Stereo Comics   +  MOJO

Things that rocked my boat recently

1. George Lucas' state funeral on TIME TRUMPET tonight. Saw Boba Fett saluting the cortege and shot lager right out my nose.

2. New issue of MOJO: some great pieces on Tom Petty (always something of a guilty pleasure of mine), The Jesus & Mary Chain and Monty Python's recording career.

3. Checked Ed Brubaker's X-MEN: DEADLY GENESIS out of the library. It's a good read, but was again struck by the fact that every X-comic worth reading these days is, at a fundamental level, just a reiteration of the Claremont stories we loved as children - Morrison's "remix" on NEW X-MEN; Millar's best-X-MEN-movie-that-never-was in the first couple of books in the ULTIMATE series; and this deconstruction by Brubaker, which reminded me (in all the best ways) of The Red King Syndrome, book two of Alan Moore's run on Marvelman (Everything you know is wrong! All those smashing adventures you remember having as a young man are false memories covering up the tawdry, shitty, truth! etc). One note: the bar man in that Welsh pub Charlie Xavier was lying low in must have been Irish, Scottish or from Yorkshire. We all say "Aye" as an affirmative. The Welsh, however, say "Aye-Aye". As in "Well aye-aye my lovely, I've been out shaggin' sheep all night like. There's nice."

4. DRAWN! linking me to Jonathan Edward's website: loved his work since seeing his work in a kids book about birds and slowly realising he was also the guy who does all those cool illustrations for The Guardian.

5. Colin Wilson has resuscitated his blog. Yay!

6. Just got the Leonard Cohen tribute album I'M YOUR FAN on Ebay. Brilliant - where's it been all my life?