"Comics" and "Graphic Novels", definitions

 It started innocently enough. Someone on a forum I'm on just asked the question as to what the terms meant and what the difference was in the context of a discussion of a particular genre (horror in that instance) and while it does seem like a fairly simple thing to ask and explain, to do so actually requires a little bit of digging into the history of the art-form and strikes at a fundamental issue with it, i.e.  that in spite of four decades of a counter cultural movement in its favour for recognition many still see it as an innately childish genre.

Its also a question I've seen asked and have personally answered many times before so this post to my own blog is essentially so I have the answer down in one place handy to send to the next person who asks.

The preferred term is sequential art. We're talking about a series of pictures, anything from two to potentially infinity, arranged in a specific order to express something, like to tell a story or invoke a feeling or idea. This might or might not also include text though usually does. The general public however have been calling this art form "comics" for more than a century. This comes from when news papers would have short 2-4 panel "comic strips" (so called because they were typically meant to be amusing diversions from the daily news, and aka The Funnies) alongside the text, which some enterprising publishers started putting into "comic books" to sell on their own without the accompanying news articles etc.

Although this came to encompass may other genre, popular ones being horror, war, crime, romance and of course Superheros, "comic books" still stuck for the format. In most of the english speaking world these were and remained popular from the 20s onwards. In the 1950s there was a bizarre moral panic in the United states about juvenile delinquency and the effects of these comic books on the fragile minds of the youth which led to congressional hearings and the industry shitting itself and self-censoring anything that wasn't explicitly for children (this would be repeated elsewhere in the anglosphere by Communist Party front organisations, and if that sounds like I'm crazy or making this up, I fucking wish). This killed off most of everything except superhero comics put out by the Big 2, who would become DC and Marvel who instituted the Comics Code, which committed them to not put out anything remotely adult or even YA.

This state of affairs would continue for decades (in the English speaking world, South America, Continental Europe and most notably Japan always had and continue to have thriving varied comics scenes), with some exceptions in the underground and indie press. What happened eventually, to really simplify things, was writers who came up through 2000AD in Britain from the counterculture, starting with Alan Moore would give the entire industry a huge shot in the arm and actually write for the big American publishers with a level of sophistication and a subversive ethos that was lacking. It was still superhero stuff but they were bringing the psychedelia and the punk attitude, and some technical innovations to the storytelling itself. This eventually got picked up by the mainstream media who coined the term "Graphic Novel" to differentiate stuff like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns from the kiddie shit, long soap operas with guys in pyjamas and capes beating each other up. It would also get applied to Maus and retroactively to previous attempts to do more adult work in the medium, like A Contract With God.

Also, in most mainstream book retailers something you'll see labelled and sold as Graphic Novels collections of works originally sold as individual issues of 24 page comic books where a complete story line or "arc" that tells a relatively self contained narrative is put into one volume. In the west these are more precisely referred to as Trade Paper Backs or TPBs, though that's an industry term and Graphic Novel or comic are as good as any. I only really include it here for the sake of completion. In Manga culture when you see the similar thing of serialised stories taken out of their respective periodicals (Manga tend to be sold in huge compilations, a bit like 2000AD but much larger, Shonen  Jump and Animage being two important ones) some like to use the Japanese word Tankebon.

Personally I use sequential art as much as I can but only where appropriate, its the correct term but is really only known to those already acquainted. Most of the time though I'll use Comics as its what most people know. I don't like "Graphic Novel" except when specifically referring to something that has been written in a long format to tell a single contained story, i.e. like a novel, because there's an implied snobbery and hierarchy over mere "comics".

Things I Enjoyed in 2024

 

Having made and successfully kept my New Years resolution of last year (which I’ll get onto) this years is to write more and actually use the blog. Even if at this point blogging is a dead art form and nobody is reading this stuff or likely to make me even a modicum of “internet-famous”, it’ll at least alleviate the mild guilt I feel about not having written. This is essentially just for me, but I hope it’ll be something at least a couple of people might get something out of. 

This is going to take the format of a SuperEyepatchWolf season roundup video. Maybe not as good (I wish I had the work ethic that guy has tbh). This is really more about cataloguing and recording where I am with certain things. It will contain a mixture of things that are brand new in the sense that they came out this year, as well as a few things that will be noted as such that came out in previous years but I only got to experience this year for the first time.

In No Order:

Gaming:

So I’ve kind of stopped playing new computer games. I got back into gaming over the pandemic, got a PS4, played everything I’d been hearing about and wanting to play for years. It was great, but before the start of last year I kind of ran right out of steam. All I want out of games now is something diverting I can do with my hands while I listen to the sort of podcasts I actually want to listen to beginning to end and not use as a sleep aid. I’m still playing Streets of Rage 4, always the Survival Mode from the DLC where you have one life and have to fight your way through increasing hordes of enemies in an enclosed environment while levelling up your core attributes or adding buffs to types of attacks. I’m also playing a cheap Pool simulator (its just Pool in an Unreal 4 engine) and Slay The Spire. To this I have very recently added Balatro, a game with Poker and making poker hands at its core. 

I did get back briefly into playing Magic The Gathering on Arena for a couple of months but that software is a piece of janky shit that after a certain update just became crash-y and unusable on both the devices I was using it on, and is basically unplayable on a mobile phone anyway, like how small the text is makes it functionally unusable unless you already know the cards by the cover art and don’t need to read what anything does. Yeah you fucked up there Wizards, you could have had me back suckling on your milky duds for the odd fix that beating up on people from across the world at Magic can give me, but you bollocksed it.

Podcasts:

Yeah I ought to say what podcasts I’ve been into listening to while gaming since I literally just mentioned they’re my entire reason for continuing to game. Chapo Trap House, I don’t agree 100% with everything they say but we hate a lot of the same things and they are genuinely good crack. They called the US election correctly and their coverage of the proceedings has been sterling in terms of making that whole mess explicable to someone like me over here with the rest of the world looking on at the absolute mess happening over there. TrashFuture, a podcast with a similar bent and humour but by queer Brits. The Only Podcast About Movies, slightly lighter fare but good analytical takes on mostly contemporary cinema. I also like, though don’t listen to quite as much as I did, RevLeftRadio – a Marxist podcast on a variety of subjects including; History, Current Affairs, Theory, Philosphy, Esoterica and hosted by a Canadian Maoist called Brett with a blessedly ecumenical approach to intra-left factionalism.

The ones I do listen to for sleep I do so not because they are boring or anything (it actually has to be interesting or it won’t hold my conscious attention, which is part of the trick I’m playing on myself), but because they are soothing and not likely to get me angry or excitable the way listening to stuff about politics generally will. These include; The Blindboy podcast - which I’ve been on since pretty early in the day, Ghibliotheque, A Podcast About Studio Ghibli - but has actually come to encompass all sorts of animated media and this year has covered the works of Makoto Shinkai, Linklaters animated films and the work of Nick Park, and The French Whisperer ASMR. Ghost Notes, a podcast broadly about music of all sorts from the two guys that do the Polyphonic and 12tone Youtube channels is the real best of both of those projects and the guys bounce off each other nicely.

YouTube:

This seems to follow on neatly from talking about Podcasts. Feels like I’m not coming across many new channels that are really grabbing my attention but I’ve got more than enough established favourites now to eat up as much of my spare time as I can throw at it. Novarra Media continues to be a good news resource. Iconic early video-essayist Every Frame a Painting returned after an 8 year hiatus with a whopping two new videos over four months, and it being an oldschool Youtube channel, these have been ten and five minutes respectively. Better than nothing, still great quality, one can hardly complain. 

Overly Sarcastic Productions and Extra Credits / Extra History continue to be an absolute joy in terms of delivering a weekly fix of good informative history and media-analysis. Red of OSP (the team don’t use real names, just colours like in Reservoir Dogs) is an absolute super-star, like if I could get to live in a house and hang out and just have the crack all day with anyone off the internet right now it would be Red by miles, hands down. 

Super Eyepatch Wolf, my distant cousin (maybe) whom I’ve already mentioned, continues to be one of the best things on the platform. I only saw his guest appearance on the Trash Taste Podast (not to be confused with Trash Future, a different trashy thing altogether) this year for the first time and it was an absolute joy and also got me into watching their stuff again which I had done in the past but bounced off for some reason. 

Fiq The Signifier's ongoing coverage of and eventual long form video essay on the Kendrick V Drake Beef that went on last spring and summer was absolutely magnificent. 

The Leftist Cooks, only managed 4 essays this year, fair enough considering they managed to conceive and birth a child between them and their essays are all feature length these days. Still killing it, really insightful and heartfelt with a lot of intellectual heft. This is maybe best exemplified in the video essay where they announce their good news itself, that sends Neil into a deep dive on the topic of anti-natalism to the point where he writes a book length refutation of David Benatar that you can buy from their patreon. Based.

Georg Rockall-Schmidt, the man is out here doing gods work. Some media analysis, just him talking movies or about stuff on TV with a reasonable amount of anti-corporate videos where he just goes ham on some particular set of capitalist bastards, be they Shein, Temu, The Sacklers, American Healthcare in general. I’m living for how snarky my boy is.

Less on the political side, the music channel Trash Theory (again, not to be confused with either Trash Future or Trash Taste) continues to be one of the most consistently entertaining and informative things on the platform. Its kind of a 90s nostalgia channel but he does cover other eras and some contemporary music. He always sounds genuinely enthused about whatever it is he's covering,  in a way that brings you along with him even if you're not mad into whatever the topic is yourself.

Music:

(Sigh). Y’know. I’ve not been on top of music at all. I’ve barely listened to anything new. I think when I stopped DJing or their being any prospect of me DJing much ever again, even for myself or to post online, that just lost my focus on finding new stuff. What I have been listening to, Cerys Matthews and Mark Radcliffe’s Blues and Folk shows on BBC Radio 2, Sherelle’s Saturday night shows on Radio 6 and other random bits and pieces on the BBC digital radio stations which I’ll generally have on as background when I’m doing my breakfast or dinner.

I loved the ØXN debut LP that came out in 2023. ØXN are a side project by Radie and the other non-Lynch member of Lankum that is if anything even darker and more Lankum-y than Lankum itself. I missed opportunities to get to see them play live this year, I literally didn’t make any festivals this year, to my shame.

What I did enjoy also that was actually from this year was Chelsea Wolfe’s latest album She Reaches Out to She where she’s still bringing the dark doom-metal-y goodness but has gone more industrial and a little trip-hop-y. She played Belfast on the tour for this one and I did get to see her, and she was great.

I did manage to get to a fair few nights and gigs about Belfast, and over to Glasgow with my sister to see Max Cooper’s big AV show. I think the best one might well have been getting to see Caribou live in the Telegraph building, which luckily for me has now been immortalised forever as it was a Boiler Room event.

TV: 

I’ve been on quite an animation tip this year. I’ve managed to finally get around to Star Vs The Forces of Evil and Amphibia on Disney as well as the masterful OK KO, Lets Be Heros!, of which I will not say too much other that they were really good since a couple of them may or may not feature on the return of a regular segment that has long been in hiatus on this corner of the internet. Arcane came through with a second and final season which while not quite up to the standard set by season one still fucking well kills dead near enough any other western animation series. 

I watched and mostly enjoyed The Dragon Prince, like I only started it this year not knowing that the final season was dropping in December. If I’d have known it was written by the Avatar The Last Airbender (which I did rewatch and loved all over again) team I probably would have got to it sooner tbh. If has what are for me some rough edges, the world is nowhere near as interesting or unique as Avatar, its just some guys DnD campaign – which is fine just not that original, I don’t like the occasional segues into goofy naturalistic dialogue. The tone shifts are jarring, to me at least, but not enough that I bounced off. It also falls for some ball achingly obvious tropes in storytelling. Its actually decent though and worth seeing. The animation style is really class, really pleasing to see something in 3d that is that old and doesn’t look like ass.

Speaking of tone shifts and a “some guys DnD campaign” setting, The Legend of Vox Machina was a whole heap of fun once again. The tone shifts were seamless and yes, this is literally a DnD Campaign turned into a series but they nailed the transition its just great fun.

Anime; I feel like I’ve rinsed the well of classics from the OVA era that I would care about. At least until Angel’s Egg makes it back to the big screens (maybe this year?). I have actually been enjoying some new stuff. NGL, those are some really basic picks for those in the know and will probably appear on most if not all anime commentators Best Of The Year lists. I will mostly just watch a small selection of the stuff I think sounds interesting from the handful of people I follow in the space and maybe see getting recommended on my socials. I’m not out here seeking out the really obscure stuff, I don’t think they still make much of the type of anime I like anymore, but the odd thing that filters through I get a lot of joy from.

Dan De Dan is one of the big anime series of this year and its not hard to see why. On paper the plot my make it appear to be more typical shonen weeb trash but it was done by Science Saru, the studio led by the guy that did Mind Game and who also did the Devilman Cry-Baby series a few years back. It scratches that itch for the genuinely unhinged shit that Anime has been lacking for a while. 

I really liked Frieren: Beyond The Journeys End, a very meditative and mostly glacially slowly paced fantasy series about an Elf mage who is, as elves are in fantasy, extremely long  lived, going on immortal that does have some great high fantasy magical combat in it but is mostly about the idea of human connections and what its like to live long enough to see your mates live and die while you stay essentially the same person. 

Less serious but equally good (better imo), Delicious In Dungeon. Like some of the other stuff I’ve been talking about it’s a very DnD-esque setting but it dares to ask questions that DnD players rarely ask in these last 50 odd years of the game, like what does dragon taste like? Does a gelatinous cube have any vitamins and minerals or is it just empty calories? Are the giant mushroom monsters that you have to fight some times going to kill you or get you high if you try to eat them or are they just a good source of zinc to the weary dungeon-crawling murder-hobo? You wouldn’t ear a person, probably not an Orc either but would Merefolk be more like fish or people, and is it ok to eat them? Its really just a good sprawling adventure fantasy with some great characters and also some interesting dissections of the notions of taboo and the value of good nutrition.

In terms of live TV, yeah there’s been some fire stuff out there. Something I only watched for the first time this year though it’s been out for a while; Wu Tang: An American Saga with the kid from the middle section of Moonlight as RZA I found and watched earlier in the year. Yeah it takes some liberties with the truth and leaves some stuff out for dramatic purposes (like RZA and ODB both had kids by the time the main plot starts, this does not come up at all) but it does their whole story and schtick really well. There’s three seasons, the third season isn’t quite as good just because the story itself IRL is less compelling than the coming together and coming up of these outsiders from Staten Island, seeing them get rich and famous and fall out with each other is not nearly as much fun. We are spared seeing Ason’s fall into madness and self destruction though that does somewhat hang over the narrative its not handled in a way that’s prurient or anything. 

Say Nothing, is yet another somewhat controversial take on actual historical events. This is about Sinn Fein / The Provos, the Finucane murders and the life of Dolours price. It managed to recreate the old Divis tower block accurately enough, down to the vibe, that it retraumatised my Mum who lived there during the events dramatized in the series. It’s good seeing something made about here with that sort of attention to detail and period accuracy, that also treats all sides reasonably fairly. Like there’s literal Gerry Adams in there as a low-key villain in the piece and he’s not some sort of moustache twirling cartoon. Shame that they blew a lot of the good will in a completely unnecessary plot point in the last episode that only seems to be in there for the sake of a Bad TV Writing climactic reveal involving one of the few players in the narrative that’s still alive and as I write is in the process of suing Disney. Worth watching in spite of all that.

The new series of Interview With A Vampire kept up the quality of the first and was if anything even better than the first. That show does a lot right, the fifth episode about the circumstances of the actual first interview that fills in a lot of Molloy’s character and story was just edge of the seat stuff from beginning to end. Like if you know the book or the film, you know exactly what happens to Claudia and Louis in Paris and you just spend the season waiting for the other shoe to drop, but this was unique to the series (afaik) and made for really gut-wrenching emotive TV. 

Books:

I was mostly using Duolingo to learn gaeilgé in my down time this year. I got the paid version after getting my first bit of paid work of the year and have finished the Irish course (standard Irish though, not Ulster unfortunately). That and The Mists Of Avalon being a long slog, and not just because of the length of the book or the writing style (see my review), I didn't really get reading nearly as much this year as usual. I did hit my years reading goals of finishing the three series I'd stated in the previous couple by reading the final books in the series. These were Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky (a good cap to the trilogy but the first book definitely rocks the others, okay to read on its own), Ancillary Mercy, which finishes the trilogy out well but doesn’t add a whole lot to the last ones in terms of world building and Emperor of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay which is the second of his books about Sarantium, the Byzantium of his fictional universe that runs analogous to our own medieval and ancient history but isn’t and so gives him license to tinker with the world building and throw in some magic and supernatural elements. It was pretty good, probably best read straight after part one Sailing To Sarantium and not a year-ish apart like I did it. 

Other things I read and liked included Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, the latest Blindboy Boatclub collection Topographia Hibernica which only came out 2023, and the collection of shorts by Norman Spinrad from the 1960s No Direction Home.

Comics / graphic novels, wise I read Bone for the first time. Its cool, like very a typical high fantasy that just happens to have three Fleischer Bros. / Old Disney cartoon characters as the Hobbits that bungle their way into the scenario. I also started Berserk, completed the first volume of the big over-sized collected editions just before the end of the year. I am already digging the vibe and we’re only just getting to what most people agree is The Good Bit, the first part of The Golden Age is what that edition finishes on.

Best book though was Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. A new book from this year that is not his first non-Tingler as in actual proper novel but is the first one I’ve read and its incredibly good. Easily as good an exploration of Queer people’s relationship with certain types of media and place in that media as I Saw The TV Glow (which tbf I also liked a lot, even if it didn’t make my top 10). The prose is a constant pleasure, readable while also being wry and funny, scary or disturbing where it needs to be. It has a lot of heart in it too. Its also low-key based AF, as in the subtext is almost pure Marxism. I’m not sure if that’s exactly where Chuck is coming from but I see it and even if unconscious its definitely in there.

Movies:

I already have a top ten for the year up on my Letterboxd. Just to reiterate what I said there, Kneecap was my favourite of the year closely followed by The Substance. When I get to my favourites of this decade these will definitely both be in there. I am very much the target audience of Kneecap, or course I’m going to love it. I have been semi-adjacent to that life in my own city for parts of my own, some of the stuff in the film literally happened to my mates, I’ll not say what so as not to implicate anyone living or dead but it is very close to my heart, even if I know for a fact that they aren’t the complete spides they make themselves out to be or the best rappers on the local scene (though they are definitely the best at doing it bilingually and best at promoting themselves). The Substance gave me everything my body-horror loving degenerate arse could ever wish for in a film, a very straight-forwards feminist allegory that goes bat shit in the last act and is really gross, people were leaving. People left my showing like 20 minutes before the end, that never happens but they must have just been like “yeah I’m already two hours into this thing and we are close to the end but this is already way past my comfort zone and is just going to get worse from here – I’m out”. Normally I would decry such behaviour as weakness but in this case I say fair play to those people. It did just keep getting worse.

We had a lot of other great films this year, see the list. A few of the big Awards-bait movies from last year that dropped in January here were, right enough, some of the best most interesting, medium pushing and generally great films of the year, Poor Things, Zone of Interest, All Of Us Strangers, The Holdovers really had us spoiled. It was a good year for horror - Oddity, Longlegs, In A Violent Nature, Stop Motion. Big Popcorn actioners gave us Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, Dune 2 and Deadpool Vs Wolverine (which was essentially a Zucker Brothers screwball comedy set in the current Marvel comic book movie landscape). Not such a good year imo for animated features, 2022 and 2023 really had us spoiled, but The First Slam Dunk was very enjoyable, we got a new Wallace and Gromit film which was awesome and my favourite animated film of the year Robot Dreams was an absolute joy. It was though a good year for Irish cinema. I’ve already sung Kneecap’s praises (did I mention just how viscerally funny it all is? No? Well it’s hilarious), but we also did have Small Things Like These and That They May Face The Rising Sun, which was incredible and will hopefully bring John McGahern’s legacy and work to a new generation of people across the world.

 

I think that just about covers everything I feel it’s necessary to say. As I said up top I’m trying to get back into updating this thing a bit more regularly. I have a steady enough job now I could see going for a wee while that could give me the sort of schedule I could see myself building a decent routine around that might lead to me being able to do more writing. Here’s hoping anyway so watch this space. 

Christmas At the Sharp End

A short story I wrote for my creative writing class a couple of years ago.  Briefly e-published, now available here for free to anyone who wants to read it...

Christmas at the Sharp End

            We started at about three in the afternoon.  We wanted to get the obligatory long-distance phone call to the folks out of the way early enough.  Well, I say phone call, Baz’s brother was technologically savvy enough to have Skype so he was able to make a free call over the internet.  Mine cost me a fortune, but it was good talking to my Ma.

            Me and Barry got up before noon because if we’d got up any earlier on Christmas day it would have been a bit too depressing.  Our flatmate was away with his girlfriend and we were happy enough to be rid of him.  If he had somebody to be with then good luck to him.  Like us, he was a stranger in a strange land, though he was born in this country he was from the other side of it and as much a blow in as myself, from a shitty wee estate in a shitty wee town at the edge of Belfast and Baz, a dirty Dub but a good lad all the same.

            We pottered about the flat with some kid’s Christmas film blaring in the background and generally gave the place a bit of a square round before the other two came.  We knew it was going to get extremely messy later but it didn’t seem cool to just leave it as it was.  We’d no tree but we had a few lights up around the walls.  They were actually there from Halloween and were shaped like pumpkins and Witches Hats but somehow they looked the part.

            I still had half a take-away box of Chicken Noodles from the Christmas-Eve carry out so I nuked them in the microwave and ate them in front of the big widescreen TV we had in the flat.  Not exactly the best Christmas breakfast I’ve ever had but it tasted good and was a bit better than the “meat” pie Barry had in the oven.  We ate our stuff and watched the Bill Murray classic Scrooged.  Great movie, must have seen it dozens of times but it was only that time when I was watching it that I realised that the title of the film was a sort of play on the word “Screwed”.

            About halfway through the film, in the middle of the scene where the guy with the big ugly face that used to be in that American punk band, you know the one Malcom McLaren managed before the ‘Pistols, anyway your man that was doing the cabbie-Ghost-of-Christmas-Past takes Bill Murray back to his childhood, and the door goes.  It’s Aleks, the guy that lives in the bedsitter upstairs.  He’s from some place in one of the nastier countries at the fringes of Europe, bit like ourselves, just the other end of the continent.  We don’t know him too well but we knew he’d be kicking around that flat on his own upstairs being all miserable and killing our buzz if we didn’t have him down here with us.  Besides at least he seems to have got the message about what we were at, he’d brought his own drink for it and his face lit up when he saw we were watching Scrooged.

            “Yes, this is good one, with the Ghost-buster.  You put on Sub-titles?  I read in English better.”

            Normally I can’t stand subtitles they distract me from what’s on screen and every little difference between what comes up and what’s said grates at me, but you know ‘Christmas’ and all that, so I was like; “Aye, why not?”.

            Around the end of the film where Bobcat Goldthwait was chasing Bill Murray around with a shotgun we had another knock at the door.  This time it was Adé.  Adé is one of the Nigerians from work.  He wouldn’t be one of our partyin’ crowd, but he would knock about with me and Barry and our mates in the warehouse, eat his lunch with us.  For some reason he doesn’t get on with the other Nigerians, different tribe or religion or something, same-shit-as-we-get-at-home sort-of-thing, but he’s a good lad and when I explained what we’d be doing he was well up for it.

            As the film died to the strains of that “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” song, I nodded at Barry to get his attention.

            “Anything else on?” I said.  He surfed a bit through the channels.  We didn’t have the best package for ourselves but we had a couple of hundred channels easy.

            “Nuthin’.  Just a laod a Christmas family shoite”.

            “Well” says I, this time to the room in general, “are we havin’ a party here or what?”.

            This pronouncement was met with general applause.  The TV went off and I put on the CD of cheesy electronic covers of Christmas classics I had randomly bought for a laugh a couple of years ago.  To be fair to it, for an impulse buy it had worked out sweet, we played the absolute fuck out of it that first year and it was always on at our Christmas parties now.  Luckily for me the first track, a Euro-Trance version of Silent Night, had a nice slow build-up, which gave me just enough time to do the wee speech I had prepared for the occasion.

            “Well, you boys all know the score.  Wee Christmas party, we all bring our own drink but we all bring a little something we can share with the rest of the group, and since this is my party I’m hoping you boys don’t mind if I go first”.

            Not waiting for a reply, I took the small mirror we had on the fire place off the stand and put it on the table.  I took the bags of white powder out of my pocket and dropped them on the table.

            “That there is three grams of Mephadrome, the very last of the good stuff.”  I opened one of the bags and poured the substance onto the mirror.  “Now you see the way it’s not exactly powder, kind of like big crystals?  That, if you care to remember before last summer, was ‘the good shit’.”  I took out an old store card from a chain of music retailers back home which had long since bit the dust in the credit crunch, the card I kept for these occasions, and began to grind the crystal shards into a fine dust.  “I got a good ounce of this in off the internet before it was banned over here, twenty eight grams, sold a load of it and took a serious load of it myself.”  The powder was now fine enough so I started to chop it up in preparation for doing lines.  “Never made that much off it but hey whatever, kept me partying for a wee while, and now that’s all that’s left.”  I chopped the entire gram into four long thin lines, which I adjusted, then re-cut, then moved a small quantity from one line to the other, then realised I’d overcompensated and mixed them all in together to start over again and repeated the process.  “Could have sold these a long time ago, or cut them and made a wee packet, but I wanted to save them for a special occasion”.

When I was satisfied I stood up and took a step back from the table. 

“Anybody got a note on them?”

Aleks nodded in assent.

“You’re up first then, big-boy.”

Aleks took a nice crisp fresh one from his wallet that he must have just got from a bank-machine and rolled it into a perfect tube.  With a goofy smile on his face he addressed himself to the table, breathed in, let a long slow breath out then went down and hoofed a whole line in one go.

He whinced a little and his eyes watered but his smile burst into a full-on beamer.  “Reminds me of the old country on a fresh day in spring.”

Impressed at his fortitude, I went next.  I somehow came at the line at a weird angle and left a bit, but I got the rest on the next pass.  It stung like a high-dive bellyflop into the most chlorinated pool in the world.  Hits you right between the eyes.  It hurt damn good but I liked it because that’s how you know it’s pure.  I got that heady Meph-rush for the first time in a long time and the ache in my knee died.  Ah its dirty stuff, but I love it and now it’s gone.

Adé went next.  I can only think he didn’t know what we were doing or saw the way we took to it and didn’t know what to expect or something.  He drew in about a third of the line and stood with a look of shock and surprise on his face.  He rubbed the nostril he’d been using in obvious pain and his eyes were bloodshot.

“Woah, easy there big lad” I said, “if you’re not use to it you just take your time with it sure.”

“In old country we say ‘The pain make you strong, is the pain that make it good!’”.  That Aleks, he can be a funny bastard some times.  I don’t believe for a minute that anyone ever actually says stuff like that where he’s from but every time he’s out with us he always finds some way to come out with some crack like that about “Old Country”, usually something completely ridiculous, and it gets me every time.

I took the bottle of clove oil I kept in the place out of the drawer and passed it to Adé.  “Sniff that, it’ll take the edge off”, I says, and it did.

Suitably chastened, Adé picked up the note and went back in for round two with the line.  Took him a few goes but he got there.  Unlike Baz who went straight for it, no note no nothing, just smacked his nose to the glass and snootered the whole thing.

We were all feeling pretty good about ourselves after those lines so we all grabbed another drink and shot the shit for a wee bit.  I did us all some shots out of my bottle of absinthe and Aleks told us all the story of losing his virginity to some wee snow-maiden in his home town back in ‘Old Country’, and near dying of exposure because the only place they could find to do it was outdoors, then nearly dying again when her Da found out and went after him.

 I knew what Barry had for the party, he had managed to get a gram of Ket and some really good green.  All good stuff, especially since Ketamine has been like gold-dust this weather, but more for the inevitable wind down and we had many hours of Christmas to get through before that would be happening.  I asked Adé, “so big lad, what all did you bring for the us?”.

“It is on its way, it will be here around ten tonight.  I’ll get a text message then I’ll go get”.

I didn’t like hearing that because there was always the half chance he was pure going to get in on whatever we’d all brought then be all like “sorry guys, it didn’t come”, but he had a look on him like he knew something we didn’t and he was lovin’ it.  I reckoned there probably was something on its way right enough. He was blatantly bustin’ to tell us but he didn’t want to ruin the surprise.  Anyway, at worst he’d have to buy us all a drink to make it up to us somewhere down the line.  Whatever it was it would have to wait so I asked Aleks for his contribution to the festivities.

This turned out to be a bag of really good ecstasy tablets.  These weren’t the usual crap pills that were going round either.  They were white with blue flecks through them, were slightly bigger than the one’s I’d been seeing recently and had an exclamation mark stamped into them.  God bless him, he didn’t know how many of us there were going to be so he bought ten of them.  We split two into half, then banged one and a half each so we would all have one left for later.  They were tremendous, they hit me like a freight train and had me tripping, which I haven’t done on pills since I was a teenager.

By this time the TV had picked up, Die Hard was on one of the foreign language channels but it was subtitled over English (thank god).  Not that that would have mattered, I must have seen that film about a hundred times or more.  It was one of my favourites when I was a kid, and I could probably act in it by now.  Actually, a badly dubbed Die Hard with us filling in the dialogue might have been good fun but alas it was not to be.

We watched away at Die Hard drank our drinks, polished off another gram of ‘drome in little coke-lines and smoked cigarette after cigarette, enjoying every minute of it.  At about quarter past ten Adés phone went.  By now I was quite curious to see what he had coming fir him.  So he makes his apologies and nips off, then comes back in about 5 minutes.  Instead of bringing a wee bag or a wrap of something, or I dunno like, a bunch of big dudes with sawn-offs to stroke all our stuff and merk the whole lot of us, he brings this girl in.  Pretty wee thing, big heart face and a button nose.  When she took her rain-drenched faux-fur coat off she was wearing black fish nets, black denim hot-pants and a tight sleeveless blouse over a petite but smoking-hot figure.  She also had a shit load of make-up on her face doing a not-very-good job of hiding how young she actually was.  It shows you how naïve I am that I initially assumed she was a stripper but I have to say, I laughed at myself a bit when I realised what was really going on.

“Jesus-hell Adé, you brought a hooker!”

“Yes my friend,” he replied absolutely shameless, “I have her booked for whole evening, we all get to share!”

Now to be fair, I was a wee bit dubious about all this, particularly since I know Adé has a Mrs and a few we-ones at home in Africa, but I thought, well fuck it, if you can’t give your mates a bit of lee-way at Christmas when can you?

I smiled at the girl and chopped her out a line of Meph from the pile and offered it to her.  “Here, love you have a hit of that.”

She gave a shy wee smile back as she went to it, but when she got the line she opened up a bit. 

“Oh, that is very nice, thank you!”, she said leaning over to stroke my knee, “you’re gorgeous, I can’t wait for later when we….”

At that point I took her hand and held it.  “Nah, you’re alright kid, I don’t do girl on girl, tried it once and it didn’t agree with me.  You’re lovely though if I was going to go lez it would definitely be with you.”

“It’s a shame, you’re so sweet and you have such lovely big boobs!”

I took a complete reddener at the compliment.  I supposed I do like, but you don’t notice these things so much, your boobs are pretty much your own boobs and if they’re bigger than the average you don’t see it.  Well not me anyway, I’m more worried that the one on the left is fractionally smaller than the other one, not that I’ve had any complaints mind.

Adé started getting stuck into the girl, Aleks and Baz were having some inane conversation about the European champions league and I was getting pretty lit up by this stage so I sat back on the chair feeling a bit smacked out and watched the window where the rain had turned to snow which was softly falling in light drifts, the flakes picked out in the amber glow of the street lights.  Then, I don’t know if it was all the drugs I had taken up to that point or what but I started feeling a bit, ‘Emotional’.  We were all strangers really and could have all been stuck with only ourselves for company today.  My work visa was coming to an end and I could feel the city lights of Belfast calling me home already.  Maybe I’ll know these guys the rest of my life but there’s a good chance that I’ll never see any of them again after I go, just a random person on Facebook, a tiny face in the corner of the computer screen until such a time as I’m having a red out of old contacts and people I don’t talk to anymore, and then not even that.  But here we all are, together and having a good time.  It might just have been me coming up on the pills but it felt like something more than that, like being happy just to be where I was with these people and full of ‘Christmas Cheer’ for the first time since I was a kid.

I wiped the little tears out of the corners of my eyes, raised my glass, said quietly but audibly to the room in general, to myself, to no-one in particular, “Merry fuckin’ Christmas everybody”.