Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 275

Size of My Skeletons

HELLO FROM CHICAGO

Not a city of health nuts, but a city of nutty music fans who were very kind to my band. Thank you, Chicago. And while I’m talking music, here’s the new single.

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SOME BEAUTIFUL COLORS

Deciding on a color artist has taken the GEHENNA team a long time. We were blessed enough to have some very gifted colorists give us the time of day. I won’t share every sample we commissioned, as I’m not sure what the decorum is on that. They were all great. And very different. But I will show you where we arrived. This is the work of Sergio Algozzino.

In addition to being a talented color artist, Sergio is a native Italian speaker and Maurizio can bounce ideas off him quickly and with precision of terms.

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HOW WE GOT HERE

“My engagement with the world correlates to the size of my skeletons.”

A friend of mine with a high-paying position and minimal public-facing life said that to me this weekend. It echoed something a friend who works in national security told me:

“There is limited upside potential to a public-facing career, but infinite downside.”

These are normal people. Not woman abusers or child predators. Normal people, with very average peccadillos and personal failings. But they fear the spotlight, because both have seen firsthand what it can do to very normal people.

And I think this is, in part, why so much of what we consume is dogshit.

The only people willing to stand and be counted are those with so little life-experience as to have NO dirt under their fingernails. This means you’re consuming art that is provincial and intellectually incurious. It means you’re getting a spectrum of emotion that starts with pop culture touchstones and ends with social media. No ‘there’ there. Scratch the surface and only get more surface.

For a long time I thought we were seeing the end result of a chilling effect. Creative people cowed into sanding the edges off their work. But increasingly I’ve come to believe that we’re at the end result of maladapted, socially anxious, prude, people pretending to be creative.

The culture we’ve allowed to fester has fostered (foisted?) some truly ass creators. They have never taken chances in life, and as a result have never been embarrassed, humbled, or humiliated. The clockwork orange of it all. No infidelity, not because these are good partners, but because they can’t risk the public shaming. The politician of it all. Toxic relationships aren’t a thing to be explored in your work, rather hidden away forever lest you show you’re human.

I’ll say it again, when these people are replaced by AI, no one will notice.

This is the HR era. And those of you playing into it should save the dozens of dollars you make, because when the moment passes there will not be anything for you here.

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CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Below is a tweet from Peach Momoko, a popular comic book creator.

[Note: Just wrote and deleted a whole thing about the difference between traditional print media artists like Momoko and the wild west world of online-only art. But then realized the copycat in this case says they work in acrylic and sells physical pieces. My bad. No excuses to be made for this individual.]

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I HAVE TO CONFESS I AM SCARED

I’m scared of young people. Or, rather, online people. I don’t think I would be so alienated by young people in the third world. It’s only where we can be so detached from in-person human interaction that I could feel this. So, to be fair, it’s people of any age who have somehow managed never to have a real conversation.

Please read the tweet below.

A great many people liked this. They thought it made sense to them.

I just wanna point out that “has good and bad qualities” is the foundation of personhood. Anything else is caricature. The original poster, and the individuals(?) who agreed with them are not in real contact with their fellow human beings. The original poster says the House character is “insane” for having a spectrum of behaviors with blind-spots and motivations informed by personal values and history. This ties back to “the size of my skeletons.” Are normal people expected to be perfect? Are characters, whose purpose is to be dynamic and keep our attention, supposed to be perfect? What an insane idea built for losers who will never know love.

This dumb shit impacts art. The way a meteor impacts the landscape. It decimates. For every fucking chicken-brained unthinking boob who consumes media, we get the requisite “take.” And when those takes are normalized, we get that chilling effect I mentioned earlier. Imagine being a television writer and seeing this. Who is your audience? The person who says they haven’t been to a family gathering in five years because of covid? Who else is this removed from person-to-person interchange? There’s a shorthand of calling people like this autistic, but I know a great many autistic people and they have the capacity to recognize the human condition.

Is this who wrote the piece of shit Marvel book that tortured my eyes and ears this week? Someone unmask this bot-in-human-skin and let’s see if they are the one responsible for the personality-free husk of a story I just read.

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AND NOW LET’S GET TO THAT

A friend of mine used to work for Marvel and now doesn’t. He’s got a good career and isn’t bitter. But when he reads a truly terrible Marvel title, he’ll text me with “am I insane?”

I haven’t heard from him about the book I’m gonna go off on in a moment, and I dare not send it to him. Because the comic is incomprehensibly bad. In Call Of Cthulhu, tabletop RPG, there’s a mechanic where exposure to the supernatural breaks your brain. Over time, you can be rendered insane. That’s what this book is like. It is SO unknowable and obtuse that reading it brought me closer to madness.

It is a mainline Marvel mini and it is properly, fully, unreadable.

The story is jagged and unnatural in every possible way, with horrible dialogue and art so uninspired it could be pamphlet for a flu shot. And, frankly, I do not see the writer as a colleague, so I would feel at peace shitting all over their work. There is no professional courtesy between a comic book writer and a scab.

But I feel like focusing on the miserable details of this book would derail the conversation. Let’s instead talk about your innate and inalienable ability to say “no.”

When you read a bad book, make a mental note of who the editor is. When you read a TERRIBLE book, write down that editor’s name. They switch positions and companies, but they don’t change their stripes. You don’t have to say yes to every ‘big look’ that comes your way. I’ll take it a step further. For all the dehumanizing shit creators put themselves through to build a name in this business, there are kneecaps you just cannot suck. “Work for company with predatory contracts?” Sure. “Work with people you think don’t have your best interests at heart?” Ok.

But, “work with editors who routinely oversee terrible work?”

No.

This is my most closely held belief in my professional life and the one that gets almost zero buy-in from my peers. They typically think their Big Two editors are “ok” to “useless” to “openly sabotaging my book” but never do they pull the brakes and say, “I’ll pass this time, publisher. This guy doesn’t help anyone make good comics.” They ALWAYS think they can power through. They ALWAYS believe that they are the single talent that can somehow squeak past the grip of the black hole. And it always results in the worst work of their careers.

If you talk to older guys they will tell you doing bad work is just part of the gig. Putting up with editors who rewrite you is part of the process to get somewhere in comic books.

Maybe it was.

But there are too many options now. If we put out bad work, let us be able to own it as OUR bad work.

Sorry, I was really triggered by how fucking awful this book was. And maybe that’s all due to the creative team. But then it is the EDITOR’S job to pull the brakes. You can’t have that type of blood (or shit) on your hands, editors.

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BRANDON GRAHAM SPEAKS

Graham is one of the better interviews in comics because he’s one of the few underline-bold-italic-capitals ARTISTS in the business. His work is natural, that’s how it preserves his vibe. But it’s also studious. He really, really knows his craft.

The Inkpulp channel is for comic ART nerds. So if that’s what you are, this is some type of geek Christmas. Lots of artist lifestyle talk.

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CONSUMED

A few weeks ago I talked about Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion. I enjoyed the hell out of it. But I also hated the ‘read.’ I hated that ‘film guys’ insisted that it was a heavy commentary on prisons, prison reform, etc. It was an exploitation film with little to say beyond what the viewer might run through their own personal lens. But a great exploitation film.

It’s sequel, Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, is undeniably about something.

This one would be heavy-handed if it wasn’t so damn stylish. While watching it, I kept thinking of the techniques being used and trying to find references. For 1972, some of what this film does seems years ahead of its time. It’s often artificial, very intentionally so, and shots are just as likely to tell us about a character’s emotional state as their location or movement.

It’s a redemption story where there is no true redemption. Villains are multifaceted, but villains nonetheless. They die villains. And the escapees with relatable backstories are treated the same as those with inhuman ones. So when I say “it’s about something” it’s not anything the people who need “something” would feel good about.

It’s a really, really great film. I don’t typically push what I watch or read on you in this newsletter, but I would at least strongly recommend this one.

Delirium, however, I would not recommend. Unless you’re into crime exploitation cinema with the budget of a local car commercial.

The premise is fun. Self-appointed morality police think they can use a damaged Vietnam vet to do their dirty work. Doesn’t go well. Again, this one is cheap. For fans of jungle combat flashbacks filmed in Maryland in February.

Remember the movie Species? I thought I did.

It’s quite stupid, right down to a squirrel attacking someone. But it is pretty fun, as it feels like a tabletop roleplaying session. Band of misfits must stop alien from reproducing. They all have really specific roles and ‘powers’ and the interplay between them is basic and clear. There’s even an empath, and everyone including the audience is just supposed to know what that is and buy in. Stupid, but pretty fun. So I’m gonna torture myself by watching the next two.

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GOODBYE EVERYONE FOR A WEEK

I didn’t realize it, but I’ve got a few weeks of living in hotels. Not the usual “arrive at 1am and out at 9am” of touring, but the mentally disruptive “stay for three days while you do festivals and whatever bullshit and then get on a plane and do it 1500mi away the following weekend.”

Not ideal.

But, festivals can be fun and I guess it gives me time in a Holiday Inn to get some writing done. I hope your week is more cohesive than mine is lining up to be. Thank you for reading. Do for self.