Author: Graeme McMillan

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Me/Not Me

Discovering my name on a newly-published story at The Hollywood Reporter the other day was a trip, as someone who hasn’t written for the site in a more than a couple of years at this point. It was attached to an obituary for John Romita Snr., one that I can remember writing in advance many years earlier; still, it’s an odd thing to see yourself suddenly out of context like that.

(It was written, darkly, just after the death of Stan Lee in 2018; we’d had a meeting that was, essentially, “Which other comic creator is old and is likely to die soon? We should write obituaries for them just in case.” Even then, Romita was 88 years old. He was, of course, on the list.)

The THR story wasn’t the first time that I’d discovered my name on “new” stories without any warning, mind you; Newsarama as-was — I think the site is officially called Games Radar now — used to do that kind of thing as a matter of course: taking old stories and updating them and republishing them as new, with the name of the original author attached. Going by their business practice, which I should emphasize I knew about ahead of time so this wasn’t a surprise, I was working for them years and years after I’d actually stopped. “New” stories would appear while I’d moved on to multiple other sites.

It’s a strange feeling, this particular lack of autonomy. It’s one thing to search for background material on a story and find something you’d written and utterly forgotten about years ago — that happens all the time, which only makes sense considering how long I’ve been doing this, and I’ve gotten used to it — but to find things that appear to be written contemporaneously, referencing events that have only just happened, that claim to be mine and I didn’t do it? That’s a whole different level of strangeness.

My writing will live on, on the internet, after me. But sometimes, it’ll be born on the internet without me, as well. It’s a disorienting feeling, at times.

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Everything Is Exactly Right

I am, as I’ve written here before, a fan of stillness and silence. There’s a particular pleasure that comes from the absence of noise and clutter — mental, as well as visual and aural — that I couldn’t even come close to explaining even if I had years to try, but it’s something that I find especially important and fulfilling the busier and more frenetic the day-to-day becomes.

This thought occurred to me recently while sitting on the couch, waiting for something to happen (a specific something, I should clarify, not the generic “waiting for something to happen” that denotes ennui or boredom). I was finishing up an unusual piece of evening work while no-one else was around — they were asleep, making all parts of the house surprisingly still and silent — and for once, there was no music playing and no television making dramatic noises off in the background somewhere. Instead, when I finished typing and closed the document in question, I suddenly realized how quiet it was.

And yet, it wasn’t entirely quiet. At some point, without me really being fully aware of it, two cats had started to lay on me as I worked — one on my legs, another against my shoulders and draped across the upper part of my arm — and both were asleep, cozily snuggled up to me and snoring. The sound of those snores, almost comically gentle and understated as if a human was trying to conjure up an approximation of the cutest snore imaginable for an animated movie, was effortlessly comforting, and somehow underscored how silent and still everything else was around me.

Even as one of the cats pushed against me, as if trying to sleepily will my leg to change shape and become more comfortable (Sorry, cat; there’s bone in there to prevent that from happening), I felt at peace, entirely comfortable and thinking I can’t move, I cannot, I can’t disturb these cats at all over and over to myself — reader, I did eventually; the ache in my leg demanded it — it felt as if I was receiving an unexpected, inexplicable gift: a small strand of the world that was not moving for just a second, letting me exist quietly and happily. That thought came to me, and was immediately affirmed by a low purr right next to my head.

Sometimes, in the midst of everything else, things can feel at least temporarily perfect.

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We Won’t Care, Just You See

A side effect of getting older as a lover of pop music is, I think, coming to accept that The Kinks were one of the greatest bands of the ’60s. Oh, sure; everyone knows their hits — “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of The Night,” even “Lola” — but the older I get, the more I just kind of step back and think, holy shit, they just kept putting out shockingly great music for fucking years, didn’t they?

I’m not entirely sure what it is about the band that prevents them from being up there with the Beatles and the Stones, the two iconic bands of the era; listen to songs like “Stop Your Sobbing,” and it’s got the arrangement (vocal and instrumental) of an early Beatles song, while “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” has all the sneering posture of the Stones at their anxious, nervous angry best. (Something like “Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl” has the blues riffs and rip-offs of the Stones’ early days, too, but paired with a vulnerability that Mick could never.)

There’s so much more the Kinks are capable of, though, at least for that first decade of their existence: songs like “Days” and “Shangri-La,” or the so-famous-you-forget-how-good-it-actually-is “Waterloo Sunset” have a wistfulness and longing and sadness all their own, while “The Village Green Preservation Society” and “All of My Friends Were There” are informed by the British Music Hall tradition in a way that other bands only claimed to be, outside of things like “Your Mother Should Know” or brief intros to more raucous songs. (Hi, bands like The Move and The Creation.)

Maybe that’s what I missed before, and am only coming around to now — a recognition and appreciation of how vast and varied the Kinks’ output was at their height, and how restless a band they were during that period. It’s not just that they could do it all, it’s that they did, for a time there… and that’s something that I find myself thinking about more and more often, as I age.

Maybe I’m just jealous, at the heart of it.

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I’ve Been on Tenterhooks, Ending in Dirty Looks

In the 1990s, I was astonishingly, fearlessly sincere in my writing. I was fueled by things like Jonathan Carroll novels, Neil Gaiman comics, Alex Chilton’s Big Star lyrics, but more of all, youth: I felt the heartfelt need to be heartfelt as I stumbled into writing. This wasn’t true of everything I was writing — the stuff I wrote for the university newsletter was, thankfully, not impassioned and emotional, because I don’t think anyone would have wanted that — but if I was writing something “for me,” which is to say, for art school purposes or worse, gulp, a diary or something similar, there was this pained need to be understood right there at the center of it all.

In the early 2000s, I shifted into a knowing artifice that almost mocked the idea of sincerity or wearing my heart on my sleeve. It coincided with my starting writing for the internet, although I don’t think that’s why it happened. (I hope not, at least.) There’s a line in Grant Morrison’s Supergods where they make a reference to writing in an approximation of Alan Moore’s middle class English voice in order to become more palatable to a mainstream audience, and I remember reading that and chuckling to myself; unknowingly, I was writing in an approximation of Morrison’s Invisibles letter columns and knowing patter from interviews and text pieces at that time. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut puts it.

(Of course, Moore’s authorial voice that Morrison’s referring to is, itself, rooted elsewhere: there’s no small influence from Douglas Adams in there, as well as other English humorists of the mid-20th century. It’s mirrors, all the way down…)

I can remember, with surprising clarity, sitting on a bus headed to work one day in… 2006? 2007? and thinking about the voice in which I wrote at the time, feeling the pressure of the assumed irony and humor on my shoulders at the time. What if I could just write the emotional, vulnerable way I used to? I asked myself, and quickly put aside the idea as impossible: it would be too risky to be so open, I remember reasoning, and also, who really wants to read someone writing like that these days?

My current writing “voice,” such as it is came from… I don’t know… age…? Necessity? I like to think it’s more honest, a truer reflection of who I actually am these days. But then, one thing about this site is, I write this for me. It’s that rare thing where the cliche is true: if anyone’s actually reading this, I’m both surprised and honored. Welcome to the inside of my head.

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As Above, Etc.

As I write this — a week or so before you read it, unless I end up doing what I’ve done before on this blog and just changed around the order of posts before they publish for reasons that even I don’t understand at the time — I’m coming off a pretty sustained period of intense workload. It wasn’t the same kind of workload as, say, a convention or whatever; thankfully, I don’t have one of those again until mid-summer. Nonetheless, I’ve found myself with a bunch to do, and my head swimming a little as a result.

While I’m never a fan of these lots-of-work-no-time-to-do-anything periods — I’m not that much of a masochist — I’ve always found something weirdly fulfilling about them, especially afterwards. There’s probably some sense of unhealthy internal justification going on, for some of that; an idea that, if I do a good job, then I’ve proved my worth on some level in a personal manner and therefore I’m… a good person, or something similar…? That’s a route I don’t feel particularly comfortable exploring, in large part because I know it’s entirely ridiculous but also close to the truth on some level despite everything. (When things were shitty in my marriage, I’d bury myself in work because it felt like an escape. I know that kind of mindset is in there, unfortunately.)

Instead, there’s a sense of reflection and calm that comes afterwards, when the work is done and I can take a breath, let a lot of things that have been floating around in my head go, and reassess how everything went. I had this after the UK trip a well, to some degree, so it’s not entirely a work thing; I find relief in the aftermath of things, in knowing that something big is over and taking that as an opportunity to take stock and look back. It’s a learning experience, in some way, even if sometimes all you learn is “That was too much, let’s never do that again.”

In this case, I’ve learned that I need to re-learn something: part of this intense work period involved writing a long form piece that I found myself struggling with for the silliest reason, in retrospect — that I was impatient with myself for the entire time, and pushing myself to just get it done already. There was no reason for that, I wasn’t up against a hard deadline, per se, but I found myself angry and frustrated that it wasn’t done already very early on in the writing, as if I was letting myself down, and it wasn’t until the third day of proper writing, when it came to an end, that I came to peace with the fact that some things really need the time and distance to get right. (I’d been writing other things during this time, as well; each of those three days, I wrote four or five other stories, because that’s how the internet works.)

It’s a good lesson, especially given that I’m theoretically going to be writing more long form pieces in the future — but also a good lesson that I should apply to all my work, and all my everything else as well: I need to learn to step back, calm down a bit, and remember that not everything can be done through sheer force of will in one sitting. Some things take time.

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The Comics of May 2023

Okay, I admit it: I have no idea what happened in May that I read quite as much as I did. When I came back from the UK and had barely read anything, I feel like I worked especially hard to try to “catch up,” and I think that mindset continued into this month for some reason — and “catching up” was pretty much what I did, going back to a bunch of Marvel titles especially and just… reading. (I also went through a period of revisiting Valiant’s output, which I still enjoy a chunk of.) So.. here’s a lot of comics that I read in May, I guess…

(I’ll never read this many in one month again, I suspect.)

  1. Gold Key: Alliance #s 1-5
  2. The Sovereigns #s 0-5
  3. Duo #s 1-6
  4. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #18
  5. Guardians of the Galaxy (2023) #1
  6. All-Out Avengers #5
  7. Sins of Sinister #1
  8. Strange Tales: Rocket Infinity Comic #1
  9. Rocket Raccoon (1985) #s 1, 4
  10. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #15
  11. Dawn of DC Primer #1
  12. Justice Society of America (2022) #4
  13. Superman (2023) #4
  14. Rocket (2017) #s 1-3
  15. Rocket (2017) #s 4-6
  16. Captain Marvel (2019) #s 22-27
  17. Guardians of the Galaxy (2008) #16
  18. Avengers/X-Men FCBD 2023 
  19. Spider-Man/Venom FCBD 2023
  20. Marvel’s Voices FCBD 2023
  21. Captain Marvel (2019) #s 28-36
  22. Captain Marvel (2019) #s 37-45
  23. Valiant Bloodshot FCBD 2019 Special
  24. Fallen World #s 1-5
  25. Adventures on the Planet of the Apes #s 1-11
  26. Invasion 1984!
  27. Thor (2020) #s 15-24
  28. Venom (2021) #s 1-15
  29. Avengers: Beyond #1
  30. Titans (2023) #1
  31. Nightwing (2016) #104
  32. Avengers (2018) #s 57-62
  33. Avengers Forever (2021) #s 1-11
  34. Murderworld: Spider-Man #1
  35. Murderworld: Wolverine #1
  36. FCBD 2023: Conan the Barbarian #0
  37. FCBD 2023: Star Trek: Day of Blood Prelude
  38. FCBD 2023: 2000 AD Regened Presents: The Best Comic Ever
  39. FCBD 2023: Dog Man and the League of Misfits
  40. FCBD 2023: The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
  41. FCBD 2023: Frazettaverse #0
  42. Catwoman (2018) #s 39-42
  43. Catwoman (2018) #s 43-50
  44. FCBD 2005 Comics Festival
  45. FCBD 2007 Comics Festival
  46. Random back issues of The Phoenix x 10
  47. Secret Wars II #1
  48. Wrath of the Eternal Warrior #s 1-14
  49. Eternal Warrior: Awakening #1
  50. Girl Juice OGN
  51. Dark Web Finale #1
  52. Doctor Strange (2023) #1
  53. New Talent Showcase: The Milestone Initiative #1
  54. Venom (2021) #16
  55. The Loving Cup (strip from Misty)
  56. Legends of the DC Universe: Carmine Infantino
  57. The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country #s 1-6
  58. The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country – The Glass House #s 1-2
  59. The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives #s 1-6
  60. Way of X #s 1-5
  61. X-Men: The Onslaught Revelation #1
  62. Legion of X #s 1-5
  63. Legion of X #s 6-8
  64. Li’l Rocket Infinity Comic #1
  65. Legion of X #s 9-10
  66. King in Black: Black Knight #1
  67. Black Knight: Curse of the Ebony Blade #s 1-5
  68. Death of Doctor Strange: Black Knight/X-Men #1
  69. Captain Britain (1985) #1
  70. Captain Britain (1976) #s 1-16
  71. More random issues of The Phoenix x 10
  72. Captain Britain (1976) #s 17-39
  73. Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain #s 231-234 (Captain Britain stories only)
  74. Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain #s 235-247 (Captain Britain stories only)
  75. Marvel Team-Up (1972) #s 65-66
  76. Uncanny X-Men (1963) #s 122-124
  77. Uncanny X-Men (2018) #s 1-10
  78. Age of X-Man: Alpha #1
  79. Age of X-Man: Omega #1
  80. Rai (2019) #s 1-5
  81. Red Sonja: The Superpowers #s 1-5
  82. Vampirella: The Dark Powers #s 1-5
  83. Even more random issues of The Phoenix x 26
  84. Fast Times in Comic Book Editing
  85. Hulk Weekly #s 1-63 (Black Knight and Captain Britain stories only)
  86. Rai (2019) #s 6-10
  87. Unity #s 1-4
  88. Yet more random back issues of The Phoenix x 14
  89. Marvel Super-Heroes (1972) #s 377-388 (Captain Britain stories only)
  90. The Daredevils #s 1-7 (Captain Britain stories only)
  91. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #19
  92. Hellcat (2023) #1
  93. Joe Fixit #2
  94. Alien (2022) #6
  95. Avengers: War Against Time #2
  96. Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1
  97. Peacemaker Tries Hard #2
  98. Batman (2016) #136
  99. The Daredevils #s 8-11 (Captain Britain stories only)
  100. The Mighty World of Marvel #s 8-16 (Captain Britain stories only)
  101. X-O Manowar (2017) #s 1-13
  102. Captain Britain (1985) #s 2-14
  103. Harbinger (2012) #s 1-5
  104. Harbinger (2012) #s 6-10
  105. X-O Manowar (2017) #14
  106. Harbinger (2012) #s 11-14
  107. Bloodshot (2012) #s 10-13
  108. Harbinger Wars #s 1-4
  109. Harbinger (2012) #s 15-25
  110. Harbinger: Bleeding Monk #0
  111. Harbinger: Omegas #s 1-3
  112. Imperium #s 1-16
  113. The Life and Death of Toyo Harada #s 1-6
  114. Wicked Things #s 1-6 (John Allison/Max Sarin mystery series)
  115. Fly By Night OGN
  116. Secret Weapons (2017) #s 0-4
  117. Secret Weapons: Owen’s Story #0
  118. Harbinger Wars 2 #0
  119. Harbinger Wars 2: Prelude #1
  120. Harbinger Wars 2 #s 1-4
  121. Harbinger Wars 2: Aftermath #1
  122. Avengers (2023) #1
  123. Spider-Man (2022) #5
  124. Fantastic Four (2022) #4
  125. The Invincible Iron Man (2022) #3
  126. X-Men (2021) #19
  127. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #1
  128. Storm (2023) #1
  129. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 245-249 (Start of the Bill Mantlo run)
  130. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 250-252
  131. Wasp (2023) #2
  132. Sins of Sinister: Nightcrawlers #1
  133. Unstoppable Doom Patrol #3
  134. Green Arrow (2023) #2
  135. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #26
  136. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 253-275
  137. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 276-280
  138. Power Girl Special (2023) #1
  139. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 281-300
  140. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 301-313 (End of Mantlo run)
  141. The Flash #800
  142. Shazam (2023) #2
  143. Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent #4
  144. Green Lantern (2023) #2
  145. Steelworks #1
  146. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #s 2-4
  147. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #s 5-8
  148. The Seasons Have Teeth #1
  149. Masks #s 1-8
  150. Incursion #s 1-4
  151. The Incal: Psychoverse OGN
  152. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2013) #s 1-6
  153. Battle Action (2023) #1
  154. Tenement #1 (Lemire/Sorrentino horror)
  155. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 42
  156. Cyborg (2023) #1
  157. 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 1988
  158. Dega OGN
  159. Savage Avengers (2019) #1-5
  160. Daredevil: Woman Without Fear #s 1-3
  161. The Valiant #s 1-4
  162. Conan the Barbarian (2019) #s 13-18
  163. The Thrilling Adventure Hour Presents: Beyond Belief #s 0-4
  164. Action Special 2020
  165. Savage Avengers (2019) #s 6-10
  166. Savage Avengers Annual #1
  167. Immoral X-Men #1
  168. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #20
  169. Savage Avengers (2019)  #s 11-28
  170. Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #1
  171. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #s 9-10
  172. Ms. Marvel (2014) #4
  173. Prism Stalker #s 1-5
  174. Star Trek (1984) #s 16-17
  175. The Flash (1959) #201
  176. DC Pride #1
  177. DC Pride 2022 #1
  178. Green Arrow (1987) #s 1-2
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The Nominees Aren’t

In large part because there’s been such a kerfuffle about the nominations in the weeks since they were announced this year, I find myself still thinking about this year’s Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards and the names nominated. Or, more particularly, the fact that my site wasn’t nominated.

On the one hand, I didn’t really expect us to be nominated, for a handful of reasons that go beyond my traditional self-consciousness. (I almost wrote “humility,” but I think “self-consciousness” might be more accurate, if I’m honest with myself.) We’re a new site that hadn’t even been around for a month when the nominations were submitted, lots of people don’t know who we are or what we do, and bluntly, maybe a lot of people don’t like what we do, even if they are familiar with us. There’s all manner of reasons for us to be left off the list.

Yet, it did sting when we didn’t make it, I can’t deny it. Partially because of who did make it on there — yes, there’s a couple of names on there that provoked a “What, are you serious?” response on first read; no, I won’t say who they are publicly — but more because, this felt like the closest I’d ever come to feeling as if I was going to be close to a nomination.

I couldn’t tell you what broken part of me wants to be nominated so much; I know, objectively and intellectually, that it’s a crap shoot in a lot of ways — I was a judge a few years back, I know all the pitfalls of the process — but there’s still part of me that longs to be recognized in some manner in that way. It’s not as if it would change anything in any real way in my life; it’s simply this dumb bucket list thing, like writing for certain outlets I loved as a kid even if I don’t even necessarily believe in the, anymore.

Perhaps that’s the way to think about such things when I don’t get nominated every year: the hangover of nostalgia for when the Eisners really meant something to me. That said, I know that if I do ever get a nomination, all of that will fall away in the flush of success and a feeling that, somehow, I’ve finally made it, whatever “it” might mean at that very minute. Perhaps we never quite outgrow the need for someone to tell us that we’ve done a good job, deep down.

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Let’s Go Back, Let’s Go Way Back

Entirely accidentally, I’ve spent a bunch of time recently revisiting media from a decade or so ago; it wasn’t something that I’d planned, or even actually noticed I was doing until after the fact, when I was talking about what I’d been watching and reading to various people and the idea came up, again and again: “Oh, you know that’s ten years ago now, right?”

What’s funny is that, thankfully, I didn’t have that moment of thinking, it feels like just yesterday that I think can sometimes happen with the passing of time; everything in the past three or so years feels especially like a jumble of potential moments that could be entirely interchangeable, especially. (Since the pandemic started, I don’t think I’m the only person to have a particularly skewed idea of time — there are things that, objectively, I know happened in a particular order, but it feels very much as if some happened last week and some happened years earlier, even though the order is entirely wrong.)

Instead, it was just the opposite: each of the things I’d been revisiting had happened almost because they felt far, far older than the reality turned out to be. Maybe this is because I have a significant life shift in between then and now — literally almost in the middle, if you consider that I split from Kate five years ago this fall — almost creating a very definitive THEN and NOW in my head. Because of the way my memory works, I can remember specific images and details about where I was when I was reading something, or watching something, and my memory almost instinctively goes, oh this happened at this point so it must be some time ago, and even ten years feels… almost too soon in some sense…?

And yet, a decade has indeed passed since these things I’m now going back to. It’s fun to see where my tastes have changed, what things I’m now kinder to, what things make less sense to me now. It’s a worthwhile exercise, if an accidental one, to revisit art and culture and use it as a mirror to remind yourself what’s happened to you. It’s nice to realize you can still change, even when you don’t think it’s happened.

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Final Looks

It strikes me that, back in Scotland at least, this is the time of year when the art schools hold their traditional final exhibit degree shows; even now, more than a quarter century after my own BA show, the thought makes me surprisingly anxious.

The degree show is exactly what it sounds like: the final show of the work you’ve been doing for the entire year, upon which you’re judged by the teachers, tutors, and whoever else is roped in on what grade your final degree is going to be. (For my school, it wasn’t only the exhibit that you were graded on; you could file supporting work as well. I did, and in the three hour window between getting my grade and the exhibit opening to the public, was told by tutors to put some of it in the actual exhibit, and remove some of the work originally in the exhibit because it wasn’t good enough. It was a lesson in self-editing, as well as a lesson in ego death.)

Even now, I can remember vividly how stressful preparing for the degree show was: the feeling that this one event would define the result of your last four years of life and work is a curiously masochistic experience, especially given the increasingly hands-off attitude displayed by art school staff in the final year leading up to it. More and more, you find yourself on your own as the final date moves closer, thinking to yourself, don’t fuck it up don’t fuck it up.

A year and change after my BA degree show, I was at it again with my MA degree show, the result of what had been at that point a sustained 12 months of work and self-directed exploration. The pressure on me for that show was, if anything, even greater for a number of reasons, but I remember feeling far less stressed about it, and far more convinced that I was doing the right thing, no matter what grade I got.

Somewhere out there as I type, there are likely kids like I was back then, feeling as if the weight of the world — and more importantly, their entire future — is on their shoulders as they prep their final exhibit. I hope they have more confidence than I did, and the perspective and self-belief that I didn’t get until my MA show.