Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 299
Can We At Least Get the World's Smallest Violin?
A SINCERE THANK YOU
Thank you to everyone who’s ordered GEHENNA: NAKED AGGRESSION. Retailer variant requests are starting to come in and that’s a nice feeling too. Special thanks to the people who have written to tell me this is their first comic book purchase ever. I hope we spark a lifelong passion for you.
Now, things happening in the world:
DIAMOND SOLD / WHO CARES
I wish I could give you some insight into what the Diamond sale means, but nobody seems to wanna talk about it. And not in a cards-close-to-the-vest sorta way. I mean, people just don’t care enough.
Small publishers are frustrated that they may have to come under another publisher’s umbrella to get Lunar distribution. Some creators aren’t happy with costs associated with Lunar.
But nobody is playing a violin for Diamond.
Must be a weird place to be as a business. You are the backbone, for better or worse, of an entire industry for decades. Then you die and the response ranges from joy to shrugs. But no tears. Rough.
Diamond. Back from the dead or brink of death. But no idea what that means.
WHICH BOOKS THOUGH?
Prana Direct Market Solutions newsletter has a number of really optimistic and enthusiastic quotes from retailers regarding the state of the market. Strong sales, they say. Notable number of new customers, in fact.
I am happy for those retailers, but I am curious “what books exactly?” Because I know some of the numbers for series we’re supposed to care about. And I know all things are relative to their respective moments in the market, but I’m not impressed. So, what I mean to say here, is are these sales from five comic books? Because if they are, I understand stores have gotta take wins from wherever they can, but that’s not gonna work. You can’t live off Batman alone.
If I’m wrong, I’m happy to be wrong. But everyone I know, from Big Two guys to dedicated indie dudes, has a completely different read of the comic market than these retailers.
If this industry is three dudes eating great, six hacks making a middle-income, and a thousand broke creators: we’re lost in miserable short-term thinking.
REMINDER: GREAT BOOK
Call your comic shop, please and thank you.
I’M AWAY FROM HOME A LOT THIS YEAR
Will have copies of STRINGER with me on the US dates, so stop by the merch table if you’d like one.
TONE PROBLEMS
An interesting phenomenon is the one-sided nature of “didn’t age well.”
If something seems gauche because it references old sensibilities people no longer hold, does that only apply to ‘right-coded’ content? Or are we squarely now in the space where 2018 progressivism is potato salad sitting in direct sunlight?
The above is a page from HARLEY QUINN FARTACULAR: SILENT BUTT DEADLY. James Joyce is a fart-huffing ghost in it. No, I can’t discern the intended audience either. But let’s presume there is one.
The bookshelf sight gag is fine. It would be a bit tired in any era, sure, but in 2013 it woulda been significantly more fun than it is today.
That’s because everybody in the western world just lived through a brutally annoying culture war, where bad actors of every variety doubled and tripled down on slogan-talk and meme-speak.
As a result, nothing reads as light-hearted anymore. Everything feels like it’s meant to teach at best and punish at worst. There’s a fatigue that runs to our bones now. And the “isn’t it a true fact that the western canon is white and male” jokes are now hackneyed by nature. I think at this point there’s less Fred Hembeck to it and more Twitter. It’s not fun.
And that sucks. Because while the joke isn’t particularly clever, it’s a silly throwaway gag in a humor comic and nothing to be overly serious about. But I know how it’ll be received: as confirmation of the DC offices having/pushing a specific viewpoint.
So what’s the solution? Do you push through this cultural moment and supply this material for the people who are game for it? Or is this nu metal and will need a decade before it’s not a total faux pas to bring it up?
I don’t know. But this book wasn’t something I’d have advised.
A/V CONTENT FOR THE WEEK
A short video by me on the impossible-to-quantify value of geek media in regard to selling your comic book.
A video by me about my new favorite series on TUBI, Poly Love In Peach City.
A long video, not by me, about the perils of widening the gap between audience and the decision-makers of the product the audience enjoys.
MEDIA CONSUMPTION
I’ve loved every Female Prisoner Scorpion movie I’ve seen, and Beast Stable is no different.
That said, this one is the hardest watch. Everyone is mistreated in this one. The villains are especially villainous. It’s a great-looking movie with so much ugliness in it. The opening sequence is an all-timer. Wish I had thought of it, and I intend to riff on it somehow. Running through Tokyo handcuffed to a severed limb is a world-class visual. Recommend.
I also reluctantly recommend Nosferatu: the wrath of Malachi. A partially procedurally-generated gothic horror game, weighed down by an annoying escort-mission play-loop.
While it was annoying at times, it was also mercifully concise and ‘scary.’ Quotations used because it’s not creepy, nor is it terrifying, but it somehow manages a great atmosphere and some fun jump scares. Weakly recommend.
Read The Road To Serfdom. Before I proceed, I’ll apologize to the Europeans readers. EPHK was kind enough to recommend my Substack, and I got a large influx of European followers as a result. I know you are proud and protective of your socialist states, but I found Hayek’s thesis pretty convincing. Or, maybe, something beyond convincing. More like, “yeah, obviously.”
Central planning of markets eventually requires similar social planning. Oversight becomes overreach, or maybe they mean the same thing from jump. I think ultimately most people agree with the premise, but believe laws can act as windbreaks or levees. And others are comfortable with the tradeoffs.
The bit that would get a modern socialist’s fur up is the 1:1 Hayek draws between ‘socialism’ and ‘national socialism’ in terms of their shared list (not starting intention) towards authoritarianism. I see this type of thing argued all the time, but it ultimately comes down to your core values. A socialist is going to see a very clear distinction between ‘government owned’ and ‘state controlled.’ Whereas a capitalist believes that’s a distinction without a difference. So, no reason to fight. Simply a YMMV thing.
The book was written in 1944 and reflects it. Much of it is about the natural evil of totalitarianism, and how to to futureproof governments against a Fourth Reich. Recommend, though I think you’ll just nod if you’re a capitalist and yell “but it doesn’t have to be that way!” at the pages if you’re a socialist.
During my Google Image search for the cover of the book, I came across this shirt on a site called LibertyManiacs. The website ensures me “These tees will be the beginning of many great conversations, and a beautiful way to express your love for liberty and literature.” And now I feel like I have to buy it. Think of the great conversations I could have.
Something that missed my generation of readers by a single hair is the fact that Jim Starlin is a creative powerhouse with few peers. I’m reading all the MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVELS at the moment and the first of the bunch, THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL is just a wildly effective and efficient bit of comicbooking. Melodrama? Maybe. But there’s a lotta class to the whole thing. Strong recommend.
FROM MY DESIGN IDEA FOLDER
A legitimately perfect movie poster. All that white. Clear about what type of movie you’re watching. Main character being MAIN. Perfection.
THANK YOU FOR A NICE WEEK
Again, the response to GEHENNA has been great. All the new followers of this blog are appreciated. Maybe next week I’ll talk about the Ghibli AI thing, as I have my usual Skynet perspectives on it. But I’m not game for bummers today. Have a good one. Do for self.
Did not expect to see Hayek come up in this. Got my bachelor's in Economics and studied Austrian Economics. Definitely informed much of my thinking about anarchy and the evils of the state.
Also, thriller a cruel picture kicks ass. I remember watching it for the first time and being blown away with how cool the slow motion revenge scenes looked.
Been a few years since I read Road to Serfdom, but if memory serves right, he and anyone who references it as a free market capitalist today are operating in such different economic and political contexts that it's essentially two different conversations. It made sense to critique a totalizing central planning in the Soviet Union era, but other than China, there's hardly an economy in the world today that is centrally planned to the extent he writes about. Famously for anyone whose read it, he's not nearly the free market fundamentalist compared to the libertarian strands you see today - he believes in active government involvement in environmental regulation, workplace safety and the definition of the workweek, ensuring competition and regulating fraud, guaranteeing a social safety net ..... Mitigating externalities that markets can't or have no interest in solving .... Short of some nationalization of industries here and there, this would basically describe the extent of most "liberal" platforms in the world that libertarians rail against today, as most countries described as "socialist" are merely mixed economies with more substantive versions of the regulatory actions above. Hayek is arguing against being assigned a job against your will in a choiceless economy, a prospect that is on no economic horizon I've seen in my lifetime - while libertarians want to cite him against the lowly regulatory actions of a CFPB, etc. Slippery slope argument on a dry ass slope.
Sorry to go long - but the "socialism" and "national socialism" conflation basically starts and ends at the rudimentary notion of government involvement in industries for the "collective good." You can read Ullrich's Hitler bio for a pretty thorough examination of what "socialism" meant to the Nazis, and at times there were many competing interpretations. There was no interest in repudiating private property, wealth redistribution, or any Marxist notion of class conflict (they uh fucking hated Marx's guts), or economic levelling - just a general idea that the economy should work for the benefit of the nation (and, obviously, this meant the racist definition of "the nation"), and that the capitalists would very much remain in charge - hardly an example of central planning. The word "socialism" in "national socialism" had the explanatory value of "liberal" in countless political parties, buzzy but of no actual distinction.
And as is common for free market proponents, there is no sufficient acknowledgement that while capitalism has the veneer of freedom and choice, and does in fact provide real choice for a select group, it is also a system that functions by reducing the freedoms provided to people through its own forms of coercion. Tradeoffs abound.