Author: Graeme McMillan

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Givin’ It All He’s Got

Every now and then, the THR newsletter graphics feel like the bright spot of a particular week, because they’re something that I don’t have to necessarily spend a lot of time working on, or preparing for: I get my marching orders and I go do it. It’s a relief, it’s a break from the norm — and it’s something that, when I look back for these posts, I realize that I occasionally don’t even remember that some of them exist, despite timestamps showing that they do. The first graphic below? I guess I did that? Maybe?


This is an unfinished graphic for a story that ended up not coming together in time for the newsletter…

No joke; the headline rewrite on this might be my favorite pun that we’ve done in all of the newsletters to date, even though the actual story ended up not running at all…

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New New New

It’ll come as little surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to… all of this that concentration has been in shockingly short supply in 2020, with seemingly every single month apparently running down the international supply that little bit more. The simple act of just getting through the day when so much is constantly happening all the time, without becoming distracted by 20 different things at any given moment, feels like an achievement in and of itself, with the end result being that every single day feels exhausting on a level that we’d previously only managed to achieve in entire weeks in the olden days.

There was a point the other day where I wondered if that was just me, and if it was more to do with my increasing age — my half century is on the horizon now, shockingly — than anything else. Maybe everyone felt like this at 46, I wondered half-heartedly, before checking the news and discovering three separate things that would have made jaws drop just five years ago, all happening at the same time and snapping me back to reality.

It strikes me that, at least twice within the last four years, there’s been a mass movement of people reassuring each other that we’re living in a New Normal that was particularly stressful — unhealthily so, in fact — and that we should be kinder to ourselves and those around us if we happen to fall short on stated goals. And, of course, the second time — when COVID hit, and we all went into a lockdown that’s still happening, despite what some might believe — came before the end of the first, meaning that we’re just living in New Normal on top of New Normal. Does that mean it’s a third New Normal, or a New Normal Squared? I’ve lost track.

All of these thoughts come up, of course, on a day when it feels as if everyone’s struggling a little bit harder than they expected to get basic tasks done, myself included. I’ve started to wonder, is there a way to do this differently?

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Read Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me

Recently I’ve been thinking about the strange way in which I interacted with stories as a kid. When I was about, say, five through seven or eight years old, there were often small details of stories that I’d assign far too much importance to, to the point where they’d utterly change the message I’d take away from the story. It wasn’t that I would miss the point, per se, because I was a precocious enough kid to recognize what the writer was trying to say on multiple occasions — hold your applause, though; we’re talking about very simple stories because I was pretty young at the time — but, instead, I’d read a story and go, wait, but what about…? and completely stray away from whatever direction I was supposed to be headed.

To give a very specific example: there was a Battlestar Galactica comic strip that I’d return to regularly, in which Apollo had to save to save the day, and the water supply of the entire fleet, by fixing a pipe by tying his jacket around it to prevent leaks. The punchline to the story was something along the lines of, “Why so glum, Apollo? You just saved the lives of everyone in the fleet!” “Yeah, but that was my favorite jacket!” Cue the laugh track.

Except, to me, that was a tragic story. I couldn’t get past the fact that Apollo had lost his favorite jacket. I got that he’d saved everyone’s lives, so the jacket had been sacrificed for a good cause, but it was his favorite jacket, so surely losing that was really sad, right…? Why was everyone laughing on the page? Were they just being really insensitive to poor Apollo?

I had this response to all kinds of stories. I’d be completely derailed by an emotional consequence that literally no-one else seemed to notice, never mind care about, aside from me. I don’t know where it came from, and more importantly, I’m not entirely sure where it went — whether I just learned to not care because no-one else did, or something else — but, every now and then, I wonder what the reader I used to be would make of the stories I read nowadays.

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Start Spreading The News

Just as I missed San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, now it’s time to miss New York Comic Con, a show I’ve been attending since 2016, and one that I’ve come to appreciate not for the show itself — NYCC is a strange, ungainly beast that can be fun, but offers just as much chance of exhaustion with little to show for it — but for the trip to New York every year, at the point where fall is just starting and New York feels that little bit more magical as a result.

I mean, sure; sometimes the weather is just a wet, cold shitshow at this time of year and that’s not really any fun, but still — it’s still New York City! As much as I want to be cynical about the city, as much as I’ve come to disapprove of Times Square and its crowds, as much as I might want to grump or gripe about the place, I can’t. I love New York City for all the tourist-y reasons (well, not Times Square; that place really is a nightmare) and all the reasons that the city isn’t like anywhere else I’ve lived; I love the architecture, the oppressive wonder of the whole place. I love the pace of it, the feel of it. The exploration of it. It’s a city that I genuinely, wholeheartedly, adore.

(It’s a genuinely stupid thing, I know, but I remember walking past 30 Rockefeller Plaza on a nightly basis a couple of years ago; it was on my way from the Javits Center to my hotel, which was out in the middle of nowhere, it felt like. Every single night of my trip, I’d walk past it in the evening, and it was dark, and I’d feel just a little bit like I was living in the TV show of my life. There’s something magical about that, despite everything.)

And I’m not there this year.

The sadness about missing it crept up on me, unlike my feelings about missing San Diego. There, I was sad about not going for weeks in advance, whereas New York didn’t really occur to me until last week, when I realized I’m used to the travel and the eating at weird restaurants and the hustle and the noise and the everything at this time of year. It feels wrong not being there, but how many things this year haven’t felt wrong by this point?