Author: Graeme McMillan

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You Can Make It If You Try

I am, famously, terrible at taking compliments.

I used to believe this was part of my societal make-up purely from coming from Scotland, a country where it’s far more accepted — and arguably more fun — to take the piss out of yourself as a defense mechanism than to boast of your accomplishments… or, really, acknowledge them in any real manner, outside of a noncommittal shrug and attempt to quickly change the subject. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that’s a significant factor in the who I ended up being today, because how could it not…? However. However.

I’ve had conversations with other people from Scotland, and elsewhere in the UK, about our inability to take compliments, and how we navigate it; I’ve also had conversations with a number of Americans about the same subject, and the ways in which the British method — essentially, just deny everything and pretend that whoever said the complimentary thing is objectively wrong — might actually be rude when you really think about it. And through all of this, I kept thinking one thing: there are some compliments I’m actually okay with.

Specifically, they’re compliments about things that come second nature to me; things that I don’t even think of as being worth noting, never mind complimenting. I am, for whatever reason, good at liveblogging or livetweeting events; I’ve been complimented on that many times, most recently at Emerald City Comic-Con earlier this month, and when that happens, I find myself surprisingly able to say thank you, and move on. No dissembling or argument; I just acknowledge it and say thank you.

What’s the difference? I’m unsure. Is it that if I don’t try, I don’t feel self-conscious if something notices me? Perhaps, but that just makes me embarrassed to consider. Maybe that’s more of the Scottishness that I hadn’t thought about coming out.

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You Can’t Go Home Again (Cheaply)

As you read this, I’m likely hurtling through the air. Actually, maybe not; time zones are hard. I think I might actually have landed in the UK by the time you’re reading this…? Well, I definitely will if you’re reading it an hour or so after it’s published. Go with me here — this is far from an exact science.

(I say that, but the passage of time and time zones are, strictly speaking, a pretty exact science. So it goes.)

My point being: I’m in the UK for the next week and a half for work — well, the first half of the trip is all for work, and it’s also the entire reason there’s a trip to the UK at all. I’m covering Star Wars Celebration, a four-day event in London that’ll be filled to the brim with all things Star Wars; I did the same show in Chicago four years ago for THR, and it feels especially weird to be back doing it again for Popverse in an entirely different country. The more things change, I guess…?

The second half of the trip is seeing family — and introducing Chloe to my family in person for the first time, as well as introducing Chloe to Scotland for the first time, too. It’s my first time back there in over a decade, and it’s far too fast for my liking; we basically leave two days after arriving, and so won’t get to see… well, anyone outside of my family, most likely. (Sorry, anyone reading this who hoped to see us.)

I’m excited to go to the UK again, and pre-emptively exhausted by the travel and the work and the constant movement while we’re there. It feels suitable to feel conflicted about going home again. Ask me how I feel about the whole thing when I’m back, though.

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Slow Life

March was an odd month, reading-wise. As I noted earlier, I didn’t really read any comics for the entire length of my Seattle trip at the start of the month, essentially removing a week from the month’s worth of reading time. Then, in the last week of the month, I found myself binging The Morning Show in bed on my iPad instead of reading, for reasons that aren’t entirely understandable even to myself. In other words, I could have read more. Instead, I read this:

  1. Teen Titans: Robin OGN
  2. Surfer 2 (Wagner/MacNeil Megazine strip, 6 eps)
  3. Justice Society of America (2022) #3
  4. Superman (2023) #2
  5. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #13
  6. The Flash #795
  7. Milestone 30th Anniversary Special #1
  8. The Spirit #50 (jam issue)
  9. Wonder Woman (2016) #s 787-790
  10. Batman (2016) #s 131-133
  11. Beneath the Dead Oak Tree
  12. Stray
  13. Food Baby
  14. Minötaar
  15. The Books of Clash preview
  16. Suicide Squad (1987) #s 63-66
  17. Earth-Prime #s 1-6
  18. Batman: Urban Legends #s 11-16
  19. The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #s 1-6
  20. Unstoppable Doom Patrol #1
  21. Avengers Assemble: Alpha #1
  22. Thanos: Death Notes #1
  23. Peter Parker and Miles Morales: Spider-Men – Double Trouble #1
  24. Justice Society of America (2007) #s 5-8
  25. The Flash (1987) #s 80-84
  26. Justice Society of America (2007) #s 9-13
  27. Batman: Gotham Knights – Gilded City #s 1-4
  28. Fantastic Four (2022) #2
  29. Dark Web: Dusk #1
  30. Justice Society of America (2007) #s 14-22
  31. Justice Society of America: Kingdom Come Special: Superman #1
  32. Justice Society of America: Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1
  33. Justice Society of America: Kingdom Come Special: The Kingdom #1
  34. Justice Society of America Annual (2008) #1
  35. Daredevil (2022) #s 1-6
  36. Hellblazer #s 175-184
  37. Star Trek: Crew #s 1-2
  38. The Complete Dice-Man
  39. Judge Dredd: Blaze of Glory (Al Ewing collection)
  40. Department K: Interdimensional Investigators
  41. Spider-Man (2022) #3
  42. What If…? #200
  43. Immortal X-Men #9
  44. X-Men Red #9
  45. Action Comics #1053
  46. Transformers (1984) #s 1-13
  47. Transformers (1984) #s 14-25
  48. Nightwing #102
  49. Stargirl: The Lost Children #5
  50. Transformers (1984) #s 26-31
  51. Transformers (1984) #s 32-37
  52. Transformers: Head Masters #s 1-4
  53. Transformers (1984) #s 38-50
  54. Transformers (1984) #s 51-58
  55. Transformers (1984) #s 59-72
  56. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #15
  57. Dark Web: X-Men #1
  58. The Invincible Iron Man (2022) #1
  59. Monica Rambeau: Photon #1
  60. Transformers (1984) #s 73-77
  61. Transformers (1984) #s 78-80
  62. Punchline: The Gotham Game #6
  63. Batman (2016) #134
  64. Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent #2
  65. The Flash #796
  66. The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #7
  67. Batman: One Bad Day – Ra’s Al Ghul #1
  68. Octopus Pie: The Other Side
  69. Octopus Pie Eternal
  70. Waller vs. Wildstorm #1
  71. JLA #65
  72. Alpha Flight (1982) #s 29-30
  73. Green Lantern (1990) #s 36-37
  74. X-Men Annual (2022) #1
  75. Gotham City: Year One #s 5-6
  76. Harley Quinn (2021) #28
  77. Superman (2023) #3
  78. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #14
  79. Nightwing (2016) #103
  80. Alpha Flight (1982) #s 31-32
  81. DCeased: War of the Undead Gods #s 7-8
  82. Alpha Flight (1982) #s 35-37
  83. Green Arrow (2023) #1
  84. Green Arrow (2001) #s 1-10
  85. Star Trek (2022) #s 1-4
  86. Dungeons & Dragons (2010) #1
  87. Gold Goblin #2
  88. Mary-Jane & Black Cat (2022) #1
  89. Alien (2022) #4
  90. Predator (2022) #5
  91. Star Trek (2022) #5
  92. Danger Street #5
  93. JLA #s 66-70
  94. X-Men (2021) #17
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Radar O’Reilly And Then Some

The dog has been particularly reactive to the outside world, lately. He’s an anxious dog at the best of times, but in the Spring and Summer, that gets almost incomparably worse because there’s so much activity outside and almost every noise he hears makes him panic. The worst noise of all, it turns out, is the sound of ladders being set up or taken down; whenever that happens anywhere near the house — by which I mean, honestly, anywhere within a one block radius, because dogs have really good hearing — he goes into full-on, running-around-the-house freak-out mode. He runs throughout all the rooms, barking and sounding the alarm: there are ladders close by. We should watch out and be prepared for invasion.

I mention all of this not to make fun of the dog, although there’s no small amount of humor to the whole thing; instead, I bring it up because there’s an unexpected side-effect of dealing with all of this, which is: now I have found myself surprisingly reactive to sounds around the house.

That’s not to say that I’m also running around the house sounding alerts at the smallest provocation (nor that I’d even be tempted to do such a thing; it sounds like far too much work, for one thing), but I can’t deny that my ears perk up when I recognize particular sounds outside the house — especially ladders, it’s true — and I find myself tensing, waiting for the dog to run through and bark in alarm. I feel as if my hearing has ended up being supercharged by the whole thing, much to my amusement, making me wonder both what other sense is going to start failing to balance our this newly enhanced hearing, and also whether this background awareness of everything around me is what it feels like to be Daredevil from Marvel comics.

It’s a cliche to say that people become like their dogs the longer they’re together, I know; I just didn’t think it would happen like this.

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Is The Less I Believe It

As chance — and the Spotify algorithm — would have it, I found myself listening to a bunch of Ocean Colour Scene the other day. (I blame the fact that I had been listening to no shortage of 1990s Paul Weller just before that; Spotify probably thought, “Oh, you’re in a Dadrock mood,” somewhat justifiably.)

In the mid-90s, it felt as if OCS, as their fans called them — likely out of a quiet acceptance that “Ocean Colour Scene” is objectively a terrible name for anything, especially a band — were, if not the butt of a particular joke that was difficult to explain to anyone who didn’t immediately, instinctively get it, then at least a band that was on the periphery of not only Britpop, but the wider and more existential concept of “cool.” Imagine the British music scene of the time as an explosion of joy and melody and, yes, even cool; Ocean Colour Scene would be some distance away from the epicenter, with onlookers and scientists arguing over their relative merits, entirely unconvinced.

Listening back to them recently, I went for the songs I remembered liking the most — “The Day We Caught The Train,” “You’ve Got It Bad,” “Hundred Mile High City,” “July” — and I realized that, well, maybe I’d been looking at them all wrong all along. That’s not to say that the songs were any catchier or lyrically any better (Ocean Colour Scene’s lyrics were, often, awkward in such a way that you’d wonder if English was their second language), but that, maybe it’s a mistake to think of them as a band, per se.

This sounds like a joke, but in each of the songs that I liked — or, again, liked the most to be more precise — the thing that was most interesting was always that the center of the whole thing wasn’t the song, per se, not the melody or the lyrics, but a particular sound, or the feel of the whole thing. At their most interesting, Ocean Colour Scene’s music is like tone poems from so far out of left field that they go all the way back to being square again: hymns to a the vibe, except the vibe in question has all the inspiration of a house band covering the Beatles lazily in 1973.

Oddly, this realization made me like them far, far more. Maybe I should go back and revisit all of those Britpop alsoran bands, and see what they sound like today. Is the world really ready for that Cast revival? (Hopefully not.)

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The End (Not Really)

I’m not entirely sure how to describe what I spent the last week or so doing, outside of the usual everyday “work and eating and cleaning just to get through the day” existence. The phrase “Taking care of business” is both apt and descriptive, but also sounds like the kind of euphemism preferred by shitty trailers for shitty movies from the 1980s to refer to some romantic and/or sexual congress that will ultimately fail to happen for reasons that are, apparently, hilarious and touching.

And yet, I have been taking care of business: I’ve had to book flights and hotels for the upcoming UK trip — which included actually sitting down and working out where and when said flights and hotels need to be, and how expensive that would be without breaking the bank (spoilers, I failed that last part; international travel is not cheap, friends.) — as well as work out just what the fuck I was going to do about taxes this year after the surprise retirement of my accountant after something like a decade of faithful service. That’s not including various behind-the-scenes elements of my job that also include reimbursements and travel plans and the like. I’ve been planning the important plans; I really, genuinely have been taking care of something that could easily and deservedly be called “the business.”

It’s been exhausting.

Here’s the thing; I am very bad at doing these things. Or, more correctly, I’m very good at doing them but none of it comes naturally. I don’t have the important mix of macro and micro focuses such things need to work properly, at least in the measures necessary to do it right; I get hung up on the strangest details and have to unplug my head after awhile because I start thinking like a journalist — “why is this the case, let me follow this thread” — instead of, you know, just completing the task. As a result, everything takes a little bit longer to finish than it probably should, but there’s an upside: everything else I accomplish while distracting myself from the task at hand.

(That sounds like a joke, but it’s not; in avoiding finishing taxes, I managed to clean a bathroom and the kitchen, sweep the stairs and the entire first floor, and take out the trash and the recycling. Would that I could be so productive on other occasions.

I tell you all of this because, as I type this, I have finished everything that’s been hanging over me for… the past couple of months or so…? I can’t quite believe it’s true, but I take comfort in one horrifying fact: there’s going to be more to deal with almost as soon as I finish this sentence. That’s how it works, these days.

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There’s a Great Big Crack in the

Watching Blur: No Distance Left To Run the other week, I had this unexpected moment at the very start of the movie that threw me off far more than I would have even imagined: a split-second shot of the Union Jack, flying in slow motion.

It’s something that only makes sense for the movie; Blur was, after all, one of the two leading lights of Britpop back in the day, so of course you have the British flag right there at the start, to set the scene. And yet: I had this really surprising reaction to it, almost viscerally.

I’m far from patriotic at the best of times, and when I even think of the idea of “patriotism,” British isn’t even something that I consider immediately; I think of being Scottish, and American, before I think of the idea of being British. (I suspect the “Scottish/British” thing is a whole subject in and of itself; I suspect there’s an entire contingent of Scots who don’t necessarily think of themselves as British, for whatever reason. Oh, the class and social systems and all their complications…)

The Union Jack was omnipresent in my twenties, because of Britpop. It was in posters, on single covers, on television, on clothes, on Noel Gallagher’s fucking guitar; it was the graphic that defined the age, somehow, at a time when the British Empire was the very opposite of a fond memory.

Is that why I had this instant revulsion to the flag when I saw it on the screen when I saw it? Was it some delayed rejection of the image of the age from my youth? Or some rejection of the very idea of patriotism for a county I don’t even necessarily believe in? I’ve thought about it a lot, and I still don’t have an answer. All I know is that, somehow, I’ve come to instinctively reject the idea of “Britishness” and look for something else, something more real. Modern life, perhaps, is still rubbish.

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Old Haunts

There was one night during my recent Seattle visit where I found myself wandering around, trying to find a pizza place where we’d eaten last year, during the previous Emerald City Comic Con; they’d done a really good potato pizza, of all things, and I wanted to have it again, given the way the rest of the day had gone to that point. (I found it, and it was good; it’s a place called Serious Pie, if you’re in the area and curious.)

The pizza isn’t what’s important, though; instead, what is was the realization as I was walking back to the hotel that I was somewhere I had been at some point in the past, but that I couldn’t quite remember when. I knew it was some time ago — I had been there with my ex-wife, I could remember, but beyond that, every single detail was completely hazy: Why were we there? When had we been there? What were we even doing in Seattle?

All of it was nowhere to be found; I just knew for a fact that, at some point, we had been there — I could remember just a flash of a moment, a mental image, of being inside the building I was walking past at that very moment. For a second, I was haunted by the ghost of myself from years earlier.

That idea stuck with me for awhile; that I was at the point in my life where I could lose the details of something like that. Earlier that day, I’d been talking to someone I work with who’s a good two decades younger than me, and we’d been discussing the idea of forgotten histories, that you’d done so much that you’d lost the details of your own life to a degree. I said something along the lines of, you’re too young for that, wait until you’re my age, not really thinking beyond the self-depreciation element of, “Oh, I’m old.” And yet, here I was, experiencing the very thing we’d been talking about.

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Such A Stupid Get

I’ll note, before I go any further, that this was written in advance of you reading it; a full three weeks in advance, in fact, for those who might think this is a reasonable reflection of how I’m feeling right now as it exists for you. (I mean, it might still be, considering. But we’ll see.)

I am tired.

Not sleepy-tired, as we’ve taken to calling it; not the sense of, “if I sit down for too long, my body is just going to slump back and suddenly, it’ll be hours later and someone will point out that I was snoring, and the dog will be upset at the noises coming out of my mouth.” That’s not the problem; if anything, I’ve actually been sleeping relatively well recently, getting consistent, not-waking-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night sleep, and my body is pretty well-rested.

No, I’m brain-tired. I’ve been thinking too much, or too often, as ridiculous as that sounds. I know, objectively and reasonably, that we’re all thinking all the time, that that’s simply how brains work; I understand that on a practical and realistic level. Nonetheless, I have a sincere and repeated belief that there are times when I think too much, traditionally around work.

It’s the nature of my job; there are times when I have to write a number of articles around 1000 words per day, each requiring a coherent train of thought or argument to be presented, each requiring some level of research or external input. This is my job, and I’m certainly not complaining about it; I do it well, and I love doing it. There’s honestly not another job I think I’d rather be doing. It’s just that, sometimes, I feel especially tired afterwards.

I joke, at times like these, that I’ve had to pull my brain across the finish line as if it’s some grand sport, or as if my brain is a muscle that’s simply been overworked. A poor metaphor, perhaps, but my brain is tired, so what do you want? As I write this, it’s been a long week of a lot of writing, a lot of research and joining the dots and speculation and presentation, and I find myself craving little more than to just… switch off for awhile. To sit down, and to stop thinking thinking for a brief period.

But there are still deadlines to be met, still other stories to write, other interviews to conduct. And so, I write something here, to vent — the irony, more writing — and then pull myself together, to go off and keep doing what I do so well.