Still Around The Morning After

It’s difficult to accurately describe my feelings this morning, seeing the results of the election. If there’s such a thing as “stunned disbelief that is also the realization that this was almost inevitable, mixed with the crushing disappointment in your fellow citizens,” it’d be that. As I said on Monday, I had a pit-in-my-stomach feeling things were going to turn out this way, but I was… I don’t know: I think, despite that, I was hoping that I was wrong and that I was too cynical about everything, and without even knowing it that hope was actually where I actually was.

I actually woke up at 3:45 this morning, stressed about what had happened while I was asleep, even though I went to bed with the dull certainty of the outcome. The first thing I did after checking the news was have a brief moment of depressed introspection and I shouldn’t say anything, and the second thing was to write what ended up being an op-ed on Popverse which was a letter to myself to remember to be kind and fight for the right people in the next four years. It was one of those, “when in doubt, write,” things.

I’m scared of what’s going to happen in the next four years, and beyond. I’m angry about the fact that 15 million Biden voters disappeared on the way to this election, whether through vote suppression tactics on behalf of the other side, or apathy on the part of those who are ostensibly “anti-Trump.” (Trump won a landslide this time out with 3 million voters less than he had when he lost in 2020; some Republicans really did abandon him.) I’m exhausted by the certainty that things are going to get worse across the foreseeable future, and in ways that I can’t even imagine just yet.

In 2016, Trump’s victory felt like a bad thing that was this great unknown. This time, I feel like we know all too well how bad the baseline is. This feels so much worse.

Low Key

I’m terrified about the upcoming election. I have tried not to be, and failed, completely; I have talked to people smarter than I about why I’m merely doomscrolling and panicking in my head, and that the reality is possibly significantly better than I am imagining, and yet none of it sticks: I am convinced of a worst-case scenario purely because I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that things are going to turn out badly.

Part of this is, I know, that I’m paying too close attention to the race at this point and getting lost in the weeds. This has been the most disorienting, most frustrating election season I’ve been through, which feels like it’s really saying something, considering 2020; it’s nonetheless true, and that too has added to the feelings of being continually gaslit by reality across the past few months, and especially weeks: how can things be a coin-toss decision after everything that we’ve seen? How can this still be as close as it seems to be, 24 hours out from ending?

That closeness — which might not even be real, but instead the result of people lying to pollsters, or polling being entirely flawed for any number of reasons this time out — is what’s doomed my mood about the whole thing more than anything else: the idea that, in a race between the two candidates where one is so clearly and obviously a danger to all kinds of core ideas of American democracy or even simple decency, there’s an almost even split in terms of support. Who are these half-of-the-country people who are okay with fascism and hatred so such clear display, and what is going to happen to them after the election, no matter how it goes?

I want my very strong sense of impending disaster to be wrong; I want to not feel that 2016 feeling again. But right now, all that I can say for sure is that I’m worried, and I want it all to be over.

The Comics of October 2024

Funny story, for anyone wondering why there are so far fewer comics on this list than in recent months: it’s because, for the entire week I was at New York Comic Con, I didn’t read anything. I woke up and went to work, and I worked until my eyes started closing by themselves, for the most part. I certainly wasn’t able to have a clear enough head to read, so… October was accidentally kind of three weeks long for me? Oops.

It strikes me now that I should have read more horror in October, because of Halloween and “spooky season” and all that, but that didn’t occur to me at the time. A second oops, in that case. So, what did I read? Gaze upon the list below, dear friends.

  1. Detective Comics (1937) #s 840-841
  2. Tales of the Unnamed: The Blizzard #s 3-12
  3. DC Comics Presents (1978) #18
  4. The Flash (1959) #296
  5. DC All In Special #1
  6. Immortal Thor #16
  7. Storm (2024) #1
  8. Venom War #3
  9. Venom War: Spider-Man #3
  10. X-Men (2024) #5
  11. The Flash (1959) #297
  12. Star Wars: The Battle of Jakuu – Insurgency Rising #1
  13. 2000 AD 40th Anniversary Special
  14. 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2020
  15. 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 2024
  16. Armoured Gideon Book One
  17. Zombo: Can I Eat You? 
  18. Detective Comics (1937) #s 842-845
  19. Zatanna: Everyday Magic
  20. Zatanna (2010) #1
  21. Daredevil (2023) #14
  22. Deadpool (2024) #4
  23. Robbie Reyes, Ghost Rider #1
  24. NYX (2024) #3
  25. Phoenix (2024) #3
  26. Wolverine: Deep Cut #4
  27. Zatanna Special #1
  28. Batman & Robin (2023) #14
  29. Detective Comics (1937) #s 846-850, 852
  30. Batman (1940) #685
  31. Gotham City Sirens (2009) #1
  32. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 45
  33. The Flash (1959) #s 298-300
  34. Gotham City Sirens (2009) #s 2-6
  35. Absolute Power #s 1-4
  36. DC Horror Presents: Creature Commandos #1
  37. DC’s I Know What You Did Last Crisis #1
  38. Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1
  39. Green Lantern (2005) #21
  40. Green Lantern Corps (2006) #14
  41. Showcase (1956) #34
  42. Secret Origins (1986) #29
  43. The Atom Special #1
  44. Giant-Size Atom #1
  45. Justice League of America: The Atom – Rebirth #1
  46. Green Lantern (1960) #13
  47. The Flash (1959) #131
  48. Green Lantern (2005) #22
  49. Green Lantern Corps (2006) #15
  50. The Flash (1959) #s 301-303
  51. Green Lantern (2005) #s 23-24
  52. Green Lantern Corps (2006) #s 16-17
  53. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Parallax #1
  54. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Cyborg Superman #1
  55. Blue Beetle (2006) #20
  56. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Superboy Prime #1
  57. Green Lantern (2005) #25
  58. Green Lantern Corps (2006) #s 18-19
  59. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Ion #1
  60. Green Lantern/Sinestro Corps: Secret Files #1
  61. X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #18
  62. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #59
  63. Exceptional X-Men #2
  64. Spider-Man: Black Suit & Blood #3
  65. Conquest 2099 #1
  66. Sentinels #1
  67. Ultimates (2024) #5
  68. Venom (2021) #38
  69. X-Force (2024) #4
  70. Legion of Super-Heroes (1989) #s 13-15
  71. Scooby-Doo Team-Up #s 65-66, 99-100
  72. Doctor Who: Once Upon A Time Lord
  73. The Flash (1959) #304
  74. World’s Finest Comics #198
  75. The Flash (1959) #305
  76. Green Lantern (1960) #20
  77. The Flash (1959) #175
  78. World’s Finest Comics #199
  79. The Brave & The Bold (1955) #72
  80. Blade: Red Band #1
  81. Marvel Zombie: Dawn of Decay #2
  82. Fantastic Four (2022) #26
  83. The Flash (1959) #143
  84. Green Lantern (1960) #43
  85. Get Fury #6
  86. Deathlok 50th Anniversary #1
  87. The Flash (1959) #168
  88. The Brave & The Bold (1955) #s 67, 81, 99, 125 (Batman/Flash team-ups)
  89. DC vs. Vampires: World War V #3
  90. The Flash (1959) #s 306-308
  91. DC Comics Presents (1978) #s 1-2
  92. The Brave & The Bold (1955) #151
  93. Justice League 3000 #1
  94. The Flash (1959) #309
  95. Justice League 3000 #s 2-7
  96. G.I. Joe (2024) #1
  97. The Flash (1987) #19
  98. Blue Devil #30
  99. The Flash (1959) #155
  100. Justice League 3000 #s 8-10
  101. The Flash (1959) #312
  102. Justice League 3000 #s 11-15
  103. DCYou Sneak Peek: Justice League 3001 #1
  104. Justice League 3001 #1
  105. Action Comics (2011) #41
  106. Batman/Superman (2013) #1
  107. JLA (2015) #1
  108. Fantastic Four (1961) #6
  109. Action Comics (2011) #s 42-44
  110. Batman/Superman (2013) #s 2-5
  111. Catwoman (2001) #s 44-45
  112. The Joker (1975) #s 2-4
  113. Startling Stories: Fantastic Four – Unstable Molecules #1
  114. The Flash (1959) #174
  115. The Flash (1959) #313-314
  116. Dr. Fate (1987) #1
  117. Swamp Thing (1985) #80
  118. The Spectre (1987) #22
  119. The Flash (1987) #20
  120. Invasion! #1
  121. X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #19
  122. Stop Project 2025
  123. The Flash (1959) #s 315-316
  124. The Flash (1959) #s 317-319
  125. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Special Edition #1
  126. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Special Edition #1
  127. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Special Edition #1
  128. Judge Dredd Megazine #473
  129. Ultimate Spider-Man (2024) #10
  130. Uncanny X-Men (2024) #4
  131. Mystique (2024) #1
  132. Crypt of Shadows (2024) #1
  133. Star Wars: The Battle of Jakuu – Insurgency Rising #2
  134. Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (1989) #6
  135. 2000 AD Prog 2406
  136. Nightwing (2016) #118
  137. Absolute Wonder Woman #1
  138. Detective Comics #1090
  139. Green Arrow (2023) #17
  140. Superman (2023) #19
  141. The Flash (2023) #14
  142. Nightwing (2016) #119
  143. Action Comics #s 1072-1074
  144. Batman (2016) #154
  145. Little Batman: Month One #1
  146. Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (1989) #s 7-10
  147. Alien: Romulus #1
  148. Avengers (2023) #19
  149. Dazzler (2024) #2
  150. The Incredible Hulk (2023) #18
  151. Iron Man (2024) #1
  152. X-Men (2024) #6
  153. X-Factor (2024) #3
  154. Spider-Boy #12
  155. Scarlet Witch (2024) #5
  156. Conquest 2099 #2
  157. Venom War: Carnage #3
  158. JSA (2024) #1
  159. Absolute Superman #1
  160. Shazam! (2023) #17
  161. Justice League of America (1960) #s 139-140
  162. 1st Issue Special #5
  163. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 5-10
  164. Birds of Prey (2023) #15
  165. Action Comics #1075
  166. Absolute Batman #2
  167. Absolute Batman Noir Edition #1
  168. Batman: Dark Age #6
  169. Batman & Robin (2023) #15
  170. Green Lantern (2023) #17
  171. Justice League Unlimited (2024) #1
  172. X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #20
  173. Vertigo Voices: Face #1
  174. Justice League of America (1960) #141
  175. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 11-16
  176. Suicide Squad Annual (1988) #1
  177. Doom Patrol/Suicide Squad Special #1
  178. Justice League of America (1960) #s 142
  179. Manhunter (1988) #1
  180. The Golden Age #1
  181. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 17-19
  182. Deadshot (1988) #s 1-4
  183. The Golden Age #s 2-4
  184. Treasury of British Comics Annual 2025
  185. Brink Book Four
  186. Brink Book Five
  187. Ghost Rider 2099 #1
  188. Justice League of America (1960) #143
  189. Brink Book Six
  190. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 20-26
  191. Checkmate (1988) #s 16-17
  192. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 27-28
  193. Manhunter (1988) #14
  194. Firestorm #86
  195. Justice League of America (1960) #144
  196. Checkmate (1988) #18
  197. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 29-30
  198. Captain Atom (1987) #30
  199. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 31-32
  200. Manhunter (1988) #s 2-4
  201. The Spectre (1992) #s 1-4
  202. Secret Origins (1986) #15
  203. Justice League of America (1960) #s 145-146
  204. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #60
  205. The Spectre (1992) #s 5-8
  206. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 33-39
  207. Secret Origins (1986) #17
  208. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 40-43
  209. Justice League of America (1960) #149
  210. The Question: All Along the Watchtower #1
  211. Suicide Squad (1987) #44
  212. Justice League of America (1960) #150
  213. Star Trek (1984) #s 9-10
  214. Adventure Comics (1938) #s 431-440
  215. Doom Patrol (2001) #s 1-10
  216. Justice League of America (1960) #153
  217. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 45-50
  218. Justice League of America (1960) #158
  219. X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #21
  220. Midnight, Mass. #1
  221. Jenny Sparks (2024) #5
  222. Milestone Universe: The Shadow Cabinet #1
  223. Suicide Squad (1987) #51

To Dream The Impossible

It strikes me that, a year ago, I was in the UK at the start of a three week excursion that feels oddly impossible now in ways that I can’t fully explain. To be honest, I think that it felt impossible at the time, but also inevitable, and I was simply too tired to do anything other than head into it and hope for the best.

I do remember, very clearly, being all too aware of how isolating the whole thing felt ahead of time — knowing that, despite the trip being bookended by two conventions and featuring a stay with family in the middle, I would be spending so much of that time alone to a degree that hadn’t been the case for years by that point. It was a scary thought, in many ways, and one that I feel like I didn’t really fully understand until a few days into the trip. (Maybe the first full day after the first convention was when it sank in, when I was staying in an AirBnB in a city I’d never been to before, realizing I had no food and no company and nothing to do for the next 24 hours while I waited for something to happen.)

And yet, there were times when that freedom from expectation or commitment was thrilling; usually when I felt less at sea, such as the hours I spent walking without purpose in the towns I grew up in, just listening to music and rediscovering the streets I’d wandered around hundreds if not thousands of times before. Or the flights and trains and drives into pastures new, and feeling a buzz of excitement instead of loneliness.

(I remember spending an afternoon in Leeds, almost by accident, and it just feeling astonishingly new and right, in ways that I couldn’t even properly put into words.)

There’s a lesson to be found here, as I find myself getting more cautious and older. Something about finding comfort in discomfort, and not letting that anxiety put me off doing things that could be good for me down the line. I know that it’s true from experience more than once, and yet: I still think about the trip from last year, and it feels daunting and impossible, even now.

My Mind Is On The Blink

One of the things that kept this past New York trip interesting was the fact that, try as I might, as exhausted as I may have been, I only managed to sleep past 5am once that entire week. (Surely, I reasoned, I should be sleeping in, in that 5am EST is just 2am PST, and yet.) In theory, I know that I should have spent that time reading something fun, watching shitty television, or some similarly mindless endeavor to keep myself from waking up too fully or testing my brain, and yet what I actually did every single time it happened was immediately get up to start working for the next hour before I went out and got myself some breakfast from the Starbucks around the corner from the hotel as soon as it opened.

Across the course of the week, I discovered the following things about this accidental routine:

  1. 6am is an ideal time to go for a walk around New York, especially in October. The sun’s not up, the people are just starting to walk around for the day, and you get to see a lot of businesses set their shit up each morning. There’s a lot of hosing down the sidewalk and people singing loudly as they do so.
  2. There are good “walking around New York at 6am” songs and there are bad “walking around New York at 6am” songs. I listened to a bunch of French hip-hop during those walks. (My hotel was just off 42nd Street, which is perpetually lit up by neon signs and an oddly wonderful thing to experience at that time of the morning when accompanied by French hip-hop; I recommend it to you all.)
  3. Inexplicably, there were always people from my company up and around at that time of the morning. Every single morning. Even the morning when the show wasn’t happening and there was no last-minute prep to be done, I ran into someone outside who was waiting for a car to head off into the morning. Perhaps the most surreal example of this was running into the same person just before I got to my hotel room the night before, and then immediately as soon as I left the hotel the next morning; in both cases, she was on a journey between the hotel and the convention center.

As I’m writing this, I’m on the plane back from New York, unsurprisingly utterly exhausted, and also hoping against hope to get a full night’s sleep for the first time in eight days. Surely it has to happen eventually.

I Want To Wake Up

To say the New York trip was not what I expected would not be entirely correct, as I’m pretty sure that there was no point before I got on that plane where I thought it would be anything less than “a lot of work” and “very stressful.” That said, it was so much more work, and so much more stressful than I think I’d been imagining, to the point where I worked… maybe 16 hours every single damn day of the trip? Okay, wait, that’s not true; five of the days. I was traveling for the other two. For those days, I worked something closer to 4 through 6, depending.

(It really was a lot of work, for reasons that I’m not going to share publicly.)

The worst day was definitely Thursday, the first “full” day of New York Comic Con, purely for the fact that it was the day where every single techical difficulty hit us full in the face and we had to get ways around them by hook or by crook. How do you do a liveblog when you have no internet connection? Let me tell you, that was definitely a question I had to ask myself, which might give you an idea of how the day went.

Actually, no; here’s the ideal illustration of how the day really went: at one point, I realized that I didn’t know where my phone was. I could remember the last time I had it, and that was maybe half an hour earlier, and thinking about it, I realized two things: (1) my phone had fallen out of my pocket in a convention room holding a few hundred people, and (2) there was a very good chance I would never see my phone again. Which, you know, would not be great for any number of reasons.

Still, I went back to the panel room, thinking, the panel’s not been done for that long, it’s probably on the ground where I was, and I climbed around on my hands and knees only to find absolutely no phone. It was at this point where I realized how stressful that day really was, because upon realizing that I had really, actually, lost my phone, my first thought was, well, this is still only the third or fourth worst thing that’s happening right now.

For what it’s worth, it turned out someone in the room had already found the phone, so when I went to ask if the A/V team could keep an eye out in case anyone hands anything in, they simply handed me my phone and said, “this is probably yours.”

If only all the other problems of the weekend had such simple solutions.

Slight Return

One of the unexpected by-products of my recent obsessive return to old Flash comics was the discovery that one of the first American comics I’d ever read was amongst their number, and the wave of nostalgia that hit me as soon as I saw the cover.

It’s the cover in particular that had the biggest impact, because while the kid me — apparently the issue came out in 1981, so I would have been six years old, probably? — kept the comic in question, apparently I lost the cover of it along the way. I can remember the interior of it with surprising clarity, especially some pages/images (although, admittedly, the version in my memory has additional scrawls in pen that I added at some point, which was something I did to a number of comics when I was a kid), but the long-lost cover has long been something that became a lot more vague, slipping further and further into a clouded, amorphous state with every passing day… until I accidentally bought it as part of a lot of back issues, and found it in my hands again.

Looking at it now, I can see why kid-me was so excited by the cover: it’s not just that it’s dynamic and has the hero in peril (Look at that posing from Carmine Infantino!), but there are two different bad guys, and each are visually distinct in a way that’s immediately recognizable and understandable. For my sins, I became a massive Rainbow Raider fan as a result of this comic, despite his being clearly impossibly lame; his secret identity is, I shit you not, Roy G. Bivolo; I still can’t tell what side of the thin line that separates genius from disaster that lies on.

Accidentally having this comic in my hands again for the first time in decades felt like a curiously charged moment with significance I couldn’t fully comprehend, not least because it happened so close to my 50th birthday. If there is some artifact of who I turned out to be from childhood, something like this really might be it. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something, although I can’t understand what.

Perhaps it was just telling me that I haven’t really changed that much in all these years. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, all told.

Hap, Happiest Season

As you read this, I’m in New York for New York Comic Con 2024. I’m actually writing this weeks earlier, knowing (a) at the time you read this, I will be so busy with the show itself that I couldn’t even consider writing a post here, and (b) that I’ve already been working on things for the show for so long that I don’t call it New York Comic Con (or even NYCC) anymore, but New York Comic Con 2024, because that’s the terminology I use at work.

New York Comic Con is a show that takes up a large percentage of my work year, because it’s the biggest show in North America, but also because it’s the biggest show Popverse does every year; it’s the one that takes the most planning and organization, and the one that comes with the most pressure to get it right. It’s also the one with the most moving parts, which also means it’s the one with the most potential for things to go wrong; to absolutely no-one’s surprise, I started having stress dreams about this show about a month before it started, simply because that’s the way my brain works.

Despite all of this, it’s something I look forward to each and every year because I get to go to New York. Even now, there’s something genuinely magical about the city to me — if anything, the magic has grown from the first time I visited (26 years ago now, shockingly; I really am old), filled with awe and entirely unsure how it happened. Now, I have decades of memories in the city that decorate the landscape, each as odd and oddly meaningful as another, even if they’re simply of walking back to a hotel with a particular song in my ear after a day’s work. It’s become a city full of memories and ghosts, which feels entirely right for New York.

So, think of me as I do the job and don’t sleep enough, and enjoy some great food and some terrible food, and some great terrible food. I might be busy, I might be stressed, but if nothing else, I am still in one of my favorite places in the world.