Author: Graeme McMillan

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Slight Return, Return

And then I broke the website.

To be fair, I didn’t mean to break the website. In fact, according to the professional who I ended up hiring to bring the website, I wasn’t actually the one who broke it, as much as the breaking was an inevitability that I just… helped happen. Their exact words were something along the lines of, “Whoever was working in the back end of this site before me did some crazy stuff. It’s surprising this didn’t break down long before now.” When I read that message, a wave of relief washed over me: it wasn’t my fault.

Except, of course, it kind of was, anyway; the straw that broke this particular camel’s back was my asking WordPress to update to its latest edition, which apparently just pushed the hinky, taped-together behind-the-scenes too far. I’m not entirely blameless, unfortunately; I just had no idea the damage I’d cause, or what laid ahead when I clicked the button. There’s a lesson there to be learned, I’m sure.

While the site was down, just under two weeks, I felt a sense of frustration at not being able to write anything new, but also a sense of relief: I’d written ahead three weeks’ worth of posts, after all, so it wasn’t as if I would feel under the gun if and when the site retuned; I could just reschedule those for the future and my buffer would still exist. Except, of course, when the site came back, it retroactively posted everything I had already scheduled, and left my upcoming calendar worryingly bare.

The moral of this story, then, is multi-fold: (1) Don’t let your then-spouse jury-rig a website because they might make weird decisions that will cause the site to go down years after you’ve divorced. (2) Don’t schedule things out in advance because it might bite you in the ass. (3) Maybe just write when you have the chance, even if you can’t put it on the website anyway, so that time isn’t lost. (4) It’s nice to be back, isn’t it?

Hello again. Sorry the site was gone.

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TBC

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “To Be Continued” lately, inspired by reading an essay (from Kevin Huizenga, from one of his Riverside Companion minis) that ends with it, as opposed to coming to any kind of conclusion; what really made me think about it wasn’t its use, per se, but the fact that… well, I’m not sure if it was used in the traditional sense. The next issue of Riverside Companion doesn’t pick up the essay, but is instead about something else entirely. I’m not sure if that original essay is actually completed anywhere. And I kind of love that.

Like everyone who grew up reading comics — or reading and/or watching serialized fiction of any kind, really — “To Be Continued” is a promise; it’s a deal that both parties agree to and understand; “we’re stopping this now, but we’ll pick it up again next time.” It’s something used so much as to have become iconic; I think about the end of Superman Beyond in the mid-2000s, where it’s the three words used on the tombstone to signify that the end isn’t the end. It’s something we all know and (most importantly for the purpose of where my head’s at right now) trust, implicitly.

So, what if it’s used insincerely, or incorrectly? What if we read “To Be Continued” and it’s just not true? (I guess, again, comic fans know that feeling: that favorite series that disappears mid-run and we never know why…) Or, alternately: what if we start using it and reading it as something longer-term, a promise to pick up the idea and come back to it far in the future at some unspecified time? That’s the thought I’ve been circling around: why can’t we use “To Be Continued” as a promise to others and ourselves when we can’t resolve thoughts or ideas or stories but don’t want to abandon them, even if — especially if — we can’t imagine when we’ll get around to it?

“To Be Continued” repurposed less as a tease of a serialized idea or story, and more as a signal that we’re not finished, but events have gotten in the way and we’ll come back to something eventually? I’m deep in the land of semiotics and semantics that matter to no-one, I deeply suspect, and yet: there’s something about this that’s very, very appealing to me here, if I can work it out.

To Be Continued, indeed.

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But Tomorrow, Tomorrow

I found myself thinking about the turn of the century recently; about the way that culture felt at the time, and the way that I felt inside that culture, and about comparing that to today.

I didn’t buy into the idea of “Y2K” or “the Millennium Bug” or anything similar; although I knew that it was a Big Deal that we were about to cross over from years starting with 1 to years starting with 2, and that it was going to be odd thinking of the next 12 months as being “00” instead of “98” or “99,” or whatever, I wasn’t really paying attention to the increasingly panicked suggestions that disaster was around the corner for any and all technology. Someone will figure that out, if it’s a real thing was pretty much my attitude towards that.

My thoughts, instead, were caught up in the idea of a societal collapse. Not in the traditional sense of that phrase, but instead the idea common in a lot of things I was reading at the time that popular culture was falling in upon itself as self-reflexiveness and self-parody combined and everything seemed to be inspired by, or copied from, something else. I was reading a lot of cultural theory at the time — I had, after all, just graduated art school just a year or so earlier — and it felt as if something was ending all around me, leaving space for something new, and entirely unknown.

I think about that when I consider the internet today, a space filled with ideas and references and commentary that I, bluntly, don’t understand. It’s not just the number of memes or shared jokes that I’m not privy to, but the shared languages of communities I can’t comprehend on almost any level. For all that the internet makes me despair on a regular basis, especially when it comes to social media spaces and the communities and cliques found therein, there are times when I think about such things in the abstract and realize that, in so many ways, this is what I was expecting almost a quarter of a century ago. This is the future I wanted, even if I didn’t know that at the time.

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Drop (Out)

A curious thing has happened over the past few weeks or so: I’ve become quietly obsessed with a rip-off of Tetris.

“Obsessed” is probably not the right word, given that I can’t even remember that actual name of the game offhand — it’s called something like Block Drop or Something Block, but I can’t remember what, exactly — but the name isn’t important in the slightest. What is, though, is the overwhelmingly therapeutic nature of playing it.

(It’s Block Puzzle, I just checked, a name that feels so generic I don’t feel that upset about forgetting it.)

I’ve had it on my phone for some time — since last summer, I think. Chloe was playing it on the plane when we were both going somewhere last year, and after repeatedly asking to borrow it for my own go, I downloaded it to play myself on the trip back, knowing full well that she’d fall asleep and I’d be at a loose end otherwise. And she did, so I did, and then I put it aside and didn’t think about it again.

Cut to… well, now. This year’s been an odd one, in ways I didn’t expect or initially know how to deal with; there’s been a lot of waiting for things to happen, or waiting for calls, or even just texting people a lot more than usual. As a result, I’ve found myself very often with both time on my hands and my phone usually close by. (Traditionally, usually, my phone lives in my office beside my laptop, with the ringer on so I can hear it if it goes off. I only carry it with me if I’m expecting a call.) Because of this, I’ve started playing the game far, far more often.

It’s not a complicated game, which is, I think, its appeal; the mindlessness is something that calls to me, the idea that I can “achieve” something with minimum effort. Again, using the word “achieve” feels misleading, given the essentially throwaway nature of the game, but the idea that I’m putting things in the right place — that there is a “right place,” and an order to things — is part of the draw of the whole thing. I find myself coming back to this repetitious activity, soothed by its small affirmations for the small effort required of me. (“Nice!” it says when a round ends, whether or not I did well. Sometimes, it’s more emphatic. “Great job!” I know better than to believe it, and yet.)

There’s simply something… reassuring about the thought-free repetition and sense that, really, I’m doing something without actually doing anything or feeling any real sense of pressure about it. The game is there when I’m overtired from work but my brain buzzes because it’s not fully done running yet, or when I don’t feel up to anything requiring true commitment. It’s a calming, almost hypnotic presence on my phone.

All told, I probably need to find something else to do. A hobby wouldn’t be the worst idea.

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If I Scream It, I Mean It

When I started this, I was just going to embed a Spotify playlist in this post, but for some reason, WordPress and Spotify don’t want to play nice together right now, so instead, I’ll just link the playlist here, and instead just list the tracks.

My idea was, simply, to offer an introduction to Super Furry Animals, one of my favorite bands and one that — as I’ve recently written — acts as an unexpected key to the way my brain works. They were active from the early 1990s through about a decade ago, although their core period was probably from the release of their first album Fuzzy Logic in 1996 through 2003’s Phantom Power; this playlist goes all the way up to their last full album, just because I’m that nerd. I’ve nonetheless tried to keep it reasonably contained — it’s just 24 songs, and runs a little over 90 minutes, because pop music.

  1. Hometown Unicorn
    2. Fuzzy Birds
    3. Something for the Weekend

All three of the above were from that debut album, Fuzzy Logic, and you can hear a band that is simultaneously unsure about who they are, and confident enough to push at the edges of the dominant Britpop sound of the moment. (“Hometown Unicorn”‘s prog-inspired guitar solo! “Fuzzy Birds” ending with a folk flourish!)

4. The Man Don’t Give A Fuck

A b-side that was excised from the single it was intended for because of rights issues — it’s based around a sample of “Showbiz Kids” by Steely Dan, who initially didn’t give clearance quickly enough, as the story goes — it subsequently became a single in its own right, and an anthem that let would be fans know exactly who the band was at that moment in time.

5. The International Language of Screaming
6. Hermann Loves Pauline
7. Demons

Three songs from Radiator from 1997. By this point, not only was the band settling into its particular musical groove — taking influences from all over the place, predominantly outside of the Britpop norm while remaining firmly pop music — but my fandom was firmly in place. I’d seen them live just ahead of the release of this album, and “Demons” was introduced by lead singer Gruff Rhys asking the crowd if they could applaud after he’d sung the first line even though we didn’t know the song. “I want to feel like Frank Sinatra singing ‘New York, New York,'” he explained. (We obliged, of course.)

8. Ice Hockey Hair

The lead track of an EP released between Radiator and the next album, Guerrilla, and a song that I remember drove my then-best friend away from his own fandom of the band, purely because a vocoder was used for the verses. It’s strange what things we will, and won’t, accept from bands sometimes.

9. Citizen’s Band
10. Night Vision
11. The Teacher
12. Fire in My Heart

All four songs from Guerrilla, which came out in 1999. It’s a weird, messy third album, as third albums tend to be — bands are struggling to prove themselves on the first, confident to varying degrees and filled with the need to find their voice on the second, and then the third is the one where they go, “Wait, do I do more of this or something different now?” Guerrilla is uneven and disunified, but there’s some great songs on there — including “Citizen’s Band,” one of my favorite SFA tracks overall, which was originally hidden as the secret bonus track you could only find if you tried to rewind from the first track on the CD. Technology!

13. Sidewalk Serfer Girl
14. (Drawing) Rings Around the World
15. It’s Not The End of the World?

2001’s Rings Around the World might be the band’s most complete, most coherent album; it came out around the time I was traveling back and forth to the US for the first few times, and I have really clear memories about listening to it a lot on my Discman — oh yes — while walking the streets of San Francisco. Both “Sidewalk Serfer Girl” and “(Drawing) Rings Around the World” were most definitely personal soundtrack songs for a long time, while “It’s Not The End of the World?” feels oddly fitting given that I was listening to this a lot in the aftermath of 9/11 and everything that possessed the world around that time.

16. Slow Life
17. Golden Retriever
18. Liberty Belle

By the time we get to 2003’s Phantom Power, things are beginning to fracture; it feels at once like the second half of Rings Around the World and somehow a lesser album, as if the band themselves are starting to get tired and in the need to do other things. That said, “Slow Life” is perhaps the song they’d been trying to make for years. The closer to the album, it might as well have acted as a final statement on something greater.

19. Zoom!
20. Lazer Beam
21. Psyclone!

I still remember how excited I was for 2005’s Love Kraft, where all three of these songs come from; I was working at the call center in San Francisco, and I had the CD in my bag waiting for me to listen for the first time on the way home. I was so disappointed that it didn’t give me the same excitement that all of the earlier SFA albums had, although I still love these three songs very, very much. One of the fun things about the recent “deluxe” reissues of those earlier albums are the unreleased and demo tracks included on them, which reveal that “Lazer Beam” had been something that had been in the works for almost a decade by the time this album came out, as an incomplete jam called “John Spex.” (Versions of it show up on the deluxe versions of both Guerilla and Rings Around the World.)

22. Suckers!
23. Neo Consumer
24. Crazy Naked Girls

And so we come to the somewhat slow decline of the band, with tracks from their last two official albums, 2007’s Hey Venus! and 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years. (“Suckers!” and “Neo Consumer” come from the former, “Crazy Naked Girls” from the latter.) Both albums, to me, sound like a band that’s going through the motions and want to be elsewhere, bereft of the playfulness that marked their best work; to be fair, by this point, they all had other bands or solo projects they were working on, so it’s very possible that they did want to be elsewhere.

The band came back for a reunion single in 2016, “Bing Bong,” which is… fine…? Otherwise, I’m happy to let them go off and follow their individual muses as they see fit. What they came up with for that decade-and-a-bit together is more than enough for me. And now you get to see if it’s enough for you, too.


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The Comics of August 2023

Oddly enough, I found myself tired of reading at one point this month; specifically, tired of reading comics, so I’d happily kill time writing something for work loosely, or reading the news or analysis of the news or whatever, but… reading comics…? I’d lost the appetite. Thankfully, it came back before too long. Maybe I was really just burned out on my specific choice of reading material for awhile. Who knows?

  1. Sins of Sinister: Dominion #1
  2. Ultimate Avengers #s 1-6
  3. Ultimate Avengers 2 #s 1-6
  4. Ultimate Avengers 3 #s 1-6
  5. The Cull #1
  6. Marvel Knights Spider-Man #s 1-4
  7. G.I. Joe (1982) #s 1-2
  8. Marvel Knights Spider-Man #s 5-6
  9. Cartoon Show (Derek M. Ballard strip collection)
  10. Dwellings #1
  11. Marvel Knights Spider-Man #s 7-12
  12. New X-Men (1991) #114
  13. Superman and the Authority #s 1-4
  14. Batman/Superman: The Authority Special #1
  15. Dark Knights of Steel #s 1-11
  16. Suicide Squad (2019) #1
  17. A-1 (1989) #s 1-2
  18. Suicide Squad (2019) #s 2-6
  19. Mech Cadets #1
  20. Suicide Squad (2019) # 7-11
  21. Incredible Hulk (1999) #s 106-108
  22. World War Hulk #s 1-2
  23. Incredible Hulk (1999) #s 109-111
  24. World War Hulk #s 3-5
  25. World War Hulk: Aftersmash #1
  26. Damn Them All #1
  27. Illuminati (2015) #1
  28. Thor (1966) #s 206-207
  29. Avengers (1963) #s 183-184
  30. Transformers Classic: UK Vol. 1 (Collected edition)
  31. Earth 2 (2012) #s 10-14, Annual #1
  32. Earth 2 (2012) #s 15-26, Annual #2
  33. Earth 2: World’s End #1
  34. Thor (2007) #s 1-4
  35. Spider-Man: Reign #s 1-3
  36. Alec: The King Canute Club
  37. Immortal X-Men #11
  38. Spider-Man (2022) #8
  39. Joe Fixit #5
  40. Thor (2007) #s 5-10
  41. Angst Farm #1
  42. Batman/Catwoman: Gotham War – Battlelines #1
  43. Batman (2016) #137
  44. Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2023) #3
  45. WildC.A.T.s (2022) #1
  46. WildC.A.T.s (2022) #s 2-5
  47. Wildstorm 30th Anniversary Special #1
  48. WildC.A.T.s (2022) #s 6-10
  49. Thor (2007) #s 11-12, 600
  50. Thor (2020) #27
  51. Void Rivals #3
  52. Thor (2020) #s 28-29
  53. Batman Incorporated (2022) #1
  54. Knight Terrors: Night’s End #1
  55. Action Comics presents: Doomsday Special #1
  56. Batman Incorporated (2022) #s 2-7
  57. Captain Midnight (2013) #0
  58. Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor #s 1-5
  59. Captain Midnight (2013) #s 1-3
  60. Nostalgia #s 1-5
  61. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin #s 1-5
  62. Dark Knights of Steel #12
  63. Knight Terrors #4
  64. Batman: The Brave and The Bold #4
  65. Knight Terrors: Angel Breaker #2
  66. Knight Terrors: Titans #2
  67. Knight Terrors: Harley Quinn #2
  68. Knight Terrors: Action Comics #2
  69. Knight Terrors: Detective Comics #2
  70. The Penguin (2023) #1
  71. Voodoo (1997) #s 1-4
  72. X-Men/Alpha Flight (1985) #1
  73. Alpha Flight (2011) #s 0, 1-4
  74. Codename: Knockout #0
  75. All Star Superman #s 1-12
  76. Alpha Flight (2011) #s 5-8
  77. Gender Queer: A Memoir
  78. Wolverine (2020) #33
  79. The Invincible Iron Man (2022) #6
  80. X-Men Red (2022) #11
  81. Captain Marvel (2019) #49
  82. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #s 23-25
  83. The Authority (2003) #s 1-4
  84. The Authority (2003) #s 0, 5-14
  85. The Authority/The Authority: The Lost Year #s 1-12
  86. The Authority: World’s End #1
  87. Shazam! (2023) #3
  88. Birds of Prey (2023) #1
  89. Fire and Ice: Welcome to Smallville #1
  90. Justice Society of America (2022) #6
  91. Peacemaker Tries Hard! #5
  92. Blue Beetle (2023) #1
  93. The Authority: World’s End #s 2-17
  94. The Unseen Hand #s 1-4
  95. Deadline USA Vol. 2 #s 1-4
  96. Thor: The Trial of Thor #1
  97. Thor (2007) #s 601-603
  98. Thor Giant-Sized Finale #1
  99. Thor (2007) #s 604-621
  100. Deadline USA Vol. 2 #s 5-8
  101. Scarlet Witch (2022) #s 1-4
  102. Destroyer Duck #s 1-3
  103. Fantastic Four (2022) #7
  104. X-Force (2019) #40
  105. X-Men (2021) #22
  106. She-Hulk (2022) #13
  107. Venom (2021) #19
  108. Guardians of the Galaxy (2023) #2
  109. Scarlet Witch (2022) #5
  110. Scarlet Witch Annual (2023) #1
  111. Hulk Annual (2023) #1
  112. Hey Kids! Comics! Vol. 2: Prophets #s 1-6
  113. Survival Geeks (2000 AD strip collection)
  114. Batman and Robin (2023) #1
  115. Danger Street #9
  116. Green Lantern (2023) #3
  117. World’s Finest: Teen Titans #3
  118. Petrolhead #1
  119. Survival Geeks: Crisis of Infinite Nerds (2000 AD strip collection)
  120. The Mean Arena #1 (2000 AD strip collection)
  121. Rare Flavours: Tasting Menu ashcan
  122. Pandora Perfect TPB (2000 AD strip collection)
  123. Moon Knight (2021) #1
  124. Bricktop A1 Special #1
  125. Moon Knight (2021) #s 2-20
  126. X-Force/Champions Annual #1
  127. Moon Knight (2021) #s 21-23
  128. Justice League: A Midsummer’s Nightmare #1
  129. The Riverside Companion #s 1-3 (Kevin Huizenga minis)
  130. Crime Destroyer: True Till Death (Shaky Kane one-shot)
  131. The Worst (Molly Mendoza mini)
  132. Fielder #1 (Huizenga)
  133. Gag! (2023) #2
  134. JLA #s 43-58 
  135. Classic X-Men #s 1-32
  136. X-Men/Alpha Flight (1998) #1
  137. The Immortal Thor #1
  138. Justice League (2016) #s 34-43
  139. Fury (2023) #1
  140. Hellcat (2023) #3
  141. Justice League Elite #s 1-2
  142. Justice League Elite #s 3-12
  143. Steelworks #s 2-3
  144. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #19
  145. Titans (2023) #3
  146. Wonder Woman (2023) #1
  147. Superman (2023) #6
  148. Nightwing (2016) #106
  149. Catwoman (2019) #57
  150. Green Lantern: War Journal #1
  151. Silver Surfer: Rebirth #s 1-5
  152. Warlock: Rebirth #s 1-2
  153. Silver Surfer (1987) #123
  154. Transformers (2023) #1
  155. Silver Surfer (1987) #s 125-138
  156. Doctor Strange (2023) #2
  157. Doctor Strange (1974) #64
  158. Not Brand Ecch #11
  159. Doctor Strange (1974) #47
  160. G.O.D.S. #1
  161. Starlight #s 1-6
  162. Huck #s 1-6
  163. The Ambassadors #s 1-6
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A Passing Thought

I’m struggling with an idea that popped into my head a few weeks back, when thinking about work stuff. Namely: did the comic industry secretly peak in the late 1980s and we didn’t notice?

There are, of course, any number of things to truly appreciate about the comics industry today that didn’t exist back then — things like webcomics, the success and scale of the manga audience and how disconnected it is from what used to be called the “mainstream” of superhero comics, crowdfunding and how creates an opportunity for work that wouldn’t otherwise be funded — and I don’t mean to discount those things fully, nor ignore the shift in publishing opportunities provided by the bookstore market. And yet…

And yet, I think about the number of independent publishers of the late ‘80s that just don’t exist anymore; I think about a breadth of subject matter that I feel isn’t really published inside the “official” publishing industry for the most part, and how the bigger publishers were ultimately more willing to experiment on a regular basis in a way that they just don’t anymore. It’s not just that no-one could really imagine DC publishing Angel Love today, it’s that there’s nothing at Marvel even approaching the attitude of Epic, no Harrier Comics or Eclipse or anything even close to it.

All of this was in my head as I saw someone on BlueSky complaining that, without that 1990s mainstay Wizard Magazine, there’s no central hub of fandom to pull readers to more obscure works, and I got to thinking, remember when there was Speakeasy magazine, or The Comics Journal covered everything and believed that readers would be as curious about Don Rosa as they were Steve Gerber?

I’m romanticizing the past, of course, ignoring the patience for mediocrity and homogeneous creative talent for the most part in doing so, but… there’s something in there that sticks around in my head as if it’s some secret truth. Did comics have their heyday decades ago, and it’s taken me this long to notice?