Author: Graeme McMillan

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One Man’s Treasure, And Other Stories

One of the things about re-buying things I owned years ago is the realization that so many of them have become genuinely expensive, rare, and treasured items in the intervening decades. Across the past few months, there have been times when I’ve gotten the idea to try and track down one particular weird thing — an issue of a comic series, say, or one specific edition of one specific book — only to find it online and think to myself, sure, I want to have it again, but there’s no way I’m going to spend that much money on that piece of pop culture trash.

It’s the flip side of whatever nostalgia wave I’m surfing, I guess; the slow acceptance that these various totems that I’ve been collecting for God knows what reason (besides, I mean, just wanting to re-read or re-hear certain things; that’s certainly part of it, if far from all of it) have value to other people as well, and seemingly more value than I’m willing to agree to. I made the reference to how much a Green Lantern comic cost the other day, but it wasn’t really a joke as much as my sincere befuddlement at the idea that people are apparently paying that much money for that particular comic.

In many cases, these are things I intentionally or unintentionally devalued in the past; I think of my teenage bedroom, a mess of comics and books and cassettes and CDs on the floor, me treating none of it with the reverence of today’s collectors. Of course, at that time it wasn’t decades old, and still easily available; I was disposable trash culture. That might be the reason for my current confusion: this stuff remains disposable trash culture for me still, purely because I lived through it. I was there, man, or whatever.

It’s 2023; it’s, what, 33 years since They Might Be Giants released Flood…? If you go back 33 years from that, you hit 1957. Imagine how arcane, how prehistoric that era felt to you back in the day. Imagine being upset that people were selling 1957’s pop culture for collector prices.

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At Sea

I’ve started waking up close to 6am every day — just before, maybe ten or fifteen minutes or so — with a dull sense of consciousness nagging at me, preventing me from falling back asleep. There’s no other way to describe it; it’s a different flavor of waking up than mid-night awakening, when it’s easy to slip back under the metaphorical blanket of sleep without a care even after getting up to piss or whatever. At 6 or thereabouts, something in the back of my head whispers, you don’t really want to sleep again. I know you think you do, but I know better and you, my friend, are wrong.

And so, I lie there as the rest of my mind washes up on shore, systems slowly booting up for the rest of the day. I’d like to say that I’m being thoughtful and mindful during this entire time, but that’s not really the case; usually, my conscious mind is in a daze, still, stuttering and fluttering around trying to get started while I look out the window at the marvelous, terrifying silhouette of the overgrown tree directly outside against whatever kind of sky is happening that particular morning. I’m not thinking thinking, not yet; that happens later.

As all of this happens (slowly, it feeds like, although my perspective might be off in that regard), the rest of my body starts to check in: my belly, my bladder, my shoulders, the whole aching, aging shebang. I can tell how hard I slept from whether or not my ear hurts from pushing my head into the pillow all night when I was out, or if I was twisted around to the point where my back hurts. As I’m lying there, wondering what makes this my silent wake up call time each day, my body chimes in as if to say, hey, sleep wasn’t necessarily all it was cracked up to be either.

Sometimes, I stop to think about how easily I used to wake up, how instantaneously it appeared to happen. Othertimes, I marvel at the fact that we make it through the process every single day.

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Wherever I Lay My Phone

With Chloe having been traveling so often recently, I’ve taken to carrying my phone around with me in case she sends a message. It’s been a singularly strange experience for me, in part because the strangeness for me is something that’s so absolutely, resolutely normal for everyone else.

I don’t, usually, keep my phone with me. It’s not a habit I’ve had for some years now — going back at least a decade, if not more. The idea of carrying my phone around isn’t something that occurs to me without having a reason to do so: that I’m waiting for a message or a call, or that I’m listening to music (for years, my phone was basically a device for listening to music that could also do other things if it really had to, I guess far more than it was, you know, a an object to use to communicate with others), or that, I don’t know: I want to take photos of something for some particular reason. It’s not been something I’ve just had with me at all times; why would I want something like that?

So: the very act of carrying my phone around has in itself been unusual, and something that I’m very aware of, when it’s happening. I can feel its weight when it’s in my pocket; I can feel the impulse to just pick it out and start playing with it, killing time on it by scrolling through screens or asking it random questions, or something, anything, because it’s there and I feel like it has to be there for a purpose or else, what’s the point?

(I spend all day looking at the internet, asking random questions; one of the reasons I don’t carry my phone around with me otherwise is to exist away from the internet.)

The curious thing — as welcome as it is — is that it doesn’t feel any more natural, any less alien, to be carrying around my phone when it happens, not even after so many opportunities in the past few months. I feel as if something should be normalizing about it, but that’s not the case. Maybe I’m simply phonephobic in some way, destined to not want to have it around all the time. Maybe I’m just not a phone guy.

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Only A Fool Would Take The Chance To Stay The Same

I was thinking the other day about the fact that so many of the people I went to art school with 25 years ago are still producing work that is, if not the same as, then at least on a par with, what they were doing in their final degree show. I see friends post their work on social media and I recognize everything about it — not in a bad way, per se, but it’s very much of what they were doing way back when.

At first, when thinking about this, I had a moment of… jealousy, perhaps? A sense of, “Oh, they found their voice early on, and that’s never been true for me.” I think back to the work I was doing in art school, and all I can really remember is how derivative so much of it was; I can think of the bits I was lifting from Dave McKean, the bits I was lifting from Kent Williams, the bits I was lifting from whoever. (Really, I was pulling left, right, and center from the various comics I was reading at the time; I was shameless, but because my teachers weren’t familiar with the source material, they never called me on it, as much as they should have.)

I was swiping so much because I didn’t really know who I was or what I wanted to say; I think that’s why I felt this feeling of envy when looking at friends’ work decades later and seeing the through line from then till now. I have this moment of, I wish I’d had that certainty of who I was way back when, as if that would have changed everything for me in some cosmic, inexplicable manner.

Of course, as I said, that was my reaction when all of this first occurred to me, and I thought to myself, oh, I should write about this on the site. Then, today, I opened up this window and thought about it again, only to switch my opinions on it almost entirely. Imagine not really finding a new aesthetic, a new thing in all that time? I might not have known who I was when I was 23, but that’s probably been all for the good in the years since; if I had, would I have ended up where I am, with the career and friends and relationship I have?

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Don’t Bore Us, Get To The

I tweeted a variation on this the other week, but I’ve become increasingly depressed about the lack of comic outlets outside of comics these days.

The thought initially occurred while reading Alec: How to Be an Artist, which makes a point of showing how important a weekly strip in the music papers was to Eddie Campbell and his peers when trying to get started as creators in the UK in the 1980s. The same thing was true of Campbell’s collaborator-to-be, Alan Moore; without his strip in Sounds, the world would likely have never gotten his work in Warrior, which arguably led to everything he did in his career from the mid 1980s forwards.

Unless I’m entirely misremembering, Rian Hughes had a short stint in one of the music papers in the ’80s, too. Certainly, Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy had a weekly strip in a newspaper, as did the Pleece brothers (Warren and Gary, for those who remember the latter). The mere mention of comics in newspapers conjures up thoughts of Will Eisner and The Spirit, 80-odd years ago now when it started, another touchstone in my personal history of comics.

What all of these comics and creators had/have in common is that their work didn’t just reflect or try to fit into an existing idea of success, but instead strove to be both original and, perhaps even more importantly, entertaining to an audience outside of the mainstream. More than any pre-determined notion of craft or formal, practical skills in terms of writing or illustration, I feel that working on a regular basis outside of the comics industry creates an awareness of, and hunger for, what a broad audience is looking for outside of the Direct Market standard, or whatever it being promoted by bookstore buyers that particular season.

It exposed creators to a mass media audience, and asked them to make something that anyone would find enjoyable. In a way, it made comics — the medium, not the business — into pop, which is arguably something that more creators in today’s industry should go through. If only.

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Everything We Know And Less

For better or worse — spoilers, it’s worse — I’m still thinking of Infinity Pool days after seeing it. It’s not necessarily a movie that I was looking forward to, per se; I’m unfamiliar with Brandon Cronenberg’s work to date, but my quasi-crush on Mia Goth after the double-header of X and Pearl last year had me curious, and the trailer had enough in it that I was more than ready to head to the theater when it arrived, especially as it also meant a chance for a date with Chloe, who was far more into Cronenberg, Goth, and the trailer, as well as the movie itself.

Unfortunately, the movie turned out to be… hollow might be the best way to describe it. So many of the ingredients are there — it looks good, and the sound mixing and design and music are shockingly good, carrying multiple scenes all by themselves — but there’s nothing new or interesting being said by the movie, despite a palpable smugness to the contrary. It’s the cinematic equivalent to talking to someone so convinced not only if their moral superiority, but also that their intellectual superiority, even as they’re making the most boring and meaningless statements possible.

For example: did you know that rich people are monsters that dehumanize others? Did you know that, when people go on vacation, they do things that they never would in their everyday lives? Did you, though? There’s a science fiction gimmick at the heart of Infinity Pool that unlocks the potential for existential dread, but it’s only ever clumsily used, and never explored, as if the mere hint is somehow enough in and of itself; it’s not, and the lack of that exploration feels like a signifier of the movie’s disinterest in anything other than itself.

It’s not even that I disliked the movie; there’s not enough there even for that. Instead, I just… was disappointed by it, and saddened that, given the potential for anything that lived up to its own self-belief in its transgressive qualities, my main takeaway from the whole thing was my unhappiness at Mia Goth’s real accent finally being on display.

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But I’m Happy To Report

Yesterday evening, I accidentally found myself stepping into the perfect metaphor for the experience of this past week. It’s rare that life offers up such an encapsulating moment, such a perfect instant of As Above, So Below, but when it happened, I felt curiously grateful in addition to everything else going on in that moment.

It’s been, I should offer as context, a difficult week for me. Not for any one particular reason, and not for any reason that I’ll be sharing in depth here, because they’re really other people’s stories that I’m connected to in many cases, but the fact of the matter is, this has been a week where things just keep happening; a week where there’s barely been a moment to catch my breath without something requiring my attention, or my presence. There’s been a lot happening at work — of course, this was the week that DC announced movie plans, requiring quick news write-ups and subsequent analysis seemingly daily — but there’s also been a lot happening personally, or at least to those around me. No matter what is going on, and not all of it has been bad I hasten to add, there would be something immediately pushing into view right behind it, asking to be heard.

So, cut to yesterday evening, and my realization post-work that I really might have some downtime. Everything had been taken care of, everyone seemed good, and there was an hour or so before dinner. Great, I thought to myself, why don’t I take a shower and just try to relax? So, I do; I give myself that time to just take it easy and get clean, stopping myself from reacting even when I hear the dog running around and making noise outside the door. Someone else can deal with that, I tell myself, as much as my natural tendency has become to take everything on myself.

I finish my shower, taking my time doing so. I’m being selfish, slightly, but not too much; all told, it’s only been half an hour at most. Everything can take care of itself for that time, I tell myself as I open the bathroom door to leave the room, and immediately step into a pile of dog shit left right outside the door. Apparently, the dog wasn’t just running around while I was in there. Apparently, things couldn’t take care of themselves after all.

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I Thought They’d Never End

Over the past year or so, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the mainstream North American comic book industry peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That sounds like both hyperbole and curmudgeonly old man thinking, when put so bluntly, but the more I think about it and try to poke holes in it — think of the amazing comics available now or there wasn’t a robust book trade back then or whatever, both of which are valid points — the more I realize such arguments are beside the point. The mainstream North American comic book industry was in better shape 30-odd years ago than it is today.

On the face of it, that’s relatively obvious: both Marvel and DC were in dominant mode, in terms of both market share but also output: beyond their core superhero comics, both publishers had additional imprints or titles dedicated to promoting different material that just don’t exist at either publisher anymore; Marvel, always the more conservative company, had Epic Comics and the Marvel Graphic Novels line, which regularly featured creator owned new concepts from Marvel talent, while DC had the Berger books, Piranha Press, it’s own graphic novels line, and random, wonderful oddities like Wasteland or Angel Love or Outcasts.

There was also a far healthier indie scene than we have today, I’d argue, with publishers like First Comics and Eclipse Comics acting in a similar manner to today’s Image Comics but with less of a focus on potential media adaptation and more willingness to experiment and challenge its creators as well as readers. Companies like Dark Horse and Kitchen Sink Press were around to offer alternatives to superheroes in terms of action/adventure strips, and Fantagraphics, Last Gasp, and others (including, again, Kitchen Sink!) were there with more alternative, artcomix material, too.

And what’s more, what’s the thing I keep coming back to is, there wasn’t the naked, blunt focus on the bottom line — whether corporate parents or potential movie or TV deals — that feels omnipresent in today’s industry. Everyone had to stay profitable, of course, but there was still, almost across the board, a willingness — an eagerness — to play and occasionally make dumb decisions for good reasons that just feels absent in today’s market.

Like I said before; there’s probably some element of nostalgia present in all of this, and certainly there are audiences and demographics better served now than way back then. But creatively, I can’t help but feel that the North American comics mainstream was far better off in the good old days. Does this make me old, or just right…?

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The Comics of January 2023

I told you I was keeping a list, didn’t I? Well, here’s the comics I’ve read this month, as of yesterday morning as you read this. (A note on grouping: you’ll see things like “Saga #s 1-6” followed by “Saga #s 7-37” — that’s because I’ve read them in those blocks, with breaks in between. I’m literally keeping track as I finish issues, as I go.)

  1. Marshal Law: The Deluxe Edition (Marshal Law, Marshall Law: Crime and Punishment, Marshal Law: Kingdom of the Blind, Marshal Law: The Hateful Dead, Marshal Law: Super Babylon, Marshal Law: Secret Tribunal) 
  2. Avengers: Rage of Ultron GN
  3. Uncanny Avengers (2015-2017) #s 9-12
  4. Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #10
  5. Convergence #1, 8
  6. Defenders: Beyond #3
  7. Ant-Man (2022) #3
  8. Thunderbolts (2022) #2
  9. Hawkeye: Freefall #1-6
  10. Avengers #675-678
  11. Rogue Trooper: Tales of Nu-Earth Vol 2 
  12. Batman #131
  13. Avengers #679-690
  14. Avengers: No Road Home #1
  15. Uncanny Avengers (2015-2017) #s 26-30
  16. Nightwing #100
  17. Timeless (2022) #1
  18. Gotham City: Year One #4
  19. Green Lantern Corps #203
  20. Secret City Saga #s 0-4
  21. X-Men (2021) #s 13-15
  22. Immortal X-Men #s 5-6
  23. Cadillacs & Dinosaurs (Kitchen Sink collection)
  24. Doctor Who Magazine #s 584-586
  25. Lazarus Planet: Assault on Krypton #1
  26. Batman: One Bad Day – Catwoman #1
  27. Shuk & Doodle
  28. Ant-Man (2022) #4
  29. AXE: X-Men #1
  30. AXE: Starfox #1
  31. Spider-Man (2022) #1
  32. Human Target (2021) #11
  33. The Incredible Hulk #156
  34. X-Men Red (2022) #7
  35. Lazarus Planet: We Once Were Gods #1
  36. Lazarus Planet: Legends Reborn #1
  37. The New Champion of Shazam #4
  38. Action Comics #1051
  39. Justice Society of America (2022) #2
  40. All Star Comics #58-60
  41. Judge Dredd Megazine #451
  42. Best of 2000 AD #109 (Tyranny Rex)
  43. Saga #1-6
  44. The Spirit Casebook (Kitchen Sink collection)
  45. Saga #7-37
  46. Saga #38-60
  47. Justice League of America #96
  48. Amazing Spider-Man (2021) #11
  49. AXE: Eternals #1
  50. Immortal X-Men #7
  51. It’s Jeff #24
  52. Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds #s 1-5
  53. Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds #s 6-7
  54. Public Domain #s 1-5
  55. AXE: Death to the Mutants #3
  56. Namor: Conquered Shores #1
  57. The Seeds #s 1-4
  58. Silver Surfer (1987) #1
  59. Silver Surfer (1987) #s 2-3
  60. Lazarus Planet: Next Evolution #1
  61. Black Beth and the Devils of Al-Kadesh
  62. Alec: How to Be an Artist
  63. Superman (2023) #1
  64. Curses (Kevin Huizenga)
  65. Silver Surfer (1987) #s 4-14
  66. Silver Surfer Annual (1987) #1
  67. The Wild Kingdom (HC version)
  68. Or Else #5
  69. The Riverside Companion #1
  70. Iron Man (2020) #24
  71. Defenders Beyond #4
  72. Lazarus Planet: Dark Fate #1
  73. Lazarus Planet: Omega #1
  74. Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths #s 2, 5-7
  75. Teen Titans Academy #s 1, 15
  76. Silver Surfer (1987) #s 15-20
  77. Silver Surfer (1987) #s 21-31 (End of Englehart run)
  78. Tales of the Human Target #1
  79. Batman: One Bad Day – Bane #1
  80. Batman: One Bad Day – Mr. Freeze #1
  81. Detective Comics #s 1062-1068
  82. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #12
  83. Danger Street #3
  84. Superman: The Power Within (collected edition of Action Comics Weekly stories)
  85. World’s Finest (1990) #s 1-3
  86. Alec: Three Piece Suit
  87. Nightwing (2015) #85
  88. Daughters of the Dragon: Deadly Hands Special
  89. Howard the Duck Magazine #1
  90. Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #1
  91. Predator #3
  92. Alien (2022) #2
  93. Punisher (2022) #5-6