No questions, it's about vibe, yeah I trust that more

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Cradlegrave (John Smith, Edmund Bagwell)

When I was a kid living on B_ Road the shared entry behind us ran the whole length of the houses ending in a brick wall. Strewn with rubbish bags, chicken carcasses and baked bean cans spilling out. It was also where every dog in christendom went to shit. The stench in the summer was horrendous. We used to dare each other to see how far down we could get. Well you make your own fun don’t you? Running on balls of feet at speed, trying not to breathe too deeply, throat catching. 

I only made it to the end once. Halfway down a weird thing happened. The space felt different. The light changed. The world greyed and all the sound leeched out. I felt fear. I ran through that bit on the way back not caring about the state of my trainers. 

Bagwell’s Ravenglade estate is solid, bleached out but solid, the claustrophobic expanse of the place you live, the streets you circle day after day like water on a prayer wheel. But Ravenglade is a soft space, ruptured by broken mirrors.  

Sun baked black bin bags pile up, split and spill, Mary distends and suppurates cancer black milk calling the children she never had to her, Shane’s dog goes mad at too many litters and eats her puppies, the kids swap drugs for the black milk, the buzz so much better, the shame so much greater, the effects accumulate and the transformation of the self begins, pregnant with hunger. The only space that exists outside the estate is the Young Offenders institution and Shane carries it with him, his old bedroom becoming prison. 

The site of infection and the infected bleed into each other without distinction. Mary isn’t the source of horror, she isn’t the cause of anything, she is just another symptom. 

Cradlegrave is one of my favourite comics by one of my favourite writers. I don’t own a copy. I won’t let it in the house.

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Park Life #1: Tokyo DisneySeaguy

Just because something is beautiful and built for whimsy doesn’t mean it’s a mask for nefarious intent, of course. To believe that would be to wage war on aspects of lived experience.

Still, if you want a mask for a sinister face it’s not a bad one eh?

Like God, Death may not always reveal itself to the senses but sometimes the shape comes through in accumulated experience. This isn’t an abreaction to the carefully crafted It’s A Small World attractions of Tokyo DisneySea – I’m too much a ‘90s plaidshirtman for Frozen but that ride’s well paced, and the song from Sinbad instantly colonised my skull – even if I did find myself wishing for a taste of that real e.g. the Irn Bru soaked M&Ds carnival buzz of youth. 

No, the true menace here is how you can end up applying multiple calculations to every second of your day. 

Once you might have taken immersive theme parks as models for building realities outside of time. Recall, if you will, official Disney Land spokesperson PKD’s world of fake humans selling fake realities to themselves, deepening the illusion with every artful line of extraction. 

Now the park screams time through your phone, offering to shave hours to the quarter for a smooth ¥2,000. 

It’s an advancement of the base technology, feedback looping with a world that had already taken on theme park characteristics. Crunching those numbers you feel yourself both building and exploring a space where “time is money” is endlessly literalised.

Death knows that its efforts at chess or Battleship or Twister are just part of the show, and so do all of us. What I end up wondering is: why is it harder for me to imagine an end to this production than it was for PKD?

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There’s millions all under one roof

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

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Suggested For Mature Readers
6: Götterdammerung

Miracleman no.15 is both the apex and nadir of the revisionist project.

This was a contraband comic; hard to find, spoken of in hushed tones. Its extremities were the stuff of legend. The quagmire of legalities enmeshing the Miracleman property meant that reprints were an impossibility.

This was the penultimate issue of the Eclipse run, in Moore and Totleben’s dense and heady final volume of the story, ‘Olympus’. Concerning Kid Miracleman’s orgy of sadistic destruction enacted on London, and his subsequent titanic rumble with Miracleman and his super-pals, it set a new bar for violence in superhero comics ensuring a powerful but dubious legacy in the annals of comics.

This is a work of nasty exploitation par excellence. It’s also one of the great formal experiments in sequential storytelling. Moore follows a thought train to its logical conclusion and finds something brutal, compelling and terrible.

He may have sniffed at the lukewarm imitators that trailed in his wake, grumbling about the wrong lessons being learned, but Moore needs to own this. It’s a thoroughly nasty piece of work that uses revisionist techniques to produce something scintillatingly unsettling. The work of a cruel schoolboy burning ants with a magnifying glass.

Teenager Johnny Bates is anally raped at reform school, murders his abusers, decapitates a  kindly nurse and proceeds to turn London into a Boschian panorama of pain and suffering. It’s rendered in baroque, barbarous detail by Totleben, pushing himself to experimental heights in his enactment of Moore’s imaginings.

Moore wants to explore what a real fight between superhumans might be like and applies his endlessly creative mind and most purple poetic prose to deliver it. 

It’s an incredible comic and it changed the game. As usual Moore felt he’d made the final statement on superhero violence.

As usual he was mistaken.

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Planks Constant

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Thought Bubble 2026

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CYBERZONE 1: Fearsome Fighting Team

It’s been in the air, but it won’t stick. Not the way creeps want it. Metaverse. A digital, parallel reality, interwoven with our own. A coexistence. Dan Olson’s The Future Is A Dead Mall mocks as the idea of a product where we willingly don a VR headset to virtually travel to a pizza shop to place an order to be delivered in your real location. As opposed to tapping through an app on your phone. A land ready for expansion and control, in the way the techbro class control digital social spaces, but lacking the convenience to attract the average joe.

Shareholders and C-Suites looked at the profits they reaped from pandemic era gaming and, as usual, couldn’t understand the correlation between the situation and the uptick.

I’ve always seen the attraction, personally. I am acutely aware not everyone does. On some brain-damaged, arrested development level, I never left the school playground. I mean, maybe none of us really does. My specific damage was a kind of roleplay. You know the thing: which Ninja Turtle did you want to be? Which A-Team member were you?

I could dabble in team sports, but didn’t have the skills, and couldn’t handle the competitiveness. The boiling red faces, almost driven to tears over the glory of five a side. When it was fun, though… Camaraderie is heady.

Video games could gradually bridge the gap. The fantasy of a Crew. Not everyone gets it, sure.

In the days of Action Force, there was a mail in offer called The Special Corps. It’s GI Joe equivalent was the Steel Brigade. A generic troop builder figure, but you completed a profile and made them yours. Your guy. Part of the team. Gaming gives me the option to take my friends and their guys, and do the things without consequences.

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B E A G G R E SS I VE

Circling back, and so we return and begin again, the new Shygirl LP SWALLOW! is a defining example of everything in the column Everything [is] Everything where genre ceases to have meaning - you can find a number of modern practitioners such as Vince Staples saying precisely this - and we discuss this by citing a load of genres, or rather how it clashes them. I have been a fan of Shygirl for a good half dozen years now, her music is both supremely hornt and tender, hard and soft, but it’s the blend of bedroom production pop, hard club, trip-hop, swirly Caroline Polachek/Chairlift mysticism, there’s a song - LUVLI - here that’s essentially a garage, grunge sound (guitars as drivers have been reincorporated this year a lot; again cf: Vince Staples, Charli XCX)… orchestral elements, lot of live violin here that makes her completely compelling and unique, a brilliant counterintuitive collagist; if I had to guess a primary influence, it would be Tricky - Live The Life You Like opens with clanking Angels With Dirty Faces basses before dropping into hard floor horn loops… the club is in yr head now remember boss?

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Ken Russell’s The Devils (2026)

Despite their empirical indeterminacy, and consequent difficulties in accounting for their origins, mass spiritual invasions occupy the same terrain, and so can be triangulated with, parrallel material incidents. 

The abduction moment maps with particular accuracy against the formation of the tribe-state. To anyone not directly enraptured, the aftershocks are felt as alterations to acceptable habits and lifeways, new tolerances and old taboos. Call it a shift in the heavens, celestial stagehands moving the scenery. A change has happened and nature’s whims mean something different now. Eventually everyone senses it, each in their way, a great new difference condensing inside Loudun’s fortifications.

Redgrave's helical prieure is contact ground zero, striking herself against Jarman’s wipe-clean torture-bunker tiling. Her broken eros gleams with cold, infernal radiance, manifesting as cosmetic stigmata on the body politic, plague sores and scorch marks proof of angelic love on the faces of the holy. Triggered into catastrophic sanctity by a moment's glance bestowed upon Reed’s lusty libertine - the lifestyle just beginning to toll around the jowls but still getting away with it - you have to forgive her. 

While the sisters writhe in her projections of alien ecstasy, the Swedish Protestant army is defeated at Nördlingen. Richelieu abandons confessional solidarity and turns west against Habsburg Spain, centralising the matter of France into nationalist oppressions. The mad king, toying with corvids and catamites, resembles god more and more each day.

Nevertheless the process needs its scapegoat, the basic ritual formula of Yahwism, reaffirmed by Christ’s example to his followers: exorcism requires sacrifice. With all the dignity of a heresy about to become wisdom, the force of her unreturned burden crushes the priest into piety, and the devils sweep the city walls away, the only thing keeping them out and holding them in.