Tag: comic books

Pockets full of fun with Dennis The Menace

Once upon a time in small-town California, the old Shop N Save down the street from my parents’ house carried comic book digests, tucked in a corner of the magazine rack. Those cozy little 14 cm × 21 cm books full of reprints were quite in vogue in the early 1980s, and packed 100 pages or so of vintage reading for typically less than a buck. 

You’d see superhero reprints from DC and Archie stories, but the best of these digests, for me, were Dennis The Menace Pocket Full of Fun books, gathering up classic comics featuring the adventures of Hank Ketcham’s good-hearted but hyperactive perpetually 5-year-old kid hero Dennis the Menace (no, not that Dennis).

Dennis debuted in comic strips, but soon moved on to his own comic book adventures, overseen by Ketcham but usually drawn by others.

As a budding comics geek, I loved the digest format, although my increasingly aged eyes have found the poorly-printed DC Digests are now almost illegible without heavy magnification – those superhero comics weren’t meant to be shrunk down to pocket size, really. But Dennis, well, his pockets full of fun still hold up pretty well with the less cluttered, more open artwork and lettering, and are still easy to read. 

The funny thing is, I never really was a huge fan of the Dennis The Menace comic strip, or Hank Ketchum’s rather too loose and scratchy art. In my humble opinion, a single panel isn’t really the best comics format unless you’re The Far Side or something. The longer Dennis comics stories worked a lot better for me, letting the pint-size characters have actual adventures and giving Dennis a chance to bounce off his uptight parents in funnier settings.

When I read those Dennis Digests, I quickly figured out there was a “good Dennis” artist tucked in amongst the diligent anonymous imitators of that Ketcham style. There was one particular artist whose stories were packed with crisp, detailed artwork, hilarious slapstick and cartooning and a dynamic wit and energy that many of the other Dennis stories lacked. 

It took me years to figure out who that “good Dennis” artist was. Al Wiseman (1919-1988) was the Dennis “ghost” artist for many years. Working with writer Fred Toole he cracked out dozens of great Dennis comics stories in the ‘50s and ‘60s I discovered reprinted in those Pocket Full of Fun digests. 

There’s something about Wiseman’s style I loved and still love. His cartoony characters are drawn slicker, with more style, his artwork lusher and more detailed – dig those fine ’50s style architectural backgrounds! And the lettering in Wiseman comics sparkles with personality, from the mellow “typewriter” conversational wording to the sharp, angular “shock” script he uses for yelling and screaming (and there’s always a lot of those in Dennis the Menace comics). 

These comic adventures were based in realism – Dennis a precocious but recognisable kid, his parents frazzled Henry and soothing Alice, his gang of neighbourhood friends. The grounded adventures tended to revolve around things like Christmas, family vacations, playing with your best pals – and as chaotic as they got, rarely moved into total fantasy, suiting Wiseman’s exquisitely researched art well. 

The stories became tailored to Wiseman’s strengths and particularly in a series of dazzling “holiday” specials – Dennis The Menace Goes To Hawaii, Washington DC, Mexico, Hollywood, etc – where all his skill at detailed renderings really came together. Goes To Hawaii is reportedly one of the best-selling comics of ALL TIME, with 4.5 million copies sold over several printings.

Ketcham continued drawing the daily Dennis strip till his death but somehow Wiseman and Toole’s work never quite got the appreciation or credit it deserved. Some of their work (along with the also very good Owen Fitzgerald, who had a looser style) was reprinted in some fine hardcover books a few years back, a series which sadly only ended up three volumes long.

At their best those Dennis digests packed with Wiseman goodness hit that “comics for kids and adults” sweet spot that geniuses like Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and John Stanley’s Little Lulu did. 

I long ago lost my childhood Dennis digests but have slowly rebuilt the collection over the years. Any time I see those Dennis digests pop up these days on the open market, I grab them, and any other vintage Dennis comics collecting that sweet Wiseman art.  

Neal Adams just couldn’t help himself

First, a disclaimer: Neal Adams is one of the all-time great comic book artists, and a favourite of mine ever since I picked up some tattered ‘70s Batman reprints and discovered that dynamic, bold style that truly changed comic art.

Adams exploded on the scene with his Batman and other work in the late ‘60s and was a loud revolutionary – he broke comics out of their staid grids and made the comics camera move, and gave Batman, Deadman, Green Arrow, Superman and many more a radically realistic upgrade. His characters heaved with emotion and muscle. Adams, who died in 2022, was truly a trailblazer for comics.

But man, I wish he could have stopped tinkering with his comics. 

Adams was notorious for recolouring, relettering and even redrawing entirely his vintage ’60s and ’70s work when it was reprinted in fancy collections in later years. It almost never improved the art. It often made it a lot worse. 

It was highly noticeable in a Deadman collection I was just re-reading, where Adams’ art is tarted up in garish colours that instantly look dated, re-lettered with bland computer lettering and woozy airbrushed looking highlights and backgrounds. The one on the left is the original. The one on the right in Deadman Book One is almost an entirely redrawn and reworked page.

A few pages later in this same collection, other Adams stories of the era are reprinted as they were – the same dynamic art is given a calmer, more fitting look with the original colours. The styles – old-school Adams and tinkering Adams – clash mercilessly when jammed together into one book. 

Even worse, in collections of his utterly iconic Batman comics of the era, too often they’re served up with gaudy new colors, hideous gradient backgrounds and art tweaking. Give me yellowing newsprint and the work that came from the pen at the time any day. 

Does it look more “modern” when Adams reworked colours and art? Sure, I suppose. But the point of old things is that they are old, and not intrinsically worse because of how they were done at the time.

I’m a developing cranky curmudgeon, I know, but the flatter colouring of vintage comics was just right for the time, and recolouring old comics in modern styles feels to me just as much of a creative violation as colorising old black and white movies is. 

This has all been quietly infuriating Adams fans for years, and it raises lots of hard to answer questions about fans, creators, and who has the agency. 

Like Adams, I believe in creators’ rights, and it’s a knotty question that if Adams wanted to “update” his work like George Lucas has bowlderised the 1977 Star Wars, isn’t that his right? I’m still working that one out. But I believe the work should be reprinted faithfully to how it was first produced. If you want to make a new “updated” version, too, knock yourself out, but don’t suppress the original.

Adams kept working all the way up to his death at age 80, although few fans would say later work like Batman: Odyssey and Fantastic Four: Antithesis lived up to the classics. Adams’ art also took a turn for the grotesque in his final years – all the dynamicism of his early work ‘roided up somehow to look more than a little weird. And let’s not talk about his writing, which was never his strong point:

All artists change their style as they go and so hey, Adams changed, that’s cool. But going back and reworking the work that put him on the map and making it difficult to even find the originally coloured and drawn versions in modern reprintings — well, I love Neal Adams, but I do wish sometimes he would have stopped tinkering and just appreciate his accomplishments as they stood.

He truly was one of the greats – and he was from the moment he first exploded onto the comics scene more than half a century ago. 

RIP Peter David, who made being funny look easy

Peter David perhaps wasn’t quite a household name, but any comics fan from the late 1980s onward knew who he was. The acclaimed comics and novel writer died overnight at age 68.

David’s remarkable 12-year-run on the Incredible Hulk changed the character forever from the “Hulk smash” days, while his work on everything from Spectacular Spider-Man to Aquaman to X-Factor to Star Trek was always entertaining, full of humour and sharp dialogue. He wrote many novels and was also an excellent, underrated essayist with his long-running “But I Digress” columns in the late, great Comics Buyers’ Guide. 

Simply put, he was a writer who knew the assignment, and delivered almost every time. 

Unfortunately, his sadly early death wasn’t a shock, as he’d been in terrible health for ages. David suffered a stroke in 2012 and spent most of the last few years in hospital or rehab care due to kidney disease, diabetes, heart attacks and more strokes. As a fan, it was hard to hear news of his slow decline. Remarkably, he kept writing through most of it all. 

Being funny is harder than it looks, but David often made it look easy. His relaxed, friendly style and deft hand with a one-liner stood out from the crowd when he began writing professionally after a long stint in sales for Marvel Comics. 

Reading David’s early Hulk and Spider-Man comics back when I was in high school, his voice was an important influence for me in developing my own goofy comics writing style with Amoeba Adventures. 

I’ve always been drawn to the sour and sweet combination of mixing dramatic moments with silly one-liners and slapstick, and David was a master at that balance. He knew when to go for the gag and to go for the gut. Not every joke landed or has dated well, but there was a lightness of spirit to Peter David’s best work that holds up well. 

He was never an Alan Moore/Grant Morrison type writer who deconstructed the comics medium, but instead a steady journeyman like Kurt Busiek or Roger Stern who could be counted on for providing usually excellent comics soaked in that hilarious wit.

His death may not have been preventable, but the one thing that makes me truly angry today is how Peter David and his family spent so much of the last few years fighting to fund his health care.  It was great to see so much support for crowdfunding his care when the call came – I donated a couple times myself – but with his death today, I wonder why it came down to GoFundMe to support a dying man and his family. 

Disney, DC Comics and Sony made millions and millions from Peter David creations like Spider-Man 2099 in the Spider-Verse movies, the “smart” Professor Hulk as seen by Mark Ruffalo in Avengers: Endgame, the revamp of the dull fishy Aquaman into the sexy long-haired, bearded warrior that Jason Momoa turned into a worldwide movie hit, the Young Justice team of tween sidekick heroes who headlined a hit animated series – just for starters. 

And yet twice, his family had to turn to GoFundMe for help as David’s condition worsened, as Medicaid cut off funding and his widow Kathleen spent an unfathomable amount of time wrestling with the unfair labyrinth of American health “care”. I’m not saying corporations owe it to creators to fund every moment of their lives, but David suffered for a long, long time in hospitals and rehab, and a million dollars jointly donated by Marvel, DC and Sony could have gone a long way and been a drop in the bucket for companies like Disney and Sony that earn billions every year.

Comics will break your heart, the Jack Kirby saying popularised by NZ cartoonist Dylan Horrocks goes, but Peter David’s last years could have been a bit easier with a little bit of corporate kindness. His life’s work amused and entertained millions. It would be nice to think his death might make a difference somehow, too. 

Val Kilmer’s very human Batman

Val Kilmer was a complicated guy, but he left behind a lot of indelible movie performances. Nobody would ever call Batman Forever a good movie, really, but despite all the missteps and terribly 1990s trappings of it all, there are moments when I do think Kilmer’s Batman is one of my favourite takes on the caped crusader.

Kilmer, I think, was the funniest Batman other than ’60s icon Adam West. That’s not exactly something that fans of none-more-dark Dark Knight takes might appreciate.

As a Bat-fan, I’ve always liked the Batman who was a little more human, the one we’d see running around in Brave and Bold comics in the 1970s tossing quips about with Green Arrow and Kamandi. A Batman who is so utterly bleak gets a bit old. 

Director Joel Schumacher took all the gothic weirdness and carnival humour of Tim Burton’s first two Bat-movies and exploded it into full-on camp and neon garishness. Batman Forever, turning 30 in 2025, was a huge hit, lest we forget, the #1 movie of the year. But it all came crashing down with 1997’s flop Batman and Robin, this time starring a far too-glib George Clooney as Bats and ramping up the colourful kitsch about 500% more. Few people look back at Schumacher’s Batman as a peak for the character now. 

And Batman Forever is a mess, don’t get me wrong. It might just boast the two most annoying comic book movie villains of all time in Jim Carrey’s insufferably twitchy Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones’ frantic and undignified Two-Face, who spends most of the movie cackling, grunting and wahoo-ing. The movie shoehorns in an origin for Chris O’Donnell‘s totally ’90s Robin, an incredibly sexed-up Nicole Kidman as a love interest and a kind of incoherent plot about brain-stealing technology.  Whenever I watch it I have to fight the urge to slap Carrey so I can focus on the bits that do work. 

It starts off clearly stating it isn’t going to be Keaton/Burton’s Batman, with fetishistic shots of Kilmer donning the Bat-gear and the first lines of dialogue being a lame joke about Batman getting drive-through for dinner. (Cue that McDonald’s ad, of course.) 

And yet, I like Kilmer as a blonde Bruce Wayne/Batman. There is a sly wit to Kilmer’s performance, which gives us a Batman with a sense of humour without being quite as lightweight as Clooney ended up. Little tics linger like his Bruce Wayne constantly fooling about with glasses (does Batman wear contacts?). His Batman smiles broadly in one memorable scene, which could be cheesy but Kilmer makes it a little, well, charming and sincere. Why can’t Batman smile, occasionally? It ain’t always dark.

His Bruce Wayne is courageous and not just a playboy – brawling with villains without a costume in several scenes, focused with a whiff of arrogance, and smart but also a little scared. 

Michael Keaton was a tense and wiry surprise as Batman (it’s easy now to forget his casting was hated by pre-internet fandom once upon a time) and Bale, Pattinson and Affleck have all given us variations on a very serious, stern Bruce Wayne/Batman. But I still think Kilmer’s Batman is the only one who seems kind of like a Batman you’d want to hang out with, really. 

Kilmer navigates Batman’s dual nature fairly well in Batman Forever – haunted by his past, but wanting to have a life of his own outside Batman. The rickety script doesn’t really serve him well – at one point Batman quits, only to unquit about 30 seconds later – but Kilmer sells story beats like his mentorship of the angry young Robin and his attraction to Kidman’s ridiculously horny psychologist character.

He cracks a few jokes, but he never makes Batman the joke. Kilmer’s movies like Tombstone and Top Secret and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang were great, but his underrated Batman manages the trick of making a mediocre movie almost worth liking. 

Hello, I wrote a book, and it’s only taken me 30 years

Greetings! I wrote a book. Well, I’ve actually been writing it for about 30 years, believe it or not. Introducing Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024, a hefty compendium of my columns, essays, feature profiles and much more over the course of my so-called career!

I’ve written an awful lot of words over the years, but I wanted to put together something that was a little more permanent than a bunch of yellowing newspapers and broken website links. Clippings is, much like many journalism careers, an eclectic mix, from long features to blog posts to deeply personal essays to in-depth pop culture criticism, spanning from Mississippi to California to New York City to New Zealand. 

From interviewing governors and rock stars to climbing active volcanos and adjusting to life on the other side of the world, this book is me saying, “Hey, I was here, and this is some of what I did along the way.” Doesn’t everyone want to say that at some point about their life’s work, whatever it is? Throw it all together, and it’s probably as close to a sort of autobiography as I’ll ever get.

It’s got many of my works from long-ago newspapers and magazines, websites and even some fine pieces from this very website in a handsome curated form sure to be adored by your family for generations.

I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

Get it here: Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 by Nik Dirga 

So, I’ve been reading a lot of Captain America comics lately

When I was a kid I always thought Captain America was a bit dorky. Batman and Spider-Man and Wolverine were hip, man. 

It took me a long while to discover the uncomplicated charms of Cap. He’s a good man in a world full of troubles, which for some peculiar reason I can’t quite put my finger on, seems really appropriate as a role model in this battered year of 2025. 

Captain America has been slinging his shield since 1939 in comics, and was probably punching Nazis before your grandparents were even born. Brought back in the 1960s as a keystone for the Avengers, he’s been the moral centre of the Marvel comics universe for decades. 

Yet I really didn’t read an awful lot of Captain America solo comics until the last few years – I never disliked the character, who soared in a lot of great Avengers comics, but he just seemed rather, well, white bread. 

But as usual, I was wrong, and slowly working my way through lots of great Cap stories from the 1960s to 2020s has shown me that you can still make a patriotic American superhero interesting. Like any character, there’s ups and downs to be had, but creators like Lee and Kirby, Steve Englehart, Ed Brubaker, the late Mark Gruenwald and Roger Stern have all done terrific stories over the years. 

The challenge for writers has been in making Cap a believer in a higher cause without being a mindless follower to it. An element of doubt is key to making Captain America great. 

Evil Captain America has been done far too many times and isn’t that interesting, but Doubtful Captain America is a constant of the character, a man who believes in his country but is fairly often willing to question it, up to engaging in a civil war over his beliefs or even quitting the job several times.

As an example of bad Captain America, Mark Millar’s post-9/11 edgelord Captain America in The Ultimates hasn’t aged well at all, channeling Bush-era belligerence and arrogance into a character who’s the opposite of what Cap should be. And being good isn’t being weak.

There’s a fine line between making Cap frequently question his patriotism and making him a whining bore, of course. Yet I admire the writers who’ve made us realise that uncertainty and kindness isn’t a bad thing, all while telling us stories of a man dressed up in red, white and blue.

There’s nothing worse than a fanatic who thinks he can do no wrong. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

The marvellous performance by Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in the MCU helped seal my Cap fondness, making square-jawed decency seem kinda hot. And of course, there can be more than one Captain America – Anthony Mackie is stepping up as the main man’s successor in a new movie being released this week. Whether or not the movie itself is great, Mackie has done a fine job in his MCU appearances tapping into that fundamental charm and battered optimism Cap needs. 

I imagine if Cap was real these days he’d be aghast at a lot of what’s going on under the colours of his flag, but then again he’d probably find it pretty familiar. He punched Hitler, after all. 

Again, maybe it’s the tenor of the times. There ain’t a lot of heroes in the real world at the moment. I’ll just keep reading my Captain America comics and hoping for better days ahead. 

“Now it’s dark” – All our heroes go away eventually

It’s inescapable that older one gets the more people you lose, whether it’s family or the creators and icons you look up to. I could turn this into a full-time obituary blog these days if I wanted to, I reckon, but one also has to grasp for the light sometimes. All our heroes go away eventually.

And honestly, any celebrity death, no matter who, is probably never going to strike me quite like the big loss that blots out the sky for me, my father’s passing last May. That’s the kind of shattering experience you somehow get through, but you’re never really the same, are you? Life is marked in before and after now.

The last celebrity death I think I really cried over was David Bowie, because it just seemed so utterly shocking at the time – the man just put out a new album, he wasn’t even 70, and everyone knows you don’t up and die during an album release window. That one hurt, in the sort of unsettling way that maybe leaves a person thinking you’ll never quite let yourself be that vulnerable again to a celebrity death. And so, Prince, just two months later, was awful as well, but it didn’t hit me as a hammerblow to the brain. 

We’ve lost two of my favourites in just a week – film genius David Lynch, who left us at 78, and the legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whose death today at 95 was just announced. Two very different men but two whose work really shaped me and how I look at the world. 

There’s been a lot said about David Lynch this week and I don’t know much more I can add to the discourse other than to say, the man rewired your brains. I remember scrambling to watch Twin Peaks my freshman year in college, where I didn’t even own a TV, having to borrow a tiny portable model from someone in the dorm. I’d never seen anything quite like this combination of American mystery and menace. A couple years later a friend and I watched a VHS of Eraserhead and at the end sat stunned, gasping, muttering “What? What?!?” over and over again. Lynch did that for you. 

The night he died I watched Blue Velvet again for the nth time, and like any masterpiece, every time I see it, it unfolds slightly differently to me. The unmistakable brilliance of the opening credits, American beauty crashing up against the rot underneath – this week, this month, this deranged moment in American history, we all need to pay more attention to the bugs beneath the earth, chittering away. Kyle Maclachlan’s jaunty student discovering the evil underneath, and the unanswerable question – how do we get past the bad things?  

Jules Feiffer was a little more underground, perhaps, but his fingerprints were surely on something you watched or read – besides his long-running cartoon in the Village Voice, he was quite possibly the last living link to the Golden Age of comic books, blustering his way into a job with the legendary Will Eisner at just 16 or so and then ending up working on the iconic Spirit. He wrote books of comic history that broke new ground, he drew The Phantom Tollboth classic children’s book, he wrote scrappy novels, he wrote the screenplays for both Carnal Knowledge and Robert Altman’s Popeye and two more different movies you could scarcely imagine. He was drawing right up until the end at age 95.

Feiffer was never a classically great artist, but that was the point – his scribbled, sketchy lines danced with expression, his bitter wit on everything from romance to Richard Nixon stung in a way most young political cartoonists would dream of. When I was a kid, my parents had Feiffer’s Marriage Manual on a shelf in their bedroom, where the kind of adult books were kept. I snuck a look at it and his wiry, intense takes on love and romance turned out not to be full of nekkid ladies, but instead a kind of naked, barbed genius that hooked me instantly. Cartoons could be about life! Whether it was books, comics, movies, plays, Feiffer was the kind of renaissance man creator that quietly helped shape the 20th century. He sure shaped me. 


“Now it’s dark,” the vile Frank Booth whispers in Blue Velvet shortly before unspeakable acts.

I’ve accepted we will see more and more go like they did in 2024 – author Paul Auster, whose tense and vibrant books never stopped wondering at life’s mysteries; The Chills’ Martin Phillipps, whose music summed up New Zealand to me; perpetually surly character actor Dabney Coleman, whose Slap Maxwell Story is still one of the best cranky journalists performances I’ve seen; CAN’s unmistakable voice Damo Suzuki and the MC5’s scorching guitarist Wayne Kramer; Gena Rowlands, whose naked honesty scorched the silver screen; the tragic Ed Piskor, prolific, detailed and often-dazzling cartoonist gone too soon to suicide; Donald Sutherland, who said more with a raised eyebrow than many do their whole career; smiling Carl Weathers, who seemed poured out of liquid muscles in the Rocky movies that I watched endlessly; John Cassady, whose ripplingly beautiful art in Planetary, X-Men and others seemed too good to be true; Paul Fry, one of my journalism mentors and a hell of a guy; the small press comics creator Larry Blake, whose precise art deserved a wider audience; President Jimmy Carter, perhaps the last good man. And so many more. That’s just the tip of those who left in the past year or so. 

It’s a lot. No matter what we do, they all keep going, and one day we’ll go, too. But they leave the shapes behind.

But maybe it’s Dad’s death, maybe it’s just that we live in a world of constant troubles and you can’t live with hate and regrets in your heart the whole time, but I’ve been trying to accept the dark and admire the light a little more this past 8 months or so. 

It all gets muddled together, the losses we face in this life. 

I hate that it does get dark, that David Lynch will make no more films and Jules Feiffer will draw no more cartoons, but they left us so much. I will pull out my Feiffer paperbacks and smile and I will head down to the marvellous local revival cinema and see some of David Lynch’s movies on the big screen next month. 

I keep dreaming about my Dad a lot lately, the brain puttering away while I sleep, doing the strange work of processing life. I don’t mind that. He’s still here, really. They all are.

In dreams I walk with you

In dreams I talk to you

Aw, man… It’s my biggest pop culture disappointments of 2024!

Let’s get negative! There is, admittedly, far too much complaining on the internet, but sometimes you gotta vent. Following up my 10 favourite pop culture moments, here’s a handful of things that I found most disappointing about the year almost gone: 

Maybe that Rocky XXXVIII was a bad idea after all: The top 10 movies at the US box office of 2024 were all sequels (or prequels). That doesn’t necessarily mean they all sucked – I enjoyed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice a lot and Dune: Part Two was great, but while last year had a brief blip of creative hope when movies like Oppenheimer broke records, this year it just feels like we’re wringing the intellectual property towels out until they are stone dry. When you have sequels that nobody demanded revisiting flicks like 1996’s Twister or 2000’s Gladiator or yet another Alien movie, or when you put out another ‘meh’ Ghostbusters sequel that’s almost immediately forgotten – it’s a sign you’re running out of properties to revive again and again. Remembering how chaotic and alive Bill Murray seemed 40 years ago in Ghostbusters, seeing him drag it all out again for a few scenes in 2024 for a fifth instalment in a franchise just felt… tired. 

The Bear spins its wheels: I’ll admit it. I haven’t finished The Bear Season 3 yet. The tale of a talented but troubled Chicago restaurant chef and his crew has been gripping, but it’s sliding quickly over into prestige fatigue. I quite liked Season 1 and 2 even when the show pushed the limits of how tense and angry you could make things, but the first half of Season 3 is repetitive and dull. It’s a very bad sign when the first episode of Season 3 is a largely wordless, drifting swamp of self-indulgence that felt like a never-ending 30 minutes opening credits sequence. It sets up a season which barely advances the overall plot so far and which seems high on its own supply, hitting the same beats – yelling, repetitive flashbacks, emotional breakdowns, kitchen disasters – we’ve already seen.  The Bear has been as much drama as comedy but this season the balance tipped. There are good moments, and I’m sure I’ll finish it… eventually … but what a comedown from the first two binge-worthy seasons for me.  

MaXXXine doesn’t mark the spot: Speaking of sequels, I really enjoyed director Ti West’s creepy, generational horror mood pieces with Mia Goth, X and Pearl. But the trilogy “capper” MaXXXine, featuring Goth’s hopeful movie star Maxine trying to make her way in Hollywood after the violent events of X, was a big confused miss. Set in the day-glo ‘80s, a distracting cast of “spot that star” cameos like Kevin Bacon and a bizarre plot twist that made the first two movies seem sane left this sequel feeling like a tired cash-in, the exact sort of movie I think it was trying to make fun of. Even Goth, so good in the first two, seemed bored by it all. 

The “return” of EC Comics. EC Comics dazzled and shocked the industry with top-notch art and edgy storytelling back in the 1950s. Periodically, someone tries to bring the IP back, and so it is with this year’s Oni Press revival. Technically, they’re not horrible comics – just highly mediocre product. They look great – boasting a cool retro design with some of the best covers out there. But where they really fell down is the dull and cliche-ridden writing, which felt like ham-handed cosplay of the original EC. The stories either have facile modern-day attempts at limp satire, dumb gory twists or uninspired morality tales. Yeah, the original EC had a lot of that too, but somehow it’s not the same in 2024, and the talents here are no Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman or Will Elder. The art is often good but lacks that cohesive feeling the EC Comics “house style” had. I get what they were trying for here, but maybe you can’t go home again. 

The rise of AI slop: I work in media, and am probably more worried about the future of this industry than I’ve ever been. The endless plague of misinformation is bad, but the AI “slop” – never has a phrase been more apt – starting to seep in on every corner of the internet feels like it’s just getting started, whether it’s shit fake trailers for movies or “pink slime” viral crap or sleazy grifters out to make a viral buck. This year saw it being shoved at us all over the show without any chance to opt out – Google front-loading AI-juiced searches at us, Facebook saying I can “imagine” a new profile photo, the Washington Post giving us “AI generated highlights” or LinkedIn telling me, a writer for 30+ years, that I can use AI to write an amazing post – it’s all crap to me, and I don’t care if that makes me a gosh-danged Luddite. We all feel like much of the internet has turned into garbage the last few years. The slop is speeding up the techpocalypse. Every word of this website was actually written by me, a human. I wish that didn’t have to be said. 

Behold, my top 10 pop culture moments of 2024!

So I’ll join the chorus – 2024 really did kind of suck, eh? For me, by far, the biggest blow was the death of my father in May, and I guess nothing has truly felt the same since. There’s been a lot of lousy things happening in the wider world as well, of course, and the general sense that everything is just careening out of control in the cosmos.

Pop culture – be it book, comics, movies or music – is one of the few saving graces we’re left with when nothing else makes sense. Thus, in a burst of optimism, here’s my 10 favourite culture moments of the year:

Now is now – Perfect Days by Wim Wenders: An awful lot of the ‘best movies of 2024’ haven’t screened in New Zealand yet, and a lot of the 2024 movies I have seen have been hit or miss. But of the new-ish films I saw this year, the beautiful tone poem Perfect Days by Wim Wenders about a humble Japanese toilet cleaner lingers the most. It’s a movie about taking the pauses, about accepting what happens and enjoying every sandwich. And it felt like the most human thing I saw on a screen this year. (Runner-up nods for movies seen in 2024: the supremely creepy Longlegs which was right in my wheelhouse, heartfelt and hilarious The Holdovers [technically a 2023 holdover itself], the utterly unclassifiable no-budget slapstick Hundreds of Beavers, and Furiosa, which confirms George Miller’s Mad Max is the only extended cinematic universe which really matters.) 

Absolute ultimate totally comics, dude: I’m on the record that I’m not generally a fan of the endless reinventions and multiversal takes on superheroes that are a sign of comics eating themselves. Ohhh, a dark alternate Superman? How daring! Yet… I’ve been generally rather enjoying DC’s latest “Absolute” line of comics starring the hyperbolic Absolute Batman, Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman. Yes, yes, it’s yet another reimagining but the actual comics have been pretty … good? Absolute Wonder Woman is the gem so far with stunning art and myth-inspired epic storytelling, and Absolute Batman not far behind with its mysterious ultra-jacked Bruce Wayne stripped of money and privilege. I don’t know how long I’ll stick with them – these “new universe” stories far too often end up tangled in the continuity of existing comics and giant crossovers and the like, but so far, it’s a pretty electric and novel take on some very well known heroes. 

You’re never too old to make rock music: I’m old and getting older, but a lot of the guys I grew up listening to are somehow even older. Massive applause, then, for near-geezers like Nick Cave and Robert Smith staying true to themselves – The Cure’s comeback Songs From The Lost World is just as moody and epic as any classic Cure album, touched even more by the unsparing grip of mortality. At 65 (!!) Smith still sounds exactly like he always has, and that’s a wonderful thing. Meanwhile, Nick Cave’s slow turn into a kind of confessional high priest continued with the excellent Bad Seeds album Wild God. At 67, Cave has suffered unbearable loss in his life and will always seem heroic for unsparingly turning it into such cathartic art. In contrast, The White Stripes’ Jack White is a mere child at age 49, but he blew me away just a few weeks ago in Auckland and his No Name feels like the rock album of the year to me. Not bad for a bunch of old guys who are all getting older. 

Just asking questions – the books of Percival Everett: Percival Everett is one of those cult authors one keeps hearing about and meaning to read, but his astonishing Huckleberry Finn reinvention James truly broke him through into the mainstream this year. Every Everett book I’ve read this year is quite different and excellent in its own way – the existential spy satire Doctor No, the haunting Mississippi lynching black comedy of The Trees, the wry literary racial spoof Erasure (which was also turned into an excellent movie, American Fiction). Everett doesn’t fit any easy box but I’ve been so impressed by his eclectic invention that I’ll be happily catching up on his prolific bibliography well into 2025. 

Sticking the landing on the small screen: I can’t keep up with all the streaming things these days, but bidding farewell to a few longtime favourites reminded me of how tricky it is to end things on the perfect note, and how good it feels when it does. These favourites of mine all said goodbye in a pretty perfect fashion – Superman and Lois with perhaps the most bittersweet and beautiful ending to a superhero screen adventure yet, the kooky What We Do In The Shadows managing to make its insane vampire spin-off parody far funnier and longer lasting than seemed possible saying goodbye after 6 seasons, Larry David at long last ending Curb Your Enthusiasm after 20+ years with a perfectly wonderful lack of remorse. (Bonus point to the much-missed Our Flag Means Death New Zealand-filmed gay pirate comedy, which ended its second season in ’23 but we didn’t know for sure it was gone for good until this year.) 

Charles Burns still haunts us all: Charles Burns is the patron saint comics artist of Gen-X, and his stark tales of teenage alienation have been blowing me away since his Curse of the Molemen days in the 1980s. As he ages, Burns has constantly kept to the same tight themes he always has – teenage alienation, romantic yearning and spooky surreal horror – but gosh, does he do them well. This year’s Final Cut is one of his finest works, ostensibly about a group of teenagers shooting a no-budget movie, but it’s also about love, choice and regret and told with his unforgettable intense style. 

The films of Samuel Fuller: Like I said, I’m behind on the newer films of 2024. But film history stretches back over a century now, and there’s always time to fill in the gaps. A big hole in my cinema knowledge was the pulpy movies of Samuel Fuller. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen fierce noir gems like Pickup On South Street, Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor and Park Row until the past year, and I keep discovering new Fuller to catch up on. His bold movies bucked convention and still feel starkly modern decades on. Bonus point: His memoir, A Third Face, is an absolutely great chronicle of Fuller’s days as a spunky young New York journalist, harrowing World War II heroics and his dive into Hollywood. 

Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee: There’s precious little mystery in pop culture these days, so every little bit of it counts. Cindy Lee is a cross-dressing Canadian musician named Patrick Flegel whose drifting, sultry songs have really gotten into my brain. Not on Spotify, not on Tidal, the sprawling double album Diamond Jubilee is only available as a single file on YouTube and soon, a physical release. Anointed by the hipsters, it’s got the gorgeous low-fi wistfulness of early Guided By Voices meets Roy Orbison, like the soundtrack to the most lonesome-hearted David Lynch movie that never was. It’s two hours of mysterious bliss and while its stealth release style might be a bit of a marketing technique there’s enough talent in Diamond Jubilee to make it feel like far more than a stunt. Diamond Lee feels like 2024 in musical form to me.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show, because love is really all around: Yes, I’m the guy who’s picking a 50-year-old sitcom as one of his favourite pop culture moments of 2024. But I picked up a cheap DVD of the complete series on a trip to Reno earlier this year, and it reminded me exactly why I love this classic sitcom so much. It’s got Moore at her loveable screwball peak, Ed Asner is one of the best editors of all time, Ted Knight’s pompous doofus act which never gets old, in a seven-season run of absurdity, crack timing, sitcom pratfalls and journalistic dilemmas that still stands up with the best of ‘peak TV’. Sometimes all you want out of life is a 20-minute playlet of banter and Lou Grant and Ted Baxter, and in this weird, wicked year, bingeing The Mary Tyler Moore Show made me feel like we might just make it after all. 

Selfishly, the Year of the Amoeba: Yeah, I’m putting myself on the list – not because I think I’m the best small press comics geek out there by any means but because I ended up putting out a heck of a lot of Amoeba Adventures stuff this year and it gave me a peculiar kind of inner satisfaction that nothing else really matches. I published two ‘regular’ issues of Amoeba Adventures this year, getting up to #35 of the series I somehow started way the hell back in 1990 (!!!), and I finally decided to embrace Amazon’s print on demand as a cost-effective way to bring my comics back to a wider world (yeah, I know, evil empire, etc, but this KDP stuff has been very good for my needs). A big old 350-page collection of The Best Of Amoeba Adventures that I started over the last holidays came out in February and presents my favourites of my 1990s work, while the smaller Amoeba Adventures: The Warmth Of The Sun book presents the first six of the “new” Amoeba Adventures stories I started telling in 2020. I’m not going to get rich doing this stuff, I accepted long ago, but I’m really grateful to get this stuff out in the world and out of the dusty small press past, and hey, if you like it, I’m just grateful I got the chance to tell you a story. 

Next: My top pop culture disappointments of the year!

Wrapping up the Year of the Amoeba – with Amoeba Adventures #35!

Hello and happy holidays to all! My Christmas gift to the people of Earth is the latest issue of my quixotic small press comic, Amoeba Adventures #35, available now as a FREE download to the technological addiction of your choice!

It’s the newest instalment in the story I’ve somehow been telling on and off since 1986 or so and while it may be nearly Christmas, it’s no carefree romp for Prometheus the Protoplasm and company in this first part of a brand new multi-part story I’m calling “The Crane Flies High!”

You can download it completely free right here at the link below!

Amoeba Adventures #35 [PDF]

You can get a sneak preview of the first page right here – and if you’ve been following the series, you’ll want to read this issue, which starts off a story that is going to change everything for Prometheus, Dawn and the gang! 

Want the limited print edition? If you’re down, order one up for a mere US$7.50 to ship anywhere in the world from groovy New Zealand by sending cash to me via PayPal at dirgas@gmail.com. They’ll be sent out after Christmas! Also, if you missed anything, print copies of Amoeba Adventures #31-34 and the special anniversary reprint of 1998’s #27 are a mere $2.50 US each!

THE AMOEBA ADVENTURES LIBRARY! OWN IT TODAY!

But wait! Didn’t I say this was the Year of the Amoeba? There’s been a lot of downs and ups in 2024 but one thing I’m really happy about is putting out not one but TWO paperback collections of my Amoeba stories this year, now available over on Amazon! They’re chock full of special features and essays and available worldwide! If you rush, they make the ideal Christmas gift for anyone who loves life itself.

If you’ve missed my incessant hustling, here’s the scoop:

THE BEST OF AMOEBA ADVENTURES gathers up the best of long out-of-print 1990s Amoeba stories by me with additional art by Max Ink are collected along with bonus rarities and more, including guest pin-ups by Dave Sim, Sergio Aragones, Matt Feazell and Stan Sakai! 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, in a hefty 350-page book available in paperback or hardcover! 

“This is one of the best things ever to come out of small press!” – Tim Corrigan, Small Press Comics Explosion.

AMOEBA ADVENTURES: THE WARMTH OF THE SUN gathers up the first six all-new issues of Amoeba Adventures beginning in 2020! We pick up Prometheus and friends in their first new tales in years to find them dealing with detective mysteries, deadly former foes, impending parenthood and occasional nights at the disco. Oh, and coffee. There’s always coffee. Collecting Amoeba Adventures #28-33.

“It’s imaginative, funny, heartfelt and smart. And it evolves, just like Prometheus, the protoplasmic protagonist himself” – Jason DeGroot, Small Press Heroes.com. 

Give a like to the Amoeba Adventures by Nik Dirga page on Facebook for updates on future comics, links to my non-comics journalism work and more!

As always, thanks very kindly for your support of my scribblings, and let’s hope 2025 is a good year for us all!