Category: Uncategorized

I’m still thinking about The Last Black Man in San Francisco a few weeks after watching it for the first time. (Yes, it took me a long time; I’d repeatedly think about it, and then think to myself, maybe it’s going to be too heavy and depressing, I’m going to watch something lighter and save that for when I’m in the mood, and then talk myself out of it using that logic even in the times when I was in the mood. So it goes.)

What I keep thinking about isn’t the sense of… removed nostalgia, if that’s even a thing, that it evoked in me. I would recognize general locations or even specific doorways throughout the entire thing with a sense of, “I know where that is!” that was immediately followed by the feeling that I had been a different me when I was in the city, at a very different time in my life. It was as if I was experiencing someone else’s nostalgia and recollection entirely, at times. 

Instead, what’s staying with me is the feeling of the movie; a sense that I found myself reading as a mixture of wistfulness, frustration, and lack of direction — perhaps a better way to put it is, a sense of anticipation for something to happen. Throughout the whole movie, the two central characters, Jimmy and Mont, are simmering with tension and an impatience that I fully recognized and felt in my bones at roughly the same age as the characters themselves: an ache that there was something important and meaningful just out of their reach that they couldn’t quite understand or explain in any real detail.

Perhaps the wistfulness I detected in the movie isn’t really there, and instead came from me watching from the point of view I have today: for all that those feelings hurt and burned at the time, I find myself looking back envious at the energy it offered, and the hunger for experience and possibility that came from those days. 

The movie was beautiful, and meaningful in ways that I can’t verbalize just yet. Instead, I keep thinking about it, and wanting to unfold it further in my mind.

I am used to the idea of “con crash” — that period after a convention where, basically, your body decides that it’s time to stop and maybe have a little enforced rest for awhile; that’s almost certainly the case after the first convention of the year, when your body is in something approaching shock at having just gone through it all for the first time in awhile, or after a particularly heavy or busy convention. It’s not a bad thing, per se; it’s just this blip in health as if a breaker has been triggered and your body needs you to sit down for a bit.

Friends, whatever happened last week was con crash times a million. I’m not entirely sure what happened — I tested negative for COVID, although others I was around during Emerald City Comic Con weren’t so lucky — but I was basically knocked out for a week or so, as my body decided that it was time to just stop. I had the fever, I had the headache, I had the dizziness and the stuffiness of both the nose and the throat. I had it all, and I wasn’t the only one: not only were other people in this here house sick too (Because of me? I genuinely have no idea, in part because it didn’t feel as if I even had enough time to infect anyone before they got sick too), but so were other people in my work.

I’m still not 100% healthy, even as I write this. (On the same day that you’ll read it, unusually! Who says this isn’t the Mighty Marvel Age of breaking-into-prescheduled-posts-to-update-you-all-on-my-health-or-lack-thereof?) But I’m feeling slightly less insane, slightly less out of sorts and removed from reality after seven days of… well, just an entirely lost week, really. I feel as if I’m stumbling back into the harsh light of The Discourse, uncertain what’s been going on and tensing up to deal with whatever’s just around the corner.

Somehow, comic convention season is upon us again; as you’re reading this, I’m in Seattle for this year’s Emerald City Comic Con, which I’m working as part of the Popverse crew for the second year running. (I say year, but the last one was just August last year; it feels simultaneously far closer and further away than 12 months ago.)

It’s the start of at least four shows for this year: I’m doing ECCC, Star Wars Celebration, San Diego Comic-Con, and New York Comic Con as things currently stand, and there’s potentially more where that came from, depending on how things work out and what the Popverse editors have in mind for me. I’m at once excited and anxious about the prospects of a new con season, which feels like the most appropriate response: happy to see old friends and familiar faces that otherwise I wouldn’t get to see, and worried about the travel and potential for everything to go wrong that always comes with this kind of thing on every single trip. At least I’m starting with one that I can get to by train, so airports aren’t in my immediate future… he writes, a month before a transatlantic flight beckons.

For this show, I’m keeping myself busy: in addition to reporting, writing, and all of the traditional journalism business, I’m also moderating a couple of panels on the Friday afternoon (and one on Saturday, too) and also ideally attending a couple of things that are convention-adjacent that haven’t been around before. If there’s a theme to my work in 2023, it’s a quiet attempt to get better at what I do, and try some things that I don’t normally do, as well. (See also: appearing on video, which others really want me to do more of despite my natural unease.)

I’m writing this ahead of time, before I’m even in Seattle, so we’ll see how it all goes on the day(s), but: it’s a trip, no pun intended, to be back on the circuit again so quickly after it last happened. I already find myself wondering if it’s going to be as good as I hope.

And here we are, in a new month, which means it’s time for me to share another list of comics that I read last month. In terms of reading, it was perhaps more indicative of what my comic reading usually is, in that there’s a bunch in here I was reading or re-reading for work. (The Spider-Man and Kang-related comics, especially.) That I have a job that requires me to read comics remains a mystery and a joy, I have to admit.

Unlike last month, where I published the list before the end of the month, this is the up-to-the-minute, complete February list. This is it, unfortunately.

1. Time2 Omnibus
2. Fighting American (2017) #s 1-4
3. DC Power: A Celebration #1
4. Juggernaut (2021) #s 1-5
5. Golden Record
6. Night Fever
7. Judge Dredd from Jan & Feb 2023 issues of 2000 AD
8. After The Snooter 
9. A Very British Affair
10. Danger and Other Unknown Risks
11. DCeased War of the Undead Gods #6
12. The Flash #793
13. Icon vs. Hardware #1
14. The Fate of The Artist
15. Fragments (from Alec: The Years Have Pants)
16. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 121-122
17. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 31-33
18. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 50
19. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #s 96-98
20. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #s 4-7
21. Predator (2022) #4
22. Punisher (2022) #7
23. X-Men Red (2022) #8
24. Strange (2022) #s 2-7
25. Hulk (2021) #s 9-10
26. Gag! (2023)
27. The Years Have Pants (from Alec: The Years Have Pants)
28. The Human Target (2021) #12
29. Batman vs. Robin #5
30. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 41
31. Action Comics #1052
32. Secret Invasion (2022) #1
33. Justice Society of America (1992) #s 1-3
34. Miracleman #0
35. Hugo Tate (Collected edition)
36. Sacrament #s 1-5
37. Poison Ivy (2022) #s 1-9
38. Tim Drake: Robin #1
39. Hungry Ghost OGN 
40. Haunthology 
41. Black Cloak #1
42. Air #s 1-4
43. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #s 56-58
44. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #s 107-110
45. Ant-Man (2020) #s 1-5
46. Absolution #s 1-3
47. Night of The Living Deadline USA #s 1-8
48. Strange Days #1
49. Absolution #s 4-5
50. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 57-62
51. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 63-80
52. The Plain JANES
53. Black Cloak #2
54. Fantastic Four (2022) #1
55. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #13
56. Spider-Man (2022) #2
57. John Stewart: The Emerald Knight #1
58. Batman ‘89 #1
59. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 80-92
60. Avengers (1963) #s 267-269
61. Avengers Annual (1963) #21
62. Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #4
63. Multiversity: Harley Screws Up The DCU #1
64. G.I. Joe (Marvel) #s 93-99
65. Stargirl: The Lost Children #s 1-4
66. Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent #1
67. Superman: Space Age #1
68. The Flash #794
69. Micronauts Annual #1
70. Avengers Forever (1998) #s 1-6
71. Avengers Forever (1998) #s 7-12
72. Avengers (1998) #s 41-42
73. The Amazing Spider-Man #s 544-545
74. The Amazing Spider-Man # 638
75. Iron Man (2020) #24
76. Gold Goblin #1
77. Thunderbolts (2022) #4
78. Amazing Fantasy #15
79. Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1977) #131, 132
80. Web of Spider-Man #31
81. Avengers (1998) #s 41-45
82. Avengers Annual 2001 #1
83. Star Trek: The Early Voyages #7
84. Superman: Space Age #s 2-3
85. DC Horror Presents: Sgt Rock vs. the Army of The Dead #s 1-6
86. Nightwing # 101
87. Danger Street #4
88. Spider-Man: Lifeline #s 1-3
89. Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods #1
90. New Teen Titans (1980) #s 16-18
91. Lazarus #1
92. Punchline: The Gotham Game #s 2-5
93. Shazam! Fury of the Gods: Shazamily Matters #1
94. The Ultimates (2015) #s 1-7
95. The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #s 30-44
96. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #14
97. Defenders Beyond #5
98. All-Out Avengers #3
99. The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #s 45-49
100. The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #s 50-58, 500 (Series is renumbered)
101. Captain Action #s 1-2
102. Ultimates 2 #100
103. Ultimate Fantastic Four #1
104. Venom #7
105. Venom #26

I’ve started waking up close to 6am every day — just before, maybe ten or fifteen minutes or so — with a dull sense of consciousness nagging at me, preventing me from falling back asleep. There’s no other way to describe it; it’s a different flavor of waking up than mid-night awakening, when it’s easy to slip back under the metaphorical blanket of sleep without a care even after getting up to piss or whatever. At 6 or thereabouts, something in the back of my head whispers, you don’t really want to sleep again. I know you think you do, but I know better and you, my friend, are wrong.

And so, I lie there as the rest of my mind washes up on shore, systems slowly booting up for the rest of the day. I’d like to say that I’m being thoughtful and mindful during this entire time, but that’s not really the case; usually, my conscious mind is in a daze, still, stuttering and fluttering around trying to get started while I look out the window at the marvelous, terrifying silhouette of the overgrown tree directly outside against whatever kind of sky is happening that particular morning. I’m not thinking thinking, not yet; that happens later.

As all of this happens (slowly, it feeds like, although my perspective might be off in that regard), the rest of my body starts to check in: my belly, my bladder, my shoulders, the whole aching, aging shebang. I can tell how hard I slept from whether or not my ear hurts from pushing my head into the pillow all night when I was out, or if I was twisted around to the point where my back hurts. As I’m lying there, wondering what makes this my silent wake up call time each day, my body chimes in as if to say, hey, sleep wasn’t necessarily all it was cracked up to be either.

Sometimes, I stop to think about how easily I used to wake up, how instantaneously it appeared to happen. Othertimes, I marvel at the fact that we make it through the process every single day.

With Chloe having been traveling so often recently, I’ve taken to carrying my phone around with me in case she sends a message. It’s been a singularly strange experience for me, in part because the strangeness for me is something that’s so absolutely, resolutely normal for everyone else.

I don’t, usually, keep my phone with me. It’s not a habit I’ve had for some years now — going back at least a decade, if not more. The idea of carrying my phone around isn’t something that occurs to me without having a reason to do so: that I’m waiting for a message or a call, or that I’m listening to music (for years, my phone was basically a device for listening to music that could also do other things if it really had to, I guess far more than it was, you know, a an object to use to communicate with others), or that, I don’t know: I want to take photos of something for some particular reason. It’s not been something I’ve just had with me at all times; why would I want something like that?

So: the very act of carrying my phone around has in itself been unusual, and something that I’m very aware of, when it’s happening. I can feel its weight when it’s in my pocket; I can feel the impulse to just pick it out and start playing with it, killing time on it by scrolling through screens or asking it random questions, or something, anything, because it’s there and I feel like it has to be there for a purpose or else, what’s the point?

(I spend all day looking at the internet, asking random questions; one of the reasons I don’t carry my phone around with me otherwise is to exist away from the internet.)

The curious thing — as welcome as it is — is that it doesn’t feel any more natural, any less alien, to be carrying around my phone when it happens, not even after so many opportunities in the past few months. I feel as if something should be normalizing about it, but that’s not the case. Maybe I’m simply phonephobic in some way, destined to not want to have it around all the time. Maybe I’m just not a phone guy.

Yesterday evening, I accidentally found myself stepping into the perfect metaphor for the experience of this past week. It’s rare that life offers up such an encapsulating moment, such a perfect instant of As Above, So Below, but when it happened, I felt curiously grateful in addition to everything else going on in that moment.

It’s been, I should offer as context, a difficult week for me. Not for any one particular reason, and not for any reason that I’ll be sharing in depth here, because they’re really other people’s stories that I’m connected to in many cases, but the fact of the matter is, this has been a week where things just keep happening; a week where there’s barely been a moment to catch my breath without something requiring my attention, or my presence. There’s been a lot happening at work — of course, this was the week that DC announced movie plans, requiring quick news write-ups and subsequent analysis seemingly daily — but there’s also been a lot happening personally, or at least to those around me. No matter what is going on, and not all of it has been bad I hasten to add, there would be something immediately pushing into view right behind it, asking to be heard.

So, cut to yesterday evening, and my realization post-work that I really might have some downtime. Everything had been taken care of, everyone seemed good, and there was an hour or so before dinner. Great, I thought to myself, why don’t I take a shower and just try to relax? So, I do; I give myself that time to just take it easy and get clean, stopping myself from reacting even when I hear the dog running around and making noise outside the door. Someone else can deal with that, I tell myself, as much as my natural tendency has become to take everything on myself.

I finish my shower, taking my time doing so. I’m being selfish, slightly, but not too much; all told, it’s only been half an hour at most. Everything can take care of itself for that time, I tell myself as I open the bathroom door to leave the room, and immediately step into a pile of dog shit left right outside the door. Apparently, the dog wasn’t just running around while I was in there. Apparently, things couldn’t take care of themselves after all.

When I was a kid, January was always The Month After Christmas, an entire month I basically resented because it didn’t have the colored lights and the music and the Yuletide Glow. It was enough, then, for it simply to have the misfortune of following December for me to dismiss it almost entirely — almost, but my mum’s birthday was at the start of the month, which granted it the smallest of reprieves. January, I knew on some kind of instinctive, atomic level, just sucked.

I still believe that now, but my reasons to root against the month have grown in the intervening years.

Maybe it’s just my age, or a tendency to slip towards curmudgeonly thoughts across the past few years — is that also an age thing? Probably — but January increasingly feels like the most difficult month to get through every year. It’s the weather, of course: the cold, the rain, and this year especially, the wind, my God, the wind. It’s a month that doesn’t want you to leave the house, and then punishes you for even trying. January, especially January in Portland, is a month that asks you to put on your metaphorical (or maybe literal, who knows?) thermals and not take them off for weeks on end.

(Still, at least there’s been no snow, at least so far as of me writing this; we’ll see if that’s still the case by the time you read it.)

This year, I’ve also ended up becoming horribly aware of how dark the month is. Not just the overcast twilight of stormy days, but the lateness of the sunrise and how early the sun sets, each and every day. I know, in theory, that the days have been getting longer since the middle of December, but it doesn’t feel like that, just the opposite; I wake up and have no sense of internal time. Is it 5am or 7:30? Have I slept in, or not slept enough?

It’s the middle of the month as I write this, with as much of January left to go as is behind me. I find myself hoping it goes faster, easier. Surely there has to be some kind of shortcut to make it to February.

To say that 2023 has failed to start gently would be an understatement; the first week was a series of days that — while none of them were strong enough to deliver a final blow — certainly left me bruised and dazed, staggering across the metaphorical boxing ring as if waiting for the knockout punch. It’s been practical and emotional hardship around these here parts, as if the year started with the intent of proving a particular point that no-one had really wanted in the first place.

And then… then I realized that the second week of the year ended with a Friday the 13th. It’s like we’re being told something, but the something is especially shitty.

I always say that I’m not superstitious, and the truth of the matter is that if I stop for any matter of time and think about things, I’m not; I understand on an intellectual basis that there are either scientific rationales at play, or else that people are imagining things and/or reading into events in a manner that isn’t actually supported by the facts, and yet… I can’t deny it. I’m actually ridiculously, irrationally superstitious.

I mean, I know, I know, that there’s nothing special one way or the other about Friday the 13ths. They happen all the time, and they’re not any more lucky or unlucky than any other day on the calendar. I know this to be factually correct, I promise. It’s just that the very fact of there being a Friday the 13th this early in what’s already been a rougher-than-I’d-like year feels as if it’s asking for trouble on a cosmic level and I am simply not prepared for the inevitable outcome.

It’s not even as if I have a particular feeling about what this outcome would be, per se; I don’t have a particular, targeted worry about what today could bring, nor a specific concern that I’m dreading as a result of reaching this point on the calendar. I just… feel as if we should have somehow skipped today altogether, like buildings pretending they don’t have 13th floors. That could work, right? If we all agreed that no month had to have a 13th in it, and added a new day on at the end. Just to be safe.

The return to work last week wasn’t something I was looking forward to, as it looked closer and larger. Even if my holiday break had been surprisingly complicated  — a mix of the holidays themselves being more difficult than I could have expected and the feeling of not knowing what to do with so much time off for the first time in years — I wasn’t excited about the return to a traditional work week, with its 7am rises and the pressure of being constantly under deadline no matter how many stories I’d filed on any given day. I spent the last couple of days of the break dreading my first day back, having no idea it would be even worse.

In his defense, the dog didn’t intend to need an emergency trip to the vet; even ignoring the fact that animals aren’t really the type to plan such things in advance (and especially not Gus, who’s never shown any signs of being a particularly strategic thinker — or much of a thinker at all, really), the look he gave me when he was being carried into the back rooms to get his paw looked at made it clear how unhappy he was about the entire situation. Me too, little guy, me too.

He was there because, suddenly, his foot had been covered in blood and upon investigation, his claw had been torn. It was a shock to discover and an additional stress neither of us needed in that moment, but that’s what happened nonetheless. He was, ultimately, fine — by a day later, his biggest concern was that he didn’t want to take his medicine — but I spent the day worried about him, and also worried about needing to take time off work immediately after the break to take care of things. Oh, and also worried about completing the work I needed to do with less time to do it, and also the cost of the vet visit.

It was, to look for the silver lining, a lesson in appreciating the good stuff when you can, and that things could always be worse. If nothing else, the next day when I didn’t spend half of it traveling to and from the vet with a cold, sad dog in my arms almost felt like being back on vacation.