Form and Format

 I’ve been thinking a lot about book formats recently. For many, many years, I’ve been wanting to scale down, and do something smaller. I even made a video about it 10 years ago (back before the rebrand and with the old logo). 

There was something about those first Traveller ‘little black books’ - the simplicity of design, and how you could afford to get a new book on what was basically ‘pocket money’ costs. And they were just cool. Probably more complicated rules-wise than I’m used to now, but Traveller has always stuck with me. It was the first RPG I ever played (as covered in a very old blogpost here) and those little books seem to have been seared onto my mind. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love those big core rulebooks, with their glossy pages, colour artwork, and robust hardcovers, but as I get older and lazier, the prospect of something smaller and easier is certainly appealing. 

Hip to Be Square

Of course, the smaller little booklets were not the only thing to constantly bug my mind when it comes to book formats. There is also the lovely square book, a fascination that started with the complete opposite of Traveller’s ‘little black books’ - Nobilis’ ‘big white book’. 

Cover for 2nd Edition Nobilis - aka “the big white book”

Again, I wrote a blogpost about square books here, but before I even started working on the game system for WILD: Wake Initiated Lucid Dreaming, I knew I wanted the book to be square. Nobilis had sown a seed of interest in square books, and I couldn’t shake it. The idea that you could have text as normal, but have space in the extra-wide margins (thanks to the square format) for additional guidance and notes… 

Example of page layout from Nobilis, showing the two column layout in the centre of the page, but space in the wide margins on either side for additional notes.

Awesome. Special thanks should go out to Stoo at we_evolve who published WILD for me and ran the Kickstarter, for letting me stick to my guns and go with a square book. (Click that link and you can buy WILD, Aegean, Action Potential, and more…)

Square books are no longer a weird or strange thing – the award winning and incredibly popular Slugblaster RPG is square, as is the recent Sleepy Hollow RPG that uses the Year Zero Engine. 

But I’m getting off track. We were talking about smaller books…

The Mothership Lode

With the recent resurgence of smaller ‘zine’ sized RPGs, it was inevitable that someone would also be inspired by the ‘little black books’ of Traveller, and the most popular of those would be Mothership. 

Same A5 format, same sized box, with a heap of books within - player’s guide, GM’s book, one filled with creatures, one for spaceships, and an adventure… and that’s not all (as Brian Butterfield would say). It also includes dice, a GM screen, a map, and standees. 

So much damn stuff in there! Stoo bought a copy at Tabletop Scotland and I read through the contents with my mind racing about how this was the future. This was what I wanted to do – “remember you always wanted to do Traveller sized books” said the voice in my head. Notebooks were filled, so many ideas for little books in a new range that I can’t really produce at the moment. 

But, I’m planning for the future…

All of this planning has been going in a notebook. A sketchbook actually as I’m doodling artwork at the same time as working on the game and the system. However, the sketchbook is one of my new favourite pieces of stationery, and it’s making me think… or rather, rethink…

A5 Sketchbook next to a copy of original Traveller (book 1)

I mean, that photo makes it look like it’s bigger than Traveller, but it isn’t (it’s just that the sketchbook is chunky - 92 pages of 140gsm loveliness. I may have got a little hooked on buying them from Hobbycraft. They were in a multi buy at the time, so don’t give me that look. 

But it did get me thinking - the idea I have, it would work nicely with a small hardback that size, with smaller booklets like Traveller as supplements or player only guides (the bigger book would be for the GM). You could even bind all the little supplements together to make another hardcover…

…and then along came the Shadowdark RPG Kickstarter. Which does just that. Over a million $1 and it collects six ‘zine’ sized supplements into a book the same size as the core book. 

Well, it’s all a while off. I can’t do anything about it at the moment, but I can make notes and plan for the future.

So what format RPG books do you like at the moment? Are you a traditional D&D hardback sized fan, or are you really into your zines at the moment? 

Comment if you like, I’d be interested to hear what you think.

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Meanwhile, if you get chance, check out this Kickstarter by one of my former work colleagues, Emmet Byrne. He’s put together a rather gorgeous looking 5e setting based on traditional Irish mythology. Looks glorious!! 

Beyond the Woods 5e

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Until next time, stay safe and stay multi-classy.

Remembering Alex

[Warning: This post is about grief, so if you’d rather not read it, please just delete this from your inbox. I know this is a tough topic.]

This week, we said our farewells to Alex Guttridge. I know a lot of you won’t know who I mean, but that’s what this post is about - at his ‘Celebration of Life’ this week, as we said our final farewells, the subject of keeping his memory alive came up multiple times. And, if you know me, or the stuff I’ve worked on, you probably know a little of Alex just by association. So this is me, spreading the word of Alex Guttridge.

I met Alex when I started my day-job in retail working at The Television and Movie Store in Norwich. It was the location of the former BBC Shop, and the owner of a company that supplied the BBC Shop with Daleks saw the empty unit as an opportunity to open a shop mostly dedicated to Doctor Who.

This business owner advertised on the well-known Doctor Who message boards, Gallifrey Base, and that’s where I heard of the opportunity. We had interviews, and the core team of the shop was defined. My boss, Si. Me as assistant manager, and two employees who would go on to become great friends and collaborators on many projects - Will Brooks, who did the covers for the Second Edition Doctor Who Roleplaying Game books, and Alex Guttridge. 

Alex Guttridge (l), Nicholas Courtney (aka, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart) (centre), and Will Brooks (r) circa 2008

With our regular ‘consultant’ Andrew, we set up the shop, painted the walls, worked out the stock control system, and filled the shelves with as much cool and nerdy stuff as we could get our hands on. Working long hours to get the shop ready, we’d chat about everything - Doctor Who (of course), Star Wars, Star Trek, Gerry Anderson, BBC comedies, Ghostbusters, Muppets, you name it, we talked about it for days and days. 

We worked together at the shop for many years – some of my fondest memories of working there was when Alex and I had to do the late night opening shift on Thursdays. Being the old BBC shop, we had a couple of screens behind the counter left over from when the BBC used to screen the news all day when they were open. We had this hooked up to a DVD player to promote some stuff we were selling, and hardly had any customers on those late shifts, so ended up sitting behind the counter watching DVDs of the 70s ‘Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries’. (Love that series).

Of course, both Alex and Will knew their Doctor Who. Hooo boy, do they know their Doctor Who. The very first boxed set for the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game (or Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space as it was then) had come out, and I was starting work on the first couple of supplements. Obviously, Alex and Will were the first people I turned to for help. Their knowledge poured into the Aliens and Creatures supplement, and they were instrumental to the writing of Defending the Earth: The UNIT Sourcebook, working out a solution to the UNIT dating controversy and defining how the book would work. [His most recent contribution to the Doctor Who RPG was developing the overarching storyline for the recent A Stitch In Time campaign book of ten connected adventures.]

But it wasn’t the limit to our friendship. Alex joined us for video game nights, LAN parties for Halo, and becoming suitably addicted to Rock Band just as we were. When I foolishly joined with like-minded gaming nerds and started recording short comedy videos and a web series, Alex was there in one of the most dramatic and serious roles. He joined us for our 8-hour charity fundraising Rockathon playing Rock Band 2 non-stop for 100 songs to get the ‘Bladder of Steel’ achievement, bashing the heck out of that Rock Band drum kit. I remember him constantly complaining that there wasn’t any Boney M on Rock Band, and how he wanted to do the drum parts for the Nightflight to Venus/Rasputin tracks off of the album.

He left the shop for another retailer, but didn’t stay away for long, returning to TVM – I guess we all just got along so well, it was difficult to capture that relationship in another store. Everyone in TVM got on really well, and we’re all there for each other. 

Never has this been more apparent than this week. 

My wife and I were on a train crossing the border into Scotland when we heard the news that Alex had died on his way in to work. He was only in his early 40s, and it just didn’t feel real. Hell, it doesn’t feel real now. This week saw Alex’s funeral and celebration of life, and I’ve not seen such a large turnout at a funeral before – a testament to not only how young he was, but also how loved he was by his family, friends, and work colleagues. It was tough – there have been far too many funerals recently, and this one was a real punch in guts at times. 

It still doesn’t feel real, but as I said before, the take away message from the funeral was to keep talking about Alex, so he is never forgotten. Alex had teamed up with fellow former TVM employees on a couple of podcasts which I highly recommend. 

The first is the Talk Toy To Me Podcast he was working on with Ben Allen, where Alex and Ben would talk about collecting toys and action figures. 

Highly recommended if you want to find out about all kinds of toys, from Ninja Turtles to Transformers. 

The other podcast is the Oh Rabbits! podcast he was working on with Nick Mellish, and the aforementioned Will Brooks.

Three friends working their way through the entirety of Doctor Who, a couple of episodes at a time. As I said before, Alex and Will, and Nick, certainly know their Doctor Who, and you can hear in both of these podcasts just how passionate Alex was about his interests.

Thank you Alex, for being a great friend, a valuable source of nerdy information, and be sure we’ll keep talking about you (in a good way, of course). 

Thanks for reading Autocratik Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Just a little housekeeping side-note. There has been a bit about Substack in the press recently, but rest assured, I’m not going to activate paid subscriptions on there. Not giving them any money, and these posts will always be available on my blog - www.autocratik.com - if you prefer.

My Nerdy Life in 100 Geeky Objects #3 - 2000AD Summer Special

#3 - 2000AD Summer Special Supercomic 1977

We’ve already established that I’ve always been a nerd. My mother had me watching James Bond movies on TV, and introduced me to Doctor Who because she liked Jon Pertwee, and my dad had been buying me a weekly comic, which (up until this point) had been either Look-In - due to my obsession with cool stuff on TV - or the aforementioned Super Spider-man and the Titans (see previous post).

I was watching all of the genre TV I could, The New Avengers, Fantastic Journey, Space 1999, I, and The Six-Million Dollar Man. Heck, that series… there was a time we were all running around the school playground pretending to be in slow motion making that ‘dunnunnunnunnunn’ noise. When word went around the school of a new comic in the newsagents that had these stickers that made it look like you had bionic implants, it became the ‘in thing’ and I had to check it out. 

Front cover of 2000AD Issue 2, March 1977

I had a little pocket money every week (I think it was something like 10p or 50p, which was plenty in those days) as long as I did some chores like washing up, so I headed to the big newsagents in town and managed to get a copy of 2000AD, issue 2. It was cool! Of course, the stickers went on my arm, and pulled a load of armhair out when pulled off, and the weird eye sticker that was supposed to go on your forehead like a ‘third eye’ obviously looked better if you stuck it over your own eye… (sticky… and not a great idea, kid). 

Inside were stories of dinosaur hunters, cool air-sport teams of the future, and my favourite - a powered secret agent in the form of MACH-1. It was all great, and it introduced 2000AD’s most iconic character, Judge Dredd. I asked my dad if we could put 2000AD on a standing order at the newsagents (which, of course meant that I had to drop my subscription to Super Spider-man and the Titans). Every Saturday morning, with the morning paper, 2000AD would drop through the letterbox.

We’re all going on a Summer Special holiday

In a clever bit of planning, 2000AD launched their ‘summer specials’ - perfectly designed to give kids something to read over the summer break from school, or to shut them up when they’re on a long journey. I don’t remember which holiday it was we were going on in 1977 - my parents loved going to Scotland and my grandmother usually came with us, so it was probably a trip there. I have a strange memory of my dad gesturing to the comics in the newsagents telling me to pick out something to read for the holiday, and seeing the familiar 2000AD logo, I leapt at the first ever 2000AD Summer Special. Or, ‘Summer Special Supercomic’ as it was called. 

Front cover of the 2000AD Summer Special Supercomic - 1977

I mean, look at that cover. Amazing, and weird! Kinda mesmerising and engaging. It was great, full of new strips of my favourite stories, but there was a double-page spread that really stood out and stuck in my mind. A spread for a little known new movie that would be hitting our shores in the UK soon called Star Wars…

Spread from the 2000AD Summer Special and my first introduction to Star Wars

Droids! Stormtroopers! A mis-credited Han Solo! It was amazing, and I was instantly intrigued. It was just the start of a fandom that would dominate my thoughts for years. But it wouldn’t be until a little later that my obsession really kicked off. That’s for next time…

Beauty in the Darkness - David Lynch

 

Portrait of David Lynch by Debs (2025)

I’ve always loved movies and TV. Always. From a kid, those first trips to the cinema, or my parents introducing me to movies and series on the TV. I love them. I used to keep a list taped to my wardrobe door of movies I’d seen and even started ticking off how many times I’d seen Star Wars or Tron. Friday nights we’d rent movies from local video store and a group of friends would come ‘round and we’d watch the latest releases. 

One week we rented DUNE (yes, I’m using all-caps, it seems more apt). It was awesome, and visually stunning. I hadn’t read the books, and the rest of my D&D group who watched it with me kept pointing out how it was different to the novels, but I didn’t care. It looked amazing, I was baffled by some of it, but visually and audibly it was mind-blowing (and speaker-blowing too - I remember the bass notes of the movie were a little more than our old TV could handle). 

Years passed, and I continued my obsession with movies, renting the strangely terrifying and hauntingly dark Blue Velvet. And wow, it was dark. Really sinister goings on there, but the lead was the guy from Dune, and he was such a wholesome, small-town innocent, I just kinda related to Kyle MacLachlan’s character, Jeffrey. I was intrigued, and kept a lookout for Kyle in other movies (The Hidden is brilliant, and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it).

Most of the D&D group had gone off to University or moved away, and I spent most of my weekends renting movies from the video store(s) and bingeing horror movies. So much so, I’d watched most of the movies they had on the shelves and struggled to find stuff to watch - after all 50p rental for a weekend, it was glorious. I noticed a new title on the shelves called Twin Peaks, read the back and saw that it was by David Lynch and had Kyle MacLachlan in it, I scooped it up and put it straight on the top of that weekend’s movies to watch. 

It was weird, and dreamlike - and lingered uncomfortably long on some of the emotional scenes, but there was Special Agent Dale Cooper in the middle of all this weird, taking it in his stride, with a whistle, a smile, and a thumbs up, he was going to solve this case. But what really blew my mind was the ending. Sure, I’d later discover this wasn’t really the ending - it was a re-edited version for VHS release with an extra conclusion that wrapped things up - but the final scenes, which were used as the dream sequence in the series’ Episode 2, just left my jaw open and I was shocked. This was amazing and unlike anything I’d seen. I was obsessed.

Who is the Dreamer?

Completely and utterly obsessed. When I flicked through my parents’ Radio Times and it announced the arrival of the TV series of Twin Peaks in the UK, I bought a pack of blank VHS tapes and sat, waiting, every Tuesday night, for Alan Bennett to finish his programme before Twin Peaks aired on BBC2. Fingers hovering over the record button, so I could rewatch each episode multiple times to really absorb what was going on. 

Cover of the Radio Times in 1990

I bought the books, the soundtrack, wore a trench coat like Cooper, got a Dictaphone, and even expanded on the relationship map that was in that issue of the Radio Times for one of my art school projects.

My art school project, a flowchart of relationships of everyone in Twin Peaks

Obsessed. I followed everything David Lynch did, catching up on projects I’d not seen. It was an obsession and a love of everything Lynch worked on. There was a perfect surreal nature, a dreamlike quality, and an unpredictability that left me enthralled. There’s always a moment that I love when watching something and I hear myself say “I have no idea where this is going”. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s a sign that it’s something that’ll stay with me long after the initial viewing.

When Twin Peaks returned twenty-five years (plus) later, Lynch really embraced his art life and did whatever he wanted to do - taking his and Mark Frost’s scripts and just ‘going with it’, And that’s just powerful. If ever I think “What I’m doing isn’t commercial” or “No one’s going to like this” I just think of Twin Peaks: The Return (Episode 8). It’s absolutely genius. The narrative progresses, there’s a great musical interlude with (The) Nine Inch Nails, and then there’s an extended atomic explosion scene, the opera house, the ‘Gotta Light?’ sequence, and more. It’s genius, and not what you’d expect from prime time television, even in this age of experimenting with the format of TV. 

Thanks to David Lynch, if ever I’m unsure of what I’m doing or creating, I ask myself if I’m enjoying what I’m creating, or if I’m just making something because I think it’ll sell. 

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy…

Sat in a gaming cafe, talking to local game creators about what they were working on, I noticed a message had arrived on my phone. A friend of mine who knew how much I admired and loved David Lynch had messaged to tell me the news. 

I was shocked, and felt that initial gut punch but carried on as best I could at the meeting. It wasn’t until later that it really sank in. I loved everything David Lynch produced. He worked with so many others that I admire, like David Bowie and Trent Reznor, who also don’t compromise in their creative visions. Created my favourite TV series (which lead me to discover my other favourite series, The X-Files - both hold that No. 1 spot jointly in my head). Showed us how meditation can calm the mind, free us from the rubber clown suit of negativity. Introduced meditation to schools. Showed us how we could all be creative, how we are all one, and if we only realised we’re all the same we could finally have peace. 

My awesome wife, Debs, drew the fantastic picture that started this post, and I had to write something about how inspiring David Lynch is, and always will be.

I can only aspire to have a fraction of his talent. But his inspiration will always be there, and keeps driving me on. 

Thank you, Mr Lynch. The driver has left the car, but continues on.

The End (Of 2024)

The Traditional End of the Arbitrary Calendar Year Roundup

At the end of each year, I look back on my blog post about the end of the previous year and see what I hoped would come to pass in the future… and most of the time it’s me saying “Next year, things are gonna happen, and it’ll be great!”. (Narrator: “It wasn’t.”)

This year, I look back on last year's “end of the year” post which I wrote on Christmas Eve 2023, and see I was (as usual) disappointed with the way the year had turned out. 2023 wasn’t bad, but I was hoping for bigger and better things in 2024.

Of course, that didn’t happen either. 2024 sucked. I felt like a miserable hamster on a wheel, going around and around and not actually getting anywhere. Just when I got some speed up and thought, ‘you know, this is actually okay!’ then something came along and tripped me up so I fell onto my face, smashing my stupid grin into a bloody mess.

It’d be great to get that project off the ground

Nope, didn’t happen.

At least nothing bad happened

Bad things did happen. Far too many funerals this year.

TV & Movies

The one thing I talked about at the end of last year that I actually DID do was keep track of all the stuff I watch during the year. So, with that in mind, let’s look at what held my interest throughout the year.

January: 

Top Watch: Star Trek Prodigy (Season 1) - went in with very low expectations only to discover that it was brilliant. Great crew, great animation, intelligent story that didn’t talk down to its target audience. Phenomenal. 

Honourable Mentions: Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Lupin (Part 3)

February:

Top Watch: The Creator - blimey, that was epic wasn’t it? Original, cool, and amazing special effects. It felt like it was part of the same universe as Blade Runner, and watching that while playing the Blade Runner RPG just made it even cooler. 

Honourable Mentions: True Detective (Season 4), A Shop for Killers (Season 1)

March:

Top Watch: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Season 1) - c’mon, let’s face it. While I enjoyed Star Trek Discovery, my favourite part of all of the seasons was the introduction of Captain Pike and the Enterprise. So, getting their own series was perfect. Great cast again, really great Trek stories. Loved it. 

Honourable Mentions: Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 4), Will Trent (Season 1)

April:

Top Watch: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - first time back in the cinema since the last of the Star Wars movies, and it was a perfect birthday treat. Love the characters, especially the new generation, and it punched me in the nostalgia feels all the way through. Not as emotional as Afterlife, but still great. 

Honourable Mentions: Three Body Problem (Season 1), Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Season 4)

May:

Top Watch: Sugar (Season 1) - I like me some weird stuff. Colin Farrell, before his amazing transformation in The Penguin, is a cool noir detective with a love of classic cinema, investigating weirdness in Hollywood. I’m not going to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it, but it has a couple of seriously good twists. 

Honourable Mentions: Destined with You (which would have ranked higher but there’s a scene with an octopus that’s unpleasant), Star Trek: Discovery (Season 5) 

June:

Top Watch: Dark Matter (Season 1) - Once again, I like me some weird. This was good, maybe a little too long, but in a world of stories where the ‘multiverse’ is the ‘in thing’ this was pretty darn good. Apple really knocking it out of the park with their series (I mean, the Monarch TV series is easily the best of the Monsterverse media, and don’t get me started on how amazing Severance and Slow Horses is). 

Honourable Mentions: Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Enemy (Denis Villeneuve)

July:

Top Watch: Shogun (Season 1) - Stunning. Brilliant acting again, visually stunning, and I can’t really fault it. My memories of watching the old Richard Chamberlain one in my youth with my dad may have surfaced a couple of times, but really good. 

Honourable Mentions: Star Trek: Prodigy (Season 2), A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Season 1)

August:

Top Watch: Travelers (Season 3) - Started watching this for an RPG that didn’t quite work, but the series itself is stunning. Genuinely heartbreaking, moving, and smart sci-fi and a great take on the ‘coming back from the future to save the world’ plot line.

Honourable Mentions: No One Will Save You, Travelers (Season 2).

September:

Top Watch: Ludwig (Season 1) - I really love murder mysteries and police procedurals, so this quirky little series was a complete delight. And some great acting in here too. Really clever use of the obsessive consideration of detail being used to solve murders. Highly recommended.

Honourable Mentions: The Batman (movie), Will Trent (Season 2)

October: 

Top Watch: The Devil’s Hour (Season 1 and 2) - Watched a lot in October, I don’t know why, but the standout was The Devil’s Hour. Really original ‘time travel’ series (and I use the term in quotes as it’s not really about time travel, it’s time loops). Capaldi on top form, but Jessica Raine was amazing in this. Season 2 builds upon the genius, though not as amazing as season 1. Really intrigued to see where it goes from here.

Honourable Mentions: The Black Phone, Ouija: Origin of Evil

November:

Top Watch: The Expanse (Season 1, 2, and 3) - Late to the party, but I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about, and it was well worth it. Great and interesting characters (Amos kinda stole it for me), and the realistic interpretation of ‘space physics’ was really cool. I could so easily see how this was created as an RPG setting before it became books, and a TV series. Can’t believe it took me so long to get around to watching this.

Honourable Mentions: Arcane (Season 2) - so good, so very good, Fargo (Season 5)

December:

Top Watch: The Expanse (Season 4, 5, and 6) - I watched a LOT in December, and while seasons 5 and 6 were not as cool, The Expanse was better than a lot of the nonsense I watched this month. Frustrated that we haven’t had the rest of the series to complete the books’ story.

Honourable Mentions: Squid Game (Season 2), Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Gaming

I know most of the people who follow this blog and Substack are here because I write tabletop RPGs, so Gaming needs to be mentioned. This year I continued the long-running D&D game with my old gaming group from 40 years ago, as well as my other group finishing off the epic Aegean game we’d been playing, shifting the setting from Ancient Greece to Mythic Vikings. We did some more Blade Runner RPG, tried our hands at FATE for the first time, and have returned to Aegean in a whole new setting.

Next year, I’m hoping we get to try Deathmatch Island, Mothership, Slugblaster, and a few other games that are brewing in the background. 

In May I went to UK Games Expo, which was MASSIVE and exhausting, but great fun. Met loads of publishers and people I knew, and was kinda overwhelmed by how huge it is. I’m really hoping to do the full three days for UKGE 2025. 

There was the second Norwich Gaming Convention, which was cool if strangely laid out - but that wasn’t the convention organiser’s fault. The location used before was under repair so it was held in a temporary home in the University of the Arts in various parts of the campus and nearby buildings. It’s certainly growing and should only go from strength to strength.

In September was Tabletop Scotland which was our first time attending, and I helped on the stall with Stoo and the We_Evolve games, and had part of the table for my wife’s Etsy business of cool gothy wares from Misery Makes. It was cool, huge, slightly damp and very foggy, but good. Didn’t make any money after the expense of going to Scotland, but the trip was great fun, and got to see lots of cool people.

And in November it was Dragonmeet, which again was great and exhausting. 

Gaming Experience of the Year?

Mothership. Which is weird, because I haven’t played it. Stoo bought a copy at Tabletop Scotland after we watched a review on Quinn’s Quest, and after thumbing through the various books in the basic set my mind was racing with ideas. I’ve always loved the ‘small book’ format and wanted to bring back the feel of Traveller, and Mothership really scratched that itch and beat me to it. It’s not so much the subject matter, but more the execution. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all week and ideas and plans were hastily jotted down…

One day I’ll get around to doing something with them…

Other Media

Finally, just a quick look at some of the other media I’ve been absorbing. I read some books, as always not as many as I’d have liked - I’m a terribly slow reader, I like to try to absorb it, and I often get distracted and start something else. Just my brain at the moment I guess. I read the new X-Files book, Perihelion - which was good, and great to see what happens after the 11th season. Had some issues with the ‘Charles Xavier School for alien hybrids’, but I hope there’s another one coming. I read the X-Files Origins books (though I’ve not quite finished Devil’s Advocate) which are pretty cool. 

I started Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword and then got distracted by having to read something for work - speaking of which, I did the first seven Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross over the last year, which were cool. I must get back to The Bright Sword, but Debs bought me I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom by Jason Pargin, so maybe after that. It did remind me that I haven’t read the latest in his “John and Dave” series…. I also read Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, which was great, gripping, and genuinely terrifying, but not the happiest of reads. 

Music-wise, I’ve been mostly listening to the usual Nine Inch Nails music as always, along with some metal like Bring Me The Horizon, Falling in Reverse, Ice Nine Kills and the new Poppy album. However, real discovery for me this year has been Night Club. 

I’d not heard of them before, but this electronica duo are the perfect, dark, synthwave, retro-80s cool that I needed right now, and it has been on constant loop for weeks.

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And that’s it. What a crappy year. Let’s hope 2025 is better. What do I want to get out of the coming year? That’s easy… CHANGE. A change in what’s going on, what I’m doing, everything… I’d post that video of The Stranglers singing “Something Better Change” but I do that every year and yet everything stays the same. 

May you have a brilliant new year, and all the very best for the future. 

My Nerdy Life in 100 Geeky Objects - #2 - Super Spider-Man and the Titans

#2: Super Spider-Man and the Titans, Issue 203 (1976) 

When I mentioned last time (for object #1, the Corgi James Bond Lotus Esprit) that my parents were ‘enablers’ of my nerdy life, I’d almost forgotten an even earlier moment. 

Set the wayback machine to the mid-1970s. Living in my favourite home in my small coastal town with my parents, I was about 7 years old and one Saturday morning my went with my dad to the local newsagents (one that is still there today!). I have a strange memory that the shopkeeper was someone called Mr. Jenner, and it was at this newsagents that my dad had a couple of standing orders. One for a morning paper - the typical tabloid that was full of cheap headlines, and one for an evening regional newspaper. 

While there, I think dad was there to pay the monthly bill for the papers, and he said to me that I was allowed one weekly comic. We’d put it on the order, and it’d get delivered on Saturday with the morning paper. I had a look at the comics on offer, most of them were war titles or traditional British action comics. But one really stood out. It was the wrong way up, but had a bright cover with Spider-Man on the front. I’d heard about Spider-Man from when my grandfather had visited (with his wife - who preferred to go by ‘Aunt’ and their son who told me about Spider-Man - he was only a couple of years older than me). 

So Spider-Man was the obvious choice. 

In the UK, this comic was “Super Spider-Man and the Titans”. A cool landscape format comic that reproduced the US comics in black and white, two pages of the original comic per page. It meant that when you opened the comic, you got four pages in a spread, and they could reprint loads of storylines in each issue. 

It wasn’t just Spider-Man in each issue. It included Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Doctor Strange. I loved every darn issue of it. It was amazing. When Marvel decided to print their Essentials range - huge phonebook collections of the old comics in black and white - I had to get the Spider-Man ones, as they were how I remember them. And the black and white artwork was awesome. 

It was where my love of Marvel started. It was just as things were getting really serious, and when they (spoilers) killed Gwen Stacey, I was shocked! 

I even got to see the Spider-Man cartoon when we went to stay with my granddad in East London (the TV regions ‘up north’ didn’t show it). Just the one episode though, while I was visiting, I remember it had Rhino in it. 

My love of this comic continued until, in a truly fickle way that kids are, something new came along. My dad stuck to his ‘one comic per week’ rule, and TV was becoming more interesting to me and I changed to reading Look-In - that strange British hybrid of comic and TV guide. But I soon learned that something bigger and better was out there. I was a week late, but starting with issue 2, I switched over to the powerhouse that was 2000AD… but that’s another story.