In last year’s wrap-up I noted that 2025 was a big important sounding year for doing big things and I don’t want to brag…
Like, I genuinely don’t want to brag. I’m Irish Catholic, I’m brag intolerant. But fine, yeah, this was a REALLY big year for me. Without a doubt my most successful year since becoming a full time writer.
For starters, my third novel, The Burial Tide was released and was selected by the New York Public Library not only as their second best horror book of the year but one of their 20 best books of 2025.
But let’s not beat about the bush. The real star of the show this year was Don’t Trust Fish, my first picture book illustrated by the incomparable Dan Santat which was…deep breath.
Because the experience of watching Son of the White Mare again could never top the experience of watching it for the first time.
And you know what’s crazy? This is…drumroll please…my final reader’s request. And the reason I left this one to last was because the requester simply asked me to review “something Eastern European” and I just chose this because it looked interesting. I picked this one almost at random.
I’ll be doing an online interview with the New York Public Library at 4pm Eastern on the 2nd of December, talking about The Burial Tide. If any of you are in the parish and want to join in, you can register HERE.
Back around the time the first eukaryotic organisms were developing on the Earth’s sea floor, I coined the term “Tar and Sugar Movies” to describe the earliest films of the Walt Disney Animated Feature canon. I chose the name in reference to the often jarring tonal shifts between cloying cutsiness and shocking darkness of those films. In retrospect though, I think I got it wrong. The true Golden Age of the Tar and Sugar aesthetic was not the late thirties and forties, but the nineteen eighties.
Here is the typical eighties cartoon experience:
“Golly Gee! This sure is a fun picnic! I just hope that mean ol’ Lord Hexxodrexx doesn’t show up to spoil everything.”
“I HAVE COME TO DEVOUR YOUR FUCKING SOULS!!! GRAAAAAAAA!!!”
And I think, with today’s movie, I may have found the ultimate Tar and Sugar movie. And, as in most things in this life, they do it better in Japan.
I don’t have to introduce Osamu Tezuka by this point, do I? Born in 1920s Osaka, created manga and animé as we know it, the Japanese Walt Disney, one of the most influential animators of all time you know all this. He was also quite possibly one of the most prolific creators in history, writing and drawing well over 700 manga series in his lifetime encompassing virtually any genre you could think of and targeted at every possible age demographic. The basis for today’s movie was the children’s manga Unico, about a cute little unicorn who has magical powers that he uses to bring happiness and joy to everyone he meets.
Well, I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly take a dark turn.
Funny how these things work out. I was pretty sure I had run out of candidates for this particular feature and then look what happens! A Dracula* AND a Frankenstein movie arrive within a year of each other. Both critically acclaimed, big budget adaptations directed by genuine auteur directors. Bats versus Bolts is back from the dead like a…what’s a good analogy. A mummy? Sure, that works.
So join me in what promises to be a real knock-down drag out fight. Robert Eggers 2024 Nosferatu versus Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. FIGHT! (Oh, and spoilers past this point).
Blogger and teacher Colby Sharp also featured DON’T TRUST FISH in a list of “Amazing 2025 Books” that you can find here: https://www.mrcolbysharp.com/2025
Oh, true story. Once my grandmother made me tidy my room and when she saw the result sniffily remarked that I’d never get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Well, well, well.
I saw a Stan Lee interview a long time ago where he was recounting the creation of Spider-Man, where halfway through he mischeviously winked at the camera and said “I’ve told this story so many times that for all I know it’s true”.
That caveat pretty much applies to any story Lee told about the birth of Marvel’s second wave of superheroes in the nineteen sixties. Even if we discount Stan’s (well earned) legendary reputation for self promotion and myth-making, he was an old man with a failing memory. But, screw it. That’s pretty much all of human history. A story we’ve told ourselves so many times, that for all we know it’s true.
There are conflicting versions of how the Fantastic Four came to be. Stan Lee said that he conceived the idea after publisher Martin Goodman asked him to come up with a superhero team to compete with DC’s then-new Justice League of America. Jack Kirby disputed this, claiming that the team was principally his idea and functioned as a continuation of his work on Challengers of the Unknown for DC. My opinion is…it really doesn’t matter. The book is credited as the co-creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and if you read it, it becomes immediately clear that it is a co-creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. If you replaced either Kirby’s art or Lee’s writing, it wouldn’t be the same thing. Both men put their stamp on it, and hard. What is, I think, un-contestable is that The Fantastic Four #1 is the single most influential comic book issue since Action Comics debuted in 1938.
While Superman’s debut launched the comic book superhero genre, it had peaked and waned in the years after World War 2. The Fantastic Four not only re-kindled interest in the genre, it set it on the path to near total conquest of the American comic book landscape. This one book acted as a cauldron for concepts that shaped the entire industry, both in a fictional and technical sense. It was working on this book where Kirby and Lee pioneered the “Marvel Method”, where instead of a full script, the writer contributed a broad outline, leaving the artist discretion to shape individual story beats, with the writer then returning at the end of the process to craft dialogue. This was the method that allowed Stan Lee to be so insanely prolific throughout the sixties and much of the seventies. The book also introduced more psychological and narrative complexity than was typical of comic books of the era, when they were still seen as a medium for children. And, of course, I could spend all day listing the iconic characters that were introduced in the pages of this one book and how it acted as the Big Bang for the nascent Marvel comics universe. Fantastic Four was the book where Stan Lee became STAN LEE and Jack Kirby became JACK KIRBY. Although they were both seasoned industry veterans, it was here that Lee honed his trademark mix of action, medodrama and wise-acre comedy. And Kirby? Kirby underwent a transformation from a talented artist to a one-of-a-kind icon of the medium.
As for adaptation to other media, the Four has been well represented with numerous animated series and a radio show in the seventies starring NO FUCKING WAY THAT IS TRUE! BILL MURRAY?! BILL MURRAY PLAYED THE HUMAN TORCH!!!?!
“No one will ever believe you.”
But for such an important property, the jump to live action took a lot longer. This is just a difficult property to adapt. It’s one thing to stick a stuntman in a Spider-man costume and have him punch a few goons. It’s quite another to set him on fire and launch him into space to battle world-devouring space gods (the union will fucking eat you alive). So it wasn’t until the late eighties when special effects driven science fiction was having a moment that the rights were finally sold. That resulted in a movie so good that Roger Corman hid it under the floorboards to ensure it was never tainted by the eyes of a sinful world. Come the 2000s the rights were picked up by Fox and we got the Time Story duology which, while undergoing something of a positive reappraisal these days, were deeply compromised.
Then there was JESUS CHRIST WHAT EVEN IS THIS?
But, at last, here we are. The Fantastic Four, in the MCU, as God and Kevin Feige intended, coming back to rekindle interest in a superhero genre that had almost died due to lack of interest.
First of all, the long awaited audiobook for Knock Knock Open Wide is available in North America from Tantor media, narrated by the wonderful Aoife McMahon!
Second! The Burial Tide was just nominated as one of the New York Public Library’s Top 20 Horror Books of 2025 in some pretty darn august company!
Maybe it’s me. Maybe I just shouldn’t be allowed near CGI animated dinosaur films. I don’t know why this particular mircogenre of movies manages to so consistently stick in my damn craw. I, of course, have Dinosaursitting proudly at the very bottom of my rankings of the Disney canon and I have every hope that it will remain that way for a long time.
And I would still gladly watch Dinosaur over TheGood Dinosaur. Mainly because, I can at least watch Dinosaur from beginning to end. The Good Dinosaur is the second last movie on my requested reviews because I have put it off over and over and over again. I cannot finish this thing. It bores the piss out of me.
But, before we crack on, I want to explain why I’m not doing a full plot recap for this one.
Still not entirely sure this isn’t my wife pulling off an amazingly ambitious prank.
3. This movie has practically no plot to recap.
4. Disney Plus was dicking me around something fierce, constantly crashing and freezing and making the experience of watching this movie even more interminable than normal. This, by the way, was also during Kimmelnacht so you can understand why I was eyeing my Disney Plus subscription with a steely eye and whispering…
So, not a recap, more a series of observations about why this fucking movie annoys me so much.
I discussed back in my King of Thieves review how Genie presents a huge problem in the Aladdin franchise: too popular to get rid of, but so powerful that he constantly has to be written around to ensure he doesn’t end the story prematurely. I think one of the reasons why The Citadel is possibly my favourite episode in the whole series is how cleverly it turns that problem into a narrative asset. The other reason of course, is Mozenrath.
Almost certainly the most popular and iconic villain in a series that, as I mentioned last time, wasn’t exactly lacking in that department. The Citadel is his first appearance and, in my opinion, represents what this series was really capable of when firing on all cylinders.
unshavedmouse 