Ken Aldred

Good to hear from you. I’m very sorry to learn you’ve been struggling with depression and bereavements, and the immense pressures arising from those factors. I’m going through a fairly extended depressive period myself but I’m experienced at masking it, to some extent. Point is, I do genuinely understand your situation. No need to be anxious, there are many here waiting to see you return. Take care, pal.

Great selection of comics. And the rest too. Greg’s very, very generous.

I remember him. Sorry to hear this.

Gift grade. From the front alone.

I agree that it’s your book and you can do with it as you wish. I recall a comic dealer at a comic mart in the 90s dramatically feigning extreme shock at my joking suggestion about trimming edges or cutting out pages, as if it was somehow sacrilegious. You can be extreme OCD as I am, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, dissect the book to pieces. Your property.

It’s a fair point. I should’ve known better and pulled out some Carl Barks to read instead. Or ‘Mazing Man.

Problem is, exploiting a work that is immensely popular and clearly lucrative is a better prospect to a stone cold, soulless corporation than gambling on future product which may or may not end up just as popular and lucrative. Not everything Moore created reached the height achieved by Watchmen. So, you can understand, if not agree, with DC’s immediate rather than long-term attitude towards their product creator.

Watchmen’s a cash cow that DC has kept penned in for milking ever since Moore created it, by keeping the work constantly in print. No point expecting selfless consideration from a corporate entity: that would be surprising.

5 to 7 Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire Vols 1 to 3 Reprints of a series that ran in the UK’s Ranger, and Look and Learn magazines, just two pages per issue. The stories are okay, readable enough, but it’s the art that’s most memorable, by one of the country’s most revered comic artists, Don Lawrence.

From Hell is a highly-regarded Alan Moore story, but I tried reading it while I had chicken pox and I found it absolutely depressing. Circumstances matter. Never been motivated to retry it since.

Only PS 5 game I have so far is Guardians of the Galaxy. Worth a look.

Those would be the Richard Corben comics, I think? Great stuff. Classic horror artist.

The heightism is irrelevant. He was a really good Batman, and Bruce Wayne.

Despite being short, still far better than George Clooney in the role.

Never a huge fan of 90s Image, but the modern version of the company evolved from that and has produced many excellent comic series, and has become one of my favourites.

I hope he’s okay.

The game’s a strange one, price-wise. It seems to hold its price around £50 on Amazon, where many great PS 4 games that have been around as long as it has can be found much cheaper, between £10 to £15.

I remember when I was looking forward to re-reading his first run on Avengers a few years back, and when I started was disappointed to have forgotten that The Eraser had inked his art.

I haven’t watched the film yet, but it’s already spoiled for me, so more detail doesn’t matter too much at this stage. I had intended to watch it on Blu-Ray.

I was looking forward to watching Eternals, but, inevitably with the delay, you encounter key plot points online which spoil the experience. Very disappointed that the film changes the Eternals into space robots and as a result trashes Kirby’s original and much more interesting concept, when there’s really nothing much wrong with it. Wasn’t broken, nothing to fix, hardly me being a purist.

A positive way of looking at it is to describe it as ‘a fascinating and unusual production flaw’.

Would it be worth more if it was restored by replacing the staple with a nice, neat one?

Don’t recall seeing one poking outwards like that.

I believe the condition is far more complex than simply being anxiety about miswraps, creases and stains. I’ve had bad lifelong OCD, and my focus on finding the nicest-presenting copy at the most affordable price is actually a fairly minor concern and manifestation of that. Of course, with the recent enormous price rises that process is no longer feasible in many cases, impossible for me to compete, but I also wouldn’t be happy downgrading at an inflated price. There are other obsessive and impulsivity issues for me to consider in my decision to put some distance between myself and these fixations. I’ve become increasingly disinterested in nostalgically holding on to the past, another obsession which I don’t consider to be that healthy, and which is easily exploited. I’ve developed a better understanding of the FOMO effect and its power in markets such as this one, and how toxic it is for those of us with OCD and impulsivity issues. All are stressors, and I’ve found that complete abstinence, the safe cocoon of the digital world, is by far the best option for me now, where the worst defect I might have to analyse is a dead pixel.

It’s important to teach younger generations about the atrocities, especially now that the people that lived it are dying off, and it’s easy to see repetition once the population has no direct physical or psychological connection to such events. Question is, at what age is it appropriate to expose kids to explicit details of the Holocaust? Maus is a brilliant and powerful work, but still a little sanitised compared to what is seen and discussed in TV and film documentaries. At the same age in Church of England primary school I was allowed to read fairy tale books that were the original versions with extremely gory illustrations, far worse than Maus, and it calls into question censorship of a work such as this, which, despite the occasional dark scene, is still a less extreme introduction to a reality that shouldn’t be forgotten.