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Hellfire

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  When I was a kid, Ghost Rider was my favourite Marvel comic. I think there were several reasons for this - my first exposure to the character was definitely the Topps stickers of the mid-70s. There was a GR sticker, referring back to Easy Rider, where GR was saying something like "Peter Fonda, eat your heart out" - I had no idea what this was referring to, but even then, I knew it was cool.  Years later, when I first discovered US comics, GR 56 was one of the first ones I bought. At this time, I didn't really appreciate that the UK comics were a repackaging of the US ones. I had found a GR comic and I loved it. Over the next few years, I was able to collect GR pretty consistently - partly cos it was regularly distributed in the UK, and partly cos he was a B-list character, and his title rarely sold out. I stopped buying comics around the time issues 73 came out, and kept that up for maybe 18 months.  When I came back, GR had been cancelled. I kept looking for his title ...
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Past Times

  There's a website called setlist.fm where you can catalogue the gigs you've been to, get to build up your history, compare setlists and stuff like that. Obviously for new gigs its pretty comprehensive - you buy the tickets online, lots of other people sign up to the website - people record bits of it own their camera and the setlist is detailed dynamically, either as it happens or pretty quickly afterwards.  But its not as good for older gigs - cos its relying on attendees making contemporaneous notes, either because they grabbed a setlist from the stage at the end of the set, or they noted it in a diary or something like that.  I used to have a Gene website, and there was a spell where I went to a few gigs over a short spell, and I reviewed them and recorded the sets. I used this to build out the detail on setlist.fm for those shows - but there's loads of other gigs I've been to that don't have that sort of info. I saw the Pale Saints, Pixies, All About Eve and T...
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Part Lies, Part Truth

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  I read the recent biography of REM, "The Name of this band is REM" by Peter Ames Carlin. I've read a lot of books about the band in the past, but much as my interest in the band dwindled towards the end of their career, so did the biography industry, and most of the books stop at their peak rather than afterwards. This book carries on to the breakup of the band, and has been well reviewed over the past year or so, and with my interest in the band renewed following the Shannon / Narducy Fables tour in 2025, I put it on my Christmas list and have devoured it since then. First things first - the band aren't interviewed for the book, so any words from them are from contemporary interviews or as told by other people. It's at its strongest in those early years - capturing the contradiction between a band that was willing to put the hours and the legwork into becoming a great band, and one that didn't want to appear in its videos and have decipherable lyrics to sin...
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Wrapped

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  There's a popular music listening app that, at the end of the year, looks at your listening stats and tries to summarise it for you. It tells you who your favourite artist is - how many hours you have spent listening to them, and stuff like that.  Last year, it told me that my favourite song was something that I'd probably listened to about 5 times. I can't even recall what it was but I probably listened to it 5 times on day of release and never again - It probably told me that I didn't really listen to a lot of music (on that app at least) and so it gave me cause to doubt the reliability of the data.  It did also give me the opportunity to change things around. It mentioned a streak - you listened to a particular song 3 days in a row (or something like that) - I decided that this year, I was going to try and listen to one song every day of the year, and see what that did for my stats. I didn't quite make it for every day but I came pretty close. I chose to listen...
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V: The Novelisation

 As I said before, V was a roaring success, and that success meant that tie-ins needed to arrive. The first if these was the adaptation of the two mini-series in the form of a chunky paperback novel by Ann Crispin. At the time, Crispin was presumably seen as a safe pair of hands. She had experienced breakout success with a Star Trek novel and delivered a V novelisation that is engaging throughout and that rockets along at impressive pace.  Released in the US at the same time as the second mini-series, I think it's obvious to see the differences in approach to the two mini series.  Presumably, in the case of the original two parter, which had already aired, Crispin had access to both the scripts and the completed material. Much like that original show, the first half of the book is more thoughtful, takes more time to develop the characters, and indeed expands some of them from their televised version.  I wonder if, for the second series, she only had access to the scr...
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The Daredevils 2

  Following on from before, it's another excellent issue of "The Daredevils" - Firstly, Brian Braddock returns to his ancestral home to find himself under attack by a villain called Mastermind. Again, Moore does a neat bit of work here retconning something that happened before without rendering it incoherent. More fine formative work from Alan Davis - at this time Marvel UK wasn't really producing much of its own comics material, so it's a bit rough around the edges but it's great to see.  Following on from this, we've got Bullseye kidnapping Black Widow to lure a trap for Daredevil. More marvellous art from the Miller / Janson team, and its effectively laying subplots about Ben Urich. Top drawer stuff. The Spider-Man strip from years before still pales into comparison, but I note that it's introducing the Kingpin, so maybe they are using that strip as a way of backstory to the wider DD continuity.  There's a two page article about a recent UK Comi...
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Visitors

  Back in 1984, a blockbuster US sci-fi show ran over 5 nights and gripped the nation, It was a short-lived phenomenon,  We didn't really know it at the time, but the original V mini-series was a 2 parter which aired in the US in 1983. It was a big success so the network commissioned a follow-uo but differences of opinion with the shows creator saw him depart and a three parter "V: The Final Battle" which saw the show veer away from being a parable about World War 2 towards standard television soap-opera, with lasers.  The 5 episodes were shown across a Monday-Friday in July 1984 on ITV and they were a huge success. Over in the US a weekly series had been commissioned, but it wasn't and although it dribbled into the ITV regions, it was never networked. The time for V had passed.  But - there were spin-offs. DC Comics started releasing a monthly comic to tie in with the weekly show. When that ground to a halt, the comic continued, their characters in stasis waiting fo...
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