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All I Need Is A Break

If there’s one thing I didn’t expect from running my own comics journalism newsletter, now that I’m five weeks in, it’s just how much brain space it would take up on a regular basis.

When I was first considering the possibility, the math in my head was pretty simple: “What if I did roughly the equivalent of a couple of longform THR pieces a week? That would only take the same amount of time as it would to do a couple of THR pieces per week!” Oh, what a sweet and innocent child I was, on a number of fronts.

Firstly, there’s the work behind the scenes to make sure everything happens and happens on time, given the Wednesday and Friday schedule that I’ve set for myself. (Why those days? Because Wednesday is still New Comics Day for all publishers aside from DC, and because Friday is when the THR newsletter goes out, and it feels like a good place to send a “week round-up” mailing. I wish there was more thinking behind it than that.) Chasing up stories and sources and trying to make everything happen for those two days is more time consuming than I’d initially expected.

Also more time consuming: the formatting, editing (as much as I edit), and image work that I’d previously been lucky enough to have others handle while at THR or other sites. I should, in theory, put “promotion” here, but I really haven’t promoted the newsletter in any appreciable manner. I should fix that, I know.

Worst of all, each and every newsletter has run roughly twice the length of a long form THR piece — more, on the occasions where I’ve ended up rewriting at the last minute and essentially junking an entire draft, which has happened more than once. There’s no reason for this, other than my own head: I am my own worst enemy, for sure.

In terms of workload, it’s actually closer to the equivalent of writing a longform THR piece every day of the week, on top of whatever else I’m supposed to be handing in as a freelance project. And yet, despite all of this, it’s still one of the most thrilling things I’ve done professionally in a long time.

Like I said, I’m my own worst enemy.

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Do You Really Wanna Do You Really Wanna

After running out of episodes of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City to binge — the season is continuing, but we caught up and now find ourselves restricted to one episode a week like commoners — Chloe and I have moved on to our next television obsession: HBO Max’s Peacemaker.

It should come as little surprise to anyone who knows either of us that we both loved The Suicide Squad last year; nevertheless, I know that I went into Peacemaker with no small amount of nervousness. Sure, the character had been entertaining enough in the movie, but did I really want to watch him be at the center of a show for eight hours? Was there really enough there for the series to be anything other than a bunch of meathead jokes made to diminishing returns, over and over?

The answer for both questions, as anyone who’s seen the show is already aware, was a resounding “yes.” I’ve been consistently surprised by the heart the show has, and the way in which it wants to examine what’s going on underneath Peacemaker’s annoying, none-more-bro shield (as well as others, but predominantly its title character, understandably); I’ve also been impressed by the kindness shown by the series when it calls him out as a bully and asks us to have sympathy for the reasons he is a bully at the same time.

The empathy at the center of Peacemaker was, of course, one of my favorite things about The Suicide Squad, as well as something I really love about another HBO Max/DC show, Doom Patrol. I know that snarky one-liners and far, far too many character in one story are the in-thing for Marvel right now — which is to say, the actually popular superhero movies and TV shows — but, the more I think about it, the more I realize that what I want out of my superhero stories in 2022 is that feeling of empathy and kindness towards those that deserve it. Isn’t that superhuman enough for you all, dammit?

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Without Pictures

Entirely by accident, I seem to have fallen back into reading prose after a significant period where that wasn’t really true. I am, to be blunt, fucking thrilled about this.

Just as I can’t really explain why I stopped in the first place — two of the causes were that my brain wasn’t in the right place to have that kind of sustained concentration across however many nights it would take to complete a book, and the earliest days of COVID lockdown meant that the library was off-limits, but that feels like just the tip of an undefined iceberg, if I’m being honest — I couldn’t really tell you what made me go back or how it happened. And yet, here I am.

Without trying, I appear to have made it through a book a week for the first month of the year. They’re not all necessary good books — I read a 300+ page collection of essays on transmedia storytelling as research for something I’m doing for work, for example — and even the ones I enjoyed weren’t necessarily quality storytelling. I’m looking at you, Star Trek: The Next Generation Warped, which is essentially just a joke book making fun of ST:TNG for a few hundred pages. It is, however, a lot of fun for those of us who grew up on that show, and are perfectly aware of its many flaws. (It’s also written by the showrunner for the wonderful Star Trek: Lower Decks, if that acts as a recommendation to anyone.)

I defend myself by pointing out that I also completed the mammoth Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers, which is an almost 1,000-page long oral history of the cable channel filled with all kinds of interesting and occasionally amusing information about television across the last 50 years or so. Surely that counts as more than one book, given just how fucking long it is? Viewed through that lens, maybe I’ve been reading even more than I thought, allowing me to feel especially smug about myself for just this once. Look at me, reading prose and enjoying it like a big boy!

(The other books I didn’t mention but read were two critical books about comics, and specifically, Alan Moore-related topics: Poisoned Chalice, about the history of Marvelman and Miracleman, and The British Invasion, a fun analysis and comparison of the work and careers of Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman. What can I say? I’m a nerd.)