Author: Graeme McMillan

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Be Sure To Wear

I’m still thinking about The Last Black Man in San Francisco a few weeks after watching it for the first time. (Yes, it took me a long time; I’d repeatedly think about it, and then think to myself, maybe it’s going to be too heavy and depressing, I’m going to watch something lighter and save that for when I’m in the mood, and then talk myself out of it using that logic even in the times when I was in the mood. So it goes.)

What I keep thinking about isn’t the sense of… removed nostalgia, if that’s even a thing, that it evoked in me. I would recognize general locations or even specific doorways throughout the entire thing with a sense of, “I know where that is!” that was immediately followed by the feeling that I had been a different me when I was in the city, at a very different time in my life. It was as if I was experiencing someone else’s nostalgia and recollection entirely, at times. 

Instead, what’s staying with me is the feeling of the movie; a sense that I found myself reading as a mixture of wistfulness, frustration, and lack of direction — perhaps a better way to put it is, a sense of anticipation for something to happen. Throughout the whole movie, the two central characters, Jimmy and Mont, are simmering with tension and an impatience that I fully recognized and felt in my bones at roughly the same age as the characters themselves: an ache that there was something important and meaningful just out of their reach that they couldn’t quite understand or explain in any real detail.

Perhaps the wistfulness I detected in the movie isn’t really there, and instead came from me watching from the point of view I have today: for all that those feelings hurt and burned at the time, I find myself looking back envious at the energy it offered, and the hunger for experience and possibility that came from those days. 

The movie was beautiful, and meaningful in ways that I can’t verbalize just yet. Instead, I keep thinking about it, and wanting to unfold it further in my mind.

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It’s Me Again, Yes, How Did You

I am used to the idea of “con crash” — that period after a convention where, basically, your body decides that it’s time to stop and maybe have a little enforced rest for awhile; that’s almost certainly the case after the first convention of the year, when your body is in something approaching shock at having just gone through it all for the first time in awhile, or after a particularly heavy or busy convention. It’s not a bad thing, per se; it’s just this blip in health as if a breaker has been triggered and your body needs you to sit down for a bit.

Friends, whatever happened last week was con crash times a million. I’m not entirely sure what happened — I tested negative for COVID, although others I was around during Emerald City Comic Con weren’t so lucky — but I was basically knocked out for a week or so, as my body decided that it was time to just stop. I had the fever, I had the headache, I had the dizziness and the stuffiness of both the nose and the throat. I had it all, and I wasn’t the only one: not only were other people in this here house sick too (Because of me? I genuinely have no idea, in part because it didn’t feel as if I even had enough time to infect anyone before they got sick too), but so were other people in my work.

I’m still not 100% healthy, even as I write this. (On the same day that you’ll read it, unusually! Who says this isn’t the Mighty Marvel Age of breaking-into-prescheduled-posts-to-update-you-all-on-my-health-or-lack-thereof?) But I’m feeling slightly less insane, slightly less out of sorts and removed from reality after seven days of… well, just an entirely lost week, really. I feel as if I’m stumbling back into the harsh light of The Discourse, uncertain what’s been going on and tensing up to deal with whatever’s just around the corner.

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Tuck In

Re-reading Eddie Campbell’s How To Be An Artist and After The Snooter recently — well, relatively recently — got me thinking about how surprisingly clear my memories are of formative comic buying experiences from my youth. For all that my memory is unreliable overall, which is to say, it’s a mess and in some cases almost entirely non-existent, there are certain experiences that I’ve internally mythologized to such a degree that it’s as if they happened last year, as opposed to three decades or more ago.

(I know, rationally, that this doesn’t mean that my memories are any more reliable, or even consistent; it’s almost guaranteed that what I think I’m remembering is actually more than slightly fictionalized or mis-remembered and just fueled by a sincere, misguided sense of belief and “realism.” Nonetheless, it feels real, and that’s what counts, deep down.)

When I was a kid, there was a store that my dad and I would go to every Sunday morning to buy newspapers and bread rolls; it was a weekly tradition, to go together to buy those things for that day’s lunch. The entire family would gather and eat sandwiches and read newspapers together, each of us grabbing one of a stack of papers — for some reason, on Sunday, we got five or six different papers — while the television played behind us, no-one really paying attention. The store was called “The Tuck Shop,” and I loved it not for the bread rolls or the newspapers, but because every month, they’d get a literal stack of DC comics for me to choose from, all available for relatively cheap. Before too long, I’d convince my dad to let me get one each week alongside the papers and the rolls.

When I say “a stack,” I mean that, each month, the store would get an entire month’s worth of DC releases, or thereabouts, all at once. They’d be dead stock from somewhere else, three months behind release in comic book stores, but I didn’t care. For 30 pence, I could pick up issues of Superman or Batman or Justice League of America or whatever; at times, I’d save up my own money and go in and just buy four or five at a time. I was in heaven.

I said it was “an entire month’s worth” of releases; that’s not entirely true, because the selection was unreliable and almost certainly missing at least two or three titles randomly every single time. There would always be the “big” books, but more obscure favorites would come and go without rhyme or reason, resulting in a frustratingly incomplete collection for the me I was at the time. I didn’t really care, though, because the lure of the Tuck Shop remained impossible to resist.

Sometimes I think about that shop, and how central it was not just to my weeks at the time, but to who I ended up becoming. Without the Tuck Shop, I’m not sure my comic fandom would have turned out the way it did. Without those weekly visits, without the excitement of having a literal pile of comics to pick through and find new favorites, would I be the person I am with the job I have today?

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So Much For The Comic Book Fan

A curious thing happened during my Seattle stay for Emerald City Comic Con, which just finished last night. (I got back at 10pm, and pretty much went straight to bed, exhausted from the entire experience of a five-day trip for a four-day convention. It was a lot.) I realized that, despite being on an entire trip for a comic convention, I hadn’t actually read more than one comic during the entire time I was gone.

This is, to be blunt, particularly unusual, because when not traveling, I find myself reading a few comic books per day, whether for work or while unwinding at the end of the day to try and let my brain slow down so that I could fall asleep. That wasn’t what happened on this trip, though; instead, I was getting back from the convention center with my head buzzing from everything that had happened that day at the show — whether work-related, or some other random thing that was just sticking in my head for whatever reason — and then going through the notes I’d made at this panel or that one, or some other work-related activity, until I got so tired that I basically crawled under the covers and fell asleep.

There was only one night — oddly enough, the first night of the entire convention, the second night of the trip — where I read comics, and even then, I found it something that I had trouble concentrating on. My head was elsewhere. (Mostly, on struggling to concentrate, and wanting to fall asleep.)

This all probably says a lot about the complete failure of work/life balance when I’m on a work trip by myself, as does the fact that I’d wake up after a restless night at something like 5am and then start going back through notes or trying to write up a story or at least think of one, really reinforces that. I am my own worst enemy, even when I’m trying not to be.

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I’m Outta Here

Somehow, comic convention season is upon us again; as you’re reading this, I’m in Seattle for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con, which I’m working as part of the Popverse crew for the second year running. (I say year, but the last one was just August last year; it feels simultaneously far closer and further away than 12 months ago.)

It’s the start of at least four shows for this year: I’m doing ECCC, Star Wars Celebration, San Diego Comic-Con, and New York Comic Con as things currently stand, and there’s potentially more where that came from, depending on how things work out and what the Popverse editors have in mind for me. I’m at once excited and anxious about the prospects of a new con season, which feels like the most appropriate response: happy to see old friends and familiar faces that otherwise I wouldn’t get to see, and worried about the travel and potential for everything to go wrong that always comes with this kind of thing on every single trip. At least I’m starting with one that I can get to by train, so airports aren’t in my immediate future… he writes, a month before a transatlantic flight beckons.

For this show, I’m keeping myself busy: in addition to reporting, writing, and all of the traditional journalism business, I’m also moderating a couple of panels on the Friday afternoon (and one on Saturday, too) and also ideally attending a couple of things that are convention-adjacent that haven’t been around before. If there’s a theme to my work in 2023, it’s a quiet attempt to get better at what I do, and try some things that I don’t normally do, as well. (See also: appearing on video, which others really want me to do more of despite my natural unease.)

I’m writing this ahead of time, before I’m even in Seattle, so we’ll see how it all goes on the day(s), but: it’s a trip, no pun intended, to be back on the circuit again so quickly after it last happened. I already find myself wondering if it’s going to be as good as I hope.

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The Comics of February 2023

And here we are, in a new month, which means it’s time for me to share another list of comics that I read last month. In terms of reading, it was perhaps more indicative of what my comic reading usually is, in that there’s a bunch in here I was reading or re-reading for work. (The Spider-Man and Kang-related comics, especially.) That I have a job that requires me to read comics remains a mystery and a joy, I have to admit.

Unlike last month, where I published the list before the end of the month, this is the up-to-the-minute, complete February list. This is it, unfortunately.

  1. Time2 Omnibus
  2. Fighting American (2017) #s 1-4
  3. DC Power: A Celebration #1
  4. Juggernaut (2021) #s 1-5
  5. Golden Record
  6. Night Fever
  7. Judge Dredd from Jan & Feb 2023 issues of 2000 AD
  8. After The Snooter 
  9. A Very British Affair
  10. Danger and Other Unknown Risks
  11. DCeased War of the Undead Gods #6
  12. The Flash #793
  13. Icon vs. Hardware #1
  14. The Fate of The Artist
  15. Fragments (from Alec: The Years Have Pants)
  16. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 121-122
  17. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 31-33
  18. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 50
  19. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 96-98
  20. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #s 4-7
  21. Predator (2022) #4
  22. Punisher (2022) #7
  23. X-Men Red (2022) #8
  24. Strange (2022) #s 2-7
  25. Hulk (2021) #s 9-10
  26. Gag! (2023)
  27. The Years Have Pants (from Alec: The Years Have Pants)
  28. The Human Target (2021) #12
  29. Batman vs. Robin #5
  30. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 41
  31. Action Comics #1052
  32. Secret Invasion (2022) #1
  33. Justice Society of America (1992) #s 1-3
  34. Miracleman #0
  35. Hugo Tate (Collected edition)
  36. Sacrament #s 1-5
  37. Poison Ivy (2022) #s 1-9
  38. Tim Drake: Robin #1
  39. Hungry Ghost OGN 
  40. Haunthology 
  41. Black Cloak #1
  42. Air #s 1-4
  43. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #s 56-58
  44. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #s 107-110
  45. Ant-Man (2020) #s 1-5
  46. Absolution #s 1-3
  47. Night of The Living Deadline USA #s 1-8
  48. Strange Days #1
  49. Absolution #s 4-5
  50. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 57-62
  51. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 63-80
  52. The Plain JANES
  53. Black Cloak #2
  54. Fantastic Four (2022) #1
  55. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #13
  56. Spider-Man (2022) #2
  57. John Stewart: The Emerald Knight #1
  58. Batman ‘89 #1
  59. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 80-92
  60. Avengers (1963) #s 267-269
  61. Avengers Annual (1963) #21
  62. Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #4
  63. Multiversity: Harley Screws Up The DCU #1
  64. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 93-99
  65. Stargirl: The Lost Children #s 1-4
  66. Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent #1
  67. Superman: Space Age #1
  68. The Flash #794
  69. Micronauts Annual #1
  70. Avengers Forever (1998) #s 1-6
  71. Avengers Forever (1998) #s 7-12
  72. Avengers (1998) #s 41-42
  73. The Amazing Spider-Man #s 544-545
  74. The Amazing Spider-Man # 638
  75. Iron Man (2020) #24
  76. Gold Goblin #1
  77. Thunderbolts (2022) #4
  78. Amazing Fantasy #15
  79. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #131, 132
  80. Web of Spider-Man #31
  81. Avengers (1998) #s 41-45
  82. Avengers Annual 2001 #1
  83. Star Trek: The Early Voyages #7
  84. Superman: Space Age #s 2-3
  85. DC Horror Presents: Sgt Rock vs. the Army of The Dead #s 1-6
  86. Nightwing # 101
  87. Danger Street #4
  88. Spider-Man: Lifeline #s 1-3
  89. Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods #1
  90. New Teen Titans (1980) #s 16-18
  91. Lazarus #1
  92. Punchline: The Gotham Game #s 2-5
  93. Shazam! Fury of the Gods: Shazamily Matters #1
  94. The Ultimates (2015) #s 1-7
  95. The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #s 30-44
  96. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #14
  97. Defenders Beyond #5
  98. All-Out Avengers #3
  99. The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #s 45-49
  100. The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #s 50-58, 500 (Series is renumbered)
  101. Captain Action #s 1-2
  102. Ultimates 2 #100
  103. Ultimate Fantastic Four #1
  104. Venom #7
  105. Venom #26
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Form and Content, Again

For the longest time, I was saddened that the mammoth Alec: The Years Have Pants omnibus didn’t include Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of The Artist in addition to all of his other autobiographical work; it’s not as if the book — which runs over 600 pages as-is — is too short without it, or that it wasn’t included out of a fit of pique that I disagreed with; I just felt as if there was a hole in the book left by it’s absence, even if there were complicated publishing deal reasons for it. (Short version: Campbell didn’t own it outright, as it was still under his First Second deal at the time The Years Have Pants was released.)

After having just finished an accidental re-read of Campbell’s autobio work, including The Fate of The Artist, though, I now feel that it’s a good thing it’s not in there. I don’t say that because I’ve changed my mind and now dislike the book; if anything, my empathy and understanding of what Campbell’s doing with his later period autobiographical material has only increased as I’ve gotten older and built a family unit around myself. Instead, I’m glad it’s not in there because The Fate of The Artist isn’t really an Alec strip in any appreciable form.

Even though Campbell dropped his pseudonym of Alec McGarry midway through the earlier After The Snooter, there’s a visual and textual language to the Alec stories that is all their own: they’re drawn in black and white, with a purposefully scratchy, unfinished line, and in a nine panel grid, with a wry, yet kind, omniscient narrator who is clearly Campbell, but sometimes pretending not to be, telling the story in captions that hover outside and above the images. As much as there’s a “feel” to the Alec work, there’s a look to it, as well.

The Fate of The Artist has none of that, by design; it’s a more removed investigation into Campbell’s life at the time and his obsessions and his relationships that is intended to be more clinical and removed, though no less wry — this is Campbell after all — and, importantly, it’s not necessarily a comic, per se. It switches between prose and comics, and fumetti, and fake-found-material, and more. It is, in the truest sense, a graphic novel… yet, at the same time, it’s very much separate from what Campbell did with the Alec material even if the subject matter is shared between them.

Re-reading all of this now, I realize that I failed to see the importance of the differing approaches and formats earlier, or credit the differing intents between projects. I was blinded by the completist impulse of, “but it’s by the same guy and about the same thing!” as opposed to, you know, actually paying attention to what was on the page in front of me. Alec: The Years Have Pants is, in fact, the complete Alec cycle, just as was intended, and remains as perfect a collection of comics as can be imagined. The Fate of The Artist is something else, and a wonderful something else, entirely.

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Cogno, Redux

Not unrelated to the recent thoughts I’ve had about art school friends and the work we were all producing back then, I’ve been toying with the idea of finally unpacking — literally — the scraps of work I produced during those ancient, halcyon days and putting it some of it up here.

I mean, I’ve been toying with it in a more relaxed, laid back manner for years at this point — I might even have teased doing it once or twice, for that matter — but there’s always been the problem of, to be blunt, my laziness when it comes to actually unpacking the various boxes it still exists in (well, what little of it still exists) and then scanning it all in or photographing it, or whatever would be necessary to making it all happen. It always sounds like a good idea in theory, and then the practical elements come in to spoil the party.

Yet, here I am again, thinking that this might be the year and this might be the time. I blame a couple of influences in this regard: re-reading Eddie Campbell’s Alec: How to Be an Artist, which excels in making self-mythologizing appealing — not to mention, attempting to create a quasi-accurate accounting for your own past in the process — but also re-reading an issue of Kevin Huizenga’s Or Else in which ended the series by advertising a number of future issues that would never happen.

That last one made me imagine writing new installments of the work I wrote and drew for the university newspaper when I was a student, as if I’d continued to do it across the past 27 years or however long it’s actually been since I stopped. (I didn’t want to do it for the final year of my undergraduate program, so… since mid-1996, I guess…?) But in order to do that, I feel like I’d have to share some of the original pieces, so…?

Again, maybe this won’t happen, yet again. Maybe I’ll search all of this stuff out, take a look and then feel so embarrassed it stays locked in my budget version of the Disney Vault. Or, just maybe… maybe this is the year to put all that back out into the world after all. We’ll see.