Author: Graeme McMillan

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Look On Up, Look On Up At The Bottom

It feels like tempting fate, especially considering the trash fire that is 2020, but there are moments recently that feel like things might just be getting a little… easier…?

That needs to be put in a greater context, I think; I’m well aware, all too aware, that the year continues to be a nightmare for most, if not all. Even without the continuing threat of COVID, there’s still the looming election and the many ways in which systems and norms are being deconstructed in front of our eyes by a President and party that will do anything to remain in power. There are still record numbers unemployed, and a recession unlike anything we’ve experienced in a century opening up right in front of us. There’s still massive inequality prompting protests against police brutality, systematic racism and more. All of that remains the case, in addition to whatever personal problems people might be experiencing on top of all of that — and, to be honest, almost everyone I know has experienced some kind of personal problem this year in addition to everything else. It’s been an especially, cartoonishly difficult year.

And yet, I still find myself thinking that things might be getting better.

I wish I could explain why; I wish I could find a logical argument for the feeling, a way to adequately describe the belief — sincere, even if it may be misguided — that we’ve somehow turned a corner and may be headed out of the quagmire. I can’t, though; it really is just a feeling that, through whatever magic or unlikely circumstance, things might — just might — be changing for the better, as unlikely and uncomfortable as that sounds after everything we’ve gone through.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome writ large, the result of a man so beaten by the year that even a brief respite from shit feels like a turnaround. Or it could be the fact that a small number of unusual, but positive, things have happened to me lately — small, tiny things, sure, but still — and they’ve turned my head around irresponsibly. Who can tell?

It’s an unusual, unexpected, feeling, this optimism. Maybe it is foolish and unrealistic. But it’s also a comfort, to feel this again after so long. I think I’ll stay foolish, just for a little bit.

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Station to Station

I have, I admit, surprising amounts of feelings about Bill and Ted Face the Music, the just-released third installment in the movie serial that seemed abandoned after 1991’s Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (AKA Bill and Ted Go to Hell, which was always the better title, but I get why the studio wanted them to change it).

It’s not just that I’m overwhelmed with happy nostalgia to see Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves back as these characters 29 years after they last played them, although that’s obviously a significant factor; I loved the first two movies, even though I remember them being little more than cult favorites in the U.K. at the time — the first one, I remember, was something I knew about in advance purely because it was advertised on the back of DC’s comic books for a couple months in the summer of 1989. I even adored the Marvel comic book series that spun out of Bogus Journey, which I’m pretty sure I discovered around the same time as I found Milk and Cheese, cementing my longterm love of Evan Dorkin’s work. To see a new Bill and Ted movie now, and for it not to be terrible — or, for that matter, just an exercise in nostalgia and nothing else — feels like a victory in and of itself.

But my feelings come from, really, the fact that Face the Music feels like a movie aimed at people my age, and a movie about getting over yourself — about allowing yourself to escape the story that you’ve told yourself about yourself since you were younger, and accepting who you actually have become, instead. It’s couched in dumb jokes and sci-fi conceits, sure, but from the very title of the movie — “Face the Music,” I mean, come on — to the fact that a solution to the movie’s problems only comes when Bill and Ted stop telling everyone, including themselves, “I can fix this!” and instead admit that they can’t, it’s a surprisingly touching movie about failing to live up to your potential and being okay with that.

Indeed, it’s a movie about realizing that failing to live up to your potential in one thing doesn’t mean that you haven’t done great things elsewhere in your life that are more worthy of celebration. (Bill and Ted raised Billie and Thea, after all, and they’re the ones who solved everything.)

Maybe I’m projecting, and none of this is actually in there; maybe these are all things that I’m reading into a silly movie that just wanted to get William Sadler back into Death make-up and came up with a convoluted way to make that happen. I don’t think I am, though. For all that Bill and Ted Face the Music is a movie about kindness and pure-heartedness and the need for people to come together as one — and it is all those things, too — it feels, more than anything, a movie for middle aged guys to accept that they’re middle aged and that that’s actually kind of a good thing, really.

As a 45-year-old man, why wouldn’t I have feelings about that?

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Is

It’s Jack Kirby’s 103rd birthday today — or, I guess, the 103rd anniversary of his birth, considering he died more than two decades ago, so “birthday” feels a bit off. To mark the occasion, and the fact that this week also saw the 50th anniversary of the release of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133, the first Fourth World comic, I sketched a quick Darkseid and posted it to Twitter.

This was, to say the least, unlike me; I share sketches very occasionally here, but never on Twitter, where people pay attention and my anxiety about sharing artwork gets the better of me. But it’s Kirby’s birthday, and I feel like he’s so much about creating things and being fearless about them, that it… felt appropriate…? So I did it, and lots of people liked it, and now I’m trying to get over my nerves and move on with my life.

I’m just adding it here, as much as anything, to have some kind of permanent record of it, because, you know what? I like this drawing, dammit.

(Here’s a very quickly colored version, although the colors took even less time than the drawing of it, which itself took… five minutes or less…?)

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Look Around Leaves Are Brown and the Sky Is a

I’ve been craving the fall a lot lately. (The season, not the band, as much as “Free Range” is a seemingly permanent musical addition to my internal playlist.)

Perhaps it’s simply a response to the oppressive heat this summer, which feels as if it’s topped 100 more often than usual even though I know objectively that’s not actually true — I’m pretty sure that I’m just feeling it more this year because there’s no air conditioning, just small fans and an aging body that doesn’t deal well with heat — or maybe it’s simply my body sensing that the change in seasons is just around the corner and wanting to head towards it, like a homing pigeon speeding up on the final stretch. I don’t know the reason, only that I’m thinking about the fall fondly more and more often lately.

It’s a feeling helped by the fact that I’m continuing to wake up before 6 these days, but the sunrise is getting later and later; there is a curious thrill to waking up before the sun, one that does make me more and more excited for the mornings when it won’t get light until after seven o’clock. There’s a nostalgic magic for me about those mornings, as I remember the brief period when I walked to the local train station to get to school each morning, catching the 7:19 train in the dark with my breath showing. Those, somehow, were the days.

But now, I crave the fall for all the things I remember it bringing. Not just cooler weather, not just darker mornings (and darker evenings! I am surprisingly, ridiculously, excited for nights to get darker earlier again), but everything, it seems. I want the sweaters, the hot chocolate in the evening. I want the trees turning red and brown and the crunch of leaves underfoot as they fall from the trees. I’m ready for the rain and the weather turning shitty in general. I’m Scottish; shitty weather feels natural to me.

Maybe that’s the key to it all. I’m not used to good weather, and too much of it makes me nervous. No wonder I want the summer to end, and for things to get  “worse.” It’s in my genes.