If I touched the earth it would crumble

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Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley and FRANKENSTEIN by Amy Weldon (Sea Crow Press, 2025)

Returning to 2026’s winning themes of Frankenstein and, erm, dead kids, Creature is an impeccably researched and beautifully written take on the early life of Mary Shelley and her enduring, unkillable literary creation by Amy Weldon (who, full disclosure, is a pal).

Christ though, the dead kids! I knew the bare bones of Mary Shelley’s life but I had not quite appreciated its sheer awfulness as her young family perished one by one in her egotist poet husband’s European pursuit of Byron and adventure. 

Weldon’s conceit is to treat the fictional Creature as a second central character, aware of himself as a literary creation who will outlive Mary, his ultimate creator. At the end of the novel there is a haunting passage in which the Creature glimpses the cutlural-technological confluences that will flow from and through him into future centuries. He dances in the light and shadows for the Lumière brothers, sowing the seed of his cinematic immortality, and then

‘There is an order to the future emerging out of this dream… The Creature senses it its focused on the metal box around which Ada paces, scribbling her calculation, haranguing Mr Babbage’

Ada is, of course, Byron’s daughter, who he did a favour by abandoning in England. I can’t shake this image of the computer in the basement of history, terraforming culture and the future. Elsewhere, Weldon has pointed out the suggestive coincidence that the WorldWideWeb, like Frankenstein’s Creature, was born in Geneva.

And now here we are in the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence, commanding lumbering digital servitors stitched together from reanimated bits of the internet.

‘My Job Goals 2026/27 - Explore potential of AI to streamline our work processes’

‘I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs’

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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Cover my tracks with Batcronyms - Batman #656 (Grant Morrison, Andy Kubert, Dave Stewart, 2006)

It's impossible to believe now, but trust me - this mess only started because we knew what we were doing. 

We were after mutability rather than meaning. An adaptive pulp form, bright enough to survive the murk of a regime that was always on the verge of dying. The material was compromised, of course. Another product of gangster economics. We told ourselves this was honest compared to modes that could talk up their pedigree when the bill needed settled. 

Having popped out the frame, art was once again free to reshape people’s lives. Cities were rebuilt out of bones and leather. Huge tower blocks flapped overhead while boy wonders of all genders swapped circus tips in the night. The rush was incredible, like being folded up by yr friendly neighbourhood Batwoman and posted to a Class A future.  In the end, though, the adaptability of the virus was also our undoing. Not satisfied with all the world’s tomorrows, the virus worked backwards, inserting itself into our history. The trick worked both ways, so now the world’s gangsters had new technology to help us buy into our own evisceration. 

MEANWHILE, IN EAST KILBRIDE VILLAGE THEATER!

A group of gifted amateurs including Tall Paul, Deonardo LeCaprio, and Charlene McBain take the stage. Despite a number of unintended pratfalls the aim of the game is clear: the whole history of Batman – which is now the history of the world – in a single evening! When McBain snaps the Batmannequin over her knee at the start of act three it leaves a skelf in everyone’s eye. The audience cries harsh chemical tears which pool together on the floor, growing darker and darker as the slush rises in the form of Batman. 

Looking out at the audience, our saviour speaks:  

“It's impossible to believe now, but trust me –”

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Mind the Gap: Red Dragon 
2000AD Progs 2451 to 2460 (Williams, Goddard, Yeowell, Teague) 

In the Caves of Androzari the Fifth Doctor sacrifices himself for Peri, giving her the antidote to the poison killing them both. The Doctor doesn’t know Peri. We don’t know Peri. We only met her a couple of weeks back in Planet of Fire. The last act of a man deeply unsuited to the increasing violence of his stories, giving his life for a stranger.  

As our ephemeral pop culture is forced to become eternal the skin splits and the desire to fill the cracks grows. Big Finish have inserted 32 adventures into this gap. This doesn’t necessarily matter. Doctor Who doesn’t have a canon, at worst it has a continuity defined by what the writer remembers vs what works for the story. You can do the mental sleight of hand that lets you enjoy the ongoing adventures of your favourite chums and keep the poignancy of the stranger’s sacrifice. 

Comics are structured around gaps, lacuna the framework of every page. But there are no gaps in Zenith. There are no gaps in Siadwell Rhys’s story. That exists entirely within the juxtaposition of fragments of hot headed idealist to bloated drunk to heroic sacrifice. 

Zenith thrilled by applying DC universe mechanics and chaos magic principles to superheroes allowed to exist in time through generational pop cultural difference. Morrison as musician is often overlooked in talking about their work. 

Rob Williams’s work doesn’t have the same engagement with pop culture, structuring the story around the new obsession of true crime cold cases. The modern day sections deliberately dreary, negate the potentials of transformation the cliffhanger end of Zenith opened. 

The sixties sections generate another reduction. A series of conversations in bare rooms and park benches that spin the wheels of everything we know and add nothing, taking the poignant economy of Siadwell’s story and bloating it out dilutes rather than extends. Red Dragon has nothing to say about Zenith even to those who want continuing adventures with their favourite chums. This doesn’t necessarily matter.

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Bulk (Ben Wheatley, 2025)

Doors and tunnels and bridges are liars. It’s so appalling to hear the word ‘liminal’ used in real life because of the ubiquitous, instinctual, but unarticulated understanding of its fallacy. Out here, nothing ever moves from one space or state to another, so there is no requirement or  possibility of an autonomous territory hiding between.

The appearance of the call to change is always, deliberate or unbidden, coming from far inside the house. Matter is rearranged not by a conspiracy of nth-party forces acting from without, but by the internal conditions - desires, longings, resentments - present in its revealed moment. The metamorphosis unfolds in the company of subjective affects like fear, disgust, or more florid enthusiasms, who require an object to anchor their being on, manufacturing the false impression of ‘outside’.

Britain’s continuing phase shift into the no-zone can only be explained by obsessive mapping of the particles and principles inhering to its transcendent-eternal body. Founding spirit masters Albina, then Brutus, are both refugees - inevitable and appropriate to our island-world, the tidal need for new energies. The semblance of coming-here was always-here-already. Her gigantic and misshapen children Gog<Magog are as inexplicable as they are inextricable, upturned and flung from the cliffs of Cornwall, only to make landfall, holding up heaven’s sky in the guild-hall, twined and rooted, bitter and greedy as they ever were, as paranoid and confused as we are now. Their instability runs wave-deep, into sapphire mines and iron foundries, bursting banks and flattening the land in their liquid panic.

It’s hard to know what manner of organism might be able to thrive in such a twisted ecological knot. The house is a home to dying spies, poisoned cops, passionate resistance fighters, desperate administrators and science destitutes. Dancing and war on the cusp of Beachy Head, crumbling alliances and inter-structures litter the receptive field, swapping spit and spilling blood into the chalk.