Reviewing the

The older I get, the more I realize that my long-term memory is very keyed off of sense memory and instants, rather than any coherent narrative. I’m not sure if this is the way that things work for everyone else or if I’m the odd one out, but I remember a chain of events as if it’s something I’ve read or been told, even when they’ve happened to me — something that I shorthandedly think of as flattening events into a straight line — while I can remember absolutely everything about very specific, seemingly meaningless, instants or seconds that just nonetheless feel fully immersive as soon as I even nod in their general direction.

I was thinking about this lately as I prepped for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con. I offhandedly tried to remember what the weather was like the year before, so I could think about what clothes to pack, and instead of any coherent “well, on the Thursday of the show, it was like this” response, my brain immediately flashed back to running from the hotel to the convention center on the first day, trying not to think too much about the rain as I listened to “Reviewing the Situation” by Sandie Shaw.

I remembered crossing the roads, the precise path I took and the sense of, Well, this year’s show needs me to do X, Y, and Z as I did so, listing off that day’s to-dos to make sure that I didn’t forget anything important. (I did, but I remembered before it was too late.) I remembered the coffee shop I passed, thinking, maybe I should get something now while I have the chance and then convincing myself that I should be responsible and get it done after my first work for the day. (A bad decision; work took over and suddenly it was lunchtime and I was starving.)

I remembered everything with such clarity and detail, even though it was this minor moment on the way to a show. But when I try to think, well, what happened on the Thursday of the show last year, it’s as if I’m reciting a list to myself instead of anything so detailed. I can’t work out if this is a gift, a curse, or simply the way everyone’s memory works… and if I think about it too much, I just end up derailed on another odd sense memory from years ago…

Sweat Out That Angry Bits of Life

“I remember thinking murder in the car.”

For all manner of reasons, I’ve been revisiting a bunch of music from the late 1990s recently, and have zeroed in especially on Blur’s self-titled album from 1997. That was a big year for me, in terms of what I was listening to: the trinity of Super Furry Animals’ Radiator, Primal Scream’s Vanishing Point, and David Holmes’ Let’s Get Killed took me outside of my indie kid/Britpop era and into more interesting areas thanks to my curiosity in hunting down the originators for all three of those albums, each of which wore different (but overlapping) influences on their sleeve. Without those three, my self-mythology goes, I doubt I’d be so eager to find new sounds even today, and to be willing to give almost anything a listen for a few go-rounds before deciding if I’m into it or not.

Looking back now, though, I’m probably shortchanging Blur in that version of the story. Of course, I loved that album — it’s still my favorite Blur album, I think, even now — and I remember getting a copy of it early through a record mart or something similar, someone selling a pre-release review copy for a tenner and me going “I loved ‘Beetlebum,’ and I think Blur’s a great band,” because I was 22 and it was the start of ’97 and of course I did. What I wasn’t ready for was what the album sounded like, all the sonic gruffness and stutters and self-conscious attempts to do something different from the pristine, over-worked Britpop glory of The Great Escape.

It’s still very much a pop album, but one that pulls from a different lineage of pop music than what the band had previously stolen from, even if the hooks remained admirably intact. It was those hooks that brought me into the obsessive re-listens immediately (“Song 2”! “Movin’ On”! “I’m Just A Killer For Your Love,” with that bassline!), but within days, it was the more awkward stuff that I found myself playing over and over again.

For weeks after, I’d find myself walking through Aberdeen streets at night on the way home from being out with friends, or visiting folk, or whatever, listening to “Essex Dogs” on repeat — the sound of this 6+ minute spoken word track with grumbling, discordant guitars squealing as backing feeling just right for the headspace I was in at the time; I was transfixed by the possibilities the song suggested not just as music, but as storytelling and narrative. It felt like there was something more out there to find, if I knew where to look.

I got distracted by other bands, other sounds, other things happening in life before I really had the chance to look; it would be years before I started listening to things like the Last Poets, Gil-Scott Heron, or even John Cooper Clarke. But I can see a through line there that I hadn’t before, stretching back to Blur. Maybe I should give that album more credit, in retrospect.

I Hope, If Nothing More

Occasionally, I think about how unlikely my life has been; about the fact that my job — writing about pop culture, but especially nerd culture, for the internet — didn’t really exist even when I moved to the United States two decades ago — and about the fact that I did move to the United States two decades ago. For that matter, thinking about the fact that, somehow, I ended up working, if not in then at least tangentally connected to the industry that I always wanted to as a kid. How did all of that happen?

When I ask that question, I tend to answer it by thinking that it all started when I went to art school, lo those many decades ago. I’ve said multiple times that the most valuable thing about that whole experience, all five years of it (there was a Masters degree in there, too; if we’re adding in the time I spent teaching at the school as well, we’re up to seven years), wasn’t the official lessons, such as they were, because those were ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things — I studied graphic design just as digital tools were being introduced, so the majority of the practices I was taught were no longer industry standard by the time I graduated.

Instead, what I came away with of value was the fact that I had five years of just… possibility. Of being around people not only being creative in their own practices, but encouraging others to be the same way; of being tasked with doing new things on a regular basis, even if I was neither good at, or fond of, the majority of them; of having a feeling that I could try new things and fail at them, and that was part of the process as opposed to a bad thing. Looking back at it now, I see the whole thing as an extended lesson in the “Yes, And” theory of improvisation; a chance to just be comfortably uncomfortable for an extended period of time.

All of this was brought to mind the other week, reading Peter Capaldi talk about how the opportunity for poor people to have this experience has basically disappeared because of government cuts in the UK, and realizing how lucky I was to be born when I was, how lucky I was to have that chance. My life has been impossibly fortunate, when I stop and think about it. It’s good to appreciate that, every now and then.

Holiday Mood

When I was a kid and thought that I wanted to work in comics — basically, my entire teenage years, if I’m honest — I found myself utterly fascinated with the idea of newspaper comics. I’m not entirely sure why that was the case; there really wasn’t much of a tradition of newspaper strips in the UK by the time I was a teenager, beyond the obvious American imports, but over and over, I imagined scenarios where I’d be responsible for writing and drawing a newspaper strip on a regular basis. (To the point where I almost submitted a package to my local paper, surreally; the ego I must have had to even consider that!)

I mention this because one of my fascinations with the newspaper comic idea was a very particular part of that: the Christmas supplement. Again, looking back, I have no idea where this came from, as I’m not sure it was a thing at the time I was growing up, but I was obsessed with the possibility of a pull-out section where I’d have multiple pages to just play with for the holidays and do whatever I wanted with, for an audience, as long as it was appropriately festive.

Cut to my third year in art school. By this point, I’d been doing something akin to newspaper comics for the student newspaper for a year or so with my then-best friend, Andy Barnett; we’d kind of fallen into it and been successful with it, much to our surprise. By the holiday season of that third year, though, we’d fallen out of favor with the new editor of the paper, and had resigned ourselves to maybe focusing on our studies instead.

And then, we found out that the editor had quit, and that the old editor was panicking to try and get the holiday issue out in time. A call came in: could Andy and I possibly fill up, say, eight issues of the issue by ourselves? We were on the way out, obviously, but if we could hit this deadline, it would really help everyone out…

I knew immediately what we needed to do, and thankfully Andy agreed. And that was how, in my early 20s, I got to fulfill a teenage dream I’d long since forgotten: a Christmas supplement of our own to play with. Think of it as a Christmas miracle with admittedly low stakes, but a miracle nonetheless. ‘Tis the season.

They May Not Mean To, But They Do

For whatever reason, I didn’t really take photos of my wandering around Glasgow on Monday morning, as I had done with Gourock and Greenock the couple of days prior; maybe because it wasn’t so early, and therefore more busy? Or that I’d had to take a train to arrive there, and therefore it felt more like a destination than a dérive? (In that there were things that I wanted to do in the city, as opposed to wandering for the sake of wandering as had been the case the two days prior, it was more of a destination, I suppose…)

Nonetheless, I found a similar sense of disorientation in Glasgow as had met me in the last two towns, despite having been there just a few months prior. (We made it there in April, and even got to walk around the west end a little; today’s wandering was far longer, and more widespread.) I walked in the directions that felt like muscle memory, only to discover locations had closed, moved, or in one case, the entire building just didn’t at all anymore. Instead, there was a passageway into an external courtyard that wasn’t there the last time I’d looked.

Even places that did still exist were different, in surprising ways: Had that building always been that color? Was that road always closed off to traffic coming in that direction? What is the “high level” of the train station, when it seems like ground level to me? And so on.

There’s been so much that I’ve enjoyed and appreciated about the Scotland stay this time around — not least of which, I stepped away from work for four days, which I very, very much needed — but perhaps my takeaway from the whole thing is that very clear sense of You can’t go home again, because so much has changed. Which only makes sense — it’s been 15 years or so since I’ve been to most of these places, and that’s a long time — but, at the same time, it underscores the ways in which I don’t belong here anymore. (If I ever did…)

He Leaves An Awful Hole, Doesn’t He?

Wandering through my hometown for the first time in more than a decade was an emotional, disorienting experience. I found myself surprised by just how beautiful it was, and in ways that I’d either taken for granted or else never even noticed when I lived there: how open the skies felt (smaller buildings, for the most part), how close I was to the river and the beautiful mountains just across the water. This was all background noise when I was growing up, of course, but after decades of city living — and I love living in cities, I should add — I found myself surprised and touched by what I was seeing.

Similarly, I got genuinely emotional seeing the house I grew up in again; I’d prepared for this back in April but didn’t manage to make it on that trip, so I’m not quite sure I expected the actual, audible gasp that I made on seeing the house again, and the flood of feelings and memories and thoughts that came with it. (They’d painted the storm door! It’s white now, as opposed to black, which just felt odd. And there’s a side stairwell because the one house has been split into two apartments, but otherwise… it’s where I spent almost 20 years of my life. It held power, and I wasn’t ready, really.)

Perhaps the strangest thing, though, was going downtown again. Downtown Greenock was never a happening spot for hepcats, but I had my internal geography based on particular memories, particular locations… and they’re almost entirely gone now. That’s probably to be expected, given that it was almost 20 years between visits… but at the same time, they’re gone and replaced by vape shops, or a multitude of To Let signs. There was a block where every second storefront was a bookmakers (that’s a betting shop, not somewhere that makes books, for those who don’t know); what I knew as a bank had been replaced by a funeral services planner. It all reminded me of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on what until I saw what had been a big grocery store when I was a teenager had become a food bank that it struck me: it was as if Bedford Falls had become Pottersville. Clarence, what am I supposed to do…?

I had walked into town in a sad, lonely melancholy mood — this was Day 11 of the trip, after all, and even though I was visiting family, I missed my family back home, and I missed home, too — but there was something about this dérive that recharged me and made me feel more grounded both in where I’d come from, but also where I am these days in life, too. I couldn’t even begin to explain why, but it was true, and I was grateful for it.

Slowly Downward and Other Stories

Upon discovering that Stanley Donwood — designer of Radiohead’s sleeve art since… OK Computer, I think? Maybe he did some stuff on The Bends before that, but I don’t think so — has a book out that’s a retrospective of his work with commentary and unseen concept and development art, I’ve been thinking a fair amount about books, and art books in particular.

(That I can remember his name without really trying is one of those weird memory things, for me; I can’t remember the full name of people who I actually know and are important to me, and yet the fucking guy who does Radiohead’s artwork, him, I can recall with no trouble.)

When I was in art school — fuck, a quarter century and some more years ago, now — I was increasingly drawn to the idea of the art book as a statement in and of itself. Lacking a course called Maybe You Want To Make Comics Or Something Who Knows, I specialized in graphic design (Visual Design, I think the course was officially called) for the majority of my time there, but it was never posters or covers that I felt truly excited by; I liked the idea of doing something across an extended space, and building a relationship with the viewer beyond one single image. It was probably my background in comic fandom that was behind this, but it’s no surprise that I ended up some very enamored with the idea of books as an artform in and of themselves.

We had a reasonably good library in the art school at the time, and Aberdeen had a similarly reasonable — in retrospect, probably only okay, but it worked for me at the time — public library, so I’d obsessively look through art books and catalogues and limited edition portfolios and the like. It was the ’90s, so there were collections and anthologies of design houses, too that I kept returning to: ones from Tomato or David Carson or whoever. All of these books would feel filled with potential and inspiration in a way I wasn’t finding elsewhere: this, I thought to myself, is what I want to be doing with my work.

The final year of my BA (Hons) course, I was making small-run zines. My post-graduate degree, I made a very-limited edition (only five!) hardcover book. All of these were imperfect examples of an idea I was just stumbling towards, messily and embarrassingly in retrospect. Looking back, though, the entire reason I started writing properly in the way that got me where I am now, is because of all of this. The words were an excuse that became the main reason in the end.

A Passing Thought

I’m struggling with an idea that popped into my head a few weeks back, when thinking about work stuff. Namely: did the comic industry secretly peak in the late 1980s and we didn’t notice?

There are, of course, any number of things to truly appreciate about the comics industry today that didn’t exist back then — things like webcomics, the success and scale of the manga audience and how disconnected it is from what used to be called the “mainstream” of superhero comics, crowdfunding and how creates an opportunity for work that wouldn’t otherwise be funded — and I don’t mean to discount those things fully, nor ignore the shift in publishing opportunities provided by the bookstore market. And yet…

And yet, I think about the number of independent publishers of the late ‘80s that just don’t exist anymore; I think about a breadth of subject matter that I feel isn’t really published inside the “official” publishing industry for the most part, and how the bigger publishers were ultimately more willing to experiment on a regular basis in a way that they just don’t anymore. It’s not just that no-one could really imagine DC publishing Angel Love today, it’s that there’s nothing at Marvel even approaching the attitude of Epic, no Harrier Comics or Eclipse or anything even close to it.

All of this was in my head as I saw someone on BlueSky complaining that, without that 1990s mainstay Wizard Magazine, there’s no central hub of fandom to pull readers to more obscure works, and I got to thinking, remember when there was Speakeasy magazine, or The Comics Journal covered everything and believed that readers would be as curious about Don Rosa as they were Steve Gerber?

I’m romanticizing the past, of course, ignoring the patience for mediocrity and homogeneous creative talent for the most part in doing so, but… there’s something in there that sticks around in my head as if it’s some secret truth. Did comics have their heyday decades ago, and it’s taken me this long to notice?

I’ve Been on Tenterhooks, Ending in Dirty Looks

In the 1990s, I was astonishingly, fearlessly sincere in my writing. I was fueled by things like Jonathan Carroll novels, Neil Gaiman comics, Alex Chilton’s Big Star lyrics, but more of all, youth: I felt the heartfelt need to be heartfelt as I stumbled into writing. This wasn’t true of everything I was writing — the stuff I wrote for the university newsletter was, thankfully, not impassioned and emotional, because I don’t think anyone would have wanted that — but if I was writing something “for me,” which is to say, for art school purposes or worse, gulp, a diary or something similar, there was this pained need to be understood right there at the center of it all.

In the early 2000s, I shifted into a knowing artifice that almost mocked the idea of sincerity or wearing my heart on my sleeve. It coincided with my starting writing for the internet, although I don’t think that’s why it happened. (I hope not, at least.) There’s a line in Grant Morrison’s Supergods where they make a reference to writing in an approximation of Alan Moore’s middle class English voice in order to become more palatable to a mainstream audience, and I remember reading that and chuckling to myself; unknowingly, I was writing in an approximation of Morrison’s Invisibles letter columns and knowing patter from interviews and text pieces at that time. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut puts it.

(Of course, Moore’s authorial voice that Morrison’s referring to is, itself, rooted elsewhere: there’s no small influence from Douglas Adams in there, as well as other English humorists of the mid-20th century. It’s mirrors, all the way down…)

I can remember, with surprising clarity, sitting on a bus headed to work one day in… 2006? 2007? and thinking about the voice in which I wrote at the time, feeling the pressure of the assumed irony and humor on my shoulders at the time. What if I could just write the emotional, vulnerable way I used to? I asked myself, and quickly put aside the idea as impossible: it would be too risky to be so open, I remember reasoning, and also, who really wants to read someone writing like that these days?

My current writing “voice,” such as it is came from… I don’t know… age…? Necessity? I like to think it’s more honest, a truer reflection of who I actually am these days. But then, one thing about this site is, I write this for me. It’s that rare thing where the cliche is true: if anyone’s actually reading this, I’m both surprised and honored. Welcome to the inside of my head.

The Nominees Aren’t

In large part because there’s been such a kerfuffle about the nominations in the weeks since they were announced this year, I find myself still thinking about this year’s Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards and the names nominated. Or, more particularly, the fact that my site wasn’t nominated.

On the one hand, I didn’t really expect us to be nominated, for a handful of reasons that go beyond my traditional self-consciousness. (I almost wrote “humility,” but I think “self-consciousness” might be more accurate, if I’m honest with myself.) We’re a new site that hadn’t even been around for a month when the nominations were submitted, lots of people don’t know who we are or what we do, and bluntly, maybe a lot of people don’t like what we do, even if they are familiar with us. There’s all manner of reasons for us to be left off the list.

Yet, it did sting when we didn’t make it, I can’t deny it. Partially because of who did make it on there — yes, there’s a couple of names on there that provoked a “What, are you serious?” response on first read; no, I won’t say who they are publicly — but more because, this felt like the closest I’d ever come to feeling as if I was going to be close to a nomination.

I couldn’t tell you what broken part of me wants to be nominated so much; I know, objectively and intellectually, that it’s a crap shoot in a lot of ways — I was a judge a few years back, I know all the pitfalls of the process — but there’s still part of me that longs to be recognized in some manner in that way. It’s not as if it would change anything in any real way in my life; it’s simply this dumb bucket list thing, like writing for certain outlets I loved as a kid even if I don’t even necessarily believe in the, anymore.

Perhaps that’s the way to think about such things when I don’t get nominated every year: the hangover of nostalgia for when the Eisners really meant something to me. That said, I know that if I do ever get a nomination, all of that will fall away in the flush of success and a feeling that, somehow, I’ve finally made it, whatever “it” might mean at that very minute. Perhaps we never quite outgrow the need for someone to tell us that we’ve done a good job, deep down.