Month: August 2025

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A Letter To Me, Rudy

In my defense, I can feel myself fighting the burnout.

I’d become so used to the old rhythms of the year, which peaked in the summer with San Diego Comic-Con and then settled into a dull thud until October saw my next wave of travel for New York Comic Con, and then a slow slide into the holidays; if I was feeling particularly selfish or bold, I might have put my birthday somewhere in between the two there, but still: it was a relatively laidback, relatively still second half of the year. This year, that’s not really the case.

Almost immediately as soon as I was back at my desk after San Diego, it was time to prepare for PAX West, an end-of-August show that I had to manage all the prep for, for multiple people; less than a week after that show, there’s another comic convention to attend here in town. That one, thankfully, doesn’t need any travel (thank God!), but it’s another weekend of working and another list of things to organize and prepare for ahead of time.

As I’m doing all that, I’m also helping plan for New York Comic Con in mid-October, which involves managing the schedules and demands of somewhere in the region of nine or ten people, while also doing prep work for Emerald City Comic Con, which is in March of next year. Oh, and also doing my regular day-to-day writing and editing work, on top of that. (Well, less writing these days, but something had to give.)

None of this should be taken as a complaint; I’m very grateful for my job, and the challenges it brings are something that I know are good for me in the longterm even if they can feel overwhelming in the short. But I’m writing this to record that it is overwhelming in the short term, and that I can feel the burnout creeping in around the edges. I’m writing this to remind myself to take moments to breathe, and try to locate the now while I’m continually working in three or four different time periods at the same moment.

This one isn’t for you, dear reader, it’s for me, to hold myself accountable when I re-read this later.

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Just Like Starting

Something unexpected happened at San Diego Comic-Con that I’ve been mulling over in the back of my head ever since: someone offered me a job, and it’s not a job in a field I’ve ever worked in before. No, I won’t say what it is, nor who offered it to me; I said no almost immediately, responding that I didn’t have the skill set — they disagreed — nor the experience required for the precise position they were offering, and I was at least entirely correct when it came to the experience part. However… I keep thinking about the fact that it was offered, and I immediately turned it down.

I don’t say that because I regret turning it down (I don’t), but because the more I think about it, the more I’m fascinated by the fact that I didn’t at least take longer to think about the possibility. If nothing else, to think about the possibility of doing anything so outside of my comfort zone. (And this very much would have been outside of my comfort zone.)

When I first moved to the US and got my Green Card, I remember meeting with a temp staffing agency purely because I needed money fast and I didn’t feel as if I had any particularly marketable skills. Sure, I’d gone to art school and taught in that same art school for a couple years after, but still: art school, you know? In the meeting, I was asked what kind of work I was looking for, and my reply was, for all intents and purposes, what have you got?

My thinking at the time was, no matter what is offered, I’ll either pick it up as I go along or not, and then I’ll move on to something else. Looking back, this feels supernaturally unlike the me I am now, who’d be daunted at the prospect of starting from scratch and seeing what could happen — but it worked out, even if much of that was due to the kindness and forgiveness of those around me at the time. (Something I have always strived to repay and pass on now that I’m in a more senior position myself.) Still: was I selling myself short by not responding to this new job offer with a do tell me more instead of a no, I’m not the guy, trust me?

I don’t know. Maybe? It’s not as if I’m in a business with any kind of long-term survival strategy, because my business doesn’t have any kind of long-term survival strategy, it becomes increasingly clear. Then again, it’s also not as if the industry I was being offered an entry point to was any more stable in the grand scheme of things. I chose to stay with the Devil I Know, and honestly, I’m glad I did. I actually kind of like this particular Devil, if I have to say it out loud.

And yet, my mind keeps wondering every now and then. And yet.

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Many Years From Now There Will Be New Sensations

I’m glad that I hit the entirely arbitrary 150 mark on my 2025 playlist before the end of the month, so I can share what my particular “Songs of the Summer” have been before the season falls into the bin underneath our big cosmic desk. For those that might not remember, every year I make a Spotify playlist of songs that are either new to me or that I’ve become newly obsessed with if I had heard them before, and I share them here in batches of 50 songs at a time; here are the first two entries of this year’s list. (Why 50? There is no method to my madness.)

Want to know what much of my June, July and August sounded like? Take a look.

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I Pick Myself Up And Get Back

Like some fading action hero staring into the distance in the dimly-lit room at the midpoint of a movie, I’ve been realizing that I don’t heal as quickly as I used to — although, while the action hero’s moment of awareness would have been heralded by surviving a set piece that likely involved no shortage of gunfire, a shattered window or two and likely a fall of a couple of stories at the very least, mine came about because of a random gardening accident.

It’s been weeks since I accidentally got a stone embedded in my ankle thanks to a weed whacker run amok, and although it was certainly pretty deep in there — the amount of blood that gushed forth when I prized it out was enough of a giveaway about that — I’m still surprised that it hasn’t entirely healed over just yet; I looked down in the shower today to see the scab still formed and wondered how long I’d be stuck with this unlikely addition. It made me think about the fact that I still have the ghosts of scars from the animals clawing at me, too, even though those are even older, and I got to thinking about how the body changes and starts prioritizing what to work on as you get older.

(I can still get out of bed every morning without pain, and my back hasn’t given out on me yet; I’ll take both of those things over more elastic skin any day, I admit.)

At the dinner with the team before San Diego Comic-Con this year, there was a moment where I looked down and realized that my left hand was bleeding. I had (and still have) no idea whatsoever how it had happened — there was nothing that I could have cut myself on anywhere near me, as far as I could see, but there I was, with a big bleeding gash on my hand. I made a joke to everyone else as I wandered away to ask a waiter for a band-aid or two, but even then, I thought to myself, is this just something that happens now? Am I just going to start bleeding for seemingly no reason?

That cut is still on my hand, too, and occasionally it still sends a sting up my arm to remind me of that, out of nowhere. There are things you don’t think about as your body ages, and there’s something almost welcome about that, in a way. It’s nice to still be surprised, 50 years in.

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Still Around The Morning After

I had a thought, the other day, upon realizing that a bunch of comics I’ve been buying in back issues lately aren’t ones that I collected back in the day, but ones that I read from the collection of my best friend in high school; I realized that I had inherited the issues originally when he quit reading comics himself, and I thought, back when he outgrew comics, just like everyone else at the time except for me and the other shy, painfully quiet loners I’d see at the local comic book store.

I thought that, and then I realized that… that probably doesn’t happen anymore. At some point in the decades since I was a teenager, buying and reading comics became, if not mainstream then at least not something that is a topic of open derision by your peer group. I’m almost nostalgic about the whole concept now, looking back.

I remember the point when I thought to myself, oh, I’m a comic collector now, and I can even remember the specific comic book issue when I realized that I wasn’t just reading comics off-handedly; it was something that was specifically an active interest, something that I wanted to do and do intentionally. (That was Uncanny X-Men #185, by the way, by Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr.; I don’t know why that issue was the one, but it was. It still took ten months for me to call myself a collector, though; I didn’t do that until I bought Uncanny X-Men #195.)

Throughout my late teens, I remember that buying and reading comics was a particularly solitary activity, that I’d find the stores and go there myself or drag along a friend or even family member despite their obvious disinterest. It was something that I kept to myself, as much as I’d occasionally attempt to convert people I thought could be like-minded and easily convinced. It rarely worked; for the most part, it was something I did and kept to myself.

There’s really is something I almost miss about all of that. As lonely as it was — and it was! — there was also something… exciting about feeling as if I spoke a secret language that no-one else around me understood, or the thrill of realizing that other people could understand, when that connection was made. The world is different now, where everyone doesn’t just recognize Spider-Man and Superman and Batman, but Metamorpho, Shang-Chi, and Moon Knight, as well. How did that even happen?

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Those We Leave Behind

I’ve been getting very self-conscious when it comes to checking out of a hotel room recently. Not the act of checking out itself, I should explain: the whole process of going to the front desk and making small talk to answer the questions of how was your stay and I hope you’ll be coming back again soon? isn’t something that particularly bothers me. (Honestly, I find the small talk at check in more uncomfortable, for some reason; chances are I’m here for work and I don’t really care about the minibar, I promise.) Instead, I’m talking about everything that happens before I actually leave the room for the last time.

There’s an obvious finality to closing that door for the final time that leaves me wracked with doubt: Have I packed everything? Am I sure that I’ve packed everything? Maybe I should check the bathroom one more time, maybe I forgot my toothpaste. The older I get, the longer it takes me to leave a hotel room, because I’m increasingly convinced that in doing so, I’ll leave something of great value behind. Never mind that I rarely have anything of great value in any hotel room I’m in, beyond my work stuff; I become anxious at the idea that anything left behind would suddenly become valuable, retroactively.

All of this was in my head as I checked out of my hotel in San Diego the other week, only for the regular check-out process to be interrupted by a couple literally running into the lobby of the hotel and immediately rush to the elevators, where one of them jumps in and the other runs back to the desk, all-but-yelling “Do our keys still work? Do they?” They’d left something — a vape, as it turned out — in their room and it was apparently of the most upmost importance that they retrieve it, to the point of mania.

I watched the couple’s utter panic with no small sense of amazement, but also relief: no matter how fearful I might be of leaving something in a hotel room, I’d never be that bad, after all. As I’m thinking that, the wife turns to the woman at the front desk and says, conspiratorially, “It’s like this every time. I don’t think we’ve left a hotel without having to rush back in and scream in years.”

Sometimes, all you need is the slightest hint of perspective to set you straight.

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The Movies of July 2025

The list below doesn’t show that I saw Superman twice in the theater — I really liked it! — or that the Billy Joel documentary was somehow five hours long over two separate but connected movies. (The first one was really good, the second less so, in part because there is genuinely just less material in his whole “I am successful and ruining all my relationships because no-one wants to fully address that I’m a self-sabotaging alcoholic” thing, as evidenced by the number of people offering variations on, “it’s really hard to be a success, no-one knew what he was going through” for two hours.) It is however, an accurate reflection of the movies I watched last month, including the fact that I went on a Soderbergh/Clooney kick mid-month because I didn’t have good wifi in my hotel room for San Diego Comic-Con but the three movies were on TV over a handful of nights.

(Also, you can thank Jeff Lester for me watching Charlie’s Angels, but it was great. The Shrouds, less so.)