Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 220
VIETNAM REALLY WANTS MY $250
Hello from Kuala Lumpur Airport. I’m trapped here at the moment as I wait for my Vietnam visa. They wanted $175 for expedited processing (hopefully a day) and then a fella named Andy hit me from a somewhat-official email telling me I could have it in a couple hours for an additional $85. I’m finding Vietnam curiously capital-driven for a communist state.
Assuming I get on, I’ll continue this newsletter from my final destination, Tokyo. I’m excited to see it, but perhaps not as excited as I would be if I knew I could find what I’m looking for in English. I think it’s cool when western artists do their manga trips to Japan and dig through old stuff. But it’s almost exclusively Japanese-language material and that’s not as thrilling to me, because I like to read. All the cool art in the world is ultimately just that without a story I can follow. Still, should be a good time.
TACTILE RESPONSES
It’s nice to hold things, right? Saw a guy with no arms yesterday and thought, “I gotta remember to appreciate holding things. Never know when the arms might leave you.”
I’m not a big collector of my own material. You’ll see these guys with libraries they’re so proud of they can’t help but make it the first shelf of their bookcase. I never felt that compulsion. I wrote the things, I proofed the things, I don’t need to have them within arms’ reach at all times.
But as my career gets longer it’s occurred to me that some things will just fall outta print and it would be nice to own a copy if just for reference. So all those comp copies I was, up to this point, bringing on tour and selling? I’m putting one aside for myself.
My parents’ house has become a customs holding facility of some type. As not to bankrupt publishers, I don’t have anything sent to Australia. It sits at my folks’ place and I will presumably grab it all at some point when I’m an oligarch who can afford such things.
All this is to say, I had only recently gotten my hands on a copy of STRINGER, and right before I left for this tour I finally held RUN THE DUNGEON.
Both are excellent physical artifacts. They feel nice in your hands. And RTD came out, from a creative perspective, as the fun romp I’d hoped for. Goran really did an excellent job, and my effort at ‘characters speak their thoughts’ in an almost GROO-inspired ‘anyone can read this comic’ fashion was better than I remembered.
But what I wanted to say with this portion of the newsletter was, holding these two side by side, I fully appreciated how good to us Image was on STRINGER. That is an expensive book to produce. A thick hardcover with impressive dimensions.
Like every creator who is bad at math, I’ve been keen to see every project in hardcover format. I asked Eric at Image, “the single-arc softcover trade collections, nobody’s buying them anymore, right?” and I could tell by his reply he’s gotten too much of this question. Basically, “you mean the product that’s the backbone of comics in the book market? Yeah, you could say they still sell.”
I get it. I get it. Affordable and accessible.
Hardcover is just sexy. But like many sexy things, sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Shoutout to Image and shoutout to Z2. These are quality books.
SHOULD YOU BE WORKING?
I won’t pretend to be the most plugged-in guy insofar as Hollywood is concerned. I know a few people, but that’s about it. So the following is informed by only a handful of voices and you’re welcome to take it with a grain of salt.
The guy who plays Oliver Queen on TV’s Arrow, or did, who cares, said he doesn’t support striking as a negotiating tactic. This kicked up feelings among the performative class. Showrunners who (may never work again and) were never gonna hire this man tweeted things like “noted” on the ‘news’ story. The implication being this actor is blackballed. Curious thing to do, really, and I wonder how they would respond to a studio head saying ‘noted’ to a particularly strident striker.
Comic creators got in on it too, for mysterious reasons. A lotta hate directed at Arrow.
This discourse corresponded with an offhand remark by Ed Piskor on his Cartoonist Kayfabe Youtube. Essentially, “anyone writing for the Big Two is scabbing because they’re writing during the strike with the knowledge their work will be adapted for film/television.” He didn’t mean to kick anything up with that. It was just a stray thought. And in the same spirit of idle conversation, I mentioned it to a screenwriter friend. His insights were funny.
“They are scabbing. They are writing for struck companies during a strike. During the strike the WGA won’t allow their writers to work in animation- AN AREA THEY DO NOT PROTECT AS A GUILD. And they are threatening non-members with being locked out of the WGA in the future should they work during the strike. The only reason they aren’t telling comic writers not to work is because they consider them beneath their notice.”
If that’s true, then those writing at Marvel and DC during the strike are breaking solidarity by taking advantage of what amounts to an oversight. It’s only a technicality that the WGA thinks comic writers are dirt. Working during this time is outside the spirit of the strike.
Just an informed perspective to consider. Maybe we’ve all got planks in our eyes.
SOME NON-COMIC PATRICK NEWS
One of my bands released a live record this week. I don’t typically use this space to promote the things I do outside of comics, but this one has some stellar art from Mike Sutfin.
We were entirely hands-off with the design as Landland, the label releasing it, is run by Dan Black, an accomplished poster designer. I subscribe to the idea of working with capable people and allowing them to do what they do (maybe that concept will pop up later in the newsletter), so when Dan said “I’m thinking Mike Sutfin” I was in. The only guidance I gave was to use the Antidote ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ 7”, with its stolen hare krishna art, as inspiration.
Happy with how it turned out and satisfied by the response from people who like us.
MADE IT TO SAIGON
Locals seem to prefer that name over Ho Chi Minh City, though they’re not twisted up about it either way. I stayed here overnight and while I didn’t get the Graham Greene room, I am on the second-floor where all the journalism stuff happened later. I’m listening to The Quiet American on audiobook while I walk the city today.
Oh no. Sensitive readers should avert their eyes for this next image.
Won’t someone intervene and tell the woman running stall 73 at the Dan Sinh Market that she’s selling Azov Brigade patches featuring Nazi imagery! What about the children???
Having haggled with this woman over a $10 shirt, I have gotta imagine her response to such a reproach would be “you buy?”
Remember in 2018 when everyone decided they’d rather feel morally superior to their neighbor than to accomplish anything in life? That’s when the ‘cultural appropriation’ conversation peaked.
For many of us, the whole concept screamed “overeducated, under-traveled” and didn’t map onto the real world in any meaningful way. Not just because the history of human civilization is cultural exchange. And not just because it’s impossible to stop. Rather, it reads as ignorant because it assumes the superiority of the college educated.
When you’re exploring ideas like “is it insensitive for gringos to wear sombreros?” there’s a tendency to default to an academy-educated [read: classist] perspective. The person asking the question does not consider for a moment that the working class could contribute to ‘the discourse.’ That is to say, it is not for the person with 200 credit hours of theory and a liberal arts degree to talk over the guy who feeds his family selling sombreros to gringos. Why, at any point, was the performed offense of academics prioritized over people living in the real world?
I passed on the Azov Brigade patch. But I did pick up a ‘peace through superior firepower’ shirt from 1986.
Speaking of cultural exchange and the fluidity of concepts and markers, here’s some kids in Saigon posing for photos outside an ‘American diner.’
MADE IT TO TOKYO
And man is it frustrating. I’m a half-block from a Book-Off with a hundred-thousand used tankobon, but I can’t read a word of it. I went to the store with the most English-language manga in the city but found (of course) stuff I would find in the US. Still, picked up some material to put me in the space.
CHAINED SOLDIER is one of those fan-servicey concepts where a man is transformed into a supernatural-beast-thing when he engages in light bondage with a female super-soldier. It’s pretty stupid, but gets a purpose midway through volume one when he’s exploited by one of the soldier’s teammates. Sorta a love-triangle without love. Again, stupid, but I enjoyed it more than any X-MEN book of the last decade. So take that faint praise for what it’s worth.
I’m gonna do the whole ‘anime district’ of Tokyo tomorrow and then walk through Shinjuku where they got the big Godzilla lurking over the building and all the lighted signage and etc, etc.
Before I close out, how about another example of why policing the transfer and exchange of culture in a global free market is worthless college shit. Here we’ve got a kid on the Tokyo subway wearing a ONE CHUM shirt. That’s a Bob Marley (Jamaica’s biggest cultural export) reference featuring Chumlee from Pawn Stars (an ultimately niche television export from the US). That’s the nexus of three distinct cultures with ugly and beautiful intersecting and overlapping histories.
Human curiosity and joy cannot be mitigated organically. A boot can do it, for a time, but it’s a fool’s errand.
IT’S 2AM
So I’m going to sleep. Hope you have a rewarding week. Read some light bondage manga. Do for self.