The way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be

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Scare City Special Report Part 1

Scare City is billed as the world's most exclusive club night. No one knows what goes on inside. The huge queue is filled with such dizzying variety one could be forgiven for thinking it's Halloween. Indeed, I'm next to a man dressed as a lion with antlers and a young woman dressed in riot gear.

"It’s my seventh attempt so I'm giving this a shot" says Lion-Stag. Whereas Riot Girl shares, "I'm done trying to crack the dress code - if there even is one. This time I'm using force."

No one I speak to knows anyone who has been inside. Bouncers survey the queue, occasionally removing hopefuls. A naughty nurse, a beefeater and a man with square hair all get bounced.

Cordons corral us towards the entrance. Another group of bouncers thin the herd. A guy in a Fido Dido T-shirt, a girl with a green arm. We see others escorted from within the building by yet more security staff. A robot, an indignant Michael Gove. What's going on in there?

Riot Girl explains, "Once you're in there's the stairwell. Bouncers at every level. They'll find some excuse to remove you."

I pay, get my hand stamped and decline the use of the cloakroom.  Security forces me to check something lest I be removed. Jacketless I pay to give them a sock as bouncers remove a girl I’m sure is Charli XCX for looking bored.

The stairwell descends into the bowels of Natitude. As we shuffle down I can see Elon Musk in a headlock on the landing below.

"No drugs!!" Shouts a bouncer as she drags Elon by his panicked head up the stairs. 

After 30 minutes of slow descent and numerous ejections, Riot Girl makes her move.

"We're getting to the third landing! I've never made it further than this. WHO'S WITH ME?!"

End of part one.

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Ketistan

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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A Brief History of British Comics
16: CRISIS

• Publisher – Fleetway Publications
• September 1988 – July 1989
• 63 issues

CRISIS is a perfect title. 2000AD evoked strange futures; CRISIS summoned the right-now. Trapped in a centre beginning not to hold. It has urgency, a sense of activism and engagement. No escapism. No escape. The logo was army stencil, missile solo. Hard edged, design heavy. Cool and immediate. 

IDENTITY CRISIS
The comic went through phases, could never settle on what it wanted to be, what it was about. Its early form had ‘Third World War’, angry and prescient, Mills in furious university lecturer mode. ‘New Statesmen’ fused Cronenberg bio-horror futurism with genre deconstruction. 

It morphed into a social realist comic, with lashings of juvenile gore and mordant snickers, Ennis emergent. Further still, it got playful, meta. Morrison as performance pop-artist. ‘Bible John’ & ‘Hitler’. 

Never quite gelling, always searching for a purpose.

CRISIS OF FAITH
Perhaps this was its curse. To come out so strong, planting itself among the style-mags and tabloids. To be tucked under commuter’s arms alongside the Economist, or New Scientist. Money was invested; hopes were high. But it wobbled, lost its nerve. Diluted its ideas. Wasn’t hard or strident enough. 

CLIMATE CRISIS
That wide-eyed period from the late 80s, when the jagged slash of ‘maturity’ cut through comics, and publishers looked beyond teenage boys and primary school kids to new demographics and fiscal horizons. It couldn’t last. It turns out there wasn’t a market there. Comics folded like origami. 

FINANCIAL CRISIS
Sales spiralled, 80000, 50000, 30000 down, down. The publisher got salty. Reprint strips arrived, like the executioner’s axe. Maxwell plopped off his yacht, and CRISIS was over. 

INFINITE CRISIS
If only it had stuck it out. A comic in dialogue with the heaving turmoil of society, reflecting, refracting, retaliating. An outlet for angry creative voices to shout back at the void. 

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“Your Reign Has No Charm” - The Chaos Engine (The Bitmap Brothers, soundtrack by Joi and Richard Joseph, 1993)

An action game about what goes wrong when the future takes root in a dead system, The Chaos Engine lied to me or at least helped me lie to myself. For a minute there I thought steampunk would not just be be fine but that it’d have a banging soundtrack – 

The Chaos Engine | Full Soundtrack

Still hits, tbh. Club sounds sliced thin to meet the needs of the moment, made fit to dissolve on the tongue while you sat in the nook under the stairs developing niche twitches, pre-workforce weans receiving sly, early intimations of some real truths. Namely, that da club is “the harbinger and release valve of industrialisation”, and that it’s everywhere (see MO #11) 

Now we know another truth: if you see a man with all cogs in his eyes reaching for the mic you don’t stop to debate the aestheticisation of empire, you just run! 

Considering the box art of the six characters the game offered, I realise that The Chaos Engine contained another truth within its lie.

Big lads with big guns, including a “Gentleman” and a “Preacher” - well, s’good for the grunts to taste authority sometimes eh? Rumour is that one of them’s invented a satnav that thirsts for blood! 

Unlike the similarly named Gibson/Sterling novel, which sweetened the smell of fetid Thames water with more elaborate adventure tropes and critiques thereof, The Chaos Engine is a world remade by powerful whims in which all that remains is brute reflex. Perfectly engrossing adolescent entertainment, but if you find yourself attempting to embody this time-stuck, tech-flexing, servile macho bullshit as a grown-up, it’s time to get some fresh tunes on –

– and try to live in a way that admits the possibility you may love and be loved. 

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Bastion - flavour / genre

What if there was a city so modern the further you travelled from it, the further back in time, or into myth, you'd go? What if the depths of that city were the unconscious and its spires the stars? What if everyone lived there, and did everything, and that city was absurd and electric? And the fucking muppets lived there?

This is Bastion, the setting of Chris McDowall’s indie-darling tabletop roleplaying game, Electric Bastionland. Bastion is rich in 'flavour', to use a term I’ve recently realised is only common in ttrpg discourse. In a sense, flavour is to ttrpg settings as genre is to prose. Both point to a taste or set of conventions or a mood or a pallette, but while genre must be (okay, often is) linked to narrative, flavour done well is more unique, immediate, not simply articulated by the setting as presented in descriptive passages, but by the entire game object: all text, art and design.  

Flavour needs to be maximised and flavour is practical. It isn’t just enjoyable as part of the reading experience when browsing the rules or a game supplement (or indeed something we’ve written ourselves). It’s fuel that GMs use to run games. You’re never unsure what the tone should be like in Electric Bastionland, or wonder what sort of things should happen, because the 'flavour-text' both guides and provides resources for creativity. Which isn’t to say that you’re mimicking the author’s intent so much as being clearer on your own.  

Thinking about flavour, I’m reminded that it’s the best word we have for that concentrated hit of aesthetic we crave from our media. Affectivity. It’s where genre fans hope genre will take them. Going back to Bastionland’s flavour, I reflect that there are notes running through it that are in some ways elided by the game’s rules. Flavour is a strange thing. It can be bigger than its game. Beyond Bastion’s bounds.      

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IDEA: SEXUAL CONGRESS FILED AS BATMAN ARCS: ‘THE IDIOT ROOT’… ‘KNIGHTSEND’… ‘JOKER’S FIVE-WAY REVENGE’… ‘BATMAN R.I.P[ussy/penis kilt him ded]’. 

GOTTA HAVE A SYSTEM.

Music this week is the new Don Tolliver album, named for the third-best Decepticon triple-changer Octane - DT is squarely in the coterie of what I like to call ‘Futurewave’, urban artists who couldn’t really exist without Nayvadius ‘Future’ Cash pioneering vocoderised textures, you can also include Playboy Carti, Lil Tecca, Travis Scott and ehh, Ty$ I suppose, some rappers, some not - some of Tolliver’s stuff sounds more like Yo La Tengo or someone than hip-hop honestly, very interesting, more romantic, and I can’t yet choose a fav off the new one - ‘Body’ is a grindier Neptunes flip after this Valentine special with his partner, ‘Sweet Home’ is an Outrun sunset… There's a minimum 8 songwriters on each track so you know that shit is good.

DING DONG

I watched all of Wonder Man on Wednesday and if you didn’t, are you even trying, yes I had the day off but it’s COMMITMENT to the brand – this one was good, I wouldn’t have made it through if it had been shit, I have given up on their cartoons: really dislike western 21st century 2D animation, the only nice one was that Amazon 1940s Batman thing and Brave & Bold like 15 years ago. There’s a particularly derealised moment here when two actors in the Matrix franchise talk about one’s role & iconic moment that seems to invite a huge level of intertextuality - is this about Jonathan Majors somehow?? - which something like the onerous and insufferable The Studio is incapable of, I thoroughly disliked that.

Anyway - this is actually untrue and debunked but that’s inconvenient - the greatest EVER rap song Shook Ones II samples a project stove but I’m sure AZ definitely does have DJ Premier sample a doorbell here… ding dong. Better believe I want to talk about the Great Lakes Avengers’ DeMar ‘Doorman’ Davies, interiority, the Darkforce Dimension behind the black rainbow, Kanye West and bipolar disorder/paranoid schizophrenia which will have to come: NEXT WEEK

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The Reckoning (Sandra Goldbacher, David Blair, BBC, 2023)
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia Da Costa, Columbia/ Decibel/ DNA, 2025)

Seeping up from its concrete tomb, it took time to emerge into afterlife, a pause befitting the dignity of the honours it won in its decades of embodiment.

These scant years allowed its reputation to gather and a new form coalesce. Accusations, less afraid of reprisals, broken arms and police harassment, congealed rumour into fact, a body of dark light woven about the remnant skeletons of memory and image. First, plastic stuffed with plastic in far-off factories, then fulfillment warehouses, awaiting Samhain's blood-season mummery.

Its emergent spectre moved through ecosystems of headlines and recovered traumas. Video archeology replayed crimes committed on-camera, memetic artefacts for those who'd grown up safe, they thought, the parents who remembered from before. Trying to explain the gone and unrecovered world it dominated, the narrow airwaves and stifling living-rooms, total projection of its monstrous surface: something that had always just been there. Something horribly wrong while our adults calmly carried on. Hunting all the while in its garish camouflage.

Its old home, overworld of palaces, ministries, high-security psychiatric hospitals, waited eleven years before returning its shadow to the screen. Claiming guilt while flashing proud teeth, the state broadcaster injected its condensed metaplasm into a primed, half-empty vessel, the nation’s favourite funnyman, uncanny tics and gestures, misfit wigs and atrocities in casual wear, rattles and catchphrases copied with eerie professionalism. Every dark corner of every seaside boarding house, morgue, ward, inside the caravan, quickly forgotten flats. Claiming banishment, deliberately mistaking the mechanical purpose of re-simulation.

It wasn't put down. It was never going away.

Now the olympic architect and royal director takes the holy task of evocation, unfolding it into the youth faction as murder cult, the death energy of immortal adolescence, cartwheels and cat-passes, aesthetics of hunger and abjection. The servant-master of princes reborn into photograph, looming over the prone bodies of children, eyes flashing into the camera light.