Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
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Even as I type these words, the Olympics is upon us. That festival of sport in which the world's finest athletes gather to try and defeat each other, as they have done, on and off, since days of ancient yore.
But is that what fills your mind?
Or is there something else that haunts it?
If so, you're in luck because tonight sees the return of the feature which dwarfs even the Olympics in scale.
It's the one in which the first person to comment below gets to decide just what we all talk about.
Therefore, don't forget to sprint right in there, hurdle your way to the front of the queue and clear the bar to register your topic for debate.
Posts
32 comments:
What have you clung onto much longer than was wise? Band / comics series / movie franchise / TV show / whatever…?
And which ones did you bail on whilst the getting was good?
I'll kick off with ZZ Top.
Everything before Eliminator was great. Eliminator was great too but had a new fuzzy sound to it that in retrospect was the beginning of the end. Next one after Eliminator was similar but a step down. That's when I should have stopped. I have all the next four, all from the 1990s and all proudly claiming that they were a return to the old blues rootsy pre–Eliminator sound. Suffice to say, they just got grungier and fuzzier, going off in a direction I don't like but I kept falling for the spiel each time.
I've successfully jumped off the bus now though. There's a 1980 pre–Eliminator album low down on my wishlist but otherwise I'm done.
Reminds me of a sad story.
A friend of mine became a father for the first time a few years back but his son was born with no arms or legs. Worse than that, no body at all. Nothing below the neck.
Somehow the kid survived to his 18th birthday and his father took him out for his first legal drink. And witnessed a miracle. By the time the kid finished that first beer, he'd grown a body.
So the father gets in a second round. And this time kid grows two arms.
The kid thinks this is great. It means he can buy a round of drinks now, so gets in another couple of beers. No need for a straw this time. And he grows a pair of legs.
With no idea what's going to happen next, the father heads to the bar to buy the fourth round. While he's doing this the kid is half pissed, running round the pub, jumping and dancing and spinning around. Can't believe that he's got this new body. Look at me! Look at me! I can do anything! Goes outside to show everyone drinking out there. He's still running around in a dream, not thinking about what he's doing. And a lorry comes flying round the corner and mows him down. Dead. A sad end.
Barman looks over at my friend clutching two beers at the bar. And says "He should have quit while he was a head."
I'll get my coat.
Charlie stayed with Wife # 1 about 25 years too long.
Bailed out of tech stocks before the proper crash around 2000-2001.
Sex and money… the cause of, and solution too, all the world’s problems.
Flipping the question…
I am thankful to have hung on to my interest in synth rock / new wave music.
Saw two UK greats last night in a smaller venue in Chicago: THOMAS DOLBY and TOM BAILEY (THOMPSON TWINS).
Absolutely excellent. Dolby in particular exudes this quiet charisma, knowledge, music… quite the savant.
Have been spending the work day listening to Dolby’s interview on “Keyboard Chronicles” from a few months ago. Lots of history as well as the future being discussed.
Glad I always hung on to him, so to speak.
Sorry: this was me.
Is it heresy these days to say I kept buying Alan Moore’s SWAMP THING long after it had ceased being good?
I was still buying Kirby comics up to the very end. Even though things like THE HUNGER DOGS and SILVER STAR filled me with profound sadness.
I still keep watching new James Bond movies, but CASINO ROYALE was the last one I actually enjoyed. I was totally ready to turn the page on dour, joyless Daniel Craig three movies ago.
b.t.
b.t., I suppose the later science-fiction stuff in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing might not have played well with readers interested in a horror comic, but I liked the way he did something different, and enjoyed it up to the end. Just compare those with the issues that came after!
Silver Star was at least an improvement on Captain Victory, but yeah - even I'll basically go with you on the late Kirby era. I have always disliked James Bond films.
Unlike dangermash, I managed to avoid the later ZZ Top albums.
And the earlier ones.
The advantage of the modern era is that you can easily listen to stuff on the internet first. So I will be avoiding the new Propaganda album in a couple of months. xPropaganda on the other hand - the version with the ladies - I like a lot.
Yes, there are two Propagandas now, which seems not to be the plus one might have hoped for.
Not like with hairy German space cadets Faust - there have been two of them for a while now. I prefer the Irmler faction, who seem truer to the avant garde spirit of the 70s 'Wumme' era - in case anyone wanted to know - but the other lot are still good too, and I look forward to checking out their new album due in a couple of months.
-sean
I gave up on tv pretty much completely around the time I discovered girls, and recreational herbs.
If I clung onto anything too long it was reading 'the new comics' of the 80s boom, past the boom. Really, after Moore left DC, and the last issue of Sienkiewicz' Stray Toasters from Marvel that was it. But I still tried stuff.
I realized the game was up when Fearless Frank Miller and Dave 'Funky' Gibbons collaborated on Give Me Liberty...
-sean
To be clear, I'm not including Love & Rockets, From Hell, or Cerebus there, which continued to be pretty good (even if the latter tried my patience on several occasions!) Or Les Bandes Dessinées.
-sean
So, a band I did bail on, and not a moment too soon …
I thought Cheap Trick’s first four studio albums (and the live album AT BUDOKAN) were brilliant, packed with punchy, crunchy, hook-filled Power Pop tunes. Their fifth album ALL SHOOK UP had exactly one good song on it — I stopped buying their albums after that and never really looked back. They had a few decent singles which I’ve got on various Greatest Hits and Best Of… type compilations. I’ve since listened to most of their Post-ALL SHOOK UP albums on YouTube and decided I made the right choice.
b.t.
I also stayed with Cerebus until the end, the only title I never missed during the transition from Blighty to Aus. Other than the final dozen, or so, issues I probably didnt fully read an issue since roughly the half way mark.
I also stayed with Lost and The Walking Dead tv series, when each weekly episode became increasingly dumb and annoying.
I’m glad I got off Special Brew after a single four-pack, and consequential chuck. That’s a habit that would only have led to further turmoil.
DW
I've mentioned before the long climb into the light that was the experience of following Daredevil between the two Miller stints. But as soon as Born Again finished, I bailed. Why would you hang around after that?
Same with Swamp Thing, sort of.
I’d been buying the whole run throughout my high school years, but the last stretch - the space stuff - was beset with distribution problems so I missed a few (though the ones I did manage to get included My Blue Heaven and Loving The Alien, two of the best issues ever, so my interest didn’t wane). Then one evening just after I’d started sixth form college at 16 I picked up a new issue sight unseen and started reading it at the bus stop and… what? This doesn’t feel right.
Checked the credits: Moore had finished without me knowing. Stopped buying right there and then.
(Though a friend a year or so later started getting into comics and would buy the Veitch runs, so I read few then. Still not very good)
In that sense I’m the comics publisher’s worst nightmare: the reader who’s creator driven, and won’t just carry on buying titles regardless of who’s producing them. No wonder they were so resistant to creators rights.
I’m not bad at leaving bands behind, even if I really liked them. I was / am a huge fan of Depeche Mode from 1981-1990. Once 1993’s ‘Songs Of Faith & Devotion’ came along I tried to go along with it but sludgy industrial rock wasn’t for me, and when Alan Wilder left after that I happily put them to bed. I’ve kept up with their stuff on and off but never bought an album of theirs again.
My one ‘hanging on too long’ was perhaps New Order, who haven’t made a good album for 35 years. I tried so hard to like ‘Republic’ in 1993, and then they split up for a bit. I saw their comeback gig at Reading in 1998 and the drug-fuelled excitement of that propelled me through almost a decade of boring lumpen albums, average gigs and desperate longing for something even remotely as good as their 80s output. When they came back yet again as a pension-padding greatest hits juggernaut in 2010 I did a couple of gigs but that was it really.
You managed a four pack of Special Brew, DW? I never even got through a single can. Horrible stuff.
-sean
DW - The Walking Dead is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind with this question.
BT - Moore’s Swamp Thing never ceased being good. It just had not-great art for the second half of its run.
Sean - yes!
Frank Miller in the 90s!
I kept buying Sin City and Martha Washington right through until about 1998! Dreadful stuff.
Even though the very first issue of Give Me Liberty was excellent, the second dropped in quality so drastically it was difficult to believe (though 1990 was when Miller really did fully believe his own hype, and he never recovered).
Why did I hang around so long?
I was interested in the whole forward motion of popular music thing as a youngster, starting with the horrible post-punk noise that was around when I first started going to record shops, and onto dub reggae, (mainly German) electronic music, Captain Beefheart, P-funk, and Afro-Beat, then the emerging hip-hop sound from America and on into the house and rave explosion in the late 80s.
But I definitely bailed on all that around the time Jungle became Drum 'n' Bass. Which seemed to be around when the culture itself seemed to lose interest. Once all that stuff was covered in the Guardian and the Times, rather than fanzines and a weekly music press that grew out of underground papers, it all became a bit boring.
So perhaps my timing was right. Or maybe it was just my age.
I have always tried to resist growing up, but even so... by the 21st century an interest in the finer points of Glo-Fi, Chillwave, and Dubstep seemed unbecoming.
So I concentrated on my parallel interest in jazz instead. Thats always cool, right?
-sean
Matthew - yes, the first issue of Give Me Liberty was promising. But it pretty quickly disappointed, and it became obvious Miller and Gibbons could get away with any old sh*t because of who they were.
Although in fairness to Fearless Frank, I liked Hard Boiled. Mind you, Geoff Darrow did the heavy lifting on that.
Why did we hang around?
I think its like smoking rocks - you think just one more, but you don't get the same hit again and keep chasing after it. Er, so I'm told.
-sean
Matthew, I did reply about Fearless Frank, but my comment disappeared. Maybe it'll turn up later.
-sean
I didn’t get on with Hard Boiled from the off. The art was… fancy but boring. All that detail and no movement or storytelling skill.
I seem to recall picking up the first 2 issues of GML and the first of HB on the same day and reading them with mounting disappointment.
Luckily I picked up the first issue of From Hell later that week so some cosmic balance was restored.
With interests, I don't think I make an active choice to bail; I think the interest seems to fade away on its own, somehow (usually.)
Music - I'm not fanatical really. Nevertheless, at junior school, after initially thinking ABBA was a girls' thing, I got into ABBA in a big way, at the tail end of juniors & early high school. Soon afterwards ABBA folded, anyway. Through the mid-80s, general pop was mostly what was on the radio. In the Sixth form, however, my bro & myself were into Fleetwood Mac. After the Sixth form, that faded away, somehow.
With Marvel, Daredevil & Cap Britain were faves. However, characters being retconned, my brother continued with Marvel (to some extent), but I was completely turned off. The Union Jack Cap B had silly art, with grinning villains like playing cards - making a mockery of a character I liked. That was how I saw it. After all the raving about Miller's DD, I tried the Bullseye/Elektra stuff (retrospectively, much later on), but didn't like it. It wasn't the character I liked. Elektra was supposed to be cool, but seemed rubbish to me. Bullseye likewise. My brother was getting a lot of the Ron Lim Silver Surfer/Thanos stuff in the early 90s. Again, I thought it was rubbish. No decent inking to improve the art, either.
Getting super cheap chess books - an interest that faded away. Moorcock's writing going down the U-bend - that faded away. Saul Bellow was a writer I used to be obsessed with - perhaps more than any other - but that faded away. I still remember that time very fondly though. Many others, if I dredged my memory.
dangermash's joke - I'm going to commit that to memory. An excellent joke for deadpan delivery!
Phillip
Sean, definitely 2 or 3 cans. Worse, as I recall they were warm. A foul concoction.
Matthew, I too follow creators rather than characters. A publishers nightmare, as you say.
Phillip, are you referring to the Alan Davis era of CB? I remember browsing the first issue of Daredevils and thinking ‘was he better when he had a big stick?’, but once you read the story it was pretty compelling.
DW
DW - After an internet search, the playing card character is 'The Knave', so yes - the Alan Davis era - or a preview of that era - is what it was. According to everyone on SDC, Davis was very good, so - like you suggest - I could have given AD a chance. However, at the time, my prejudices against it were too strong. The grinning faces didn't even resemble Marvel characters, to me. As Stewie Griffin once declared, "I don't like change..."
Phillip
Phillip, give the Moore/Davis Captain Britain run a go at some point. If even I can enjoy a series about some fella wrapped in a union jack, sure everyone will.
-sean
Like Sean I gave up on TV but it took me longer to do it. I discovered Radio 4 around the age of 30 (1996 or so) and never looked back. If only I could erase the memory of all the crap TV I watched.
I clung on to cash for much too long. My bank provided me with a debit card which I never used until the pandemic came along and then I discovered how much easier paying by card is. But in Tesco this morning the self-service checkouts were playing up and it took me two attempts to pay so obviously paying by card can have its' problems!
Its mad to abandon cash, Colin. Unless we're talking about replacing the current economic system with an anarcho-communist workers paradise.
Anyway, as regular Steve Does Comics commenters will know, I'm not normally one to go off topic here. But in light of the forthcoming US election I feel I have to warn our American friends about something I just found out, courtesy of Fox News.
Scientists say that if you're a man and vote for a woman, you will transition into a woman!
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1818457133752434808
I knew it! Ever since I voted for a black woman to be my MP in the recent UK election, I have felt my inner sista.
I wonder when the change will come.
-sean
Sean - Starhawk regularly changed to Aleta - so maybe they voted for a female candidate on their home world!
Phillip
Don’t fight it, sean. Once we Closet Cat-ladies take over, the world will be a much better place.
b.t.
Thanks for the topic, Anon.
I'm clearly far too pragmatic for my own good because i can't remember ever having clung onto anything for longer than I should have.
As for abandoning things while the going was good, I must confess I gave up on Lost two episode into Season 2 when it became apparent they were just making it up as they went along.
Steve, I did exactly the same thing with LOST, and for the exact same reason. Except I think I may have abandoned ship one episode earlier. I remember the Season One finale being a long drawn-out episode that seemed to be promising answers to some of the show’s mysteries, but instead ended with the beginning of another enigmatic mystery. I told myself I’d tune in for the Season 2 premiere and if I still felt like they were making it all up on the fly, I’d pull the plug. It did feel that way , and I did stop watching the series.
b.t.
Pretty late to this party , but I'll chime in anyway.
I stuck with "Walking Dead" much longer than I should have. Finally got tired of waiting for some kind of resolution.
Likewise, I kept following "Amazing Spider-Man " well past reason. Over the years, there were still good stories, but they seemed less and less frequent.
Some might say I'm sticking with compact discs beyond any reason, but they still beat the alternatives, imho. Plus they gave me something to look for at flea markets besides comics (which are ever scarcer to find in bargain boxes)...
Sean- thanks for the tip about the risks of voting! I'll still risk it, as a bohemian liberal arty type I'm already in touch with my feminine side anyway. But one still must wonder, why shouldn't the women voting for a male candidate then be concerned about possible machismatic consequences?
Ah, the Neverending fun of politics...
I popped into the Notting Hill comics exchange shop and right at the front of the comics box on the floor were back issues of Captain Britain monthly. Issue 1 was £10, the rest slightly less.
So not exactly Lee/Kirby prices but still more than I got for them 20 years ago.
At the front of another box was Hard Boiled issue 1, which felt eerily like someone was monitoring this comments thread.
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