I’LL BE THE ROUNDABOUT [558]

“Why don’t you do your website as a character, who else is going to know? Start where you want to be, and then you will evolve into it.”

When did I start giving myself career advice in my sleep? Either I was the one giving the advice, or a version of me, but in that dream, I couldn’t see. The thought left me restless, having given myself a problem to solve, and a plan for solving it.

Whether my name and words connote a certain personality is not something to which I have given thought before, and isn’t something anyone has discussed with me either, leaving me with even less reason for having the question now. But the question has now been asked, and I am don’t have an answer for it.

I already knew that writer Grant Morrison, in his counter-cultural conspiracy thriller comic series “The Invisibles”, had created the character of King Mob as a “fiction suit” for himself to enter the story as a cool and charismatic leader with plenty of agency, a healing sigil within a larger “hypersigil” of a series that would kickstart our culture into a more positive direction. I guess my mind decided to complete one step at a time.

But waking up on Wednesday 26th August 2026, I remembered what could have mixed into my dream. Dolly Parton had died on Tuesday, social media filling with her words, including a most pointed quote: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” I tried to find the origin, but I have no reason to dispute her having said it.

I had also watched a video by the “Comic Tropes” YouTube channel about the art of Hirohiko Araki, the creator of the long-running manga “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”. The video traced how Araki’s art evolved from the more typical shonen (boys’) manga of muscle-bound heroes fighting evil towards a stronger influence from fine art and fashion photography, which had been there from the start. Araki’s restaging of fashion poses into the famously striking and angular poses characters take in “JoJo” was juxtaposed with the outright retracing and copying of poses for which other manga creators have been accused, giving rise to the portmanteau “torepaku”, from the Japanese words for “tracing” and “plagiarism”.

Aside from the discussions of ethics and plagiarism, I was transfixed by the art. All I had previously seen of “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” was the first two episodes of David Productions’ masterful, ongoing anime adaptation of the series that began in 2012, which I mistakenly took as an outlandish and, well, bizarre story of rivalry in a well-to-do family in Victorian England. Having been shown the episodes by someone else, I did not know this was only the initial seeds of a supernatural, intergenerational saga spanning continents, inspired by Alex Haley’s “Roots” and John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”, the wonder of humanity serving as its primary theme and message.

Later during Wednesday 26th August, I heard that Tim Curry had also died the day before. The most recurring tribute I saw to him was that his grand performances, from Dr Frank-N-Furter to Wadsworth the butler, had awakened their audience to who they could be. Tuesday wasn’t a good day for the best of us, the people you thought would always be there, waiting for your mind to fully switch on to their insight.

I had intended to find out more about Grant Morrison and King Mob, but I needed to work out how “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” fitted into all this. Finding out that part 4 of the series, “Diamond is Unbreakable”, was inspired by “Twin Peaks” would be all I would need to give its anime version a try. 

I watched all thirty-nine episodes in nine days. I was struck immediately by the constant yellow daytime sky, a nod to Araki’s colour palettes changing with emotion, itself influenced by the post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. I also learned about “Stands”, one way Araki had depicted characters controlling their “life energy” in the series. The hero of this story, Josuke Higashikata, can repair matter within a short distance, from healing a person to repairing a photograph torn to pieces, although he is unable to use his abilities on himself. 

I was also quickly introduced to Araki’s impeccably tasteful song references: Josuke’s Stand is known as ”Crazy Diamond”, and eventual main villain Yoshikage Kira has one named “Killer Queen” in the manga, renamed to “Deadly Queen” in the anime, presumably for rights reasons, while the name “Stand” references Ben E King’s “Stand by Me”, a song whose lyrics fit Araki’s concept perfectly.

In “Diamond is Unbreakable”, a supernatural arrow is thought to be somewhere in the town, and anyone hit by it can develop a Stand, if they are mentally strong enough. Just as in Twin Peaks, Washington, the strange happenings in the town of Morioh could be coming from any number of people, from the eccentric to the unprepossessing.

In hindsight, I was watching the series so I could reach a story titled “Let’s Go to the Manga Artist’s House”. Koichi Hirose, a friend of Josuke, is told that the author of a manga he likes, an apparently supernatural series titled “Pink Dark Boy”, has moved to Morioh, so he decides to visit him.

There are antagonists, and there are manga antagonists, but then there is Rohan Kishibe, a manga artist created by a manga artist. Immediately, he looks eccentric, an artist whose clothing has pen nib motifs everywhere can be placed, always wearing pen nib earrings and a headband with serrated edges, reminding me of Archie’s Jughead Jones. He has clearly been made rich by his work, but everything is secondary to his work as a “mangaka”. He is adamant that realism is at the centre of writing an interesting story, the world there to be studied... which includes discovering a spider, killing it with a craft knife and, for the experience, licking its insides.

I am going to tell you right now that, spider aside, I have produced what I think is my best work when I have directly experienced them, like coming to like the dispensing of my own possessions, and having climbed over the O2 dome in London and reached the top of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. I have travelled across the country to see an art exhibition about Keith Haring, can describe sitting in a seat on Concorde, and had four pieces in a row suggest themselves to me by having been on a trip to New York City. I have bought items to be able to talk about them properly, from physically being able to hold a laserdisc and CED, to uncovering a TV guide for shows that were never broadcast, to using a typewriter. Perhaps I should only write about experiences going forward. 

Then it is revealed that Rohan was hit by the arrow, just as Koichi had been earlier in the series. Rohan’s Stand, “Heaven’s Door”, means he can read people like a book... by opening up their face like pages in a book, reading their contents.

If I was going to write this website as a character, it appears that character already exists, having done so since the original manga story was published in 1993. I needed to know more.

Next time, I will tell you what I found.

I CAN SEE YOU FROM HERE [557]

“What is a video podcast?” is a question for which you might accuse its asker of ignorance, but I only ask it because the term has risen as something that we all apparently understand. We all know what a podcast is, so a video podcast is surely just one where you can see who is talking?

But just as podcasts, as a form, are similar to existing half-hour and hour-long speech-led programmes found on UK radio, particularly magazine programmes on BBC Radio 4, video podcasts seem to me to be too close to television, or just a video of the type you find on YouTube. At worst, it reminds me of what Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut, in their famous interview, that he believed cinema should avoid: “photographs of people talking”.

At the time of writing, a video podcast is currently being watched by an average of four million people in the UK because it is also being broadcast in primetime on standard over-the-air television. Admittedly, this is because it ties in to “The Celebrity Traitors”, BBC One’s wildly popular reality game show immediately preceding it, but “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” features presenter Ed Gamble interviewing his guests, massive condenser microphones on stands before them all instead of lavalier mics clipped to their clothes, our view cutting between unmoving cameras. The visuals are entirely superfluous to the programme, which the BBC also makes available as audio-only podcasts, but those pictures are there if you want them.

Having previously talked about Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, describing television as a “cool” medium, owing to the amount of attention the audience needs to give to make it “warm”, I am wary of the “warmth” of the sound of a podcast being attached to the “coolness” of an optional picture. If it is optional, it can be dispensed with entirely. If it cannot be, then you have crossed into a different media, whether that be television, competing for an attention in a room or, if you move to prioritising visuals over the picture, cinema.

My guess, and it is only my guess, is that podcasts are a more intimate media than radio: both can be listened to individually through headphones, but you will still find radio more frequently in social settings, if only as a background to them, than you will with a podcast. This bifurcation of audio broadcasting is what I think has led to the BBC announcing that its replacement for the long-running BBC Radio 4 consumer affairs show “You and Yours” will be “a refreshed consumer programme, designed to work both on air and on demand”, although the mechanics of how it will work were not elaborated.

Admittedly, other chat shows look similar to “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” – episodes of “Parkinson” from the 1970s also have microphones on stands, trailing wires out of shot – but these can be more obviously made as television shows, recorded in a TV studio in front of an audience, with operators moving the cameras. The kind of convergence being attempted by treating a video podcast as a television programme is a point when neither medium is being used as effectively as it could be, just like the act of putting a film in a TV schedule and not expecting the audience at home to turn the lights out and be quiet.

I’M ON THE ROAD AGAIN [556]

148 inches versus 206 inches

Nearly two years since Jaguar Cars announced an even-more-upmarket rebrand under the phrase “copy nothing”, and ten years since I first wrote about the Citroën 2CV, a car as far away from a Jaguar as you can get, two new cars were announced within a week of each other.

On Tuesday 6th October, the Jaguar Type 01, a four-door, four-seater grand touring saloon, and an evolution of the Type 00 coupé concept shown in 2024, was unveiled by JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) at an event in New York, with a starting price of £129,995. Five days later, Stellantis unveiled their own concept car, a Citroën 2CV reimagined as a modern supermini-sized city car, alongside a new version of the “Fourgonnette” van, aiming to be among the cheapest of available new cars, a tenth of the Jaguar’s cost, when the eventual production model goes on sale in 2028.

The timing of these cars’ launches was not the only reason for me considering them together, as the owners of both Jaguar and Citroën are using these new cars to reposition our perception of these brands. Jaguar is deliberately being pushed away from “premium mass market” Mercedes-Benz and BMW customers towards Bentley, Aston Martin and, well, Range Rover drivers, with an imposing design and price to match. Meanwhile, the outright quirkiness and excitement of Citroën car design arguably began fading after it merged with Peugeot in 1976, before becoming part of the even-larger Stellantis in 2021 – the current Citroën C3, sitting above the 2CV in size and also originally a 2CV-inspired design, can also be bought as both a Vauxhall/Opel Frontera and Fiat Grande Panda, with cosmetic and dashboard changes separating them.

Importantly, both the Type 01 and 2CV only have electric drivetrains. Jaguar had already stated their range would be electric-only by 2025, by which time they had stopped production to prepare, while European emissions rules had added enough to the cost of producing a new petrol-driven small car to make their price too high to be viable, already ending in the production of cars like the Peugeot 108, Citroën C1, Volkswagen Up! and even the Ford Fiesta. However, the Type 01 will be far less frugal with energy than the 2CV, with one electric engine in the front and two in the rear, producing an expected one thousand horsepower. I could not find details for what engine or batteries Citroën have planned, other than they want to keep the 2CV’s weight to under one metric tonne – a base Mini Cooper from BMW is 400kg more than that these days – so it won’t match the Jaguar’s expected range of four hundred miles on a single charge.

The Jaguar Type 00 concept was a two-door coupé, with my expectation being that a modern E-Type would appear. Instead, with two extra doors and a “grand tourer” description, the Type 01 is not a new XJ6 saloon either. Armour-plated XJs had often been used as British ministerial cars, but since Jaguar ended XJ production in 2019, its replacement in this capacity has either been the Range Rover, or even the Audi A8 – the Type 01 is too ostentatious for a politician to be seen using it in an official capacity. 

My having mentioned Aston Martin earlier is because the car the Type 01 reminds me of the most is the 1976-90 Lagonda, a cutting-edge design plied with computers and touch controls and, having been built by hand, made exclusive through its increased expense – they are even about the same size.

The Citroën 2CV, however, will only remind me of the original 2CV – every styling choice, from the tiny door handles, corrugated bonnet and headlights sticking out from above the front wheel arches, is a nostalgic exercise, and not just an inspiration like the original C3 from 2002. Coming from a mass-market car company with multiple names, the 2CV concept looks so much like the original 2CV that I cannot imagine the final version looking so close, as the platform on which it is built cannot be then shared for other cars – a very rounded-looking Peugeot or Vauxhall city car will just look suspicious.

That said, one other small car had a similar rounded design and protruding headlights, selling in huge numbers: the 2002-10 Nissan Micra. Nissan had already made retro cars like the Figaro convertible and a 1989-91 van inspired by the Fourgonnette, named the “S-Cargo” – the 2CV had already been nicknamed the “tin snail”.

But the new 2026 Nissan Micra is why my original point stands. Based on the Renault 5 E-Tech, with Renault having also dipped into its back catalogue for its small car range, along with the Renault 4 and Twingo, the new Micra has only a restyled front and rear, and even that doesn’t stop it from looking like a Renault 5. Renault has since insisted other cars using its platform need to look more distinctive, as a new Ford Fiesta will be based on it too.

What I was surprised most about was the new 2CV’s spartan yellow interior with front and rear bench seats, a tiny heads-up dashboard display and a central console made from a wicker basket. The nicest touch of all is the on-screen control system that uses illustrations from Belgian comic book artist Jean-Luc Delvaux, a hand-drawn touch I have not seen on any other car, while I hope the removable “Radioën” sound system makes it to the final car, because that means I could by one for myself.

I anticipate seeing a new Citroën 2CV on British roads before a Jaguar Type 01, despite the former still being two years away. Both JLR and Stellantis hope these cars will revitalise their brands, but that is a question that will be answered by what cars follow them. Neither the 2CV nor the Type 01 can afford to be a one-off.

KING OF THE HILL, TOP OF THE LIST [555]

Continuing my unexpectedly enjoyable mission to clear a loft of my possessions, I concluded that a particular collection of magazines I have built up over fifteen years would, like so many others, also need to go. However, for all times’ sake, this pile will be earmarked for a charity shop more than for recycling, because they were not easy to find.

Whenever I have picked up a copy of “The New Yorker”, on the rare occasion a UK newsagent had one for sale, I have treated its mix of essays, cultural reviews, fiction and cartoons as a portal to the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, noisy and outspoken city that acts like a far-away playground for my mind — I have always seen Los Angeles as more a place of industry, even if those are film and music, and London is too near to elicit the same kind of anticipation. Its art direction is second to none, its illustrated covers having been given away by me as birthday cards on a few occasions. Its pages saw the first appearances of James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a ghoulish family depicted in cartoons by Charles Addams, and articles on which the films “Saturday Night Fever” and “Coyote vs Acme” are based. The nearest magazine to that mix that is published in the UK is the satirical “Private Eye”, which I have been reading for decades now. 

However, I the nearest newsagent to me that still sold “The New Yorker”, which is least ten miles away, has now closed. Adding to my need to create space, I have inevitably decided to subscribe to the magazine online, rather than risk being cut off altogether. Knowing the origin of its source material, the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” always hit a weird note with me when they sing, “we can try to understand The New York Times’ effect on man”, but I should have realised that can reference New York-based media as a whole, having read “The New York Times” for years for a similar vantage point, although one more reactive and with less time for consideration than a weekly periodical can afford itself.

My first action upon subscribing to “The New Yorker” was to look at their archive, which turned into my looking at a gallery of thousands of vibrant covers, in all manner of styles, portraying political events to everyday life, punctuated every February by a reproduction or reinterpretation of Rea Irvin’s portrait of Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s mascot, a dandy with enough time to examine a passing butterfly with his monocle. The magazine has been a butterfly for me for quite some time, but will that change now I have finally pinned it down?

NAME IT, READ IT, TUNE IT, PRINT IT [554]

I am not saying that you shouldn’t buy the Canon TR4750i combination inkjet printer and scanner, I am just saying that using one is never straightforward.

I needed to print out some tickets, sent to me by e-mail, for a visit to an art gallery, a standard failsafe for me because the last thing you want to do is rely entirely on your phone to hold the key to visiting places – the same has gone for airline boarding passes. 

I bought my first inkjet printer when I was completing my A-Levels – carrying on into my degree, I remember the satisfaction of submitting coursework and essays without the added worry of finding somewhere to print them first.

However, that was a time before wi-fi. Attempting to print the tickets from my phone via Apple’s AirPrint standard did not pick up the printer at first, necessitating my restarting the printer. Once my phone finally connected, the printer just fed the paper through itself without making a mark. 

Two further attempts at printing, with the same outcome, led me to shine a light, literally, on the LCD panel on the printer – it is not backlit, and I have put the front-loading printer on a shelf due to available space, which obscures my view of this display – to be told that the device needs to complete a firmware update before it will do anything else. You would have thought Canon could have sent such a message to the print properties screen on my phone, or even print it on the paper I was trying to use.

I later turned on my desktop computer, reasoning I can better see and control what is going on, which made no difference to what the printer was doing. The QR codes showing on the tickets were not appearing in the preview screen, which led to my finding they were being treated as part of the document’s background, instead of as the main reason for doing any of this. Finally, having changed all the settings I could see, I printed the tickets off, and got on with my life.

Rather than the usual gripe about inkjet printer cartridges being so expensive that buying a new set of black and colour cartridges could set you back as much as the printer initially did, a comparison per millimetre of ink with the price of champagne, mine is with the actual ability to print. I let two months pass from the purchase of the tickets until I could sum up the energy to print them out, knowing it will never do it how I want the first time.

I think I may have also expected too much from it for the money. The printer loads and feeds out its paper from the front, meaning you can place it on the shelf, but more expensive models have its control screen on the front flap too, meaning you will be able to see if it needs a firmware update. I also have my suspicions that its ability to print double-sided leads it to spew out an empty page if processing the request becomes too difficult.

Admittedly, the scanner was my main reason for this printer’s purchase, intending for it to eliminate more sheets of paper than it will ever be expected to print. Somehow, I have had no software problems there so far, so perhaps Canon is encouraging me to reduce my use of paper?

TIME TO CLEAN SOME HOUSE [553]

I have spent the last forty minutes filling two Ikea “Pappis” boxes with DVDs I had been keeping in a loft. I will always support owning your own copy of something, but with Blu-ray having now existed for twenty years, my having joined that bandwagon in 2011, looking at these discs has either made me think, “I’ve got this on Blu-ray now,” or, “I’ll come back to this eventually”. Then in the box it goes, to be taken away. VHS, DVD, or Blu-ray, most people will have had this discussion with themselves.

I had an enormous amount of trepidation at beginning to clear out this loft, which I had filled with (most of) a life’s worth of books, comics, CDs and DVDs, especially as it had reached “where do you even start?” levels. But I had been asked to start because the heatwaves that made the summer of 2026 so uncomfortable also highlighted how combustible people’s houses became in that heat, and so much paper in a room without climate control was now asking for trouble.

With limited space elsewhere at home for me to use as storage, I was confronted with the option that immediately confirmed I had too much stuff, leading me to reject it very quickly: paying for a self-storage facility. I could not see myself maintaining an off-site memory hole, being held in conditions even further out of my control.

I had needed to something about this at some point, which had always been “later”, but being asked causes you to reconsider your priorities. Once I had come to terms with having a collection that made me look like a budding hoarder, I could find a way of turning this experience into a positive one.

After tiring myself out on the first weekend by bringing out the items I clearly had no use of like exercise equipment, old PC peripherals and wires, and a typewriter, I established a routine of coming home from work, eating dinner, then clearing out two bags or boxes of items, mostly books. By the weekend, not only could you tell yourself you made a good start, but you also would have spent a week considering whether you ever going to get around to reading, watching or listening to that, and could that question have been asked at the time of acquiring the item?

I now look forward to having this moment of catharsis each evening, and I haven’t gone back to retrieve anything so far. These books, films, TV shows and so on do not become lost just because I don’t have access to them. Remembering that has made parting with them that much easier. 

What this ongoing process has also done is highlight where I used to be hastier in getting rid of things, like having none of my school exercise books because I only deemed the end of term grade as important. Likewise, I had re-bought, some time ago, two books I thought had gone years before: “The Saga of Erik the Viking” by Terry Jones, with painted illustrations by Michael Foreman, and a 1975 book titled “The Science Fiction Book: An Illustrated History” by Franz Rottensteiner, which had been a case of searching online for a book that could match my memory of what was in the pages. I could have saved myself a lot of time.

YOU TOLD ME, PEOPLE LIKE TO SUFFER [552]

Every glowing review received by the film “Coyote vs Acme” has acknowledged the act of having been able to see the film at all, and while I could add another thumbs-up to the pile it has received, the film’s commentary on corporations and the law make it a far more prescient release in 2026 than if Warner Bros had not shut it away as a tax write-off in 2023.

Having now read the original 1990 “New Yorker” humour piece, by Ian Frazier, on which “Coyote vs Acme” is based, presented as a dry opening statement by Wile E. Coyote’s lawyer at a trial, you can see how the film has expanded upon the apparent absurdity of applying cartoon logic to a real-life court case – the gag of an injury on “Mr Coyote’s” body turning him into an accordion being of a “distracting and embarrassing nature” which “has been a major impediment to Mr. Coyote’s pursuit of a normal social life” – while his exclusive use of Acme products is explained as their being the only domestic supplier of rocket sleds, spring-powered shoes and giant rubber bands, exploiting its advantage in the market: “One can only wonder what our trading partners in Western Europe and Japan would make of such a situation, where a giant company is allowed to victimize the consumer in the most reckless and wrongful manner over and over again.”

I loved how the film of “Coyote vs Acme” expanded upon this. With the courtroom relocated from Tempe, Arizona to Albuquerque, New Mexico, now depicted as the home to all Looney Tunes characters, we have a situation where “Human Law” and “Cartoon Law” is delineated separately: Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Road Runner is defined as a line of work “pursuant to Sylvester vs Gonzalez”, in what might be the most clever wordplay I will come across this year.

However, the elastic nature of cartoon characters has led to a callousness in the practice of the law: the lawyer Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte, initially described Wile E. Coyote’s case as “a run of the mill $300 rocket skate case”, having already told Porky Pig, having had a window smash on him, that he could get $250 for that accident. Meanwhile the Acme Corporation, whose CEO is Foghorn Leghorn, and with legal counsel Buddy Crane played by John Cena, has separate human and cartoon product ranges, but has engaged in practices where products designed to help cartoon characters, like erasers to remove visible stink lines, became more recklessly made, using the data from real-life cartoon injuries in order to provide testing for its human product range, under a scheme named Project Sisyphus, confirming why Acme Corporation is happy to pay out a few hundred dollars here or there each time.

I was surprised that this was put in the mouth of a cartoon character, or that Foghorn Leghorn is played so meanly in “Coyote vs Acme”, but for the head of the Acme Corporation to say that pain is the price of progress, and cartoons are not important enough to care if they get harmed, leading to a very affecting moment where Road Runner testifies about the pain he has witnessed being inflicted on Wile E. Coyote, before asking, through Morse Code, “when are you coming back?” I had wondered if this had any correlation with Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, which he coincidentally coined during the time of this film’s production in 2022, but while that is more about an online service degrading the experience of its service for its users to benefit its business customers, then doing the same to them to take all the value for itself, it does play into how that term has been more widely adopted to indicate a deliberate degradation in services, products and experiences.

That said, “Coyote vs Acme” is easily the best feature film that the Looney Tunes characters have appeared in, is the best animation/live-action hybrid film since 1988’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, a tribute to how world-building and strong characterisation makes such a Looney world believable, qualms over the use of 3D animation to look 2D notwithstanding. The oddest part of the film, for me, is how the often-used caricature of Peter Lorre is an official Looney Tunes character now, and married to Granny?