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?

RIP Sal Buscema

Just read the news that comics artist Sal Buscema passed away last week at the age of 89. I might not have remarked on it, if I hadn't been revisiting some of his work in the last few weeks - I just wrapped up a long-awaited read-through of Walter Simonson's run on Thor from the 80s, the last half of which Buscema drew. Reading it, I was reminded of Buscema's classic style, which I recall from reading books like Spectacular Spider-Man back in the 90s.

As some of the posts I saw noted, Buscema was one of the last remaining creators who were present in the early years of what we now know as Marvel comics. In addition to his long run on Spectacular Spider-Man, he also drew the Incredible Hulk for ten years, and I'm sure I've come across his work elsewhere. He was also the younger brother of John Buscema, who's associated with formative runs of so many Marvel characters - but ironically, I feel like I've encountered more of Sal's work over the years.

The timing is sadly ironic, because his work on Thor reminded me what a good artist he was, and I found myself considering reading Spectacular Spider-Man just to see his run on the book - I'd even looked him up on Wikipedia a week or two ago to find out what else he'd done. I'll definitely read Spectacular Spidey now - and looking again at his body of work, it looks like I have extensive runs on Daredevil and the Avengers, among others, to look forward to.

My condolences to his family and coworkers, and all the fans - it's sad to see one of the old pros go.

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.

10 Years of This Shit

Funnily enough, the title of this post isn't precisely, or only, referring to the political stuff. 2016 was the first in this current sequence of terrible, terrible years, and it started off with a bang when I logged into the AV Club and learned that David Bowie had died. I was reminded of that when I started seeing think pieces, on Facebook and on the Guardian, among other places, marking that anniversary. And these have been followed by 10-year tributes for Alan Rickman, which means we're going to get to relive the Great Celebrity Die-Off of 2016.

So I wanted to get out ahead of all that, and just note, in among all the horrible shit going on in Minneapolis and Alligator Alcatraz and Greenland and Ukraine and Venezuela, that we're going to be reminded of how awful that felt back in 2016. And the worst part is, that all began in January 2016 and went through the whole year, until we got treated to Brexit and Donald Trump's first election win.

I was also thinking about the good things from that year, of which there were few, but a couple did spring to mind. One was, of course, Leicester City's Premier League title, which remains one of the greatest sporting fairy tales I've witnessed. They had a good few years after that, even though they sacked Claudio Ranieri as manager the following season, but then they had an ever worse set of seasons until they were relegated a couple of times. Sic transit gloria.

The other good things that I remember from 2016 are in the dating realm, where I went on four dates with someone and even smooched her a couple of times, the first since I'd moved back from London. I also got a mini-raise that year, also my first since London, although the following year I learned just how grossly I was being underpaid by my company.

Anyway, this post isn't about me. It's more about solidarity: we're going to be seeing a lot of commemorations of ten years of All This Shit, even as All This Shit burns down even more intensely around us than it did then. Take a break from social media and the news as needed, and set boundaries so that people don't bring that kind of thing up as a way of making small talk (I have people in my family who do this). As shit as it all is, and as shit as it's all likely to remain for a while, we'll get through it as long as we take care of ourselves and of each other.

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.

So Long, 2025: Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

You know, I've been writing these posts every year since 2016. Some of them have titles like, "Gosh, what an awful year" or "Another year I'll be glad to see gone". When I looked forward, it was stuff like, "Things are gonna get worse after 2024".

Thing is, they really all have been terrible in so many ways. We should have noticed in 2016 when all the celebrities started dying, completely out of nowhere, but by the end of that year it was clear we'd crossed into the darkest timeline. Even when we got a respite at the end of 2020 by voting out Trump, 2021 started with a deadly riot at the Capitol and the deadliest phase of the Covid pandemic was about to start.

So, uh, with that in mind, welcome to my recap of 2025! It's been another bad'un, both at the macro level and the micro level. Looking at the wider world, political chaos and violence have been the norm, and while it's been disheartening to see how many institutions simply caved to whatever nutty Trump demands came their way, it's been good to see some pushback from the grassroots level. Though it's not going to mean a thing if the Democrats don't take back the House and Senate in the midterms and impose some accountability on this administration.

Oh, and btw, it still won't mean a thing if they do. Realistically, even if Democrats sweep a supermajority in both chambers and impeach Trump, he'll get pardoned by President JD Vance, and whatever Vance can't pardon him for, the Supreme Court will just say he had immunity or something. I'm not actively worrying about how bad things will get in 2026, 2027 or 2028 because I can't change any of those things, but I still sometimes find myself wondering what absolute chaos will happen because people last year thought Joe Biden was too old.

As a final point on the political stuff, whenever Democrats regain the levers of power, I'm really worried about how hard it'll be to undo everything that's happened just this year. A bunch of agencies, like USAID and Voice of America, are probably not coming back at all, because both parties seem to have lost interest in soft power, but apart from that, the health and economic data collection isn't going to bounce back easily - even if whoever's in the White House and Congress after 2028 has any interest in resuming all the research and data collection that we had before this year, any datasets we have on, say, infant mortality or broadband penetration or basically anything will have these large gaps between 2025-2029 that'll skew our understanding of what was happening.

And that's to say nothing of the sustained cyberattack that was DOGE, in which a bunch of unelected Elon Musk fanboys got a hold of the federal government's data and can now do whatever they want with it. That situation isn't going to change when President Gavin Newsom or whoever gets sworn in, and we're gonna be feeling the aftereffects for generations.

Okay, but how was it for me?

Ugh.

As I may have mentioned, I lost my job in March - incidentally, five years to the day since my boss at State Farm told us we'd be working from home because of the then-nascent coronavirus. But we'd be back in a couple of weeks, they assured us. In my five subsequent years of work, I spent 1.5 days working in an office, and those were for office parties.

The job search sucked, with three legitimate callbacks and one that was a waste of time because it paid way too little (like, it would have meant a $36k pay cut). On the plus side, the last one then led to my first proper interview of the year, so we'll see how that went.

The first thing I did, though, was schedule out my time for every week, so that I'd ensure I was spending my time doing the things that mattered to me. This meant that I had time for writing, job-hunting, going to the gym, learning, and so forth. Of all of these, the writing is my one bright spot for 2025, both because I made sure I spent a couple of hours on it each day and because I was in that TV writing class I've talked about so much.

Compared to previous years, where I found it tough to get new projects off the ground, this year I ended up writing four TV scripts (one spec and three pilots), plus plotting out four novels (two rewrites and two new ideas). I also came up with ideas for movies, a non-fiction book, and a rewrite of a novella I wrote a few years ago. It's hard to say whether I'll be able to maintain this momentum, especially when I find a job again and don't have quite as much time anymore, but at least I know what to work on.

On the dating side, once I lost my job, this was never going to be a great year, but at the very least it seems to have been better than 2024. I went on a couple of dates, had a phone call vibe-check that was supposed to turn into a date but then she bailed, and after Thanksgiving I reconnected with someone I'd gone out with back in 2023 - we've only been texting, but it's nice to chat with her again, wherever this leads.

Fitness-wise, I got a lot more serious about going to the gym, even though I had to cancel my monthly personal training sessions. I maintained my schedule of going 4 times each week, and I way overshot my original goal to lift a total of 300,000 lbs, by hitting over 1.2 million lbs. This included that period of two months when I was in Europe and wasn't going to the gym. Not to be shallow, but the friend I've been texting noted that I looked fit when I sent her a picture of myself next to the Christmas tree, so it looks like at least all that gym work has had some effect.

On the financial front, once again, it was never going to be a great year, but I was quick to cut down on certain spending, and was lucky enough to be able to lower my rent quite substantially. All of which means that, even though I haven't had any money come in since September (when my unemployment ran out), I still have a fair bit of runway, even without raiding my retirement accounts.

As far as the life/other goals, mixed bag again - I didn't get out to as many cultural things as I'd have liked, but I got to some. I didn't leave the Bay Area as many times as I'd have liked, but traveling is expensive, and anyway, I managed to fuck off to Europe for two months, which was cool. Still didn't do enough decluttering, though.

There's no dressing this up: personally, 2025 was a shit year, and it was a shit year in part because the macro directly affected my micro (I'm pretty sure I'd still have a job if Kamala Harris had won last November). But amid the shit, I made the best of it where I could, and that's the important thing. Now... it'd be nice to have a year where I thrive, both personally and professionally. I'm not due anything, because the universe doesn't work like that, but the hope is that I unlock something, whether internally or externally, that makes that year (decade? Lifetime?) of thriving possible.

For as many years in a row have been terrible, in however many ways (2026 looks to be the 11th bad'un in a row), the hope is what keeps me going. Things may not clear up in 2026, or 2029, or, honestly, in my lifetime. But something will come along. It'll do so for me, and it'll do so for you.

Happy New Year, and don't let the bastards grind you down.

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.