Part 4: "Classic" Movies

When I was a child, I had no particular interest in film. I mean, sure, I liked movies, as the wear-and-tear on my old VHS copies of 101 Dalmations and The Lion King would indicate. I always enjoyed going to the local Blockbuster, browsing the racks, trying to pick out something that looked interesting out of the thousands of weird video covers staring at you from shelf after shelf after shelf.

I watched 10 Things I Hate About You to the point where, if I am watching it now, I can recite the entire script along with the movie. There are multiple jokes in 10 Things that I learnt the exact wording and cadence of before I ever understood what the words actually meant.

Given the fact that the entire film is a reasonably accurate Shakespeare riff, a lot of the jokes that I didn't understand at the time basically boil down to, "I have genitals. You also have genitals. Wouldn't it be funny if our genitals either touc…

Given the fact that the entire film is a reasonably accurate Shakespeare riff, a lot of the jokes that I didn't understand at the time basically boil down to, "I have genitals. You also have genitals. Wouldn't it be funny if our genitals either touched or where injured in some way?"

There were plenty of movies that I liked. There were a bunch of movies that I loved. But I simply did not care about it in the same way that I do now. There were three moments throughout my teens where all this changed for me. Three moments without which I would quite possibly not be the weird, emotionally stunted film nerd I am today. Those three moments were, in chronological order:

MOMENT ONE: The shower scene in Psycho

What an incredible scream Janet Leigh has.

What an incredible scream Janet Leigh has.

Being forced to watch Psycho in a High School Media Studies class was the first step. Before watching the film I had the exact same, “black and white movies are boring” thoughts that everyone has when they didn’t watch old movies as a child. After the first half hour or so, I remember thinking, “oh, okay, maybe this isn’t as boring as I thought it would be.” And then, half way into the film, they kill off the main character.

In just the creepiest goddamn scene, too.

In just the creepiest goddamn scene, too.

My teenaged brain exploded.

I knew enough about film and storytelling structure as a weird child to know that you just do not do that. You don’t set up a suitcase full of money and then ignore it half way through. You don’t put the climax of your film at the midway point. And you certainly don’t spend 45 minutes establishing your protagonist’s entire convoluted backstory just to have her die at the end of the first act. It would be like if you were watching The Lion King, and the first half hour is exactly the same. Simba hangs out for a while, sings some songs, his dad dies, he runs away, he’s lying there in the middle of the desert, the buzzards are all circling him. And then, instead of Timon and Pumbaa showing up, the buzzards just proceeded to rip Simba to shreds and eat his still-warm entrails, and the rest of the movie was all about some other stupid garbage. It would be like you were watching Cinderella, and instead of the fairy godmother showing up, Cinderella just doesn’t get to go to the ball and her life continues to be exactly as miserable as it was before, the end. It would be like if you were watching a fairly conventional seeming thriller about a suitcase full of money and then halfway through the main character just gets murdered in the shower for no reason! This taught me that classic movies could be absolutely insane.

MOMENT TWO: Humphrey Bogart being cool in The Big Sleep.

Just look at that face. So hang-dog cool. He can wear a rumpled suit like nobody else.

Just look at that face. So hang-dog cool. He can wear a rumpled suit like nobody else.

I was watching the 1946 version of The Big Sleep in High School, doing an elective “Film Classics” subject that I had chosen specifically because it sounded like a bludge. And it was a bludge, but what a wonderful, glorious bludge it was. We were looking at film noir, watching The Big Sleep as a study of the epitome of Humphrey Bogart’s inherent coolness. I was enjoying the film well enough for the first hour or so, thinking, “well, it’s certainly better than doing actual schoolwork.” Then it got to a scene that is maybe my favourite thing that I have ever seen in a motion picture.

It’s night-time. Bogart is sneaking around a house that a bunch of criminals are occupying. He comes across one of the criminals. Both Bogey and the bad guy have their guns out. Pointed at each other. About three feet between them. Stalemate. Bogart, nonchalant as anything, tosses his gun on the ground between them, throws his hands in the air. Has a “you got me, fair play” grin on his face. The criminal bends down to pick up the gun. Bogart, swift as anything, kicks the criminal in the head, picks up the gun, and fires.

It was just… so effortless. It was like the sequence in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford shoots the crazy sword-wielding guy instead of fighting him, except Bogart is somehow even cooler. I still think about that moment roughly once a week, and it taught me that classic movies could be awesome.

MOMENT THREE: The Mexican Spitfire series.

People complain about modern-day movie posters being boring, but old posters are exactly as inane and terrible.

People complain about modern-day movie posters being boring, but old posters are exactly as inane and terrible.

Psycho, The Big Sleep, and a couple other movies had taught me that maybe old movies did have something to offer after all. And so, being the weird pop-cultural knowledge-obsessive I am, I sat down to watch all the films that were considered “classics”. From Here to Eternity, Citizen Kane, Gentleman’s Agreement. And here’s the thing: they were all super boring.

I was not connecting with any of them. My opinion on some of them has changed since then – I now think Citizen Kane is a masterpiece, From Here to Eternity has some interesting stuff in there, Gentleman’s Agreement is well intentioned garbage. But at the time, I thought these were what old movies were. I thought old movies were stuffy, self-serious, slow moving, and just basically kind of tedious. “Oh well,” I thought to myself, “never mind. I guess I’m not going to become an old movie buff after all.”

But I still wasn’t sure, so every week when the new TV Guide came out, I would check what old movies were playing on ABC in the middle of the night, and I would check this against a copy of the 2000 edition of Leonard Maltin’s Film Guide. If any of them got good ratings, or sounded interesting, or had Humphrey Bogart in them, then I’d set the VCR to tape them, and watch them the next day. To be honest, given how tedious I had found so many classic movies, I was often as concerned with “does this film have a relatively short run time?” as anything else.

One day, I read in the TV Guide that a 1940 comedy called Mexican Spitfire was playing. I looked it up in Leonard Maltin – it got three stars, it only went for 67 minutes, what the hell, I’ll record it. I got home from school the next day. Rewound the tape. Pressed play. And what I was greeted to… was not great. It was a movie about a strait-laced American businessman who is married to a stereotypical fiery Latina woman, played by Lupe Velez. The film was clichéd, over the top, very stupid, and had an excessively obvious ending.

This is the level of ham we're dealing with.

This is the level of ham we're dealing with.

But it was funny. And, more importantly, it was very easy to watch. It moved at the pace of a sitcom, and was even structured like one. It had the farcical plot of a Frasier, the culture clash comedy of a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the hang out vibe of a Friends, the silliness of a Newsradio. It spoke a language I knew, the language of situational comedy, and it did so in a breezy, enjoyable way. It was comfortable. And that was when I realised… not every OLD movie is a CLASSIC movie. And that was okay – not every piece of entertainment was aiming for greatness. Sometimes they just wanted the audience to have a good time.

From there, it was easy. I had learnt the trick – don’t try to force an old film to be important just because it was old. And it was important, at least for me, to learn it from something that was as obviously dumb and inconsequential as Mexican Spitfire. If I had attempted to learn that same lesson from something that was generally considered to be a comedy classic, I don’t think it would have worked. I think I would have approached, say, the Marx Brothers, or Buster Keaton, or even Some Like it Hot with an inherent seriousness that the works themselves would have been unable to support. After having seen Mexican Spitfire, however, I was able to watch Charlie Chaplin getting hit in the face with a ladder or whatever on its own terms, not bogged down with the weight of history and implied importance.

So if there is anyone reading this who thinks they don’t like old movies because they are all boring, you are wrong. They are not all boring. Just the boring ones are boring. You probably just haven’t seen any of the non-boring ones yet, because unless they are Singin’ in the Rain, they aren’t the ones pretentious gits like me talk about as being “great.”

Seriously, though, Singin' in the Rain is the most infectiously exuberant movie ever made. There is no way anybody could possibly not enjoy it.

Seriously, though, Singin' in the Rain is the most infectiously exuberant movie ever made. There is no way anybody could possibly not enjoy it.

Part 3: Saturday Morning Cartoons

When I was a kid, there were three distinct blocks of important children’s television programming, all with their own rules, codes, and styles. There was weekday morning television, which was a vicious gang war, in which all children were forced to choose a side between the brilliant-mad puppet-genius of Channel 7’s Agro’s Cartoon Connection, and the lazy, pandering garbage of Channel 10’s Cheez TV. This is a war which now, with the passage of time, I am able to be completely objective about.

Yeah, Cheez TV sure was terrible. Not like this cool dude.

Yeah, Cheez TV sure was terrible. Not like this cool dude.

There was weekday afternoon television, which was significantly more egalitarian in nature – one could quite happily flip between Channel 9’s The Cool Room and ABC’s ABC Kids block and whatever weird game show Channel 7 were trying out that week without feeling like you were betraying the cause.

Some of those weird game shows were pretty... A*mazing.

Some of those weird game shows were pretty... A*mazing.

These televisual blocks were comfort blankets. They were always there for you, playing the same stuff, day in, day out, five days a week. If you wanted to watch Rugrats, or Scooby Doo, or Dragon Ball Z (which was shown on Cheez TV and was therefore stupid garbage for babies, but still,) then you could. Every single day. At the exact same time. Pingu was always waiting for you.

But there was a third block of programming. An elusive block. A magical block, a fleeting two hours a week. And that was the Saturday Morning Cartoons. Specifically, it was Saturday Disney.

If this doesn't sum up the late nineties better than any other single image possibly could, I do not want to see that image.

If this doesn't sum up the late nineties better than any other single image possibly could, I do not want to see that image.

There was something beautiful about Saturday Disney. Part of it was the hosts – as much as I loved Agro’s Cartoon Connection, and as much as idiots with no taste loved Cheez TV, there is a reason that none of those hosts ever went on to greater stardom, whereas many of the Saturday Disney hosts did. They were professionals, who knew what they were doing. Also, they only had to fill two hours a week, whereas the weekday hosts had to fill two hours a day.

But that wasn’t all of it.

Part of it was the audience participation. Saturday Disney would get children to send in what was basically Disney fan art, and the hosts would display it and discuss how amazing it was. And every single week, you’d watch, hoping against hope that the terrible picture you drew of Mickey Mouse and Aladdin holding hands or whatever would get shown, and feeling insanely resentful and jealous of all these no-talent hacks whose work the hosts chose to display instead. “That seven year old can’t even hold a pencil properly!” you’d think, “how dare they celebrate his Donald Duck board game! It’s clearly a Snakes & Ladders rip off! No originality at all! Why can’t I win a year’s subscription to Disney Adventures Magazine?”

I could have been getting this in the mail for free! Every month! Rather than paying, like, $3 for it!

I could have been getting this in the mail for free! Every month! Rather than paying, like, $3 for it!

But again, that was not all of it.

Part of it was the quality of the cartoons. Perhaps quality is too strong a word. Consistency would be better. The Disney television cartoons, at least in the nineties, had a consistency of tone and style that made them all feel like they fit together, in a way that no other children’s programming quite did. You could pick your favourites, obviously, and there would always be that one cartoon, the one they played in the middle, that was kind of mediocre, but it was rarely outright bad, and even when it was bad, it was at least bad in a perfectly watchable way.

Some of them were unwatchably bad, though.

Some of them were unwatchably bad, though.

That consistency was important, but still, it was not the whole appeal.

The main appeal was the ritual. It was getting up on a Saturday morning, pouring yourself a big bowl of cereal, loading it with sugar (taken straight from the 1kg sugar bag, kept in the cupboard near the nuts and the sultanas, rather than the sugar bowl kept near the coffee jar, as we weren’t allowed to load our cereal with sugar, and I was always paranoid about getting caught,) pouring milk right up to the top of the bowl, and letting it all go soggy, so you could chew it less. It was dragging your quilt from your bedroom to the couch, and snuggling up under it in front of the television. It was watching television in your pyjamas, and nobody telling you not to. It was knowing which cartoon would play when, and what types of sketches the hosts would do at what times, and being delighted when an unexpected change occurred. It was even the exquisite agony of organising all of this perfectly, orchestrating everything just so, and then finding out that the goddamn football grand final was on that day, so instead of playing your cartoons, Channel 7 decide to play a stupid bloody black and white football match from 1956. “The first grand final ever televised!” That feeling of intense anger at the mere existence of sports – that was all a part of it. It was all part of the ritual.

Bunch of stupid jerks, taking my Goofy away from me.

Bunch of stupid jerks, taking my Goofy away from me.

I think Australian children are lucky in this sense. I think the children’s television host adds an element of ritual and continuation and cohesion to the entire enterprise that is sorely lacking in other country’s children’s television. And the reason for this is simple – the Australian government mandated that all free-to-air television stations had to show a minimum of 60% Australian productions. To get around this, most stations chose to buy content from overseas and package it with some very cheaply filmed Australian presenters saying, “here’s Donald Duck!” All of a sudden a two hour block of American cartoons becomes a two hour block of an Australian-hosted variety show. It was the exact same reason that Sandra Sully was brought in to film one minute introductions to two hour British documentaries under the name Sandra Sully Presents. Even though it was an entirely mercenary thing done to avoid producing actual Australian content, I still think it was a good idea. It made Saturday Disney feel weirdly ceremonial.

Of course, this ceremony could be disrupted. My sister was four years older than I was, and our house only had the one television. So when I wanted to watch Saturday Disney, she wanted to slump on the couch, disaffected fourteen year old that she was, and desultorily channel flip between Rage and Video Hits. She was too old and mature for cartoons. She was fourteen, not twelve.

Saturday Disney ran from 7am to 9am, which meant you had to be vigilant about getting up early, lest you miss the latest episode of Darkwing Duck. On Saturdays, Video Hits ran from 10am to 12, so Saturday Disney was over by then. After 9 it was just repeats of the stuff they were playing on Saturday Disney like, two years earlier. Which was still good, don’t get me wrong, just not essential. So Video Hits did not pose a major problem.

But Rage. Oh, Rage.

My mortal enemy. Until I turned 14, then it was the best.

My mortal enemy. Until I turned 14, then it was the best.

Rage ran from the middle of the night until 11.30am. It always hovered over my head. I knew that if my sister could just be bothered to get up before 9am, I was screwed. She was four years older, and that meant she had seniority over the remote control.

Fortunately she was a teenager, and she liked being asleep. Particularly on Saturday mornings. But, on the other hand, the television was in the lounge, which was right next to my sister’s bedroom. I was a child with bad hearing and poor impulse control. I would ride that volume control button like I was playing a game of Pacman. If I woke her up, it was all over. I would be stuck watching Rage for the next three hours, knowing full well that I would have to watch every single one of these music videos all over again the next day, on Sunday, when I couldn’t even argue there were any cartoons worth watching.

I would be stuck watching Rage, or, worse, if she got up during a big clump of music that she considered rubbish, I would be stuck watching Titanic on VHS for the millionth time. All four damn hours of it. So I rode that volume control. And I prayed my sister had snuck out the night before to go to some party, making her too tired to bother.

Or at the very minimum, if she did get up before 9, at least she did so when The Little Mermaid was playing. She may have been too old for cartoons, but she was never too old for mermaids.

As far as I am aware, she is still not too old for mermaids.

As far as I am aware, she is still not too old for mermaids.

PART 2: My First Director

I once read Tim Burton described as “Baby’s First Director.” This wasn’t (entirely) a slam on Tim Burton. For many film nerds of a specific generation, Tim Burton taught them what a director was, and lead them, unavoidably, to the auteur theory. The auteur theory states that a film’s “author” is the director, and that any worthwhile filmmaker will have all of their films feeling like they are made by the same person.

 All Tim Burton’s films are unmistakably made by Tim Burton. To a ludicrous degree. They all feature the same riffs on gothic horror, the same spirals, the same mediocre-to-bad storytelling abilities, the same colour scheme, the same intense fear of the suburbs, the same “too precious and beautiful to survive” male protagonists, the same score, and (increasingly irritatingly) the same damn Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Whenever you watch a Tim Burton film, you feel that all of this sprung fully formed from the mind of one man.

Which is rubbish, really. Films are intensely, wildly collaborative mediums. No one person is solely responsible for any single frame, let alone a whole movie.

But because Tim Burton’s signifiers are so intense, so glaringly obvious, it makes him very useful for young film nerds to latch on to, and think, “that’s what a director is!”

Hence: Baby’s First Director.

Tim Burton was not my first director. Of course I went through an embarrassing and shameful Tim Burton phase in my teen years. Hell, to be completely honest I am still going through an embarrassing and shameful Tim Burton phase ("Frankenweenie was surprisingly enjoyable." "Big Eyes has some interesting ideas that don’t quite come together, largely because of Christoph Waltz’s completely incongruous and inexplicable German accent." "Amy Adams is good in it though." "It’s no Ed Wood but it’s worth a watch." "Seriously, I know Alice in Wonderland was awful, I’m not blind, I just think his later films have gotten undeservedly rough receptions based on the fact that every single person in the world went to see Alice in Wonderland, paying extra for terrible 3D, and it’s now colouring everyone’s opinion of his whole career." "The guy released a feature length black and white stop motion animation in 2012, what more do you people want from him?")

"Seriously. It's no masterpiece but it's a lot of fun." "You should check it out." "I've gone on too long like this already."

"Seriously. It's no masterpiece but it's a lot of fun." "You should check it out." "I've gone on too long like this already."

But Tim Burton was not my first director.

I wish Tim Burton was my first director. There is a certain street cred to having Tim Burton be your first director. You can say things like, “oh, you like Tim Burton? Don’t worry, I used to be an idiot too.”

My first director was Kevin Smith.

Yep.

Yep.

I was fourteen years old when I saw my first Kevin Smith movie, and it changed my life. That is one of the most embarrassing true sentences I could ever possibly type. Particularly as the film in question was Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

JaSBSB felt like nothing I had ever experienced before. It was the first film where I could feel the thinking behind the movie. It was the first movie that made me think about the fact that every single film that has ever been made has been deliberately and intentionally created, by other human beings. It forced this realisation on me by being just so… constructed. The constant fourth wall breaking. The deliberately overwritten, artificial dialogue. The writer/director also being the star. The fact that it’s a movie so blatantly and reverentially about movies. And not just about movies. About the process of making movies. It was mind-blowing stuff, and I was exactly the right age and disposition to have my mind blown by it.

The fact that it is absolutely terrible does not take away the astonishing effect it had on me.

The sexism. The homophobia. The terrible acting. The gratuitous use of awful cameos from celebrities nobody even cares about. The feeling of bad-Saturday-Night-Live-sketch-dragged-out-for-two-interminable-hours that so many American comedies had at that time, whether they were based on SNL sketches or not. The general shambling unfunniness. The fact that really I could just have been watching two hours of Bugs Bunny cartoons and it would have achieved most of the same goals, except the Bugs Bunny cartoons would have been much funnier and the acting would have been more believable.

PICTURED: An overly stylized cartoon with facial expressions imperfectly rendered and exaggerated to the point of total, grating unbelievability. PICTURED RIGHT: Bugs Bunny.Who wore it better?

PICTURED: An overly stylized cartoon with facial expressions imperfectly rendered and exaggerated to the point of total, grating unbelievability. PICTURED RIGHT: Bugs Bunny.

Who wore it better?

None of this mattered to me at the time, in a way that it all matters to me now. Similarly, the things that seemed so revolutionary to me at the time don’t matter to me now at all. If I wanted to watch something crazy, free-wheeling, and largely-plotless that explores the toxicity of celebrity culture with a bunch of fourth-wall-breaking non-actors, I’ll watch A Hard Day’s Night, thank you very much. Or I’ll accidentally spend four hours watching terrible emotionally needy teenagers trying desperately to vlog their way to fame on YouTube. You know, whichever.

Regardless of the film’s quality, the shock to my system has reverberated throughout the rest of my life, in ways both large and small. It completely changed the way I thought about film. It taught me what a director is, and why that is important. It was a useful, necessary jumping off point for me to explore the wide world of cinema.

I, you know, just kind of wished I had jumped off a little earlier.

I spent so much of my teenage years watching Kevin Smith films. Thinking about Kevin Smith films. Talking about Kevin Smith, and the films thereof. Smoking weed because I wanted to be cool like Jay and goddamn Silent Bob, the two lamest people in cinema. Desperately trying to get obsessed with Star Wars because Kevin Smith told me I should. Watching his unbelievably pointless DVD specials, which were less stand-up comedy and more a sad fat man saying boring things until everybody told him to stop.

All because of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. All because I saw it at the exact right millisecond in my life for it to have that effect on me.

And here’s the thing: there were warning signs.

The very next film he made after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was Jersey Girl, a romantic comedy so terrible it basically ended Jennifer Lopez’s career, despite her only appearing in the movie for all of about five minutes.

Why yes, Larry King did say, "Terrific!" What, about Jersey Girl? No, of course not, he's not an idiot. But he has said it, presumably. He is a person. He's said lots of things.

Why yes, Larry King did say, "Terrific!" What, about Jersey Girl? No, of course not, he's not an idiot. But he has said it, presumably. He is a person. He's said lots of things.

The film he made immediately after that was Clerks II, which I saw in the cinema the weekend it came out. Saturday night. If my two friends and I had not attended, there would have been three people in the cinema, all of them by themselves. By the time that film got to the scene of a man trying to have sex with a donkey, and then that continuing to happen for about twenty minutes, I should have given up on Kevin Smith.

I should have chucked his DVDs in the garbage.

I should have vowed to never smoke weed again.

I should have thrown out my collection of terrible comics Kevin Smith inexplicably wrote for Marvel in the late nineties.

Ha ha ha, remember when these were considered prestigious? No? It's just me? Oh, okay then. I'll... I'll just be over here... in the corner... Nah, I'm fine. Don't worry about it. I'm not... I'm fine. Seriously. Just... just... eh, you know. It's...…

Ha ha ha, remember when these were considered prestigious? No? It's just me? Oh, okay then. I'll... I'll just be over here... in the corner... Nah, I'm fine. Don't worry about it. I'm not... I'm fine. Seriously. Just... just... eh, you know. It's... it's just...

But I didn’t.

He stayed in my mind. Burrowed deep. Making me refer to myself, even then, as a “Kevin Smith fan.”

He’d made a couple bad decisions. But he was just trying to work out his next course of action.

And hey! Then he made Zack and Miri Make a Porno! See! I knew it. I knew he still had it. Critically acclaimed, starring the biggest comedian of 2008, and giving Elizabeth Banks a good role, back when we were all still saying, “Elizabeth Banks is great, she just needs the right role. Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with female comedians, always casting them as the girlfriend or the love interest.”

Remember? Remember when we were all saying that, about Elizabeth Banks? Before we all started saying it about Anna Farris? Right before Bridesmaids came along, and everybody realised women could actually headline comedies that were, you know, good? …

Remember? Remember when we were all saying that, about Elizabeth Banks? Before we all started saying it about Anna Farris? Right before Bridesmaids came along, and everybody realised women could actually headline comedies that were, you know, good? But by that time Elizabeth Banks and Anna Farris were both stuck in this girlfriend-wife-love interest rut that they will never escape from, just because they both came along about four years too early? Remember that? Ah. Good times.

And sure. Elizabeth Banks was technically still playing the “love interest.” And sure, it was the first Seth Rogen starring comedy to not make over $100 million. And sure, a lot of the critical acclaim seems, in retrospect, to be mostly along the lines of, “it’s not as bad as Jersey Girl!”

But it restored my faith in Kevin Smith. At a time when I really, really wish my faith in Kevin Smith had not been restored.

And then, as if down from the heavens, came Cop Out, one of the worst movies ever made, to permanently destroy my “Kevin Smith fan” status. Cop Out is a film that features the laziest performance of Bruce Willis’ career, which would be impressive if it wasn’t so unbelievably boring. It features some of the worst dialogue in any film, ever (I went to IMDB to get a quote to illustrate this point, but I just… I couldn’t do it. I was having flashbacks.) It was so terrible it made me think, “oh, maybe Tracy Morgan is playing a toned down version himself on 30 Rock. Cop Out meant I could enter my twenties unencumbered by all of the sad, pathetic baggage that comes with being a Kevin Smith fan. It also meant that I officially stopped caring about Kevin Smith right at the time that he began his podcasting empire, which was fortunate because I don’t want to think about how many endless hours of my life I would have wasted listening to Kevin Smith prattle on every single day for hours at a time. Instead I get to waste my life listening to the incestuous self-congratulatory world of American indie comedy podcasts. Which is better, I suppose, but I am well aware that I am going to look back on myself in ten years’ time and think, “what the hell were you doing? Was it really necessary to listen to that many podcasts where people complain about bad Nicholas Cage movies?” (Apparently, yes. Yes it was.)

To be fair to myself, not ALL of these update on a weekly schedule.

To be fair to myself, not ALL of these update on a weekly schedule.

But I digress.

Kevin Smith served an incredibly important service to me at a specific time in my life. He made me feel less isolated. Less alone. A part of a community of like-minded individuals. He made me feel like my total inability to apply my intelligence to anything of any use or worth wasn’t a character flaw, but an attribute. He made me feel like not only could I be snarky and surly and mean-spirited, but I should be those things. That it was my duty to be those things. It was a valuable life mission to be those things, as often as possible, to as many people as possible.

So, yeah. There were positives and negatives.

I feel like acknowledging that past is important. I am who I am today, for better or worse (largely, to be fair, for worse) because I went through that phase. But I am through it now. I have let go.

I suppose the point I am trying to make is this. Items of popular culture do not change. A book, or a TV show, or a movie, or a song, are the same now as they were the first time you first experienced them. But you are not. You are now a different person than you were then. It is only natural that you would have a different experience. Something you loved becomes boring and unwatchable. Something you found tedious becomes emotionally heartfelt and true. Something you thought was okay pretty much remains at that level, but maybe the reasons why are a bit different now or something.

Try not to hold on to the things you have outgrown. You don’t need to stay obsessed with something just because you liked it when you were a young idiot. Let it go. That cartoon you got up at 6.30am every Saturday morning to watch? It was garbage. That book you read seventeen times when you were twelve? Rubbish. That punk band that electrified your mind when you first listened to their debut album in your parents’ living room, trying to work out that exact sweet spot where you could play it as loud as possible without your parents coming in and telling you to turn it down, thus ruining the vibe? Tedious.

And that’s okay. Pop culture is made to be disposable. Feel free to dispose of it.

Go ahead. You know you want to.

Go ahead. You know you want to.

Postscript, just so we are all abundantly clear and upfront: Yes, obviously I am aware that this is the most hypocritical thing I could possibly write. A man who just spent 2,000 words talking about bad movies he loved when he was a teenager telling everyone else they need to chill out on the nostalgia is, quite frankly, absurd. Obviously, in those last three paragraphs, every time I said “you,” I meant, “I.” I am the one who needs to stop doing all of those things. You are probably fine.

PART 1: Non-Superhero Comics

Being a kid in Australia in the late nineties was a very strange experience, particularly if you loved comics as a medium. Because the sorts of comics that people think of as “mainstream” comics, superhero books from DC and Marvel, did not exist. They were not accessible to me in any meaningful way. If I had been born ten years earlier they would have been at the Newsagents, ten years later they would have been in big fancy hardback trades in the library, but the only place superhero comics existed for me at that time was in episodes of The Simpsons.

Oh, and The Phantom. Every single Newsagent I ever went in to as a kid always had four random issues of The Phantom in stock. These were twenty page black and white reprints of deeply disjointed and confusing newspaper strips from 1979 or whatever, part two of four in some saga titled “The Revenge of the Missing Leopard…’s Handbag!” The Phantom WAS superhero comics to me.

What... What's he going to do with that skull?

What... What's he going to do with that skull?

So it is unsurprising I did not get into them as a child.

Although, quick sidenote: I did have one friend who was bizarrely obsessed with collecting Phantom comics. Not reading them, mind you, never reading them, just collecting them. I remember spending multiple afternoons with this kid and his “Phantom Comics Price Guide!” trying to see which of his comics that he bought for two dollars at the newsagent a week ago was now somehow worth thousands. A lot of, “Wow! This comic from 1967 is worth twenty bucks! Oh, wait, no, that’s for the first edition, yours was published in 1994, never mind. It is literally worthless. Yes, even if you kept it in its little plastic bag.” Repeat that for about four hours, you get the idea.

So, no, I did not like superhero comics.

But I loved comics.

I loved them in a way that, truthfully, I don’t think I have ever really loved any other medium. I love film, don’t get me wrong, I am a massive film nerd, and if I continue writing these columns for very long AT ALL I will write some things about Fred Astaire musicals that will make those gushing bonus feature old- man fanboy talking heads on every classic DVD release say, “alright, buddy, tone it down a notch. Geez.”

But I think the medium of comics is my true love.

I love the mixture of the visual and the textual. The way that the passage of time in the story is this beautiful collaboration between artist, writer, and reader. The way the medium allows for, even encourages, cartooning; exaggeration, facial distortion, impossible body positions, expressionistic use of line and colour. The way the reader can pour over the artwork in a way the watcher of a cartoon simply does not have time for. The way that so much storytelling short hand can be done by the visuals, meaning you don’t need to have a three page description of a room to convey exactly what the room looks like. I love the way it allows for formal experimentation – playing with time, with framing, with the way information is presented – that cannot be done in any other medium. I love the bright colours. I love comics.

But none of this came from superheroes.

To me, comics weren’t superheroes. Comics were newspaper strips. They were Peanuts, and Calvin and Hobbes, and Footrot Flats. They were cutting out Hagar the Horrible strips from the newspaper and gluing them into my own makeshift collections, with the intention of annotating them about their historical inaccuracies.

Comics were Disney comics. They were weird five page stories I would find hiding in the pages of Disney Adventures about Timon and Pumbaa meeting the Backstreet Boys. They were collections of Carl Barks’ Donald stuff or Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey strips I would somehow stumble across.

This is a real, actual comic that was released by the Disney company in which N'Sync gets sucked into a computer. Who the hell needed stupid nineties superhero comics when I had this?

This is a real, actual comic that was released by the Disney company in which N'Sync gets sucked into a computer. Who the hell needed stupid nineties superhero comics when I had this?

Comics were Asterix and Tintin, European comics borrowed from the library. I would marvel over the fact that they were translated, particularly Asterix. Someone managing to convert that many puns into another language seemed impossible and magical. I would just stare at the title pages, at the words “Translated by Anthea Bell,” and think she must have been at least a genius, if not an actual wizard.

Comics were The Beano and, to a (significantly) lesser extent, The Dandy, British kids comics that were never any good at all, but were cheap, and weekly, and available everywhere. Hey, at least they were comics, and maybe if I read enough of them I’d be able to work out why there appears to be a second, English, Dennis the Menace. Is he the American Dennis the Menace’s cousin? Is he from some sort of parallel universe? Is there something wrong, on a profound and fundamental level, with whatever the hell Gnasher is?

PICTURED: Gnasher. Presumably some sort of non-euclidean demon squiggle baby. Should not exist.

PICTURED: Gnasher. Presumably some sort of non-euclidean demon squiggle baby. Should not exist.

Comics were my mother’s collections of Leunig cartoons – all melancholy and inscrutable and painfully, achingly beautiful. And funny. But funny in a way that thirteen year old me just simply could not explain. It was like if you took all of the depression of Peanuts comics and distilled it down to its purest essence by removing all the humour that makes the sorrow bearable. Then somehow you crammed that ball of abject misery into the most absurd Far Side strip ever published. Then you gave that mess to the world’s saddest Icelandic eight year old and told them to redraw it. Just unbelievable stuff.

Not pictured: my tears.

Not pictured: my tears.

Comics were, for a brief period, Mad Magazine, before I had the sudden and overwhelming realisation one day that Mad Magazine was absolutely terrible, and that I had literally never found it funny, even once, not even as a twelve year old.

Comics were black and white reprints of Looney Tunes comics from the 50s that newsagents only ever stocked during school holidays. They were exclusively sold in triple packs, advertised as “Three Great Comics! One Great Price!” You could see two of the comics, the ones on the outside, they both had Bugs Bunny on the cover, that seemed good. Then you’d open it up and you’d find some awful Classics Illustrated: Ding Dong’s Big Day by Charles Dickens or whatever wedged in between, and feel totally ripped off. Then you’d read the Looney Tunes comics and feeling ripped off all over again (but ripped off in a mind-bending, reality warping way – “Oh look! It’s a Roadrunner and Coyote comic! This should be good. Wait. Why are there word balloons? These character don’t talk. Wait. Why does the Roadrunner have four identical sons who follow him around everywhere? Wait. Wait wait wait. Why do the four identical sons all speak in rhyme? Why is this happening? How was this allowed? There is no God.”)

Why... why would they do this?

Why... why would they do this?

Comics were my sister’s Archie Double Digests, always lying around the house everywhere, available whenever you wanted them, the background noise to daily life, always the same, always comforting in their weird, creepy, sexist way.

And I know I already said this, but I want to make it absolutely clear. Comics were Peanuts. Endless Peanuts collections, bought from endless garage sales and op shops. I remember once when I was thirteen seeing a brand new Peanuts collection sitting in a Dymocks bookshop, and thinking it looked weird and wrong, unnatural even, with its unbroken spine and all its pages intact. If you didn’t have to sticky tape it back together as you read it, it wasn’t a real Peanuts collection, as far as I was concerned.

That was comics when I was a kid. I spent my whole childhood obsessively reading comics and literally never once read an entire superhero book. One time I stayed over at a friend’s house who had exactly one Spiderman comic in his possession, and I tried to read it, but it was totally incomprehensible, and not even in a fun way. Just boring garbage.

So when people refer to “mainstream” comics as Marvel and DC superhero books, I just don’t get it. What is mainstream about them? What is mainstream about comic books published by “The Big Two” that aren’t widely available anywhere but specialty shops? Nowadays you can get collections of superhero books in bookshops, but you can also get lots of other different kinds of comics, and guess what? The other comics sell better. I just looked at The New York Times Best Sellers list for February 21, 2016. They have three different sections for comics. They have “Hardcover Graphic Books,” “Paperback Graphic Books,” and “Manga.” This is a list of the bestselling comics of any given week, according to the mainstream press. Out of those thirty potential bestselling slots, how many of them do you think should go to the mainstream comics? Obviously DC and Marvel are shut out of the “Manga” section, which seems like it is listed separately because of some faintly racist assumptions about what “real” comics are. But they still have a potential 20 spots out of the 30. They could still have 66% of the market, which would seem pretty mainstream to me.

It turns out they don’t have 66% of the market. They have 6.6%. Out of the thirty bestselling comics for the week of February 21, 2016, exactly two of them are “mainstream” superhero books. There is Batman: The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, a comic from 28 years ago that has been described by Alan Moore himself as “clumsy, misjudged, and [of] no real human importance.”

So that’s one of the two.

The other one is DC Comics: Secret Hero Society Volume 1, which is a thing I have literally never heard of. I’m just going to go and look it up.

What the hell? That’s not even a DC book. It’s a kid’s book published by Scholastic, who presumably licenced the characters from DC. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman are children in a high school. I mean, the art’s by Dustin Nguyen, and looks absolutely fantastic, so I’m glad that the book exists. But it isn’t a real “mainstream” superhero book at all.

So that’s back down to 3.3%. Mainstream comics have exactly 3.3% of the market.

Oh, I just rechecked the lists, and The Sandman: Overtures is on there, which is published by Vertigo, which is owned by DC. It’s sort of a superhero comic. So yeah, ok, if you wanted to argue that it was 6.6% I wouldn’t quibble.

But still.

If the only American superhero comics that are selling are a children’s book published by Scholastic presumably so DC can get in on the lucrative School Book Fair game, a fantasy book that operates as a prequel to a comic stoned people liked in the 1990s, and a stupid Batman comic from thirty years ago, then that is not mainstream. It just isn’t.

You know what is mainstream?

I mean, aside from Manga, which is obviously what actual teenagers are actually reading? Perhaps because they don’t have to understand 80 years of convoluted comics continuity to know what the hell is going on?

You want to know what is mainstream?

Raina Telgemeier.

Owning 2016 comics like a goddamn champion.

Owning 2016 comics like a goddamn champion.

She is 2016 mainstream comics. On the New York Times Paperback Graphic Novels Bestseller list of February 21, 2016, Raina Telgemeier wrote and drew fully 70% of those books. Seven of the ten bestselling paperback graphic novels are by the same person, a person who the “mainstream” comics media almost never talks about. My only guess why is that her comics are for girls, and mainstream comics are a big, poorly constructed pillow fort with a real ugly “No Girls Allowed” sign out front.

Very Serious Mainstream Comics. Obviously more important than a bunch of gross girls feelings books.

Very Serious Mainstream Comics. Obviously more important than a bunch of gross girls feelings books.

I would just like to reiterate: 70% of the Paperback Graphic Books Bestseller list was written and drawn by one person. 0% of that same list was published by Marvel or DC. Out of all 30 of the comics on the New York Times Bestseller list, Raina Telgemeier wrote and drew 23.1%. Marvel and DC, together, published 6.6%. This is the same percentage of the total that is taken up by One-Punch Man, a really hilarious superhero comic that has two volumes on the Manga Bestsellers list. So DC and Marvel aren’t any more mainstream than a Japanese writer who calls himself ONE, just like that, in all caps.

I didn’t love comics less as a kid because I wasn’t into superheroes. Kids today don’t love comics any less because they are reading Raina Telgemeier, or Kate Beaton, or One-Punch Man. Comics that are sold in specialty shops are not inherently more valid than comics that are sold in bookshops.

So please. Comics nerds everywhere. Expand your horizons. See what great stuff is out there, just waiting for you to discover it. Not every comic has to have Batman in it.

Batman can be in some of them, though.

Batman can be in some of them, though.