How to Write Romantasy, by Jenna Moreci

I've already written about how romantasy seems to be everywhere, but now that I've started writing my own, I've had a lot more opportunity to think about how it's built. My Instagram feed has a lot of discussion of tropes - both over- and under-used - and I've taken inspiration from Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean/Fourth Wing series. Inspiration, in this case, being both stuff to try in my own story and stuff to avoid.

But the other week I was poking around my local, Kepler's, and found Jenna Moreci's How to Write Romantasy, and snapped it up on a whim. I was already about 80,000 words into my own, but the layout of Moreci's book appealed to me. I've since read a chapter or so every day, and just finished it today, so I thought I'd give some thoughts on it.

The first thing to say, which I think the book does well, is to define the key aspects of both the romance and the fantasy genres, and from there, to define the two sub-strands that define romantasy: romantic fantasy and fantasy romance. In short, romantasy is essentially fantasy that doesn't work if you take out the romantic parts, and romantic fantasy puts more emphasis on the fantasy part, while fantasy romance puts more emphasis on the romance part. The differences are in the world building and when the leading couple gets together.

It's worth noting that this passage, which occurs early in the book, reflects what I've read elsewhere. My impression is that Fourth Wing is a little more romantic fantasy, and ACOTAR is maybe a little more fantasy romance, but I suspect the lines are more blurry than I'm suggesting.

What I thought was really well done about the book, however, was in its discussion of structure. It uses the classic Freytag structure:

1. Exposition
2. Rising action
3. Climax
4. Falling action
5. Resolution

Moreci looks separately at how fantasy and romance stories fall along this structure, and then combines them to show how romantasy should flow from one act to the next. She then talks over several chapters about how to create a good central relationship, ranging from matching the two (or more) romantic leads with one another to building that chemistry between them, to putting obstacles in their way, in the shape of both fantasy tsuris and romantic tsuris (as an aside, I've been warming to the potential of that word, "tsuris", which is Yiddish for something between trouble and grief).

Because I was already well into my own story, I used How to Write Romantasy more as a map to ensure I was hitting all the right notes, rather than to get ideas or anything else. But as I said, I liked the description of structure, especially because Moreci treats structure not as a strict prescription but as a general guideline of when things are meant to happen.

Now, I wrote this blog to talk about this book that I enjoyed, but also, it's because I've been thinking about what exactly I'm doing here, writing in a genre that I'd never properly read before about December and that is dominated by women. And then, this morning, I found this article in the Guardian. I agreed with the author's general thesis, that straight men aren't really writing sex anymore, although I thought he could have ventured beyond literary or highbrow fiction and talked about genre - though I can't think of too many recent SFF novels that contained much sex.

The exception being Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, though those scenes don't have the same goal as sex scenes in romantasy (or indeed romance), ie to deepen intimacy between the principal characters. Which I guess means I'm saying that the Guardian article could more profitably have been a discussion of why straight men aren't writing romance.

Answer: because straight men aren't reading romance. But also, maybe we should be? Both reading and writing romance and romantasy, I mean. Instead of writing porn, we could be writing about what sex means to our characters, and what it reveals about them - which strikes me as just as valid a subject matter as thinly veiled allegories of the Byzantine Empire or the Industrial Revolution, especially when elves and dragons are involved.

Bringing it all back to my original point, I think How to Write Romantasy is a good primer for anyone delving into writing the genre, though you should also read the genre, to get a sense of what other authors are doing, what works for you and what doesn't. Go and get it from your local bookstore rather than on Kindle, though!

Finally Getting to Grips With Avengers Vs X-Men

Spent the last week or so reading the 2012 crossover event that pitted Marvel's two biggest teams against each other, and that heralded a big change in the status quo for the X-Men in particular (I'm assuming, though I haven't read the Avengers books from around that period). I've read that it wasn't universally loved as a story, and I kind of have to agree, since it feels like a number of characters have to act weird for it to work.

Before I get to that, I wanted to consider that statement, that the Avengers and the X-Men are Marvel's two biggest teams. I'm old enough to remember when the X-Men really were Marvel's biggest property, and when nobody really cared about the X-Men, so that feels weird to say. But by then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had started in earnest, and the crossover came amid the first Avengers movie, which was a big success and seemed to live up to expectations, at least in terms of forming a template for later MCU phases. To put it another way, the Avengers were on the upswing, finally living up to their billing as a top team and pulling in decent sales (I presume).

The X-Men could be said to have been on the opposite trajectory: their most influential writer, Chris Claremont, was long gone from the books (and crucially, from setting the tone editorially) by 2012, despite a couple of returns in the previous decade or so. The two most innovative runs, Grant Morrison's New X-Men and Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men, were over by then too, leaving the mutants in the hands of writers who weren't worse, necessarily, but whose runs don't seem to have captured the imagination of fans as much. I didn't like Peter Milligan's run, for example, while Mike Carey's was good but maybe not as spectacular as I'd have liked. Same with Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen's respective runs, though both have a lot to recommend them (apart from when the art was done by Greg Land).

The premise of the story felt like it came out of nowhere, a bit: without much foreshadowing, the Phoenix Force is headed toward Earth, and its presumed new host, Hope Summers, the mutant messiah. The Avengers want to stop the Phoenix, given that it eats planets, while the X-Men, against their history, see it as a force of rebirth for the mutant population, which had been cut down to 198 after the House of M crossover. I thought Cyclops's position was particularly strange, since the two previous Phoenix encounters, the early 80s Phoenix Saga and 2004's Planet X storyline, both ended in the death of his girlfriend-then-wife, Jean Grey (she got better in 1986, died in 2004, and got better again in 2018 or so).

On the other hand, given that the Avengers line had expanded to a bunch of new books and teams, it was nice to see how the rest of the Marvel universe reacted to these events. A storyline that I really found intriguing was the Phoenix's ties to Iron Fist's history, since a previous Iron Fist had fought the Phoenix off with the help of Leonardo da Vinci (but of course!). I also quite liked the storyline in Avengers Academy, the book focused on younger heroes, like Wolverine's clone/daughter X-23, in which the younger mutants from the X-Books were held at the Avengers Academy and the two groups debated their own agency. That may have been the most interesting philosophical debate in the entire crossover, given that it hinged on X-23's own experience of being controlled and manipulated by adults.

Not that it was always easy to follow the storyline across the various books. Marvel Unlimited is usually good at gathering these crossovers into reading lists and funneling you through the story, issue by issue, but this crossover was an exception. The reading list put the VS miniseries first, which was focused on individual fights without regard to the overall plot, then the main AVX miniseries came next, and after that the tie-ins that ran in individual series. That would have meant reading the main storyline in the AVX miniseries, then going back to the beginning with the first of the tie-ins, which made it a little more confusing than it should have been. At any rate, there was a lot of going back and forth in time, so it wasn't always clear where a given issue fit in the narrative.

The other thing that came to mind as I read through the crossover was how interesting it would be for one or more MCU phases to focus on this storyline, or something similar. The X-Men are meant to be joining the MCU in the next couple of movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars, which means there could be a big fight between them eventually. I found myself wondering as I read how Marvel might go about it, but it's probably too convoluted and pie-in-the-sky, and would probably be unfair to the X-characters, since they'd have a lot less backstory to make you root for them.

On another note, an MCU version of AVX would probably turn the Scarlet Witch into the villain again, since the whole thing came from her whispering "No more mutants" and depowering them all, which led to this situation. I feel like she's been through enough.

Still, it's a fascinating artifact from the previous decade, when Marvel was on its way to becoming the entertainment juggernaut that we now know it as, and I feel like it has the epic sweep that could be fun as the big crossover movie that caps a few years of individual movies. Though I worry it would turn into a character assassination of Cyclops, featuring him taking on the Phoenix Force and almost destroying the world. He's a favorite character, so I don't like to see him done dirty this way.

In any case, I'm excited to see how the next phase of X-Men comics plays out - I've already read a few of those books, but not in an organized way, so putting them all into context will be like reading them anew. And I'm interested in eventually getting back to AVX via the Avengers books, which should provide a different perspective.

As I said, I don't think it was always fully successful, and it made the X-Men overall look bad, but I have to give Marvel points for ambition. It was developed by all the big Marvel writers of the time, including Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman, who went on to be so influential in later X-books, so it's also neat to see their first work on these characters.

Thoughts on Wonder Man

I just finished Wonder Man on Disney Plus, and I think it was pretty great. I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by it - I wasn't even really planning on watching it right now, but decided to check it out earlier this week, just to see how it was. And, to be honest, to give it kind of a pity-watch - I expected the bad-faith review-bombers to get to work on it, since it changes the lead from a white guy in the comics to a Black guy.

But I took to it immediately, in part because the episodes were short - only about half an hour each, growing to about 35 minutes toward the end. But also in part because of the two leads: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is great as Simon Williams/Wonder Man, and Ben Kingsley reprises his role as Trevor Slattery/the Mandarin from Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi. Abdul-Mateen commands the attention in the lead role, especially when Acting. Meanwhile, Kingsley's portrayal of Trevor grows better and more layered every time we see him, with this show casting him first as Simon's friend and then (early on) revealing that he's got his own agenda.

In between we get a lot of enjoyable business about what it's like to be a jobbing actor in Hollywood, contrasting Simon being at the beginning of his career and Trevor being, if not at the end, certainly defined by his most notorious role as the Mandarin. As a creative person myself, it was particularly enjoyable to watch them navigate that life, even toward the end, where they find themselves in a different headspace than at the start.

As far as the changes to the character of Wonder Man himself, I've already referred to the change of ethnicity - though it's interesting that they gave Simon a Haitian background. The other big change is that, instead of getting his powers through some energy nonsense, as in the comics, their origin is just... unexplained. There's some suggestion that he's always had them, or that they emerged during puberty, which would imply that he's a mutant, which Marvel's been seeding through the movies and shows for a while (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ms Marvel, Deadpool & Wolverine and the Marvels all refer to mutants in some capacity).

But this show isn't about superheroes or their origins. It's about getting out of your own way to reach your goals, and about how you lift yourself up by connecting with others, rather than focusing constantly on yourself. This eventually becomes... literal? You'll know what I mean if you've watched the last scene.

The important thing is that Wonder Man doesn't do the usual superhero pyrotechnics (even if most of the best MCU shows, like WandaVision and Loki, also didn't), preferring instead to tell a character-based story. I've seen some reviews suggesting it might even be Marvel's best show? I don't know if I'd go that far, as WandaVision (and yes, Loki, just to mention both again) were probably richer overall, but as I said, I watched it just to see what it was like, and ended up bingeing it in half a week.

I don't know if we'll get to see Simon (or Trevor) again, but I hope so. He's not a huge character (one of the reasons why I was a little reluctant to start the show), but he's always been associated with the Avengers in some way, so it might be fun to see him pop up in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Or, while we're thinking pie-in-the-sky, an Avengers West Coast movie?

Blue Lights May Be My New Favorite Brit-Cop Show

I just finished Series 3 of Blue Lights, and wow, wow, wow.

It wasn't even on my radar until fairly recently. I'd watched the first series of Line of Duty a couple of years ago on Hulu, and then wasn't able to get back to it until last year, when I knocked out Series 2 through 4 in short order and Series 5 when I got to the UK last July. When I discovered that Hulu here didn't have Series 6, I started considering taking a subscription to BritBox, reasoning that paying $11 to watch a full season of a show is completely fair.

Then at some point I read about Blue Lights, and was intrigued. So when I finally found the time to subscribe to BritBox (back in November, when it was offering two months for $6 rather than the usual $11), I finished Line of Duty and then went looking for Blue Lights. And I was hooked from the start.

The best I can say about it is that it's like the UK's version of the Wire, which is my absolute favorite TV show ever. It starts with following the cops, but expands to spend more time following the criminals as well, with investigations that expand from the first series through to the third. However, like the Wire, it's as much a profile of a city as it is a police procedural.

Series 2 expands from Series 1's investigation of a former Republican turned gang leader to look not only at the loyalist gangs of Belfast, but also the effects that the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis, plus a decade and a half of Tory austerity, have had on the city's neighborhoods. The first image of Series 2 has two of the protagonists answering a call about a homeless man's overdose death - and it soon becomes clear that he was killed both by the drugs sold by the ongoing antagonists and by society's indifference and powerlessness in response to the ongoing and overlapping crises.

Series 3 is a little weaker in some ways, but still compelling TV. It's meant to look at how criminality has infected the higher levels of society, but I didn't feel like it delved into those characters' inner worlds as well as the first two seasons did with the Republican and Loyalist neighborhoods. In part that's because they're engaged in varying levels of child exploitation and abuse, which makes it pretty impossible to make them someone you want to watch, let alone root for. But none of the villains in Series 3 are as good as Series 2's main antagonist Lee Thompson, who's at once clearly a criminal but also disposed to see himself as a key part of his community.

That said, the final episode has a nice sting in the tail when Series 1's Tina McIntyre faces the Dublin gangsters she's been propping up since her husband and son went to prison. I don't know if it sets anything up for Series 4, but it was a satisfying ending to the show so far.

All of this means that I'll now have two reasons to subscribe to BritBox again down the line - the BBC has commissioned Series 4 of Blue Lights and Series 7 of Line of Duty, so I'll be keeping an eye out for those. I've cancelled my subscription in the meantime to save a bit of cash and not feel like I have to watch yet another streamer regularly, but again, paying $11 for a month in which to watch a full season of either show, plus whatever other Brit-delights I can fit in (the Responder! Silent Witness! Wire in the Blood! Rebus! The New Statesman!), is completely worth it.

The bottom line, though, is that I can't recommend Blue Lights highly enough - even if you might need subtitles to cope with all the Belfast accents.

Thoughts on Pluribus

It's been a while since I finished Pluribus, about a week or so, but I wanted to set down some thoughts on it while the show was still relatively fresh in mind. The TLDR is that I really liked it, more than Breaking Bad and more than what I've seen so far of Better Call Saul, although I've still only seen one season of Saul. I'm looking forward to seeing where Pluribus goes next, but to discuss that, I'll have to engage in some SPOILERS, so proceed with caution after the jump.

What I Read and Watched and Listened to in 2025

With the winding down of another year comes the chance to think about the stuff I've enjoyed (more or less) throughout the year. I found myself reading more books this year, but watching fewer movies, and I think my TV watching was also slightly down on previous years, for a number of reasons.

In terms of comics, I've mentioned a few of the books I've been reading this year, but the main thread remains the Uncanny X-Men. If I spent 2024 reading one issue of that series each day, from 1963 onwards, this year the question was reading through it until I got to the end of its original run, which I did the other day. That makes Uncanny volume 1 the first comics series I've read from its beginning in the 1960s to its end in the 2010s. Marvel subsequently relaunched it with new numbering, so I'll be checking those out in the year to come, but it's definitely the end of an era - when I was a kid I liked seeing those ever-increasing numbers and the increasingly ludicrous milestone issues (#500! #750! etc).

Quality-wise, it was a weird year for reading X-Men comics, quite apart from what's happening in the books at the moment. As I finished 2024, I reached the reboot that saw Grant Morrison take over New X-Men, something I'd been looking forward to since signing up for Marvel Unlimited. I liked Morrison's New X-Men, and I still think it's the second-most important point in the X-Men's history, but I suppose it didn't hit the same as in 2004, when I first read Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow.

I had a similar feeling when I went back and read the original Age of Apocalypse event. I remembered a lot of it, but I'd just been reading the core X-Men books, and hadn't read much of the X-Factor or Excalibur or X-Force tie-ins - which may have been the wise choice back in 1995. I wasn't super impressed with the sequel miniseries from 2006, either, though Chris Bachalo's art on it was pretty good.

The other notable comic for me this year was an Epic Collection of the original run of Master of Kung Fu, the title featuring the original conception of Shang-Chi from back when Marvel owned the rights to Fu Manchu. It's not on Marvel Unlimited, and the Epic Collections are out of print, so I was super excited when I found it at one of my local comics shops. It's pretty dated, both in terms of Chinese representation and in terms of storytelling and art, but reading it, I can see why Douglas Wolk highlighted it in All of the Marvels. The book I have is the second collection, and I'd love to find the first and third, which apparently both exist - I don't know if I'm ready to go looking for individual back issues.

In terms of books, I stuck with my usual mix of SFF and history, for the most part. I read the second of Genevieve Cogman's Scarlet Revolution novels, which I quite enjoyed and I'm looking forward to reading the third, Damned, in the coming year. The first in her new trilogy was announced in January as coming out in October of 2026, so I'll be eager to snap that one up as soon as I can.

And I've spoken about romantasy, having started A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. I'm really interested in the storytelling potential of this genre, which is why I figured I needed to do some research.

I also spent a few enjoyable months reading John Julius Norwich's histories of Byzantium and Venice. I liked the one on Byzantium better, it must be said, because it was a good summary of that empire's long history, and because I feel like there's more drama to it than to the Most Serene Republic, though I liked getting an understanding of how Venice came to be such an important power in the Mediterranean.

But by far my favorite history book that I read this year was Unruly, by David Mitchell. The prose was entertaining, because he's a very funny man already, but I also appreciated that Mitchell really knew his stuff, providing insights into how the English understanding of the monarchy changed over the years. I'd love to see a similar book on the kings of France or the US presidents, written in the same tone, but I appreciate that Unruly will likely have to remain a one-off.

Outside of those genres, the Slow Horses series occupied a lot of my reading time. At some point this year I bought books 5-8, and ended up reading them all in quick succession, with book 9 pinch-hitting admirably after its release in September. Mick Herron has become a surer hand with his plotting, and even if certain tics seem to have insinuated themselves in his writing, they're still super entertaining in their glorious put-downs, skewerings of British politics, and generally twisty-turniness. I was happy to also get some background on certain Slow Horses secondary characters in the Secret Hours, which is set in the same universe.

Speaking of, I got Apple TV late this year so that I could watch the latest season of Slow Horses, and stuck around to watch Down Cemetery Road. The former was a solid entry, modified from the book in ways that make sense, and I'm looking forward to whatever else they do on the show. With regard to the latter, it was similarly twisty and paranoid, and entertaining enough that my dad also got really into it (he doesn't watch much of the same TV I watch). I'm curious how it differs from the book, but hopefully we get another couple of seasons to fully adapt the rest of the series.

Apple TV was on a bit of a hot streak this year, since I got into Severance with the approach of season 2. I tend to think Season 1 was better, but that final image of Season 2 was amazing - hopefully it doesn't take too long to come back. I liked Murderbot even more than Severance, having read a couple of the early novellas in the series (and it's another one my dad loved). I'm still about halfway through Pluribus, but I'm quite taken with it, even more than with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (though my dad's less into it, so make of that what you will). I hope to write something clever about Pluribus when I finish it.

I didn't only watch Apple TV, though. Alien: Earth was well-made, but I don't think I loved it as much as many others did. It really came alive for me in the 5th episode, which flashed back to all the monsters running loose on the ship. Boy Kavalier and the other stuff on Earth was a little less of a draw, in the end. I got caught up with The Boys and Gen V, both strong entries though I found the parallels to current real-world politics wearing. I'm looking forward to the new season of the Boys, though, as well as Fallout.

I've already called Andor the best Star War in years, to the point that it overshadows Rogue One. This may seem like it's in contradiction of my complaint about the Boys, but at heart, Andor's less nihilistic and it's not rubbing your face in the comparison. Same with Daredevil: Born Again, which revisits and expands on the original Netflix show so well, while giving us a similar parallel in Wilson Fisk's ascent to NYC mayor. That said, I prefer the one we got in real life. As for Ironheart... I wanted to like it, but it came to a screeching halt for me when they had Riri get mixed up with magic, though I'll admit that the fabulous crew of bank robbers also felt like they belonged in a different show - preferably one that would give them more of a spotlight and not come off as box-ticking.

Another disappointment was Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In contrast to last season, it didn't feel like it pushed as many boundaries or played with the structure, preferring instead to work in as many references to older Trek in place of storytelling (see "Wedding Bell Blues", where Rhys Darby plays Trelane). Where the show did play with the formula, the results could be... uneven. The "documentary" episode "What is Starfleet?" is an example, and ranks - for me - as the worst hour of Trek I've ever seen. I think part of the reason I was so disappointed was that I'd spent the year studying the show deeply while writing my spec script, so my expectations may have been too high. There's only two seasons left, and they've wrapped on the fifth, so I guess I won't be seeing my little script onscreen, but at least I hope they right the ship in the home stretch.

The main show that characterized my year though was Line of Duty - incidentally, another show that held my dad's attention. Keelie Hawes as Lindsay Denton in Season 2 was the best adversary, in my opinion, but every season's been a banger, and I'm glad that it's coming back for a seventh go. In the same vein, I've gotten into Blue Lights, which is sort of like the Wire but set in Belfast. I took out a subscription to Brit Box expressly for those two shows, just to give you an idea.

As mentioned, this wasn't a big movie-going year. I think I went to the cinema three times, all for superhero flicks? Whether at home or in the theater, old or new, my standout was Superman, imperfections and all. It certainly surpassed both Captain America: Brave New World and Fantastic Four: First Steps, which may have been better than Eternals or the Marvels, but still felt drifty to me. I'm getting excited about the next Avengers movie, though.

Turning to music, I listened to a shitload of it, but very little new stuff, though I appreciated some of the singles by Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae - wonder what that's about, eh? Something I got obsessed with late on has been Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts soundtracks - his Linus and Lucy seems to be on permanent repeat in my head.

My big British rock listen-through reached the Britpop era, which was great - I got to revisit Blur, Pulp, Oasis, Suede, plus other lesser-known faves like Ash and Supergrass. I was also weirdly taken with Cast and Sleeper - the fact that I kept listening to Cast's first few singles was not something I'd ever have predicted, but here we are. I then spent October listening to Apple Music's goth playlist, so I got acquainted with the Sisters of Mercy, and I quite enjoyed some of their stuff too.

Looking back right now, it feels like there wasn't much going on this year, but I've written a lot more than I expected to, so I'm clearly consuming more than enough media. TV is clearly my big thing, given how many strong opinions I have, but this year I've also learned about how it's produced, so I think that's given me extra appreciation for the good stuff.

Anyway, here's to an equally fecund and watchable 2026! As long as there's more than one studio left, and the output isn't all AI slop paying homage to David Ellison at Skydance, it should be an interesting year. We'll see.

Marvel's Ultimates is Weird

The latest comic in my reread of my whole collection is the collected first storyline of the Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvel version of the Avengers, from 2002. I'm three issues in, but it's a weird book, in both good ways but perhaps more bad ways. It's one of very few Ultimate Marvel books I still have from back then, and I'm not sure I'll keep it after this read.

To start with, it's written by Mark Millar, whose work I don't particularly enjoy, apart from Superman: Red Son and a couple of issues of the Authority. It's drawn by Bryan Hitch, whose work I do enjoy, and who brings the same widescreen sensibility to the Ultimates that he evinced in his run on the Authority with Warren Ellis, and in his run on JLA with Mark Waid. Overall, the book looks gorgeous, with some beautiful splash pages and some good action - the first issue, where we see Captain America's last mission in WWII, is colored a bit oddly, so that it all looks muddy, but the rest looks amazing.

The team consists of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp and Giant Man, plus the Hulk in a support role (as Bruce Banner) and as an antagonist (when he inevitably hulks out). That provides one of several cognitive dissonances, because I'm reading this with the memory of the first MCU Avengers movie. There are definite overlaps between these versions of the characters and the movie versions, but they're not totally the same, which accounts for the whiplash. This book also has the version of Nick Fury that looks like Samuel L Jackson, which was brought to life in the actual movies.

Part of why I don't like Millar's writing is that everything is extreme and amped up. Iron Man is pretty recognizable from the movies (I'm not sure if he's meant to look like Robert Downey Jr, but there's at least one reference to the actor), in terms of his womanizing and partying. Giant Man is on prozac, because I guess Millar thought that would be modern or something? Thor is positioned as an environmental activist who's suspicious of Fury's motives, which I suppose allows Millar to claim he's putting his own politics into the book.

The portrayal I find least easy to enjoy is this book's version of Captain America. He's described as having "John Glenn's buzz-cut cool and John McCain's politics", which even back in 2002 was a red flag for me. There's a lot of comments where Cap calls people sissies or girls or whatever, and he's generally an asshole (cf that panel where they finally turn Hulk back into Banner and Cap kicks him in the face).

Obviously a guy from the 1940s who suddenly wakes up in 2002 (or 2012) wouldn't be a weekly guest on MSNBC or Air America, but this version has none of the vulnerability that Chris Evans brought to the character in the movies. Instead of the skinny nerd who became Cap because he hated bullies, this version feels like a bully himself.

I blame all this on Millar because he's that kind of self-proclaimed left-of-center person who uses that as a smokescreen to write a lot of gross stuff. Of course there's a difference between the art and the artist, but Millar always seems a little too pleased with himself when he's transgressing.

And more to the point, all this stuff dates the book horribly. In the third issue, SHIELD unveils the Ultimates and Cap in his new uniform, and there's an appearance from George W Bush. Hitch's drawings of Bush are weirdly stiff, because they're taken from photos, but even with all of Trump's outrages, just seeing Bush is off-putting. The regular Marvel Universe generally did a better job of not putting actual politicians into the books (the less said about that time Spider-Man hung out with Barack Obama, the better), and I wish Millar had done the same.

Anyway, it's a flawed book, but it's fascinating as a time capsule of what Marvel thought was cool in 2002, as well as an embryonic form of the Avengers we'd later see in the movies. It's also an attempt to make the Avengers cool, something that they definitely weren't in the regular Marvel Universe up until then. In fact, the best description of the 90s version of the team that I've heard is as a repository for characters whose books have been cancelled - that came from Max Carleton speaking on Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, and it feels so right.

I lost touch with the Ultimate Universe not long after this, and I no longer have the Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men issues I bought when they came out. I'm given to understand that it was a weird time (apparently Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were in an incestuous relationship, which was treated as "modern" by the characters at the time, rather than deeply fucked up. Blame Jeph Loeb, who was writing it by then), but on the positive side it gave us the Miles Morales version of Spidey, so I can't complain too much.

But one of the pleasures of reading old comics is seeing how they fit into their cultural milieu, and the first arc of the Ultimates definitely transports me back to the early days of the War on Terror. Your mileage may vary as to whether you want to be transported back to then.

A Mid-Term Report on X-Men Evolution

My usual rule is not to write about a show that I'm watching until I've finished it, but there are extenuating circumstances this time around. I'm only halfway through X-Men: Evolution, the second animated show about Marvel's mutant flagship, but given that I'm probably going to let my Disney Plus subscription lapse next week, I figured I'd write down my thoughts so far.

I think I've gone on record as not having been the biggest fan of the original animated series from 1992 (hereafter to be called X92). Whereas Batman: The Animated Series had a bold new design for the characters and a visual aesthetic borrowed from the Tim Burton movies, X92's visual language was a bit more nondescript - the character designs were the then-current looks that Jim Lee came up with for his and Chris Claremont's 1991 relaunch, but the animation style was pretty generic 90s Saturday morning. At least for the first four seasons: season 5 featured a notable decline in animation quality, as 10 new episodes were ordered and animated by a cut-rate animation house.

X-Men Evolution was meant to be a complete reimagining: instead of a team of adults, the core team (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, Rogue and new character Spyke) would be kids learning how to use their powers and navigate teenage life. Storm and Wolverine were teachers at the Xavier Institute, which was also a nice touch, and they'd be joined by Beast later in the second season. A new set of younger characters, mostly based on the New Mutants, would also join in Season 2.

The bad guys, or antagonists, were a group of mutant misfits drawn from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (just the Brotherhood here), led first by Mystique and then by Magneto. But they weren't "evil mutants", because characters would switch between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, and there were themes like Shadowcat's kinda relationship with Avalanche that meant the relationship wasn't just trying to kill one another.

The big thing I like from this show, at least so far, is how it treats Cyclops and Jean. Cyclops is the victim of character assassination in the movies and X92 - if someone hates him, it's a good bet that they first encountered him in the original animated series. Here he gets more personality, kind of a dork, kind of a regular kid who likes cars and is in love with his best friend, but he's not the authority figure and killjoy from X92. Jean, meanwhile, is the popular girl who's also cool, but who's still prone to making mistakes and getting jealous (like when her friend Taryn moves in on Cyclops - meow). This version of Jean is quite a bit better than the X92 version who just yells "Scott!" and faints whenever she uses her powers.

I can't deny it: the development of their feelings for one another is my favorite plot thread in Season 2 of Evolution, and I can't wait to see how it plays out in the third and fourth seasons.

The other thing I like is the theme of the characters choosing whether to be X-Men or Brotherhood members. Avalanche tries to join the X-Men once, Boom-Boom joins the Brotherhood (and then leaves), and the two teams have to work together a couple of times. That question of how to be, and how to use their powers, is central to the X-theme in a way that X92 never really managed, as far as I could tell.

Now, I don't want to over-romanticize this show. It's clearly a kids show from the early 2000s, with sometimes dodgy animation, character designs and writing. Boom-Boom looks off-model most of the time, there are times when the movement looks cheap, and some of the plots make little sense.

But if you can get beyond those issues, it's a good reimagining of the concept that highlights the themes well. And it introduces one of my favorite characters, X-23, although not until Season 3. I'm looking forward to seeing if the subsequent seasons are as fun, as well as the 2009 follow-up, Wolverine and the X-Men. I have to do something while I wait for season 2 of X97, but as I got to the midpoint of Evolution, I couldn't help thinking that this show would also be ripe for a reboot. 

Anyone at Marvel want to take that on?

Fantastic Four: First (Tentative) Steps

It's over a week now since I saw the Fantastic Four movie, at the same Vue Cinema on Finchley Road where I saw Iron Man and Black Panther. I'd just arrived in London from Italy, and was enjoying some free time and mobility (living out in the country has its advantages, but the drawbacks are needing a car to get anywhere), so I took an afternoon to finally catch the movie.

There's two ways I can discuss it: first off, I can (and will) discuss it on its own, and then I'll talk about how it fits into the MCU. There are some spoilers, as usual, so read on carefully after the jump.

James Gunn's Punk as F Superman

I just saw the new Superman movie yesterday, marking the first time in... gosh, years... that I've watched a movie on opening day. Of course, it's easy to do that when you're funemployed and able to hit the 3.30pm show at your local cineplex. I'm gonna write without fear of spoilers below the jump, but just in case you're skimming, my overall verdict is that this is a way better movie than we had any right to expect, and better than any other attempt this century. I'd say the original, 1978 movie with Christopher Reeves is still better, but this absolutely holds its own.

All of the Star Treks

Last week I finally hit a goal I first set for myself back in 2006, when I watched the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager. That means that I've now watched almost all Trek, with the exception of Short Treks and the Section 31 movie - which I suppose means my title for this post is somewhat misleading, but bear with me.

When I decided that watching every Trek show and movie was a worthwhile goal (yes, I know, I know), we were a couple of years off from the end of Enterprise, which was the last, somewhat labored gasp of what I like to call Trek's imperial phase: that period from 1987 to about 2004 that saw the launch of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise, as well as four movies starring the TNG cast. Not only did Trek finally get a measure of critical and ratings recognition, but every one of those shows lasted longer than the Original Series (and Enterprise was the first Trek show to be cancelled since TOS).

When I made that goal, I'd only seen a few episodes of TOS here and there, none of the Animated Series, large parts of TNG but never in any systematic way, seasons 3-6 of DS9, and parts of the first two seasons of Voyager. I'd also seen all 6 of the original cast movies and three of the four TNG movies (Nemesis might not have come out yet). The Kelvin Timeline movies hadn't come out yet, and we were still more than a decade away from new Trek TV shows.

A big part of my decision to try to watch all Trek was that I'd just started a new job after graduating from journalism school, and I'd made a friend at work who was just as into Trek and all the other 90s SF shows that I'd loved. My new friend Paul lent me DVD box sets of Deep Space 9, Babylon 5 and the X-Files (as well as the West Wing), and when I discovered that someone in my building was stealing my mailed-in DVDs of DS9, Paul graciously allowed me to send them to his place and then brought them with him to work.

(No lie: this incident led me to rule out subsequent flatshares if they didn't have a personal letterbox in the front door, for fear of my rental DVDs getting nicked again)

Another coworker helped me catch up with a couple more seasons of TNG and the first two seasons of Voyager, and other shows I caught bit by bit, by renting from Sofa Cinema, which was the UK version of Netflix back then. But I wasn't very focused on my goal in those days: I watched all of TNG and Enterprise, but my attempts to watch TOS, DS9 and Voyager petered out - in part because TOS is quite slow and uneven, and Voyager takes a while to get better, if not ever properly good. I can't remember why I lost the thread of DS9 at that time, but on that attempt I only managed to get to the end of Season 4.

One thing that helped me stay focused on the TOS watch was the Mission Log podcast, which I've spoken about here. I remember seeing their first episode pop up on the Nerdist Podcast Network in 2012, so I listened to it eagerly even though I hadn't watched the Cage (TOS's first pilot). By 2013 I was watching more of season 1 of TOS and dutifully listening to Mission Log after each episode - but I took so long with it that in the interim I moved to the US and had to switch my DVD and streaming queue over to Netflix.

Now, I was a partisan of Netflix's DVD rental service up until the end, but I have to admit that once I was able to stream Netflix on a TV (first through the smart TV itself, then through an Amazon Fire TV and finally through Apple TV), it made it easier to keep up with Trek shows. I also determined that I was taking too long with too many shows - I'd finish a season of something, jump to another show entirely, and then by the time I went back to the first show I'd forgotten what I'd already seen of it.

So with that in mind, I finally decided to polish off DS9, all in one go. I took a few months, but it was the only show I was watching, and it was so good that I didn't feel the need to check out other shows in that time.

(I suspect that Kids These Days might have more trouble conceiving of a world with only one streaming service, Netflix, than of a world where Netflix mailed you DVDs)

With the end of DS9, I decided it was finally time to tackle Voyager, but I didn't do it in a very methodical way. It's so long ago now that I can't remember when I started it, but I must have given it a proper try after 2018, because that's when I worked with another colleague who also loved Trek, and assured me that Voyager picked up after Kes left and Seven of Nine joined the cast.

Getting a girlfriend put a little kibosh on the Voyager watch-through, especially because we were effectively living together during the pandemic and she didn't like Trek (she liked Star Wars, though). The other thing that slowed me down was Voyager's move from Netflix to Paramount Plus, along with the rest of the shows. I subsequently signed up for Paramount, and when I broke up with the GF, I had more time to watch whatever I wanted. I duly resumed Voyager, reserving it for lunch on Sundays.

That all still took years, of course. I finished season 7 of Voyager in June of 2025, and determined that I'd finished season 6 in June of 2024, with a similar amount of time since I finished season 5. It doesn't help that Voyager is still, for me, the weakest of the pre-2017 Trek shows - making it my only show, seven days a week, is probably more than I could handle.

And of course, yes, it took me so long to watch all these shows that Trek underwent a renaissance in the interim (two of them, technically). It's notable that in the time it's taken me to watch all of Voyager, I've also watched all 5 seasons of Discovery, 3 of Picard, 5 of Lower Decks, 2 of Prodigy, and the 2 so far of Strange New Worlds. 

So what does all this Trek amount to? I've watched the good (large chunks of TNG, almost all of DS9, large bits of TOS, Lower Decks and SNW), and I've watched the less entertaining (Voyager, Enterprise, Disco, those other bits of TOS and TNG). I've even watched TAS, which looks pretty abysmal but features the odd grown-up storyline, like a young Spock mercy killing his beloved pet to spare it a painful death, and the Devil telling children that they shouldn't let authority figures tell them who to be friends with. I'm not even joking!

My favorite period of Trek remains the imperial phase, specifically season 3 of TNG to the end of DS9. A lot of modern Trek is very good, but even the best of it sometimes feels too beholden to the past, as if they're worried that viewers won't like shows if they don't call back to every minute detail from the last 60 years of shows. This nostalgia works better on Lower Decks, which subjects every era of Trek to this treatment, and mines all that continuity for good-natured laughs; and while I love SNW, it sometimes feels too beholden to fan service as well. But it's still miles better than Star Trek Into Darkness, the second JJ Abrams-helmed Kelvin Timeline film, which does... not a great job of revisiting The Wrath of Khan.

And unfortunately, even when Trek does try to break free of the past, it feels very self-conscious. Look, Discovery is, hands down, my least favorite Trek, but I applaud it for making a clean break with the past at the end of season 2 and jumping forward over 900 years, so that it's nominally not beholden even to the TNG era. And yet, the show still fails to hold my attention as much as I'd like - its attempts to discuss hot-button social issues feel inorganic and labored, we never learn enough about the non-Michael Burnham characters to really like them, and the plots just don't feel that urgent. Even Prodigy, which grew into a fine show by the end of season 1, sometimes feels like it's laboring under the burden of showing that it's a Trek show.

This isn't to say that 90s Trek is perfect. Seasons 1 and 2 of TNG are absolutely terrible, with only one episode of note (Measure of a Man) to redeem them. DS9 can be slow at the start, and even up to the final season isn't completely immune from subjecting to us to some duff episodes. And for a supposed showcase of futuristic values, 90s Trek can be pretty disappointingly regressive: early TNG episodes like Code of Honor are rightly held up as grossly racist, while Harry Kim, Voyager's Asian cast member (the first since TOS's Sulu), always seems to get belittled and forgotten compared with the boorish white character, Tom Paris.

But the best summation I've heard of Trek (I believe from Mission Log) is that it's "competence porn", i.e. a show about smart people working together to solve problems. This squares with Gene Roddenberry's original vision, and his oft-quoted disparagement of "ancient aliens" hokum: he used to say that of course humans built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard. This spirit suffuses the best of Trek, and it's why Lower Decks and SNW and Prodigy have landed the best for me among the most recent entries.

It's worth noting that I've finished Voyager at an odd time for Trek in general. We're only a few weeks off from the premiere of SNW's third season, but Paramount has also announced that the show will be ending with season 5, which will be an abbreviated 6 episodes, rather than SNW's usual 10. Given the long lead times for the show, that could take a while yet, but it means that Trek is going from having 5 series on the air to just one, the Starfleet Academy show that's meant to emerge at some point.

Trek hasn't been immune to the toxic fandom that plagues other nerd-world properties, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. It's also suffered, in my opinion, from over-production on the TV shows, meaning that Paramount had to cancel them all to save money as it looks for a buyer; that over-production, in turn, has meant that the Trek creative teams relied too much on visual effects and action scenes, and not always enough on the interpersonal relationships among the members of each ensemble cast that made Trek so good (at least in the 80s and 90s).

I want Academy to do well, but I also kind of wonder if it wouldn't be good for Trek to have a little break again for a year or two. It'd be nice to see it come back with something important to say, rather than always trying to recapture the magic of TOS - a quest that goes back all the way to 1995, when Voyager launched. My friend Paul, the one who lent me those DS9 and X-Files and Babylon 5 DVDs almost 20 years ago, hasn't really warmed to the latest generations of Trek, because he'd like to see another time jump like the one between TOS and TNG - one where there are reminders of the past, but where the shows aren't in thrall to it.

I'd like to see that new, third generation myself. And I'd like it to bring the best of both worlds with it: the actual recognition of non-white, non-male, non-hetero characters that New Trek does so well, with the episodic but still interconnected storytelling that Old Trek did nicely.

And if it goes away for another long period, well: today I restarted Enterprise. As long as it's available somewhere on streaming, we'll always have Trek to inspire us.

Andor Season 2: The Best Star Wars of All

I've been trying to formulate my thoughts on the second, and final, season of Andor since I finished the last couple of episodes earlier this week. The first thought that came to mind was that it may well be the best Star Wars offering of all, including the much-hallowed original trilogy.

Perhaps that's overblown. Andor and the original films represent very different things, based on the times when they were made and the audiences they were aimed at. Moreover, they're connected by Rogue One, which is my favorite of the new Star Wars movies but has its own problems. Still, I want to explore these ideas in this blog, and I'm gonna need to spoil the hell out of the show to do it, so you can catch that after the jump.

Daredevil Born Again Mostly Sticks the Landing

When I previously wrote about the show, I was three episodes in and we'd just seen the culmination of the White Tiger storyline, along with a tease of things to come in the shape of the assailant's Punisher logo-bearing shirt. Since then we've gotten the real thing, and in a fairly prominent role, as well as hints of the wider Defenders and/or MCU continuity. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out, but if you haven't seen it yet, be warned of spoilers ahead.

Thoughts on Star Trek: Prodigy (with Spoilers)

Just finished Prodigy last night, and wanted to set down some thoughts. The first being, it's nice to see that it did get picked up somewhere after Paramount Plus cancelled it and dropped it from its platform. It was a bit slow going at points, but in the end it came good, with an emotional ending to the second season and nice tie-ins to the rest of Trek. Anyway, there are probably going to be some spoilers, so catch my more detailed thoughts after the jump.

Daredevil Born Again Is Off to a Good Start

Once again I'm breaking my rule about not writing a post about a show that I'm currently watching. But I've been considering the first three episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, and I'm interested to capture this moment and see where the show goes.

Obviously, I'm covering big spoilers, which come after the jump, so don't read on if you don't want to know what happens.

Captain America: Brave New World is a step, but only a step, in the right direction

I decided to snag a random day off, and while I ended up wasting half of it at the gym and then a good quarter at the doctor's office (because things happen at random, don't they), I also found the time to go to the theater to watch the latest Captain America movie.

As I say in my headline, it's a step, but it remains to be seen if it's enough of a step. Spoilers for the whole movie after the jump:

2024 In Review: Media Consumed

One of the things that struck me this year was just how much media I consume at the moment. At any given time I'm watching a few TV shows and movies (based on interest and on feeling like I'm getting my money's worth from the various streaming services I pay for), reading a number of books and comics, listening to music and podcasts, and maybe playing video games. Which all makes it odd when I consider that it doesn't feel like it's been that good of a year for it all, somehow?

In fairness, I have kept up with a number of shows, particularly from Disney Plus. Of those, X-Men 97 was the clear standout, both because it was a good treatment of the characters and because it dovetailed well with the comics I was reading this year. Echo was decent, though maybe not as memorable as Hawkeye, where Maya Lopez originated, and the Acolyte had some promise but didn't necessarily live up to it. Its cancellation feels like capitulation to the toxic review bombers, but I also don't feel like I'll wither and die not knowing what happens next. 

Agatha All Along was another promising one, which did a very nice job of playing a long con on its viewers, at the same time that it was pulling the con on its characters. Its seventh episode, "Death's Hand in Mine", was the standout, but somehow I felt like it whiffed at the end - not in undoing Agatha's death, but rather in failing to really explain her motivations. I liked the fact that the Witches' Road never really existed, though.

That said, there was one other big standout, and that was Shogun. I already wrote about it, so I won't go on at length here, but it was probably the most compelling show I watched all year. Honorable mention also goes to Slow Horses, Fargo and Fallout, while Bel Air remained the most fun cheesiness. I'm expecting Slow Horses and Fallout to get more seasons, but I'm also hoping for more from Fargo and Bel Air.

In terms of movies, I feel like the one standout was Deadpool and Wolverine, which is the only film I watched twice. It held up just as well on the second viewing, on Disney Plus, but I'd have even been happy to catch it in theaters a second time. Dune Part Two was pretty good, though maybe not the visual feast that the first part represented, while the Maxine Minx/Pearl trilogy of horror movies from Ti West was good, trashy fun - particularly the first two movies. The Zone of Interest was so different from the book that it might as well have had a different title, but it was a fascinating, harrowing watch. And for ongoing comfort watching, I started the year with Fox's X-Men series and continued with a new MCU rewatch, which let me re-evaluate a couple of films and confirmed my opinions of the others.

Turning to books, the one that was most influential was Douglas Wolk's All the Marvels, which has brought me into the world of critical analysis of American superhero comics. It led me to The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz's review of how postwar comics informed progressive activism and imagery, and vice versa, as well as Guy Mankowski's Albion's Secret History, which I picked up because of its references to music but was pleased to see that it talked about other cultural aspects of Englishness.

I also read a lot of Richard Osman and Mick Herron, and I'm debating picking up Osman's latest, even though it's not in the Thursday Murder Club series. Other than that, history was a big part of my reading, particularly the Shortest History series, as I took in the volumes on Italy, Japan and India.

For comics, I mostly read X-Men related books, though Wolk's book convinced me to try The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which turned out to be a great read. A friend lent me Image's W0rldtr33, and that was a nice change from the superhero stuff. I'm still debating whether or not to get the DC Universe Infinite app, but somehow the pile of physical comics beside my bed isn't diminishing fast enough for me to go ahead with that one.

For podcasts, I finally finished Revolutions, which I started in 2022, just as it was ending. Ironically, just as I was finishing its final series on the Russian Revolution, Mike Duncan started it up again, but this time with a speculative story about a possible Martian Revolution. I don't know if I'll check it out, but it might have to wait until it's done - somehow I found it harder to retain information from the Revolutions format than I did from Duncan's History of Rome.

Keeping the X-Men theme going, however, the standout podcast for me this year was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. I've mostly been listening in order from when they started, so I'm only up to the episodes from 2016, when they were covering Inferno, though I made sure to listen to their more recent review of X-Men 97 and their interview with Lenore Zann, who played Rogue. Their show's given me a taste for more comics-related podcasts, so I've started exploring Wolk's Voice of Latveria, and at some point soon I'll be checking out the Cerebrocast for more X-related goodies.

And finally, my video gaming has been limited primarily to various Kingdom Rush tower defense games on my iPad. I've been playing them off and on for about a decade, but my interest really took off when the Youtuber Voduke published his magisterial ranking of all the heroes in the series. That led me to buy a few heroes and towers across the various games of the series, including the DLC levels for the fourth installment, Vengeance. 

The big news for this year was the launch of Kingdom Rush Alliance, the fifth tower defense game in the series; for the first time I was there from the start, though on some level I found it a little underwhelming - I still haven't been able to figure out if that's because it only offered the main campaign at launch, whereas I discovered all the other games after they'd been out for a while and had released a lot of elite levels. Alliance has its charms, though, so I won't say it's terrible or on the wrong path, but it does feel a little lacking in replayability. I'll have to see how I feel when the next elite levels and its first DLC drop.

Looking ahead to next year, I'm hoping for big things from Marvel's new offerings, particularly the fourth Captain America movie, Brave New World. Having watched the MCU's Infinity Saga again, it's clear that Marvel dropped the ball a bit in the Multiverse Saga by not giving us more glimpses of the core characters - if you think about it, this is the first time we're seeing the new Cap since 2021's Falcon and Winter Soldier, and we're not getting a new Avengers movie until 2026, so it'll be a gap of seven years since Endgame. That means Brave New World will have a lot riding on it, particularly since Marvel had to pivot away from the Kang storyline they were doing.

I'm also hoping for a good new season from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which will hopefully make up for the end of Lower Decks next week. I'm sure other, unheralded shows will come up, and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised by them as they launch.

Overall, though, I'm hoping to spend a little less time consuming media and more time... I dunno, doing stuff? I wouldn't say my media diet made me stay home more, but now that I'm not really sequestering myself like I did during Covid, I think I can go out and explore the world more again.

Or maybe we'll be stuck inside again thanks to the new administration? I'll explore some of those concerns in my next blog, which will be a rundown of my 2024. Though I'll spoil the main theme for you here: 2024 sucked, just like the eight years before it, and like the four years that are coming now. But next time I'll explain just how 2024 sucked. Lucky you!

Two Different Visions of 'Salem's Lot (And X)

I haven't read that much Stephen King, and I haven't read him in a while, but I absolutely loved 'Salem's Lot when I read it in 2003 or 2004. I read it at the right time to be primed for the updated NBC miniseries that came out in 2004, starring Robe Lowe as Ben Mears and Donald Sutherland as Straker, but it's also been so long since I watched it that I don't remember anything except the iconic scene where Barlow kills Mark Petrie's parents - instead of clonking their heads together, he spins their bodies around, breaking their necks.

These are the things that stick with you, 20 years after the fact.

I also knew that there was a 1979 version, but I can't recall how much of it I saw - if any. In any case, just before I left for Europe I saw that Max was getting ready to release a new version, so I put it down on my "to-watch" list, and dutifully caught it when I got home. My short review is, just watch the 1979 version instead.

This is exactly what I did, and the differences are pretty stark, even though the new movie is pretty indebted to the 1979 version, moreso, in some ways, than it is to the book.

The 2024 version suffers from two big problems. First, it is a single, two-hour movie, instead of a three-hour TV miniseries (as the previous two versions were). The pleasures of the novel come from the slow unfolding of the horror of what's going on, after we've become acquainted with the characters who live in the town and their relationships to one another. This new movie has pretty much none of that, so that the characters feel like they're on rails - they're just doing their thing as dictated by the plot, without it feeling like any of their actions are organic.

The other big problem for me is that the new movie is set in the 1970s, as the book and the first miniseries were. I love a well-done period piece, but this version suffers from the same issue that a lot of 70s-set movies made in modern times do, which is throwing in 70s signifiers to really hammer home what decade we're in. In the 1979 version, Ben Mears drives a jeep, but in the 2024 version he drives a sort of Impala that is intended to scream 1970s. The 2004 doesn't have this problem, because it sets the story in the present.

There's another issue with Ben Mears, which is his age. David Soul was 36 when he played the character in the 1979 version, while Lewis Pullman is 31 in this year's version. Five years doesn't seem like much, but it does give you a change in perspective, as you start to see middle age on the horizon - and it's particularly important here, because of Ben's backstory as (supposedly) a grieving widower. I say "supposedly", because the 2024 version doesn't give Ben any of that backstory - he's just some guy who lived in the Lot as a kid and came back. This version also takes away his interest in the Marsten House, which is the thing that brings him back to the Lot in the other versions.

I don't particularly begrudge other changes the new version makes. It may have been more true to life that the only Black character in the 1979 version was one of the gravediggers - and he has, at best, one line in a single scene. But the actor that was cast as Mark Petrie is pretty good, and I'm never going to complain about Alfre Woodard in a role (here she replaces Jimmy Cody, Ben's first ill-fated sidekick in the book).

But overall, the better technology for photography and special effects ends up detracting from the story. In the 2024 version, characters get grabbed in jump scares, but in the 1979 version, they didn't have the budget for stuff like that, so they just stand there while the vampires bite them - which is true to the book's depiction of vampiric hypnosis.

The climactic battle in the 2024 version takes place at a drive-in theater, where the vampirized townsfolk are hiding in the trunks of cars. This sequence has some good visuals, but it also relies on a vampire trope that I hate, which is of them being able to survive in shadow (in this case, the shadow of the movie screen). It's emblematic of the movie as a whole: it has some good, evocative visuals, but it lacks substance. The 1979 version is pretty cheesy, but it does the atmosphere and the characters' motivations better, and because it's set in its own concurrent era, it's not so desperate to show you how 1970s it is.

This thought was brought home to me when I watched X, the throwback slasher flick directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth. X is set in 1979, but it seems a lot less desperate to show that it's set then - the year is more to link it to old-school slasher flicks from that same era, and to comment on the way porn capitalized on new technologies even back then (there's a scene where one of the characters talks about the possibilities that home video holds out for porn). The result is a lot less self-conscious, and a lot more deft in introducing the characters and describing their relationships.

It's kind of an unfair comparison, because 'Salem's Lot has different themes on its mind than X, but as I say, the new version of 'Salem's Lot doesn't do as good a job of exploring those themes. All that leaves you with is a good-looking but ultimately empty movie - on the other hand, Lot director Gary Dauberman originally filmed a three-hour version, and I'd like to have seen that.

Netflix's Beckham Documentary is a Weird Snapshot of a Weird Time

I try not to do this, but sometimes I'm just taken with a show and I feel the need to talk about it here, even though I'm not through watching it yet. Add the fact that I had no idea what else to blog about this week, and voila: I want to talk about the David Beckham documentary on Netflix.

I heard about it when it first came out, and gave it a hard pass, because Beckham's a footballer that I made my mind up about years ago, and I've been content not to revisit that opinion. Whenever he comes up in conversation these days, it's usually negative, like the flack he took for shilling for Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup. After years (decades) of playing to the LGBTQ community and presenting himself as an ally, many in that community felt betrayed by that move.

I've also been a little bemused by his whole thing at Inter Miami, not that I knew about the details. Having checked out the ownership section on Inter Miami's Wikipedia page, it looks like he received an option to buy an expansion team when he joined MLS in 2007, which I guess is the same deal the league gave to Lionel Messi when he joined Miami. Nothing too odd, at least without doing full due diligence.

So I was a little surprised when I learned, or was reminded, that the documentary had been directed by Fisher Stevens, who played Hugo on Succession and has made a career for himself as a director of well-regarded documentaries. It came up because I heard Stevens talk about the Beckham doc on Marc Maron's podcast, WTF, in an episode from last year. They talked about the various people Stevens spoke to for the doc, and that's what persuaded me to have a look.

It's authorized by Beckham, which is both good and bad. Good, because Stevens gets access to a lot of people, from Beckham's wife Victoria to former teammates, his parents, and various others. I think what made me want to check it out was the fact that they spoke to Sir Alex Ferguson, which felt like a good get. The bad thing about being authorized is that sometimes it feels a little sanitized - Beckham gets to present himself as he wants, which is his right but is also at the heart of why I'm a little disdainful of him.

On the other hand, the documentary does give Sir Alex a voice throughout, including when it discusses his rift with Beckham. The only person that's clearly thrown under the bus (so far, because I'm partway through the third episode, of four) is Glenn Hoddle, who was the England manager at the 1998 World Cup. That means he was in the hot seat to talk about the red card in the match against Argentina, which Beckham received for kicking out at Diego Simeone. In fact, it's kind of cool that they talked to Simeone about it, and he's quite forthcoming about it.

More than anything, the episodes I've seen have been a nice time capsule back to the 90s and early 2000s, and the football culture that prevailed. There's a lot of archival footage of Beckham from the time, both on the pitch and off it, which takes me back nicely. The music is pretty on-point too, capturing some of the Cool Britannia stuff that was happening around then (see also my love for the Britpop documentary, Live Forever).

There are some things I didn't know, or had forgotten about. For example, that red card against Argentina may have galvanized the whole of England against Beckham, but it was good to be reminded that his sending off didn't actually make them lose the match - they held on for penalties, which is when England came a cropper. Though it wouldn't be the last time the English collectively blamed a single individual for an early exit from a tournament...

It was also interesting to hear directly, from Beckham and Ferguson, about the incident that led to (or at least presaged) Beckham being sold to Real Madrid. I remember hearing about the boot to the face incident in the dressing room, but hadn't read up on how it was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's boot, or how it was effectively a freak accident when Ferguson kicked a pile of laundry and the boot hit Beckham in the face. I also hadn't known that they'd originally sold him to Barcelona, only for him to ask to go to Real Madrid.

The other thing that was helpful to be reminded of is just how good Beckham actually was on the pitch. My enduring memories of him are missing a penalty against Portugal at Euro 2004 and of his tear-filled tantrum when the same opponents knocked England out of the World Cup two years later. But the documentary, without spending too much time on the intricacies of football, does a good job of showing the ways Beckham could be influential. The prime example is the qualifier against Greece, which Beckham essentially won single-handed (though my abiding memory of that qualifying campaign was the October 2001 demolition of Germany).

I suppose my memories of those years are erased by the unceasing juggernaut of the Messi-Ronaldo rivalry that dominated the 2010s, and by the importance of Wayne Rooney to the English game. Though it's worth noting that Beckham's stardom and ubiquity essentially paved the way for the circus that surrounded Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, as evidenced by the religious ecstasy Beckham provoked in fans when he got to Real Madrid. Rooney, on the other hand, was a creature that the English fans understood better - a chaos agent with a rampaging style similar to that of Paul Gascoigne, who however didn't squander his gift like Gascoigne did.

My memories of Beckham end when he left England, though I had a good laugh at his first couple of seasons as one of Madrid's galacticos, since they didn't win many trophies, being too top-heavy to play well. I do remember when he came to MLS, and how they allowed him to break the salary cap, which has become known as the Beckham rule. I even (vaguely) remember when he went to AC Milan, though I think I didn't know he'd ended his career at Paris St-Germain. I'm looking forward to seeing what the documentary has to say about those years.

Overall, the show isn't perfect, but it's been nice to revisit those years through the lens of Beckham's career. I made a point at the time of ignoring the celebrity stuff he was involved in, thanks to his wife (who I should add was also my favorite Spice Girl), so the hoopla around his wedding and children was new to me. But it all brings me back to those years when I'd first moved to the UK, so it's fun to watch.

Also, the sections where Stevens talks directly to Beckham about his life now are unexpectedly interesting, like the joke about playing football against his son Romeo and threatening to invite his former teammates, like Zidane and Figo and Roberto Carlos, to destroy Romeo and his friends. It's nice to see that will to win is still there, even when it seemed like he was more interested in being a fashion icon.

Chris Claremont's X-Men and What Came After

As part of my ongoing reread of the X-Men, I've finally arrived at the moment when Chris Claremont, the book's most influential scribe, left. This was in 1991, when the X-Men were at the height of their popularity, spawning a new flagship title and inspiring toys and the X-Men animated series. It's also the inflection point for the X-books, where they went from the bestselling titles of the 80s to the sprawling mess that made podcasts like Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men necessary.

This post isn't so much an explanation of what happened (which I've pieced together via Wikipedia pages and comments on podcasts), but more how I saw it play out then, and how I see it now.

The first thing to say is that Claremont's departure after X-Men #3 was the first time that I realized how important writers were. I bought that issue soon after it came out, and continued on with the book for a couple of years, but I must have noticed something was off, because I kept coming back to X-Men #3 and its farewell to Claremont, and I put two and two together that Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza weren't quite as good.

Thinking back, that must also be the point at which I became a fan of writers rather than artists, to the point that for years I barely noticed the actual art. It's only in the last few years, with my overall reread of my old collection, that I've forced myself to study the panels in many books. As a result, some artists don't hold up like they did for me back then, while others, like Jim Lee, do look as good as I remember.

Claremont's departure is likely also involved in my switch to DC. The JLA books that hooked me at that time were well-drawn, with one of Adam Hughes's earliest ongoing commitments, but overall the writers, Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis, were the standouts powering the book. I had a similar whiplash when Giffen left both JLA and Legion of Superheroes, which drove home how important the writer's voice was to my enjoyment of a book (even if, in those specific cases, Giffen was doing the plot rather than the script).

What I didn't realize until I reread my physical copies of Claremont's old issues is how full of tics and idiosyncrasies his writing was. Much has been made of how every character always repeated their powers in the course of an issue (likely a result of the old adage that every issue is someone's first), or of how they repeated certain phrases (doing something "fit to burst"; yelling "Glory!"; and so on). 

I was also struck by how wordy his pages were, from 1975 to 1991, as he described everything and had the characters deliver long monologues. Those are probably also the result of a certain way of doing comics, in which he was plotting the book with the artist and then writing the script after the pages were drawn. It meant Claremont had to adapt his wording to whatever the artist had drawn; most notably, John Byrne drew the Dark Phoenix destroying an inhabited world, which meant Claremont had to adapt the rest of the story to that, leading to the death of Jean Grey, something he hadn't intended on at first.

I like to jokingly wonder whether Chris Claremont is the best bad writer or the worst good writer, but both are unfair. He managed to create a richer world for the X-Men than either Stan Lee or Roy Thomas had before, and having unchallenged control of that world for 16 years meant that he could introduce characters and concepts that are still playing out now, whether in the comics, in the movies or in TV shows. Wolverine is essentially his character, even if he didn't originally love Logan as much as Byrne or other collaborators did; same with the more complicated understanding of Magneto's motivations. 

In terms of Claremont's legacy, I'm still figuring that part out. I have bad memories of the issues in the 90s after he left, but now that I'm embarking on reading that era, I'll have a better sense of how it all played out. I still haven't quite forgiven Lobdell and Nicieza for (as I saw it) ruining books that I loved, but I'll be interested to see how I see their run going forward.

One problem with them and some of the other writers who followed Claremont is, as Jay and Miles put it in an episode that I listened to recently, Claremont had been writing the X-Men so long that Lobdell, Nicieza and whoever else thought that was just how you had to write them. Anybody would have trouble replicating such an imposing voice, even if they were a good writer themselves, so it's fair to say that the deck was stacked against them. And even more so when you consider that, as the flagship Marvel title, X-Men was subject to a lot more editorial interference than it had been in 1975, when Claremont, Len Wein and Dave Cockrum rescued it from the obscurity of being a bimonthly book of reprints.

Since I'm reading one issue of Uncanny X-Men per day (and now also X-Men, the series launched by Claremont and Jim Lee), I've calculated that this first year will take me through to the very eve of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. As I recall, there were a few reboots and new directions in that time, including Claremont coming back, and Warren Ellis being given control of the non-core X-books. But Morrison's run - divisive as it is - still strikes me as the short, sharp shock the X-line needed to move on from Claremont's influence.

I've heard some stuff about Morrison's pitch when they were plotting out what they wanted to do with the book, and it sounds bad when they talk about disregarding the existing fans. But I also think of the context, when creators, including Ellis, were just getting to grips with the internet and how easy it was to hear about how pissed off certain fans were that someone was doing new stuff with a book. I don't know how much of a link there is to the toxic fandom of today, but it certainly seems to prefigure stuff like Comicsgate, which has also served to radicalize a bunch of nerds to be culture warriors. If that link really is there, then I kind of wish Morrison's run really had driven all the old fans off. But I'll have to study it myself in more detail when I get to those issues...

The other thing to consider is that, influential as Morrison's run was, they also became something of an albatross on the characters after they left. At the very least, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men is meant to be a good continuation of New X-Men, but in the 20 years since Morrison left, there haven't been that many notable characters introduced - certainly not many that stuck. As far as I can tell, the exceptions are Hope Summers and Pixie, but I'll have a better sense of it when I get to those issues.

As for Claremont himself, I'm kind of looking forward to X-Treme X-Men, but also not. My sense is that he's never really recaptured the lightning in a bottle of his first X-Men run, so that series may end up just complicating the continuity further. But we'll see.