It's Like Wasting Everything
On Someone Else's Dream
LET’S GO
REGICIDE #1 Final Order Cutoff is MONDAY! That means you’ve gotta call your comic shop and tell them NOW that you need this book! I feel blessed by your support this year and I’d like to keep the train rolling! Thank you!
PAGES IN MY INBOX
Goddamn! Leonardo doing the most!
THEMES
I’m gong to attempt to dovetail two thoughts I’ve had in my head this week. wish me luck.
The purity of cool shit.
The joy of mine.
The Furious is a superlative martial arts movie. It has a thin exploitation plot draped around the coolest fight set pieces I’ve seen in years. I know this sounds dramatic, but I got emotional when the hero motorcycles through a packed hallway while his 12-year-old daughter hits gang members with a pipe.
Not because it was profound. Or because it taught me anything about life.
But because it was unbelievably cool. And cool is its own reward. It’s fog around a Tennessee mountain. It’s a gothic basilica. That is to say, it is beautiful on its own merits, for its own reasons, without thirst for context or meaning. You learn nothing and are edified nevertheless.
Now humor me as I come from the top rope with a non sequitur. Would this movie be any better if it starred Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter?
Last week I started and then deleted a few hundred words on the retailer variant discourse (don’t look it up). One of the voices in that debate(?) is a perpetual “this guy again?” artist. And this time, I asked colleagues, “this guy again? Does he have a single creator credit?”
And the answer was no. His name appears next to no characters. No properties. He doesn’t even have one of the pity credits they hand out when you draw Steampunk Spider-Man or whatever the fuck.
This is a purely mercenary commercial artist. A hack. A glorified jobber. Living like a grave robber in a particularly picked-over dig site.
And now things come back to cool.
Does cool feed your family? Eh. I wouldn’t rely on it. But can you make a great living while also doing cool things? Yes. It’s supposed to be the goal for real creators. And there’s nothing cool about being the guy who only draws static images of dead men’s characters.
The title line and subtitle line of this week’s newsletter is from a Sebadoh song. The man who wrote it felt like he was subservient to an autistic bully in his previous band, Dinosaur Jr.. It was someone else’s dream. The last line of the song, repeated, is “seems pretty crazy to me.”
It seems pretty crazy to draw or write Spider-Man and not also your own creations.
MEDIA CONSUMPTION
Manga about a brothel girl who takes assassination jobs from clients while she sexually services them, then snipes the targets. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION.
I think the kids would call this “libbed out.” Risso always a genius. Azzarello is always bold, but sometimes his genius fails him. This is one such example. When you’re old and you know you’re not right wing, but can’t reconcile your own distance from the left, you produce work like this. “Critique” like a punk band singing about McDonalds in 1983. SADLY CAN’T RECOMMEND.
Fun little ghost story. LITE RECOMMEND.
Mediocre horror with a decent cast and dumb/fun premise. LITE RECOMMEND.
Cool, but budget, martial arts action. For fans of children with disabilities with considerable ability to whoop ass. SOLID RECOMMEND.
Great folk tale with creative (very) practical effects. Like a HELLBOY series in 90min. RECOMMEND.
A guy who really loves something talking about it with passion. RECOMMEND.
FROM THE DESIGN FOLDER
I like to see western media using obi strips, even if they are just flat design elements. I think for an upcoming book we’re doing top and bottom of the page with this type of thing making the art portion of the page a narrower band than usual. Maybe spill into the back cover.
THANKS
REGICIDE #1! Thanks! Do for self!
