Wha’Happen?
I was explaining to a friend the other week that, when the year started, I was all too aware that I’d be turning 50 soon. In January, it felt like something I was amazingly, unstoppably conscious of, as if there was a countdown in my head that I couldn’t stop listening to — a biological clock of some kind, if you will. This is the year, it told me, look at the number, this is the one where you hit that half-century mark, this is something you need to be conscious of at all points all year.
At some point, that entirely disappeared from my head. Life happened, and other things got in the way of me thinking about my birthday. (If you think about this year alone, I’ve been to multiple conventions, interviewed-for and got a promotion at work, and then had to adapt to that, in addition to everything else.) That is, really, how it’s supposed to be, I suspect; you take care of the everything that you have to as it’s happening and the larger anxiety about your birthday slips into the background. But here I am, just a week or so away from it happening now, and I’m wondering: should I have done more to celebrate, or even prepare for, turning 50?
There’s a practical answer to the preparation bit, at least; I almost certainly should have scheduled more doctors appointments, to make sure everything is in working order. (I am appallingly bad at that, in part because some subconscious part of me doesn’t want to know in case something is wrong. Ignorance is bliss, after all.) But otherwise, I find myself thinking about the self-conscious things I thought back in January about this being the year I learn a musical instrument, or publish zines, or whatever, to make a new mark on the world, and wondering when I was supposed to find time to do any of those things.
My 50th birthday will, I suspect, come and pass in a blur of deadlines and real world obligations, and then I’ll wonder what happened. (Well, I’ll probably wonder that after New York Comic Con, which is just a week or so later, and sure to take up all my brain in the meantime.) Somehow, that feels curiously fitting.
Observe Scoop Law
The Villain is a Hyper-Realistic Great Gazoo, Of Course
I can’t get this idea out of my head, so I’m putting it here as a form of exorcism.
For reasons that I honestly can’t explain beyond simple accidental masochism, I’ve been re-reading a bunch of Geoff Johns comics lately; you know this if you look at my lists of the comics I’ve been reading every month. One of the things I’ve noticed that he unfailingly does is concentrate on making the subtext text in almost everything he writes, but in a very specific format. It isn’t just that he’ll make sure that the subtext is made very, very clear to everyone reading the comic, but that he’ll almost certainly have a character say the subtext out loud in such a way that is, almost without fail, either a complaint or a wistful comment about a problem that doesn’t really exist.
I was re-reading The Flash: Rebirth the other week — a comic where the first issue is just filled with characters essentially looking out at the reader and saying, and this is my relationship with the Flash before he shows up and also looks out at the reader to say, and here is my dilemma that I will be addressing throughout this series, and this is how it connects to the readers’ own feelings about me as a fictional construct — and my brain went, ‘I wonder if someone who can do such a thing could create a Geoff Johns mad-libs where an entire comic could be constructed basically by filling in some well-paced gaps?’
This thought then immediately switched to, imagine if Geoff Johns was writing a reboot of The Flintstones and I could see the first page horrifically clearly without any further thought.
It would be essentially one big image of the town of Bedrock, with an all-too-detailed, quasi-realistic bird-like dinosaur squawking in the foreground, against a backdrop of cavemen moving things out of huts. The dinosaur, an update of the idea of dinosaur-as-radio or whatever, would be talking about how Bedrock has been hit by a wave of layoffs and everyone is being forced to move out of the city because of impending meteor warnings. Everything would be in muted, dull colors, and look very depressing.
A relatively small panel is inset into the bottom of the page, showing the tired, downset eyes of Fred Flintstone — again, far too realistic in terms of depiction — as he looks off-panel. A caption, relaying Fred’s innermost thoughts, is at the bottom right of the panel. It simply reads, “It’s hard being a modern stone-age family.”
Follow Me, Don’t Follow Me
Posters That Never Were
This was made for a thing, kind of; it was really me playing around with someone else’s design brief as a way of trying some techniques in Pixelmator I was curious about, but I really like how it turned out, so I’m saving it here.
Not unrelated: I really miss doing graphics for the THR newsletter every Friday.
Goodnight, Summer
Spoilers: You Can’t
I didn’t actually realize what was going on until it had been going on for awhile, unfortunately; I was talking to someone at work about the fact that all of us seemed to be operating under less than optimal circumstances lately and I wrote something like, “we all just seemed a little burned out,” at which point my brain went, oh, that’s it. You’re burned out. That’s what this is.
I had, to this point, been operating for a few weeks wondering why I was failing to have the same joie de vivre (which I have likely misspelled) that I normally had; I’d been feeling sluggish both in terms of feeling physically tired, but also emotionally under the weather, with everything feeling that little bit less exciting or even interesting than it usually did. I’d been ascribing a lot of this to the fact that, just weeks earlier, I’d had COVID and it takes time to get over that — something that is still true, it should be noted — but, nonetheless, had also been wondering why I’d failed to spring back as quickly as I had the first time I’d had the virus. Was this a stronger case? Was it just that I’m four years older?
The truth is, I realized when talking to my work colleague, I was burned out — a state that, in my mild defense, I’d practically trained myself out of recognizing back when I was a freelancer. It’s not that freelancers can’t get burned out — they do, and often — but that being burned out didn’t help when it came to meeting deadlines and paying bills. At some point relatively early in my freelance career, I convinced myself that because it didn’t “matter” on some practical level if I was burned out, then I simply wouldn’t accept that I could be burned out. There’s that entirely-healthy attitude I had back then.
Looking back on it with older, fresher eyes: of course I was burned out. I’d moved through three separate highly stressful work periods without a break, during which time I’d also attended San Diego Comic-Con and had COVID for a week. in addition to navigating whatever home life had been throwing at me at any given moment. (That list included the kid coming back from his summer away, and getting him ready for school, in addition to pet nonsense and other stuff.) How could anyone not be burned out, after all that?
The realization was something that allowed me to feel smug, for all of… a minute or so? After that, there was the inevitable follow-up question: how are you supposed to recover from being burned out when you have no less than two separate conventions to attend and report on for work in a two week period?
After Months Away, How We Missed Each Other
You Just Can’t Stop
Eating chips — they’re crisps, still, but I’ve been living in the US for more than two decades by this point; it’s the same as calling trousers “pants,” but still cringing a little inside as I do so — while traveling to a convention recently, I found myself having a particularly unexpected and strong sense memory. It’s not that I was immediately transported to another point in my life where I was eating crisps, although that’s not not the case. Instead, I found myself remembering with shocking clarity what it was like to eat lunch in art school.
I don’t mean the food, because if I’m being honest, I really don’t remember the food from the art school. (I think there was a canteen-style meal every day? Maybe? But I genuinely can’t recall.) Instead, I’m talking about the way it felt to sit there in that room, eating whatever we were eating while gossiping with friends and crushes and whoever else happened to be there at the time.
The canteen area — should I call it a “dining room”? That feels so much more grandiose than the reality, which was a medium-size room with really great, massive windows and a couple vending machines at the back that kept us going on more than one late night session — was an escape from the rest of the school in some way, despite being a pretty high traffic area for the school as a whole (obviously). We didn’t have to perform in any official capacity there; there weren’t projects to work on or presentations to give. The only arguments we made we did by choice, and we enjoyed them as a result. It was a haven, and one we retreated to often, especially in the rare occasions that it was mostly empty and you could have relatively private conversations in a building where that felt otherwise impossible.
The large windows were an important part of the appeal, although I didn’t realize at the time; when the weather was good (not that often; it was, after all, the North of Scotland), the entire room felt luminous and magical, in its way: A glowing example of the friendship, community, and small secluded society we’d all found in that building by intention or accident in our time at the school.
All of this rushed back into my head three decades after I’d first arrived at the school — I graduated from my Masters 25 years ago this year! — and all because of crisps. It’s strange, the way our minds work.