Mad Max by Dave McKean

Mad Max by Celia Calle

Mad Max by Simon Bisley

Mad Max by Rian Hughes

It's another low-content week at the Tearoom, I'm afraid, as me and the family head over to the wild and wonderful West Coast for the week. But to keep the daily content ticking over, I'm highlighting my favourite pieces of art from the Mad Max: Inspired Artists book that DC released when Fury Road was coming out. 

It's probably out of print right now, but it can be worth tracking down if you like A) Mad Max and B) comic artists like Jim Lee, Paul Pope, Javier Pulido, Marguerite Sauvage, Cliff Chiang, Peter Kuper, Gibert Hernandez, Nicola Scott and many, many others doing lots of pin-ups of scenes from that apocalyptic white line nightmare. The art can get a little monotonous, but there is glory in those pages. 

See ya next week, friends and neighbours!

This is a house of Sienkiewicz: Outside the mainstream (part one)

How much more Hate do we need? All the Hate!

While the universe seems to take a great delight in shitting on all your hopes and dreams, sometimes it can give you exactly what you want, and literally the day after I finished re-reading Peter Bagge's Hate Annuals and wondering how old Buddy Bradley was doing these days, there was the announcement of some new Hate.

While I do have genuine concerns that Buddy might have gone full MAGA - all the signs were there in his earlier deeds and misadventures - I've known Buddy since he was a teenager and we haven't seen him in more than a decade. I'd like to know how he's doing.

For me, a grudge is no more than a place to pork your cor!

I haven't listen to any of the Twelfth Man albums in many, many years - the big man himself passed away a while ago, so it's not like there is any new stuff to catch up on - but I'm sure I would find a lot of painfully casual racism, sexism and homophobia if I go back on them. We've come a long way in that regard, baby, even if there is a lot further to go yet.  

Also, many of the people it made fun of in the Australian sporting scene, including Richie and his wonderful commentary team, are no longer with us, which adds some melancholy to any time I hear 'two for twenty two' in some modern commentary.

But I cannot stress how fucking funny it was to hear these albums when I was a teenager. I didn't get half the jokes because I wasn't balls deep in the Australian sports media scene, but that didn't make the outrageous accents and wordplay any less funny.

They must have made an impression, because there are still phrases that have stuck with me for life, and still get whipped out at opportune moments - whether it's telling somebody that we need to work like a team, and do it my way; or they can blow it out their arse. Or how it's a great day for the world and that's it's not canary yellow, it's Australian gold my friend, and don't you fucking forget it. 

Super bits of writing, that. Top stuff, expertly delivered. 

Admiring the dream of Dallas

Even for a soap opera, it was a ballsy move - to bring back a major character who had been killed off, the producers of Dallas decided to write off 31 episodes as a dream, with Bobby Ewing popping out of the shower like nothing had happened.

In the past 38 years, it's become a shorthand for creator laziness. Rather than coming up with a reasonable explanation for the return of the actor - an evil twin, a fake death, anything - they just started over again, as if nothing had happened. 

But I've always had a weird, sneaky admiration for the move and the sheer ballsiness of it. You can do anything with fiction - it's all made up, after all - so why not just wipe the most recent slate clean and start over?

Of course it doesn't make any sense, nobody dreams of 31 hours of events during one night's sleep. But it's the endless complaints that they broke all the rules of storytelling that really grinds my gears.

Because despite what all the 'Write real good' self-help guidebooks will tell you, and no matter how many times you quote Robert fuckin' McKee, you really do anything with fiction. There are no rules, not really. 

Some things work better than others when it comes to plotting or character development, but the appeal of creating your own stories is that you can do what you want with them, and if you want to make it all a dream, fucking go for it. 

After all, we all still remember Bobby's shower, four decades after it happened, so it must have had some kind of a impact. Just fucking go for it.

This is still Lima Mike Golf

For all the talk on Monday, bemoaning the lack of blogging that has faded away like a fart in the wind, it occurred to me that there is still one site that has been doing the business with regular updates that I've been following for more than 20 years now.

I started following linkmachinego in the early 2000s, mainly because its name was an Invisibles reference, but then never stopped because it kept updating with all sorts of weird and wonderful ephemera from around the internet. It remains a most delicious curation of delights, and I usually find something worth reading from it every week.

Everything quickly fades in a digital world, but some things endure, and nothing lasts like good recommendations.