Month: March 2026

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!

This bridge was built in 1823!

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. 

Prometheus Meets The Beatles, 1988

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 Prometheus #6, 1989

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. 

From Amoeba Adventures #2, 1991

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. 

From Amoeba Adventures #9, 1992

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. 

From Amoeba Adventures #16, 1994

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. 

From Amoeba Adventures #27, 1998

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. 

From Amoeba Adventures #33, 2023

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!