DC Challenge: The insane comics crossover everybody forgot about

Almost 40 years ago now, the DC Comics universe went through a bit of a crisis. Crisis On Infinite Earths debuted in April 1985 and was one of the first giant “shared universe” crossovers, a sprawling epic that brought together multiple worlds and changed them forever. 

Meanwhile, just about at the same time, another universe-spanning 12-issue all-star miniseries was going on – but decades later it’s nearly forgotten, even though it was kind of the last gasp of that “pre-Crisis” universe. 

DC Challenge is a 12-part miniseries that also debuted in 1985, but instead of some carefully orchestrated event, it was a loose and wacky round robin jam comic where each issue was written and drawn by a different set of creators, bringing together everyone from the big guns like Superman and Batman to the obscure like Viking Prince, Congorilla and Adam Strange. Great comics writers and artists who played a big part in the ‘pre-Crisis’ DC Comics world joined in – Mark Evanier, Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Roy Thomas, Curt Swan, Gil Kane and many more. 

Jam comics by their very nature are probably a little more fun for the creators than the reader, to be honest. They’re a creative exercise that stumbles along from player to player and resist any attempt to smooth out the bumpy transitions. But they’re also kind of fun because literally anything can happen. 

DC Challenge is still an awful lot of goofy fun, maybe because it isn’t trying to change the entire comics universe. Instead, it’s a giant sandbox paying tribute to DC’s then-50-year-old history. Set outside “continuity,” it reads now as a kind of fond farewell to the pre-Crisis DC Universe where you’d regularly have Superman turned into a blimp by red kryptonite. A little less “serious” universe. 

You get such oddities as cowboy Jonah Hex transported to the present day, Deadman teaming up with Plastic Man’s sidekick Woozy Winks, a Batman / Mr. Mxyzptlk encounter, a cameo by Humphrey Bogart, and creators pulling obscurity after obscurity from DC’s vast library of old characters, whether it’s Space Cabby or B’Wana Beast.

Is DC Challenge “good,” exactly? Not quite – it’s nowhere near as emotional or skilled a spectacle as Crisis On Infinite Earths with the late great George Perez’s stunning art, still my gold standard for everything-and-the-kitchen-sink comics storytelling. But it’s an awful lot of loose-limbed fun even when the story threatens to crumble entirely under the weight of a dozen or so authors trying to make sense of each other. 

Sometimes a writer comes along and throws out a bunch of cool bits another threw in (at one point, Albert Einstein becomes an endearing cosmic-powered character in the DC Challenge carnival, only for rollickin’ Roy Thomas to come along in the last few issues and say it was just an alien pretending to be Einstein!). One of the more enjoyable part of the comics is the lengthy afterword essays each issue where the writers critique each others’ plot twists. More so than many comics, here you see the creative process laid bare.

Thirty-nine years on, DC Challenge is really only remembered by oddball comics fans like myself – it’s never been collected, is rarely referenced, whereas Crisis has been collected multiple times, adapted to TV shows and animated films, there’ve been at least a half-dozen “Crisis”-named sequels and it is still in many ways the template for giant comics crossovers to this day where we get swirling invasions from beyond and everybody and their brother teaming up to fight it all. (There was a nifty “Kamandi Challenge” DC put out a few years ago that did homage the round-robin concept, though.) 

DC Challenge wasn’t helped by a kind of goofy catchphrase used to advertise it – “Can You Solve It Before We Do?” The thing is, DC Challenge wasn’t actually some kind of Sherlockian mystery, and the “challenge” really is each creator picking up the pieces after the cliffhangers the previous issue’s writer inserted. “Can You Follow The Insane Plot Twists?” wouldn’t be quite as good a catchphrase, however. 

There’s been about a thousand big comics-universe spanning crossover events ever since Crisis and Marvel’s 1984 Secret Wars kicked the whole modern version of the concept off. Some are still pretty good, most are forgettable, but overall, the concept has been exploited for so much and so long that there’s no real novelty anymore in dozens of heroes gathering together under darkening skies to fight an unbeatable foe. 

On the other hand, the madcap idea of just telling a fun story with your mates and seeing what weird roads it takes you on – well, it may not always be pretty, but it’s rarely ever boring. 

How Odd Bodkins by Dan O’Neill blew my fragile little mind

I was a comic strip-reading kid addicted to the funny pages when I stumbled across a peculiar yellow book – more of a pamphlet, really – at a friend’s house, called Buy This Book Of Odd Bodkins by a guy called Dan O’Neill.

A curious little strip that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle from 1964 until he was fired (apparently for the final time) in 1970, Odd Bodkins began as the quixotic adventures of anthropomorphic birds Hugh and Fred, having wry discussions about current affairs and encounters with oddballs like the Batwinged Hamburger Snatcher, Smokey the Bear and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. The early comics in that yellow book were slightly edgy, although in a kind of Doonesbury-esque subtle way, casting an askew eye at a topsy-turvy world. 

A few years later I found another book of Odd Bodkins, a big ol’ tome called The Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins, and man, that’s where things got weird. The same characters of Fred and Hugh were there but instead of gag strips they ambled along on an odyssey into the 1970s, and the comics got stranger and stranger, journeying to Mars and beyond. The backgrounds, nearly nonexistent in earlier strips, became swirling psychedelic landscapes, the lettering became baroque and extravagant, and the story, such as it was, became an extended walkabout in search for enlightenment in what felt like a world suspended at the end of time. The comics became far less about a punchline and more about a quest for meaning. 

I didn’t quite get it all – a lot of the references were already ancient history by the time I read the comics – but I got it,  you know? That was it. I was trippin’ on strips. 

Once upon a time, iconoclasts didn’t mean crazed internet-addled sovereign citizen conspiracy theorists. O’Neill was one of the great independent thinkers and has never been afraid to stir the pot, or to, in the best editorial cartoonists’ tradition, cause good trouble. 

Because he was publishing work in ‘mainstream’ media like the Chronicle, O’Neill couldn’t get quite as risque there as folks like R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson and Gilbert Shelton did in underground comics. Yet that actually proved a strength, because forcing himself to draw ‘toons for the “straights” made O’Neill work harder to create bold, thoughtful strips without piling on the sex and drugs. He was the perfect gentle guide to more alternative viewpoints for me. 

Of course, he could go “adult,” too. O’Neill is more widely famous for Air Pirates Funnies, a very adult X-rated parody of Disney’s Mickey Mouse that ended up in a copyright lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court during the 1970s. Those are hilarious too in their own naughty way, if you’ve ever wondered what Mickey Mouse’s bits looked like. And the battle against Disney over these strips and the boundaries of what parody was and is is one of the great stories of creative freedom, wonderfully chronicled by Bob Levin in his exhaustive book The Pirates And The Mouse: Disney’s War Against The Underground.

This great little short documentary recaps the Air Pirates saga and is a fine introduction to O’Neill’s fierce individualism. “You can’t have more fun than drawing pictures and pissing people off,” he notes right at the start. 

Air Pirates is very smutty and funny stuff, but it’s still Odd Bodkins that made me a fan of O’Neill for life. 

Odd Bodkins was a great intermediate step between “kids” comic strips like Peanuts to the wild weird world of the underground. The handful of old ‘60s and ‘70s collections have been reprinted by O’Neill and can be found on Amazon, although I think a huge chunk of his work has never been collected, which is a bit of a crime for underground comics history. 

Weirdly, Dan O’Neill moved to the same town that I grew up in up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, although I’ve never met the man – alive and well and drawing scathing cartoons about Trump well into his 80s. It’s fitting he ended up in Nevada County, which as I’ve written is kind of a weird, wonderful place. 

When I turned to drawing my own comics, O’Neill’s scratchy, anarchic spirit was definitely one of the many ingredients in the cosmic gumbo that made up my work. He showed me you didn’t need to be a master artist to make a difference, and that a unique point of view and a sense of humour went a hell of a long way towards making great art. 

O’Neill has always pushed at the system, and found the funny in the chaos of the world. He blew my mind at a very young age and part of me has never quite been the same since. 

Movies I Have Never Seen #27: Tank Girl (1995)

What is it? A famous bomb that slowly has inched its way back towards being a cult classic in some circles, Tank Girl is one of those comic book movies that came out before comic book movies were everywhere. It’s based on some freewheeling British comics by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett (who’d go on to co-create the band Gorillaz). Lori Petty stars as Tank Girl, a spunky punk-rock survivor in a vaguely post-apocalyptic Australian Outback world (in the far, far future of… gulp … 2033) where water is a commodity, ruled over by the corporation of the dictatorial Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell). Tank Girl becomes dragged into an uprising against corporate power, and joins forces with other outcasts and mutant kangaroos to fight evil in a very riot grrll way. While it’s remembered as a flop, it turns out Tank Girl is a gleefully oddball and slightly ahead-of-its-time feminist curio of a world before every comic book movie was envisioned as part of a cinematic universe. 

Why I never saw it: In a sign of increasing senility, I always lumped Tank Girl into the list of movies I had seen at one point and forgot about (I did work for a video store a little back in the 1990s, after all). The back shelves of defunct video stores were littered with movies like The Phantom, Mystery Men, Barb Wire and Spawn that were clunky, low-budget attempts to turn comic books into gold. Most of them were awful, plagued by terrible scripts, dodgy special effects, or both, but at the same time they were often kind of interesting movies. Tank Girl failed at the box office, mystified most critics, and mostly went on to be known as that movie that featured rapper Ice-T under a lot of latex as a mutant kangaroo. 

Does it measure up to its rep? Tank Girl is just original enough to become bizarrely enjoyable as Petty trash-talks her way through a dried-up world. The chaotic production was directed by Rachel Talalay, in an era where a woman directing a big blockbuster attempt was even rarer than it is now. Tank Girl has attitude and style mixed in with gritty practical effects and a little amateurism (those mutant kangaroos won’t win any make-up Oscars, mate). Iggy Pop pops up for about 30 seconds as a pedophile Tank Girl beats down, because why not? There’s also the ever-enjoyable scenery chewing of McDowell and a very young Naomi Watts as Tank Girl’s shy sidekick. The movie combines a smashing ‘90s soundtrack with cool colourful animated sequences styled after the comic strips. The movie isn’t anywhere near as raunchy or anarchic as the more free-wheeling comics, giving Tank Girl a more traditional heroic arc and a family, but it’s got enough of their basic spirit to feel rather fresh even now. 

Worth seeing? Set aside your expectations for machine-tooled perfection and the kind of glossy anonymity too many recent superhero movies have settled for. Still, Tank Girl is a clear forerunner of recent superhero movie starlet Harley Quinn, a kick ass, anarchic female antihero who isn’t afraid to mix it up with any foe. I won’t claim Tank Girl is some lost masterpiece but at its heart, it’s kind of daft fun, with just enough of the punky frenzy of the British comics to make it still feel quietly a little revolutionary. They don’t make ’em like this any more.

Concert Review: Shonen Knife, Auckland, March 9, or, finding that happy place

Sometimes I like to listen to depressing songs. Sometimes I like to listen to happy songs.

I’ve got my Cure, my Joy Division, my Depeche Mode and Leonard Cohen. And they’re great when I’m in the mood for it. 

But other times I just want a happy sound – and there’s few more unabashedly happy bands out there in the world than Japan’s Shonen Knife. An all-girl band who marry Ramones thrash-pop with Beach Boys-style wistful harmonies all twisted together with a healthy dose of colourful Osaka charm, they’re a delight to see live. 

Heartbreak? Depression? Shonen Knife don’t do that. They sing about their favourite foods, cute animals, and the silly happy things that, in the end, kind of make this life worth living. And they do it while kicking out some thrashing power chords and rocking with incredible style, dressed in often matching colour-coordinated outfits that seem retro and futuristic at the same time. 

For a band that’s been going for more than 40 years, since the women were all teenagers, Shonen Knife still make a tremendous racket, headbanging hair and all. I’ve been a fan since they broke through a bit in the US in the alternative music-ruled 1990s with celebrity fans like Nirvana and Sonic Youth. They’ve carried on for a pile of albums, rarely altering their sunny, hook-filled sonic approach, and they’re all the better for that. 

Sisters Naoko and Atsuko Yamano have been the core of the band for most of its long run, with excellent drummer Risa Kawano on sticks these days. I’m old and creaky and so I’m kind of out of it with the hip pop music the youth listen to these days, but the appeal of a good cheery song is universal. 

The packed gig at Auckland’s underground Whammy Bar was probably the first time I’d been in a crowded basement club environment since the pre-pandemic era, and it was kind of invigorating to feel that sweaty, borderline uncomfortable shared experience, for a little while. 

Song titles like “Sweet Candy Power,” “Afternoon Tea” and “Banana Chips” give you the overall vibe of a Shonen Knife show. I can’t think of too many rock gigs I’ve been to where the audience is led in an energetic singalong chant of “Candy! Candy!” 

In a fun interview over at my day job RNZ, Naoko said, “I like to make people happy through music and if our audience or listeners get happy through our music, it’s my happiness too.”

Perhaps it’s just my mood in the very stressful vibe the 2020s have proven to have, but sharing a little happiness no longer seems as corny as it might have once to me. 

In a world as askew as this there’s something blissful about celebrating the little things, whether it’s a funny-looking jellyfish, wasabi being hot or one Shonen Knife song whose chorus is simply, “it’s a nice day!”

And you know what, sometimes it is. 

Yeah, OK, the Oscars are silly. But I still love to watch.

Yes, the Academy Awards are self-indulgent, pointless arbiters of artistic excellent, a vapid popularity contest, constantly make the wrong calls, et cetera. But still, for nearly every year of the last 40 or so Oscars, I watch them. 

For the third year in a row, I’ll be live-blogging the action over at Radio New Zealand on Monday our time, and I’ll admit I look forward to it – it’s a welcome break from political chaos, climate apocalypse and general creeping internet-induced psychosis and hate. 

I’ve watched the Oscars since I was a fidgety pre-teen, and still remember my first, the 1982 Oscars. It was the year of Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire – a movie I’ve still never seen – and that plinky inspirational piano theme felt like it was played every five minutes. 

It was so long ago the host was Johnny Carson! The ceremony, 40+ years ago, seems weirdly low-tech now – dig the grainy still photos to introduce the Best Picture nominees – and how is it that Raiders of the Lost Ark received the least applause of the five? 

I watched early Oscars celebrating what seemed like, to me, boring adult movies like Gandhi and Terms of Endearment, and liked the novelty of seeing, in a pre-internet age, movie stars outside of their day job. It wasn’t until 1988 or so and Rain Man that movies I had actually seen started winning the top gong. For a kid who was just getting interested in movies, the Oscars felt like a Cliff’s Notes course introducing me to a wider world, and how movies were put together. (You could win an award for sound? For costumes?) 

A lot of folks whose film takes I respect still loathe the Oscars, but I don’t know – it’s the kid in me who was mesmerised watching actors in tuxedos and fancy frocks all those years ago, I suppose, but I just find it a fun moment to pause and celebrate the existence of movies.

Yes, yes, there are far more important things in the news universe, but a bit of levity doesn’t take away the gravity of other events. Stories keep us sane. During the freaky otherness of the pandemic, one of the happiest moments for me was when we finally got to go to the movies again.

Now, I’ll argue about the actual winners, losers and snubs at the Oscars till the cows come home, but I don’t get mad about it. We’re all too mad in general these days, aren’t we?

Forrest Gump’s Oscar doesn’t really take away a thing from Pulp Fiction being the infinitely better, more memorable film, does it? CODA was an amiable optimistic film, but Jane Campion’s The Power Of The Dog was tougher, smarter and visually unforgettable. Martin Scorsese should have a dozen Oscars by now, not just one for The Departed. The great directors who never won a Best Director Oscar is a list of the greats – Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Lynch, Kubrick. Meanwhile, Kevin Costner has a Best Director Oscar? Et cetera, et cetera, you get the point.

The Oscars get it “wrong” more than they get it right, I admit. Yet there’s been plenty of times I’ve cheered to see a film or a performance that grabbed me recognised, from Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to take Best Director for The Hurt Locker to foreign film Parasite’s plucky Best Picture win to the beautiful good cheer of Ke Huay Quan going from that kid in The Goonies to an Oscar winner last year. 

I am trying to gripe and be mean less in an age of meanness, but I’ll admit one thing that always gets my goat is the arbiters of “what matters.” Multiple things can matter in this world. The Oscars are not the final word on anything in the world of film. But I’ve had a blast watching them most years, even at their most tedious, pandering and predictable.

There’s a lot of self-indulgent talk about the “magic” of movies this time of year, which makes it sound like movies cure cancer and balance the national debt all at the same time. 

But you know, you take a blank screen and add some moving pictures, sound and a few sprinkles of humour, horror or heartbreak, and it makes a story, can draw a portrait of a life. When you really think about it, if that ain’t a little magic, I don’t know what is. 

A gay old time: Revisiting Three’s Company in a changing world

“Come and knock on our door. We’ve been waiting for you. Where the kisses are hers and hers and his, three’s company too.“

Could there be a more swingin’ 1970s TV theme song? Come on, you know the words. We all do.

So while on holiday recently I was feeling a bit under the weather and, as you do, one evening I ended up watching four or five episodes in a row of ‘70s-‘80s camp sitcom Three’s Company in a row.

It was the first time in years I’d actually watched the show, but I admit that like most kids growing up in the ‘80s, I watched Three’s Company all the time. We watched everything, from classics like M*A*S*H and The Brady Bunch to also-rans like What’s Happening! and Manimal. That’s what we did in the olden days, before the eruption of a sprawling multiverse of entertainment options 24-7, when you simply watched ‘whatever was on’.

Watching a slew of Three’s Company in my vaguely sick bed recently was bizarre – I have trouble remembering what I ate for lunch yesterday, but as these goofy sitcoms unfolded I nodded in recognition – ah yes, here’s the one where they went to the farm; here’s the one where Jack makes a mob boss linguini. How the hell do I remember a sitcom episode I last watched in 1983? The inanity of childhood sitcoms, the quintessential comfort food, imprinted itself on my brain. 

The 1977-1984 run of Three’s Company seems a strange relic now, nearly 50 years (!!) since it debuted, a broad bawdy farce perched between the groovy ‘70s and a more uptight ‘80s Reaganland. The premise is pretty much the definition of problematic by modern standards  – hep cat Jack Tripper (the late, great John Ritter) pretends to be gay so he can live in an affordable apartment with two attractive young single women (Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt) without offending their prudish landlord Mr Roper (Norman Fell). Hijinks ensue, somehow for eight entire seasons! 

Loose-limbed and amiable Ritter was a national treasure, of course, and like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers he carries the show on his shoulders. The women of Three’s Company fared less well; I know we were all supposed to like the late Suzanne Somers but I found her blonde ditz irritating and Joyce DeWitt’s Janet was often just a straight woman. I rather liked Priscilla Barnes’ Terri, who replaced Somers in the later years, and seemed a bit more sly and unpredictable. 

The central homophobia that drives Three’s Company is incredibly dated, but the show, mostly, was lewd and campy rather than hateful, even though there’s plenty of cringe-worthy farce humour revolving around gay misunderstandings and affairs.

Unfortunately, a lot of the ‘humour’ relies on the premise that the worst possible thing would be for Jack to actually be gay.

I grew up in a world where “fag” was the number one insult of choice by and for teenage boys. I got called one an awful lot for a few years and I’m ashamed to admit I probably called other kids it too a few times. It was stupid. 

Jack’s homophobic landlords, despite usually being the butt of the joke for their overwrought gay panic, do leave a bit of a sour aftertaste. Even watching the show as a kid, Stanley Roper and Mr Furley’s limp-wristed gay-bashing jibes seemed forced and unfunny to me.  Norman Fell’s oily Mr Roper always struck me as a little too nasty and sinister. You felt he meant it. Knotts’ goofy Furley, on the other hand, definitely felt like a closet case, and the show eased off a lot on the gay panic as it ambled along. The series ended with Jack Tripper, of course, marrying off to a nice girl. 

Did gay characters actually ever appear on Three’s Company as more than a punchline? I don’t have enough of an encyclopaedic memory to recall if they did, but the show was far more about the idea of being gay as some strange unknown rather than any kind of cultural exploration of what that meant in 1978. 

While there’s a lot of things about the modern world that are pretty terrible and backwards still, the gentle wave of gay acceptance just during my adult life makes me feel a glimmer of optimism sometimes. A good half-dozen or so of the friends I grew up with in high school later came out as gay, and I was overjoyed to see how happy and complete they seemed. I can’t imagine what it must have been like trying to keep that quiet in the ‘80s, which feels now the last real gasp of generally accepted wider cultural homophobia. 

Still, there’s plenty of people out there who still see nothing wrong with calling someone a “fag.” It’s nowhere near good enough today, of course, and a lot of people want to roll the clock back or worse. 

Three’s Company was a flimsy, unsubtle and silly show that didn’t intend to change the world like so much of today’s “prestige, event TV” – honestly, spending 800 words or so going on about it seems wildly overegging it – but at the same time, gazing back from what seems the impossibly futuristic date of 2024, it kind of shows how the world has changed, slowly, ever since Jack Tripper first knocked on that door. 

Shh, I’m on holiday. But say, have you bought my book?

Technically, I’m on holiday! But here’s an update on a few miscellaneous projects I’ve been involved with to share so I can keep my Social Influencer TM status:

Thanks to everyone so far who has ordered the amazing, spectacular Best Of Amoeba Adventures Book which is now available on Amazon worldwide as a dirt-cheap shiny paperback or a deluxe fancy-pants hardcover! In case you missed my shilling for it before, it’s 350 pages, more than a dozen stories from my 1990s small press comics and a great introduction to the Prometheus the Protoplasm comics I’ve somehow spent almost 38 years (ugh) dabbling in. If you haven’t ordered it yet, give it a shot and help me support my expensive habits. It’s tax deductible!* (*Might not actually be tax deductible.) If you have ordered it, please leave a review or star rating on Amazon to keep the algorithm overlords happy!

Meanwhile, over at the hip website Bored Panda that all the kids are into, I was interviewed for a little piece this week on the aesthetic of one of my fave filmmakers, Wes Anderson – go read it here!

Back to comics, perpetual motion machine Jason DeGroot has been organising a massive jam comic featuring dozens of small press creators, The Sunday Jam! A lot of these projects fizzle out but this one has been barrelling along all year with a new page each week, and I was pleased to take part with a page back around Christmas. Coincidentally mine is the last page in the new Collected Sunday Jam Volume 1 gathering up the first 28 pages of this epic, oddball and sometimes totally insane adventure! You can order the collected Jam for a mere $5 right here, and enjoy a mad sampler of small press talent, or give the project so far a read if you’re jam-curious. Do it!

More regular blog posting will resume in March!

Announcing: The Best Of Amoeba Adventures book!

Here’s what I did over my Christmas vacation: I’m happy to announce the release of a new book containing nearly 350 pages of classic Prometheus the Protoplasm stories from the 1990s, THE BEST OF AMOEBA ADVENTURES! 

Back in print for the first time in decades, it’s my curated pick of more than a dozen of the greatest Amoeba Adventures stories dating from comics I did in high school all the way up to the award-winning small press era! 

It’s available right NOW worldwide over on Amazon in a gorgeous paperback for a mere US$19.99, and for the fancier folks there’s a hardcover variant for US$29.99. An e-book will be available soon.

The link: The Best Of Amoeba Adventures TPB/HC

Here’s more about what’s inside: 

Nik Dirga’s Amoeba Adventures was one of the most critically praised small press comics of the 1990s. Now, for the first time, the best of long out-of-print stories by Nik 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. Dive on into the story of Prometheus the Protoplasm, Rambunny, Spif, Ninja Ant and Karate Kactus, and meet some of the strangest heroes and villains of all time as they battle toxic mushrooms, gorilla gangsters, time travel to the dinosaur age and even appear on David Letterman! 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.

Buy it now, buy two and invest in the future, buy three and pay for my mortgage!

As always thanks for your support and enjoy!

RIP Dick Waterman, keeper of the blues and my favourite columnist

Dick Waterman and Son House. All photos C the estate of Dick Waterman.

Mississippi blues writer, photographer and keeper of the flame Dick Waterman has died, one of the most extraordinary columnists I ever worked with in all my years in journalism. He was 88. 

Dick worked with some of the great blues legends starting in the ‘60s like Mississippi John Hurt and helped “rediscover” the forgotten Son House. He gave many struggling blue legends a second chance at a career and some sort of justice and support. He also photographed and hung out with pretty much EVERYBODY in the music scene at that time – Dylan, Jagger, Bonnie Raitt, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Janis Joplin. 

This picture of Mississippi John Hurt is probably my all-time favourite photo of a musician. C Dick Waterman.

There will and should be some fine obituaries taking in the whole sweep of his career. (Such as this excellent Washington Post one or this fine one in The New York Times) But when I met Dick Waterman, he was a columnist for the weekly newspaper I started working at in 1994, Oxford Town. It was the very beginning of my post-college career and I knew everything and nothing. The editor Chico had hired him and it was one of the best things he’d ever done. 

Almost every week Dick would drop these fascinating columns and stories about his life in music, tales of the legends and the forgotten geniuses, peppered with his gorgeous black and white photos. His columns were candid, backstage stories of what the blues legends were really like, or about his own life. When I was asked to take over as Oxford Town editor, visits from Dick were always a highlight.

Not that it was always smooth – Dick Waterman would turn in his column as late as humanly possible, shuffling into the old-school layout room close to midnight with a sheath of pages, while the pressmen could be heard loudly grumbling in the back. Once he discovered fax machine technology he pushed it even further. I attribute my skill at editing some copy very, very fast to some of his columns.

But he was unfailingly gentle and kind, with a bit of the “distracted professor” vibe around him. His photograph stash was an astonishing treasure trove that he had really just started to understand and promote in the 1990s. At one point he let us use an amazing photo of B.B. King on the back of an Oxford Town t-shirt. 

B.B. King, 1968. C Dick Waterman

I was just a rather self-important and fumbling 25-year-old editor dude at the start of my own weird journalism career but Dick was always good to me, and honestly, it took me a long time to fully understand what an amazing “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” type character he was in the ‘60s music world. I’ve never met Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, but hell, I knew Dick Waterman.  

When I left Oxford Town around 1997 to sow my wild oats back in California, Dick Waterman for some reason singled me out in his column in what is still, coming up on 30 years on, one of the kindest single acts of writing anyone has ever done for me. I include it not to brag, but to show what kind of man Dick Waterman was. 

He wrote about a Mississippi journalism award I won and said, “For the second year in a row, the Best General Interest Column was won by Oxford Town editor Nik Dirga. To appreciate this feat, you have to understand that he doesn’t even think about his own column until the rest of the paper has been completed. Nik has already announced that he is leaving in a few weeks and my sadness at his departure is mixed with the joy of having had the pleasure of working with him.”

“If Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world at the age of 21, I can only hope that I stick around to see what literary accolades will come forth for Nik Dirga. The best part of working with Nik is that he honestly does not know how talented he really is. I am over twice as old as Nik Dirga and he is the best editor with whom I have ever worked. 

“I wish him well in his travels and know that I will be reading his byline out there somewhere.”

He didn’t have to write all that about me, I know now, and I’m sure no Tiger Woods. But he did write it.

I wish you well in your own travels now, Dick, where ever they may take you. 

Mick Jagger. C Dick Waterman

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

It’s Oscar nominations day! Let us share in the joy of headlines that aren’t full of sadness, despair and such and celebrate what was actually a pretty good year for film. In my status as Radio New Zealand Official Academy Awards Correspondent (TM) here’s my take on the nominees and a look at a few New Zealand-linked possible winners:

Oscars 2024: Who will win, who got snubbed, and where NZ is in the mix

Meanwhile, I’ve also got a book review in this week’s issue of the New Zealand Listener magazine on Michel Faber‘s excellent new sprawling look at sound and our relationship to it, Listen: On Music, Sound and Us —

Review: Music-loving novelist Michel Faber on the psychology and sociology behind the sounds that keep us hooked (Paywall)