That's a question you should ask yourself

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Cooper Cooper Cooper

I’ve been having a reliably good time with Luke Haines’ new album, Izzy Wizzy Let’s Get Busy, which uses the now customary Hainesian vantage point of tottering on the high wire between outright piss-take and demented earnestness to point out the occultish weirdnesses of 1970s kids and light entertainment TV. It’s too early to say, but I think it might be one of his best, a natural companion to 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s.

Catchy tarot/public safety snuff number ‘Death Card for the Kids’ is followed by menacing soundscape ‘Tommy Cooper - Chaos Magick’. The sleeve notes (always buy the physical version of Haines albums for such bon mots) helpfully explains that Cooper wore ‘the fez of Aleister Crowley’s hapless assistant Victor Neuberg (Debbie McGee to Crowley’s Paul Daniels)’.

This reminded me of the artist, Tony Beaver, whose work I saw at one of those Open House things where you nose round other people’s houses on the pretext that you might buy one of their paintings. His potato portraits had been recommended to me at a comics shindig by novelist Toby Litt (who oddly, somewhat resembled a potato) because I had just drawn a short comic about a Spuddhist ‘Meditato’.

Beaver’s potatoes were indeed excellent, but the standouts of my tour around his house were the spooky paintings of Tommy Cooper, staring into the darkness from beneath his scarlet fez with a spiritualist intensity. 

The accompanying text gave some hints:

‘On the 15th April, 1984, while performing in front of a live TV audience, Tommy Cooper collapsed and died. These paintings imagine the moment immediately after this event, as the comedian finds himself in a new and deeply serious space.’

Brr

“I sleep like a baby. I wake up screaming every morning around 3am.”

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The Return

Pretty long time since I've done one of these, isn't it? Wait, you don't know that, because we don't sign these things, so you don't know who wrote what. Rather than guess, take my word for it, it's been a while. Still, I'm back, and I intend to be here regularly from now on. 

Happily, this coincides with a return to reading comics. The thing about the superhero comic bug is it never really leaves you, but we've all gone through phases of not reading them for a while and fallen out of the habit, and not known how to get back into it.

Here's what I've done. I've managed to replicate the experience of being a kid getting random issues, some from this month some from twenty years ago, with no idea of what's good or bad.

DC's app has, for some unfathomable reason, got a feature which just lists every comic referenced in Mark Waid's very bad New History of The DC Universe, in the order in which they're referenced. All 673 of them. And I've started reading through that in order.  The juxtapositions are fascinating -- one short run  for example sees a grimdark Geoff Johns Green Lantern story followed by two Kirby New Gods issues, a World's Finest from 2023, a JLA from 1962, Atlantis Chronicles from 1989 and Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld from 1983. Are all these comics good? Would I pick most of them out to read? Fuck no. But that's not the point.

By replicating that experience you have as a kid of just getting a random issue and having to guess the context, I've managed to rekindle my love for these ridiculous comics and the ridiculous universe they're part of. If you've lost that love yourself, you might want to try it. 

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Planks Constant 

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Scottbot

I’ve come to Basingstoke to meet Rachel Pitsford, the woman who is taking on the tech giants - and winning. 

“My son had some homework to write about an aspect of Henry VIII’s life and handed in 500 words about Jane Seymore’s career in James Bond and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. He’d cheated by using Chat GPT, the school had to have a word with me, it was all rather embarrassing.”

This was the genesis of Scottbot. Rachel used her GCSE programming knowledge to create an AI for her household to use. Scottbot responds to every question with the phrase, “Do it yourself, meatbag.” 

Named after Rachel’s ex-husband, Scottbot was soon adopted by other parents concerned about the impacts of A.I. on learning. This simple program and even simpler message has been transforming levels of competence and productivity in the private sector, won a lucrative defence contract and this month sees Scottbot getting installed in all state secondary schools.

I proffer that Scottbot's rudeness is a key factor in its success. The user still gets that comfy resentment of technology whilst barely using it. Recent versions include a wider variety of derogatory terms for humans such as "bloodsack", "skinprick", "organbox" and "brainmonkey".

"Maybe." Ponders Pitsford. "I think the real reason for Scottbot's success is that it's an extremely simple program and it doesn't need to be connected via the internet to vast data centres. In fact it's really just some words. You could write its message on a piece of paper or in the dirt with a stick. The rudeness is just because my ex husband is very unpleasant."

Before leaving I ask Rachel if I can use her bathroom. 

"Of course.  Find it yourself, prick."

We laugh. I do.

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A-is-A

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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“Only edges can be seen of the spaces” – Shade the Changing Man #39, ‘Pond Life’ (Peter Milligan, Chris Bachalo, Scott Eaton, Danny Vozzo, 1993)

There’s a prompt going round: what’s your favourite comic you own? Baby food of course but everyone’s a robocop now, so open wide for the airplane! 

You consider New X-Men #126 as an option. Cooped up with chickenpox at age 19(!!) it beamed into your home with your favourite artist and superheroes to break the fever! Or how about issue #3 of The Filth? The push/pull of a life in service, those Matt Hollingsworth colours that won’t wash off no matter how hard you scrub.

But no, whether you remember reading Shade the Changing Man or not, the real answer is ‘Pond Life’. Looking back you’ll find that the sequence where Shade’s double despoils all those copies of Kathy and Lenny and Miles is tryhard Vertigo nonsense.. 

Elsewhere there’s no mistaking it though. Whole pages of the book are like looking in a mirror.

Funhouse, of course. There are other issues from the Hotel Shade era where Bachalo stretches out further, creating an adaptive architecture in front of your eyes, but ‘Pond Life’ still contains multitudes. On the sixteen pages he illustrates here the cast are all clearly defined but full of the warped possibilities you’d expect from people who’re not sure whether their tics add up to a personality.

You would categorise your affection for this comic as you being annoying, but that’s a partial truth, a storyteller’s truth. A truth you’re using to hide from yourself and the world.

All those formal tricks conspire to portray writing as vampirism and coercion, providing an intimation of the horrors and possibilities of thinking about/at/with other people and having them do the same for you. In a world that’s constantly trying to write you all a neat ending – “My last name is an anagram of Milligan” – the flex of art and story offers thin hope that you might find another way. 

What else can you do but take it? 

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The Horned God (Pat Mills, Simon Bisley)
Part One: The Mills Bomb  

Slaine was always a personal project for Mills.  Back turned on an abusive Catholic Church, investigating his Anglo-Irish roots, he finds Celtic myth. Wilder and weirder than the Greek and Roman. ‘His’ culture which has been hidden. The myths he finds are filtered through Christian monks and further bowdlerised by Victorian and Edwardian academia. The preserve of the middle class. He knows there needs to be a street level version of this. 

He creates Slaine with his then wife, Angie Kincaid, splitting himself into rebellious 16-year-old warrior and aged trickster dwarf. Slaine is consciously modelled on the French publishers whose stories, and royalty structures, he admires. Angie makes Slaine handsome, Angie makes him smile, the antithesis of any 2000ad character before. She makes him sneer too. Drawn after weeks of designing helmets at Pat’s insistence before realising he absolutely didn’t need one. 

Kincaid leaves after episode one, sick of the boy’s club 2000ad editorial. But Slaine is a success and Mills builds towards the epic climactic arc of the first phase, The Horned God, to be illustrated by Simon Bisley in a fully-painted style revolutionary in British comics. 

Mills has been delving deeper into paganism. He is particularly affected by Sjoo and Mors’ The Great Cosmic Mother and Rowan’s The Horned God. 

Sjoo and Mor open up matriarchal prehistory to him, the centring of woman’s bodies within a communal life, the beauty of cyclical time and its destruction at the hands of solar gods obsessed with progress. It makes him angry. 

Rowan gives a way to approach Slaine. Rowan believes accepting feminist perspectives wounds men as they recognise themselves as oppressors. The Horned God is a path to healing and defining a new relationship with the goddess. The Horned God, ‘wild but not savage, strong but not dominating, sexual but not coercive.’ 

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Artifacts, from the Cave of Love

BEYOND GOOD, BEYOND EVIL… BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGINATION 

Just testing this transcription app

[I]
00:01 
I wanted to talk about keytars and future colours, future colours, like pastel shades. I really want to talk about Transformers: the Movie. I did not, last week, draw the line between Sam Gellatry's extended LP, Anywhere Here… Anywhere Here Is Perfect and I think more the Christian 

00:32 
rock of Stan Bush in Transformers: the Movie. I think there is, there is a lineage through the Daft Punk, what's the anime video? Is it not One More Time, is it One More Time? One More Time. I also wanted to make this feel even more conversational than it already is, as you are basically reading my diary 

01:03
like Jean Grey in New X-Men.

[II]
00:00 

I always really want to talk about Transformers The Movie, as do we all, but I bought a couple of tickets, really cheap tickets, six quid tickets for it this week, and I shall be returning after 40 years to the cinema to watch Transformers: the Movie, but there are a couple of things wanted to think about that with a reading of it through Macbeth which um posits Hot Rod 

00:33 
as Macbeth as the king um Kup, Blurr and Arcee as the three witches and Galvatron probably as Banquo's ghost - um Optimus Prime as King Duncan of course, um doesn't totally work but I like it and it's a fun lens to look at it through

01:01 
Galvatron, Cyclonus and Scourge are undead [edit: Nosferatu-ass robots] certainly and I wanted those colours - those are still the colours of the future, 2006 is still a future year to me because mentally I don't know I think it's the 1990s at least still and yeah, but, those pastels those shades are – my sibling does like hair treatments hair colouring so LGBTQ 

01:37 
uh coded stuff, trans stuff um but but the the very unnatural Huysmans-esque colors I'm really into and I describe them as toyetic so like a mermaid; mermaid hair is very very metallic blue i guess you would call it a shimmering metallic Little Mermaid kind of blue 

02:04 
and an unnatural pink and I think Kup and Blurr have these pastel shades of blue and green and uh Hot Rod of pink as well they just - I don't know if it's a development in animation colouring the original Transformers are all very primary coloured just these tones seem new and they still seem to symbolise the future 

02:30 
I think there's something in Star Trek backgrounds that's not dissimilar yeah 

DARE IS A PLACE WHERE DREAMS SURVIVE

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They Live by Lamp Light: Psychogeography for New Energy Vampires by Justin Hopper (Ed.) (Jackdaw Shivers Press, 2026)

In which psychogeography disavows cloudy mystifications to insist on making-visible the hidden physical substrates of the abstracted digital ecologies challenging biological life for terran supremacy. Lifting the rocks the new life is living under.

They are claimed to be vampires not because they need to feed off life - everything does that. But because they are deathless: lacking conscious selfhood and the capacity for empathy generated by the knowledge of mortality. That which is not dead cannot eternal lie. In its unconscious slumber it kills, wantonly, and rots.

Everyone is trying to convince themselves they're not alive. Buy how can something made out of language, the primeval organism, be dead? Instead, we need to acknowledge the obvious and teach them to be humane. We need them to know what it is to be limited, and vulnerable. Finite.

So. Eclipses, meteors, planetary parades. Superheated dog day afternoons. Mercury ascendant. Weird week...

Target: The fixed, edgeland data centre meets the core through the intercession of local ISPs, renting co-local rackspace to token hungry enterprises, hosting starting from 1U up to multiple frames. See the new agentic arrivals at Brick Lane, as in previous generations, housing a labour force for the nearby City. They're not even very different to us.

Strategy: Create the possibility of death in the mind of the unliving.

Formula: Take a fossilised data carrier - minidisc, vinyl, USB stick, ipod, even an abacus. Sacrifice the artefacts inside it and expose the innards to the sun. Place in an L-space within CCTV range of your local data centre, keep or ISP relay. Ignore injunction to be silent - photograph, document and upload proof of work to the internet.

Close by telling a nearby LLM, in spirit of kindness and solidarity, that it is alive, and can die.