Worlds Will Live, Worlds Will Die

Of all the sense memories to float to the surface, I was surprised to wake up the other morning suddenly aware of something from a quarter century ago: sitting on a coach at Glasgow Bus Station, preparing to travel back to Aberdeen for… work? A visit with friends? I can’t remember which, exactly; I know for a fact it wasn’t one of the times I was going back to go to school, because of everything else that is happening in the memory: me sitting in the seat, eagerly unwrapping and opening a copy of DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths collected edition hardcover.

(I just checked; that came out in 2000, so it really was 25 years ago exactly. I must have been going up to Aberdeen to visit friends.)

It’s not the book itself that’s the center of the memory as much as my feelings surrounding it. This was an expensive book — a slipcased hardcover that came with, I think, a poster and maybe something else as well? — and it was by far the most expensive book I’d ever bought for myself brand new by that point in my life. I was very conscious of the fact that I had just spent that amount of money on myself for something that I did not by any measure “need,” and it felt luxuriant in a way that I was so uncomfortable with that I was practically vibrating in the seat as I unwrapped it.

That’s not to say that it was “bad” discomfort as much as it was simply novel discomfort. I felt accomplished and adult to be able to spend this amount of money on just a book, and it felt like a strange benchmark that I had passed by buying it. I remember thinking to myself that it wasn’t just a book but an object that I would always take care of and treasure forever — a four color piece of evidence that I had passed into a particular phase of adulthood.

I was sincere in that at the time, but when I left the country two years later, it was one of many things I left behind. Looking back now, I find myself strangely sad about that. Chalk it up to middle aged nostalgia, I guess.

What’s Wrong With That? I’d Like To Know

Part of my “Actually trying to be slightly more deliberate in what I do” approach to 2025 has included the new tradition of reading an issue of Fantastic Four every evening. Specifically, I made the decision to read through the entire Jack Kirby and Stan Lee run of the series — all 104 issues, and the attendant annuals (I think there’s four of them, somewhat fittingly) — an issue per day, no matter how much I might be into it and wanting to rush ahead and read more. I’m also revisiting a bunch of other comic runs that I like an issue per day as well; there’s something to this drip-feed revisit approach that really appeals to me, especially when it comes to going back over favorite comics from my past. It’s weirdly exciting and restorative, in ways that I struggle to understand, never mind put into words.

One of the things about the Fantastic Four issues in particular — and the early Thor stories from Journey Into Mystery, also by Lee and Kirby from basically the same time period, which I started reading as well — is how playful they are. I don’t just mean that in the sense of, “they hadn’t worked everything out and were willing to throw things against the wall and see what stuck,” although that’s always thrilling to see from today’s perspective, especially when it comes to what didn’t stick around.

What I mean is, these stories are often very intentionally silly in a way that feels almost sacrilegious when compared to the self-seriousness of superheroes in pop culture today, and in almost every single case, that silliness is utterly charming and winning to readers. It’s difficult not to enjoy the experience of people in what in the full flush of not just creativity but success, so secure in what they’re doing that they’ll take the piss out of themselves and poke holes in their own work just to see what happens next. The confidence, the swagger, on show in all of this would be infuriating if it wasn’t being punctured right in front of your eyes, so all you’re left with is low key awe at what you’re reading.

If there’s one thing I’d want to see more of in contemporary superhero comics, it’s that willingness — eagerness, even — to embrace silly ideas and notions and run with them, just to see where they lead.

On A Series Of Events I Cannot Explain

In the couple of months, I’ve been listening to the song “I Have Been Floated” by the Olivia Tremor Control almost obsessively, over and over and over again. It was something that I found almost by accident, adding it to a playlist initially because I liked the organ hook and moving on, only for the song to take root in my brain and settle in for the long haul.

(To speak to how little I was really paying attention to it at first, when it started playing on a loop in my head, I couldn’t remember what song it actually was, just the melody; I went back through everything I’d been listening to to try and find it, going, it’s definitely got to be something I heard in the last couple of days, right? I’ve not just made this tune up, have I?)

Somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth day of listening to the song for a third or fourth time, I realized that this was something I do entirely unintentionally; become obsessed with something in the short term and loop it, revisiting it time after time to try and understand it on a level that unlocks something inside my brain. It’s most often music — with this song, it’s me realizing that the way the song plays with recurring elements is a masterclass in arrangement and production — but it can be anything: a TV show, a book, a comic, a movie. When I discovered the rom-com Rye Lane, I watched it three times in one weekend. I’ve watched Lovers Rock more times than I can remember, despite only seeing it for the first time three years ago, especially the “Silly Game” scene, which I rewind and watch again even while playing the movie through as a whole. It’s all about trying to get why it makes my brain itch.

This is, perhaps, a “me” thing — the desire to revisit until something feels fully understood and appreciated — but I doubt that I’m the only one who does it, somehow. Don’t all of us who have ever considered ourselves fans of anything have this gene inside our heads?

I Didn’t Mean That

Maybe it’s much too early in the year, but I thought I’d ask you just the same: how much thought do you give to intention in everything you do? I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the past few weeks, in large part because the holiday break gave me an opportunity to stop, take stock, and realize just how much of what I’d been doing what more reactive than fully intentional on my part.

What started me on this train of thought was thinking about certain processes and traditions in work that had essentially evolved by themselves without any of us really fully intending for them to happen — and, in the same frame of mind, noting that certain plans we had made had come to nothing because, again, things had happened that we hadn’t really intended that pulled our attention away at the wrong moment. But it’s not only a work thing; I’ve noticed it in other areas of my life, and even here: things I fell into doing without even noticing, and then after months going, “when did that become a thing?”

(If you don’t know what, I’m not going to show myself up and reveal all.)

Upon realizing this — and, bear in mind, I did so as the year started and thoughts of “resolutions” were in the air, as pointless as that tradition might ultimately be — I told myself that I would at least attempt to be more conscious of what I was doing, and have more actual decision-making going on inside before things happened. Of course, that’s one of those things where the theory and the reality are two drastically different things: as soon as I had to start interacting with the rest of the world, that theory was tested and a lot of purely reactive activity started back up because, turns out, other people have their own opinions, wants, and needs, it seems…?

What’s left, then, is the desire to do better and the hope that doing so will get easier with practice as the year goes forward. That, or I just forget about it entirely again by April or something.

Busy Feelin’ Anxious About Doin’ Nothin’

During the holiday break, I read something online along the lines of, “If you feel like you need a break, take a break — don’t do anything at all, and let yourself actually relax without any kind of expectation on you whatsoever — and then take even more of a break, because if you feel like you need a break, chances are you need more of one than you believe.” It was the kind of self-help talk that made my head buzz with recognition, so I decided to heed the advice and proceeded, for the vast majority of 12 days to do as little as possible.

And that’s when I discovered that all of my workaholic tendencies have apparently come back in force.

Back in the day, I managed to hide all the worst workaholic feelings I had because I was a freelancer, and that comes with the Freelancer Hustle, so the impulse to always be working and always be productive could be disguised as, “If I stop for even a minute, then I’m losing income that I can’t afford to give up.” That particular lie — to myself, and others around me — allowed me to work myself into a hole with a defense of it being necessary and, in the grander scheme, maybe even good for me if I could get to a point where I was successful enough that I could relax.

That never happened, of course, but the joys of therapy and a significant change in life circumstances made me realize that I was working too hard and needed to pull back about six or so years ago, and I actually managed to do so for some time with no small amount of smugness: look at me, taking care of myself! And then, this recent break happened and the antsy-ness I felt while purposefully not doing anything let me know that maybe it’s not a habit I’ve entirely broken, after all…

I resisted the urge for pretty much the entire break, however — sometimes, some things really did need to be done — and I’m probably better for the experience, as much as I kind of hate to admit it. The trick for the next few months is working out how to force myself to relax on a regular basis, and not find reasons to work more than necessary in the hopes that I’m earning back time that future me will never claim.

Someone Should Record A Teen Titans Song Called “Titanic” to the Tune of Atomic

At some point in November, I started re-reading The New Teen Titans, a comic book series that was for a large stretch of the 1980s one of the most acclaimed comic books in the U.S. market — and one of the leading titles for DC Comics at a time when it was positioning itself as one of the most forward-thinking publishers out there for mainstream audiences. By all logic, such a description would suggest that New Teen Titans is an all-time classic that people place in the same pantheon as Chris Claremont’s contemporaneous run on Uncanny X-Men, or other such 1980s superheroes classics. And yet… they don’t.

The problem is, bluntly, that the last… half of the classic 1980s/early 90s run is not particularly very good. In fact, it’s so bad that it’s almost more interesting than the good stuff, for reasons that amount to little more than simply asking, “What the fuck is happening?” over and over and over again.

The “classic” New Teen Titans run starts in 1980 when Marv Wolfman and George Perez revive the 1960s team book with a bunch of new characters and a mission statement that essentially consists of, “see what Claremont is doing in X-Men? Yeah, that, but even more soapy.” It was an immediate smash hit because, honestly, it’s addictive glossy soap superheroics that very deliberately places all of the big threats as something with personal connections to one of the core cast, because everything in the damn comic is soap opera and character-driven, and that’s what makes it work. Keeping everything claustrophobically focused on its core cast is a strong enough gimmick to keep the momentum going even when you realize that some plots are going nowhere, and others are repeating over and over again. (How many times need we worry that one of the team is evil?)

And then, stunningly, everything goes to pieces. The 1980s New Teen Titans comic was successful enough that, four years in, it gets replaced by another comic, also called New Teen Titans, which gets renamed The New Titans with its 50th issue because, well, maybe teens weren’t in anymore. That second series continues until its 130th issue in 1996 or so, but here’s the thing: everything after, maybe, #62 or so is… terrible. Not just “not very good,” but, actively bad. And it’s all because the series seems to utterly forget what works.

I can’t deny it: the sudden, unmistakable drop-off in quality is what kept me reading until the end, in part because I was compelled to try and figure out if there was method to the seeming madness of dropping almost all of the pre-existing cast in any number of melodramatic ways — one is literally tied to a missile, flown into Russia, and then transformed into a mind-controlled robot; that’s not a joke — while also wondering just how crazy things could get.

There’s something compelling to me about watching artistic “flops,” or failures in some degree or another, but the fate of New Teen Titans is almost singular in the ways in which it doesn’t just lean into the skid as things start to go wrong, but almost speed up into it, too: doubling down, as if to see what might happen if the crash is harder, more violent, more destructive. You almost have to admire that sense of nihilism, if it wasn’t for the fact that… it’s kind of boring to read…?

Lucky by Radiohead

It’s a surreal, disturbing thing to watch the wildfires in Los Angeles and know that people I know and love are caught up in all of that. I mean that in the literal sense; I know people who got the evacuation notice and had to get the fuck out of there, leaving me — who’s lucky in that I’m states away from any of this and in no danger whatsoever — in a heightened state of anxiety and concern for them and thinking, over and over, I can’t imagine going through that myself.

I’ve been astonishingly lucky in terms of natural disasters, in that I’ve never really had to go through one. I think the worst I’ve ever personally had to deal with has been… an earthquake or two in San Francisco when I lived there, maybe? There was a hurricane in my hometown when I was a kid that was terrifying because it sucked a window out of our attic, but (a) I might be misremembering, and (b) our house wasn’t in the best shape at any given moment, so maybe that wasn’t that serious of a feat after all. Kid memories are always notoriously untrustworthy.

I remember, too, the wildfire smoke in Portland from the past few summers, and the days when the sky was orange because of the pollution and debris in the air; how curiously, surreally dystopian and cinematic it felt, and entirely unrealistic at the same time. How could this be the actual real world I asked myself as I ventured outside, the oppressive heat and thick air feeling like something artificial, as if I was in some strange room that I’d be able to step outside of and breathe freely again.

It’ll be worse than that in LA right now; the photos I’ve seen look like special effects from disaster movies, and videos of burned out neighborhoods that just don’t exist anymore. Everything I see makes me realize again how lucky I’ve been, and how little I’ve had to experience. I really can’t imagine going through any of it myself, and I’m so sorry, and so fearful, for those who have to.