirby reprints before then, but this was my first proper introduction to that world, of semi-realistic artwork and melodrama.

And at some point during all this, Eagle relaunched, so that’s when I started reading British comics. I think of them as three very seperate introductions, though they all feed into the same love of the medium.

(Two things worth noting – backwhen, it wasn’t unusual for people to just dump piles of comics, either on bored visiting kids, or at coffee-morning boot-sales for pennies. Course, reprint comics aren’t ever worth very much, but people are a little more cautious about such things now, I think. Also worth noting: I don’t remember when I started reading Tintin or Asterix, and I think this is because nobody treated those as comics – they were books, that you borrowed from the library, and there was nothing at all unusual about them.)

2-Who bought you your first comic?

Probably the same grandfather, actually – though to be honest, I’m not sure whether the comics he gave me were new or hand-me-downs.

More clear in my memory are the times when we visited relatives in London… though there were always UK reprints or comics about – more like magazines, really – I’ve always thought of US comics – with their smaller and to my eyes cooler size, and full-colour – as being the platonic ideal of periodical comics. I think it was scarcity that gave me this impression. None of the shops around us had them, but most of the newsagents in London seemed to – some of them weren’t so good at getting rid of old stock, so had piles of them, too!

I only ever had enough pocket money to pick up one or two at a time, so I can still remember some of them really clearly.

The other time I count as being the first time I bought/was bought comics was when I found a newsagent in my home town that sold US Marvel comics. This was like a miracle to the younger Nick, on a par with the later discovery of comic speciality shops.

The first two locally-sourced US Marvel comics I ever bought were:

Look at that Charles Vess cover on the Spider-Man!

I’d read the X-Men before, in reprints of the original team’s earliest adventures, but I think I’d only really got to know this newer iteration in the previous year’s “Secret Wars”, which I’d read in UK magazine format. There was always a tinge of social commentary in Lee and Kirby’s originating run, but this issue closed with Professor X being viciously beaten and left for dead by a gang of anti-mutant teenagers, which was a total eye-opener for me. I was oblivious to the more mature corners of the British comic scene at this point. It was this, not Watchmen or DKR, that made me realise that comics could make an actual point, as well as contain realistic violence and drama that might have real consequences.

Also, the panels of the beaten Professor X were the point at which I became truly aware of John Romita Jr – though it later turned out I’d seen his artwork before, in reprinted Iron Man comics, Uncanny X-Men #192 was the beginning of my continuing love-affair with the artist. It’s all about the difference the inker makes, in this case: Dan Green and Steve Leialoha put a roughness into Romita Jr’s art that wasn’t in the much cleaner ink-job on Iron Man, and every notable comic I’ve seen him work on since had taken advantage of that raw edge to his work. Kick-Ass was practically built on the back of it.

3-Did you take any time away from comics? Why?

Nope. There have been odd periods of a few months at a time, when I haven’t been able to get hold of new ones, but I’ve never gone for more than a few days without reading them.

4-What brought you back into comics?

…having said that, there have been times when I haven’t actively sought out new sources for comics. There was a long time, between the point where Southampton’s only decent comic store had closed down, and the local Forbidden Planet had yet to open, where I wouldn’t have been buying comics at all, if Andrew Cheverton hadn’t invited me along on monthly runs to Brighton – where the streets were paved with comic shops!

So, Andrew Cheverton, I guess. He’s what brought me back into comics. The one time I might have gone away from buying them.

5-Do you prefer getting comics monthly or in trades?

Ever since I stopped working at FP, and more importantly stopped getting that lovely discount, I shunted almost all of my comic buying to trade paperbacks on Amazon… it was the easiest way to keep up with my key titles, and it was significantly cheaper.

Now that I do the #MOMBcast, though, I’ve shunted back to going into our local shop weekly, and picking up the monthly pamphlets. When we conceived the podcast, that was one of the things we built into it – we record on a Thursday, and weekly, specifically to cover the comics that came out that day.

Pushing this set-up served a personal agenda, too: I don’t really keep up on online comic talk, and because it’s no longer my job to read Previews, I wouldn’t have a clue what was current if I didn’t have to go and buy comics.

Personally, I’ve grown into preferring trades, but it’s a function over form decision, really. As a single man in my twenties, I loved having the comics in boxes, going in, sorting them out, rooting around for a particular run, and I had the time to properly devote to keeping up with what was coming out. Now, I get a lot of satisfaction from looking at shelves full of graphic novel spines, and knowing I can pick up a whole story or chapter of a story in one selection. I guess I’ve become more reflective than anticipatory in my comic-loving.

Books are less stressful to lend out than pamphlets, too!

But I think the pamphlets are the lifeblood of the industry – especially the mainstream. I’m glad that they’re still the format of choice for so many people.

6-Do you know the name of your Local Comic Shop (LCS)?

I can top that. I know the name of every single one of my LCSs.

First one was House On The Borderland, in Peterborough.

The next one was Wonderworld, in Southampton.

Then it was Dave’s Comics in Brighton. Never our Local, as such, but the place where we had our standing orders.

And now it’s Forbidden Planet, in Southampton.

7-Does your LCS know your name?

Yup yup. Only one I’m not sure about is Dave’s Comics – I was never as profitable a customer for them as some of my friends, and despite the store’s cheerfully informal and generous nature, it was always obvious to me that I was given preferential treatment on the back of their huge spends, rather than any personal fondness.

I worked in Wonderworld, and managed Forbidden Planet, though there’s only one remaining member of staff there from my time at the store. There was a period of time where the customer service was not democratically distributed, there, but all of the staff in place at the moment are friendly as fuck.

House On The Borderland was the amazing one – I haven’t had a standing order or visited there since around 1990, but when I popped in there on a recent visit to see my sister, he remembered me, by name. I was absolutely stunned. (He is, incidentally, the spitting image of Alan Moore. In fact, just thinking about him now, I’m starting to wonder whether he actually is Alan Moore, running a great comic shop in disguise!)

8-Do you own any old number 1 comics (must date before 1980)?

Pretty sure I don’t. Oh, actually, I may still have a copy of 2000AD #01. But that’s not as scarce as you’d think.

9-Do you own any original comic art?

Do we count commissions?

I have a page of Zoot, by Roger Langridge, and a page from Frazer Irving’s The Authority one-shot, by Frazer Irving. It is a weird page, with a vagina encoded in a shot of the streets of… San Francisco?

I’ve also got a picture of Fred The Clown by Roger Langridge – though his convention sketches are so detailed that I’ve a few sketches by him that are as good! – and two commissions by Marc Ellerby, of Girl One and I, one for a gift, the other for our wedding invites.

10-Do you bag and board your comics?

I have done. At the moment, storage space and lack of attention to detail, as well as a shortage of bags/boards,  means that some are packaged together, and some are hanging around.

I’m not particularly cautious about things being immaculate from a collector’s point of view, I just want them to last so I can keep reading them for as long as possible, and share them with my eventual kids. I find it easier to be careful with them than to be careless!

11-Where do you store your comics?

In Just Comics comic boxes, under the bed – they fit perfectly! Oh, but there’s a lot of overspill, in a couple of those boxes, and some Diamond ones, that need a home finding for them somewhere in the house.

12-How many comics do you read right now, in either floppy or trade format?

Hard to say… I’ve found that I’m picking up a lot of first issues with the intention of continuing, but I’m resistant to getting a standing order, and keep forgetting titles. Probably around five or six titles I’m religiously picking up, actually, and a couple of series I’m slowly getting through in trade.

13-What would be your number one, all-time desert island, favourite comic series?

Overall, Daredevil – there are enough super-strong runs in that series that it’d be worth the extra time to pick through.

Preacher’s always worth a look, and sometimes surprises me still, though, so maybe I’d pack that instead, and save some space for food and such. Or pack Hitman as well.

(This changes all the time, by the way!)

14-Do you follow comic creators on Twitter?

Ayup. The interesting thing about web-presence, though, is that sometimes you can end up quite liking someone whose work you don’t get on with, or vice-versa. But they are a fun and excitable lot.

15-Do you have a favourite comic creator?

Hard to say. I’m a massive fan of Greg Rucka as a writer, but have lost track of some of his work, because of it’s entrenchment in the DC Universe. And nobody can beat some of Warren Ellis’ stand-out titles – but unfortunately, that includes a lot of Ellis’ own more recent output, Freakangels notwithstanding.

I think one of the few writers who maintains a consistent quality to his writing is Garth Ennis. Only a few of his books would make it into my top ten, but he’s only had one real misfire, that I can think of off the top of my head.

16-Do you harbour any aspirations to create your own comics?

Yup. But it requires a work ethic that I’m still developing!

17-Do you access comic news online, if so where?

Only a little. Mainly, I just pick stuff up from Twitter etc.

Time to pick sides:

Marvel or DC - Marvel U, though I think DC has the more iconic characters, and the more stand-out classic books. But sometimes it’s all about the iconography, and there’s a lot of chaff, and I grew up with the Marvel U. God knows, at times both have tried their damndest to put me off!

Superman or Batman - Have to say Bats, if only because he’s been better served by creators on some fucking excellent comics. Though Batman isn’t immune to the issue, for a comic about a god, Superman seems to devolve into soap opera far too much.

Spider-Man or Wolverine – Wolverine. But I have to tell you, if I hadn’t been reading both of their comics in the eighties, before Wolverine had his own ongoing book, and Spider-Man had his own Todd McFarlane, I don’t think I’d have a particularly pleasing relationship with either of them!

Iron Fist or Luke Cage – Luke mother-fucking Cage. Because I will never be able to eat a pizza the way he eats a pizza, and I’ll be forever in awe of him because of it.

Nick Fury normal or Nick Fury Sam Jackson – Ah, tough question. I liked the audacity of the Sam Jackson thing, and haven’t ever really had that much experience of the other one. But once the Ultimate Universe started seeping into the mainstream, I’ve been getting irritated with how inconsistently sourced the non-comic stuff has been, and Bendis/Hickman et al have started to make Nick Fury Prime an actual interesting character to me. Still think Sam Jackson was the right way to go in the movies, though. Feel like anyone else would be acting up to the role too much, and I can see that turning camp far too easily.

Spandex or real life stories – You can’t ask me that after most of these questions have made me think about superheroes! Though, you know, I think the success of the super-hero narrative, while giving the medium a super-recognisable and accessible face, has done a lot to create the current culture around comics, and ultimately, that’s going to stunt the medium’s growth, or even make it difficult to sustain successfully. So probably an anti-vote for Spandex from me.

Golden Age or Silver Age or Modern Age – While I know exactly what that means, I have no idea what it “means” means, if you know what I mean. On such matters, I bow to Batmite and Mxyzptlk!

Digital or paper – Paper. What can I tell you? Paper! I think a lot about this subject, and I keep coming back to that – I like the way it feels, and I like the fact that you actually own something, rather than just the license to look at that something. And I don’t see that changing, even if I do end up reading a lot digitally. I listen to most of my music on digital media, and have done for nearly ten years, but I still only tend to buy if there’s going to be something I can hold in my hand at the end of it.

Gotham or New York – Gotham. Though I have conflicted feelings about the in-continuity ravaging of it in recent years. Story-wise, it’s risky and has often paid off, but long-term, it makes it difficult to go back to a model that makes sense for casual readers.

Hero or villain – Anti-Villain.

Cape or no cape – Full cape or no cape at all. Because a half-cape just looks too silly. There are probably lessons to learn from Zorro on this subject, though Zorro is the exception to every rule.

Cowl or domino mask – Gimp mask. LIKE SPIDER-MAN’S!

Thank you for playing, now post your own and spread the love, and feel free to add your own pieces into the mix.

@JamesMOMB
15:40 Captain America Reborn #6 (Ed Brubaker/Bryan Hitck/Butch Guice)
22:00 Robocop #1 (Rob Williams/Fabiano Neves)

@JaneMOMB
32:00 Madame Xanadu #19 (Matt Wagner/Joëlle Jones)
37:00 Demonic #1 (Robert Kirkman/Marc Silvestri)
47:00 Tracker #1 (Jonathan Lincoln/Francis Tsai)
55:00 45 (Andi Ewington/Various)

@Nixsight
59:00 Detective Comics #861 (Greg Rucka/Jock)
01:03:05 Batman & Robin #7 (Grant Morrison/Cameron Stewart)
01:06:30 Thor #606 (Kieron Gillen/Billy Tan)
01:08:30 Kick-Ass #8 (Mark Millar/John Romita Jr)

01:19:00 Nocturne Hotel (Eddie Robson/Simon van Alphen)
01:20:30 PJANG (Rol Hirst/Various)

01:24:30 Tintin – Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham’s Treasure (Hergé)

Nocturne Hotel: Purchase at Lulu.com
Rol Hirst & PJANG: http://rolhirst.co.uk/

MOMBcast 19 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/