MMC - Extra Portions 6

Believe it or not, writing my comics memoirs hasn't been as cathartic as I believed it would be. I suppose it has a lot to do with leaving me feeling like I've advertised to the entire world more about my faults, and those of others, than my positives. Yes, that sounds stupid, considering I've been criticised for blowing my own trumpet; for suggesting that I was the sole reason for some things being a success and others being failures. For being morally on higher ground than others and even for painting a Dorian Gray picture of the man who many revered. But, I was lucky. I will never forget that, especially over the last few years.

When Borderline finished, well, actually, about four months before it finished its monthly run, I'd given up. Which was why, a year later, I sat down and wrote over 200,000 words, which would eventually get edited and edited down to the 160,000 or so words that got published on Kindle last year. Pete Ashton was right; much of the first draft was like a long drunken blog post. I wanted to write it out of my system, but despite all the 'adventures' I had, I don't think I managed to convey just how bad it was and just how stupid I was for sticking with it. A better man would have decked Dez, taken what was rightfully his and made damn sure that he could never repeat the actions he did to me to another person. But I didn't.

When my mother died, my brother described it as surreal. When a good friend's mother died on the same day Princess Diana was killed, she described it as both surreal and distasteful; surreal because the world just carries on, despite the size of your own personal loss and distasteful because of the outpouring of grief aimed at someone who wasn't my friend's mother. Death is a surreal and highly personal thing. After my comics career died, I became a mischievous poltergeist; rattling the windows of the people who might quite easily forget me. I had gone from a man who could not work for other people, because I didn't like to be told anything to a humble, to a self-effacing masochist who let himself be metaphorically butt-fucked on a weekly basis because it allowed me to be a lazy bastard.

The 10+ years I've been away from earning a living from comics, I've earned considerably less and have worked exponentially harder; I'm relatively fulfilled, but there's part of me that hates myself for not trying harder, for not having more of a backbone, for not being my own man sooner and for being nothing more than below average.

The irony and I've probably said this before, but it deserves repeating; Dez left himself in an odd situation when it came to me; he knew that I was a lazy, grammatically inept, potentially above average writer and editor; he was also far more concerned about what others thought of him and the decisions he made - why else would he be forever trying to mould all of us into the public image he wanted the people to see - all of us mini-Dezes, repeating the party manifesto. Dez had to be very careful who he said I was shit to as he discovered on The Comics Journal forum when he tried to start a fight with me at just about the height of my popularity.

It wasn't really like he needed to do a lot; I've had loads of stuff published that looks like it was written by a Statement of Educational Needs child; I'd lost the gig at Comics World partly because it was dying, but long before it died. I think Steve Holland, the editor, had little patience and less understanding of my writing foibles; the ones Dez cottoned on to like any reasonable editor would. The Marvel UK gig ended acrimoniously. The DC one was a combination of bad timing, laziness and some could argue tactlessness. I'm not the easiest of people in the world to have working for you, obviously. I think I'm a far more competent writer and editor now than I was then, but still have loads of blindspots and elementary errors that I should have got out of years ago. Dez couldn't understand why I repeated errors and I've since explained it away with some psychoanalysis and jargon, but in the dark moments when I don't love myself, I just figure he couldn't understand it because he didn't quite understand my already odd brain once it was full of dope.

In the years since leaving comics, I have suffered from three bouts of debilitating depression. At least two of these experiences were brought on by self doubt. Ironically, I never suffered from depression when I worked with Dez and yet all the jobs I've had since 2001, I've never felt as lonely and isolated as I did when I worked for him. The years since the split haven't been kind to my id. It has left me with times of extreme self loathing.

The reason I believe I am better now than ever before, despite now being 50, is because when I parted company with Dez, my safety net went with me. For everything I had to put up from him, I was a lazy, drug-addled lackey, who allowed himself to be treated that way because I was too damned lazy and unmotivated to improve myself. He might have had the touch of a rhino, but deep down, for a few years at least, I think Dez had hopes for me; I'm not exactly sure what those hopes were, but I'm convinced he had them.

Did I emphasise enough just how fucked and bombed I was most of the time? That has a lot to do with it and the fact that I am not a lightweight meant that I could get utterly shitfaced and still function at jobs that needed to be done that required no real thought. One of his assistants told me that I used to disappear after about 11:00pm; not literally, just inside my head and even Dez wouldn't bother me if I was in the 'zone' because I produced huge quantities of work that admittedly needed copy editing, but was done so quickly that the pros outweighed the cons by miles. This was probably why he used me. I am prolific and I am unflappable at deadline.

As I said, I'm now 50; it seems remarkable that a journey that started for real in 1971 and has taken up 41 years of my life, is so alien to me now. The fact that I am wringing the life out of analysing stuff I've already gone over suggests to me that I can't let go, I can't say no to the other drug that has controlled huge quantities of my life.

If I hadn't been such a little fucker at school and come away with a better education and done some uni time, I think I still would have been a comics fan and maybe I would have tried to have been more successful; which considering how honoured I feel at times to have worked around the centre of the industry, would have been some achievement. Who knows, in some alternate reality; one where I did good; I might be a millionaire. Heh.

I attribute Dez Skinn for one other thing; destroying my ambition, which in turn left me with gnawing confidence issues. Whether or not it was justified, I was once very confident in my skin. People commented, some doubted, but all couldn't deny that I was the least insecure person they knew. I was totally secure, completely confident and probably pretty dislikeable. A good friend of mine, a chap called Ian Bates, would accentuate on the positives; he would tell me that however much it felt like hell, working for Dez ultimately made me a better person; I just needed to rid myself of him to discover that. But the two of us (Ian and I) never go there; it is a subject that is too raw, for me, even now. If nothing else, Dez has left me scarred and incredibly insecure about my ability to the point where I shy away from praise; I worry about personal development meetings and reviews; I'm really conscious of any written reports I hand in, despite never having received anything but glowing feedback.

You could argue that drugs played a big part. I would agree they played their part. I am, at times, a mixed bag of metaphors, constantly contradicting myself.

So, what now? I feel I've truly exhausted my repertoire; there is very little but fumes left in the tank - I had considered talking about DC's Watchmen prequels, but couldn't think of anything other than greed and politics to focus on, or my lack of literary respect for the writer of the original. My brother-in-law brought up a bag of new releases last week, they all just confounded me. I might as well have been looking at a physics book, for the amount of interest and curiosity they produced. What would be the point of prolonging my pain - especially after my diatribe on applications which proved, as one friend said that I really am out of the loop - and yours? Am I not just doing this to bask, just a little longer, in the eyes of the handful of people who have realised this blog is still going?

I'm not going to say never; there are still loads of links to comics in my life - movies, friends and the very occasional dip into some comics via the PC; what I've been doing largely since 2005. I am an anachronism.

See you in the funny pages.

If you want good, unequivocal comics opinion, reviews and stuff, go to http://tottenhamista.blogspot.co.uk/ and read the wondrous words of my good friend, colleague and sometime writing partner Martin Shipp.

MMC - Extra Portions 5

Let's look at the stats. The period where I talked about Comics International were the highest viewed pages during the entire year long run of the book; yet, surprisingly garnered very few comments - I might have comment approval turned on, but I only received one comment that I didn't run and that was right at the beginning, long before I talked about Dez, CI and that strange semi-celebrity period during the 1990s.

During the late 1990s, Dez Skinn discovered strategy games and through the medium of Age of Empires you got to see just what made the man tick. He is/was a relentless competitor, probably born out of his disinterest and self-confessed uselessness at sports. If there was another way to win, he would pursue it with vigour. As a businessman, he might not have been in Sir Alan Sugar or Steve Jobs's league, but he knew how to survive comfortably and he knew how to be ruthless to protect his life. This isn't a bad thing. Sometimes you have to be hard to be fair - as our incumbent government keep harping on about - but Dez wasn't just ruthless in business, he was also ruthless in play and just about everywhere else he could be.

I learned very quickly that beating him at pool during our lunchtime pub sessions was something I only did if I wanted to spend the afternoon doing the magazine equivalent of cleaning toilets. Don't get me wrong, he knew his way around a pool table; he just wasn't a patch on me. I remember the one time we ever played snooker; I started to deliberately miss shots because he was so woefully inept at it and was growing more and more angry at his inability to beat me. Obviously, this lesson was not one I'd learned well enough by the time we went to San Diego and thrashing him on American pool tables was just enough to turn him into psycho-boss. Watch Kevin Spacey in Swimming With Sharks if you want a watered down version of what it's like to work for a complete and utter bastard.

But Dez's new found 90s love of Age of Empires was something that caused quite a few ructions; especially at the time just before I got 'fired'. I was pretty much rubbish at the game and this was perfect for Dez. It was something he could relentlessly grind me into the floor with and the fact that I had to play it kind of made his almost orgasmic joy greater. When I stopped going down so often, I knew that deadline weekends would have to include at least three hours at the end of being crushed by his hordes of armies - whether I liked it or not. But once I'd been sacked, Dez needed some new whipping boy and Mike Conroy had absolutely zero interest in any computer game and had the strategical nous of a dead vole. So, part of me actually believes there was the Age of Empires reason why Dez began reintroducing me to the magazine's hierarchy. He knew that I was stupid enough to play him.

However, when I returned, properly, to the fold, it was under my conditions, despite what he believed, and we never played AoE again. It was around this time that he started to invite people round to the house in Finchley. There had always been a steady stream of visitors at the office; we got about 5 a week, which might seem little, but was actually a great sense of relief, because Dez loved playing the host, even on deadline and it took a little of the heat off a day. Some of these visitors were AoE friends; others just long standing comics friends and it was after one of these comics friends came over that possibly the most controversial thing during my time at CI happened. One I've never talked about publicly, because for many years I hated myself about not doing something about it. Now, with hindsight and events in recent months I am unbelievably glad that I didn't say anything, because I might have implicated an innocent man in something truly horrific.

Not the mention the fact that of everything I've written about, I can get corroborating statements to confirm that it happened; with this thing I didn't and ended up being complicit in a crime. So, legally, this is the dodgiest ground we've ventured near...

I got in one Monday morning; Dez had thrown the key down and told me to get on with things; he'd had a late night and wouldn't be down for a while. So I let myself in, made a coffee, rolled a spliff and sat down at my computer station, which was still on...

My PC was often used by networked AoE players, so finding it on was not an unusual thing. What I would normally do was just open an application and start getting on with stuff. There was always copy typing to do; classified ads to input and just stuff. This being the 90s, there wasn't ever the huge need to be on line all the time - we had a ISDN connection, because we embraced attachments like no other - but when my monitor cleared, whoever had been on the computer had left themselves in Internet Explorer and for some strange reason, I looked at the browsing history. I don't know why; it's not something I normally did; but this was back in the days of Windows 3.1 and 95 and both Dez and I were pretty much DOS masters, so we often did things you would never contemplate doing with modern PCs.

The URLs displayed all looked pretty sordid, but some of them looked very sordid. Clicking on one I was taken to a page that made me cough up my smoke and inhale my coffee. Abhorred by what I'd seen, I came out of it and sat there with a massive dilemma. I looked at the Temp folder in Windows and there were at least another 40 obscene images all cached there. I did something really stupid. I deleted all the pictures. Deleted the browsing history. Deleted any evidence (or so I believed) that could incriminate Dez in any way. Then my conscious started to work at me. Was my boss a paedophile?

When Dez came down to the office a few hours later, he said the two things that years later would make me relieved I never said or did anything. He told me that he hadn't gone to bed until 4am; he had been working with Rob Barrow on a Camden Mart advert; had crashed and left Rob to let himself out. This meant, at the time, that either both of them were looking or one might have looked after the other had gone - too many variables.

The incident very much disappeared from my mind for a couple of years, but one day when things were getting really tough for Mike Conroy and I, I told my replacement news editor about the web pages. his reaction was as shocked and incredulous as mine had been, but suddenly we now both had a minuscule doubt in our minds about the Stan Lee of British comics...

I've told a number of people about this over the years; most of them dislike Dez with a passion and have berated me for not saying anything. Then last year, Rob Barrow was found guilty of possessing more than 1million indecent images of child pornography. The same Rob Barrow who had sat up working on an ad with Dez until the wee hours of the morning and then had stayed to finish up some things after Dez went to bed. This must have been manna from heaven for a paedophile; given carte blanche on a PC with little or no comeback.

There had been rumblings about Rob's sexuality/preference/interests for years, but none of his closest friends believed any of them. As one said to me about Rob's penchant for young boys helping him at marts was that no one batters an eyelid at youth workers and none of the kids who worked for Rob during the 80s and 90s ever looked like they didn't want to be there - but I suppose that's part of the MO for perverts and paedos. I had even pooh-poohed a suggestion from a friend that Rob was a kiddie-fiddler; it just didn't seem logical or possible. But the facts are there now and deep down I wish I'd said something to Dez at the time. But, what would I have done if he had said or done anything that would have implicated himself or made me doubt the veracity of his comments? I was too much of a coward to say anything, but equally I was also selfish - something like this could have destroyed the magazine and possibly implicated me in the whole sordid business...

I'd like to think this was just 'one of those things', but for the last 12 years I have worked with children and adolescents; I've never been acutely aware of the shit that kids have to suffer at the hands of freaks and perverts. I dislike myself for not saying anything at the time; I hate myself that 15 years down the line the person probably responsible for the filth finally was caught and punished, because it should have happened a damned sight sooner. But, I'm also quite pleased that for once, in a period of my life where knee-jerk reactions were common that I had the patience to try and find out if Dez was really even more evil than I had believed. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't check browser history again after that, but apart from the occasional bit of conventional porn, I never found anything I maybe wouldn't have looked at myself.

As for Age of Empires... well, about 2005, when I first discovered the joys of torrents and illegal downloads, I got a version of the game and played it for about two hours. I hated it as much then as I had the first time around and the first time I have thought of it again was when I sat down to write this. Hopefully it will be the last.

Next time: After spending hours writing MMC: Extra Portions 4, I discovered that I really am so far out of the loop that I'm making a mockery of myself, so next time might be the last time...

MMC - Extra Portions 4

An aside; because anyone who has followed this knows I like asides (I'm also a big fan of some b-sides too).

At some point during the serialisation of My Monthly Curse, one of my friends asked me a similar question to the one that prompted me to e-publish and blog serialise the book what I wrote. He asked me if I would go back into comics if could; which considering how vehement I've been about there not being a future in comics seemed a little like asking me if I'd like to invest in manufacturing black and white analogue TV sets. My reply was my stock answer - pay me enough money, guarantee that income for a minimum of five years and don't fuck with me; which as we all know is as likely to happen as a boom in black and white analogue TV sets.

However, this got me thinking and some time later, while watching another friend fiddle with her iPhone, I thought apps. Yes, I met some kids recently who have just got into comics, but come on, after everything you've read can you see how and why that won't save the industry? But what if comics could be made available to be read on a phone or a tablet? They probably can; I'm so out of the loop on modern technology, it's probably been done for years (so don't tell me unless it hasn't, okay?). But my understanding of an app is you either get it for free or pay a nominal charge - what if you gave away a viewing app and then charged a small fee to download each monthly instalment of your favourite comic? Hell, if you could buy a comic for $0.49 to read on your phone or tablet, you'd probably be tempted to try something you wouldn't normally.

The way technology has developed since I dropped out of comics is phenomenal: I have the piss taken out of me regularly because of my archaic and decrepit Samsung phone, but I didn't actually own a mobile phone until 2002, so I really am more of a novice than the average 4 year old. You see for as much as I claim to still not collect, there's this 1500+ CDs behind me that include things I've either downloaded or bought that I have never played; I have them because they were there and either I might like them or I have it because I have something else that I quite liked and one day I might listen to this and like that too... I still collect and suddenly, while perusing my big boss's iPad the other day thought, 'Hmm, you know, you could read a comic on one of these things and it would be hi res and I could, theoretically, read it on the toilet (maybe not the bath, unless I had shitloads of money) and with all those gigabytes of storage space, I could have just about any comicbook series I've ever enjoyed and they would take up NO ROOM! I wouldn't be concerned about how much they're worth or whether I could get a copy of something and that, if I had any inclination to read anything again would be, what they call, a sure bet.

Obviously, the yoof of today can get more kicks from playing a Marvel or DC Universe superhero video game (do they still call them video games?) and with the amount of scope available in these sprawling great mammoths now, you could be anything from Batman to the Joker to a clingon on Batman's cape - the scope is becoming endless. But as a comic and one that could be charged at such an affordable rate that piracy would be almost pointless; think of the money these companies could make from everything they possess?

Heck, you could interactive versions; versions for dyslexics, even the blind. You could package the legit versions with extras to make people want to buy it from the publisher rather than pick up a torrent copy. How about a top writer or artist conducting an exclusive interview split across any title he or she works on as incentive to buy other comics by that creator? Yes, it's the gimmick cover malarkey again, but if you charged $0.49... Plus think of the devastating effect it would eventually have the monopolising distribution company, um, companies? If over the next 20 years tablets become very affordable and the change over to comics on screen is a success then out goes expensive printing, haulage and excessive editorial costs - the companies can pay the creators the same or similar money, but save millions over a year in physical production costs. If a comic sells 10,000 copies at $3.95, the actual profit is going to be something like $1.00, before editorial costs. So out of possibly $10,000 gross profit on a single issue, the company might make $4,000 net profit. If, however, they could sell 10,000 copies at $0.50 each, that's $5,000 profit before editorial costs; okay, you've got to pay some people to convert the finished pages into something that can be scanned and read on a tablet, so you can knock 10% off that gross profit - but that leaves $500 more than a physical copy would make and there is far more scope for increasing sales on marginal titles because of the less than prohibitive price. A fair to middling book with a wee bit of money thrown at it to publicise it throughout the net and the comics community could double the readership and suddenly that minimal extra profit becomes no longer marginal - nearly $10,000 on a single issue instead. To my obviously misguided and addled brain that sounds like a far better area to investigate and develop than attempting to flog the dying horse that is the paper comics medium.

I am convinced that the only real thing preventing some kind of comicbook renaissance is the price you pay. In a world where economics is God and potential customers are inclined to buy food and pay the mortgage before they indulge in a spot of Spandex, innovation has to be the thing these dinosaurs need to invest in - they're dying anyhow, so what's to lose?

Also, talking to my good friend Rodrigo in Brazil last week, I asked him to give me a breakdown of Brazilian comics: home produced comics; kids' books, funnies etc., cost the equivalent of about $1 in Brazilian money; if you want the Marvel or DC superhero titles you'll pay about 200% more, because these are popular amongst the kids - yet home grown books still sell upwards of a million copies a month, while the reprints translated into Portuguese sell about 100,000 copies - but more than enough to make them lucrative. However, because of the cost of superhero reprints, there's been a growing small press market with Brazilians producing Brazilian superheroes (not all of them child friendly either) and these, because they sell massive amounts compared to UK and US small press, are making creators some money, despite the ridiculously cheap cover prices - in line with the funny books. More importantly, it gets them exposure and the chance to work for one of the major USA companies and earn, by their standards, big bucks - it's why Mike Deodato jr went into comics, it was either that or go into design work, because for all the comics Brazil sells, creators don't earn the same as they do in the USA - proving that the USA made a fatal error when it started beatifying their hot artists.

Brazil just replaced the UK as the 6th largest country by GDP. It can't even be described as a Third World country any more. Yes, I'm aware there's a multitude of practical reasons why US and UK comics cost so much and there's the strange peculiarity of comics fans distrusting comics that are ridiculously cheap - Marvel tried a 99c range back in the early 90s and it flopped like a gay man on a lesbian porno set. The fact the line was utter shit is immaterial, no one was tempted and largely because of the price. Fucking comics fans, just love to be as contrary as a contrary thing.

The point is, if this hasn't already been done - why not? If comics - the paper versions - are still needed, then the publishers invest in developing their own small direct supply networks, with local print companies producing small runs of books and shipping them out and setting up deals with book publishers to supply artwork for trade paperbacks and albums.

The future of comics companies might be to dispense with the need for distributors entirely.

Next up: I'm hoping to remember the thing I've forgotten I was going to write about.

MMC - Extra Portions 3

If Spider-Man ever had a semi-modern renaissance then it was probably around the time that Marvel was lining up hot new artist Todd McFarlane to work with comics veteran (even then) David Michelinie to boost the fortunes of the Wallcrawler, whose comics had been plodding along, inspiring no one and living off its name and reputation.

But before these two had a chance to set Amazing Spider-Man alight, there was Kraven's Last Hunt; a comics story arc that, had it been released a few years later, would have been a prestige mini-series and not much else. Created by J. Marc DeMatteis and Mike Zeck, it was a groundbreaking and controversial six-part story that [spoiler warning] ended up with long-time Spidey villain Kraven the Hunter committing suicide because he could never live up to his greatest nemesis. This was after drugging Peter Parker and burying him in an unmarked grave with limited air supply. This series was as dark as Spider-Man ever got and some of the themes and ideas introduced had the Comics Code of Authority glancing nervously at Marvel's offices. I mean, no one had ever committed suicide in a comic before (maybe they had, I can't remember) and especially not a supposed pinnacle of masculinity which Kraven was. It was shocking and should have heralded an era for the web-slinger filled with ideas never touched on before.

Instead, you got retro-Spidey, which in itself was great fun for a couple of years, at least until Todd McFarlane's ego got the better of him and someone told him he could write.

Kraven's death might have been unexpected and shocking, but death was a really useful plot device for a lot of comics. People remember deaths in comics, so a comic where people die a lot is bound to be a winner. Carl Potts, Alan Zelenetz and Frank Cirocco created a SF superhero combo called The Alien Legion, which essentially could have been one of the best comics ever created, but never really found the right audience. Imagine the French Foreign Legion meets Star Wars, that was Alien Legion and it had some excellent artwork, strong stories and minuscule support from Marvel's Epic line. It wasn't owned by Marvel so they spent the equivalent of a buck eighty on its promotion.

While it wasn't like Marvel's other death book - Strikerforce Morituri - where you could pretty much bet the farm that someone would die and regularly, in Alien Legion some characters such as Sarigar, Torie Montroc and the brilliant Jugger Grimrod were pretty much guaranteed to survive, no one else was afforded the same luxury. The closest thing I've ever seen to the Legion in film was Paul Vorhoeven's Starship Troopers. The earlier issues are the ones worth reading, before it became too fixated on Grimrod.

Death is also a lead character in another Marvel graphic novel; The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin acted as kind of an epilogue to the acid casualty of a writer's early spell on the cosmic superhero. It had one purpose really, to have a superhero die of cancer, it had a secondary purpose, to tug on the heart strings of any comics fan. It was pure schmaltz wrapped up in decay and blackness. It has probably been over-written umpteen times since it originally came out and probably struggles to pass the test of time (Starlin's artwork is just so 1970s), but if you want to feel miserable and elated at the same time, this might fit the bill.

Death as a character was a sensibly used guest star in DC's The Sandman, a series which I hate admitting that I loved at times. It was like the X-Men in many ways, you just couldn't pick out one issue or one story that superseded any other and the opening seven issues were possibly the weakest, it really sprang into life with the introduction of Death in #8 and Season of Mists is possibly my personal favourite story arc. It's almost clichéd to say it, but if you haven't read comics, read the one that most other non-comics fans read.

Oh and I have told you that I discovered Dave McKean haven't I?

Moving away from mortality and back at Marvel, where one of my true loves was Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's long and at times simply brilliant Fantastic Four. I dread to think how much out of time they must look now; how simplistic and unadulterated they were; but for 100 issues it was pretty brilliant stuff. Unfortunately, anything but trade paperbacks would set you back the cost of your house, your parents' house and all of their friends' houses; so let's move on...

Alan Moore might have reinvented Swamp Thing, but most of the 23-odd issue first series were personal favourites of mine. Initially by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, it has been documented that it was the first US comic I bought and still have, but after their remarkable 10 issue run, we were treated to David Michelinie (again) and Nestor Redondo's slightly less gothic, more superhero slanted version, which I loved with equal enthusiasm. Truthfully, most of them suck by today's standards, but hell, I enjoyed them and hated what my neighbour Mr Moore did with it, even if it was evolution.

Moore, with the aid of Gene Ha, produced Top Ten, a kind of superhero Hill Street Blues and it was one of Image's true high points. Unfortunately, it was so irregular that you kind of forgot what it was about and I'd long given up comics by the time it probably progressed or even finished. It was a good read, looked nice and evoked the feelings you got from watching a well made TV series.

Rarely has there been a comic that has stopped or has been cancelled that fully deserves your attention and what makes my next nomination all the more odd is that it only lasted 3 issues and never finished, yet it was, quite simply, one of the loopiest and intelligently put together comics ever published. Bill Willingham's Coventry, had it been published by a company with money, rather than Fantagraphics, might have been one of the most successful independent comics of all time; but it wasn't and Willingham took some of the ideas to DC for his Vertigo book Fables (which isn't a patch on the source inspiration). Set in the 51st State of the USA in an alternative universe where it is the only state where magic is allowed to be practised, it offered so much and might have delivered with the couple of spin-off novels released in 2002, but I don't know, I only found out about the books about two minutes ago.

What I do know about Coventry is that every single person I showed it to, bought it and each to a man was as disappointed as I was that it never continued.

I always had a bit of a soft spot for Howard the Duck or it might have been a teenage crush on Beverley Switzler's tits, which were finally unveiled by Gene Colan in the Howard the Duck magazine. For it's time it was a cutting edge satirical comic book, a rarity for US mainstream comics, looking back on it now, it was a strange comic, for which Marvel took a lot of risks with, but I suspect it has little more than curiosity value now, although it documents a period in US life that has largely been sandwiched and overlooked between the reigns of Nixon and Reagan.

Jim Starlin crops up a lot in my nominations and amazingly I got into him before I discovered drugs - a child psychologist might have fun with that - because he came into my life when I was about 14. Starlin did shit loads of stuff, but also had a name for himself as something of a maverick re-inventor, long before John Byrne or Alan Moore 'mastered' it. He took a lame character, originally invented by Lee and Kirby and poorly rendered in the interim by Herb Trimpe and Len Wein into one of the craziest Marvel comics ever created and then, through some clever writing managed to tie it into the core Marvel universe without so much as a dissenting voice. Warlock was bonkers comics and I suspect it would still be pretty bonkers even today. This sprawling story eventually played out in two hard to find Marvel annuals - Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two in One Annual #2 and had more superheroes than you could shake a stick at (Starlin loved drawing mass superhero scenes, even if he could never master the art of drawing feet).

I don't know if (Adam) Warlock has ever been resurrected, but when he died, like Captain Marvel, you got the feeling that bringing him back would be a story too far.

Next time: maybe some more, I'll have to search the memory banks; but there will be something.

MMC - Extra Portions 2

I was trying to think if there was one thing most people who have heard of me would remember about me. Would it be as the guy who invented Borderline (hopefully), the git who worked on Comics International (probably), the bloke that spent a lot of time talking about The X-Men (doubtful, unless you've known me a loooong time) or even the man who is best known for telling people what he's most known for, just to remind them, in case my name has slipped their mind or they just remember me as the long haired fella with the big nose who loved himself? Whatever.

Most people who remember me as, first and foremost, a comics fan will probably associate me with the X-Men; it is, after all, one of the key obsessions in My Monthly Curse and yet, I've often said I can't think of a single X-Men story or arc that I would include in a favourite top ten comics - no, not the Death of Phoenix* or the Roy Thomas and Neal Adams issues, even Jim Steranko's brief cameos; most of them were either rendered redundant or were big dollops of shit with a dusting of loveliness to disguise the fact that the story was about as interesting as counting the amount of hairs on your forearm.

The X-Men was a bit strange. it got canned because, essentially, it was neglected and had stories that made Millie the Model worth reading. It was one of those comics that seemed to get passed around the Marvel Bullpen in a Russian Roulette fashion and I think Roy Thomas returned to it because it was the first comic he really got the chance to have a good run on, but he did it much too late. Another problem with the X-Men was, despite it being pretty much cutting edge upon its return, Chris Claremont recreated a comic as a soap opera, so while you had story arcs, you had other stories running in the background all the time, so even if separate issues were defined, it was difficult to pick any one specific issue or story arc as stand out. To be fair to it though, in the late 70s, when the book was having its renaissance it was pretty much unique compared to most of the rest of the major companies stable of titles. Plus it had had a major character's death happen inside 6 months, which sort of made it a bit edgy - who would die next?

It was also a book where the characters were so well developed that it wasn't about the stories as such, but about the way the characters were progressing and growing with the reader. People will nominate favourite stories such as the first Savage Land tale or the Hellfire club, the Brood, Inferno, Nimrod, the Starjammers, the Sentinels, etc etc ad nausea, because people have their favourites. However, I found most X-Men comics to be enjoyably frustrating and having left with most of those frustrations intact, I wouldn't return to it now if someone offered them all free of charge and threw in their beautiful wife to give me oral pleasure. Besides, I've seen your wife's teeth and frankly I wouldn't want those teeth anywhere near me.

Do I have a favourite X-Men comic? It depends what you class as an X-Men comic. If I had to pick one for a collection on pleasure value alone it would either be X-Men #66 by Roy Thomas, Sal Buscema and Sam Grainger; as it was the first US X-Men comic I ever bought, therefore it has some weird sentimental value. If I had to pick something else, it might be Uncanny X-Men #200 by Chris Claremont, John Romita jr and Dan Green, not because it was particularly stunning, but because it promised so much. Apart from those two I'm hard pressed to remember anything that sticks out like a sore thumb. It was a comic book that did more for your imagination than it did for your reality (or your finances).

However, I think there have been some awesome spin-offs - which is weird considering I've never been a fan of spin-offs. Some of the Claremont and Alan Davis Excaliburs were pretty funky; some of Peter David and Larry Stroman X-Factors were worth another read. I, perversely, liked Louise Simonson and Brett Blevins's New Mutants, thought the 6-part Longshot series was fantastic eye candy and didn't have a bad story (Ann Nocenti again) and Art Adams's X-Men annuals always looked fantastic even if the stories were always a bit twee. The populist in me likes the Peter David and Todd McFarlane issue of The Incredible Hulk where the green (or grey as he was then) giant had a rematch with Wolverine, even if it was one of the most popular and expensive comics of the 1990s (and only in this list by virtue of its guest star).

The other real enigma about the X-Men is the fact that there are so many great characters in search of the ultimate storyline. Over the years, heroes such as Nightcrawler, Colossus, Kitty Pryde, Mystique, Rogue, to name just a handful, have been strong characters as 'humans' as well as heroes, with interesting back stories and likeable personalities; but... you know... it's like reuniting the cast of a brilliant TV series and getting them to do something else; the chemistry might be there, but the scripts just make it a novelty item.

The X-Men was more about a way of life rather than a battle every issue. It was probably the first comic ever to ponder; to take 5 between massive stories. It could have issues where nothing particularly happened apart from conversation and some fans would have gladly had this every month for a decade if it untied some of the convoluted and knotted history; because people who have never read this comic or all its family of titles cannot possibly understand the miasma it created and if you think that's a harsh or even wrong definition, then think again.

Another problem the X-Men had was Wolverine - the puzzle within the enigma. It got to the stage during the 1990s where Logan was appearing in just about every Marvel comic being published at some point in a calendar year. Wolverine sold, so Marvel put him everywhere and rarely was it more than just a gimmick or a poorly executed attempt to boost sales with a piss poor story with shit artwork. The X-Men weren't the X-Men without Wolverine; more of a cash cow than a vicious predator. It also kind of made a mockery of Marvel's famous continuity.

Of course, one of the reasons that the X-Men was successful was its similes to race problems, oppression, and the analogies and parallels it used - mutants were blacks, Jews, gays and Muslims all wrapped up in spandex and prejudice became the watch word in the series - no other comic could focus on the differences and how unsettling they were to normal people more than X-Men. It also allowed Chris Claremont to get subtly political by portraying Republicans as fascists and kind of made The X-Men the first oppressed minorities comicbook - I mean, it had a black chick, a Jew, a lesbian couple and balanced it with a fuzzy blue German, a Russian (therefore a communist) and worst of all... a Canadian...

It wasn't just the themes and the writing that made the comic popular. The X-Men's list of artists is like a veritable who's who of comics legends: Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams, Sal Buscema, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Paul Smith, John Romita jr, Marc Silvestri, Arthur Adams, Michael Golden, Frank Quitely, Alan Davis, Jim Lee, Andy Kubert, Whilce Portacio, Joe Madureira, Terry Austin, Dan Green, Scott Williams and probably a lot more since I last read an issue - approximately Uncanny X-Men #380, (I'd pretty much stopped collecting it by #350). Looking at it now it seems like an even greater mess. Which is probably one of the biggest reasons why I no longer want to read comics.

* Oddly enough The Death of the Phoenix is something I was discussing at work today with a couple of new comics fans - two 15 year olds - both relatively new to comics and spending over £10 a month on just FOUR comics each! They had both been told that probably the ultimate X-Men story was the death of Jean Grey - the first death (she gets better and dies again later I've been told) and neither of them regard it as anything more than a slow paced story that didn't really install any interest in the supposed 'classics'. They were more into Spider-Man (which isn't a bad thing, really), so I recommended they read Kraven's Last Hunt.

One thing I was quite interested in was their reaction to the fact that I used to collect comics and worked in them for years. They were impressed, but of course, it meant little to them. They were intrigued that I'd worked for Marvel UK writing a 52-part biography of all the X-Men in the Marvel universe, which is part of my original tale that managed to slip through the cracks...

I got approached by Marvel on the recommendation of Steve Holland, the editor of Comics World and my other boss - because I wrote a monthly column for that magazine for almost its entire life. The Marvel UK editor's name escapes me - that impressive - I think it was Scott something. Anyhow, he was highly critical of my contributions - and rightly so - because I was lackadaisical and submitted pretty shoddy copy. If I wanted to be pissy, I'd say he wasn't an editor and didn't know how to edit. He seemed to expect word perfect copy and everyone needs an editor; my mistakes were pretty fundamental, yes, but that's what a copy editor is for. Marvel UK didn't have any of them by the time I worked there.

Anyhow, I got about 20 weeks into the assignment and I was getting hassled by Dez Skinn because I was spending too much time on this 'other job'; a job, incidentally, that he hated me having and virtually admitted so one night when he drank most of a bottle of ouzo. I rang the editor and basically said he wasn't happy with me, I wasn't happy with him, so perhaps he should find someone else to finish it; he already had a replacement lined up and was going to tell me. Oddly enough, the replacement had been busy working for weeks on future contributions and yet this Scott fellow, from New Zealand, was going to tell me. But this was my fault; I didn't treat the job serious enough and besides I already had my own arsehole; I worked for an arsehole, I didn't need my own personalised mutant power of having no less than 3 arseholes.

The sad thing is I have all the issues of Comics World, Comics International and all the other magazines I was published in, but I never kept those British X-Men comics, which had my name in bold on the contents page for 20 weeks. I can't think why.

Next time: having got t'mutants out of the way, the rest of my recommendations (possibly).

MMC - Extra Portions 1

Over the years, I've read, written or heard about thousands of comics and someone suggested that I do a column or two about things I'd recommend. Now, the thing is, I think he was talking about the here and now, but that would be a wee bit impossible, especially as I don't read comics any longer. So that kind of precludes everything that has happened since 2003...

That said, there have been a number of comics and series that I look back on fondly and here is a selection of stories I think you should check out. Whether they have stood the test of time is an unknown for me, only you can decide whether or not something I liked was actually a piece of shit and for others this might be a real jolt of nostalgia. Let's see, shall we?

Captain Britain - already covered in the main section, this Dave Thorpe, Alans Moore & Davis, story is arguably one of the best ongoing series ever to appear in a UK comic. Groundbreaking, emotive and very, very riveting; I shan't go about it, read the original entry in Part 47 of My Monthly Curse.

Daredevil - Everyone tends to talk about Frank Miller's first two spells on this Marvel series, but Ann Nocenti and a fledgling John Romita Junior turned this series, for a couple of years at least, into a complex mixture of minimalism meets philosophy meets despair. It was arguably the first comic that took a hero too far; reminiscent of the above Captain Britain story, it follows the fall and eventual resurfacing (not rise, by any understanding) of a man who doesn't seem to understand anything about his life and his surroundings any longer. Outstanding highlights include the fantastic A Beer With the Devil and a double-sized issue where DD gets his arse handed to him, repeatedly, by a group of second-rate bad guys who the blind hero would normally dispatch in seconds.

Towards the end of the run, the series got just plain weird with guest stars including the Silver Surfer, The Inhumans and what is essentially the main story about the fight between Mephisto and his son Blackheart. Nocenti stuck around for a while, but the replacements for Romita failed to elevate the appearance above mediocre, which subsequently made Nocenti's unusual themes lose their impact. However, the biggest crime was that Nocenti never got the chance to do much more in comics and that is also a big tragedy.

The Griffin - Dan Vado & Norm Felchle (unfortunate name, if you think about it) created a strange 6 part hybrid of Rebel Without a Cause, Superman and Alien Legion, with some thrash metal Muppets thrown in for good measure and a banana.

The story is simple - Matt Williams is a high school jock with limited future because of his crazy ways; one night while railing against society he is offered the chance of becoming a super powerful hero as long as he enlists for a superior race of aliens in their seemingly never ending war against their greatest foes and for a long time Matt is the champion and is committed to the cause above and beyond the expectations of his 'masters'. He has everything he could ever want, but essentially he is a prisoner, performing in wars that his keepers no longer have the ability to win. When he seems to win the war, Matt decides it's time he went home to see the people he left behind, so he goes AWOL and inadvertently sets into motion the possible destruction of Earth.

The art is stylised, the script kind of suggested that Vado had a bright future and it was neatly tied up with only the barest hint of a sequel, which never, to my knowledge happened and that makes this an excellent stand alone story to be enjoyed and, at times, savoured. Some of the twists and turns are not obvious and I'm still of the opinion it would make a quite brilliant action movie.

We3 - Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely's contribution to this list is possibly the most recent thing I've read and fallen for. It is a truly heart-wrenching tale of cybernetic organisms - a dog, a cat and a rabbit and just kicks ass big time. This is Morrison at his simplistic best - no weird shit, no existential bollocks, just a damned good story with an uplifting ending, although the one fatality from our trio of heroes upset me because she was the real hero. If you love your animals, love a great action adventure and want a story that will stick with you for a long time, this has few rivals.

The Incredible Hulk - Peter David's first spell at the helm introduced us all to one of the definitive Hulks, well, actually several definitive Hulks, but let's not split hairs (or purple pants). With initially Todd McFarlane and then newcomer Dale Keown, David literally reinvented the green giant in such a way that probably no other comic character has been changed so drastically, yet kept total faith in Lee and Kirby's creation.

This was my favourite book for several years; the consistency was of the highest levels and Marvel had arguably the finest superhero writer of his era; David wrote sparkling and evocative stories that sometimes completely ignored history and made you wonder how come no one had ever thought about doing what he did. He was let down by Marvel's inability to manage themselves properly in the early 90s - they never seemed to realise that 95% of the people who bought the book was buying it for the writer; the extremely good artists they attracted only made it sumptuous eye candy; once they started to impose the artist du jour on the writer, cracks started to appear and the flow was lost. Gary Frank was a good addition to the art chores, but over a year of David's scripts being crucified by below average artists like Jan Duursema, meant that by the time the young English artist joined the team, you could tell that David was losing faith in his long term plan.

Crisis on Infinite Earths - by Marv Wolfman & George Perez. You could argue that this deserves no place on anyone's must read list, because it isn't really a story more of a long winded homage to bygone days. You could also argue that it created something DC never anticipated - a jumping OFF point, but it was pretty much the most ambitious idea ever attempted in modern comics.

I've talked about Crisis a lot over the years, because I love it. I love the pointless deaths; the heroic deaths, the ridiculously contrived situations, which evoked memories of a time when DC was much simpler to understand despite it being like a rat's maze of contradiction. DC seemed to realise that continuity was Marvel's big contribution to comics and pretty much its greatest asset and the only way they could hope to rival their young competitors was to reinvent their own universe and get rid of 50 years of stories that the fanboy editors of DC saw as the real hurdle to them re-establishing themselves as #1. But these guys grew up with these heroes, so they just couldn't start again, they had to give the die hard DC fans an ending of sorts.

It was poorly produced, suffered all manner of problems and ignored huge swathes of history because the powers that be wanted no change to Batman at all. At the time of Crisis, Batman was probably the only real competition Marvel had and DC editors felt that changing the character, the way they intended to with Superman, would be more detrimental to sales than stimulating. However, at the end of the series, we're treated to one of the most uplifting of ambiguous endings ever and an era had gone.

Detective Comics - Most people will cite The Dark Knight Returns or The Killing Joke as defining Batman comics, but after the furore of the, to be honest pretty poor, Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams issues, the character needed stimulating and in the mid-1970s the team of Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin produced half a dozen or so issues that might have been as classic as other stories had DC not been plunged into a financial mess that almost sent them to the wall.

It's an era of DC that had a lot of shit, a big lot, and little stuck to anything, yet despite their problems they had two of the hottest artists of the time in Rogers and Michael Golden producing wonderful little stories which seemed light years away from the usual DC dross. I'm betting these have stood the test of time the worst, because of the era they were created; but I can't help think that if DC hadn't imploded, this team might have gone on to great things.

However, Englehart really struggled to stay a top writer; Rogers seemingly disappeared for years before returning with an almost unrecognisable style, to draw the Silver Surfer for Marvel, with Austin, who spent many years inking The X-Men and other top titles. Yet this era of Detective and the odd issue of Batman Family had stories that stood out like a sore thumb compared to most everything else being produced by anyone.

Fish Police - Steve Moncuse was an unknown and he returned to that level, but for a while Fish Police was the reason I returned to comics. It was bright, colourful, funny, refreshing and essentially a quite British styled series that lost its way when Moncuse decided to introduce a story to explain the comics origin. But the first 16 issues and Special are a wonder to behold, with at least one side-splitting moment in each and usually from a kind of breaking the 4th wall aside; such as when Gil, our hero who just wakes up one day as a police fish in an underwater world, ponders why there is a need for stairs.

It's colour-saturated noir for the most part, which eventually got lost in an exercise in ego massaging; but the first part of the story is just plain bonkers.

The Thing and The Hulk in Big Change - is a Marvel graphic novel by Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson and is worth buying for the comedy than anything else, especially when Ben Grimm persuades his savage green companion to use reasoning rather than his fists to stop a fight, with results far more devastating than you could imagine.

Gumby's Winter Fun Special by Steve Purcell and Arthur Adams is still, possibly, one of the funniest things I have ever read and it still makes me chuckle even now. You don't get comics like this any more - full of cartoon characters, the devil, Santa Claus, moles, monsters, a journey to the centre of the Earth and everything else you can throw in and get away with. It is just 48 pages of utter madness and amazingly evocative of Art Clokey's original, but perhaps with a vat of LSD thrown in for good measure. Is especially worth checking out for the panel of Gumby and Pokey being carried around in buckets because it's too hot for them to be in their normal forms.

It was also one of the first things I ever saw Arthur Adams draw and frankly if you can't see the man's genius in this you have shit in your eyes.

Amazing Adventures #34 by Don McGregor* and P. Craig Russell was possibly my favourite comic of all time for many years. It looked good, read brilliantly and delivered the deaths of at least two major characters in a bloodthirsty and pointless manner. I had never read anything like it before and it belonged to a series that I had little or no time for before and sadly after.

Killraven was a character created out of the ashes of HG Wells War of the Worlds story, it was set in the near future and was Marvel's kind of version of Jack Kirby's Kamandi - it was about a band of freedom fighters trying to rest control of the world back from alien oppressors. This 'resistance' had pretty much been whupping the Martians' arses in most issues, but #34 was a game changer and amazingly (if you'll pardon the pun) was years ahead of its time.

The aliens decide to strike back and send an assassin charged with killing Killraven and his band of merry men. After killing two central characters with ease and seriously wounding another, our hero is left to fight the ruthless Martian killing machine and discovers to his dismay and anguish that the 'man' who killed his friends isn't a man at all but an unfeeling robot; so even when Killraven gains his revenge, all he can hear is the laughter from the robot that has decimated his family and life. It was a really shocking ending.

It left me slack-jawed in awe; it was so good I revisited the entire series and couldn't find much to endear it me, yet this one issue had more power, more shocks and more pathos in it than anything Marvel had ever done before and was the first comic I can recall that basically offered the example of the ultimate futility of war. It's worth checking out if you can actually find it and Russell's artwork has never been bettered.

* McGregor was one of the first creators I ever met in person and this set me on a path that was to bring me into contact with the group of people I wrote about in the main section - the ones who for a while made up Dez Skinn's entourage.

I'd pretty much been talking up the brilliance of Amazing #34 all the way back in the late 1970s, and I'd also been a big fan of his graphic novel A Remembrance of Threatening Green (which he produced with Marshall Rogers) and this had come to the attention of Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie who were helping organise the Bloomsbury Hotel Comic Convention. McGregor was one of the star guests and they needed a retrospective and fluff piece about the writer and I got asked to write it. I'm pretty sure what I submitted was a piece of crap, because they got someone else to do it at the last minute, but I was young and the disappointment didn't last for long - I'd expected a lot of rejection in my quest to write. As a result, the organisers gave me a guest pass and included my name in the Special Staff index and I got to meet McGregor, talk to him and basically tell him that I'd written the original article on him but it had not seen print. He was a strange man and I never really took to him.

However, George Perez, who I also met at the same event, proved to be a great guy and I still have a Vision sketch he did me. Had it been 30 years later, I have no doubt that because of the Internet I would have done McGregor justice and also built up a relationship with Perez, who, at the time, was one of hottest properties in comics art.

With hindsight, this might have been the first real opportunity I had of breaking into that clique and I blew it because I had not paid attention in English lessons enough. I had got to a level at school where I knew that I was a more ... exciting writer than my peers; some of my stories and poems had teachers scratching their heads in disbelief that the shit who did nothing but fuck about in class could produce such good, if grammatically awful, stories. So subsequently, when people were learning about verbs, adjectives, syntax, and all those important things you need for the future I'd set myself, I was sitting at the back of the class flicking bogeys at the nerds and acting like a chimpanzee.

This was never more acute than when I dug out the first novel I ever wrote, back in 1982. It was done on a typewriter, word processors were the thing of science fiction at the time, and being a lazy bastard, if I went wrong I attempted to right the wrong rather than scrapping pages and have to retype them. So when I sat in the loft, flicking through the pages, I wondered why on Earth I'd kept the thing. It was, for the most part, unbelievably awful, but it was 200 fullscap pages of single spaced type and I'd had an idea, started it, done the middle and finished it by the time I was not yet 21. If nothing else, that made me proud. What also made me feel slightly better about this original manuscript was that, in places, it showed the true potential my teachers had seen. Yes, it was full of apostrophes in the wrong place, bad sentence structure, dangling prepositions and split infinities. In places it read like a drunken man's rant and in others it made absolutely no sense at all, like I'd forgotten how to write in English, but had failed to notice it on the page (and proving the theory that you type what you think you've typed rather than what you have actually typed).

Yet, in places it absolutely rocked and I sat, slightly amazed, at the 10% of it that showed I had potential. I attempted to rewrite it in 2008 and got about 400 words into it before I realised that it didn't do anything for me and the time to write or revisit it had passed. I also, with hindsight, learned something about the people who read your work; three people read The Future, a tale about a boy with the power of God, the girl he loved and a mentally retarded (that term was still okay to use in 1982) serial killer. Two of the people were friends who raved about it, but they knew me and probably were impressed that I could write something so big and the other person was my old English teacher, who incredibly skilfully managed to avoid saying anything about it that she thought might upset me; but the truth of the matter was, she didn't need to tell me that it was shit, I realised that all by myself.

Next time: the rest of my recommended list, plus some other guff.

After the Party... The Menopause

That's all over then. I've been very pleased with the reaction and interest generated by my tale. It might not have reached as many people as I would have liked, but it's there, for all to see and read for as long as I keep it there or Blogger stays in business.

Admittedly, I didn't receive the shit storm I expected at times - not that I wrote it to cause any kind of storm - and I was surprised by the amount of supportive emails, personal (horror) stories about working in the industry and reignited friendships. I've had moments where I've felt that spark in me, the one that flares up whenever I show a glimmering of interest in comics; the one that's telling me that perhaps I should try and get back into it, even if it's not as a fan but as an observer; but the truth is I now find comics deathly dull.

I'll be 50 in a couple of months; I got involved in US comics for the first time when I was 10. That's 4/5ths of my life that has been linked by 20-odd pages of four coloured bollocks. Yes, I had years away, but like any bad addict, I managed to sneak back into the same old groove, like dragging on a big reefer and chilling out like it was only yesterday I'd last done it. Obviously, that was one of the reasons for writing My Monthly Curse. When Pete Ashton asked me why I kept plugging away with comics when it continually gave me a good spit roasting, I thought, 'Hey, tobacco has never done me any good, but Christ I'm happy to slowly kill myself (like my parents) by inhaling carcinogenic smoke and turning my arteries into deadly cul-de-sacs'. There is probably no rational explanation.

If someone out there thought, for argument's sake, that Borderline could make a triumphant comeback, maybe as a website, and were prepared to treat the project with respect and promote diversity, then I'd be more than happy to let them do it. I'm not precious. I'd be happy with a cursory mention on the 'about' page. However, I don't think something that is now over 10 years old and only lasted two years is likely to resonate throughout comics. The name might open a few doors, especially amongst some veterans of comics, but generally I suspect that a large percentage of people who work in comics now wouldn't be aware of its contribution. But if anyone wants to do it; feels it is necessary, then they know how to contact me.

I do believe that Borderline deserves recognition in comics history. I doubt it will get it.

But... I might hate comics. I might not get any kick whatsoever from reading them, but it's an industry that I have always displayed an intense amount of passion for. Borderline shouldn't really have existed. I should have walked away from Comics International and done something else, straight away. The thing was I had and to some degrees still do have a passion for the comics industry. I don't know if it's just because I loved it so much, or if I've grown to want recognition from my peers - maybe it's a bit of both? But, anyone working on Borderline will tell you that I wasn't important - not when the chips were down - what was important was the magazine and the way it catered to its readers and the way it recognised the contributors.

I actually have never really craved the spotlight (honest, guv) and if I haven't talked about this over the last year then here it is: I have told just about everyone I have ever worked with in comics that I'm really happy being a backroom boy. I have always felt there should be some recognition for the backroom staff, they are the guys who oil the machine, feed it and rub its back when it has wind. For me keeping the machine working has, remarkably, always been my driving force. And, if I'd really wanted to be a successful writer, in comics or outside of it, I would have worked harder to achieve it. I would have done all the things that I could be construed as criticising people in the book for.

But in all self-honesty, my best position at CI and Borderline was as the production manager - the guy who puts all the elements together to produce the finished product. The guy who solves the problems. I might have mended as many bridges as I napalmed in my years, but I ensured that everyone involved in whatever process I was doing was as committed to it as I was. I suppose I'm a motivator, but I've never really seen myself as one, so it's an unusual way to describe myself.

In my new job, I manage a department, but I don't feel as though I'm there to just delegate. I do as much, sometimes more, than my staff, but as a result, they're working with me; they're on the same hymn sheet; they're doing the things we need to do without me having to stand over them with a stick. That has never happened and would never happen on my watch. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink! If I had a work ambition left in me it would be project managing something that improves the lives of others and getting 101% out of the people who are involved, because they want to, not because they feel obligated to. Borderline worked because everyone involved felt their contribution was important - the prima donnas ran away very quickly and left the nucleus of brilliance - I just pointed that luminescence in the right direction.

***

I've been alarmed to discover that what remains of the retailing market is still as slapdash and hand-to-mouth as it seems to have always been. I've heard stories about new retailers really trying to make a difference; yet I'm hearing stories about the same people that suggests they have learnt nothing and have come into comics retailing with the same enthusiasm and zero business acumen as so many of their predecessors.

I cannot see a happy ending for retail and that should mean possibly the end of the comic book business as even a peripheral member of the entertainment industry. Comics are in for a massive change in the UK and US, I firmly believe that, but I'm firm in the belief that economics will be the ultimate downfall. What has been the law of diminishing returns for many years will be reduced to only those stupid enough to part with extortionate amounts of cash for trade paperbacks - because there always will be; like people prefer vinyl to CDs or MP3s.

Unless comicbook companies can develop iPhone apps, iPad display, or interactive comicbooks played via an Xbox or something, then I see the genre turning into something different. Etchings were once all the rage, now there's a handful of people keeping history alive - comics will be like that in 100 years.

***

Many of the things the comics industry consistently failed to do was be genuinely supportive; I'm not suggesting that rival retailers weren't friends or didn't do things to help each other out - because they did, once - but the reason retail had such a tight bond is because the bastards knew their backs were against the wall - all the time - so they needed to develop a support mechanism.

People in comics are normally convivial and enthusiastic about each other, but they would, if necessary, kill to survive. As retail has changed, I'm not sure the relationship between rivals has benefited and from what I've been told by friends still in the retail business, times have got a wee bit more cut throat and full of false camaraderie and the cynic in me just wants to say, 'It hasn't changed much then!'

If you want support in retail then you're buggered because I expect a lot of other retail businesses are going to be looking at burdening the shop keeper with more of the costs, especially if they are independent traders.

I think it's clear to see from the average High Street that retail in general is changing, dying. Amazon sell trade paperbacks considerably cheaper than an independent retailer; if you have sense you'll forget any loyalties you have and buy from the cheapest place and that means the Internet. I expect retail, in all areas, to change drastically in the next 20 years. The future might be in mail delivery firms.

***

So... What to do now?

The idea had crossed my mind to start another autobiographical blog, this time about all those years I talked about sans the comics; mainly because my life has some pretty exciting, lunatic and weird things happen in it, plus there's my penchant for illegal drugs and my sometimes farcical situations I find myself in.

But that idea has sort of died off. I really don't want many people to know about much of that life, not unless I can write it under a pseudonym.

Then someone suggested keeping the page going and my reaction was, 'what the bloody hell do I talk about?' To which he said, ask your readers. Throw an open invitation for people to ask me what my knowledge or opinion is of something. As flattering an idea and as interesting as it is, I don't know if anyone really gives a shit. Someone else suggested I could expand on a lot of the book and use some of the stories that got cut or didn't make it. Simple answer to that - they got cut or didn't make it, does that tell you something?

The bottom line is I quite like the idea of people suggesting a topic for me to spout off about - if indeed I can - and I'm still open to ideas, athough I'm all too aware that getting reaction from people is like trying to fuck a duck with an elephant's cock.