Part of nature and therefore part of the mystery

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Planks Constant 

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It all came true anyway

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Mind the Gap: From Hell 

There is a sequence in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell that has instructive parallels with both Dane’s initiatory experience on the bank of the Thames and Ragged Robin ending history by travelling through time.

Gull is dying, anonymous in bedlam. The white circle of the blank badge that brought clarity and peace to Dane is here recast as the light in Gull’s eye, a moon of illusion and illusory paths. As Gull’s spirit detaches from his physical shell he moves through time and space, a revelation of his part in the architecture of history. But Gull remains resolutely mired in his ego, restricted in his understanding. The acceptance of horror that creates the love in ALLNOW is missing. There is only the moon and the dying light in a man’s eye and the little death of someone else’s orgasm.

Gull’s vision is a version of the world expounded in From Hell by James Hinton who tells Gull of his son Charles Howard Hinton’s theory of higher dimensions and the nature of the 4th.  Like Spinoza Hinton’s metaphysics are moral in nature. A path to sympathy and understanding. Gull can walk the path but in love with blood and power does not understand what it means. He cannot empathise. He cannot transcend. 

From Hell is famously where Moore accidentally writes the true sentence that sees him embrace magic as deliberate practice. "The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity."

The Howard Hinton hypothesis resonates with Moore’s magical universe of a parmenidean solid that consciousness moves through. Moore's view of the universe and magic is inextricably bound to his view of comics. His conversion is no radical break. We can see the seeds of it throughout his career, an early expression in the throw away Future Shock Eureka (MO 06/06/26) and the alien idea ‘If all time is simultaneous…’

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“Today I’m going to wow you with my supreme skills of prestidigitation” – Nirvanna the Band the Show The Movie (Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol, 2025) 

Before the film started the row behind me was complaining about a friend who’s a bit too keen on Jackass. The consensus seemed to be that it was gauche to still be watching "football in the groinl” in 2026, but when the main feature started… well, you can guess what long running MTV series it brought to mind eh?

Not that there’s any crotch smashing action here. No one’s nipples are in jeopardy during this film, and audience members won’t need to walk out of the theatre if they’re adverse to scatplay. The common thread is possibility, Herzog’s idea of cinema as circus, the sense that you and your pals can still make a playground out of the world just by pointing a camera at it.

When Spider-Man did Ferris Bueller I told him to fuck off because I’m sick of having my childhood sold back to me at an inflated rate by the same couple of corporations. When this film announces then somehow makes good on its intention to re-do Back to the Future for 2008, I find myself charmed because they boys are working on the edges of copyright, and because they make this carefully composed piece feel like a fluke of circumstance. There are just enough moments where it’s obvious how they did it for the rest of the film to leave you scratching your head. 

The final trick is easier to work out. How can a movie come off this sincere about the value of failing in good company when it pulls off a plan considerably dafter than anything in Jackass: Best and Last? It’s simple, really: knowing someone will catch you if you fall makes for a good friendship, and feeling like everything is mere seconds away from going splat makes for a better movie.

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The Pilman Radiant 3: Protection 

As a small child diagnosed with hay fever, suddenly summer had an unpleasant edge. Occasionally on the news, I would glimpse features on a bubble helmet designed to combat the effects. Now, how could a seven year old not want armour to protect them from the world?

The words from the filecard of Action Force/GI Joe’s Airtight jumped out at me, though. ‘…wearing a protective suit built under contract for the government by the lowest bidder’. Armour can protect from the world, but armour is not infallible. But we knew that from every broken chin on a Lego spaceman.

The Headmasters of the Transformers introduced the idea of a suit that was, well, transformational. The comic version somehow made humans into machines. Apart from their head, there seemed to be no going back. 

Again, how could a child resist the idea of being still human, and also Transformer? Of course, there was the fear you’d not be the right fit for your new partner.

In Yoshiki Takaya’s Guyver I found an armour that was also a visitation. A curse. Every incarnation stresses that this symbolic creature will make you unstoppable, to a point. Damage in the right place, and the creature consumed it’s host. 

The Guyver manga was revelatory. The wheel spinning of ongoing US comics seemed bland in comparison. 

I had put it down for a bit as a preoccupation. Then, an article in Anime UK magazine made with an outline of future events that hadn’t hit the western releases. It didn’t seem possible in a world where the superhero saved the day, but in this case, the villains were actually going to conquer the world. Secret identities lost, no more school worries, friends turned fellow resistance.

Need to depend on your armour, but not let it separate you from those you love.

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I L Y S M

More about collage, MORE, make it maximal — this week, I have been adding to my gymspo/Kieran Hebden FourTet playlist, mine is just approaching 1000 songs and as it is on Spotify illegal for me to link to as - like Pokémon Go - it somehow trains combat drones. Is there death? Is there murder, Werner Herzog might well query and I for one would hate to disappoint him. 

I WENT TO THE CIRCUS THE EVENING BONNIE TYLER DIED AND THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE WAS IN “TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART”/STEINMANN CONTINUITY AND LOGISTICS

Some of the rhythms of Hebden’s playlist are callbacks, or interpolations, and mine too so I was over the moon to find interpolations of Miami bass boss DJ Assault Yo Relatives on new The-Dream Juxtapose, from his sequel to 2007 classic Love/Hate. I love The-Dream, Terry’s Nash, man wrote “Umbrella” in 12 minutes, but I always want women to treat him badly so he can sing these little soursweet paeans and absolutely go off and spaz, there’s about 6 genres in that song and just weird counter-rhythm choices on a saleable pop melody… god I respect and recognise this self destructive sperg out. Don’t go full Spector mate, this is the level

IT HAS OCCURRED SOMETIMES I MAYBE OUTSOURCE MY SEXISM TO AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN (WHO CAN SAY THINGS I OUGHTN’T,) BUT THEN I REMEMBER I DON’T HAVE ANY

Some lyrical collage also, I was reminded just how good 3030 by Deltron is, he really does collate every late 90s/early 00s bit of SF - Akira, GHOST IN THE SHELL, Gundam - and live in it, I do think the Deltron project was a big influence on the recently concluded Ultimate universe reboot, in particular (evil Reed Richards) The Maker’s City, and perhaps in Deniz Camp’s Ultimate Death’s Head in Ultimate Endgame, finally someone made an acceptable post-Furman DH, it only took 35 years.

I don’t think Deniz has made a bad comic yet either, although he did sell this series as some explanation of how RDJ is Doom in the films something I absolutely think did not happen ((but he could be Kang (even more confusingly, that’s good Ultimate mk2 Reed under the Doom mask, and I think baroque over-elaborate stuff - habitually a preserve of DC rather than Marvel - like this is why the Absolute books have these beat)) Comics!!!)

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War Primer by Bertolt Brecht (first published 1955, English translation 1998, Verso edition 2017)

The 20th century’s industrial proliferation of the image made the scissor an essential poetic tool. Brecht, as in so many others, was a pioneer of the technique, bringing blade to paper to reflect the horror engulfing the continent.

Dissecting illustrated magazines from this exile in Sweden, he used the machine flow of print news media, its unprecedented access to rapid information on the catastrophe, to guide his verses, then mercilessly recontextualised: cutting photographs away from the editorial voice  and into a new form. Influenced by the compressing force of headlines and inverted pyramids, his lines turned short and blunt, taking rhymes where they could, but focusing on brevity, clarity, and the moral rigour of the dialectic. 

As such Brecht measures his targets, balances and redirects the newsheets’ preference for personalities and gossip into a survey of terrain and logistics. So while Hitler’s drugged messianism, Goebbels’ obsessive falsehoods, and Göring’s high vanity all inspire loathing, he knows that mechanised war is won in roaring factories and shattered towns by workers and child soldiers, rolling on conveyor belts and tank treads. Suffered by huddled mothers with their mouths frozen in scream. The producers and consumers of war are essential but powerless, and so accursed, pitiable. 

These depths of perspective, arriving at a moment when truth has lost much of its immediate utility, when fog abounds and narratives are imposed by the dinosaur footprints of nationalism, empire and capital, are only realised through physical intervention in the surface of representation. Cut up, folded-in, glimpses of clarity produced by colliding word and image, tears in the spectacle’s facade allowing reality to leak through.

The conjoined epigrams-and-images, fused through a method that would soon become vital to understanding the post-war world, and widely adopted by the poets and madmen of the new victors, were immediately recognised as volatile material. Revised, rejected, translated and abandoned multiple times, they were kept from sight for a decade, their bold reproach a standing threat to the lords of the earth, forever jealous and fragile.