‘ST: One last thing, when you hear people say, “Let’s nuke ’em,” “Let’s nuke these people,” [al-Qaeda] what do you think?

PT: Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ’em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: “You’ve killed so many civilians.” That’s their tough luck for being there.’

At an important time in my life, between the ages of 12 and 19, I was practically autistic at home. I had a lot of fun at a boys school during the day but evenings were grim beyond Morrissey’s most rueful yodellings, spent huddled in our flat above the Finefare, drawing my own homemade comic books and writing fantasy novels with cock in hand (see Flex Mentallo #3 ).

I just re-read a bunch of Doom Patrols and they were fucking brilliant. I’m a little ashamed that I would never dare end the X-Men on a full-page cliffhanger featuring a floating pyramid and a Satanic Noel Coward lookalike with a periscope in his head shouting the words “REVERTH MY BUTTOCKTH SERGEANT MAJOR!”

[Crisis on Infinite Earths] made for a great maxi-series and possibly the best, most apocalyptic superhero crossover ever. Ten billion characters screaming as entire universes caught fire. George Perez was the John Martyn of comics and there was a sense of genuine threat and armageddon. It seemed like the most important event of all time (unless you’d been there for the death of Jean Grey, which fucked with me more, sleek and romantic and 21 by this time. I wept silent tears as Scott and Jean held hands and ran out to face certain death on the moon. Lying on a park bench beside Hyde Park in the sun at 8 a.m., I penned a tear-stained paean to mutantism. Me in Chelsea boots, drainpipe trousers, fluffy moptop, with The Winds of Chaos, my first novel in a folder in my attache case. “Dear Chris, I cried for Jean Grey …”

‘JP: What about comics is driving you nuts right now?

FM: “Crying Fireman” comics. Golly, we all got plenty emotional after 9/11, and a lot of us did some plenty emotional work. But at least we knew when to stop. Now Marvel seems to have turned it into a goddamn cottage industry. Ghoulish. Shameful. It reminds me of the old saw that every American tragedy winds up turning into a farce.’

‘The Killer was elemental Woo, the template that has relentlessly infused much of his subsequent work. A super-abundance of picturesque violence props up the usual conflict of good and evil, in which we are invited to observe not so much the clash of black and white, but the shades of grey that lie between the protagonists. Hero and villain become interchangeable; creatures of the same culture, victims of the amorphous pressures put upon them by a wicked world, equally beset by guilt, shame and regret, similarly capable of acts of selfless nobility, brothers under the skin. The hitman and the cop are two fingers on the same hand. In other words, it is a buddy movie. Add to that the love interest: the girl is a veritable apotheosis of anorak sexual longing – she is beautiful, lonely, isolated and, best of all, she is blind. No button is left unpushed. You get the car ‘n’ speedboat chases, innocent kiddies caught in the crossfire, a spectacular gun battle in God’s House with His statuettes exploding all over the shop, a close-up euthanasia shot (very matey) and a grande finale of Woo’s special trademark, white doves fluttering over the carnage. Phew.’

‘The professor looked down at his new young lover, who rested fitfully, lashed as she was with duct tape to the side of his stolen hovercraft, her head lolling gently in the breeze, and as they soared over the buildings of downtown St. Paul to his secret lair he mused that she was much like a sweet ripe juicy peach, except for her not being a fuzzy three-inch sphere produced by a tree with pink blossoms and that she had internal organs and could talk.’

‘I know a lot of creators really hate the Internet because it’s an unedited forum where readers can tell you what they’re really thinking and share this view with hundreds of thousands of people. They’re also down on it because the ‘net provides spontaneous response and people say the kind of things they might reconsider if they were to put it all in a letter and mail it. However, I think the Internet has become the lifeblood of the industry and it’s at the absolute heart of the recovery we’re experiencing at the moment.’

• Blogjam: ‘…the Internet has turned me slowly from an outgoing, gregarious, popular fellow into a shallow, reclusive computer dweeb with very few remaining friends, and blogjam is the nearest thing to a serious relationship I’ve had in some time. In summary, I think blogjam warrents some recognition for putting up with me. It’s the very least she deserves.’ [via Wherever You Are]
• Blogadoon: ‘I suspect Blogadoon is too strong on cock and spite, too weak on tech and eye-candy to rate well in any kind of mainstream beauty contest.’

• Gentle giant? ‘…the corporation is a many-tentacled monster that would be unrecognisable to wireless entrepreneurs of the early 1920s. It has staff numbers that would dwarf many a small city and an annual income of £3.16bn that, if it was a country, would make it a rival of the GDP of Iceland or Mongolia. Plainly the BBC has more global clout than either country. There is no 24-hour rolling news network pumped out from Rekyavik or Ulan Bator. The BBC has more world-class orchestras than either Iceland or Mongolia, and possibly both. Neither has a publicly funded news website that can draw on the journalistic talents of one of the biggest multimedia news-gathering teams in the world. Neither has a film industry that would bear comparison with BBC Films. Neither has Nicky Campbell enjoining people to “join the nation’s conversation” on Radio 5 Live or Anne Robinson debasing that conversation by means of scripted insults on a vile, though extremely popular, game show.’
• Boxing clever: Greg’s debt to John … ‘The air of despair that descended during the dark days of John Birt has been lifted; where once there was discord, Saint Dyke of White City sows harmony. “I remember going to my first meeting of the executive committee and hearing laughter coming out of the door,” cooed the corporation’s new director of television, Jana Bennett, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph last week. “I assumed I was in the wrong place. But when I peeked in, there they all were – and they were actually enjoying themselves.” Over at doom-laden ITV, the only sounds are the scraping of chins dragging along the floor and the occasional splash as another executive jumps ship. At Channel 4 it’s worse: hundreds are waiting to pick up their P45s as Mark Thompson claws back the excesses of recent years.’

‘In many respects he embodies all that is supposed to be politically unacceptable in a modern prime minister. He’s an outrageous toff and an image consultant’s disaster area. What’s more, he has no man-of-the-people credentials at all. Yet, assuming another election defeat, after the disappointment of a decade of William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, the Tories may well be in the mood for a wild card. The electorate will eventually tire of the joyless puritanism of the Blair-Brown regime. If the Tories want to play the joker, Boris could be their man.’

‘I’m saying, you simpleton, that to claim that the RSPCA is wasting its time complaining about the welfare of animals while people are dying all over the world, when your own life is so utterly and comically meaningless, is hypocrisy. Or, more precisely, stupidity.’

‘Mr Dan, where do you live? If it’s London, I’d love to meet up for a (non-alcoholic) drink. You seem like an interesting fellow.’