The End of the Week
5 Old Rings
Current 20
All I Need Is A Break
If there’s one thing I didn’t expect from running my own comics journalism newsletter, now that I’m five weeks in, it’s just how much brain space it would take up on a regular basis.
When I was first considering the possibility, the math in my head was pretty simple: “What if I did roughly the equivalent of a couple of longform THR pieces a week? That would only take the same amount of time as it would to do a couple of THR pieces per week!” Oh, what a sweet and innocent child I was, on a number of fronts.
Firstly, there’s the work behind the scenes to make sure everything happens and happens on time, given the Wednesday and Friday schedule that I’ve set for myself. (Why those days? Because Wednesday is still New Comics Day for all publishers aside from DC, and because Friday is when the THR newsletter goes out, and it feels like a good place to send a “week round-up” mailing. I wish there was more thinking behind it than that.) Chasing up stories and sources and trying to make everything happen for those two days is more time consuming than I’d initially expected.
Also more time consuming: the formatting, editing (as much as I edit), and image work that I’d previously been lucky enough to have others handle while at THR or other sites. I should, in theory, put “promotion” here, but I really haven’t promoted the newsletter in any appreciable manner. I should fix that, I know.
Worst of all, each and every newsletter has run roughly twice the length of a long form THR piece — more, on the occasions where I’ve ended up rewriting at the last minute and essentially junking an entire draft, which has happened more than once. There’s no reason for this, other than my own head: I am my own worst enemy, for sure.
In terms of workload, it’s actually closer to the equivalent of writing a longform THR piece every day of the week, on top of whatever else I’m supposed to be handing in as a freelance project. And yet, despite all of this, it’s still one of the most thrilling things I’ve done professionally in a long time.
Like I said, I’m my own worst enemy.
Do You Really Wanna Do You Really Wanna
After running out of episodes of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City to binge — the season is continuing, but we caught up and now find ourselves restricted to one episode a week like commoners — Chloe and I have moved on to our next television obsession: HBO Max’s Peacemaker.
It should come as little surprise to anyone who knows either of us that we both loved The Suicide Squad last year; nevertheless, I know that I went into Peacemaker with no small amount of nervousness. Sure, the character had been entertaining enough in the movie, but did I really want to watch him be at the center of a show for eight hours? Was there really enough there for the series to be anything other than a bunch of meathead jokes made to diminishing returns, over and over?
The answer for both questions, as anyone who’s seen the show is already aware, was a resounding “yes.” I’ve been consistently surprised by the heart the show has, and the way in which it wants to examine what’s going on underneath Peacemaker’s annoying, none-more-bro shield (as well as others, but predominantly its title character, understandably); I’ve also been impressed by the kindness shown by the series when it calls him out as a bully and asks us to have sympathy for the reasons he is a bully at the same time.
The empathy at the center of Peacemaker was, of course, one of my favorite things about The Suicide Squad, as well as something I really love about another HBO Max/DC show, Doom Patrol. I know that snarky one-liners and far, far too many character in one story are the in-thing for Marvel right now — which is to say, the actually popular superhero movies and TV shows — but, the more I think about it, the more I realize that what I want out of my superhero stories in 2022 is that feeling of empathy and kindness towards those that deserve it. Isn’t that superhuman enough for you all, dammit?
Without Pictures
Entirely by accident, I seem to have fallen back into reading prose after a significant period where that wasn’t really true. I am, to be blunt, fucking thrilled about this.
Just as I can’t really explain why I stopped in the first place — two of the causes were that my brain wasn’t in the right place to have that kind of sustained concentration across however many nights it would take to complete a book, and the earliest days of COVID lockdown meant that the library was off-limits, but that feels like just the tip of an undefined iceberg, if I’m being honest — I couldn’t really tell you what made me go back or how it happened. And yet, here I am.
Without trying, I appear to have made it through a book a week for the first month of the year. They’re not all necessary good books — I read a 300+ page collection of essays on transmedia storytelling as research for something I’m doing for work, for example — and even the ones I enjoyed weren’t necessarily quality storytelling. I’m looking at you, Star Trek: The Next Generation Warped, which is essentially just a joke book making fun of ST:TNG for a few hundred pages. It is, however, a lot of fun for those of us who grew up on that show, and are perfectly aware of its many flaws. (It’s also written by the showrunner for the wonderful Star Trek: Lower Decks, if that acts as a recommendation to anyone.)
I defend myself by pointing out that I also completed the mammoth Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, which is an almost 1,000-page long oral history of the cable channel filled with all kinds of interesting and occasionally amusing information about television across the last 50 years or so. Surely that counts as more than one book, given just how fucking long it is? Viewed through that lens, maybe I’ve been reading even more than I thought, allowing me to feel especially smug about myself for just this once. Look at me, reading prose and enjoying it like a big boy!
(The other books I didn’t mention but read were two critical books about comics, and specifically, Alan Moore-related topics: Poisoned Chalice, about the history of Marvelman and Miracleman, and The British Invasion, a fun analysis and comparison of the work and careers of Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman. What can I say? I’m a nerd.)
Spilt Milk
I’ve been thinking a lot about housecleaning lately, not least because there’s a lot of cleaning that we need to take care of in this house. (January’s been a strange month, everyone; things have fallen behind, and I’m not afraid to admit it, even if I am somewhat ashamed.)
When I was a kid, I was almost the dictionary definition of “messy.” My bedroom was a disaster site roughly 99 percent of the time, with a floor near-permanently hidden underneath debris consisting of discarded toys, comics, scribbled-upon papers and anything else that had at one point slipped through my fingers. I was more than okay with it, though; I knew just how messy the room was, and also how frustrating it was for my mother, who’d perpetually complain about it before eventually just tidying it herself. I just didn’t particularly care.
Somewhere along the line, that changed; decades later, I find myself tidying and straightening up as a form of therapy, although actually putting it in those terms makes me feel self-conscious and a little bit ridiculous. Nonetheless, on days when my stress or anxiety are peaking, I’ve discovered that something as simple as doing the dishes or folding laundry can help me feel more relaxed and more human.
Similarly, the idea that the house needs some attention is something that I find almost… comforting…? That’s not the right way to put it, I know, and I’m sure that when it actually comes to the time to, you know, do the cleaning, I’ll find ways to grumble and complain, but still: I am almost looking forward to the idea of putting on some music and getting down to work with broom, dustpan, cleaning sprays and paper towels in metaphorical hand. The very thought makes me smile, as if it’s some kind of strange meditation I can look forward to, somehow.
The moral of this story, perhaps, is that someone needs to invent time travel so I can go back in time and clean up my own childhood messes, and enjoy doing so.
Whoops There Goes Another
One of the stranger things about the variety of media available to us in this, our digital era, is the ways in which you can find objects of utter nostalgia without meaning to. Simply scrolling through Netflix or HBO Max, or Spotify, or whatever, it’s all too easy to discover that movie or that song that meant so much to you at one point in your life and be flooded by the feelings that surrounding you at the time. It’s a strangely passive form of nostalgia-seeking, in that it’s not the same as going through old photographs or even record collections, yet the end result can be exactly identical.
I’m thinking of this because I was looking for something in DC Universe Infinite of all things — the digital comics subscription service for, unsurprisingly, DC comics — and came across an Aquaman cover from the mid-1990s, and found myself nearly overwhelmed with the memory of a comic shop where I’d bought that particular issue, despite not having thought about the place since… well, probably since I bought that issue, almost three decades ago. (On a related note, I am old. Three decades? Jesus.)
It’s a strange thing to remember, not least of all because it feels so very removed from my day-to-day existence today. I don’t just mean that in the sense of, I don’t buy many Peter David comics these days, but in the sense of… well, almost missing the feeling of being able to wander into stores and browse, if that makes sense. We’re approaching the two-year mark of COVID lockdown next month, and with the exception of a very limited number of non-grocery store trips, it’s not as if I’ve been into many (any) stores during that time.
There’s a whole process of discovery and love of ambiguity and not knowing exactly what I’m doing every time I step out the door that is entirely missing from my life these days, and it’s an absence that I feel on a deep level more and more. Accidentally stumbling into nostalgia via streaming services is a poor substitute, but at least it’s what’s available.
Blazing A New Trail
In an attempt to come down from the insanity of the past few weeks — none of which has been bad, per se, as much as simply overwhelming and seemingly relentless — Chloe and I have unfortunately fallen down a hole called “Binging The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
I’d like to blame our friend David Wolkin for this disaster, mostly because the very idea came up when he texted to suggest that we try it, claiming that just a few episodes in, “I’m convinced that our entire society needs to be rebuilt from scratch.” That kind of schadenfreude is difficult to resist for both of us, coming as we are from the guilty pleasure that is Below Deck, and so we succumbed before too long. (Not immediately, though; we binged HBO Max’s Finding Magic Mike first, finding it an unexpectedly wholesome, uplifting show. I genuinely recommend that one.)
It’s safe to say that, if you also like watching terrible people being terrible to each other in a way that can be genuinely shocking at times — how do people like this actually exist, and how can they talk to each other like that? — then The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is a must-see. It’s the only Real Housewives I’ve ever watched, but it feels like the only one I’d ever need, given the curious combination of horror and comedy almost very interaction provides in any given episode. Again, that this is at least some form of reality, feels almost impossible, given how tonally perfect the show manages to be in its analysis of embarrassment and awkwardness. Armando Ianucci only dreams he could have made this.
As with all televisual obsessions, however, it’s started seeping into my everyday in unexpected ways; the opening titles feature each of the housewives saying an introductory, ridiculous phrase. For one, she spend the entire first season saying, “Like my pioneer ancestors before me, I’m trying to blaze a new trail,” and now I can’t help but think like my pioneer ancestors before me ahead of any random sentence in my head, as if that somehow makes the sentence more meaningful. The unexpected thing is, it works. Like my pioneer ancestors before me, I suggest trying it for yourself.