Hello, friends! The brand new issue of Amoeba Adventures is now here as a FREE PDF download just for you! Amoeba Adventures #36: ‘Evolution’ is the second part of “The Crane Flies High” three-part story that promises to change everything for Prometheus and pals.
It’s just the latest chapter in this small-press comic I’ve somehow been putting out on and off for 35 years!
You can download it completely free right here at the link below!
Want the limited print edition? 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. Print copies of Amoeba Adventures #27 and 31-33 are available for $5 each and if you missed an issue, #34 and #35 are $5 each if you order the new issue as well!
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 permits, I’ll put updates on future comics, links to my non-comics journalism work and more!
Gaze with me back into the misty reaches of time to a year called 2005, when I was thinking of buying a fancy device called an iPod, where we all thought George W Bush was the worst President ever, the pope had just died and Christian Bale debuted a gritty new take on Batman. We’re at least two Batmans along now on the sliding scale of time, but everything old is new again, ain’t it?
I mark 2005 as just about the time when I got a little less intensely involved in following all the hip cool new music trends out there – I’d just had a kid, which instantly makes you less cool, and the internet hadn’t quite exploded into a tsunami of content no one person can absorb. While I still try to keep up with what goes on for the youths, I’m well aware I’m a middle-aged white dude and the tastemakers aren’t me.
Yet, 20 years on, it feels like 2005 was a very good year for the bustling world of indie rock and music – acts like Queens of the Stone Age and Fiona Apple built on their earlier success, quirky pop music was having a moment and singer-songwriters were blazing some new ground with the work of Mountain Goats and Sufjan Stevens.
So, here’s my 10 fave records to pull up on the ol’ iPod from 2005, and while popular music is always an ever-moving target, many of these songs still feel pretty vital today in our increasingly fractured world.
ANOHNI (as Antony and the Johnsons), I Am A Bird Now– The soaring voice of the transgender musician now known as Anohni is one of the most evocative in music, and this heartbreaking album by her earlier band is still dazzling chamber pop, rich with love and loss.
Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine – Apple has been determined to follow her own muse, and this album saw her truly embracing her own vision after her earlier flirtations with MTV stardom. Filled with confidence, she sets out her own jazz-influenced territory, channeling influences from Joni Mitchell to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and dares us to take it all in.
LCD Soundsystem, self-titled – James Murphy’s dance-rock project zipped through the culture like a comet but their first album remains their best, combining hipster self-parody in “Losing My Edge” with joyful anthems like “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” The arch coolness of their work would eventually lose its novelty, but man, I was there, at the start of it.
Mountain Goats, Sunset Tree – For “This Year” alone, this album deserves a slot in the 2005 pantheon. John Darnielle’s fragile, gorgeous songs delve into his abusive childhood, but makes it a universal concept album about powerlessness, hope and gathering the strength to move on.
New Pornographers, Twin Cinema– This all-star group of indie musicians with a kind of terrible name includes Neko Case, AC Newman and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar crafting wonderful power-pop. This is their finest set, which plays like a greatest hits collection for a band you’ve never heard before – an upbeat, melodic group of songs that bounces comfortably between each of the members’ distinctive voices.
Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins– The loosely defined Elephant 6 Collective of psychedelic pop bands had a moment, and of Montreal was always my favourite of them – eccentric, inventive swirling sounds filled with hooks. Like a lot of bands of the time they were insanely prolific and not always great at quality control, but the one-two punch of The Sunlandic Twins and 2007’s Hissing Fauna were their finest hour, with frontman Kevin Barnes’ keen, chameleon voice guiding you down his own very peculiar musical highways.
The Phoenix Foundation, Pegasus– This New Zealand band’s gorgeous melancholy came together nicely in their second album for a series of atmospheric, wandering songs that feel laidback, yet tense with subtext. It gets more and more rewarding with each listen.
Queens of the Stone Age, Lullabies to Paralyze– I sometimes feel like QotSA are the last great rock band, left from a time when stoners ruled the earth. Their pounding desert rock coalesces here into a pounding haze of riffs that broods and pummels away. If I had long hair still, I’d be headbanging to this one, which still stands out in Josh Homme’s stellar career.
Spoon, Gimme Fiction– Spoon never quite became the big name they deserved to be, as alternative rock faded from the zeitgeist, but their attitude-drenched sound had a delicious energy, and this album, packed with swaggering nuggets like “I Turn My Camera On” and “Sister Jack”, holds up well.
Sufjan Stevens, Illinois– Stevens’ voice, always so delicate, takes us on a concept album through the American midwest, but his ultimate subject is always the fragile human heart. Layering on orchestras, show tunes, baroque pop and gentle ballads, it’s a remarkable album that feels like it covers more than just one state, but the promise and peril of America itself in its songs. It may be 20 years old now, but it’s still pretty timeless stuff.
Once upon a time, when I was a young card-carrying Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe-reading fanboy, I could’ve told you every single superhero who had been a member of the Avengers.
These days, pretty much every Marvel character other than Aunt May has been an Avenger (and she might’ve been, for all I know) and there’s been regular Avengers, Secret Avengers, Space Avengers, Young Avengers, X-Men Avengers and oh, so many more.
But 40 years ago, the very first Avengers spin-off team took off in their own ongoing title. The West Coast Avengers debuted in 1984 in a miniseries, and in mid-1985 their own 102-issue run began.
And man, I was a West Coast Avengers fanboy from the start. The idea of spin-offs of a superhero team was a novelty then, and best of all, these Avengers lived in California. Hey, I lived in California, too! It’s a common complaint that 95% of DC and Marvel superheroes seem to live in New York or elsewhere on America’s East Coast. West Coast Avengers was a rarity – a reminder that the rest of the country existed. Sure, it was set in a laid-back Hollywood version of the Marvel Universe, but it still was somewhere I’d actually been.
There’s something about the West Coast Avengers that has lured a cultish fandom ever since – and I like to think it’s because it was almost always a team of underdogs, of B-listers and troubled superfolk who had something to prove. It’s a lot harder to be underdogs when Captain America and Thor are running around like on the main Avengers team.
The team was originally led by charming mook Hawkeye and his new bride Mockingbird, self-doubting hero Wonder Man, twitchy cat-woman Tigra and Iron Man at his most disheveled. Later on, more flawed heroes joined up – former Ant-Man Hank Pym, desperately needing redemption; arrogant Captain America substitute the USAgent, and the poster child for superhero mental issues, Moon Knight.
Hawkeye, to me, is one of the main disappointments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The comics character has always been a bit of a ratbag, arguing with Captain America, getting into punch-ups with teammates and always pushing back against authority. Nothing against Jeremy Renner, who did what he could, but reimagining him as a kind of stoic secret agent married with children took away Hawkeye’s bratty appeal. Part of the novelty of West Coast Avengers was finding this character – who literally spent years telling others how to run the Avengers – put in a position of power for the first time. Hawkeye was a loveable jerk, and his struggles in the top job gave West Coast Avengers an edge the more polished main Avengers team lacked.
Superheroes had been arguing and had their issues for a while – that was Marvel’s whole point of difference, really – but the struggles of the West Coast Avengers still stood out. You had Tigra battling with her feline side, Iron Man being filled in for by future War Machine James Rhodes due to Tony Stark’s alcoholism, or Wonder Man’s endless fear of death. (Don’t worry – Wonder Man’s been killed several times since. It’s really the main thing he’s remembered for.)
WCA was written in the early years by Steve Engelhart, a veteran Avengers writer who could sometimes be workmanlike, but had a nice eye for character and soap opera melodrama. Dialogue was sometimes cringe, but that kind of fit in with this team of second-chancers. And for ‘80s mainstream comics, Englehart pushed at boundaries, tackling Hank Pym’s attempted suicide, or in a particularly raw storyline, Mockingbird being sexually assaulted. The execution could be awkward, viewed 40 years on, but the heart was there.
The two best eras of West Coast Avengers were #17-24’s “Lost In Space-Time,” a sprawling classic time-travel epic that split the team all through Marvel history and had an unpredictable novelty to it all, and John Byrne’s shortened stint as writer/artist from #42-57.
After the time-travel epic, the title began to fall into aimlessness, and then superstar Byrne suddenly came along and amped up the excitement. Byrne was a bulldozer – he tore apart the Vision and Scarlet Witch’s amiable marriage and it’s never actually been the same since, and he abruptly left the book in the middle of a storyline (also one of Byrne’s bulldozer skills). But for a year or so there he made West Coast Avengers stylishly cool and energetic, with his dynamic, chunky art the best the series ever had.
After Byrne left with #57, it was a long slow slide down for West Coast Avengers. Changing the title around #50 to the more generic Avengers West Coast was a sign. There were some terrible fill-in issues, including one issue which killed off several characters only to go with the hokey “it was all a dream” ending, which I still remember as one of the worst comics I ever read. Journeyman Roy Thomas took over writing and there were a few good moments, but bores like Spider-Woman (the second, painfully bland one) and Living Lightning added little to the team, all those 1990s endless crossovers started seeping in, and some diabolical 1990s Image-style artwork erased any attempt for the book to actually look like it was set in California.
West Coast Avengers died at #102, long after I stopped reading it regularly, and there was a brief oh-so-‘90s “extreme” attempt to keep some of the group going called Force Works that is just plain awful. There’s been a couple of brief revivals of the book in years since that never understand its fundamental appeal or are too gimmicky.
But for a while there, the West Coast Avengers were good comics fun. I’d never say it was another Watchmen or anything, but it took the age-old dream of going to California to reinvent yourself and gave us a bunch of second-tier superheroes grooving away under that endless sunshine.
They may not have been the best Avengers, but they were my Avengers.
There’s an impending natural disaster. There’s two countries going to war. There’s a rich, arrogant billionaire tech bro who wants to rule the world. This sounds like a job for Superman!
Director James Gunn’s new reboot of Superman brings some much-needed compassion and good humour back to the Kryptonian superhero after director Zach Snyder’s overly grim approach to the character in The Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman.
Forget the same Super-origins we’ve all already seen before – baby rocketed away from dying planet, growing up on a farm in the Kansas wheat fields, yadda yadda – Gunn drops us immediately into the middle of the action with a story that starts at full tilt and rarely lets up for two hours. This colourful, pleasantly weird epic is just unpredictable and refreshing enough to stand out from the sea of superhero content.
Oh, and there’s a dog – a very good boy by the name of Krypto who very nearly steals the movie right from under Superman’s cape.
It’s a tangled plot that starts out with the aftermath of Superman (David Corenswet) attempting to stop a war and spins into a broader tale of whether this alien immigrant from another world can truly be trusted. On-and-off girlfriend Lois Lane (a fierce and funny Rachel Brosnahan) is trying to figure out their relationship, while scheming Lex Luthor (a terrific scowling Nicholas Hoult) has gathered some bad guys and sets in motion a plan that aims to defeat Superman once and for all.
Gunn had already made a splash on the comics movie scene with his quirky Guardians Of The Galaxy trilogy for Marvel and his giddily gory and over-the-top The Suicide Squad. He impressed DC Comics so much they hired him to shepherd their whole rebooted universe of screen projects, in a course correction after movies like Justice League and The Flash underperformed.
The 2025 Superman is a comic book movie that embraces a fundamentally goodhearted view of the world, no matter how many terrible things happen, and understands what makes Superman work. Corenswet makes a sturdy, likeable Superman, whose fundamental guiding principle is helping others. He’s all about the art of being kind, while Luthor’s preening ego only cares about envy, power and control.
Gunn channels some of the charming energy of Christopher Reeve’s seminal 1970s and ‘80s Superman films, especially with repeated riffs on that iconic John Williams theme music – still the best superhero movie score of all time. He’s not afraid to get goofy, and embrace the colourful eccentricity of the original comic books.
Fans who think comic movies should always be super-serious and “realistic” may be turned off by Superman, but a plot that features robot sidekicks, shapeshifting element men and shimmering cosmic scenery feels truer to the wild world of the original Superman comics. A few years ago having that super-dog Krypto in a movie would’ve been seen as campy. These days, it feels like a welcome relief. Why can’t a dog be a superhero, anyway?
Superman sets up yet another cinematic universe, but there’s a deft touch to the way Gunn introduces a pile of other characters from ratbag Green Lantern Guy Gardner (a hilarious Nathan Fillion) to steely Mr Terrific. By avoiding the well-worn origin stories here this universe feels a bit more lived in. Comics fanboys will be delighted to see even characters like reporter Jimmy Olsen (a fun Skyler Gisondo) get a moment to shine.
Still, Superman is, intentionally, rather overstuffed. Sometimes Gunn threatens to lose control of the narrative, and a few characters get short shrift – I would’ve loved to see a little more depth to Corenswet’s Clark Kent or some of his Daily Planet co-workers. Yet most of the dangling pieces come together nicely in an action-packed conclusion that features plenty of city-smashing chaos without the nihilistic undertones to it all that 2013’s Man Of Steel had.
Most importantly, the “man” in Superman is key here. Too many Superman movies starting with 2006’s misfire Superman Returns have focused on the melancholy godlike figure soaring above it all, forever apart from the rest of us. Corenswet’s relaxed, genial Superman bleeds a lot and makes mistakes, while never losing his cheery optimism for long.
This is the first Superman movie since 1981’s Superman II I haven’t felt a vague sense of disappointment with over compromises or inept plot decisions.
Of course, the usual outrage merchants online are already banging on about how Superman has apparently gone “woke,” as if he hasn’t been fighting bullies and haters for the past 80-plus years. Sincerity is a much better superpower than cynicism, isn’t it?
For a while, Superman’s reputation has suffered in comparison to edgy heroes like Wolverine, Deadpool or Batman. Is Superman still cool? Sure, he may be a little corny, a little idealistic, but he also refuses to back down and hangs out with an awesome dog.
I know which hero I’d rather have in the real world any day of the week.
*This review appears in a slightly different form over at my day job at Radio New Zealand!
Golly, but I’ve been busy writing everywhere but this blog lately.
I’ve been doing a lot more assorted fact-checking and explaining work for cash money so it’s time for another roundup of stuff what I wrote:
Just in time for the hopefully good new movie opening this week, I did a recap for Radio New Zealand on Superman’s best (and not so best) moments on screen to date and some comics recommendations!
Over at AAP FactCheck, I did a deep dive into the disturbing and increasingly surreal world of bizarre AI slop infesting your social media feeds. The “conjoined twins celebrity scam” posts are the ones that finally broke my brain for good, I reckon:
And finally pivoting back again to the murky world of AI and how it’s slowly eroding all that is fair and decent on social media, here’s another explainer:
For a long time, Bruce Springsteen was seen as American as apple pie and waving flags – with all the good and bad that entails.
I considered myself too cool for Bruce for an awful long time, and it was really only after I moved to New Zealand nearly 20 years ago that I started to get what he was really all about.
The thing is, I came of age when Bruce was in peak “Born In The USA” stardom, a swaggering figure in tight blue jeans who felt, well, kind of cheesy during a time when I was more into the sexy pulses of Prince or the inescapable Michael Jackson (yes, I have regrets there). Springsteen, somehow, felt like dad rock to me.
The problem was, Born In The USA the album and song did too well, and Springsteen’s image got solidified in that early MTV age as the all-American troubadour dancing in front of an American flag, no matter how much his lyrics indicated otherwise. Springsteen hit that rare peak stardom when what the entertainer is actually singing about matters less than their place as a cultural signifier, where who they are is less important than what they represent.
It’s amazing that 40+ years on, people still mishear “Born In The USA” as some swaggering anthem of Yankee superiority. Heck, I did too for way too long.
With “Born In The USA,” all many people heard is the chorus, without realising how much of a sad hopeful wail it was. It’s about American dreams and the darkness behind them. Heck, how could a song with lyrics like “Got in a little hometown jam / So they put a rifle in my hand / Sent me off to a foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man” ever be interpreted as some patriotic anthem?
But in America, image – and surface – is everything.
I wouldn’t say I disliked Bruce, but just felt he was a little uncool for a hip young fellow to be listening to as I delved into Depeche Mode and The Cure fandom. His work is very short on ironic detachment and long on sincerity – virtues I value more now than I once did. I did like the spooky atmospherics of “Tunnel of Love,” or the nifty twang he gave to the chorus on “Lucky Town,” and the very first time I finally heard “The River,” I realised Springsteen was a writer who could sum up an awful lot in a few short verses:
“Now all them things that seemed so important / Well, mister, they vanished right into the air / Now I just act like I don’t remember / And Mary acts like she don’t care”
Springsteen’s work has always been about speaking truth and he continues to do so to this day, blasting the current man in the White House relentlessly, no matter how the beer-swilling “Bruuuuuce” fans shout back. It might seem funny to call a millionaire rock star pretty courageous for doing that, but these days, courage is in short supply on the American scene.
It took me far too long to delve deeply into Springsteen’s impressive discography, and realise how much he’s always been about challenging the American dream instead of idealising it.
I cracked into Bruce Springsteen’s mammoth new box set on the weekend, Tracks II, which compiles a whopping seven unreleased albums from the Boss over his prolific career. (So far, the gem is the spooky, drum loop driven songs in The Streets of Philadelphia Sessions). The bounty of this set once again reminded me of how much broader Springsteen’s message has been than the pumping chorus of “Born In The USA.”
America is so into its own mythology and mythmaking. The perils of that can be seen in the news every single day now. Sometimes I’m amazed by how chill and self-effacing New Zealand generally is by comparison.
The thing is, no matter what you might think of the USA these days, “Born In The USA” is still a great song, maybe because it carries within it all the contradictions and hopes of a country that has never quite been as great as it likes to imagine it could be.
I haven’t lived in America for an awful long time now, but listening to Bruce Springsteen always seems to evoke the open-hearted good times I had there and the promise and potential that so often falls short. I don’t really mark the Fourth of July down here any more but if I do, it’ll be by listening to some Springsteen.
Nik Dirga 