Grog Watch So last week I got touched up at the bus stop – and it was a lot less fun than it sounds. Which means not only was it no fun at all, but pretty much all of the experience was some form of negative fun that was the opposite of fun – “unpleasant” would not, I feel, be understating the case. And let me stress, I was felt up at a bus stop: for something like that to be bad it would have to be pretty bad indeed. For is it not the dream of every public transport user to find love on the train, tram or bus? Isn’t part of the fun of getting around on public transport – insofar as it’s possible to have any kind of fun at all on a system that, outside of inner Melbourne at least, seems basically designed to take you nowhere near where you want to go at an extremely slow and meandering pace – the hope that you might
PULP. >>>>>> By Cameron Urquhart & Alastair McGibbon
Alastair: So, DC doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to movies. Sure, The Dark Knight trilogy is a high point (though I have serious beef with The Dark Knight Rises), but most other (live-action) attempts have been sub-par at best. (Opinions on Man of Steel are divisive to say the least.) So, when local comic sage Darren told me that Superman: Earth One was what Man of Steel should’ve been, I was cautiously optimistic – the comic stories are inspirational for a reason, after all. I definitely wasn’t disappointed. I’m not usually a huge fan of Superman, and I generally avoid buying trades that feature him as the central character. Until now, the exception had been All-Star Superman, and while Earth One isn’t as high quality as Grant Morrison’s Superman masterpiece, it’s still a damn good read. It’s an alternate dimension origin story (what is it with good comics and origins?) featuring Clark Kent’s first public outing as Superman. Written by J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, The Amazing Spider-Man) and drawn by Shane Davis (Batman), Earth One sees Clark Kent arriving in Metropolis to decide on a career. While weighing up his options, ships from a distant planet arrive, their leader threatening to destroy the planet unless the fugitive he is hunting reveals himself. Torn between maintaining a quiet, normal life and defending the planet he loves, Clark has to make the most important decision of his life. Earth One is most definitely a modern Superman story. Leather-clad and brimming with potential, Straczynski’s Clark Kent isn’t the Boy Scout we’re all used to. Earth One is a comic that makes the most of being outside the current continuity (much like the Marvel Ultimate universe), and I’m excited to see where the Earth One series is headed. Cameron: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I kind of dig horror. I also rather dig comics – and this year Vertigo heard my pleas for some new horror comics. Some have pointed out that Vertigo does this on a regular basis without my input, but I disagree. So let’s thank me (and Vertigo) for their
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meet new people and maybe forge some kind of lasting connection with them? Short answer: yes. So why then am I complaining about feeling a stranger’s warm caress while waiting for my regular bus? Maybe I should start from the start…
and then next thing I know the guy had draped his hand over my right leg. Like I said, “draped”. He wasn’t grabbing me or anything: his hand just flopped there like it had been for a long run and was too tired to move.
It was a hot and unpleasant day, and I was waiting for a bus on the fringe of Geelong’s CBD. For those unfamiliar with Geelong’s rubbish bus system, not only do the buses generally run close to once an hour on each route (so if you miss your bus it’s often quicker to walk home, considering you won’t be getting home until over an hour later) but a few years ago they removed all the bus stops from the city that weren’t the two big bus stops on Moorabool St. One bus stop in the middle of town … two or three blocks with no bus stops … then bus stops. So basically I was in the middle of nowhere (as far as pedestrians were concerned) waiting for a bus that I had to catch.
“Uh,” I said, “what the f**k?” and flicked his hand off me like you would a spider. He kind of mumbled something that I assumed was “sorry”. I didn’t get up or anything – hey, I was there first – which turned out to be a mistake because the next thing I knew he had his wallet out and was rubbing it on my leg. I’ll be honest here: that freaked me the hell out. I leapt to my feet, expressing my displeasure in a strongly verbal fashion, backed off in a direction that only later I realised was directly onto the fortunately briefly not amazingly busy road, and generally kept my distance. He didn’t move from his seat.
Then this guy came out of nowhere and sat down next to me. This was a little annoying, because who wants anyone sitting next to them anytime, anywhere? But to be fair, the bus stop bench was pretty small and I was sitting close to the middle of it so when he sat next to me he was pretty close to me. Because of all that, my dodgy dude radar didn’t really go off; plus it was the middle of a hot day, the bus stop was by a busy road, I was busy reading the back cover of a Jason Statham DVD I’d just bought,
While I had no desire whatsoever to spend any more time near this guy – who was wearing dodgy tracksuit pants, a t-shirt, and had stringy blonde hair hanging down over his face – my options were limited. The next nearest bus stop was at least two blocks away; I wouldn’t have made it before my bus went past, and the bus after that was at least 40 minutes away. So I backed away from this guy in a big arc until I was on the other side of the bus stop standing by the bus stop sign. He was still on the seat. I looked down the road to see if the bus was
coming; though what I would do if he got on the bus I had no idea. No sign of the bus. I looked back at the seat. No sign of the guy. Wait, what? The seat was empty. So where was he? And then I realised he was standing right behind me reaching out to touch me again and I just about lost my mind because this was some serious horror movie shit and for all I knew every time from now on until the end of time every moment I opened my eyes he would be there reaching out for me. Only this time, something was different: he wasn’t reaching out to me, he was holding his hand out like he wanted to me to shake it. It’s never a bad idea to get on the good side of your demonic tormentor, so I did. Shake it I mean, and as I did he mumbled something. I leant in close. “I’m not feeling very well,” he said. “Do you need medical help,” I said. “Do you need the hospital?” He shook my hand a second time, let it go, and walked off down the road without saying another word. My bus arrived a few minutes later. I still use that stop. But if I see him again, I think I might take up running. Tony “Never sleep again” Montana
newest series, Coffin Hill. Written by urban fantasy novelist Caitlin Kittredge (the Iron Codex & Nocturne City series) and drawn by Inaki Miranda (Fairest, Judge Dredd) this series is a breath of fresh air … Also of dank, musty air with a scent of archaic tomes and the foulest of magics. I had heard of neither of the women involved in this comic but gravitated towards it due to Dave Johnson’s incredible cover for issue #1. Thankfully its innards are as beautiful as its … outtards? Whatever the word I meant to use was – it’s incredible. The comic follows two periods of time in the life of Eve Coffin, first as a rebellious teenager born into money and experimenting with magic. The second sees Eve Coffin injured as a cop in Boston before returning to her hometown, the after effects of her younger experimentations still being felt in the world. The woods surrounding her New England family mansion have a hunger for flesh, and it all appears to be Eve’s fault when the bodies start stacking up. It’s gory and thrilling while managing to balance it with backstory and character development. At the moment we’re only five issues in so the first storyline is yet to wrap up, and I gotta tell you, I’m way excited to see how it ends.
POrPe! cultu By An th on
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The big loser in the recent Sunday night clash of the Aussie dramas was the first episode of the new series of Rake (ABC1, Sundays, 8.30 p.m.). Which makes no sense if you think about it, because Rake is an actual good show that’s entertaining on its own merits, while both Seven’s INXS miniseries and Nine’s Schapelle Corby telemovie were firmly in the trash TV bracket. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking Australia can’t actually make entertaining drama that’s actually good – so often do we get telemovies and miniseries that are only watchable if you take a sarcastic, jokey attitude to everything you see on screen – and with the increasing popularity of Twitter as a platform for people to make jokes about what they’re watching, it’s more than plausible that the networks know this and program for it. Obviously docudramas have always had a big role on Australian television – thanks in large part to the generally abysmal state of television writing in this country; at least if it’s based on a true story you don’t need to pay someone to come up with that part of things – but in the current climate even when they don’t work you still win. If your true story drama works as quality television, then viewers get to watch quality television, which presumably they’ll enjoy; if your true story drama is a sloppy mess with bad wigs and accents and loads of gratuitous nudity, then audiences get to go on social media and have fun making fun of it. So if you think about it, why would you bother making something with a smart plot and fun characters? Yes, it might be “good” – and again, it bears mentioning that while Rake does have its
problems, it was easily the best of the three local dramas by any real comparison – but good isn’t what it used to be. Look at it this way: the job of television is to get you to watch it, even if it’s the ABC. Why you watch it doesn’t really matter – you could be watching the news or current affairs for information, some big live event just to see what happens, a comedy to laugh (probably not an Australian comedy then), an historical show to be informed, and so on. In the past, the reason for making “good” programming was to a): keep people watching as it happened and b): get people to talk about it afterwards so that other people would tune in next week – you know, “word-of-mouth”. That didn’t work for crap programming, because people would stop watching and tell their friends it was crap. But now, thanks to social media, it doesn’t work like that: people will watch a bad show to tweet about how bad it is, and people on social media will see people tweeting about a bad show and tune in to see what all the fuss is about. So a bad show – just so long as it’s an “event”, preferably with a local hook – works just as well when it comes to getting people to watch it, right? Actually, it works even better: if a show is good (with interesting characters, engaging plot and so on), you’re going to actually want to watch it. It’s only the rubbish shows where you can go off and tweet about them, because you don’t really care about what’s happening as anything more than something to make fun of. Congratulations: we now live in a world where bad shows no one really enjoys make for better television than good ones.