The Spectre is the most heavy metal of superheroes

How do you write good comics about a being that’s essentially invincible, a force of nature incarnate?

The Spectre is one of those heroes who’s been hanging around DC Comics almost since the beginning. He was introduced in 1940 as hard-as-nails cop Jim Corrigan, who is murdered by criminals but brought back to life given a chance to serve as the “wrath of God,” the Spectre. 

His schtick was punishing criminals in gruesomely inventive ways, such as just full on skeletonising one particularly unlucky bad guy in his very second story:

He was made a bit friendlier over time (including a very goofy era when he was basically the sidekick to the dorky “Percival Popp, Super Cop”) and even joined the Justice Society of America, but the Spectre never quite fit in as one of the superhero crowd. He represents something far bigger, more cosmic. When he was brought back in the 1960s, his short-lived solo book had him wrestling bad guys by smacking them in the head with whole planets, because the Spectre always goes hard. But it was hard to make the character relatable when they’re that far beyond humanity, and the run didn’t last long. 

I first encountered the Spectre in his brief appearances in Alan Moore’s essential Swamp Thing, where the character was portrayed as an unknowable, awe-inspiring presence, one that reduced your average metahumans to stunned silence. 

There was also a great short run by Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo in the 1970s in Adventure Comics which made the Spectre into a full horror movie villain, punishing the guilty with some insanely creative kills – turning a man into wood and putting him through a woodchipper, or chopping him up with giant cartoon scissors, for instance. There wasn’t a lot more to the stories than “how will the Spectre kill this guy?” but they were a lot of gruesome fun. 

The problem with the Spectre is how do you really write such a character? “Embodiment of the wrath of God” doesn’t give you a lot of room for nuance. He’s had comics runs that played up the mystic angles and supporting cast and turned him into a kind of Dr. Strange character, but then he just blends into the wallpaper. Some stories had Jim Corrigan definitely part of the Spectre, others had the Spectre as a separate being hosted by Corrigan. 

Enter John Ostrander, who married the gnarly punishments with real character work on the Spectre and Jim Corrigan and their peculiar, never-ending bond. His superb 62-issue writing run in the 1990s was peak Spectre, with a comic that was both bombastic and over the top and yet fiercely humane. It embraced the duality of long-dead angry cop Corrigan and the barely contained rage of the Spectre entity for some absolutely banger stories. It richly expands the history of the Spectre entity and its origins in one of the best underrated comics runs – the first half recently was reprinted in an excellent new omnibus. 

This Spectre run cobbled together all the bits of the character over the years and spun it into a dense, melancholy epic, interrogating again and again what it actually means to be the “wrath of God” and what good vengeance can actually serve. In one story, we see the Spectre brutishly pushing forward to avenge a woman’s murder – in the process driving other innocent people he accuses to suicide. 

At one point the Spectre slaughters the population of an entire country torn by civil war – see it as an allegory for the Balkans, or Rwandan genocide – declaring angrily that “no one is innocent!” It’s a key moment that breaks the character free from the giddy righteous cathartic gore of the Fleisher and golden age comics and makes you realise that when you start punishing, it’s pretty hard to stop. 

In the end, Ostrander’s Spectre run is about the fluid toxic nature of hate, and how far it can spread and how much it can control even the most cosmic among us. 

There’s an operatic excess to Ostrander’s writing, aided by Tom Mandrake’s anguished and dynamic artwork. You can’t go small with the Wrath of God as your lead character. It’s also the rare comics series that actually builds to a firm ending, with Jim Corrigan finally allowed to go on to his reward in the masterpiece last issue. (Of course, being comics, this great ending has been fiddled with a fair bit since that 1998 “last issue,” but it’s still a great story.) 

The Spectre hasn’t always been the best fit for good comics and DC is always failing upwards by trying to reinvent the wheel with him (we won’t even talk about that time that, bizarrely, they turned Green Lantern Hal Jordan into a new Spectre for a while), but over the last 85 years, he’s starred in some remarkable stories.

Ostrander’s run is a reminder that you can take a heaven-sent angel of death whose life feels like the chorus to a hundred Black Sabbath songs and still turn it into compelling storytelling. Now, that’s totally metal. 

There’s more than one edge of the world

I’ve always been fascinated by the edge of the world. 

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but one of them is that I’ve never travelled as much as I would like. In my free-wheeling 20s I was dead broke, and then marriage, parenthood, et cetera. Now, I’m teetering on the edge of old. But when I do travel, I’m always interested in those spaces that feel like the edge of the world.

New Zealand is all edge, really, a handful of wee islands bobbing away out there on the far reaches of the South Pacific, surrounded by wide wide seas on every side. I’m always vaguely aware that hunched on the horizon below us like a yeti is Antarctica, which is a mere 2500 or so kilometres (1500 or so miles) to the south. 

We took a recent road trip around the very bottom of the South Island recently, a place I hadn’t been to in far too many years, all mountains and long empty roads and sheep, everywhere sheep. We stopped for a visit at Slope Point, a stark little bit of cliffside that happens to be the southernmost point in mainland New Zealand. You cross a sheep paddock and brave never-ending winds to stand there on the edge of all things, a lighthouse and scrubby plant growth for company. If you’re lucky like we were, you get to experience it by yourself, only the jaunty yellow directional sign pointing out you’re closer to the South Pole than the Equator.

You can’t see Antarctica, of course – it’s still very far away – but you can feel it, lurking like a Norse ice giant. That’s what I mean by edge of the world. 

I’ve been to several places I would consider edges, even if they aren’t next to the ocean. Places that feel ancient and pre-civilisation, bigger than our squabbly little day-to-day human concerns and doomfears. Uluru, perched in the Red Centre of Australia, is definitely one of them, magical and awe-inspiring even with other tourists wandering about in the hot desert emptiness. 

Another is Alaska, the place I was actually born half a century ago at an icebound Air Force Base. I’ve only been there once since I was a toddler, but it was enough to feel the edges that exist everywhere there in the last frontier, watching a glacier slowly rumbling into the sea, dropping chunks of ice the size of houses in the frozen ocean.

Or the Badlands in South Dakota, another spot that feels untroubled by the world of humans, rippling and strange.

Or New Zealand’s northernmost point, Cape Reinga, which is where it is said spirits of the Māori dead begin their journey to the afterlife by leaping off the edge of the shore. I like that image – on the edge, a new beginning.

The thing about an edge of the world is that it should make you feel proper small, a speck of dust floating around in a world far bigger than we can ever really comprehend.

Mucked up as life often seems these days, there’s still an awful lot of world edges out there. I hope to get to more of them and teeter happily on the abyss a few more times in this brief little life we get. 

Sometimes all you want is a medley of the hits, right? 

While foraging at the groovy local record emporium last weekend, I stumbled across a CD single I’d never seen by Prince, Purple Medley. I snatched it up instantly, because I’m a sucker for the cheesy medleys, and a medley of Prince’s golden era is not to be missed. 

OK, I’ll admit – medleys sit at the bottom of the ladder of musical melding, while a little higher up there’s remixes and at the top, skilled sampling. Medleys are the Cousin Oliver or Poochie of pop music, bastard children that nobody really respects. Yet there is a party-down energy to a good medley, which at its best feels like a song of “all good bits” and no boring bits. Medleys are proudly basic – a chorus bashing into another refrain slipping into a good drum solo, with little layering or dissection. 

On Purple Medley there’s goofy fun in hearing “Little Red Corvette” push into the sultry chorus for “Cream,” or the raunchy opening power guitar chords of “Batdance” swerve into the bouncy intro to “When Doves Cry.” It never replaces the Olympian Prince originals, of course, but sometimes all you want is a medley.  

You can’t think “medley” without going past the kitschy world of Stars On 45, the Dutch tinkerers who used knock-off soundalikes to bash out a stew of Beatles ’n’ disco ’n’ Star Wars and much more in the early 1980s. In that distant pre-internet age, such repurposing of well-loved hits felt a bit startling, like a glimpse of the future. It wasn’t much fancier than splicing, but a good medley always carried an element of surprise. 

I always dug Weird Al’s delirious silly “polka medleys” on his albums slapping together a half-dozen or so hits into a crazed Looney Tunes-style joy ride, and I’ll admit, guiltily, to playing Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers’ eminently dopey cassette single for “Swing The Mood” an awful lot back in the day. Jive Bunny turned canned nostalgia into a brief viral sensation by giving old chestnuts like “Rock Around The Clock”, “Tutti Frutti” and Glenn Miller a hip-hop spin. It’s music as party wallpaper, no depth required. 

I won’t argue these are great art, and in fact a lot of the times they’re just awful. But other times, the  appeal of the medley is hearing the bits you know spliced and diced into something new.

It’s not really the same as sampling, which actually is an art form – the bits are shattered into many smaller shards in a sample, chopped up so far that they become building blocks for something new. A lot of great music has been created from the once-maligned art of sampling, from the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique to J Dilla to DJ Shadow to The Avalanches and many more. The samplers take it further, but the medley-making mix masters like Jive Bunny are all about sticking to the surface, cutting and pasting a collage of all the things you already know. 

To my embarrassment, I dabbled in splicing together medleys myself for a spell my freshman year of college – in between the drunken escapades and studying I sometimes found myself playing around with my old-school double tape deck and CD player, painstakingly pressing “record” and “stop” again and again to put together a just-for-me melange of clips from my tape and CD collection of Depeche Mode, cartoon sound effects, Men At Work, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Prince, Aerosmith, Robert Plant’s “Tall Cool One,” Iron Maiden, quotable bits of movies and TV shows all mashed up with excerpts from dire “comedy” cassettes my teen friends and I made. 

I spent an awful lot of hours in that weird time pressing “stop” and “record” to slap together a half-dozen or so silly medleys, but to me at the time, it felt kind of comforting to see the pieces of my past in new ways. I could see the appeal of getting inside sounds. 

Medleys are hacked together for sheer consumerism but sometimes they can feel like a bit of accidental art. Prince didn’t have a thing to do with putting together “Purple Medley” far as I can tell, but it’s still all about echoes of his art. And of course, a medley doesn’t erase the original songs.

One could even argue that it’s a heir of William S. Burroughs’ “cut up” techniques of random art generation, with Jive Bunny part of a long line of iconoclastic innovators. 

…Or maybe not. Perhaps I’m just basic in my occasional need for a medley. But y’know, that “Purple Medley” is pretty darned cool.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, my ultimate comfort watch 

I’m not a big one for massive binge re-watches of television shows. There’s always so much other stuff to watch, for one thing. So when I see people say that they’re watching all of Friends for the 42nd time, I don’t really get the appeal.

And yet… when I just want to zone out in front of a familiar face, I often find myself stepping aboard the good old starship USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. I like a lot of Star Trek, even the current stuff  (let’s not talk too much about Discovery, though), but for me, Star Trek: The Next Generation is the home I keep returning to again and again, more than 30 years after its final episode. There’s a lot of Star Treks now, but TNG will always be my Trek.

There is something very soothing about boldly going where you’ve already gone before. On a recent holiday night at a hotel, we somehow burned through four classic TNG episodes in a row without even meaning to. That’s the TNG spell for you.

The show ended in 1994 and yet Jean-Luc Picard and crew just keep sailing on those voyages long after the actors entered retirement age. All 178 episodes form a comforting narrative that remain eminently watchable – mostly self-contained, with those occasional dazzlingly energetic two-parters to shake things up. (Yeah, OK, the first two seasons are pretty middling, but by mid-season 3, TNG hit its stride and even the dud episodes – I’m thinking of pretty much any one that focuses too much on Deanna Troi – have their moments.)

Perhaps I’m viewing it all through the retro-futuristic zen of a late 1980s imagining of a better tomorrow that didn’t quite work out the way we imagined. TNG posits a world that still has a lot of conflict but rarely feels weighed down by the dystopian tech-troll world of existential loathing we appear to have gotten for our future instead of Vulcans and holodecks. Watching the best TNG episodes over and over again, you know they’ll sort it all out in the end, that Picard will get un-Borged, that Riker will still define space-sexy masculine goofiness, that Worf will be grumpy and Data will be endlessly curious. 

One of TNG’s strengths is its willingness to indulge in quieter moments – Data playing with his cat, Picard drinking tea, Beverly Crusher putting together her awful plays. You get a sense of real life in these glimpses at life aboard the Enterprise, in a way that a lot of other sci-fi shows and even other Star Treks never quite settle down enough to showcase. Who wouldn’t want to hang around playing cards with Riker and the gang at the end of a long day battling Romulans? 

Terrible things happen all the time on Star Trek, of course – you can get turned into a Borg, trapped in a space-time anomaly, accidentally turned into a child in a transporter accident or Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis might come to life on the holodeck and take over the ship. Every problem can be solved by a generous helping of techno-babble and Patrick Stewart’s soothing narration. 

There’s a vaguely cozy vibe to even the very bleakest of TNG scenarios, when you watch them again and again. The NCC-1701-D is ‘90s kitsch of what the future might look like, bold primary colours and a starship full of liminal spaces. It’s never seemed quite as dated to me as the original 1960s series does, and its blandly functional professional aura isn’t as idiosyncratic as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Voyager, which tried to shake up the five-year mission assignments a little more and threw in a lot more interpersonal conflict. 

The Next Generation cast moved on to movies after the series ended and I generally like them all too. And while the recent Picard series was a fairly mixed bag, an old TNG fanboy like me still dug seeing the old Enterprise gang coming together one last time in the final season.

Yet none of the continuations ever really hit that blissfully comforting zone that the 178 original episodes of TNG do. Every episode is reset Groundhog Day style, as we hear the latest captain’s or crewman’s log and the crew of the Enterprise get set to go about their business, again and again. 

Watched from our jittery world of 2025, there’s a relaxed pace to TNG that feels like a nice cup of tea at the end of a long day. Even when characters lose their temper and shout a bit, it still all feels, well, calm. You just don’t lose your shit on Jean-Luc Picard’s ship, no matter how wacky things get. And when the real world feels crazier than any science-fiction scenario, a little interstellar comfort food is sometimes all that you need.

God love a duck: My favourite cartoon ducks of all time

Who doesn’t like ducks? It’s the time of year here in New Zealand when the ducks roam the footpaths, with little baby ducks trailing after them. It reminds me of how versatile the plucky duck is in the world of comics and cartoons. There’s been many a duck star in fiction, but only some of them can be the top ducks. Here’s my 10 favourite fictional ducks! 

1. Daffy Duck – There’s nobody more despicable than Daffy Duck, who woo-hoo’ed and bounced his way through the very best of Looney Tunes cartoons – the perfect counterpoint to sly Bugs Bunny or naive Porky Pig, an unrepentant greedy ball of ego and id who will never quite win, but who will amuse the heck out of us while getting there. The platonic ideal of a cartoon duck, and while there’s been a lot of ducks who quack me up, there’s only one Daffy. 

2. Uncle Scrooge – Carl Barks turned Uncle Scrooge into one of the most fascinating characters in comics – a tightwad capitalist with a slight warm streak, a daring adventurer at odds with his own selfishness. Sure, he’s a duck, but Uncle Scrooge is also refreshingly human, and starred in some of the best comics of all time. 

3. Howard The Duck – Steve Gerber’s twisty, wordy and satirical comics were a surprise hit in the late ’70s – Howard even ran for President! – but the duck’s name was long marred by the weirdly sloppy 1986 Howard The Duck movie, which missed most of the comic’s subtlety. The movie has its moments (hellooooo, Lea Thompson) but go back to those original comics and you’ll find a dense, philosophical soup of goofy comic book parodies, existential meandering and always, a simmering sense of anger at an unfair world. They are a product of their time but honestly the yearning at the core of Gerber’s writing still resonates strongly today. 

4. Donald Duck – I know, Donald Duck at number four?! But here’s the thing – I just don’t think Donald Duck’s cartoons were anywhere near as good as Daffy’s, and that frickin’ cartoon voice is just annoying. Now, in the comics, Donald Duck is a lot more fun, a short-tempered adventurer whose ego always gets in the way. But… Uncle Scrooge remains an even better character, and as great as Carl Barks’ immortal comics are, they’re ultimately more of an ensemble act that Donald is part of. I do love Donald, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t change that there’s a few greater ducks in this here flock. (To avoid a flood of Disney ducks, I’m only listing two here, so sorry, Darkwing Duck, Daisy, Launchpad McQuack, Huey and Dewey and everyone else. Not Louie, though, he sucks.) 

5. Destroyer Duck – Born of outrage, Destroyer Duck was created by Steve Gerber and the legendary Jack Kirby in protest over comics creators’ rights and stomped his way through a half-dozen or so issues published by Eclipse Comics in the early ‘80s. It’s an exceedingly bitter comic book with lots of swipes against the industry and Gerber’s satire and Kirby’s dynamic artwork are an interesting combination. However there’s one big flaw – Jack Kirby, godlike as he was, simply could NOT draw a duck bill to save his life. His Destroyer Duck often looks a little too awkward. 

6. Super Duck – This fella was a weird kind of rip-off of Donald and Daffy published by Archie comics for a surprisingly long time. His appearance changed an awful lot over his career but I first came across him in some old Archie reprint digests. He had this strange off-brand Donald Duck look with an insanely big head and “cockeyed” expression that made him look perpetually deranged. Oh, and he often wore lederhosen. But his adventures were pretty funny, for a B-level runner-up kind of waterfowl.

7. Dirty Duck – This nasty fellow was a creation of the great underground comics artist Bobby London of Air Pirates and Popeye fame. Dirty Duck cartoons are scrawly, foul-mouthed countercultural fun in a style that’s heavily influenced by George Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoons and very much a product of the groovy, acerbic ’70s. Unfortunately they’re hard to find these days other than some scraps online, although London has been promising a collection of the classic strips for some time. I’m down for it, whenever it happens.

8. Duckman – And what about those adult ducks? Jason Alexander voiced Duckman as a kind of rude and crude mallard version of George Costanza filled with outrage and self-loathing in this long-running adult cartoon, which boasted an edgy alt-duck design I’ve always liked. The cartoon was hit or miss for me, but I do like Duckman as a character. 

9. Dippy Duck – Yet another dimwitted cartoon duck, but this one boasts the unique pedigree of being created by none other than Stan Lee and the extraordinarily versatile artist Joe Maneely just before Marvel Comics became a thing and Maneely died tragically young. I rather like how this scruffy, silly duck DOESN’T represent the 1000th ripoff of Donald’s design and the unique look old Dippy has. Only one issue was ever published, though. 

10. Buck Duck – Oh, we’re in the dregs now. Yeah, this guy kind of sucks, OK? Buck Duck can stand for the flood of generic cartoon ducks that swamped kids’ comics back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, all rote rip-offs hoping to be the next Donald – your Dizzy Duck, Dopey Duck, Lucky Duck, the off-puttingly creepy Baby Huey and all the other wild amuck ducks out there. Not every duck can be a dynamo. But that’s cool – there’s more than enough great ducks for everybody.

I still miss Halloween

Of all the holidays of my wayward youth, I think I miss Halloween the most. 

I have great memories of trick or treating on Race Street back in California as a kid, with my brother and neighbourhood pals, from when we were small enough to need a parental escort to when we were pushing teenager-hood and almost too old to pull it off.

I remember the daft costumes – dressing up as a blackfaced “assassin,” a pirate, Spider-Man, one memorable year attempting to pull off a mummy costume by donning yellow pajamas and draping them in toilet paper … which unravelled after the first few blocks. One of my very first appearances in the mass media was a grainy black and white newspaper photo of me dressed up as Underdog. Another year my parents hosted a great haunted house for our church (!) turning our basement into a cobwebby labyrinth of silly scares.

I think it was the delightful otherness of Halloween that appealed to me the most, the chance to dress up as someone else entirely for one day out of the year. The people who go on about it being some kind of “Satanic” holiday never had the kind of childhood fun I did. There’s far bigger monsters out there in America these days than kids having a bit of dress-up.

You’d wander up and down the shadowy streets and most homes would have a light on and a bowl of candy from the good stuff (M&Ms! Bounty! Pop Rocks!) to the not so good (candy corn, go straight to hell!). It was the one day of the year you’d get to actually see the inside of all the houses in your neighbourhood, even if it was just a fleeting glimpse. I think I came of age at peak Halloween time, before scary threats like poisoned candy or psychos with razor blades kind of spoiled the vibe.

Halloween was innocent fun but as you aged, it could get wilder and weirder. On a drunken expedition during freshman year in college we decided to steal a lot of neighbourhood pumpkins, which worked out great until I got pelted by a dozen eggs at one house. 

Halloween is kind of a thing in New Zealand, but not entirely. It’s definitely way more visible than it was when we moved here in 2006, but there is a certain amount of resistance to it. The stores all shove it down everyone’s throats starting in August or so because money, but I also still remember my late mother-in-law dismissing it as “begging for lollies.” It’s not embraced here.

Halloween kind of requires a cultural consent to pull off and it’s only partly there in New Zealand. Certain neighbourhoods are earmarked for trick or treating but most aren’t. And an awful lot of people here see it as another arrogant bloody Americanism being pushed on New Zealand, which, considering my homeland’s reputation these days, fair point. 

It’s also not helped by it being Spring down here when Halloween falls, and the days last until 8pm or so. Halloween trick or treating should properly be done in the dark, with a faint autumnal chill in the air, rather than spring blooms and chirping birds. 

When P was younger, I got a bit sad that they weren’t experiencing the kind of Halloweens I had. We had one Halloween in the US before we moved here when P was still a toddler. Still, I got a few of them in with our child while they were young enough to get into it – there was at least one good year of neighbourhood trick-or-treating with a cousin and a fun visit to a couple of carnivals. 

Another thing about Halloween is that it’s a holiday you largely age out of. There’s an ugly awkwardness to being a teenager too old to trick or treat shoving your way in among the little ones for a handful of Snickers. You can do Halloween as a bawdy older holiday of course, and I remember some fine drunken college Halloween parties that I think I enjoyed, but honestly, it’s mainly at its best a holiday for the kids and kids at heart, I think. 

So I still get that bittersweet nostalgia every October 31 remembering the Halloweens of the past and how one day you take off all those masks and have to become a boring old grown-up. I compensate, of course – typically with a lot of Halloween themed horror movies and hey, we might also have some candy in a bowl. For us, of course, not those lolly-begging trick or treaters.

You may get wrinkled and bent and unable to pull off a sexy Superman costumer but you never, ever age out of candy, by gum. 

That cinematic jolt: Spike Lee and those double dolly shots

I’ve been on a bit of a Spike Lee binge lately, re-watching some of my favourites like Do The Right Thing and The 25th Hour and BlacKkKlansman and dipping into some of the more obscure byways of his filmography. I’ve been a fan since first having the sweaty chaos of Do The Right Thing blow my mind more than 30 years ago and even when Spike swings and misses, it’s usually worth a watch.

And there’s one thing that always gets me, whenever it pops up in his films – the jolt of the double dolly shot. For non-film nerds, dollies are basically cameras mounted on carts to capture fluid movement. In Spike’s films, he’s popularised using the “double dolly,” where two cameras on dollies work together to create an eerie sense of actors “floating” through the background, like they’re on an unseen riverboat wafting downstream. 

I love the double-dolly moments in Spike’s movies, which frequently illustrate emotional chaos like in Inside Man or foreshadowing fate as in Malcolm X. They’re kind of a cold splash of water that burst the fourth wall of film, like the kick of a 3-D movie effect without having to wear those dorky glasses.

When Malcolm X, shortly before he meets his brutal death, suddenly begins to glide through the New York streets, he no longer seems quite human – and yet, you can’t take your eyes off the effect.

Lee has always liked to shake the audience to remind them they’re watching a film, with those confrontational to-the-camera monologues in movies like Do The Right Thing. Sometimes it doesn’t work – as much as I like his coming-of-age comedy/drama Crooklyn, a bizarre choice to distort the aspect ratio to an elongated box for 20 minutes or so of the movie almost derails the whole thing. 

But when it works, for me, Lee’s double dolly shots deliver a shock to the system of passive film watching. In that same Crooklyn, there’s a few shots when the young girl Troy has vivid nightmarish dreams driven by double-dolly shots, which seem to emphasise how little control she has over her swirling life. At the movie’s end, the double dolly shot bursts into the real world in a cathartic moment when Troy and her brother attack the neighbourhood drug addicts. 

Is it a bit flashy and show-offy as a film technique? Certainly, and it’s a good thing generally Spike uses it sparingly, and not in every film. But if you save it for those critical moments – Philip Seymour Hoffman’s existential despair in The 25th Hour, or the startling burst of violent anticipation that ends BlacKkKlansman – it lands with a sharp impact.

The cinema screen often bends but it doesn’t quite break, but for me, in the quick brief moments of those trippy double dolly shots, Spike Lee comes very close to exploding the whole idea of what a movie can be. 

Swamp Thing: The forgotten comic book movie franchise

As part of my annual Halloween month monster movie marathon, I went back to the swamp. Swamp Thing, that is, who starred in two almost forgotten comic book movies that oozed their way through the ‘80s. Nobody would ever call them timeless classics, but I’m weirdly fond of them. 

Swamp Thing and Return Of The Swamp Thing came in that kind of interregnum in superhero movies through much of the ‘80s, in the period between the last good Christopher Reeve Superman movie Superman II in 1981 and the Tim Burton Batman-palooza of 1989. In that grim limbo we comics geeks made do, dimly, with unsatisfying stuff like Howard The Duck, Supergirl and Sheena: Queen Of The Jungle. 

Neither Swamp Thing movie is really great, but there’s something about them I’ve always found cheesily enjoyable, from their campy humour to their amiably low-fi practical effects. Now, Swamp Thing has starred in some of the greatest and most out-there comics of all time, and the basic muck-monster idea has exploded into existential horror, cosmic wonder, time travel, LSD-tinted romance and much more. But on screen, there’s still something loveable about just having a guy in a rubber suit wandering around the swamps. 

There was an attempt to make 1982’s Swamp Thing the next Superman, with adverts on the back of every comic and awesome poster art. The movie closely follows the comic plotline about a scientist, Alec Holland, (the great Ray Wise, who I kinda wish had been allowed to suit up as Swamp Thing himself) whose groundbreaking research is targeted by thieves. In one of those only-in-comics accidents Holland is set on fire, doused in his mysterious chemical formulas and thrown into a swamp, where he re-emerges as a half-man, half-man muck monster. With the aid of another researcher (Adrienne Barbeau), the Swamp Thing (played by Dick Durock) seeks revenge on Anton Arcane, the evil mad scientist behind all his troubles (Louis Jourdan). 

Swamp Thing is a breezy monster mash of a movie, with a costume where the seams are clearly visible and the steamy swamp setting is one of the film’s biggest assets. Swamp Thing is a monster, but a good guy, and in the end he gets into a classic monster-movie throwdown wrestling match with Arcane, who inexplicably ends up turned into this wild bug-eyed shrew/rat man hybrid when he overdoses on Holland’s formula. It’s a so-bad-it’s-good moment.

Maybe it’s because it was one of the first real “horror” type movies I saw, but I still love Swamp Thing, flaws and rubber costumes and all. Barbeau is a great steely kick-ass heroine, Jourdan is smoothly menacing and Dick Durock gives Swampy a melancholy charm. It’s a movie that just gets to the point, pure popcorn cinema with a dash of sadness over poor Alec Holland’s fate.

The sequel Return Of The Swamp Thing pretty much gives up at being serious at all. It starts off, weirdly, with a credits montage that features lots of glorious art from Alan Moore’s legendary 1980s Saga of The Swamp Thing comics. As these images by Steve Bissette and John Totleben pass across the screen you think whoa, is this movie going to boldly reinvent the whole idea of a swamp monster hero like Moore’s comics did?

But nope, it’s a tease. Return Of The Swamp Thing is a far campier and sillier sequel that feels like it came straight from a USA Up All Night! marathon. It opened up, very briefly, in theatres a month or so before Batman in summer 1989, and it’s a plucky last gasp of the slapdash amateurism most superhero movies had until Tim Burton came along. 

This time, Swamp Thing has a much cooler leafy costume that apes the looks of the Alan Moore comics, but that and an eerie scene where Swampy slithers out of a bathtub drain and puts himself back together are about all that this one has in common with the Moore stuff. 

In one of the weirdest castings of all time, Heather Locklear plays a hilariously broad valley-girl version of the comics’ goth girl love interest Abby Arcane, while poor old Louis Jourdan looks half-dead in his sleepy return as Anton Arcane, rather inexplicably no longer a shrew-man. The henchmen are ridiculous action movie parodies and the movie features two of the most obnoxious child actors you’ll ever see and a far more talkative Swamp Thing who feels like some chill surfer dude rather than the rumbly monster of the first movie. (Seeing Swamp Thing laugh like a businessman at a cocktail party is one of the most off-model moments of the film.) It’s a ramshackle, small-scale story that basically seems to consist of Arcane doing more goofy evil science stuff, and Swamp Thing defeating the rather physically unimpressive bad guy by… throwing a chair at him. We don’t even get a return of the bizarre shrew-man costume. 

…And yet, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just my love for Swamp Thing as a character and the low-stakes vibe of these movies, but it’s far more entertaining than the plodding, overly serious and dull attempt to bring Swamp Thing back in a very short-lived TV series a couple years back. Word is James Gunn wants to do a new Swamp Thing movie as part of his DC universe empire. I know these days everything is done with CGI and motion-capture but I still kind of hope that if they do a new flick, we still get a guy in a somewhat sloppy rubbery costume stomping about in the muck.

When it comes to Swamp Thing on film, the dirtier, the better. 

Diane Keaton was always my first love

God, where to start with Diane Keaton.

She was perhaps my first big Hollywood crush, because I was a budding teenage intellectual who caught Annie Hall on the TV sometime in the mid-1980s and recorded it on a VHS tape, watching it over and over until the image began to break down into jittery lines. 

It was a movie that spoke to me of a wider, more glamorous world than small-town California, with wide Manhattan streets and everybody dropping witty banter and watching foreign movies that would surely change your life.

Her death yesterday at age 79 shocked me, when I shouldn’t really be too shocked anymore about us slowly losing all those great ‘70s and ‘80s stars of my youth. But Diane Keaton always felt so fervently alive, that for her to suddenly cease felt immensely wrong. 

I’ve watched Annie Hall dozens of times and it sparked a lifelong love for the films of Woody Allen and Diane’s impressively light touch as an actress. (I know, I know, there’s a lot of pitfalls about being a Woody Allen fan these days, but despite many problematic concerns and allegations and my rather mixed feelings about the man himself, I can’t ignore that his movies shaped a hell of a lot of my teenage worldview, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.) 

Diane’s “Annie Hall” character was the grand template for so many of Keaton’s comic characters in her wonderful Woody collaborations and more – a manic pixie-dream girl prototype who actually was often far wiser than those around her. Take her ditzy pleasure addict in Sleeper, who ends up a devoted revolutionary warrior, or her hilarious turn in the Russian mock comedy Love and Death, where her deadpan wit often blows everyone else off the screen. 

She never quite played the same character in any of these films despite her style becoming a bit of a stereotype – look at her nuanced turn in Woody’s tricky dramedy Manhattan as a spurned ex or her delightful mid-career return to Woody as a paranoid, dissatisfied wife in the detective comic romp Manhattan Murder Mystery.

A natural successor to Katherine Hepburn, like her, Keaton always had a keen intelligence shining away behind that “la-de-da” exterior. You’d see it in films like The Godfather or Reds, where she turned that comic energy inwards to create vivid dramatic roles. 

The same year as Annie Hall, she also starred in the incredibly dark Looking For Mr Goodbar as the anti-Annie. It’s a depressing, bleak film that aims to show the seamy underside of ‘70s swinger culture, but Keaton, as always, is very good – playing a character who isn’t as confident or cunning as she thinks, who ends up lost in a nightmare.  

But it’s Keaton the comic I fell in love with watching Annie Hall over and over as the VHS tape juddered, and her great willingness to marry her stunning beauty with undignified pratfalls. Even in a middling ‘80s workplace comedy like Baby Boom, she sells her character’s turn from stoic yuppie to loving mother with an unforced ease. 

As Keaton got older she played lots of moms and winter romances, not all of them great movies, but she was never better than in her final Oscar-nominated turn in 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give. All of the classic elements of those silly rich white folks rom-coms are here – houses in the Hamptons, characters swanning through privilege without a care in the world – but again, Keaton takes the material and makes it so much better with her wit and sincerity. Was there ever a sexier comic love triangle than both Jack Nicholson and hot young doctor Keanu Reeves falling for Diane Keaton? And why wouldn’t they?

Keaton grew old gracefully, even if she left a little too soon, and there’s as much to love in the middle-aged longing of Something’s Gotta Give as there is in the bright-eyed unwitting fashion icon of Annie Hall. I kind of loved them all – after all, you never forget your first love. 

Five years, that’s all we got: Jacinda Ardern and being Prime Minister

There’s something spooky about watching a documentary covering events you lived through and still haven’t quite processed yourself. 

Jacinda Ardern was New Zealand’s leader up until about 2 1/2 years ago, but somehow that already feels like a few centuries ago in the current grim timeline. Watching the excellent, if starry-eyed, new documentary Prime Minister takes us back through the whirlwind of 2017-2023, when New Zealand was often buffeted by a series of tragedies that all felt sadly outside our control.

Prime Minister is a startlingly intimate portrait of the Jacinda years, and what it’s like to be a young pregnant woman suddenly lifted up to the corridors of power. Whether or not you agreed with Ardern’s administration – and it was ultimately as flawed as most governments, in the end, but not as bad as some – Prime Minister is a movie that is somehow bittersweet and optimistic all at the same time. 

So it’s weird watching Prime Minister and seeing the history of your country retold when it feels like it’s all not even quite ended yet, to see everything unfold again as it did in those crazy five years.

I was in the thick of the Ardern years as a journalist, typing away news alerts and quick takes from the day she surprisingly came out on top of government coalition negotiations in 2017. I watched with horror the shocking mosque shootings of Christchurch in 2019, helped cover her massive re-election win in 2020 and watched as Covid crept in and everything in the world seemed to grind to a blurry halt. We journalists waited for the “1pm update” on what the pandemic had to say today, and saw the creeping dissatisfaction grow in some corners.

I watched Parliament’s grounds become occupied by a collection of protesters for weeks in 2022 and I had the curious fortune to be running a live-blog the morning that the police came and that occupation came to a violent, fiery end. For a journalist, the moments when you think, “I’m watching history right now” come with an electric charge.

We’re very much all still living in the societal and cultural upheaval the pandemic left behind and the swamp of populist rants, conspiracy theories and anger-fueled online bile feels like it will never end. Did New Zealand get everything right? Probably not, but the overriding fact is that all the rewriting of history going on at the moment ignores that at the time nobody knew what might happen, and in the end, a whole lot of people could have died in a small island country like ours. Ultimately less than 6000 died of Covid-19 here – while in America, 1.2 million did.

Prime Minister boasts a candid access that it’s hard to imagine a lot of political leaders allowing. Ardern’s partner Clarke shot lots of footage of her over the years, as she sits in bed worn out after long days or works through the exhaustion of pregnancy. Even though I spent so much time covering Ardern and writing about the events of the day, it’s all a very different perspective that sheds new light on the burdens of power and Jacinda’s – perhaps impossible – attempts to remain kind at heart in a world that frowns on that. 

Again, I won’t argue New Zealand was some magical utopia when Jacinda Ardern was in power. But to be honest, a lot of politicians running the world at the moment seem barely human, let alone humane to me. We dehumanise politicians, and Prime Minister aims to correct that. Ardern has been turned into some unrecognisable demon avatar in some corners of NZ to this day. It’s hard to reconcile that with the images of a young mum playing with her daughter we see in Prime Minister. It’s also easy to see why Jacinda quit when she did, having no more petrol in the tank. 

Prime Minister isn’t a deep investigative dive into NZ politics. It’s glossy and aims to make Ardern the hero without really diving into the intricacies of politics here. And yet, in its own way, it feels a bit like an elegy for a lost world. Why would anyone want to be a politician these days? 

Power costs, and in the end, you have to wonder if, in a timeline crowded with blustering authoritarians, grim bottom-liners, hucksters and grifters and outrage merchants, that the eminently human scale of Jacinda’s politics is something we may never see again.