Zvezdan Reljić (1961-2023)

Posted on by under Life, Malta, Obituary

My father, Zvezdan Reljić, passed away on 22 December 2023 after suffering a massive heart attack a few days prior. He was 62.

A photographer and print-maker, he leaves behind a legacy of work that has attracted a myriad of admirers at different stages of the process. Because it wasn’t just the end product that drew a crowd. Through his film photography workshops, he slowly amassed a myriad of students who found in him an accommodating tutor, teaching them the ropes as he reignited his own passion for a vocation he had to put the wayside as he raised kids and kept a family afloat after emigrating all of us from Serbia to Malta in the early ’90s.

The black-on-white CV version of his life will tell you that his most notable works include the book Wiċċna / Our Face (2018) — a collection of portraits depicting the polychromatic reality of cosmopolitan Malta, gathering faces of those who were either born, settled or simply passed through this ancient but ever-transient island in the middle of the Mediterranean which our family made into a home, finally becoming fully naturalised citizens in 2012.

The CV would also then include a reference to his most recent achievement: the solo exhibition JA! JA! JA! at R Gallery in Sliema, the town in which he was still living at the time of his death, in the rented apartment of 3A, Panorama Flats, into which our family settled after a nomadic couple of years and for which I wrote this poem on the occasion of the exhibition’s finissage.

The CV would then also list his publishing venture Ede Books, responsible for some award-winning titles and latterly, the publication of hand-printed & pressed chapbooks: yet another manifestation of his DIY approach, coupled with his desire to discover and elevate fresh voices in the community, while also giving the more established players a welcome breathing room to experiment on the fringes.

The CV, and the established bio, would also necessarily have to mention that he served as president of the Kixott Cooperative; a small but vibrant cultural hub in the town of Mosta, which arose in 2019 as an endeavour by “my family and other animals” and went through various permutations and faced numerous challenges — the pandemic, in retrospect, being the least among them — but which survives as an events space, bar and small bookshop that consolidated the communal space which my father opened up to students and other artsy aspirants, after my siblings and I flew the coop, which we gradually did following my mother’s stroke and extended “exile” in a care home.

Many beautiful tributes have already been penned and some — such as this one by Seb Tanti Burlo and this one by Chris De Souza Jensen — have even been drawn. Our long-standing friend and colleague Matthew Vella wrote a beautiful obituary for MaltaToday, where both my father and myself worked for a long period of time, establishing both of our careers in the process. The piece is as impassioned as it is comprehensive, and collates the life and career in a way that only a seasoned journalist who is also a dear friend can manage.

Many will talk about how my father helped galvanise an artistic community, and that he offered a ‘safe haven’ for rootless yet artistically ambitious souls: both at Kixott and in his own home. It’s a beautiful image and memory to cling onto.

But of course, every romantic impression comes with the flip-side of harsh reality. And as his eldest son, along with the rest of the family, navigating my father’s legacy will be about accepting the challenges that some with the ‘public vs private’ aspects of it all… which were further complicated by his opening up his doors to so many people.

Going forward, there will be a lot to unpack. We need to ensure that his work survives, and is sheparded to the right places as carried by the right hands. (Being as accommodating as my father was meant that a few bad apples will, inevitably, slip through the net.)

But that’s yet to come. The smoke is still clearing. And after the tributes gradually recede, the silence will be deafening and the true work of grief will begin.

Book Review: A Death in Malta by Paul Caruana Galizia

Posted on by under book review, Malta

My book review of Paul Caruana Galizia’s A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice is now up over at The Markaz Review.

I was honoured to be commissioned to write the piece for such a prestigious publication, thanks to poaching by one of its editors, the Malta-based Rayyan al-Shawaf. I tackled it with some abandon (the original draft was far longer and far more winding), because the book itself is a heady hybrid that cuts to the bone while also providing the necessary context for an international audience.

The politics and ‘true-crime’ angle are very much in there, and will appease the readership looking for the necessary does of robust, hard-nosed investigative journalism that the Caruana Galizia family as whole is now renowned for.

But it’s the ostensibly ‘digressive’ passages that really struck a chord with this reviewer… one who’s had to internalise the Maltese context the hard way, and one who’s also lost their mother at a young age.

There’s a tendency among us Maltese to have to ‘explain’ what Malta is to the rest of the world. Usually this is done with pre-packaged touristy pride: the brochure version of the island’s greatest hits. But the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia led to a dark inversion of that habit, and this book by her youngest son offers the starting point of an in-depth exploration of what such an inversion implies.

Keep your feasts and keep your famine

Posted on by under Books, Comics, Life, Malta, Memory, Music, Reading

There’s something surreal about still being able to glut on a banquet of streaming material as the Hollywood strikes rage on in the background.

Add to that the ‘feast or famine’ vibe of my own personal summer vs autumn streaming experience: there was very little new stuff I wanted to watch over the summer, and then October came along and I’m once again spoilt for choice.

Not that this is a new mood for me. For all the economic chaos we’ve been labouring under in the Western world since 2007 or so, that doesn’t really seem to apply to cultural consumption. Audio-visual “content” is piped in at a regular pace through our obedient army* of trusted apps.

The “TBR” pile only grows and grows, and in my case, twists and morphs into Cronenbergian variants as I give up on one pile to forge another, confident in my prediction that this time, this will be the one that gets devoured.

Ready for them re-reads

This all stands in marked contrast to how I remember experiencing culture in the ’90s. As a geeky son of emigres who lived in Malta and spent summers back in native Serbia, but who was trained to desire the globalised products of the Anglophone sphere, I was often left blue-balled by my inability to grasp at all the stuff I wanted — nay needed — and required to consume. Consume, of course, on the basis of an imagined diet whose prescription was as vague as it was specific.

Getting comics in Malta was nigh impossible at the time, though there was a grassroots ‘comics club’ established by a pair of passionate — though often frustrated — friends who often treated its members as foundlings… which, in many ways, we were: orphaned in our need to latch onto story-products which would not otherwise have reached us were it not for their benediction.

The lack of a foundational cultural identity — or rather, a fragmented one that I wasn’t particularly keen to embrace or even poke at, given that Serbians were officially the aggressors in the nineties’ most significant conflict, rudely blotting the End of History with its own traumatic fallout — is perhaps what led me to latch onto various subcultures: comics were one, metal music was another.

Funnily enough, our trips to Serbia were particularly useful when it came to the latter. The mess of the post-Milosevic era meant that bootlegs could proliferate with impunity — public television channels even aired brand new cinema releases on their evening schedule — so we’d end up taking a bunch of CDs home and gain some degree of bragging rights with out metal head buddies.

Because for all that it was still struggling under the weight of a post-war depression, Belgrade in particular remained a European cities, and subcultures still functioned with an historic sense of purpose, and kindred spirits could be found if you knew where to look. Malta, for all its aspirations of being an up-and-coming place, still operated on a provincial logic.

This was also why the rapid rise and fall of Napster — whose fall was made largely redundant by the floodgates opening up to handily-available variants — was a balm to us in Malta. Suddenly, we could all be on the same page as our international counterparts. Metal Hammer and Kerrang were no longer dispatches from the future.

And yet, fast-forward to the present day, and what I look forward to most re-read season. This is how I’ve unofficially dubbed autumn, over and above its many reliefs and delights (ostensibly cooler weather at some point — climate change permitting — the excuse to binge on horror faves ‘cos Halloween, etc etc.).

It’s about acknowledging a split. On the one hand, there’s so much desirable stuff to consume. On the other, all of that noise is just so piercingly alienating. And caring for the self is all about remembering what makes you, you. The foundations built by all those things that left an impact, for some reason.

This runs counter to the prevailing cultural narrative, of course, which is probably why I always feel an internal pushback whenever I try to implement it. But the relief of re-reading a favourite book is immediate, and immense. It’s a relief akin to the best of drug-free hedonistic pursuits: sex, swimming and a volcanic eruption of laughter during a friends catch-up.

Consumption is what sold us the end of history. But we were nowhere near the end, of course. And regardless, there’s always been a ton of history to feast on in the meantime.

*though a master-slave dialectic may be the more appropriate metaphor here.

Mibdul reviewed… in German!

Posted on by under Comics

Our plucky comic book that could — MIBDUL — gets the Teutonic treatment over at Timo Berger (@comic.timo)’s review page on Instagram!

There’s something about this far-flung little book being discovered in equally spontaneous ways that warms the heart. Check out the original post here. (Non-German speakers like myself can avail themselves of Insta’s admittedly efficient automatic translator).

Timo joins the Serbian online publication Strip Blog in giving Mibdul its due. Be sure to read the first and second of an ongoing review series that is thorough and incisively written, courtesy of Strip Blog’s in-house reviewer Ivan Veljković.

MIBDUL ships internationally via the Merlin Publishers website. Inez, Chris, Emmanuel, Faye and myself — that is, the small-but-fierce team behind this six-issue mini-series — would be most delighted to hear what you think of it.

Indie comics thrive on word-of-mouth, and as a particularly ambitious project in that vein — stemming as it does from tiny Malta, engineered and engined with a pioneering streak — Mibdul is as indie as they come.

Poem: 3A, Panorama Flats

Posted on by under Life, Writing

Poem read on the occasion of the ‘finissage’ event for JA! JA! JA! — an exhibition of print works, photography and installations by Zvezdan Reljic at R Gallery, Sliema.

Zvezdan Reljic is my father, and 3A, Panorama Flats is where our family was based for a number of years, and whose sofa featured as a prop in the exhibition.

***

3A, Panorama Flats

The place is an afternoon. 

My room is a terracotta cocoon.

Etruscan. The texture of clay. Amphorae retreived from the bottom of the sea. 

We had a view of the same sea, once. 

The view that gave the place its name, I guess. 

The panorama thinning out over the years to make way for more apartments. 

But I allowed myself to think, none of the new apartments are like ours. 

I allowed myself to think: this is ours, and ours alone. 

I allowed myself to think, the cocoon will be there for me.

QUOTE, this place is huge. You guys are so lucky UNQUOTE. 

QUOTE, they don’t make them like this anymore, UNQUOTE. 

The place is an afternoon. 

The light lands on the corridor in a strong thin strip. 

Falls on the rusty back terrace. On the vintage furniture. The vintage furniture whose cousins we spotted in the wild once, at an exhibition commemorating Maltese modernist interiors. 

The light stops at the doors. Our doors. We each have a room. 

QUOTE, We’re not like your typical family, really. We’re more like flatmates. UNQUOTE. 

The place is an afternoon.

In the morning we disperse like rats. Into our rooms, or out of the place.  

And at night, others seep in. 

At night, the new people gather around the oaken table. 

QUOTE, My friends after midnight. UNQUOTE 

But the place is an afternoon, because then I’d sneak into my mother’s studio while she made dresses and sit on the sofa and talk about nothing. 

Now it’s a darkroom, and the time of day no longer matters. 

QUOTE, We’ll talk later. I have people coming over, UNQUOTE. 

The place is an afternoon, but there’s no longer a cocoon for me. 

The Etruscan room is whitewashed. Colonised and recolonised. But clean. Finally clean. We’re roommates, all of us roommates. 

The place is an afternoon. But if you sit on the sofa while you sip on a Turkish coffee you’ve been drinking far too late in the day, you can see the evening make its way in. This how you can start to say goodbye.

But it’s a process. You’ll need an instruction manual. But you won’t find it heaped among the books, papers and discarded prints. You’ll need to write it by yourself. 

So this is me trying. Here goes. 

Close the room that once made dresses and that now makes images.

Close the room to the corridor. 

You’ve allowed the place to become a box. 

The hard twilight hits the oaken table. And you realise, for the first time, that it’s not rough at all but that it gleams smooth, with a surprising freshness. 

You sit on the sofa. You sip that umpteenth Turkish coffee. 

The light sits on the neighbouring buildings until there’s no longer any of it. 

The place is no longer an afternoon, but the coffee won’t let you sleep. 

Get up, get out. 

It’s time to start walking.

Words will wait

Posted on by under Books, Malta, Writing, Writing habits

Writing hasn’t been easy lately.

That’s not to say I haven’t been able to jot things down. And neither am I “out of ideas” or bereft of the required energy or confidence to keep on ploughing through the sentences and drafts.

It’s just that my current project is at a point where the drafts, the ideas and the characters need some time to get to know each other better. They’re talking at cross-purposes and on a vague, sun-bleached plan, which was mapped out by a remote authority seated in a comfy office and simply left out to the elements and the drafts, the ideas and the characters are forced to squint to make out the shapes which were once words or diagrams meant to take them to the next stage of their journey.

This probably just means that I need to take a break.

Which is funny to consider, when my writing schedule is essentially “whatever you manage in the one hour before you have to head out to go to work”. But a mental break from a specific strand from writing doesn’t necessarily mean stopping to write altogether. Even switching projects works, though arguably swapping over an ingrained, long-term writing practice for some experimental noodling could have an even greater restive (or restorative) effect.

***

Freedom in writing is always a relative term, for me… I’m deeply sceptical of the idea that an artistic practice implies a sense of spontaneous, intuitive and even anarchic liberation away from the strictures of mainstream society. If anything, I find that it actually requires a deeper and more neurotic commitment to some of these tenets, with the anarchism only made evident in the obsessive streak with which you double-down on them.

You can zone out at work, and go for the umpteenth cigarette or coffee. Household chores have definitive parameters, and even the most byzantine of bureaucratic tasks have some kind of ceiling. Clients will have deadlines, and even lovers have their ultimatums. Lovers, partners and friends also have physical bodies that tick away to sometimes endless-seeming, but ultimately finite desires and frustrations. They may be erratic but they’re never truly, entirely unpredictable for those of us who know a thing or two about how humans operate in general. And while they may expect a certain degree of telepathy on your end — and as annoying as such an expectation may be — they will never ask you to create and recreate them anew.

But your characters will. And this is why I think that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will always remain a reference point. I’m sure there’s a flurry of doctoral theses and obscure articles out there to prove the following statement wrong, but I’m always surprised that so much of our processing of that pioneering piece of sci-fi gothic literature is focused on the ‘scientific hubris’ reading, and so little on how it’s also a commentary on the act of creation. Yes, I’m sure the theological implications have often been made as well, but I’m referring specifically to how Victor Frankenstein could also be seen as the neurotic and nervous artist trying to come to terms with the horror of a first draft. (And also, how that first draft threatens to morph into something unexpected, and demands that more of these mutations be facilitated by dint of a fertile co-partner).

(I’m not trying to claim this interpretation as original. Those of you have links and PDFs, please pass them on. They are more than welcome).

So yeah, for me, writing is never about freedom but about finding the right straitjacket for the right moment. Or rather, the correct protective suit for whichever uncharted territory you happen to be traversing at the time. Because the territory will always BE uncharted, and populated by monsters to whom you’d not only have to teach language, but whose independence you’d have to facilitate and reassure. Let Victor Frankenstein’s fate be a cautionary tale.

***

Apart from being literally one of two or three annual events I legitimately look forward to each year, the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, organised by Inizjamed, often offers me a chance to experience writing in a looser and more immediate way to my default mode. More poetry, less novels. More of experimental prose, and less of the three-act structure.

It often results in me buzzing with a renewed fervour for the written word, experiencing precisely the kind of ‘break-that-is-not-a-break’ that I’d mentioned earlier. You encounter new writers without the aid of an algorithm: better still, right in the flesh. This adds wrinkles to your programme; unexpected experiences that open new doorways.

But there was a dash of welcome familiarity in this year’s edition of the festival. As an honorary member of the extender Inizjamed family, I’d assumed that I had some dibs on suggesting future festival guests. So a couple of years ago I started lobbying for the inclusion of Karin Tidbeck to the roster. Of course, as a subculture-rat since my early teens, my allegiance to specific groups will always trump pretty much all else: in this case, it’s the genre/speculative fiction community. I will always aim to advocate and represent of that literary class in my local stomping grounds, much in the same way I managed to do for Kali Wallace and Jon Courtenay Grimwood.

But I also felt Karin to be germane to Inizjamed’s festival in particular for more specific reasons related to their artistic practice and MO. A festival that comes with its own translation workshop attached, a multi-lingual, self-translating author is practically catnip. And a writer who so keenly identifies with liminal spaces can’t help but feel at home in any festival that deigns to include ‘Mediterranean’ in its title, and this particular one does so with a degree of conviction: operating with both intellectual rigour and humane generosity to create authentic spaces of encounter.

***

All of this largely a preamble to celebrate this year’s edition of the festival (as I did when I was lucky enough to participate back in 2018); to remind you that I got a chance to chat with Karin in print about their uncategorisable nature in the run up to the event; to brag about being allowed to ventriloquise for Karin in her absence from the grand finale due to a ridiculously early wake-up call the following morning; and to hopefully open this space back up for more regular, and looser, writings of this kind.

Especially now that I’m starting a new job in a field that’s relevant to my experience once again. Which is the perfect push and pull of the familiar and the new.

***

I mentioned the prolific (and gentlemanly) Jon Courtenay Grimwood above. During one of our in-person conversations (either during his Malta visit or a follow-up meeting in London, I can’t recall), I spoke admiringly of his substantial output, a lot of it filtered through different noms de plume.

He responded by stating simply, “Well, if I don’t write, I can’t think.”

Increasingly, I find this to be true in my case. It doesn’t necessarily mean that whatever I write will have any value at all; at least not in that early stage. And neither does it have to be some sort of revelatory, epiphanic distillation of the self at that given moment.

The mechanics of writing are their own reward. This is why every single shift away from the programme has value. Words remain words. They will serve you in different ways at different times, but they remain at your disposal.

Featured image: Authors performing at the final night of the 18th edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival, on 26 August 2023. From left: Tanja Bakic, Claudia Gauci, Karin Tidbeck, Simone Inguanez and Virginia Monteforte (photographer)

Streaming through a strike | Beef, Dead Ringers, The Bear

Posted on by under TV

The things you take for granted.

Like the vast slew of hard-hitting, boundary-pushing streaming TV shows that manage to both hook you along for an escapist journey that also makes you think of the world you’re living in, RIGHT NOW, for all that you live on a tiny speck of island in the middle of the Mediterranean and said shows would be conceived and shot oceans away.

(Though the latter may not always be true — some would be filmed closer to home, in jurisdictions with comparatively weaker film unions, but that’s a story for another day. Or is it?)

Shows like Beef, Dead Ringers and The Bear: a powerful but eclectic bunch (I know I’m late on the last one) and an example of the kind of stuff we’ve learned to yes, take as a god(s)-given gift without questioning its provenance.

But the currently-ongoing writers’ strike puts what we take for granted into real perspective.

Funny Feud: Steven Yeun and Ali Wong in Beef (Netflix)

When I posted to my socials about how much I was enjoying BOTH Beef and Dead Ringers, the enthusiasm came thick and fast for the former: a zippy-snappy comedy-drama forged by the joint behemoths of Netflix and A24; a charged melange of commercially friendly adrenaline-hit episodes and an arthouse-boosted satirical, observational backbone (that one of its two main leads is a professional stand-up comedian by day surely helped channel some that energy).

But few seemed to be aware of Dead Ringers, despite its starring the quasi-generation hopping, quasi-household name of Rachel Weisz (multiplied by two, no less). Here’s a show that seems to be playing all its cards right: like FX’s Fargo, it is a legacy reboot of a cult classic film — in this case, David Cronenberg’s 1988 surgical fever dream opera, conducted by Jeremy Irons times-two — and, again, it stars an actress we’ve had a chance to fall in love with over and over again in projects which range from award-baiting costume dramas to prestige espionage thrillers and endlessly rewatchable action-adventure capers. And this is hardly about Weisz taking a swing to give a newbie a chance: the show is penned by Alice Birch, a regular scribe for a little show by the name of Succession.

Double Trouble: Rachel Weisz in Dead Ringers (Amazon Prime)

But just like Variety‘s article on the matter states, the gold rush for shows has led to a saturation point that’s created an absurd scenario, where even projects with the marquee-est of marquee actors struggle to find elbow room in this crowded space: “Do you remember the Julia Roberts series on Starz last year? What was it called? How about Samuel L. Jackson’s series on Apple TV+? And they were good shows.”

Dead Ringers is also a good show. Not as easy to watch as Beef, certainly — for all the moral wincing Beef pinches at, DR squeezes the corkscrew in far deeper while cackling at your pain — but to me, at least, it brought back memories of another favourite yet hard-done-by programme: NBC’s (or should we say most emphatically above all, Bryan Fuller’s) Hannibal, once again starring a couple of Hollywood primed behemoth thespians in roles of a lifetime.

Both DR and Hannibal are pointedly indulgent programmes, more in terms of tasteful production design than anything requiring a surfeit of digital effects (though I’m sure its painterly bouts of bodily violence did require some tinkering in that regard). It’s the kind of stuff that gets made when both literal and figurative stars are aligned.

Love Crimes: Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy in Hannibal (NBC)

But they’re also the shows that risk getting buried under the avalanche of material that the streamers have insisted on churning out to appease the gods of growth. A malaise that has infiltrated many areas of our life, for sure, but that’s how it’s manifesting itself here, among the very shows that we settle down to watch after our own daily reckoning with what’s asked of us by late capitalism.

It may not be as baroquely pretty as DR or Hannibal, and neither does it attempt to chase the zeitgeist like Beef, but The Bear — whose characters traffic in literal beef! — may serve as the best compounded allegory for this mess.

Just like we tend to forget about the writers who toil away to conceive of the avalanche of shows we not only take for granted, but that we are actually spoilt for choice over, so would a (largely off-screen) clientele fail to consider the full extent of the sacrifices made by the chefs delivering up signature beef sandwiches in The Bear.

Pressure Cooker: Jeremy Allen White in The Bear (FX)

It’s not so much about stoking a dormant guilt in us. That would defeat the purpose, and even be counter-productive. It’s also not about some passive idea of ‘awareness’; of simply paying tribute and showing appreciation and then flipping back into default mode a second or two later.

But it may be about remembering that we watch these shows primarily because they explore the things that make us people… as stylistically exaggerated and/or excessively zoomed-in as they may be. And if the people making them are sidelined — either through dismal pay conditions or by defaulting to AI solutions — well, that deflates the whole point of watching these shows in the first place, don’t you think?

Annual Batman Returns Christmas Rewatch: Stray Observations

Posted on by under Films

A kiss can be deadly if you mean it.

– My favourite movie Batmen — Burton here and Reeves’ recent outing — are the ones that display at least a glancing affinity with subcultural figures, in contrast to hectoring enforcers of the status quo. Musical choices confirm it.


– Case in point: The Batman (2022), famously, re-introduces Nirvana to Gen Z, and on top of ‘Returns’ pan-freakshow of fetishistic weirdness, let’s not forget that Bruce and Selina kiss under the mistletoe while Siouxsie and the Banshees are snuck into the playlist for the Gotham one-percenter’s schmoozy Christmas do.


– The very ’90s ‘battle of the sexes’ sub-theme just scans as quaintly adorable now.


– Yes, Burton was unfettered this time around in contrast to the 1989 original. But I dream of a world where screenwriter Daniel Waters was ALSO allowed to go full Heathers on this one. Not that I don’t cherish the crystalline nuggets of punny dialogue that do betray his indelible presence. And on that note, last but not least…


– Max Shrek absolutely, positively, has the best lines.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s hardly surprising that a beloved film you love so much and have rewatched so often leaves an indelible stamp on both sub- and conscious mind. And over the past couple of rewatches, it’s become clear to me how strong an influence this movie in particular has been in the creation of Mibdul.

In Defense of Escapism

Posted on by under Art, Books, Films, Storytelling

Following the annual horror binge of October, I tend to slip back into fantasy favourites during the subsequent months in an attempt to close off the year with something of a cosily immersive lilt; to both weather and take advantage for what passes for autumn and winter in this warm part of the world, and to plug into its wellspring of restorative nostalgia.

This often gets me thinking about the vilification of the fantasy genre — broadly speaking — as ‘escapist’, which tag tends to be loaded and, as is often the case, flung around in a dismissive and rather unreconstructed way.

The implication being that, the further we are from a cleanly mimetic representation of reality in fiction, the more ‘irresponsible’ we become in its consumption. That such a mode encourages us to forget the world as it is now, in favour of an ethereal indulgence that numbs us to our day-to-day realities and leaves us in a torpid stupor, the kind that Tennyson detailed in The Lotos-eaters.

There’s of course been endless shadings and nuancing of this argument over the years, but I believe that the core of it has remained with us — throbbing like a planetary core that has lodged itself and become essential to historical ecosytem of the discourse, much like any other ossified truism.

The Rings of Power (Amazon)

I find it to be endlessly faulty, and not just because I’m a fan of fantasy literature (and therefore don’t appreciate being characterised as some sort of head-in-the-sand naive idiot by proxy).

My issue here is far more fundamental. To put it as plainly as I can manage: it assumes that reality is a flat, clearly definable surface, and that we can posit a clean reality : fantasy binary.

The popularity of such an assumption is hardly surprising, given that it’s taken root primarily within the confines of a materialist, capitalist western society. This is a mode of living which at best compartmentalises all that is not tangibly measurable, rendering it peripheral to the day-to-day workings which make the machinery tick.

So that religious practice is tolerated, as long as it can be woven into the fabric of the day-to-day without causing too much offence (and crucially, it is called upon to occasionally prop up the agendas of certain politicians and ratify certain acts of exclusion and social inequality).

Acceptable escapism? Naked Lunch (1991) by David Cronenberg, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novel

Perhaps we accept the intangible when it relates to issues of mental health. There is, at the very least, an understanding that — medication-based psychiatric help aside — the mental realm needs tending to in ways that are suspiciously apposite to the kind of treatments and rituals we would associate with religious and/or magical practice.

But even then — the overarching practise is to simply ‘treat’ any mental health anguish in a way that’ll make it go away so that you can resume being a healthy cog that can help keep the system chugging along. We are hardly encouraged to take its wider implications — that there’s more to life than what’s in front of us — and run with it.

In the same way, fantasy is also compartmentalised, only to be richly consumed by all of us. Literature aside, its popular adaptations litter our screens and the streaming services that have latched onto them like eager barnacles. Adaptations of the works of JRR Tolkien, George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman were some of the most-watched (or at least most talked about) shows of the past year or so.

Chloë Grace Moretz in The Peripheral (Amazon)
Chloë Grace Moretz in The Peripheral (Amazon)

Even something like Amazon’s take on William Gibson’s The Peripheral — ostensibly a work of ‘hard’ neo-cyberpunk from the grandfather of that subgenre — ultimately partakes of fantasy tropes at its root: it’s a portal fantasy with virtual reality and cyborg stand-ins only superficially replacing the mechanics of magic and its adepts.

Ultimately, branding fantasy more escapist than its supposedly ‘realistic’ counterparts is bound to devolve into a fool’s errand animated into being solely by the assumptions of a category error.

Still from The Company of Wolves (1984), directed by Neil Jordan and adapted from the Angela Carter short story

If you’re reading, watching or hearing something — anything — for an extended period of time, you’re lost in that experience, and at least somewhat disconnected from the real world, by proxy. Whether this is an epic adventure quest populated by dragons, elves and goblins, or a kitchen-sink drama of an immigrant family trying to make ends meet in present-day Munich, is really beside the point.

That’s not to say that there are no distinctions to be made within the minutae of experience to be had in each, of course. But the moralistic tone that is often taken against the allegedly more ‘escapist’ of the two still betrays at least a hint of lazy thinking.

For all that the more grimily realist fiction can illuminate and raise awareness — political awareness which, it must be said, is thinner on the ground(s) of that genre’s more navel-gazing counterparts — the fantastic acts as an extension of that experience.

Let’s give voice to what’s easier to defend here, for starters. Boundary-pushing works of the fantastical — the kind you’ll find among the likes of Kafka, Angela Carter or David Cronenberg — will exaggerate and amplify with the aim of exploring loftier points. The flinty realists are largely on the side of these non-escapist works of the fantastical.

Tom Sturridge as Morpheus/Dream in the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

But I would submit that even the most reactionary or nostalgic of fantasy works can have a purpose which isn’t simply redolent of intellectual vacuity or laziness, of a kind of distracted quietism that numbs the intellect and reduces its consumers to little more than sludge.

At the end of the day, even the knockiest of Tolkien knock-offs will be better for your mental hygiene than hours spent doomscrolling through the social media platform/s of your choice… and the degree of actual, conscious choice involved in that experience is questionable to begin with.

Because if distraction from reality is what makes fantasy such an ‘irresponsible’ intellectual pursuit, what is the doomscrolling impulse of the 24/7 news cycle, which has now emigrated beyond the relatively confined space of the television screen to also latch themselves onto our mobile phones? (Yes, Gibson and Cronenberg have been warning us of this with grotesque gusto for decades).

Haunted by this reality, I submit that anything which promotes immersion of any kind is a better and more meditative alternative.

***

Re-read of the season: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany
Currently reading: The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson

It’s time to take a trip to MIBDUL…

Posted on by under Comics, MIBDUL, Writing

A young girl whose mother has committed suicide discovers she’s able to commune with ancient monsters, who have emerged from their slumber to wreak havoc on the over-developed, tiny planet of Mibdul.

‘Mibdul’ is a six-issue comic book mini-series written by myself, illustrated by Inez Kristina and published by Merlin Publishers. The first issue will be launched at Kixott on 14 April, and the party starts at 19:30. Said party will feature a signature cocktail, and early-comers will be rewarded by an open bar tab courtesy of our long-suffering but beloved publisher.

Now that the logistical stuff’s out of the way…

I’d like to point out that, much like the last few posts to appear on this sporadically updated page, Mibdul is a tribute to Marsascala. The place served as a hometown for both Inez and myself while we worked on the book, and the very idea for the comic came about after it was announced that the unspoilt patch of seaside land at Zonqor Point was given away to a Jordanian construction company.

The ‘American University’ project thankfully never panned out as per its worst threats, but at that point I needed a vent for the helpless rage that came over me and many others.

It is, sadly, a rage that continues to crop up every now and again, whenever the construction lobby which de facto rules the country proposes a fresh monstrosity.

We all protest in the ways we know best. At least, we should be allowed to. From each according to their ability. And my own tend towards a love of genre fiction. As such, Mibdul taps into the ‘space fantasy‘ popularised by Star Wars, with a dollop of cosmic horror and the freewheeling surrealism of Euro-comics.

Mibdul will be published as a monthly six-issue series, starting from April and running through to September. We hope to see you at the launch for Issue 1. But in the meantime, do avail yourselves of the pre-publication offer, to have each issue delivered to your door upon release, at a discounted price.