Tim Curry and the Rocky Horror Picture Show club: Don’t dream it, be it

Tim Curry had a wonderful career full of offbeat acting, but for many of us, he’ll always be Dr. Frank N. Furter. 

The Rocky Horror Picture Show just marked its 50th birthday last year, and what many fans may not realise is it’s got small-town New Zealand embedded deep in its DNA, thanks to its creator and co-star Richard ‘Riff Raff’ O’Brien. O’Brien emigrated to New Zealand from the UK as a kid and grew up around Tauranga and Hamilton, and the kind of greyish conformity of life down under in the 1950s is exactly what Rocky Horror is rebelling against. 

Tim Curry had been in poor health for years, but his leaving recently at age 80 still hit hard. I went to a memorial screening of Rocky Horror on the weekend at Hollywood Avondale – the midnight showings there in the ‘70s and ‘80s are apparently still New Zealand’s longest running movie of all time. It’s the spiritual home of Rocky Horror in Auckland – my last time seeing it on the big screen there about six years back featured Richard O’Brien himself telling stories and introducing the movie, which was a rare treat. 

I’m somewhat impressed by those who can watch it every week in their own personal mad carnival, but I find catching a live Rocky Horror every 5 years or so is enough for me. I have to overcome my natural aversion to people yelling out shit in movie theatres, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Some jokes will land with an escalating wave of laughter, others will belly-flop to little notice. There is self-policing – at one screening, a guy who just started shouting gross obscenities every time Janet appeared on screen quickly got shushed up. 

But I get a kick every time out of watching the joyful carnage of a good Rocky audience, dancing to the “Time Warp,” of the celebration of life itself. Whatever you want to be is OK here. 

I have a different favourite Rocky Horror song all the time – I love Barry Bostwick’s stiffness in “Dammit Janet,” Susan Sarandon’s brazen awakening in “Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me”, Meat Loaf’s swagger in “Hot Patootie,” O’Brien’s sinister slinky menace in “Time Warp” – but the last time I saw it, the dreamy haze of “Don’t Dream It, Be It” stuck with me the most.

Be what you want to be. Make it happen. 

The first time I saw Rocky was in high school, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It wasn’t a chaotic screening, but there was a lot of yelling and throwing toilet paper and rice around. Yet something about it grabbed me – Curry’s beautifully odd Frank N. Furter, the cast of hunchbacks and nerds, and the ultimate beautiful message of letting your inner freak flag fly.

I copied a friend’s cassette of the movie soundtrack and listened to it endlessly, “Sweet Transvestite” and “Science Fiction/Double Feature” playing on a loop. I was boringly hetero and conventional in a lot of ways, but I also was an awkward weirdo, performing too often as the class clown and getting called a “fag” a lot by the jocks and assholes, and my heart was always with the theatre kids and the punks even though I never really dressed as cool as they did. 

Curry’s defiant outcast who refused to be cast out was the patron saint for anyone who felt trampled on by dull conformity. 

It wasn’t for everyone – I remember an attempt by me to impress a girl in college by popping a VHS tape of it on only to have it greeted with an increasingly chilly silence. (To be honest, watching it on home video for the first time is a rookie mistake.)

Curry, of course, is the beating heart of Rocky Horror – while O’Brien’s songs are terrific, the movie itself kind of sputters along in low gear until Frank N. Furter’s dazzling entrance, still one of the most captivating character introductions of all time. His big mascara’d eyes pulse out of the screen like laser beams, his swaggering self-confidence, booming singing voice and purring line delivery redefined the straight world’s notion of beauty. 

Sure, Rocky Horror has become big business over the decades – it was featured on Glee, for crying out loud – but still, the essential strangeness of the original movie remains intact. It’s, objectively, not a perfect movie, perhaps – the narrative is wonky, the filming sometimes painfully low-fi, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. 

What always gets me about Rocky Horror isn’t so much the manic audience interaction, the costumes and the campiness – it’s actually the rising melancholy that slowly comes into focus, the loneliness of Frank N. Furter we start to see. For all the partying it’s a movie that ends with its star dead, its young romantic couple seemingly dead or dying and the “bad” guys getting away. It lulls you with catchy songs and then breaks your heart a little bit. 

It says something about Rocky Horror’s essential power that it still feels all like a triumph somehow, and that Curry’s beautiful, doomed decadent genius remains a shining light for so many people, and probably will for as long as we still watch movies. 

It was 25 years ago today – One journalist’s 9/11 memories

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was eating scrambled eggs and bacon at a Rotary Club breakfast meeting in Northern California when everything went upside-down. 

There was a TV playing the early shows there in a corner of the room, and suddenly everyone was paying attention to that. I wasn’t sure why, but then I saw skyscrapers in flames in Manhattan, and even as the editor then of a tiny little weekly mountain town newspaper, I knew my job had just changed. 

Pretty much nobody over 30 will have direct memory of that day now – how has it been 25 years? – but my primary recollections of that time is how impotent we all felt. 

Something that’s hard for people to get now is that nobody knew anything for those first days. As with any mass casualty incident even now, it can take a while for details to come out, something we really chafe against in our I-want-it-all-now 24-hour news cycle. There were rumours other world cities were being attacked, there were tales of 50,000 dead. For a few shaky days, it seemed like anything could happen. 

Truckee, California was far, far away from the epicentre of the day, but I scurried back to the Sierra Sun offices where one of those absurdly tiny mobile TVs was scrounged up because we knew we had to do something that day. It barely got reception, and we balanced it on one shelf with the antennas pointing out the window and could fuzzily see a tired and strained Peter Jennings seriously narrating the news, grainy images of huge explosions that didn’t seem possible. 

The limitations of the era were clear to me – my small staff of reporters kept clicking refresh on the news websites of the time, but everything kept crashing. We listened to National Public Radio, to find out what we could. Nobody was posting on TikTik or Facebook then, of course, and only a few early primitive blogs could be found with tales of the day. 

America was so sheltered from the kind of sudden violence so much of the rest of the world had experienced through the 20th century – and still does today. In our blinkered innocence it felt like we were somehow special, which of course was wrong.

The one image that haunted me the most is the one of the second jet hitting the World Trade Center, hurtling in oh so very, very fast and just slamming into the building and through it. The speed! In an accident it would probably be slowed down some, but the total speed and deliberateness of it as it plunged through the building – unreal. 

Nobody knew what was really going on, a terrible place for a journalist to be. I trashed the plans for whatever we were leading with in that week’s paper and my reporters bashed out quick reactions from locals, about what the local airport was doing, and tried to capture a moment in time that felt impossible to capture. 

Paranoia was firmly in the air for months, years afterwards. There was the brief terrifying anthrax scare where even the smallest of post offices around America would freak out over the tiniest hint of white powder. 

I still remember this gem from one of the Tahoe papers at the time:

“Inside city limits, a man on Capistrano Avenue called police Saturday night after he noticed a white substance inside a newly opened roll of toilet paper. It turned out to be lint from the paper, said South Lake Tahoe Police Officer Brian Williams.”

It was a very different media world then – we barely had email, social media wasn’t a thing and we were still in the age when you often waited for news to be served to you, on the 6pm news or the comforting thwapp of the morning newspaper delivery. Headline news was a luxury for those with cable TV. I only bought my first cell phone – a chunky Nokia – after the attacks, when the idea of being able to get in touch with your loved ones instantly suddenly seemed a lot more important. 

Flags sprouted everywhere in the days after – hanging from buildings, flapping from awnings, attached to car antennas. Again, nobody knew what was going to happen next, a feeling I’ve only truly encountered a few times in the decades since.

It was the end of something and the beginning of something that I honestly think we’re still not through yet on this ever-turning globe. Twenty-five years from today, I guess I’ll be an old man. I wonder what the world will look like then. 

• Meanwhile, over at the day job for RNZ, I’ve written two long pieces looking in-depth about how 9/11 affected life here in New Zealand — go give them a read if you like!

Explainer: How 9/11 changed how we fly in New Zealand forever

Explainer: How did the 9/11 attacks change New Zealand?

I get knocked down, but I get back up again: Coyote Vs. Acme 

“Cartoons are meant to be funny!” – Buddy Crane

Looney Tunes are, of course, the greatest cartoon characters in history. While bits of a dozen of the classic Bugs & Daffy shorts are taking up my headspace at any given time, can anyone even really remember a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck cartoon outside of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? (Comics, now that’s where Donald Duck truly soared.)

The Looney Tunes gang are messily human, flawed and mischievous, perhaps none of them more than good ol’ Wile E. Coyote.

The new Coyote Vs. Acme movie gives the long-suffering coyote his moment to shine, and it’s a hilarious, surprisingly moving celebration of the dogged predator who somehow never, ever gets his prey. 

This movie nearly never came out at all, a saga which has been well described elsewhere but which is a perfect illustration of the film’s sneering takedown of corporate culture and soulless profiteering. It’s all about maintaining valuable IP, sure, but Coyote Vs. Acme bites the hand that feeds it a little bit too. 

In tone, it’s an awful lot like a long-delayed sequel to the classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It could even be conceivably set in the same wacky cinematic universe, one where ‘toons and humans co-exist uneasily and where the cartoons are often being exploited unfairly. 

Coyote Vs. Acme is a lot less frantic than other sloppy live/cartoon hybrid Looney tributes like the Space Jam movies. At times, it’s almost bracingly mature in some of its thinking – it’s hard to imagine a Minions or Super Mario Brothers cartoon including several references to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, or a central plot point being questioning a character’s essential purpose in life. 

When I was a wee kid, I foolishly found the Wile E. Coyote / Road Runner cartoons a bit boring – those stark desert landscapes, the lack of dialogue, their repetitive nature – and it was only as I got a bit older I started to appreciate their inventiveness and wit. I realised you could tell the same story 1000 different ways and get a laugh every time. 

“Nobody cares about the coyote!” – Buddy Crane 

There’s plenty of madcap hijinks – human costars Will Forte and John Cena practically are living cartoons themselves, and many things get blown up, bizarre car chases happen and more. But the key to Coyote Vs. Acme’s success is that you actually do care about the coyote, and his twisted relationship with Road Runner. Wile E. is perhaps the most sympathetic of Looney Tunes, while still being an evil genius whose primary goal in life is to catch and eat his nemesis.

Coyote ain’t a good guy, but the real bad guy in Coyote Vs. Acme (and the movie’s real-life release saga) is the power of monolithic corporations, taking over every bit of our lives and obsessed with profit at any cost. …I feel like there might just be a bit of subtext in there about the world we live in circa 2026. 

Another classic reimagining of Wile E’s story came in 1998’s Animal Man #5 by Grant Morrison, where the indefatigable coyote ‘Crafty’ becomes a kind of horror-movie monster, unable to die, unable to break the cycle of his cursed destiny. He’s ultimately a kind of ungainly messiah figure whose tragedy is that nobody ever understands him. That story definitely ain’t for kids, though. 

Fortunately Coyote’s arc is less dark in the new movie, and one of its quietly optimistic joys is that Coyote is understood in the end, and he and that pesky Road Runner’s places in the universe make a demented kind of sense. 

One of the central joys of the Looney Tunes is that they do basically do the same thing over and over in those classic shorts – Yosemite Sam rages, Elmer Fudd screws up, Daffy Duck blows a gasket and wily Bugs Bunny always escapes in the end, wisecracks ready to go. 

Blowing himself up over and over again, getting crushed by giant anvils and rockslides and his body mangled in infinite ways, Wile E. Coyote might feel like a tragic figure – but one of the triumphs of Coyote Vs. Acme is how it shows us this gangly misfit, this evil genius, is actually kind of a plucky little hero despite it all. 

Graceland: I’ve reason to believe we all will be received

Graceland is the nexus of the Elvis Presley multiverse. 

Elvis feels more alive than ever in 2026, closing in on 50 years since his death. He was a bit of a joke, a punch line for much of my teenage years, but it kind of feels like we’ve all moved past that a bit to appreciate the massive cultural space he filled in America’s 20th century. Sure, there’s Vegas Elvis in all his jumpsuited splendour but there’s also raw Sun Elvis, hungry and strange, and swaggering ’68 Elvis, showing the kids how it’s done. 

I hadn’t been to Graceland since the mid-1990s sometime, where it felt kind of quaintly humble, but it’s since blown up into a full Disneyland-style complex. It’s not cheap – is anything these days? – but for anyone even slightly interested in Elvis and the pop history of America, it’s a must. It’s plonked down in a rather apocalyptic, run-down section of Memphis which isn’t exactly inspiring, but once upon a time it was the suburban mansion on a distant hill that a boy rock star decided to buy as his first – and only – home. 

I suppose once the “Elvis is really still alive” jokes all started to fade (I mean, the dude would be 91 by now even if he was secretly lurking in Mongolia somewhere), I started to respect a little more the dreamy kid from Tupelo and his ascension to the top of the world, the thunderbolt effect he had on pop culture (a moment which Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis movie, flawed and rushed as it is, really captures ferociously well). 

The mansion itself remains the same as always, a kitschy time capsule of what a superstar considered fancy circa 1976. Elvis’ Graceland has survived the spins and twists of what’s fashionable to kind of be weirdly cool again with its low carpeted ceilings and brash colours and sweetly low-key touches. It remains the sort of home a poor Mississippi kid made good would have had rather than the kind of sterile megamansion an Elon Musk probably owns 10 times over. 

Here is where Elvis watched his three TVs at once (imagine how he would’ve fared in the multi-screening device age), here he played pool in a densely curtained room decked out like an ancient sultan’s lair, here in the oddly peaceful ‘Jungle Room’ he laid down some of his final songs surrounded by shag carpeting and tiki-tacky exotic furniture. 

Once upon a time, I visited Graceland with friends in the mid-1990s, paying tribute at his graveside (which sadly today now includes his daughter and his 27-year-old grandson as well). I came this time at the start of “Elvis Week,” marking the 49th anniversary the King left this mortal coil, and the memorial area was decked out with wreaths from Elvis fans around the world, Belgium to Japan. Elvis is everywhere, as Mojo Nixon famously sang. 

What’s changed the most since then is the sprawling “Elvis Presley’s Memphis” complex across the road, 200,000 feet of Presley-ania covering his entire career from the scholarly to the silly. Excess was Elvis’ brand, and the music and pop culture nerd in me adored the trips through Sun Studios, his Hollywood era, the comeback years and the final days.

Everywhere you turn there’s little bits of musical history – an acetate from Sun, the Presley family’s battered personal copy of his first record. High and low art mingle freely – an entire room devoted to Colonel Tom Parker, even a section devoted entirely to Elvis’ hats, in case that floats your boat. 

Only in Graceland would the remote control to Elvis’ television get a quirky little display case of its very own, or the handwritten letters Presley infamously wrote President Richard Nixon before their well-documented White House meeting. 

I admit, when I walked into a room where the famous leather jumpsuit from the Elvis ’68 Comeback Special sits in a glass case, I felt a bit like the time I saw Abraham Lincoln’s hat in the Smithsonian. History in black leather. 

At another point, I walked into one towering room where more than 50 bedazzled Elvis jumpsuits are stacked up 30 feet high, and I surprised even myself as I gasped out loud. As the kids say these days, Elvis was a lot. The cheesy tacky “fat Elvis” years don’t seem quite as awful as they once did to me, but the kind of last gasps of a dying lion, and the over-the-top showmanship those Vegas years displayed have echoed in music ever since – I mean, have you seen a Chappell Roan concert? 

Is Graceland “worth it”? I spent four hours there without a pause and probably could’ve done another two (I mean, you’ve got to check out every Elvis hat, am I right?). In its reinvented modern form, its big glorious slab of rock star overkill and the lingering tastes of Southern humility and hospitality, Graceland almost feels like a museum for America itself, of rises and falls and all the echoing ripples we get from our stars, no matter how quickly they fly by. 

Maybe Paul Simon put it best – in some strange way, Graceland feels a little to me like coming home. 

Maybe I’ve a reason to believe

We all will be received

In Graceland

– Paul Simon, Graceland, 1986

On the road again: How America can still soothe my soul

Oh, how I needed a road trip. 

I’ve just returned from an epic 3-week, 11-state, 3000+ mile road trip across the land of my forefathers, from Texas to Mississippi to Kansas to California. It’s the furthest I’ve travelled in America for years, and it was a much-needed anecdote to the boiling chaos of the endless news cycle. 

The road and the sky, the lines on the pavement and the clouds on the horizon – strip life back to the basics, for a few days, and hit the road, jack. You won’t regret it. 

The thing about New Zealand is, you really can’t drive 8 hours straight in any one direction without running into the ocean eventually. It can sometimes get a wee bit claustrophobic. America goes on forever, and so much that you pass through are empty vast panoramas and blindingly blue skies. 

There’s something primal about the American road trip that has stirred song and poetry from everyone from Woody Guthrie to Kerouac. You can ride along the freeways, the backroads and byways until the sun sets and still only make it a few inches on the map. 

It was a pleasure to be reminded America is far more than the dipshits currently in power, that while the country is going through a very lousy time at the moment, it is possible to put away your phone and spend several hours hurtling along the interstate with fields and mountains and endless landscapes rippling by and not think of Washington, D.C. once. 

The last serious solo road trip I took in America was, dear god, nearly 30 years ago, back in 1997 when I loaded up my Toyota Camry with supplies and CDs and rode away from my life in Mississippi to discover strange new worlds back in California. It was a weird, lonesome trip for much of the time – pre-internet, pre-Google Maps, following along on my floppy road atlas as I unwrapped the country over the miles. No mobile phone, and there were hours at a time where nobody on Earth knew where I was.

These days, Apple Music, Google Maps and diligent application of cruise control made the roads a little less empty, although I really could’ve done without my fancy-pants Kia rental car talking to me sometimes and letting me know I needed to take a rest break. A steady soundtrack of Americana kept me company, all the old favourites rolled out – a little Wilco, a little BB King, a little John Mellencamp, a little Dolly Parton. Hurtling along the interstate at 82 miles an hour, every song feels like an anthem, somehow. 

I made it through Kansas for the first time, and while I’d never want to live there, especially with some of the current political atrocities going on, Kansas is still a powerfully evocative piece in the American jigsaw. Superman came from there, after all, and the Wizard of Oz, and Dwight Eisenhower and Amelia Earhart and my “imaginary friend” the great underrated musician Freedy Johnston. I marvelled at the infinite fields and the thousands of towering windmills lining the land, spinning across the prairie. 

America is, at its heart, still the land of wide spaces, of final frontiers, and the landscape of my home country is something I’ve longed for at times despite how much I love New Zealand. I rolled through Utah’s endless geology, and I thought, “at last.” I bopped along Louisiana’s alligator-filled bayous, Missouri’s rippling Ozarks, Colorado’s steep jagged canyons and Nevada’s sturdy laconic cowboy country and even the places I’d never been felt familiar to me, somehow. 

A landscape tells its own stories, separate from all our chattering human concerns. Americans grow up steeped in their landscape’s mythology and legends, for better and for worse, and while there’s an awful lot of things that vastly disappoint me about what’s going on back home, I can still never let it go entirely. I’m always ready to get back on the road again, and see where it takes me.

Maybe I’ll learn something, maybe I’ll be different at the end, and maybe you will, too. 

The Internet 2026, or, why even bother with this stuff?

So, I’ve been wondering whether or not it’s even worth it. 

I took a little hiatus from blogging back in June, as I had a lot of life stuff going on, but it also gave me a little chance to pause and try and figure out what my place is in this great churning, gurning algorithmic content machine most of us are caught inside these days. 

To tell the truth, I’ve gotten a little discouraged in the last 12 months or so. As someone who makes a living writing words for fun and profit, the rise of generative AI, the ongoing social media-fuelled breakdown in polite society, the daily doomscrolling and the hourly outrage alerts have started to make it all feel quite futile. There’s too much of everything and not enough of something, and it kind of feels like we’ve all developed a case of Ren and Stimpy’s space madness, doesn’t it? Do my little words even matter?

There’s a lot of nostalgia for the pre-collapse internet era out there these days. Like a lot of people, I got mesmerised by the shiny town squares of MySpace and Facebook and Twitter back in the day, sharing all kinds of random babble and life moments that I’d be truly embarrassed to do now. Again, like a lot of people, I’m a lot more cautious now about my online life, what I say and what I share. I begrudgingly still use Facebook (honestly, when you live on the other side of the world from a lot of your friends and family, it still has its uses), I abandoned Twitter years ago when the Nazis took over and find most other sites incredibly irritating (the various Twitter replacements) or full of stupidity (hello, Reddit). 

These days, many of the spaces I used to go to online just make me feel sad, mad, or bad. 

I started this website all the way back in 2018 when I was at a bit of a creative slump in life, mired in journalism jobs that weren’t really fulfilling and needing a bit more of an outlet. I could write about anything and everything I wanted here, and it spurred me to stretch my brain a little more.

It’s been a good impetus – I’ve ended up migrating in my work to doing far more writing and reporting than I’ve done in years for what I humbly think is New Zealand’s best news web site, and restarted my long-dormant comics hobby with Amoeba Adventures in 2020. Writing for this website has turned into my “pressure valve” for writing about things that don’t quite fit into my paid writing niches, a chance to babble on about cool music and comics and movies and sometimes whatever’s going on in my life. 

But yeah, sometimes I get a bit discouraged, when I start to think about how many “readers” to this website may now just be AI bots scraping my actual words for their soulless slop, about how hard it is to make actual human connections online now. Sometimes it feels pointless. Sometimes you want to toss your phone in the ditch and walk away.

The quandary is if you want to be a writer in 2026, you have to use the internet, at least a little bit. So I’m not going anywhere on this space, just yet. 

I took a break for a few months to mull it all over, feeling so very tired of the “enshittification” of online spaces and ideas. I took a little holiday in the real world to remember what it’s like out there and to remind myself that, ultimately, as much as I appreciate every single person who reads my words out there, I write the words for me, because I have to get them out, because being a writer is the only serious job I’ve ever considered in my life since I was about 12 years old and because, I hope, in the end real words by real people are always going to feel more real than all the endless garbage being churned out by opportunists and grifters out there. 

It ain’t a big site, this one, and yet I’ve had a blast writing my little essays here for the past 8 years, despite moments of doubt. 

 “I’m looking to something more than endless scrolling for that dopamine hit,” I wrote back in my first post on this site in 2018. “I’ll focus on what keeps me going in this tattered world.“

Why bother? Well, it beats the alternative, doesn’t it? In a world gone mad, we find the joy where we can, when we can. Onwards!

Paul Chadwick’s Concrete: The best comic book you may have never heard of

There were a lot of fantastic comics that launched in the 1980s – your Dark Knights and Watchmen, your Maus and Love and Rockets – but one of the closest to my heart is Paul Chadwick’s unforgettable Concrete, a series he’s been writing and drawing on and off now for 40 years. 

After far, far too long of a hiatus, the first new Concrete story in 20 years is set to come out this week, Stars Over Sand. It’s pretty much the comic event of the year for me. 

Concrete has always been an unusual animal and while it’s widely loved amongst comic fans, it’s not hard to feel it’s still somewhat overlooked and underappreciated.

For a series that is steeped in realism, it has its roots in the fantastic – political speechwriter Ron Lithgow is abducted by aliens and his brain transplanted into a hulking stone body, before the aliens vanish from the story forever. Concrete is about a man divorced from his own humanity but gifted with possible immortality trying to find a way to fill up his new life. And it’s not by fighting crime or other superheroic tropes, but by writing, exploring, and using his strange body to wring the most out of existence. 

Chadwick started with a superhero-esque premise, but the fantastical origin story aside, has resolutely kept Concrete a story in human scale, even with a towering golem as its lead. Concrete and his human friends/handlers Larry and Maureen remain some of the best written, nuanced characters in comics – smart and funny but also capable of being vain, conceited, cruel or forgetful. It’s quite possible the most humane comic out there. 

Chadwick’s stories are deeply researched – Concrete’s visit to Nepal has the realism of Chadwick’s own visit there, for example – but he has an eye for the little bits of character or distraction that help make his work so authentic – Concrete’s occasional inexplicable outbursts of temper, or Larry being distracted by the need to urinate during a harrowing hostage scenario.

Concrete is a gloriously ruminative, verbose figure, given to imaginative flights of fancy or philosophical meanderings that make him all the more relatable. He’s a writer, and Chadwick makes him feel like a writer, always testing out ideas and questioning. Chadwick’s art has got a classical elegance that shows in his quirky page designs, which sometimes leap right into surrealism, and his clean, expressive style that carries his wordy, thoughtful stories well. 

I re-read the entire Concrete series of stories every few years and I keep finding new layers in them each time.

The original 10-issue Concrete series of the 1980s is only dated by its fashion and technology – the underlying stories, whether it’s Concrete’s daring exploration of Mount Everest or a Gothic-flavoured tale of love and pain on a small family farm – hold up beautifully. Chadwick has gotten more ambitious with time, tackling contentious topics like how far environmental activism can or should go and whether or not humanity should aggressively work to lower the world’s population. Yet even with the knottiest of subjects, his love for his characters shines through. 

A series of miniseries and piles of wonderful short stories have tackled everything from suspenseful action movie to comic catastrophe to unlikely love story, but for those of us who love the rocky old dude, Concrete stories have been few and far between, and 2006’s The Human Dilemma was the last gasp for now – leaving us with a rather shocking cliffhanger change in status quo for the character I’ve been often thinking about ever since. 

I’ve missed seeing new stories with Concrete, who feels like a fond friend after so many years. I imagine it’s been hard for Paul Chadwick to make a good living doing Concrete alone – he’s dabbled in film, other comics and more, but this is ultimately his magnum opus. In a perfect world we’d be up to like Concrete #300 by now, I guess, but the 40 or so comics and dozens of short stories are still a fine legacy to have. 

Concrete has never quite broken through to the mass public – there’s been talk of movies (Chadwick turned his own movie experience working on the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie into the hilarious satire miniseries Concrete: Fragile Creature), but perhaps Concrete is a character who works best on the printed page. Chadwick has said he’ll turn to prose novels as a way of continuing Concrete stories, which isn’t quite the same, but I’d be keen to see how he makes that happen.

Whatever the future holds, Chadwick’s work on Concrete, forged these last four decades, is still some of the best comics I’ve ever read, and I can’t wait to see, finally, finally, where he’s taking his hero next, and hope there isn’t quite so long a wait until the next time. 

Laugh? I thought I’d cry – The best comedian documentaries do a little bit of both

Mel Brooks from the film “Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man!” (HBO Max via AP)

The lives of comedians are a funny subject for documentaries, but I find I can’t get enough of them. 

Right now is a golden age for those of us who like long (sometimes very long) documentaries about classic ‘70s and ‘80s comedians. Just in the last year or two, films about Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, John Candy, Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase, Martin Short, Pee Wee Herman and probably a heap of others I’m missing have all stumbled onto centre stage. 

Other great documentaries in the past several years have taken apart the careers of Robin Williams, Garry Shandling, George Carlin, Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder and so many more. Honestly, it’s easier to make a list of ‘70s/80s comedians who haven’t gotten a sprawling documentary look at their lives yet. 

There’s a theory out there that explaining comedy ruins it, but I have always been weirdly interested in dissecting what exactly makes something funny.

Sometimes, these documentaries are about reinforcing what we already know – everybody loves plucky Martin Short, everyone has a story about what a jerk Chevy Chase can be, Steve Martin is so much more than a wild and crazy guy and Garry Shandling may have been the most neurotic man alive. 

Yeah, there is sometimes too much reverence and not enough bite in these films. Comedy should sting a little bit, and so should documentaries about its makers.

And yet, I’m kind of here for them all. 

I’ve grown to appreciate Martin Short’s guileless energetic charm more and more over time, and Marty: Life Is Short is the textbook example of showing us how comedians often come from the saddest possible circumstances but can turn that pain into a sword and shield. Short lost his parents and a brother before he was 20 years old – and later, his wife to cancer – and yet he’s forged a career being one of the most likeable men in show biz. “There were laughs,” he says at one point, reflecting on the darkest times in his life. “That’s the point.” 

The recent John Candy documentary I Like Me is haunted by Candy’s ridiculously sad early death at age 43, and often falls into the trap of telling, not showing, with maudlin footage of Candy’s funeral and sappy strings dominating until it loosens up and starts to show us exactly why Candy was so funny and loved. It’s a tricky thing – you want to show the ups and downs but if you tip too far into the sadness, your comedian documentary starts to feel more like a wake. 

Still, a little bit of self-congratulatory backslapping also goes a long way, like the recent Being Eddie that fails to ask the hard questions about Murphy’s career. I don’t want a documentary that just feels like a tribute special. I want to know how these folks work. By far the best comedian documentaries are the ones which really rip away the public image to give you an idea how these people tick and how they think. 

I’m Chevy Chase And You’re Not is actually one of the more effective documentaries I’ve seen lately, because it doesn’t hold back in examining Chase’s longstanding reputation as, well, a massive asshole. It features several brutal clips and stories that show Chase insulting peers, crossing the line between comedy and cruelty without actually being funny – but it also digs into the abusive childhood he lived through, and makes us realise nobody is truly 100 percent villain or hero, success or failure. It’s a canny look at an often off-putting, self-sabotaging man who still has made me laugh a lot over the years. 

Documentaries have all their cliches – the random talking heads, the jittery home movie flashbacks and the standup performance videos. Sometimes they get too formulaic. Why do we need to have Ryan Reynolds’ opinion on Chevy Chase, for instance?

Several of them go very long, giving the creator of Spaceballs the same treatment you might give the American Civil War. Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, George Carlin and Pee Wee Herman all got two-part, nearly four-hour long deep dives. It may be excessive, but done right, I could watch this stuff all day. 

Mel Brooks is a living treasure, turning 100 in a few weeks time, and The 99-Year-Old Man! is a loving tribute to a man who shaped comedy for me ever since I saw Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein flickering away on TV reruns. Nobody expected Brooks to last this long, but the 216-minute documentary shows us why he matters and is still vital, even if at times it feels sad to watch a man who one day won’t be with us, knowing when we lose Mel we’ll lose a lot. But we’ll always have the laughs. 

Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, didn’t make it past 70 years old, but as I’ve written before, Pee Wee As Himself is one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in recent years. It reveals a lot about Paul Reubens’ art background and experimental work before Pee Wee became a blockbuster and patron saint for oddballs, and fills in the gaps on the private comedian’s personal life and loves.

There’s a fine balance to comedian documentaries. I mean, everyone’s story has the same sad end – people leave your life, then eventually you do, too – but comedians can show how you cope with that and even find the sprinkles of wit in the worst days. Comedian documentaries often tend to be tearjerkers in their final act despite all the funny clips – John Candy’s potential sadly cut short, Robin Williams’ tragic mental health struggles, or the images of aged, shrunken Mel Brooks at nearly a century, smiling away and cracking wise even as he becomes the last man standing from his friends and loves. 

A good comedian documentary should make me laugh… but I don’t mind if it makes me choke back a tear or two as well, as long as it’s got a little of both, sugar and salt. Life is a funny thing, and it’s sometimes a sad thing. And a lot of the time, it’s everything all at once. 

Can Doctor Doom be funny?

Doctor Doom is, of course, the greatest comic book villain of all time. 

Forget the Joker or Darkseid – both way too overexposed – or figures like Catwoman, Magneto and Loki, who’ve all been turned into vaguely redeemed antiheroes too often. Villains are often one-note sadists, like the Green Goblin (who should’ve stayed dead decades ago) or Bullseye, or gimmicky like the Riddler and Captain Cold. Lex Luthor is probably comics’ second-greatest villain, but he’s still ultimately a bald tech bro with envy issues. 

Victor Von Doom is an imposing monarch, an egotistical perfectionist and would-be ruler of the universe who’s been battling the Fantastic Four for more than 60 years now. He’s a rich enough character that writers are constantly finding new depths in him. 

But should he be funny? 

I’ve been reading the Doctor Doom epic collections Marvel has recently put out which collect all Doom’s early ’60s appearances across Fantastic Four, Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man and more, and it’s interesting to observe the gradual evolution of Doom. It took a while for Doctor Doom to truly become “Doom” – in his first appearance, of all things, he’s ordering the Fantastic Four to make a time heist to steal the pirate Blackbeard’s treasure! 

In the early years, Doom was often your standard-issue bad guy, turning up with wild plans and wacky weapons only to be defeated for another day. His haughty monologues and occasional wails of defeat could be funny, but he was a little less self-assured than he eventually became.

Gradually Stan Lee and Jack Kirby realised they had the ultimate Fantastic Four villain in Doom, whose tortured backstory – his youth as a poor, abused Romani child, the death of his mother, a face disfigured by scientific meddling, et cetera – was slowly filled out. Once his side hustle as the ruler of European nation Latveria was brought in, it gave a whole new side to Doom – beloved and feared world leader, as well as calculating supervillain. 

Under a series of great writers including John Byrne, Ryan North, Mark Waid and Jonathan Hickman, Doom’s complexity has gradually been unpacked over the years. I don’t envy writing Doom – it’s a hard line to make him a figure of some dignity while also keeping him consistent as a power-mad villain. I mean, he’s done stuff like kill his childhood ex-girlfriend and turn her skin into magical armour and sent Reed Richards’ young son to Hell. Yet he’s not an utter psychopath like the Joker, who at this point will murder you because it’s a Tuesday.

Doctor Doom is going to have a big year as the centre of the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. I’m nervous – Doom has already been messed up in four live action movies and counting, and the stunt casting of Robert Downey Jr is a worry. If Doom shows up and immediately turns out to be some multiversal dopplegänger of Tony Stark, they’ve done it wrong and don’t even understand Doom’s appeal. 

Doom is a figure that demands respect in his best stories, and like any comic book villain, he’s got infinite potential if written well – I can’t count how many times his evil plans have been thwarted or he’s been just outright killed, but Doom always comes back. In the stories where he does briefly end up ruling the world, he usually is defeated by his own demons. 

And Dr Doom can be funny – but strictly on his terms. Good Doom humour (‘Doom-mour?’) stems directly from his overwhelming ego and confidence that he is the greatest man there ever was. Heck, he’s even smack-talked Superman!

A big ego can be funny. I’ve got zero regard for the man in the White House these days, but I will admit one thing about him – he has, at times, been funny, and that’s usually a direct result of his grotesquely swollen ego. And so it is with Doom.

There have been plenty of funny moments in stories featuring Dr Doom in the past 60 years, although an awful lot of them make him the butt of the joke.

These days you probably won’t see Doom engaging in slightly problematic smack talk with Luke Cage… 

Or fighting super-powered squirrels … 

Sometimes portrayals could be unintentionally funny, like the time Dr Doom was shown shedding a few tears in a mawkish Spider-Man memorial comic after 9/11. No matter how sentimental you’re trying to make your story, Dr Doom does not cry.  

It took a while for Dr Doom to evolve into comics’ greatest villain. Doom being plonked into funny situations, like fighting Squirrel Girl, doesn’t quite sit right for the character anymore.

Doom can indeed be funny, but really, only on Doom’s own terms. Disobey him at your peril.