THE WEDNESDAY WAFFLE 10th JUNE 2026: A "Sub-Optimal" week, featuring death, crime and coffee.
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
LOOK! LOOK! We've managed to get a Waffle out two weeks running! We intend to keep this up, but no promises. And before you ask, yes, we fully intend to bring "What's on the Rack?" back too - the only thing that's stopping us is time.
Time, my pretties, continues to be in rather short supply. Regie is still spending half his week at the wrong end of the country, which is why we are still closed on Fridays - we'll get that sorted as soon as we can. That lack of time is also why our web store is still down. We're working on that too.
OK. So. Our bad news this week is that the shop was broken into. We'll get to that, but honestly it's not as big a deal as it sounds.
The important bad news involves two very untimely deaths. Actually the first one has almost nothing to do with comics, which is a little outside our remit - obviously, as a comic shop our main focus is always on comics. But we wouldn't be into comics if we weren't also geeks. And as geeks we have to pause for a second and mark the passing of Anthony Stewart Head, best known to most of you as "Giles from Buffy". (And to some of you really old folk as one half of the Nescafe Gold Blend Couple).
I don't have any personal stories about the man himself, but it says rather a lot that the internet has been full of tales of his kindness and general awesomeness, to fellow professional actors and to just regular folk. Never flashy, never self aggrandising, just genuinely wanting to make things better for others.
It was as Giles, the tweedy school librarian and Watcher of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that Head first really came to my notice. I mean, I'd seen the Gold Blend adverts - everyone had, these were the days when there were only four channels and two of them showed ads, so advertisers could make their ads into mini soap operas that kept the audience as glued to the screen as the actual shows. Indeed, the Gold Blend Couple ad series was so popular that an estimated thirty million people tuned in to watch the final ad in December 1992. Not the show the ad was in, but the ad itself. Nope. Not kidding.
For nostalgia's sake, you can follow the saga below...
What? It was the eighties/early nineties. Four TV channels and 8bit graphics on video games. This ad series was a sensation!
It was Rupert Giles I really identified with though. I was in my late twenties when Buffy first hit UK screens - too old to really identify with the central characters, but not yet old enough to enjoy them in a spirit of nostalgia for my past youth. Giles though, was older. He liked books. He found teenagers both unfathomable and mildly irritating. He was just a tweed wearing version of me, basically.
Head made Giles his own. In less capable hands Giles could have been buffoonish, or even creepy, but Head played the role with a compassion and depth of feeling that made the paternal love that Giles feels for Buffy feel real and wholesome. He was the heart of the show, the calm fulcrum around which the action and craziness could revolve.
But he also brought a darkness that added a touch of menace. When Rupert Giles was moved to action he could be terrifying and utterly without mercy. If anything threatened his Slayer Giles was a holy terror. You can check out some of his best bits below:
Head also starred on stage - perhaps most notably as Doctor Frank'n'Furter in the Rocky Horror Show in the early nineties - yes, even as he was romancing that nice Yuppie over coffee. I couldn't find footage of that, but her he is reprising the role in 2006 for the Rocky Horror Tribute:
Anthony Head was 72, and has joined his lifelong partner Sarah Fisher, who died last December, in the great Beyond. Good night Giles, keep watch from above and enjoy the coffee.
Perhaps an even more unexpected death this week was the French/Iranian cartoonist, writer and film director Marjane Satrapi, who was probably best known for the iconic autobiographical masterpiece Persepolis.
In a statement Satrapi's friends said that she had "died of sadness" this week in the wake of the death of her husband, the Swedish actor, producer and screenwriter Mattias Rippa, who died in April 2025. Satrapi was 56.
An outspoken, dissident voice Satrapi spoke out against the theocratic regime in Tehran, having left her native country for France in 1994. Her graphic memoir Persepolis explores her early struggles against the limitations she lived under in Iran and both her work and much of her life were dedicated to highlighting the negative behaviour of the Islamic Republic and the suffering of the people of Iran.
In 2025 she refused the Legion d'Honneur in protest at what she regarded as France's "hypocrisy" in it's policies towards the Islamic Republic of Iran, particularly the Visa rules that made it almost impossible for Iranian dissidents to flee to France.
She was Oscar nominated for her film of Persepolis, for which she was awarded the Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. She leaves behind a substantial body of work on both film and paper as well as the Mattias and Marjane Ripa-Satrapi Cinema Foundation which supports students from outside France who want to go to Paris to study filmmaking.
Persepolis in particular is a profound, personal and thought provoking piece of work which, if you have not yet read it, I cannot recommend highly enough. Her loss at such a young age feels very wrong and we are, without question, diminished by her passing.
So, briefly, moving on to our little local difficulty. We arrived in the shop on Saturday morning to discover that we'd been broken into. Our suspicion is that the perpetrators were looking for cash, and left dispirited when they didn't find any. (I mean seriously, cash?! In a comic store?! There's no money in comics kids!)
Thankfully the damage was minor and while we're irritated by it, it's not the end of the world. We would, however, like to publicly thank everyone who got in touch with messages of support - we really appreciate every single one of you.
Anyway - last week was a bit of a bust. Let's all have a better week this week, shall we?
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