There was one time Declan was walking down the stairs. If I was taking a half hour or hour-long nap, I’d just be talking total nonsense. I’d also be really alert and freakishly scared of everything. Declan would go to put his arm on me or touch me and I would jump out of my skin. I was definitely falling apart. I might be paranoid, but I think my hair was also thinning. We were living off of pizza and Indian food, so I definitely packed on some September pounds. From the end of September to the rest of the year I still had a crazy workload, though it never got back up to 17. It hovered around 13-15. Then in January, everything slowed down. Some books ended or went on hiatus. But I got sick for four weeks. It just caught up with me. From New Year’s to February 1st, I was sick in bed. It was terrible. I never want to push my body so hard again. My body was just so angry.
Electricomics will be a 32-page showcase with four very different original titles:
Big Nemo – set in the 1930s, Alan Moore revisits Winsor McCay’s most popular hero
Cabaret Amygdala – modernist horror from writer Peter Hogan (Terra Obscura)
Red Horse – on the anniversary of the beginning of World War One, Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys) and Danish artist Peter Snejbjerg (World War X) take us back to the trenches
Sway – a slick new time travel science fiction story from Leah Moore and John Reppion (Sherlock Holmes – The Liverpool Demon, 2000 AD)
Two quick thoughts on this PR about the launch of the new digital comics app/imprint Electricomics:
- Only one artist is listed in that creative line-up. Is that because they only have one artist signed up, or is art that unimportant to the company?
- Of course Alan Moore is “revisiting” an existing character. For such an important, revolutionary comic creator, the extent to which Moore revamps existing properties instead of creating new ones is kind of amazing. Miracleman, Swamp Thing, Watchmen, Supreme (which is a one-two punch, considering the 1950s Superman tribute he turned the character into), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls, and arguably Tom Strong and Promethea, as well… I’m sure I’ve forgotten some in there (Does From Hell count, in that he didn’t create the characters per se? Hmm). It’s oddly fascinating to me.
Over the course of the next six months, an unexpected side effect started to emerge. It first happened, according to the report, when Mr B happened to hear the Johnny Cash song Ring of Fire on the radio. “From this moment on,” the report says, “Mr B kept listening simply and solely to Johnny Cash and bought all his CDs and DVDs.”
When listening to his favourite songs, the report adds, Mr B felt like he was the hero in a movie, and although he played Johnny Cash songs almost exclusively for the following years, the music never annoyed him.
Brain implants made a Dutch man into a Johnny Cash fan. Even better, when the charge on the implants ran down, he stopped being a Johnny Cash fan.
Eric Lewald takes pride in his ass-kicking women of X-Men: The Animated Series and the number of female writers he had on the show. “We always get crap out here when we’re doing shows, ‘This is for boys. Don’t have any girl characters,’” he says. “Margaret was probably the main reason. It was her show. Storm and Rogue’s toys didn’t sell as well. [Usually] they would tell you no matter how good Storm is in the episode, the toys will sell half as many as the male characters. But it was a time when there were no toys selling well for Marvel. We didn’t have the pressure from the toy companies.”
I wonder how this connects with the oft-cited “They didn’t make enough toys of the female characters” trope? Did the X-Men toys sell half-as-well because there were less produced overall, or was there genuinely less demand for Storm and Rogue compared with Wolverine and Cyclops in terms of toys?
Obviously we all know that the currency of issue #1s has been devalued of late, and we also all know that when there are so many X-Men titles, most of them are going to be throwaway. Even so, it comes as a surprise to see such a blatant filler issue so early in the run of a new title.
An odd feature of the X-Men line right now is that while the two lead titles are plainly the Bendis books, neither of them actually features the X-Men. By which I mean, they both feature teams that, until a few years ago, would have been given a different name and presented as spin-off titles. The X-Men, by any sensible definition, are the team living in the Jean Grey School. Uncanny is about Scott rebuilding a new group after the collapse of his side of the schism during Avengers vs X-Men; All-New X-Men is specifically about the time-travelling teen group, making it akin to the early nineties Legionnaires spin-off from Legion of Super-Heroes.
That ought to leave the way clear for somebody else to write the actual X-Men and have some leeway to make their book feel significant. But none of the other three titles do feel significant right now, in pretty much any way, and hitting a comedy fill-in issue about a goat seven issues in really brings that home.
In Relief of Silence and Burden
In Relief of Silence and Burden
I will not write his name. I will not speak his name. I will try not to think his name.
I saw the young man’s video, and the first thing I felt, god forgive me, was pity for this broken man child and his grotesque narcissism and his naked hatred of women, of himself.
“At a reading in Miami, a man asked something like, “Do you think all men are rapists?” I said no because I think nothing of the sort. And still, one is too many.”
The “Not All Men” thing is exhausting/frustrating/depressing/alloftheabove in large part because it is such a straw man argument than nonetheless fails to engage with itself. Of course no-one is making the argument that every single man is a rapist/killer/misogynist, because no-one truly talks in statistical absolutes like that. Nonetheless, by saying “not all men,” it suggests that there’s a threshold for it not being a problem – as if, if it’s only 10% of all men or whatever, that’s just fine.
The “And still, one is too many” cuts to the heart of that for me. At some point on Saturday, I thought to myself that the correct response to “Not all men” was “Maybe not, but more than anyone would really want and that’s the point.” But even that feels cowardly nitpicking. The correct response is probably “Just shut up and listen.”
Anyway: Read the Roxane Gay piece linked above.
You Know My Name
A belated thought, re: Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice (which, yes, is a very very strange title all told).
For all of Man of Steel, Superman isn’t called Superman. There’s even the “On my planet, the S means hope” scene to explain the symbol away without having to go anywhere near the word “Superman.” Maybe I’m misremembering, but I could’ve sworn there were thinkpieces about this, convinced that it meant that Warner Bros was afraid of the name “Superman,” as if it were too ridiculous for the self-important tone of the movie.
For the sequel, the character is not only called Superman, but the name is right there in the title – as is “Batman,” making its first appearance in a movie title since… what, 2005’s Batman Begins? That’ll be more than a decade since the character has been named in a movie title by the time BVS hits screens. It’s as if Warners has decided not only to embrace the source material, but – judging by the Dawn of Justice subtitle – overly embrace it. I look forward to future thinkpieces.
She reminded them of the BBC’s guidelines on social media, laid out on its website: “But the guidance is clear when it comes to personal activity: ‘As a BBC member of staff – and especially as someone who works in News – there are particular considerations to bear in mind. They can all be summarised as: ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’”
I would love to, but … It’s a mixture of being too lazy and also having been spoilt by writing lyrics. In songs, you can write something that’s only a page long and yet it’s the whole song. I’m reading the new Dave Eggers book [The Circle] at the moment, which is about 490 pages long. The idea of sustaining something over that length, well, I’m in awe of people who can do it. I’m more like a short-sharp-bursts kind of person.
Jarvis Cocker sums up my attitude towards writing a book. Just replacing “writing lyrics” with “blog posts.”