Category: Uncategorized

Part of my “Actually trying to be slightly more deliberate in what I do” approach to 2025 has included the new tradition of reading an issue of Fantastic Four every evening. Specifically, I made the decision to read through the entire Jack Kirby and Stan Lee run of the series — all 104 issues, and the attendant annuals (I think there’s four of them, somewhat fittingly) — an issue per day, no matter how much I might be into it and wanting to rush ahead and read more. I’m also revisiting a bunch of other comic runs that I like an issue per day as well; there’s something to this drip-feed revisit approach that really appeals to me, especially when it comes to going back over favorite comics from my past. It’s weirdly exciting and restorative, in ways that I struggle to understand, never mind put into words.

One of the things about the Fantastic Four issues in particular — and the early Thor stories from Journey Into Mystery, also by Lee and Kirby from basically the same time period, which I started reading as well — is how playful they are. I don’t just mean that in the sense of, “they hadn’t worked everything out and were willing to throw things against the wall and see what stuck,” although that’s always thrilling to see from today’s perspective, especially when it comes to what didn’t stick around.

What I mean is, these stories are often very intentionally silly in a way that feels almost sacrilegious when compared to the self-seriousness of superheroes in pop culture today, and in almost every single case, that silliness is utterly charming and winning to readers. It’s difficult not to enjoy the experience of people in what in the full flush of not just creativity but success, so secure in what they’re doing that they’ll take the piss out of themselves and poke holes in their own work just to see what happens next. The confidence, the swagger, on show in all of this would be infuriating if it wasn’t being punctured right in front of your eyes, so all you’re left with is low key awe at what you’re reading.

If there’s one thing I’d want to see more of in contemporary superhero comics, it’s that willingness — eagerness, even — to embrace silly ideas and notions and run with them, just to see where they lead.

Maybe it’s much too early in the year, but I thought I’d ask you just the same: how much thought do you give to intention in everything you do? I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the past few weeks, in large part because the holiday break gave me an opportunity to stop, take stock, and realize just how much of what I’d been doing what more reactive than fully intentional on my part.

What started me on this train of thought was thinking about certain processes and traditions in work that had essentially evolved by themselves without any of us really fully intending for them to happen — and, in the same frame of mind, noting that certain plans we had made had come to nothing because, again, things had happened that we hadn’t really intended that pulled our attention away at the wrong moment. But it’s not only a work thing; I’ve noticed it in other areas of my life, and even here: things I fell into doing without even noticing, and then after months going, “when did that become a thing?”

(If you don’t know what, I’m not going to show myself up and reveal all.)

Upon realizing this — and, bear in mind, I did so as the year started and thoughts of “resolutions” were in the air, as pointless as that tradition might ultimately be — I told myself that I would at least attempt to be more conscious of what I was doing, and have more actual decision-making going on inside before things happened. Of course, that’s one of those things where the theory and the reality are two drastically different things: as soon as I had to start interacting with the rest of the world, that theory was tested and a lot of purely reactive activity started back up because, turns out, other people have their own opinions, wants, and needs, it seems…?

What’s left, then, is the desire to do better and the hope that doing so will get easier with practice as the year goes forward. That, or I just forget about it entirely again by April or something.

During the holiday break, I read something online along the lines of, “If you feel like you need a break, take a break — don’t do anything at all, and let yourself actually relax without any kind of expectation on you whatsoever — and then take even more of a break, because if you feel like you need a break, chances are you need more of one than you believe.” It was the kind of self-help talk that made my head buzz with recognition, so I decided to heed the advice and proceeded, for the vast majority of 12 days to do as little as possible.

And that’s when I discovered that all of my workaholic tendencies have apparently come back in force.

Back in the day, I managed to hide all the worst workaholic feelings I had because I was a freelancer, and that comes with the Freelancer Hustle, so the impulse to always be working and always be productive could be disguised as, “If I stop for even a minute, then I’m losing income that I can’t afford to give up.” That particular lie — to myself, and others around me — allowed me to work myself into a hole with a defense of it being necessary and, in the grander scheme, maybe even good for me if I could get to a point where I was successful enough that I could relax.

That never happened, of course, but the joys of therapy and a significant change in life circumstances made me realize that I was working too hard and needed to pull back about six or so years ago, and I actually managed to do so for some time with no small amount of smugness: look at me, taking care of myself! And then, this recent break happened and the antsy-ness I felt while purposefully not doing anything let me know that maybe it’s not a habit I’ve entirely broken, after all…

I resisted the urge for pretty much the entire break, however — sometimes, some things really did need to be done — and I’m probably better for the experience, as much as I kind of hate to admit it. The trick for the next few months is working out how to force myself to relax on a regular basis, and not find reasons to work more than necessary in the hopes that I’m earning back time that future me will never claim.

It’s a surreal, disturbing thing to watch the wildfires in Los Angeles and know that people I know and love are caught up in all of that. I mean that in the literal sense; I know people who got the evacuation notice and had to get the fuck out of there, leaving me — who’s lucky in that I’m states away from any of this and in no danger whatsoever — in a heightened state of anxiety and concern for them and thinking, over and over, I can’t imagine going through that myself.

I’ve been astonishingly lucky in terms of natural disasters, in that I’ve never really had to go through one. I think the worst I’ve ever personally had to deal with has been… an earthquake or two in San Francisco when I lived there, maybe? There was a hurricane in my hometown when I was a kid that was terrifying because it sucked a window out of our attic, but (a) I might be misremembering, and (b) our house wasn’t in the best shape at any given moment, so maybe that wasn’t that serious of a feat after all. Kid memories are always notoriously untrustworthy.

I remember, too, the wildfire smoke in Portland from the past few summers, and the days when the sky was orange because of the pollution and debris in the air; how curiously, surreally dystopian and cinematic it felt, and entirely unrealistic at the same time. How could this be the actual real world I asked myself as I ventured outside, the oppressive heat and thick air feeling like something artificial, as if I was in some strange room that I’d be able to step outside of and breathe freely again.

It’ll be worse than that in LA right now; the photos I’ve seen look like special effects from disaster movies, and videos of burned out neighborhoods that just don’t exist anymore. Everything I see makes me realize again how lucky I’ve been, and how little I’ve had to experience. I really can’t imagine going through any of it myself, and I’m so sorry, and so fearful, for those who have to.

The joke used to be, of course, that people couldn’t get used to writing the correct year on their checks for weeks (or months!) after New Year. That’s gone the way of all things flesh because, well, who writes checks for anything anymore? (I still have some in my office, of course, in case of emergency or the utter collapse of the internet… but we’d never be so lucky for that latter one to happen any time soon.) The strange thing for me, however, is that somewhere in my brain, it’s been 2025 for weeks before the year has even officially started,

I’d love to blame this on being really, really organized and prepared for the year that’s coming, but it’s more likely an after-effect of having almost entirely lost track of time in the past few months. I know that I’m not the only person who, writing this mid-December, feels as if it’s actually somewhere back in late October or maybe early November at the latest; I’ve spoken to enough people in the last couple of weeks who seem as surprised that it’s actually the holiday season as I am to confirm my company on this particular crazy train. But I’ve also been spending more time than I’d like to admit thinking about what lies ahead in the next 12 months that, on countless work documents in the past week, I’ve described our current time frame as December 2025.

That’s not all; in referring to the past 12 months in emails to people or multiple work scenarios, I’ve talked about it as 2025, and asked people what their favorite things have been in 2025, prompting more than one “I don’t know yet, what are you actually asking?” in response. (If only I knew the answer to that question, friends…) Maybe “2025” just sounds better in my head than “2024.” Perhaps I just wanted to skip out of the year that saw me turn 50 all the sooner, thinking that 51 is somehow preferable for a mysterious, probably non-existent reason. Who can tell why my brain does anything it does, at this point?

This sense of disorientation is something that, I can only hope, will lessen across the next few months with no holidays, conventions, and very little travel planned. As strange as it may seem, the space between January and March is as close to a “quiet period” as I get these days, for all manner of reasons; a time when other people need to settle into their new year and find their feet. Some of us, it turns out, have been living here for awhile already.

Merry Christmas, whoever’s seeing this.

If there’s a literary tradition I am inordinately fond of, it’s the nom de plume. I love the idea of people working under fake names for whatever their reasons, and perhaps even more so, I love the idea that others can then discover the true identities behind the name through a small amount of detective work; the whole thing seems like a strange, sometimes sadly necessary, game that I find myself all too eager to play on any number of occasions.

(I have, to the best of my admittedly poor memory, only employed a fake name in work once — which is not the same as ghostwriting, which is something I’ve done a lot and, as I continue to work as an editor, find myself doing with no small amount of frequency. The fake name I did use was a matter of necessity, as I was under a non-compete contract at the time but also owed another outlet a story. Shhhh. Don’t tell.)

My admittedly ridiculous joy in the practice might stem from growing up reading 2000 AD as a kid, where there were issues where 4/5 of the stories were written by the same writing team, but using different names to disguise the seeming lack of available talent. Names which were familiar to the kid-who-was-me at the time — John Howard, T.B. Grover — were, in fact, not real people at all, a fact that utterly delighted me when I eventually found out, years later. I’d been a fan of no-one, this whole time!

I was thinking about this recently upon discovering that there’s an Elephant 6 band called Major Organ and The Adding Machine that… well, no-one actually seems to know for sure who it is. It feels like the pseudonym taken one stage further, somehow; a group identity that people can (and have!) made guesses about the truth, but which more than 25 years later, no-one really knows for sure. Imagine if the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper’s… but kept the act up the whole way through…

I have, on more than one occasion, promised myself that I’d start doing a webcomic under a fake name and just put it out there for people to randomly discover. Maybe that’s a project for 2025.

For someone who is both such a fan of the holidays in general — embarrassingly so, achingly so; it genuinely is probably my favorite time of the year — and specifically such a fan of the traditional holiday music that generally fills the airwaves at this time, I’m suitably embarrassed to admit that, the first time I heard Christmas songs on the radio this year, it came as a surprise.

In my defense, November was another beast of a month that left me feeling somewhat adrift in time. Even with the anchor of Thanksgiving — one that, for the first time in years, had actual guests, and from out of town at that, making it more of an event! — the entire month seemed to go by so quickly that I wasn’t entirely sure when I was the entire time. (Surely November had only just started, right? Wasn’t Hallowe’en just the week before? When was the election?) I was, bluntly, not prepared to hear the twinkle of the Beach Boys’ singing about Ol’ Saint Nick just yet.

I wonder, in some absent-minded, half-hearted manner, whether there’s something to be said for a pop cultural indoctrination or preparation; traditionally, Thanksgiving around these here parts means watching Miracle on 34th Street and putting my head into that Santa space, but this year that fell by the wayside because of the guests, so maybe I just wan’t properly prepared…

Here’s the thing, though; it wasn’t just that the songs were surprising, it’s that they felt so welcome when I heard them – at once familiar and oddly grounding, as if letting me know that I knew exactly where I was on the calendar and maybe a little bit emotionally, as well. In my defense, it wasn’t actually the Beach Boys that did that trick, but hearing “Linus and Lucy” from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special; hearing that piano hit me so strongly, in a good way, and put me in the mood I should have been in for a few days prior.

Chalk another one up for the magic of music, the holidays, or that very particular combination of the two, I guess. Next year, I’ll try to remember this ahead of time to get me where I’m supposed to be.

It’s rare that I have dreams that I remember, as I’ve noted before many times on this site. It’s even more rare that, when I do remember those dreams, they’re not somehow either inexplicably weird enough, or unsettling enough, that they stick with me. for whatever reason. The other day, though — the other night? Well, early morning, I guess — I had a dream that was just… nice. Pleasant. Positive, even. And for some reason, it stuck with me, and so here it is.

As with so many of my dreams, it’s the details I remember rather than the plot, per se. (Do dreams really have plots, or is that just pushing some kind of expectation of storytelling on them that they don’t deserve?) Everything was happening on a sunny fall day — I remember both the sun, and the chill in the air — even though I was inside, talking to people in a big room with massive windows from floor to ceiling. The room was part of an imaginary office, and I remember there was a lot of white furniture everywhere, including white shelving that extended across the window in part to dramatic effect.

I was in that office because, in the dream, I had been offered the job of editing a magazine. I’m not entirely clear on who was offering me that job or why, but there was some weird connection to the fact that James Gunn’s first Superman movie was about to come out and that was playing some factor into it. (Was it DC offering me a job? Who can tell at this point.) All I remember was, it was a job where I was being told I could do what I want with budget not an issue, literally a dream job, and I was sitting in this room thinking variations on, “I can’t believe my luck” and also “But I’m already editing Popverse, would I have to quit to do this? Is that something I’d want to do?”

Such thoughts weren’t anxiety inducing or bad, I should note; this was, again, a positive dream so it was far more, “Oh, what a great place to be in, what an opportunity” than anything else. The feeling throughout the entire experience was one of being fortunate, and of the potential available to offer people work as a result, and make a good thing that also helped other people in the process.

There’s no small amount of dark humor to be found in the fact that my dream was literally, “Imagine the publishing industry was so healthy to launch a new magazine that you got to be part of,” and also, “imagine the industry was so healthy good writers you know could get work,” but let’s overlook that for now. Let’s just bask in the memory of a nice dream. Good vibes only, as the frustrating saying goes.