Nik Dirga

Marvel’s mysterious Human Fly or, why real life people don’t always work as superheroes

The Human Fly’s brief run in Marvel Comics never really got a lot of buzz back in the 1970s, but I still have a soft spot for this oddball stuntman-turned-comics hero.

The first issue – released 49 years ago now – blared on its cover, “The wildest super-hero ever – because he’s REAL!”

Well, kind of. The comic was loosely based on the real-life Canadian stuntman of the same name, who wore a mask and did daredevil attempts like strapping himself on top of a jet plane and jumping a motorcycle over 27 parked buses. (Unfortunately, both attempts ended up with him suffering pretty major injuries.) The Fly was apparently the brainchild of two Canadian brothers hoping to make it big who formed a company called Human Fly Spectaculars Ltd and hired a guy named Rick Rojatt who claimed to be a former Hollywood stuntman.

Marvel Comics was looped into the brothers’ publicity machine, and before you know it, a comic book version of the Fly was in the works – with a dramatic backstory of how the Fly lost his wife and daughter in a car crash that left the Fly with steel replacing most of his skeleton, and a mission to be a “philanthropic daredevil” inspiring millions and helping handicapped or ill children all across America. The Fly came during Marvel’s flood of licensed comics in the late ‘70s, which brought us everything from Star Wars to, um, Alice Cooper. Why not a “real” stuntman superhero?

Stunt action was everywhere at the time – remember Evel Knievel, or the stunt-inspired (and far more successful comics hero) Ghost Rider? But an action packed real-life stunt doesn’t really translate well to comic books, where Superman is off juggling planets in every issue and a chained-up guy diving into a shark tank is just pretty pictures. The main problem The Human Fly faced is that it didn’t make for a very good comic book.

Despite decent art and that cool costume design, not a lot really happens to the Fly – most issues are devoted to stunts that go wrong for some reason (dastardly criminals, greedy interfering journalist, meddling kids, et cetera) and the Fly repeatedly insisting he’s “not a crimefighter” despite often, well, fighting criminals because that’s what comic books do. At the end, everyone smiles and the orphans got much-needed funds.

The stories quickly become repetitive (an awful lot of time is given to a tabloid journalist out to “expose” the Fly who then becomes convinced of his essential greatness), and the Fly himself really has no character arc – he’s just saintly and self-sacrificing. There’s a brief attempt to make a mystery of why he’s never seen without his mask but it doesn’t go anywhere. It all just sort of ambles on until cancellation.

Trying to figure out who the real Fly was in 2026 is quite a rabbit hole to go down. Rojatt was or is real, and made the rounds in Canadian media, but nobody is really entirely sure what happened to him after his brief bout of fame. A documentary about the Human Fly has been in the works for ages but I’m not sure if it was ever actually finished. Was Rojatt’s back story, adapted to the comics, of a horrible car accident and his family’s deaths true?

His surreal appearance on Canadian television back in 1976 is proof of life, but also leaves you with more questions than answers:

The Human Fly’s 19-issue run was written by steady journeyman Bill Mantlo, who was the patron saint of Marvel licensed properties back in the day – ROM, Micronauts, Man From Atlantis, Shogun Warriors, etc etc. Mantlo, who tragically suffered a traumatic brain injury back in 1992 and has been in full-time care ever since, was a reliably fun hand at entertaining, fast moving comics – his long run on ROM is a particular highlight – but even Mantlo couldn’t quite give the Human Fly the juice it needed.

I still carry a little bit of a torch for the Fly’s brief flight, though – maybe it’s that cool costume design, or just his relative obscurity – I’ve always had a thing for Marvel’s goofy short-run ‘70s superheroes like Omega The Unknown, The Man-Wolf and Black Goliath, after all.

In a bombastic over-the-top editorial in the first issue, Mantlo proclaimed that “The Human Fly is me. He’s also you and millions of other people.” The Fly was “the living bionic man, compared to Captain America or Spider-Man in media presentations throughout the world.” “I’ve got 50,000,000 kids out there depending on me,” the Fly is quoted as saying.

The Human Fly comic never quite escaped the taint of self-promotion and having no real reason to exist. Spider-Man, Ghost Rider and Daredevil were dragged out for brief cameos. The Human Fly apparently was going to put out a record album (!) so there was a plug for that in one story. In one issue we get a special “bonus feature” of the Human Fly visiting the Marvel bullpen festooned with awful-quality grainy, barely legible photos of the Fly with Stan Lee, and appearances by his “new sidekick Mercury”, a very short, vaguely annoyed-looking fellow in a spandex costume who never was mentioned again in the comics.

All the self-promotion in the world couldn’t keep the Human Fly from vanishing. There’s been talks of revivals and such over the years but honestly, he feels like a creature of his time, nearly 50 years ago now.

And yet – there’s a core of essential decency to the Fly in his short comics run, a guy who’s all about helping others and eschewing any reward. Was he “real”? Was there much in common between the saintly comics hero and the mysterious real-life battered stuntman? We may never really know.

Given that if someone like the Fly emerged in 2026 he’d probably be some streaming influencer and part-time grifter, what Mantlo calls the Fly’s “glorious altruism” isn’t the worst possible thing to look up to, I guess.

Hang on tight, it’s time for Amoeba Adventures #38!

Friends, romans, countrymen – brace yourself – it’s time for Amoeba Adventures #38, the latest issue of the small press comic series I’ve been bravely publishing on and off ever since 1990! Get your FREE download of the digital copy below and learn how to order the super-fancy print edition!

This issue, Ninja Ant has to get a job! But it all goes hilariously wrong when he teams up with our old pal Rambunny to face the unbelievable menace of… well, let’s not spoil everything, shall we? Plus: Prometheus the Protoplasm turns 40 in 2026, here’s a special look back at how it all began!

You can download it right this second to the computing machinery of your choice via the link below:

AMOEBA ADVENTURES #38 [PDF]

Want the limited print edition? As always, they’re a mere US$7.50 to ship anywhere in the world from New Zealand by sending cash to me via PayPal at dirgas@gmail.com. A few remaining print copies of Amoeba Adventures #27 and 31-33 are still available for $5 each, too!

And while I’ve got your attention, if you haven’t already, check out my books on Amazon! Now available are three books by yours truly:

CLIPPINGS: COLLECTED JOURNALISM 1994-2024 is a heaping compendium of the best of my essays, reporting, criticism and memoirs from my so-called career, gathering up material from Mississippi to Oregon to New York to New Zealand. It’s as close to an autobiography as I’ll probably ever write and is all yours as a thick paperback or a groovy e-book!

THE BEST OF AMOEBA ADVENTURES gathers up the best of long out-of-print 1990s Amoeba stories by me with additional art by Max Ink are collected along with bonus rarities and more, including guest pin-ups by Dave Sim, Sergio Aragones, Matt Feazell and Stan Sakai! Collecting material from Amoeba Adventures #1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11-13, 16, 17, 21, 22, 27, Prometheus The Protoplasm #4, Prometheus: Silent Storm; Prometheus Saves The Earth and Amoeba Adventures Fifth Anniversary Special, in a hefty 350-page book available in paperback or hardcover!

AMOEBA ADVENTURES: THE WARMTH OF THE SUN gathers up the first six all-new issues of Amoeba Adventures beginning in 2020! We pick up Prometheus and friends in their first new tales in years to find them dealing with detective mysteries, deadly former foes, impending parenthood and occasional nights at the disco. Oh, and coffee. There’s always coffee. Collecting Amoeba Adventures #28-33.

And if you haven’t please like the Amoeba Adventures by Nik Dirga page on Facebook where, if the algorithm allows anyone to see my posts, I’ll put updates on future comics, links to my non-comics journalism work and more! Thanks as always for reading, amigos!

If it’s a bad day, it’s always a good day for Nine Inch Nails

In an effort to be cool, I watched a fair bit of Coachella streaming on YouTube over the weekend. There’s an awful lot of bands an old geezer like me doesn’t know, to be honest, but there were still faves like David Byrne, Iggy Pop and Wet Leg to check out and I could do it from the couch.

But the performance I’ve seen that most made me wish I was there in the heaving California desert crowds was Nine Inch Noize, the latest incarnation of Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails’ industrial rage. It was an amazing, thunderous show, with Reznor teamed up with electronic producer Boys Noize to remix some of NIN’s classic tunes and give his already-powerful sound a massive boost. It was pure dazzling showmanship with some phenomenal staging, and a reminder of how great Nine Inch Nails can be at their ferocious peak.

Trent Reznor is, inexplicably, somehow 60 years old now, and he’s been a buzzing, relentless part of my musical brain for more than 30 years. But only sometimes.

I have to be in the right mood for Nine Inch Nails, but when I am, there’s nothing else like them. Again and again, ever since I first stumbled upon The Downward Spiral as a jittery college student, they’ve felt like a good way to purge all the frantic energy of feeling powerless. Sure, you can also bash that out to hair metal or the Ramones or Amyl and the Sniffers or whatever your loud furious music of choice is, but for me, a particular unsettled, deeply angry kind of energy finds its best outlet in Reznor’s seething vibe.

I listened to them when thrown around by romantic upheaval in my 20s, during career chaos in my 30s and traumatic moves and departures, and at those stark tipping points in your life triggered by fear like 9/11 or losses like the death of someone you love. These days they feel like the soundtrack to the world’s ongoing enshittification.

Listening to Nine Inch Nails is my primal scream therapy, and it’s a joy to see him still hollering away at Coachella and those big crowds letting it all out yelling “I want to fuck you like an animal” as loud as they can.

Trent’s music has matured, like almost all of us have to in the end, and he’s morphed into a sort of elder statesman of noise. He used to seem pretty scary, in that Marilyn Manson kind of way, but I don’t find him scary any more. I find him relatable. He’s doing the best he can in a world that never quite makes sense. He’s in the Rock ’N Roll Hall of fame, he won an Oscar, for crying out loud, and in recent years a lot of his work has been on moody, throbbing soundtracks and instrumentals. But he can still scream when he wants to.

I dip in and out of NIN, and months might go by between my bouts of listening to them. But when the chaos of the world gets too loud, a rousing run through bangers like The Fragile or With Teeth is just the ticket.

The Coachella 2026 performance came at a time when I wanted cathartic noise, after a tense week when President Disruption nearly Cuba Missile Crisis-ed the world – again – and New Zealand faced yet another harrowing tropical cyclone scare.

And it turns out Nine Inch Nails – I mean Noize, sorry – are putting out an entire album this week. I kind of can’t wait. The more bad days the weird old world throws at us in 2026, the more Trent Reznor I need.

To quote old mate Trent’s tunes, sometimes, he is the perfect drug for me.

Concert review: The Mountain Goats, Auckland, April 10

I’m so damned jealous of John Darnielle.

The Mountain Goats, Darnielle’s band, have been one of my favourites for years, and like all the best artists, I’m kind of astounded at how on earth he does it.

More than 20 albums into his 30-plus year career, the Goats began as John and a guitar and a boombox and super crackly low-fi tunes that turned into earworms. He’s become one of the best songwriters in music, with a knack for painting entire life’s stories into a few short lines and always, a comforting intimacy that makes it feel like he’s singing to you alone. With his sing/shout preacher’s cadence, his voice has an insistent hint of a real-life goat’s bleat combined with the familiar tones of someone you’ve been friends with all your life.

Darnielle turned a youth filled with anger, addiction and abuse and made it art for everyone. He once wrote a novel called Universal Harvester, and that’s kind of what his songs do – they harvest the feelings we all have.

The Mountain Goats always feel like one of those “just for you” bands, so it’s sometimes a little strange to suddenly be in a heaving crowd of strangers singing along to every word.

At their gig at Auckland’s Powerstation Friday night – their first in New Zealand in 16 years – the Mountain Goats reminded me why they’re the chosen soundtrack for all of us battered optimists churned up on the beach by life’s wild waves.

It’s been 18 years, somehow, since I last saw the Mountain Goats, at a packed gig at the now sadly demolished Kings Arms pub. I think I could honestly watch him once a month for the next five years and not feel like I’ve had enough yet.

Of course, they played the “hits” – two of the finest songs he’s ever written, “This Year” and “No Children.” But he also hit on titles like “Dutch Orchestra Blues” from his earliest days, while more recent tunes like the superb “Bleed Out” got extended workouts. The quiet “Cotton” blew up into a jazzy epic, while “The Diaz Brothers” – inspired by Scarface, of course – was a roar of energy. A joking rant about Kiwi soda L&P changing their advertising endeared him to the locals, as did his mention of a visit to patron saint of Kiwi music Chris Knox.

Darnielle has written somewhere well over 500 songs – enough that an entire excellent recent book of his lyrics and essays only covered 365 of them. (This Year: 365 Songs Annotated is one of the best books about the creative process I’ve ever read, highly recommended.)

I’m jealous of him because he’s such a friendly polymath – on his social media he’ll tell you about everything from 14th century literature to Danish heavy metal bands and his albums have taken on wide topics from a concept album about professional wrestling to an album about paganism and the Roman Empire.

But the beauty of the Goats’ work is no matter how dense the subject, Darnielle’s songs are sung with a fierce sincerity that makes them feel universal.

While the “Mountain Goats” have always basically been Darnielle and whoever he plays with, his band are fantastic. Matt Douglas provides some amazing jagged saxophone solos that expand the sound, while powerhouse drummer Jon Wurster is the confident pulse of it all. The duo give Darnielle’s intimate songs a wider screen to play on without sacrificing their tone.

Darnielle is full of contagious good cheer, even when he sings about death, divorce and doomed drug dealers. He’s got one of the best shaggy smiles in the business, and when the moment calls for it can pound his acoustic guitar like he’s Pete Townshend at Woodstock, then turn to moments of shimmering closeness at the drop of a hat.

The biggest highlight for me was the highly obscure “You Were Cool,” which packs a galaxy’s worth of cathartic heartbreak into a few short verse. I’ll admit it – this one had me choking up out of nowhere, in the middle of a crowded room.

But hell, I was also shouting along with everyone else at “This Year” and its addictively defiant chorus – I am going to make it through this year / if it kills me. That’s universal harvesting, right there. That’s the Mountain Goats.

You Were Cool, The Mountain Goats:

[Verse 1]

This is a song with the same four chords I use most of the time

When I’ve got something on my mind and I don’t want to squander the moment

Trying to come up with a better way

To say what I want to say

[Chorus]

People were mean to you

But I always thought you were cool

Clicking down the concrete hallways

In your spiked heels back in high school

[Verse 2]

It’s good to be young, but let’s not kid ourselves

It’s better to pass on through those years and come out the other side

With our hearts still beating

Having stared down demons and come back breathing

[Chorus]

People were mean to you

But I always thought you were cool

Clicking down the concrete hallways

In your spiked heels back in high school

[Verse 3]

You deserved better than you got

Someone’s got to say it sometime, ’cause it’s true

People should have told you you were awesome

Instead of taking advantage of you

I hope you love your life now

Like I love mine

I hope the painful memories only flex their power over you

A little of the time

We held onto hope of better days coming

And when we did, we were right

The last American newspaper I worked for is about to die

I’ve been a journalist for more than 30 years now, and even as I work these days for the website of the national radio station here in New Zealand, a healthy dose of printer’s ink still flows in my veins.

I read today that the last newspaper I worked for in the US before moving to New Zealand almost 20 years ago is ending its print edition this month, “pivoting to digital” entirely as the kids say. The Roseburg, Oregon News-Review dated back almost 160 years. It’s a damned shame, and is surely likely to lead to more of these cursed “news deserts” that are spreading across America.

The current management is trumpeting the announcement as “the news is about to become free,” which these days, probably means it’s going to be overwhelmed by videos, AI-generated “content” slop, clickbait and regurgitated press releases. And of course, they’ve sacked the entire newsroom staff. Good luck with that free news, dudes.

I mourn this, because it doesn’t feel good in an age when the free media is under assault, disinformation is swamping us all, grifting influencers cosplay as journalists and the entire concept of objective truth has slowly crumbled.

The News-Review was a fine ol’ paper, where I worked from 2002 to 2006 as the features editor. We had a great team there – an editor I really looked up to, who offered reliable, smart advice but also welcomed new ideas, encouraged us when we needed it and dressed us down if we (well, me) deserved it. While there was always a lot of coming and going – the average age of most of the 10 or so reporters was probably about 25 – the N-R felt like a “team,” like all good newsrooms do, covering our little corner of rural Oregon down the road from Portland and Eugene. Journos come and go and you sometimes lose touch but I’ve kept up with a surprising number of the team from the News-Review days – they were generally all good sorts.

It was, curiously, the first daily newspaper I’d ever worked on, having mostly done my time at weeklies or semi-weeklies. I loved the news buzz, the hustle to put the paper to bed by 10am or so (we were one of those mostly-gone afternoon rags), the juggling of local priorities from irrigation boards and logging companies with state and global news. Often on the weekends I’d act as the editor for the big Sunday paper, at the helm for breaking stories like Ronald Reagan’s death, the War in Iraq and the Space Shuttle Columbia exploding.

I also wrote a lot of long-form features then that were great practice for the eventual raggedy arc of my so-called career ending up at Radio New Zealand – stories I’m still pretty proud of now, like a profile of the local wildlife park veterinarian, an eccentric Russian painter, or interviewing Alice Cooper as he brought his shock-rock act to town.

Sorry, I won’t be answering any calls at this number any more.

It was a gorgeous place and the town where my wife and I had our child, so Roseburg will always mean something to me, but even then it was also thick with the kind of blinkered conservatism that’s led us firmly into Trump-land, all these years later. The paper’s been bought and sold and staff chipped away over the years since and the paper already cut to barely being printed at all. I’d check in on the website occasionally long after pretty much anyone I knew had left Roseburg, because an old newshound never quite forgets a familiar scent, long after he’s left the country, even.

The News-Review is hardly the first newspaper I worked at to fold, even – the college town free weekly in Mississippi that broke me into journalism withered away ages ago, another small paper in California faded away, even the big old New York City-produced national magazine I worked only publishes occasional special issues these days.

It’s not a lot better here in New Zealand, really – journalists have lost jobs, outlets have dried up. I’m very glad to still be in the industry I’m in and at a place I respect, but I do miss the rumble of the presses at the back end of the building, the painstaking proofreading of printouts of your pages, the clamour and rush of daily print deadlines instead of the perpetual motion machine the news is now.

A newspaper, in its day, provided context and coherence to the swirling world of the day’s news, wrapping it all up in a tidy package with crosswords, Blondie cartoons, Dear Abby, weird classified ads and frequently ridiculous letters to the editor. It was complete, for one day at least. Internet news, as great and useful as it is, somehow still never quite feels like the complete package in the end to me – you just keep scrolling, forever, don’t you? Maybe I’m just a physical media guy to my core.

And for those people in small town Oregon, many of whom probably haven’t read the soon-to-die paper in years and get all their news from their own internet bubbles now – I miss the things they won’t even know they’re missing, in a world without a newspaper.

Ten things I now know about Tasmania

…And so I was off in Tasmania, perched at the hinterlands of Australia, an inverted triangle hanging over the far-flung reaches of Antarctica thousands of kilometres south. If New Zealand feels near the end of the world – and it does, often – Tasmania is the creaking doorway, left ajar in a howling southerly wind.

In my epic quest to one day say I’ve “done” Australia, our southwestern island neighbour was the next step. I am always intrigued by the places on the edge, and hey, there’s a direct flight from Auckland to Hobart three days a week – let’s go, mate! So here’s 10 things I learned about Tasmania:

1. It really is the edge of Australia. Lest we forget, Australia is bloody HUGE, mate – almost as big as the entire continental United States – and Tasmania is about the size of Ireland all by itself. Its geographical isolation across the Bass Strait has led Tasmania to develop its own evolutionary spins on life and a culture that stands out from the rest of Australia. We took a leisurely 10 days or so and still only scratched the surface of what you can see there. Things like…

2. It’s got animals you’ll see hardly anywhere else. You’ll easily run across wallabies and the smaller pademelons, fluttering kookaburras and cockatoos, perhaps a most excellent quoll, but unless you’re patient you may not see rarer things like wombats, platypuses and echidna in the wild – but they are there. And of course, the Tasmanian devil is one of nature’s greatest curiosities – a pudgy dog/pig-looking fella that has one of the powerful bites in the entire mammal kingdom, lives only a few years and yes, just like the cartoon character, they’ll eat about anything to power their speedy metabolism. They’re amazing little buggers and they’re also highly endangered, which leads us to …

3. Unfortunately, you’ll see an awful lot of dead animals. I’ve seen kangaroo roadkill elsewhere in Australia but I’ve never seen quite as much marsupial carnage as I did on the roads of Tasmania – deceased possums, wallabies, wombats and ‘roos dot the highways like road markers, hundreds of them. At night time the roads become an animal highway, and vehicles become murder machines. And then there’s the sad familiar story of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, a fascinating carnivorous marsupial the size of a Labrador that roamed these hills for millennia – until 1936, when the very last one died in a Hobart zoo. You can see its skin in a bittersweet room devoted entirely to the thylacine at the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart, with specimens, rare images and even a few brief snippets of film. What a gorgeous creature it was, until we humans came along.

4. They made their buildings to last, here. Auckland’s got a bad habit of knocking down its historic buildings and so it was a pleasure to see so many sturdy stone buildings all around Tasmania, from downtown Hobart to wee towns in the middle of nowhere. Even a mid-size town like Launceston boasts at least a half-dozen amazing ornate stone churches more than a century old.

5. They do darned good bookstores. I brought home a tidy pile of Tasmanian and Australian history books to add to my library, and for a wee island Tasmanian nonfiction and literature are pretty booming genres. Particular shout-outs to the awesomely named Cracked And Spineless and Fullers in Hobart, Petrarch’s Bookshop in Launceston and my favourite, The Book Cellar in the historic Midlands village Campbell Town, built in the historic convict cellars of an 1830s inn. It’s like a dungeon but full of books!

6. Tasmania was a place of racial genocide, and it knows that. The dire fate of the Aboriginal Tasmanian nations is a black mark on history, and to its credit, Tasmania acknowledges that early settlers basically set out to exterminate them by suppression, relocation and flat-out massacres. Truganini, for years called the “last” Tasmanian (she was a full-blooded Tasmanian and quite possibly the last of that time), has a moving memorial on her native Bruny Island that looks out over the sea. Today’s descendants of the original Aborigines are working hard to keep the culture alive, but for many years, the native people were treated as little more than pests to be wiped out. The highly recommended Truganini: Journey Through The Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus digs deep into this dark time, and while it’s not exactly comforting reading, it’s history that must be remembered.

7. Tasmania doesn’t shy away from that bleak history. For much of its recent history, this gorgeous island was a place of pain – the fate of the indigenous as mentioned above, and its claim to fame as one of the main dumping points of convict transportation, where British criminals – even children – were shipped around the world to exile in Hobart and the rest of Australia. In Tasmania, one of the bleakest spots you could be sent was to Macquarie Harbour on the far west coast – the arse end of the arse end of the world in those days – while a bit later on Port Arthur was turned into a virtual convict city. The ruins of Port Arthur stand today and are a haunting kind of convict theme park – drawing tourists from all over the world, and the silent bricks and ruins feel like they pulse with the despair of the past. Australia’s worst gun massacre also happened in Port Arthur in 1996. There’s no whitewashing of all the bad things that have happened in Tasmania in the museums and sites we visited, and at a time when objective truth feels slippery, there is some cold comfort in that.

8. It was where the explorers came to find the end of the world. One single spot, Adventure Bay, boasted visits from Abel Tasman, Captain Cook, William Bligh, Bruni D’Entrecasteaux and more during the 1600s and 1700s. A lot of bad stuff happened as a result of the exploration days, yes, but I still remain fascinated by the voyages they took, centuries ago.

9. There’s a world of landscapes in Tasmania. We only got to some of the island – much of the west and north will have to wait for the next trip – but it’s as rich a landscape as the South Island of New Zealand, with sweeping farmland, dense rain forest, gorgeous beaches and rocky monoliths all tossed together. Nothing quite captures the contrasts like Hobart’s Mount Wellington or kunanyi, which rises a sharp 1200+m above sea level to tower over the harbour town – a pretty quick drive up it takes you into pure alpine country, capped off by a huge plateau summit with dolerite columns swelling up everywhere like some Martian landscape.

10. Big trees, big dreams. I love a big tree. Towering stands of eucalyptus up to 90m (300+ feet) tall can easily be found, and hidden in the bush is Australia’s tallest tree, Centurion, 100 metres tall. You can’t go wrong with a big tree, no matter how weird the rest of the world might seem these days.

Somehow, Prometheus the Protoplasm turns 40 years old today

From the very first Prometheus strip, March 11, 1986

“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm.” – Robert Redford

I’m not entirely sure about when the very first time I drew Prometheus the Protoplasm was, but the first proper cartoon I signed and dated was on March 11, 1986. Somehow, that’s 40 years ago today, and I’m still telling his stories in Amoeba Adventures well into the 21st century. Weird, eh?

I’m kind of big on anniversaries, maybe because they feel like a concrete way to mark the inexorable, annoyingly quick passage of time.

The first very silly Prometheus the Protoplasm cartoon was a weird parody stew of anti-communism propaganda that was heavily influenced by newspaper strips like Bloom County, Doonesbury and Dan O’Neill’s Odd Bodkins in its attempts by a pimple-plagued 14-year-old to appear edgy. I drew it in a science class – and many of the earliest Prometheus comics were done like that, in the margins of classes I should’ve been paying attention to.

But comics were my school, too, and so I drew things like the first few very rough Prometheus comic strips and full comic stories (published for the first and only time in the digital Amoeba Adventures Archive back in 2020 if you’re keen to look it up), scribbled mildly PG-13 comics in notes to my friends, experimenting by jamming on weird diversions like a Prometheus-meets-Snoopy comic, Prometheus meeting the Beatles and a never-finished horror tale called “A Protoplasm on Elm Street.”

Eventually, though, an actual character and stories started to take shape with this oddball Prometheus – who basically, with his fluid shape and bobbing eyeballs, was the only thing I could easily draw at the time. Prometheus became a bit of an alter-ego for me, insecure, lacking confidence, but hoping he could be better. Other characters started to pop up, too, all fragments of who I wanted to be – swaggering Rambunny, brainy Spif, hilarious Ninja Ant and wise Karate Kactus.

From late 1986 to 1989 I whacked out six issues of a Prometheus comic that nobody other than me and a couple other people ever really read, a rambling narrative that began with unbearably primitive art and ended with slightly less primitive art that ripped off a lot from the Marvel and DC comics of the mid-1980s. But I kept wanting to do more, to do “real comic books” somehow with my limited talents.

Prometheus became more than a diversion between classes when I entered college and I started drawing a new comic called Amoeba Adventures, putting out the first issue around November 1990. I was a freshman in Mississippi on the other side of the country from my friends and used my comic as a kind of pen-pal bait to fervently keep in touch with the past.

I soon discovered the great bustling small press fanzine scene of the 1990s and somehow, people actually wanted to read my weird comics. Amoeba Adventures and Prometheus became something far more than just a series of doodles – sure, small fish indeed in the wider comics world, but to me, it was a revelation to actually have fans and readers following Prometheus as his world gradually became more and more complex.

The great artist Max Ink joined me for a dozen or so issues of Amoeba Adventures and made it all look better than I could ever imagine. Twenty-seven issues of Amoeba Adventures and another dozen or so spin-offs and side tales all came out by 1998. Prometheus comics won acclaim and awards on the small press scene, “big” comic creators like the legendary Will Eisner, Dave Sim and Sergio Aragones read them and offered a little uplifting praise, and it was a remarkable time.

The rest is painfully ordinary, probably – by 1998, burned out and getting busier in the so-called “real world” with my journalism day job, leaving my twenties behind and starting a family and all that jazz, I put my pens down and Prometheus went dormant for more than 20 years, until the gaping void and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic made me pick it all up again in 2020, republishing all the old stuff online, putting out a couple of actual real-life book collections over on Amazon and putting out 11 issues now of “new” Prometheus adventures.

A part of me is still that 14-year-old kid, scratching away on his notebook paper when he probably should’ve been paying attention to other things. I still marvel, sometimes, that all the great experiences I’ve had because of Prometheus – friends I’ve made, stories I’ve gotten to tell – stemmed from those first comics, 40 years ago now.

It was strangely easy, it turned out, to return to Prometheus as a middle-aged dude. The same uncertain, hopeful amoeba I drew all those years ago was there, like me, a bit more battered and slightly wiser from everything that happens in a lifetime. I’ve loved drawing a more “mature” Prometheus and his cast of friends, his unlikely love affair with the human superhero Dawn and his changing voice in a changing world. My art skills will never be magnificent but at least I’m better able to capture the stories in my head than 14-year-old me once did.

In recent years it feels like I’m finally finishing the story I began as a gawky teen, all those years ago. I sure appreciate everyone who’s ever read one of my silly Prometheus comics, and had a few words to say about them. You never know when a doodle might change the course of your life, a little bit.

From the upcoming Amoeba Adventures #38, here before you know it!

The Bride and why I love all the Frankenstein’s monsters

Frankenstein’s Monster is dead, but he’ll also really never die.

I love it when a character hits the cultural level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, and can be endlessly reinvented for new eras.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride is the latest reimagining of the bones of Mary Shelley’s tale, a wild, anarchic creation myth and love story. It’s as loose and freaky as major Hollywood productions ever get these days, and while it’s sure to be divisive, I kind of loved it.

Very loosely retelling the events of Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930s, Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley gives a delightfully unhinged performance as a new “Bride” to Christian Bale’s wounded and lonesome Frankenstein’s monster. The Bride at times feels as rough and patched together as the monster himself, but that’s what charmed me – it tells something new by stitching together ghostly possession, a screwball musical, a blood-spattered romance and a Bonnie and Clyde-style violent lovers on the run arc.

The monster and his bride tear through polite society, and while the plot is sprawling and doesn’t always add up, terrific turns by Bale, Buckley and Annette Bening as this movie’s “mad doctor” work well. A truly insane homage dance number to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is the most audaciously strange scene I’ve seen so far this year. This one’s for the sickos, and I’m proud to be among them.

I’m here for all the Frankensteins, to be honest, right on down to campy ‘60s kaiju romp Frankenstein Conquers The World and the ultra-sleazy Frankenhooker.

There remains endless potential in the story of man creating life, and how it (usually) all goes horribly wrong.

We’re only a few months from the last great Frankenstein movie, Guillermo Del Toro’s Gothic Oscar-nominated epic of an adaptation of Shelley’s novel with a committed and curiously sexy performance by Jacob Elordi as the monster. That one is as overwrought and passionate as The Bride, but in a completely different way. Those great lonesome Arctic chase sequences – always my favourite part of the original novel – sparkle on the big screen.

A rough Google estimate tells me there’s been close to 500 spins on the Frankenstein story. Boris Karloff set the standard, of course, and his performance, closing in on a century ago now, remains the template for investing the monster with both humanity and menace. Christopher Lee played the creature as a hurt, abused animal, with melting-egg makeup that seemed startlingly grotesque in 1957’s Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein – then followed by a half-dozen more Hammer movies that totally reimagined the creature’s story each time, even as a woman and once as a New Zealand wrestler with the world’s worst makeup job.

Every era has its Frankenstein – splattery gore from Andy Warhol in the ‘70s, kid-friendly spoofs like The Monster Squad in the 1980s, bombastic excess like Kenneth Branagh’s 1990s take. I like the weirder angles, like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Bound from 1990 that throws time travel and metafiction into the mix.

I’m even fascinated by the schlocky look of 1910’s Frankenstein by Edison Studios, the first adaptation of the creature’s story done in a mere 16-minute silent film, with Charles Stanton Ogle as a shaggy, deformed monster that’s memorably bizarre. A mere 116 years old now, it’s more of a curio than a successful film, but it sets the template for many a Frankenstein story in the century-plus since.

And that doesn’t even get into the non-film realms, like DC Comics turning Frankenstein’s monster into a kind of immortal holy warrior, queer fiction imaginings like Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and the novel and movie of Gods And Monsters, or modern-day parables like Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.

The Bride builds on all these flocks of Frankensteins, and Gyllenhaal’s weird delight of a film embraces the shimmering fluid identities of the monsters – her romantic duo are alternately enraged and peaceful, needy and fiercely independent. I expect The Bride is the kind of movie a lot of people will hate, and it’s certainly not flawless, but it’s brave in its own weird way.

For a book that came out 208 years ago, Shelley’s Frankenstein is still remarkably futile ground for birthing all kinds of stories about mankind’s hopes and dreams, and nightmares.

That time the Ramones became unlikely teen movie sex symbols

You know, I love the Ramones a little more every day, and their molten-punk purity of just bashing out pop tunes as fast they could. They weren’t fancy – they were anything but – but they hit on some elemental force that they turned into a 20-plus year career.

Back in 1979, legendary producer Roger Corman and director Allan Arkush somehow thought the Ramones would be the perfect band to anchor a classic teenage rebellion musical with a warped underground edge. Rock ’n’ Roll High School is a campy screwball delight even now, a time capsule of leotards and neon fashion in that cusp of an era where disco, punk and new wave all scrambled for cultural relevance.

PJ Soles is Riff Randell, a perky punk fan with a heart of gold who’s the Ramones’ biggest fan, while her best friend Kate is a nerdy good girl with a crush on football player Tom. When the no-nonsense new Principal Togar (the wonderful Mary Woronov, veteran of Andy Warhol movies and much more) comes into town, it all sets up your classic clash between teens and authority.

It’s a wonderfully sincere little punk rock movie, with Soles’ chipper enthusiasm jostling with Woronov’s sexy dominatrix vibe. It lacks the meanness of a lot of teen movies (for comparison, I watched 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds for the first time in decades the other day, and hoo boy that hasn’t aged well). Even the handsome football jock in this movie is kind of a decent guy, despite being an utter horndog. The kids in this movie mostly look like real kids rather than 30-year-old cosplayers, and it’s filled with great character actors like Clint Howard and Paul Bartel’s stiff music teacher who, of course, loosens up and gets down with the punkers.

And when the Ramones rock into town, they’re like a blast of sleazy adult energy that still manages to feel cartoony.

One of the beauties of Rock ’N’ Roll High School is just how weird the Ramones are on screen. They don’t appear until around halfway into the movie, riding down the street in a groovy Ramones-mobile and looking like they just fell out of a comic book, a leather-clad blast of menacing charm.

The Ramones seem rather uncomfortable shoehorned into this teen comedy, and yet, it all works – they’re an intrusion from another world, and you can’t take your eyes off them. Joey, in particular, was all awkward angles and bulbous features covered by a mane of hair and those ever-present dark glasses, and he looked a bit like a scribbled rough draft of a rock star come to life.

The movie’s best scene is a barely-disguised masturbatory fantasy by PJ Soles of the Ramones playing in her bedroom, capped with Dee Dee revealed to be playing in her shower! I love the darned Ramones, but picturing them as Elvis-type sex symbols feels like a stretch. Did they ever even take off those leather jackets, anyway?

The Ramones couldn’t really act worth a lick – most of them barely have lines in the movie, and when they do they sound like the raw amateurs they were at doing anything other than punk rock. A highlight of the film is simply watching them in concert blasting through numbers like “Blitzkreig Bop,” “Teenage Lobotomy” and “Pinhead” and the title song.

In real life, they were troubled, of course – only one of the band made it past his early 50s, and Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy are all long gone now. The Ramones blazed through the culture like one of their songs, and I’ll always regret that I never saw them live.

By the time the Ramones show up at the high school and tear it all up in a furnace of punk petulance and a literal explosion, it’s cathartic as hell, even if you didn’t mind high school all that much. Take that, Principal Togar and all the jerky fascist authority figures in this world who think they know what’s better for everybody else. (Um, I might just be projecting about life in the year 2026, a little…)

Amusingly, the behind-the-scenes on the blu-ray talks about how the movie almost came to star other bands – such as Van Halen or Devo (can you imagine?).

Yet it’s the Ramones, who got so much out of a handful of chords and lyrics about freaks and fumbling love and sniffing glue, who were the perfect fit for this subversive take on teen musicals. Their presence captures the alchemic power a great rock song can have in your life, the way it feels like it blows down the doors of your boring reality and hurls open the doors of infinite potential. Yeah, even if they’re just singing about how Sheena is a punk rocker.

As both a time capsule and a kind of warped Bizarro version of so many other far worse rock ’n’ roll teen movies, Rock ’N’ Roll High School has strangely endured, closing in on 50 years now. It’s a blast of pure weird joy that makes the world feel a little bit better every time I watch it. Gabba gabba hey!

King Hell Heroica: Rick Veitch’s insane psychedelic superhero epic

One of the wildest superhero narratives in comics is nearing its final act, after 36 years.

Comics legend Rick Veitch has been slowly unfolding his grand statement “The King Hell Heroica” in staggered instalments since 1990, starting with the dark satire Bratpack. The big overall story came to a halt back in the mid-1990s with only part of it done, but for the last few years Veitch has been picking it up and telling it exactly the way he’s always wanted to. There’s nothing else quite like it out there in superhero-land.

I’ve been a fan of Veitch’s work since his collaborations with Alan Moore and solo work on Swamp Thing (now also getting a well-earned revival of sorts). Veitch’s background was in underground comics and his demented, expressive cartooning always carried a rough-hewn, tactile presence.

His filthy and funny Cold War superhero apocalypse The One for Marvel’s Epic Comics line blew my fragile little mind when it hit stands back in 1985. The One was a warm-up of sorts for the King Hell Heroica, which kicked off when Veitch’s still-boundary pushing miniseries Bratpack emerged in 1990. Bratpack didn’t hold back in its dark portrait of abused, wasted superhero sidekicks, and superheroes who were drug addicts, pedophiles and neo-Nazis. It’s a fantastic read that gets far sleazier and stranger than books like The Dark Knight Returns ever did.

Fittingly, for this eccentric saga, it all started off with Bratpack actually being Volume 4 of 5 (shades of George Lucas!). Veitch first returned to the King Hell Heroica with 1992’s The Maximortal miniseries (which turned out to be Volume 1!), which dove into the Superman-esque mystery hero True-Man whose presence haunted Bratpack. For the first time we really started to see Veitch was doing something bigger than just naughty dark parodies of superheroes.

Unfortunately, The Maximortal miniseries then ended the story for years; even though Veitch laid out a complex 5-book plan, it seemed it would never be finished. But he brought it all back starting in 2017 or so, and it’s been remarkable watching this old narrative turn into something that’s still very relevant in our conspiracy-addled weird modern world.

I can get behind the idea of returning to a comics narrative after a decade-long break myself, and Veitch has been hitting it out the park. He has been releasing chapters from Volumes 2 and 3 in nifty little 100-page annual print-on-demand editions, and is now just one book away from finishing them. Then there’s just the final volume of this long-gestating saga, Volume 5: Death of the Maximortal. In keeping with the timey-wimey weirdness of this tangled project, the first two chapters of Volume 5 were actually released as single comic issues as Bratpack/Maximortal Super Special way back in 1996 – BEFORE books 2 and 3 but after books 1 and 4. Lost yet?

Yeah, it’s confusing, but the cool thing is, as Veitch fills in the gaps of his magnum opus, it’s all starting to make sense – in a wonderfully shaggy-dog fashion, that is.

Veitch gladly embraces his underground roots with a bawdy, sometimes X-rated story that outdoes genre touchstones like Watchmen and The Boys in its sheer mad invention – there’s acrobatic sex with supermen, mass-murdering children and a big plotline involving mind-controlling fecal matter (!).

The “new” chapters Veitch has been unfolding have a different feel than Bratpack, with his art – mostly done digitally now – smoother and more polished, and the rawer, more energetic style of his earlier comics is missed a little bit. But the story has also broadened out to include dozens of cameos by actual historical and fictional figures – hello, Mad Men’s Don Draper! – and become a surreal, sustained comic romp.

It’s become a tangled secret history conspiracy story of America’s hidden superhero cold war, and Veitch wraps in everyone from Jack Kirby to Jack Kennedy to Robert Oppenheimer to Muhammad Ali and underground comics legend S. Clay Wilson in his narrative. I’m a sucker for alternative histories and love how he’s tied all kinds of flashpoints in American history to the influence of True-Man.

Despite hundreds of pages about him in the nearly completed first four books of the Heroica, True-Man himself remains an alien enigma – a blank slate template manipulated by us messy humans. While the King Hell Heroica narrative is full of ultraviolence and corrupt heroics, Veitch is also striving to say something profound about the spiritual nature of what a superhero might really represent for humanity.

The King Hell Heroica has been an incomplete puzzle for decades now, and I’m sure it’s changed some from what it was originally going to be way back in 1990 – Bratpack was somewhat rewritten and the ending changed after the original comics came out, for instance. “What’s great about print on demand is that it allows me to pursue my muse without having to think about any market at all,” Veitch said in an interview.

There is a risk it may all come apart in the last few hundred pages, of course – we’re just starting to see the seeds of the Bratpack cast of utterly debauched “superheroes” and their sidekicks enter the story, and the mystery of what exactly the aliens that kicked off the whole shebang are remains pretty opaque. It’s likely to get very meta, and very weird, knowing Veitch.

But to be honest, cold hard sense isn’t necessarily what I’m here for with King Hell Heroica. It’s a vibe that marries the irreverent curiosity of underground psychedelia with a thought-provoking exploration into the very idea of what superheroes mean.

Veitch is still an underground cartoonist at heart. Without a big publisher backing him or restricting him and banging away on his life’s work well into his 70s, Veitch is creating something not quite like anything else in the crowded world of edgy superhero deconstructionism.

I hope when it’s all completed and can be read straight through – maybe in the next year or two – comics critics will look back at what Rick Veitch has been trying to say these last 35+ years and give the King Hell Heroica the attention it deserves. It’s a wild, wild ride.