Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 215
Hello all! Let’s start with a quick ‘what I did over summer vacation’ and a plug for a talented friend. I just wrapped a tour of the US and it was among my favorite I’ve done. We were direct support to Drain, an act that has a lotta energy around it at the moment. The touring package was well put together and every night popped off.
And that is normally the whole of things for me. I don’t tend to revisit the recent past, and I only look at photographs of myself performing if my stepson is interested.
That said, I was very impressed with the quality of photo we got on this run. I found myself really engaged them. As if I was 23 again and deeply interested in myself. It’s funny how little interest you have in even ‘very cool’ photos of musicians after you’ve done it for years.
I give the credit to Dookie. He’s a school teacher from the Coachella Valley who put in the hours to become a truly great photographer. He’s also got the uncanny ability to be around strong personalities for weeks at a time. This is his second tour with us and he’ll be joining us in Japan in August.
I don’t know what purpose you might have for a photographer in Southern California but he’s your man.
Some comic material from me! Or, really, from Lorenzo! I just wanted to say I’m enjoying the hell outta this collaboration. The most rewarding thing in any partnership is the growth. Marco became better with every page we’ve done together and is now recognized as a real force. Lorenzo is likewise advancing! And these achievements have little to do with me, of course. But it’s nice to help someone get the pages under their belt.
Ok, what do we have for comic news? I was told by a couple friends the Twitter folk are coming for Mark Millar. His crime? He thinks RFK Jr is an exciting presidential candidate. Also, he listens to Joe Rogan.
If you’re here because you like comics and you don’t really get into the nutball bullshit, you’ll need to read that again.
A candidate polling at 21% would, if the models hold, have millions of supporters come primary time. Millions of voters. Joe Rogan is one of the most-listened media personalities in the western world. Millions of ears.
[There was also some shit about Millar being pro-Brexit. And this is approximately true, at one point. But he arrived there through the classical liberal (and Scottish) opposition to foreign rule. This was a very mainstream perspective until the Brexit movement was hijacked by the uglier side of nationalism. At which point the millions (there’s that word again) of EU skeptics on classical liberal grounds felt like there was no place in the conversation for them. Whatever your feelings on the matter, there is no honest lumping of Millar in with the xenophobes. Sorry. Sometimes people hold views you don’t agree with for reasons other than ‘evil.’]
I don’t presuppose that because someone or something is popular they are correct or even ‘good.’ But I do believe that popularity demands actual examination from critics. Handwaving simply will not do. And if you somehow arrive at “these people are evil” then you’ve subscribed to a level of opposition with the world that, I’m sorry, your lifestyle just doesn’t bear out. That is to say, if you think the majority of the people around you are moral monsters, it is incumbent upon you to properly war on them. Twitter is not enough. I’d like to witness the courage of your convictions. Firebomb your dads.
I’m gonna speak candidly. There’s tiers to comics, as all industries. You’ve got superstars, established pros, guys you’ve heard of but haven’t broken through, aspirants, and… The League of Losers.
The League of Losers sounds cold, right? I don’t even like typing it because but for the grace of God go I. We were all losers once, and life is a series of ups and downs with the downs occasionally making us losers again.
‘Loser’ is a rough judgement, but maybe some people need to hear it. Because what initiates you into the League of Losers isn’t your résumé, but your approach to life. When you find yourself railing against Mark Millar for ‘views’ shared by MILLIONS of people, you give up the game. You reveal there’s something in you that is malformed and maladaptive. You’re unhireable.
And, you know what? That’s fine, on its face. More of us need to be unhireable. We need to be difficult in clever ways and idiosyncratic in our thinking. We need to be less corporate and more independent.
But… there’s an offshoot of unhireable that isn’t so great. It’s the “goddamn, this guy is strident in his delusions” and the “fucker really has a vendetta against successful people, huh?” You get nothing with this. You arrive at poverty and burnout. And without the self-reflection needed to properly assign blame (on yourself), bitterness is inevitable.
To the losers reading this: the pros you aspire to be (or at least wish to usurp) talk this way about you. They call you losers. They think of you as a bloc to disregard. Yes, even the ‘ally’ pros who signal their approved politics and quietly shade the Millars of the world. When push comes to shove, they choose a working life unencumbered by barnacles and crabs. They don’t want any association with you. And if you read that and think “fuck them” well, ok, I guess. But maybe fuck you too, right? Maybe worry about yourself and work on yourself. Millar isn’t your enemy. You are.
Related: Twitter announced a few hours ago that they’ll be limiting the number of tweets you can read per day. Thank Jesus. Some of the brains out here need detox.
Other comic news, my it’s looking grim. CBR let go a buncha staff.
Now, I’ll be honest, the utility of comic news sites is limited in 2023. There’s very little in the way of reporting, and what could be counted as news is of the gossip variety.
Additionally, there’s an explicitly partisan thing happening that just does not work. For example, you’ll hear moans from the IndieGoGo set that Heidi McDonald at The Beat does not acknowledge them. Some of them do real money on the platform, so her failure to cover it is an obvious concession to the Team Comics faction that believes IndieGoGo is for Nazis. But that doesn’t actually work, because Team Comics people don’t want to NOT read about these things. They want news that reinforces their existing beliefs. So by pretending something doesn’t exist, you actually alienate the people who hate it.
And on the other side of that aisle, you’ve got the reactionary sites that are NOTHING BUT belief-reinforcing half-news. If you’ve ever been to one of those pages, you’ll find pie-in-the-sky fan hopes reported as imminent fact. These are the “DC Comics to be sold this week” outlets that feel more like doomsayers than news sites. This doesn’t work because you have to be correct, at least sporadically.
On the smarty-art-guy end of comics, we’ve got exactly one online publication. TCJ is interesting for how obviously torn the staff is. It’s like that meme of the guy choosing between two red buttons. In this case, one reads “profile on cartoonist with short bangs and self-applied cat tattoos” and the other reads “something about an original Marvel Bullpen member.” You will occasionally get a loving look at something personal to the reporter, which has value if it lines up with your own loves.
Right now our options are partisan news, tawdry gossip, unearned pretentiousness, or listicles about comic movies. When these sites cover an issue, it’s really covering Twitter’s response to an issue. There’s zero actual reporting. And to any comics journalists reading this, please recognize: You can’t beat Twitter. Once you become a mere aggregator of it, there’s no real purpose to coming to your site. We all aggregate within our own feeds, faster.
So this is all to say, the people at CBR may be great. And it may be really unfortunate that they’ve lost their jobs. But in this exact moment, the goodwill is gone. Comic news sites are nobody’s favorite sites right now. There just isn’t a warm feeling. And I really hope that changes before the sites are gutted. To be an actual industry, we need (actual) industry news.
Alright, onto things I consumed this week. Extraction 2 is somehow expensive and cheap. Netflix films exist in an uncanny valley where we recognize they are movies, but they have an unmistakably ‘TV’ feel to them. I enjoyed the set-pieces (the train was fun), but everything else was from the dollar store.
The original film, and I guess this one by extension, is an adaptation of a 2014 comic called CIUDAD by Andre Parks and the Russo brothers. The original film saw the setting changed from Mexico to India, I think for the better. Like the Keanu thing helmed by Kindt and Garney, there isn’t much to it. When you start with Hollywood, the whole of the project must be an elevator pitch. That doesn’t make for the deepest stories. But, as I’m always saying here, sometimes the glory of a thing is purely presentation.
Maybe watch the first Extraction. I enjoyed the locations.
My read of BATMAN: LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT continues! This newsletter, I’m looking at ‘Prey’ a Moench/Gulacy/Austin arc that feels properly 80s despite its 1990 cover date. This one’s got jealous steroid cops, a pervert villain, and undeniably GULACY vibes.
It’s another shot at Batman as a ‘thriller’ protagonist rather than a straight action hero. And it works. Or, mostly. It drags a touch. We spend a lotta time with a psychotic detective fixated on Batman and a campy mannequin-sexdoll-enjoyer villain. And as exciting as those sound, we’re left wanting in some way.
Still, Gulacy is highly Gulacy and if you enjoy that, this will definitely pop for you.
Because it’s not every day you get well-drawn trash. This is a bit like a De Palma film. It’s objectively garbage, but so well done that it becomes something else.
I’ll give it a recommend.
Sometimes I look at the dog, reflect on our short time together, and am afforded some perspective on life. We’ll be dead in 40 years. Time to stop yelling at Mark Millar.
Here’s a song for people feeling lost and unable to let go of the bullshit. It’s a schmaltzy fundamentally ‘Australian’ track from Perth’s (rare modifier there) The Triffids. Listen to this one and work on YOUR work. Police nobody. Do for self.