Beamslingers 5 Apr 2014 I have finally compiled Hazel and my posts about Young Avengers (and matters related) into a series - you should be able to see it there at the side when…
Marvel Comics: A Character Guide 10 Feb 2015 Marvel Comics' famed innovation in the 1960s was introducing characters who were "human" with "relatable flaws" as opposed to the super-icons of rivals DC. These relatable flaws gave each Marvel…
Grand Designs 13 Aug 2013 Avengers #1-17; New Avengers #1-8 by Jonathan Hickman et al. Marvel's Avengers and New Avengers comics at the moment remind me a lot of Dragonlance-era D&D, where the whole plot…
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2014: #25-#11 11 Jan 2015 "Wotcher, HUMES! Sewer robot RO-JAWS here, taking time out from cleaning THARG'S CLUDGEY to bring you the second part of the 2014 Freaky Trigger comics poll. And MANKEY MOSES, it's…
It Was Fifty Years Ago Today Sgt Loki Taught The Band To Play 31 Jan 2013 Another in our series of posts on Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers comic. The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” came out in August 1963, started building radio play, then…
Cheers for three sweet Avengers 25 Jul 2013 [IMPORTANT TIMESTREAM INSTABILITY NOTE: This is not about the current issue of Young Avengers. This is an old thing about issue #2 that I'm just slipping in here because my…
The Jackpot 31 May 2013 A Brief History Of Teen Superhero Comics, Part 4 It’s probably the most famous panel in 60s Marvel history. A gag, a cliffhanger, a revolution. A young woman standing in…
About the Author
Tom invented Freaky Trigger on a bus journey in the mid-90s. A page about what he's up to can be found here
10 Jul 2000
The Pokemon Phenomenon This piece was going to be an unabashed paean to Pokemania, explaining what a cracking game it was and how the mass tweener hysteria which greets every fresh Pokegame, cardset, pillow-case, or doily was a good thing inasmuch as ten-year-olds are natural obsessives and it wasn’t like they were wasting their time […]
5 May 2011
#667, 13th July 1991 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I […]
1 Sep 2002
I don’t think much of the idea of ‘guilty pleasures’ but there’s guilt and there’s guilt, isn’t there? There’s guilt for something you might be doing wrong – breaking some invisible law of taste, maybe – and that guilt you can and should kick aside. But then there’s guilt for the things you have done, […]
13 Aug 2008
#428, 18th November 1978 “Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite […]
10 Jul 2017
#924, 4th May 2002 At The Disco A scene from Phonogram III: The Immaterial Girl, by Gillen, McKelvie and Wilson, published in 2015. It’s the early 00s, at a disco somewhere in the south of England. A group of people who love music so much it’s become their life and the tools of their craft […]
28 Jul 2009
Here’s something I did for fun yesterday: a graph showing the % of UK #1 hits with female lead vocals, year by year. (Shared male/female leads counted half)*. (Click on it if you want it a bit clearer). The red bars are the percentage of female leads for each year. The line is a trendline […]
21 Dec 2009
Well, that’s that: the machine has been given a good beating and we can look forward to “Bulls On Parade” on the festive Argos ad next year. I will admit I didn’t think the RATM crew could do it: I was wrong. But as the dust settles on this most fractious and increasingly entertaining Christmas […]
15 Dec 2009
One of the things that’s fascinating about the UK Top 40 is that a device designed to be a pure expression of popularity also works as a reflection of so many other things. People buy songs: if enough people buy a song it gets into the charts, or to #1. Simple! But so simple that […]
