April 2026 – Nik Dirga

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.