Brace yourselves, here’s the real blockbuster!

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DOOMED SUMMER: Me, Myself and I

The sensational character find of 1975. Like most Virgos I hate astrology but irrationality enables existence beyond mechanistic control.

I was careless with lives. Taking Stanley Knife blades from the toolbox under the stairs, drawing panels on my arms. I couldn’t feel anything. In all the wrong places. The Candlemaker snuffing out stars like your dad roaming the house muttering  ‘…Blackpool illuminations...’

d +  p & 1 + 0. You can make anything from them. We are great machines for calculation. Curious creatures, things of parts - something missing. I feel weird. Kinda flat and unreal the way I get sometimes when I’m depressed. 

Mycelium for the unsuitable.

Falling into the map.

Fumetti curling round the edges.

When I am regulated I will know who to be and when to be them. It sucks but ordeal is recognised initiatory practice.

Collage is one of our weapons. Assemblage of higher dimensional objects flattened by technology. Dream diaries, automatic writing, a conversation with comics, talking to our selves.  All I want is to be a happy man. 

Probably just ceremonial magic whiplash mate, it’ll be fine. 

Fight capitalism make bad art.

Morrison is a poet working in a narrative format.

It’s not as complex as the real world. Haven’t you noticed all the coincidences?

‘[Doom Patrol] is a comic that tells you nothing about life’ says Ken Chen. The nano-machines Caulder makes real on the Doom Patrol story plane were imagined on our plane by Drexler. Drexler’s other contribution to humanity was successfully lobbying against the treaty which would have outlawed the capitalist colonisation of space.

If you want to destroy a people destroy their dreams but centuries accreting and they still haven’t. And the effort they have to expend, the resources they have to constantly commit and they still haven’t. That’s something to cling to.

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Trapped in the Web of Spider-Man

My wife changed jobs before the summer, altering her routine to include ten extra minute in bed. Having flexitime, I followed suit, discovering that the ten minutes was actually more crucial in my morning organisation that I’d realised. Especially with a life condition described by the doctor as ‘probably IBS?’

Ten minutes behind where I wanted to be, my wife suggested I take the bus instead of walking as I usually do. This turned out to be of no help at all. Once the bus hit Cathedral Street, the works going on where it’s intersected by Hanover Street and becomes Bath Street jammed things up. Even then, once it got past that, things didn’t improve and I realised my bus probably wasn’t going to be able to make its regular final stop. I groaned internally as the understanding sharpened into an angry thought: THIS IS THE FAULT OF THAT ACCURSED SPIDER-MAN!

The web-slinger had hit Glasgow and his exploits were all over the streets I normally commuted. It was disruptive enough in the morning during the commute, but became even more frustrating as the streets lined with admirers of the vigilante menace. Social media erupted with admiring photos and videos of his exploits, filtered and edited to look as though he was the star of his own movie.

I didn’t get to see any of it. I had to work.

At some point modern superheroing lost some of its charm for me. The feel of secret clubhouse with your mates who truly got you diminished. In its stead, the superhero became a celebrity. The outlaw became a steady government job. The War on Terror, with less limb loss.

In the meantime, I became a government contractor, subject to the whims of rebids and TUPE.

I wondered which this Spidey hewed to?   

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Scottish Friction 5: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (Mickey Eye and friends, 2026); Peter’s Thoughts (Grant Morrison, 2024) 

If you want a readymade daydream against our national pantomime slouch, where art and trauma are allowed so long as everyone knows their place, here’s a favourite from an old conversion with Grant Morrison:

'That's why we can survive here. All the bands think they're living in New York and they know Andy Warhol… All the artists think they're from somewhere else. Everyone imagines they live in America.'

Picture that, eh? The world outside your window transformed, Glasgow as Boston as Gotham as Metropolis as New York!

Spider-Man was in town for a while there, riding tanks, getting his arse toasted mid air, diverting traffic. He’s not the first superhero to visit and he won’t be the last. It all makes sense somehow - we’ve got those long grids of tall buildings in the city centre, and much of the best superfiction of our lifetime has its origins nearby.

Sometimes, though, you might long for a future where we reimagine how we live in our own streets, instead of leasing them out for cheap and then paying to gawp at them. 

Peter’s Thoughts is Grant Morrison’s contribution to the second issue of Nova Scotia. A self-declared “science fiction anthology in miniature”, it’s frayed, funny stuff, a mind confined in the plague age, rattling off sly pitches in the dark. Morrison’s traditional generosity of imagination is there, but as the worlds pile up the story teases us with the notion that it’s all broken algorithmic product. Venom’s out back right now taking a shite in the bin shed while wearing a bucket hat. “Save us from cancellation!” The difference between being stuck powerless in your own home and living in a world of ideas that have escaped the bonds of mortal reality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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POLYPUS IN BOOTS

In his new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, Philip Hoare explores the watery elements of Blake’s autodidact mythology, in particular the benthic Polypus, a tentacular common denominator at the root of organic creation. In Milton, Blake writes of 

‘the Ulro: a vast Polypus

Of living fibres down into the Sea of Time & Space growing

A self-devouring monstrous human Death Twenty-seven fold’

This speaks of Blake’s sometime horror of organic, suppurating matter, the uncontrollable stuff of Nature. Hoare adroitly compares this to H.P. Lovecraft (who, cards on the table, I have only imbibed via Morrison and Moore) and his queasy terror of multi-tentacled entities from the deep. 

This got me thinking again about how my other bald guru, Grant Morrison, overlaps with Blake. In The Invisibles we encounter Lovecraftian organic horrors, in which entities seem trapped in writhing, communal torture, but later, seen from a cosmic angle, we understand this as the wondrous structure of biological life itself, ‘the body decades long, billion-eyed and billion-limbed’.

In an earlier Morrison story, Lovecraft in Heaven, H.P. cowers from a hellish cosmos of alien surveillance, which is revealed, finally, to be the kindly eyes of ascended humanity looking back at us. What looks terrifying from one angle (eg. that of an uptight, sexually repressed racist) can look holy from another.

Similarly, there’s never just one reading in Blake -  it’s all about how you (choose to) look at things. Elsewhere in Milton he writes ‘‘for every Man born is joined / Within into One mighty Polypus and this Polypus is Orc’, Orc being his personification of revolt, energy, change.

For Blake Man(kind) is holy, but/and we are the pulsating, vegetative, cosmic Polypus, life itself. Or, as Oscar Wilde never wrote, ‘We may be looking at the stars, but we are all cosmic mulch’.

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UK Comic Creators Survey 2025

If you are a UK-based comics creator over 16 years old, whether working professional, a casual creator or student, if you make – or plan to make – comics for public consumption, this anonymous online survey by the Comics Cultural Impact Collective is for you. 

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B.Eno

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I’M SEEING A LOT LESS DOGSHIT AND THE BINFIRE SMELL ISN’T EVEN A PROBLEM ANYMORE

Imagine being a serial comic, I would be on #557 if I was an American one which is one of these scarifying revelations where you realise more issues of Detective or Action Comics have been published in your lifetime than not. If you were a British weekly well, you most likely would be around the same amount as 2000AD I’d hazard… Coming up on 2500… I hope you managed to do something worthwhile since 1994 unlike them (and here must register my customary lament they renamed it neither 2100AD or ~ preferably ~ 3000AD)

Spider-Man & Zoids lasted 51, Transformers 332 (and a short-lived sequel I was too old for)… if you know you know. 557 issues, with an unusual accent on the lead character watching videos of women in the gym if Jeffrey Brown were drawing, life’s funny ain’t it!! 

JOURNEY INTO HUMILITY #558 COMING SOON READERS

I tried rereading my earlier columns to gather a continuity, it’s a little excruciating staring yourself out in a mirror after a while, but I don’t remember writing “Word is light” which has illumined the idea here, that like Nix Uotan in Final Crisis one can find the right magic word in the right time, life is a composition of this, that wow, think of the multifarious purposes and register of just words, your nerd glasses will fall off… SHA_A_

There’s a bit of Beanotown fanfic there, because I live there, trying to find my Pansy Potter (the fourth wall reader addressing break is particular to DCT kids comics initially I think) and a lot of the modern troubadour, the rapper… I am listening to Future presently and he often sounds unconscionably sad until you listen to ‘Trophy’ and remember he used to be married to Ciara, must be hard to live when you have fucked up that hard.

THESE ARE THE WORDS | I MANIFEST

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Scottish brunch at Boisdales of Belgravia

Rumoured to be a favourite feeding hole of Farage, maybe there’s something revealing here between the dark paneling and bleachy napkins. It’s tempting, and easy, would be a relief to tell a simple tale of gammon, gristle and gout, but the truth is like the creamy scent of Cohibas lingering on the terrace: a little more complex.

Most tables are identical. Mega-wealthy Muslims from way out of town being shown some authentic local something by their local business contact, leaving quickly Black Virgins (nozeco and Guinness 0.0%) untouched. A west end actor and his agent trying to woo someone serious. A merry pair of ad men justifying expenses with pseudo-anthropology. But mainly just what you’d expect: massive snowtopped schoolboys glowing red in windowpane tweed, manhandling burgundy jeroboams across big single sex reservations.

The two complicating factors are Scotland and jazz, their unifier ‘trad’. Boisdales is a Clan McDonald soft power project, its ideology helpfully unveiled by a Covid-era pivot into a lifestyle brand, since abandoned, whose remnant artefacts emphasise ancient and unlimited rights of usufruct and guiltless oppressive enjoyment. The food is heavy fried haggis whose herbs are overwhelmed by fat and breadcrumbs, wild venison carpaccio dowsed in cold lime, wide asparagus spears poached and skinned of greenery, leaving only the rich white flesh. The sound is disruptive black American rhythms, its legends locked in frames behind glass in portraits above the eye line, safely condensed and digested by ‘musical director’ Jools Holland’s twelve bar boogie woogie lines and curated live soul revues braying on Sundays.

This aristocratic confidence, where priceless is the only value and everything difficult can be reduced to ownership and pleasure, indulges a particular Greater-British insistence. London strongholders with historic French surnames striding timelessly into a tomorrow which doesn’t want to be different to the past. Because we had the future before, but chose to turn it into this.