If I had to list my heroes you’d probably not know one of them. Everyone has heard of George Lucas, Clive Barker and JRR Tolkien but not so many have heard of Larry Hama,. For me he’s up there with those icons.
Larry Hama was the writer of a toy tie-in comic called GI Joe, released by Marvel in 1983 to cash in on the toy run’s popularity. The thing is, it would have been easy for Hama to dial this in. But he didn’t. Sure it had to feature toy of the month and some of those were pretty whacky, but Hama always embraced it, treating his tie-in universe with the respect you’d expect on a big A-list project. No-one was expecting it to last for years, yet I believe at one stage it was Marvel Comics’ biggest seller.
When I was clearing out the old house I came across a lot of my old print publications that I thought I’d lost. I took them with me and, today, have spent the afternoon scanning covers and updating bibliographies. With some magazines I was actually quite surprised just how much I wrote, and whilst I doubt the effort of listing them all will give me any real benefit, it does give me piece of mind that I now have a complete list of my publication history.
In my opinion, Dark Knight is the finest superhero movie ever made. There’s something about the way it builds its own Batman mythos, borrowing minimally from the comics but adding its own twists to make a great movie that you’d love even if you perhaps weren’t a superhero fan.
The day job took me to a disaster recovery site yesterday, the idea being that if something happened to a main site, staff could up and migrate to the disaster recovery site and carry on working. But until that happens the place is almost empty. It’s a fantastic site and incredibly eerie. I went into the toilets and had to switch on the lights, the fluorescent bulbs flashing and clicking a few times before coming on fully. It felt like it was taken directly from a horror movie. It’s like a real equivalent of the prison from The Walking Dead comics.
There’s a story that always got told in the collectables industry about HR Giger. It’s one of those stories that has its origin in truth but has grown in the telling, such that I’m no longer sure just how much truth, if any, is left in the story.
One of the big reasons I prefer the Marvel over the DC universes is the way that with the exception of the Ultimate stuff, it’s largely all taking place in the same universe at the same time. The narratives intertwine and contradict and are usually brought together for whatever the big crisis (i.e. marketing crossover of the given year) occurs.
Today, I lack focus. I have 101 ideas.
I think one of the reasons I’ve never really got into horror is because I jump easily. If I’m watching a movie, the cinema disappears and I’m there in the scene. Consequently when anything jumps out at the screen, I jump out of my seat, whether it be zombie, serial killer or fluffy kitten.
I’ve written about my love for Larry Hama’s GI Joe comic series before (see 
With my move to digital comics and the new DC 52, I’ve been thinking a lot about Batman lately. I’ve always been a Spider-man person myself – I’ve always enjoyed Peter Parker’s little quips – but the new 52 has confirmed that when it comes to DC, it’s the darkness of Batman that really pushes my buttons.