Author: nik dirga

I'm an American journalist who has lived in New Zealand for more than a decade now.

The Toxic Avenger, still the world’s most disgusting superhero

For a series that literally stinks of radioactive ooze, the Toxic Avenger sure has had a long half-life. 

The Toxic Avenger movies are often objectively terrible films, working hard to be as nasty and dumb as they can be, and yet the franchise has somehow lasted more than 40 years and now is reborn in a moderately big-budget Hollywood movie.

I first came across 1984’s The Toxic Avenger at a high-school late-night party devoted to cheesy movies like Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes and Night of the Lepus. It’s an airhorn blast of crude comedy and gore, the story of a screeching nerd who’s bullied relentlessly and falls into a vat of toxic waste, transforming him into the Toxic Avenger, “New Jersey’s first superhero.” Armed with a janitor’s mop, he dispatches crowds of bad guys in nastily inventive ways, with splattery violence and slapstick lowbrow humour all crashing together into a swampy mess. 

Within the first 10 minutes of The Toxic Avenger a bunch of thugs run down an innocent teenager on a bike in sick, lingering detail, played for comedy, and you know what kind of trash-flick you’re in for. It feels like the only proper way to watch these movies is on a battered VHS tape in your Mom’s basement, hopped up on Nerds candy and Jolt cola. 

Troma, the studio behind Toxie, made its calling card its splattery punk-rock ethos B-movie horror comedies, calculated to outrage and offend.

 And yet, there’s a bit of ugly charm to some of the Toxic Avenger series if you’re in the right twisted frame of mind. It’s got this “let’s put on a show” amateur enthusiasm that evokes the days I’d spend as a pre-teenager hacking together terrible comedy cassette tapes with pals, or scribbling my early comic books. It’s the appeal of doing something, anything, even if it isn’t very good.

The first movie is so in-your-face with its offensiveness and broad comedy that it’s curiously watchable, but the three sequels spewed out from 1989 to 2000 are generally a case of diminishing returns (and they’re also all way too long – 87 minutes is the scientifically correct length for this kind of movie, not nearly two hours).

Toxic Avenger Part II takes our hero to Japan for some amusingly silly equal opportunity offensiveness, while in the proudly inept Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie, our hero battles Satan himself. Both of these movies – shot at the same time and even oddly duplicating a few scenes – are choppily directed, terribly acted and gleefully stupid, although the sleazy sheer malice of the first movie fades away for a bumbling sloppiness. I gather Troma was trying to “mainstream” Toxie a bit – heck, there was even a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon and a Marvel comic book of this most un-mainstream saga. 

Ultimately, the twistedness all comes roaring back with 2000’s Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV which is easily the grossest, most offensive movie of the franchise, ramping everything up to 11. A mad story that claims to be the only “real sequel,” it’s about Toxie and his evil alternate universe doppelgänger, and overflows with bodily fluids, gratuitous nudity, rape, rancid racial stereotypes and gore, to the point where the satire gets pretty lost in the sheer ugliness. Maybe I’m a snowflake, but lingeringly gross scenes showing a school shooting in a classroom of mentally disabled students or riffing on racist hate crimes just go too damned far. I get what they’re going for, but not sure I want to go there. Citizen Toxie is definitely an experience, but also an endurance test for most people. 

After the nihilistic stench of Citizen Toxie it’s strange indeed to see the character “redeemed” in a way with the new moderately gentler, family-focused reboot.

It’s strange to contrast director Mason Blair’s The Toxic Avenger 2025 with its predecessors. It’s far more of an actual movie, for one thing, with decent special effects and recognisable stars like Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood. It’s got gore and a few raunchy bits but held up against the sleazy originals, it feels positively tame. While it follows a similar arc – bullied Winston Gooze (Dinklage) is transformed into a working-class deformed hero taking on corrupt businessmen – it’s all slicker and less eccentric. 

There’s a core sense of sadism to much of the Troma Avenger years that simply doesn’t fly for many viewers in 2025. It’s funny to me that apparently the new Toxic Avenger, which was first released in 2023 but only now hitting cinemas, couldn’t find a distributor because it was “unreleasable” due to violence. Honestly, it’s about 1/10th as offensive and gross as Citizen Toxie. Times change. 

Toxic 2025 is still a pretty good time, although ultimately it’s far more conventional and lacks the outsider-art reek of the original movies. In the first four Toxic Avenger movies, everyone is pretty loathsome, even our hero (the incredibly unappealing performance by Mitch Cohen as the nerdy pre-Toxie in the first movie honestly makes you want to root for the bullies). It’s a world that feels tangibly rotten, with cackling moronic extras, gibbering villains and bumbling anti-heroes. 

Dinklage’s excellent performance here fills you with actual sympathy for his Toxie, and his relationship with his bullied son (a great Jacob Tremblay) gives the movie some serious heart, while Bacon and Wood have a lot of fun playing the sneering bad guys. There’s righteous vengeance and over-the-top villains (my favourite was the endlessly parkouring thug), but also a bit of a moral about acceptance. 

I can’t say I would ever feel the urge to rewatch anything but the first and most recent Toxic Avenger movies, to be honest, but I am oddly captivated by the strange longevity of Toxie’s warped world, where everything is shit, even the superheroes. The original Toxic Avenger series doesn’t have a serious bone in its body, mocking everything from the blind and disabled to the very concept of heroism. The new movie ends with a father bonding with his defiantly different son, on a kind of elegant note of optimism despite all the chaos that came before. 

As nice as all that feels – and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you want to wash your hands afterwards like the Troma movies do – it’s also not very Toxic, I guess. Then again, the world is a toxic enough place these days as it is, isn’t it? Perhaps a gentler Toxic Avenger is the hero we need. 

Still sticking up for Phil Collins after all these years

Musical tastes change with age, I get it. But no matter how cool you think you get, the stuff you loved when you were 14 years old will always be your secret love.

So it is with me and Phil Collins, whose best work I’ve always got time for, no matter how much other stuff I listen to. 

Phil’s third and best solo album No Jacket Required came out 40 years ago this year, and 1985 really was the peak of Phil-mania or Collins-palooza, whatever you want to call it. The guy was everywhere for a year or so there. And boy, some people hated that. Not me. 

In the summer of 1985, I nerdily rocked out to Genesis’ later albums with Phil and company and the gloriously cheesy video to “Don’t Lose My Number.” There was something about the best of Phil’s songs that excited me – perhaps it was the way Phil’s sincere voice always made everything sound so darned dramatic, or his drummer’s sense of rhythm pushing along the tunes. 

I wouldn’t classify Phil as an innovator, but when it came to pop hooks, the man could cook. That unforgettable drum burst with “In The Air Tonight,” the melodramatic urgency of “Don’t Lose My Number”’s chorus, the soaring keyboard riff that opens the banger Philip Bailey duet “Easy Lover.” Even the annoyingly catchy chorus of “Sussudio,” a song folks love to hate, is a bona fide earworm of amiable gibberish. 

I think what struck me all those years ago on MTV was Collins’ seeming normalcy in the heart of pop stardom. Balding and ordinary, he was the odd man out against flashier, more innovative stars like Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson or Springsteen. He wore Members Only jackets and had a mullet. He’s a history nerd who collected Alamo relics. He felt relatable. I’d never be a George Michael, but maybe I could be a Phil. 

And even though I’m a diehard Peter Gabriel fan until the end, I’ll quietly under my breath admit that when it comes to Genesis, I kind of listen to the radio-friendly Phil years more than I do the proggy Gabriel era. Listening to the vaguely proggy Abacab at a church ski camp felt slightly subversive. And none-more-’80s blockbuster “Invisible Touch” for the win, man. 

Unfortunately there’s a kind of weakness in Collins’ work that only increased with age – his tendency for mawkish ballads. His solo albums tended to be a mix of ballads and rockers – some very good ballads too, like “Against All Odds” or “Take Me Home”, but somewhere around the unfortunately foreshadowing album But Seriously… Phil got more sappy and less sassy, singing about poverty and apartheid instead of Sussudios. 

By 1993’s Both Sides album he slipped mostly into bland soft-rock territory and the hooks of his grand early solo run faded away. He left Genesis and did Disney movie soundtracks and kind of like Billy Joel, he left the work that made him famous for different territories. 

These days he’s basically retired at age 74 – Collins’ health has been notoriously poor the last few years, a lifetime of hardcore drumming catching up with him. Recent reunion tours saw him sitting down the whole show. 

Still, from Face Value through that 40-year-old banger No Jacket Required, Phil Collins was an unlikely arena-filling superstar. And I have to admit a little bit of my love for classic Phil is sticking up for the underdog. Collins became a bit of a piñata for critical beatings over the years, even with “In the Air Tonight” becoming a classic across generations. Even in his breezy autobiography Going Back, you get the sense he sees himself as a little unappreciated. 

Listening to Phil grounds me and reminds me that sometimes it’s just about whether or not the music moves you, not what the in crowd says. Even though I don’t listen to a lot of today’s pop – sorry, I’m still agnostic on the Taylor Swift question – my Phil-fandom means I try not to sneer at anyone else’s tastes too hard. If you like it, you like it. 

Collins’ songs didn’t change the world, but I also can never quite entirely get them out of my head. For a musician, that’s not the worst legacy to leave. I’m too old to care about being cool now, so I’ll listen to Phil Collins sometimes and bang my head to “Easy Lover” like it was 1985 all over again. 

And if you don’t like that, you can Sussudio right off, eh? 

The best image ever taken of Phil Collins in concert, 1981

John Byrne’s Alpha Flight: Anything can happen

In his white-hot comics run through the 1970s into the 1990s, John Byrne was always one of my favourite writer/artists – his bold dynamic style felt to me like the platonic ideal of what good old-fashioned superhero comics could be. And I’ve got a special place in my heart for his run on Alpha Flight, a Canadian superhero team who debuted fighting fellow Canadian Wolverine in an issue of X-Men and were spun off by Canadian-raised Byrne into their own book. 

I loved Byrne’s classic takes on Fantastic Four, Superman, X-Men and the like, but there was a rather raw edge to his Alpha Flight run that holds up well. Byrne fielded an oddball group of Canadian stereotypes, with Captain America fill-in Guardian, hulking Sasquatch, French-Canadian twins Aurora and Northstar, Native American Shaman and wilderness spirit Snowbird, the dwarf Puck and aquatic Marrina. 

Alpha Flight was a curious book about a team that wasn’t really ever a team. Marvel’s The Defenders tagged itself as the “non-team,” but for most of Byrne’s run, the entire team of Alpha Flight was rarely assembled together, and the book focused on a series of solo tales or small pairings of team members. It felt a bit exotic to me with its name-drops for Winnipeg and Quebec and glimpses of a culture alien to this small-town California kid. 

Canada was an unusual setting for superhero stories, and Alpha Flight was a superhero series that seemed unpredictable and energetic. It was no Watchmen or Dark Knight, of course, it didn’t deconstruct the medium – but it stood out on the comic racks to me in 1983 when it premiered. Byrne himself doesn’t think much of his Alpha Flight run and calls the characters two-dimensional, but I think he cuts himself short. 

(SPOILERS for 40-year-old comic books follow)

Because Alpha Flight were hardly top-tier characters, there was a real sense that anything could happen during Byrne’s run. The most notable was the still-shocking death of team leader Guardian in #12, which came as an accidental tragedy – Guardian’s damaged battle suit explodes when he’s distracted at a critical moment by his wife Heather Hudson. It was cruel and sudden, no heroic death but just one of those terrible things that sometimes happen. 

In the pre-internet age where nothing was spoiled, Alpha Flight #12 was stunning, and left teenage comic reader Nik feeling like the world was suddenly a far more shaky place. If you could kill off the leader of a superhero team, was anyone safe?

Byrne’s run constantly rocked the boat on the idea of a “Canadian Avengers” team. In the very first issue the team has been defunded by the Canadian government and broken up, and while they briefly reunite, in the first two dozen or so issues of Alpha Flight there’s only a few times all the members are together at once. In the second issue, the sprite-like aquatic member Marrina turns out to be an alien invader and nearly kills Puck. A few issues later, the sibling team of Northstar and Aurora have a brutal feud and break up. The burly Sasquatch loses control of himself constantly. There’s always a sense in Alpha Flight that everything is about to fall apart. Is there such a concept as an “anti-team” superhero comic? 

John Byrne’s work has often had a bit of a dark side and it is fully unleashed in some storylines that felt very brutal at the time – the villainous Master recounts being tortured and dissected alive by alien machines for thousands of years, the creepy Gilded Lily is basically a dessicated corpse kept alive by machines and sorcery, Sasquatch’s battle with Super-Skrull leaves a group of innocent scientists brutally murdered. Aurora battles a multiple-personality disorder, Puck is wracked with chronic pain and most of the team don’t seem to actually like each other that much. It feels like Alpha Flight rarely save anybody and it’s a real surprise late in Byrne’s run when the team battles a run-of-the-mill hostage-taking supervillain for the first time rather than malicious gods and murderous aliens. 

Byrne has a long history of leaving series abruptly, sometimes in mid-storyline, but his Alpha Flight feels more or less complete. It did end in a cliffhanger handed off to new writer Bill Mantlo after #28, but that was intentional. 

Byrne’s work kind of peaked by the late 1980s and hasn’t really felt as fresh for a long time. Alpha Flight carried on for a good hundred issues after Byrne left and I periodically checked in, but the book was really never very good again. The non-team was quickly turned into yet another standard superhero team, Wolverine kept showing up, and the inspiringly “normal” Heather Hudson immediately became a superhero wearing her dead husband’s costume. (The worst was Bill Mantlo turning Puck from a fascinating dwarf character into the subject of some inane ancient curse that made him a dwarf, although the gay character Northstar’s legendarily ham-fisted coming out story with some of the worst most 1990s comic art ever is a close second.)

They even brought Guardian back to life a couple of times, negating the stunning power of Alpha Flight #12. So it goes. 

I guess Alpha Flight are pretty much C-list Marvel characters these days and I couldn’t even tell you who’s dead or alive or resurrected or whatever. They haven’t shown up in the MCU yet and nobody is rocking Sasquatch T-shirts (although really, they should). But for a couple dozen issues before Byrne wandered off, they felt like one of the more exciting books in Marvel Comics – where anyone could die at any time, and where the bonds of the team itself were constantly breaking apart. In their chaos the comic felt weirdly alive. Not bad for a bunch of Canadians, eh?

Universal Monster endings: The Creature Walks Among Us

I’ve written many a time before about my love of the classic 1930s-1950s Universal Horror monster movies, which almost a century on still cast a spooky spell. And my sentimental favourite has always been Creature From The Black Lagoon, whose 1954 debut came at the end of Universal’s classic run.

Creature is in my mind an almost perfect old-school horror movie – it’s got exploration of the unknown, man meddling where he shouldn’t, a sexy lady in a swimsuit and a monster who is ultimately a tragic figure. In a tidy 79 minutes it tells a classic beauty and the beast story with a kind of haunting elegance (especially those gorgeous underwater scenes) and gives us one of cinema’s most memorable monster designs. I’ve watched it countless times and get a kick out of it every time.

It’s a shame the two sequels never felt very essential, although in one choking last gasp, the franchise finale The Creature Walks Among Us is almost a good movie. 

Universal Horror movies were the best, but they weren’t usually very good at sequels. Other than the original Frankenstein, which boasted great follow-ups in Bride Of and Son Of Frankenstein, most of them fumbled at sequels. They foolishly didn’t bring back the iconic Bela Lugosi for a sequel to 1931’s Dracula until 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which while fun, isn’t exactly top-tier. Lon Chaney Jr’s melancholy Wolf Man ended up as a supporting player against other monsters after the first Wolf Man, Claude Rains’ Invisible Man died and sequels to that were bland bores, while Boris Karloff’s Mummy was reborn again and again without Karloff in a series of increasingly silly riffs. By monster mash House of Frankenstein – where the monster barely does a thing until the final 5 minutes – everything was increasingly played out.

A clutching claw at the heart of civilization! They don’t make tag lines like they used to.

The same problem befell the Creature of the Black Lagoon, who was enough of a hit to come back for two more sequels. The uninspired 1955 quickie Revenge Of The Creature is basically a remake with a Florida aquatic park setting and a brief cameo by Clint Eastwood in his movie debut. 

The last sequel – and the last of Universal’s classic monster era in general – was 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, which took an intriguing idea and dropped the ball, but left us just enough hints to imagine a much better movie. 

In this one, the Creature is once again captured by pesky humans – but this time by a fanatical scientist, Dr Barton (Jeff Morrow), who wants to experiment on him, turning him into from an aquatic creature into a more human organism. (The pseudo-science explanation given is this would somehow prepare humans for interstellar travel.) The Creature is captured but badly burned, which gives Barton the excuse to alter his genetics. Of course, being a monster movie, things go badly for everyone in the end.

It’s an interesting idea but the execution is limp – far too much time is spent on irritating scientist Barton’s marriage troubles, and the Creature feels like an afterthought in his own movie. Also, the end game appears to simply be to set the Creature up in a kind of petting zoo enclosure, so not sure what all that science was really for. 

In the encyclopaedic book The Creature Chronicles by Tom Weaver – an insanely comprehensive green-scaled bible that’s a must for any fan of the movies – it’s revealed that earlier drafts had a fair bit more Creature action and debate over what it means to play god with such a being. Little of that shows in the finished movie, which is workmanlike and slow and padded out with dull humans. Only the Creature himself – despite the alterations, still an unforgettable look – is worth paying attention to. The Creature’s sad journey – given short shrift in the film – is the movie that should’ve been made.

There is something haunting about the repeated images of the mutilated monster, who now has very human eyes, reduced from a sleek underwater god to a hulking, out of place figure in a world he doesn’t fit in. Creature Walks is a monster movie with very little monster action – the final minutes kick in with the Creature framed for a murder by nasty Dr Barton – who he then, of course, kills himself. The Creature evades punishment, unusually for a monster movie – he is last seen lonesomely on a beach, advancing towards the ocean, where in his altered form he will surely die. Is this the end of the Creature? It’s a pleasantly open-ended and evocative ending. 

And even though the movie is a pale imitation of the original Creature and much better Universal Monster movies, those final moments feel like they could sum up the appeal of classic monsters in general – a misunderstood creature alone, on a beach, staring at the sea, trying to find a place to belong. 

Why Eddington is the movie America deserves in 2025

Look, the world kind of lost its mind in 2020, didn’t it? And we’re all still dealing with that. 

We’re all very much living in the aftermath of the pandemic, which seemed to break apart the bonds we imagined held the world together. Everyone’s got a relative or friend whose opinions seemed to go down weird rabbit-holes, or topics you just don’t discuss anymore. Covid, culture wars, digital disinformation – a dozen tangled threads all seemed to bloom and spread beginning in 2020. 

But so far, there haven’t been a lot of major motion pictures looking at this age of weirdness. We need satire and storytelling to process the societal earthquakes that hit us. After Watergate in the 1970s we saw a surge in paranoid cinema, while it took America until the 1980s to really unpack its Vietnam traumas with films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born On The Fourth of July and the like.  There were even a slew of (mostly kind of dire) 9/11 reenactment movies after those 2001 attacks or smarter ones like The Hurt Locker processing how terrorism spreads.

But on Covid, lockdowns and the fractured, polarised world that’s come out of it all, Hollywood’s been pretty silent. Ari Aster’s new film Eddington – a black comedy Western pandemic dystopian frenzy of a film – boasts two Oscar winners and a hot director and seems to be the first major Hollywood take on the year everything went, for lack of a better word, batshit. 

Even now, I don’t like thinking back to the strangled tenseness of the pandemic years, to masks fogging up my glasses, to queues at the supermarket, social distancing and the lurking rise of protest movements galore and the latching on to conspiracies. No matter what your views are on how it’s all turned out, it ain’t a time anyone fondly remembers now. 

The pandemic still feels raw, the culture war battles are still raging strong under Trump 2.0, so is it really time for satire? Yet Eddington feels like the movie America deserves in 2025. It’s shocking and slapstick in equal measures. “More distance will make it easier to laugh,” the LA Times’ Amy Nicholson wrote in her positive review of Eddington, and I can’t disagree.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross, a tense conservative who doesn’t care for masks and social distancing and who despises the town’s charming mayor (Pedro Pascal) and decides to run against him. His wife (Emma Stone) is going down online rabbit holes and Joe feels like everything in his world is changing. Black Lives Matter protests come to town, Covid is here, and big tech is making a play for a giant start-up facility in town. Because this is an Ari Aster movie, and Aster is the patron saint of dread in film right now, everything escalates very quickly into a violent, unpredictable mess. 

Joe posts Facebook campaign videos saying “we need to free each others hearts” but soon starts ranting about sexual predators and driving around in a truck plastered with slogans like “Your (sic) being manipulated.” Pascal’s perky mayor slaps up pandering inclusive videos featuring smiling Black extras in a town with almost no Black population. A lovestruck white teenager who dives into BLM activism to win over a girl ends up bemoaning his white privilege to a crowd, yelling “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!” 

Eddington is an equal-opportunity satire that sees the absurd in all viewpoints. It hits all the bases – mask mandates, pedophiles, artificial intelligence, police racism, Bitcoin and Antifa – offending left and right with equal measures. 

But ultimately, Eddington is really about how social media has rotted our brains, turning us all into circus animals hooked on dopamine and conflict. It’s bad here in New Zealand but exponentially feels far worse in the far bigger America, where politicians and celebs now spew conspiracies and hate speech that felt unthinkable 10 years back. 

America doesn’t make much sense to me at the moment, and Eddington is an exhausted grim chuckle at how fractured it’s all gotten. 

“I am a much better human being than you,” Joe sneers at one point to his opponent, and that arrogant phrase seems to capture so much of the vibe of America 2020 and Social Media 2025. 

I wouldn’t argue that Eddington is a masterpiece – it’s too long, a bit scattered and overstuffed, the ending ramps up the violence to a kind of incoherent mess, and Aster’s “everyone’s an idiot” worldview will probably rub some the wrong way … but in its bleakly comic way, it captures the moment in a way that cinema kind of needs to help us process whatever the hell has happened to the world the last few years. And Phoenix, who never feels better on screen than when he’s falling apart, is terrific.

Eddington shows how community and dialogue vanishes as we all get sucked into our little tech bubble windows, how performative our lives have become and how lonely we’re all getting as a result. “All of these people are kind of living on the Internet and they are sort of all seeing the world through these strange, individualized windows,” Aster said in an interview.

Sometimes you just need to see it all splayed out before you under a hot desert sun, and marvel at the endless foibles of humans and how easy it is for the things that hold us together to prove as flimsy as a tumbleweed in the breeze. 

Eddington is not here to make conclusions, other than that perhaps we’re all kind of ridiculous creatures. At the moment, still trying to process the world we all live in now, laughing a little about that feels like enough for me. 

Look out world, it’s Amoeba Adventures #36!

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!

AMOEBA ADVENTURES #36 [PDF]

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! 

Plus, 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 permits, I’ll put updates on future comics, links to my non-comics journalism work and more!

As always, thanks for reading!

I’m losing my edge, but I was there: My top albums of 2005

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.

West is best: Let’s hear it for the West Coast Avengers 

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. 

Movie review: Superman 2025 soars

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!

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

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!

Everything you need to know about Superman before his latest movie

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:

Junk accounts serve up fantasy tennis tales

For RNZ, I’ve also done a few long explainer pieces lately:

Did you know US Customs can legally search your phone? Here’s what you need to know about it

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:

How to tell if an image or video has been created by AI – and if we still can

Featuring my very own test AI-generated slop image that I was particularly proud of:

Don’t always believe your eyes, is the moral of the story.

Unless it’s something on this website, which in that case is totally 100 percent legit and doesn’t need factchecking.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and assist in the emergency conjoined twin surgery for my good friend, celebrity Taylor Swift.