Category: Nostalgiaville

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?

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.

It strikes me that, back in Scotland at least, this is the time of year when the art schools hold their traditional final exhibit degree shows; even now, more than a quarter century after my own BA show, the thought makes me surprisingly anxious.

The degree show is exactly what it sounds like: the final show of the work you’ve been doing for the entire year, upon which you’re judged by the teachers, tutors, and whoever else is roped in on what grade your final degree is going to be. (For my school, it wasn’t only the exhibit that you were graded on; you could file supporting work as well. I did, and in the three hour window between getting my grade and the exhibit opening to the public, was told by tutors to put some of it in the actual exhibit, and remove some of the work originally in the exhibit because it wasn’t good enough. It was a lesson in self-editing, as well as a lesson in ego death.)

Even now, I can remember vividly how stressful preparing for the degree show was: the feeling that this one event would define the result of your last four years of life and work is a curiously masochistic experience, especially given the increasingly hands-off attitude displayed by art school staff in the final year leading up to it. More and more, you find yourself on your own as the final date moves closer, thinking to yourself, don’t fuck it up don’t fuck it up.

A year and change after my BA degree show, I was at it again with my MA degree show, the result of what had been at that point a sustained 12 months of work and self-directed exploration. The pressure on me for that show was, if anything, even greater for a number of reasons, but I remember feeling far less stressed about it, and far more convinced that I was doing the right thing, no matter what grade I got.

Somewhere out there as I type, there are likely kids like I was back then, feeling as if the weight of the world — and more importantly, their entire future — is on their shoulders as they prep their final exhibit. I hope they have more confidence than I did, and the perspective and self-belief that I didn’t get until my MA show.

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman has the idea of a dream library that’s filled with all the books people have never written, but thought about writing — the unwritten stories by celebrated authors and those who never got past the blank first page alike. It’s a wonderful, romantic idea: yes, all those small disappointments we harbor inside (because all of us, each and every single one of us, has at least one book they secretly wish they’d been able to write; I have many) are relieved just a little because there’s somewhere that those dreams are fulfilled, no pun intended.

What I want to see instead, though, is a sister library: one filled by the versions of books that we’ve read but misremember. Especially when, as I’ve been discovering on multiple occasions lately, the versions of the book that we remember end up being significantly more interesting than the actual books themselves.

As frustrating as this experience has been — these experiences? Does it count as a separate experience if the disappointment is the same, just on a different topic? — there’s something to be said for the realization that my initial suspicion, fueled by the curmudgeonly attitude of an old man, that books were simply better back in the day, or at least filled with more interesting and challenging material, especially when it came to culture writing turns out to be just plain wrong.

Maybe I was simply more impressionable and more easily impressed, or it could be that my memory has rushed to paper over earlier disappointments by making me believe I was reading better material in the first place. All I know is that certain books I remembered as being eyeopening and worth of a revisit have demonstrated that just the opposite was true. The age of the cynical curmudgeon is always now, it seems.

If you’re tuning in hoping to read about my trip to the UK, bad news; I’m writing entries ahead of time again, so you’ll have to wait… an indeterminate time, I guess…? (Just because I’m writing them ahead of time doesn’t mean they’re going to run in the order they were written; I’m not that linear, which is a fancy way of saying, “I’m bad at organization.”) That doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking about the trip, which is still a week away as I write, though. Specifically, I’m thinking about the prospect of going back to my childhood home for the first time in… what, 15 years or so?

To be clear, I’m not sure how much of my childhood home still exists, per se. My parents sold it when they were both alive, a handful of years after I’d moved to the US and my sisters had both moved out, and the last time I’ve even seen it — from a car as we drove past it, quickly — it looked as if the three-storey house had been split into two separate apartments with an external stairwell added to the side. It was a weird thing to see in passing, as if someone had drawn over a memory quickly and carelessly.

Since then, I’ve longed to go back and see what’s actually happened to the house. I’ve done the Google Earth thing, of course, but that’s not the same as actually being there. There’s something about the light of Scotland, a quality that feels different than the light in the US; I want to stand in front of the house in that light and… be there, whatever that actually means. I want to get as close as I can to the experience of going home that I felt every time I did it when I was in school.

If that’s even possible.

Watching Blur: No Distance Left To Run the other week, I had this unexpected moment at the very start of the movie that threw me off far more than I would have even imagined: a split-second shot of the Union Jack, flying in slow motion.

It’s something that only makes sense for the movie; Blur was, after all, one of the two leading lights of Britpop back in the day, so of course you have the British flag right there at the start, to set the scene. And yet: I had this really surprising reaction to it, almost viscerally.

I’m far from patriotic at the best of times, and when I even think of the idea of “patriotism,” British isn’t even something that I consider immediately; I think of being Scottish, and American, before I think of the idea of being British. (I suspect the “Scottish/British” thing is a whole subject in and of itself; I suspect there’s an entire contingent of Scots who don’t necessarily think of themselves as British, for whatever reason. Oh, the class and social systems and all their complications…)

The Union Jack was omnipresent in my twenties, because of Britpop. It was in posters, on single covers, on television, on clothes, on Noel Gallagher’s fucking guitar; it was the graphic that defined the age, somehow, at a time when the British Empire was the very opposite of a fond memory.

Is that why I had this instant revulsion to the flag when I saw it on the screen when I saw it? Was it some delayed rejection of the image of the age from my youth? Or some rejection of the very idea of patriotism for a county I don’t even necessarily believe in? I’ve thought about it a lot, and I still don’t have an answer. All I know is that, somehow, I’ve come to instinctively reject the idea of “Britishness” and look for something else, something more real. Modern life, perhaps, is still rubbish.

There was one night during my recent Seattle visit where I found myself wandering around, trying to find a pizza place where we’d eaten last year, during the previous Emerald City Comic Con; they’d done a really good potato pizza, of all things, and I wanted to have it again, given the way the rest of the day had gone to that point. (I found it, and it was good; it’s a place called Serious Pie, if you’re in the area and curious.)

The pizza isn’t what’s important, though; instead, what is was the realization as I was walking back to the hotel that I was somewhere I had been at some point in the past, but that I couldn’t quite remember when. I knew it was some time ago — I had been there with my ex-wife, I could remember, but beyond that, every single detail was completely hazy: Why were we there? When had we been there? What were we even doing in Seattle?

All of it was nowhere to be found; I just knew for a fact that, at some point, we had been there — I could remember just a flash of a moment, a mental image, of being inside the building I was walking past at that very moment. For a second, I was haunted by the ghost of myself from years earlier.

That idea stuck with me for awhile; that I was at the point in my life where I could lose the details of something like that. Earlier that day, I’d been talking to someone I work with who’s a good two decades younger than me, and we’d been discussing the idea of forgotten histories, that you’d done so much that you’d lost the details of your own life to a degree. I said something along the lines of, you’re too young for that, wait until you’re my age, not really thinking beyond the self-depreciation element of, “Oh, I’m old.” And yet, here I was, experiencing the very thing we’d been talking about.