I’m writing this from my other favourite café – the one where I’m friends with the owners. One of them had just come back from a coffee conference, and gave me a packet of coffee to take home, and made me a delicious pourover of an as-yet-unlaunched coffee.
Pays to have a favourite café, I tell you.
Last week’s status update was the first one I sent out since I went off Twitter, and I fully expected there to be a drop in visitors. Instead, there was a spike – double the number of people visited the blog, and most new visitors were from Instagram, of all places.
I think it’s been understood for a while that Twitter demotes tweets with links – I noticed that I would have more people clicking on my links on BlueSky than on Twitter, despite having fewer than 400 followers on the former as compared to nearly 9,000 on the latter.
So any lingering doubt I had about needing to be on Twitter is gone. The one thing I’ll truly miss is discovering obscure horror movies from the 5-6 people I follow who talk about them constantly. I’ll find a workaround for that.
Work-wise, I forgot to note last week that Blue Book Volume 1: 1961 was released, featuring the complete story of Betty and Barney Hill. I’m looking forward to future issues of Blue Book as a reader, but as I mentioned before, I will continue lettering the True Weird backup features. (Blue Book #7 will feature the one I wrote for Anand Radhakrishnan to draw – “The Monkey Man of Delhi”).
This week saw the release of The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #4, where, let’s put it this way, shit gets real.
Behind the scenes, I just finished lettering TOPLOCC #6, which wraps up the first arc. I also submitted revisions for a new #1 for DC Black Label that is likely to be announced soon – it’s a big one.
I wrapped up revisions on the gorgeous OGN I mentioned before, and since he’s been teasing it over on his Instagram, I think I can safely mention that it’s with Iván Brandon – one of my oldest collaborators in comics.
As I finished writing this, I noticed that Ram posted this sneak peek on Bluesky, so I can tell you that in November’s Detective Comics #1076, Ram is writing and drawing (and painting) a backup story, and of course, I had to be along for the ride lettering it. (This was the Very Special story I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.)
Sir Michael Gambon passed away yesterday at the age of 82. I suppose he will be best-known by the largest number of people for playing Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films, but I knew him first for playing Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective – a role that allowed him incredible breadth – and lately, my favourite role of his was as Albert Spica in Peter Greenaway’s monumental The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Gambon played him with a hulking menace – a viciousness that was as animalistic as it was riveting. I have little knowledge of (and little enough interest in) the man he was, but as an actor, he had few peers.
In books, I finished Books of Blood Volume 1 and started on Volume 2 today. As with any collection, there are hits and there are misses, but “The Midnight Meat Train” is still a thrill, and “In the Hills, the Cities” remains one of my favourite short stories, period – a true original, narrated with fantastic form.
I’m halfway through The Devil All the Time, and I’ve slowed down my read so I don’t chew through the book too quickly. It’s an intense experience – densely written, each character drawn in just a few sentences of great specificity – and it’s a meal to be savoured. Enjoying this one thoroughly.
I only watched two films this week.
No One Will Save You is a great mashup of a home invasion film with classic alien invasion sf. Largely wordless, it’s anchored by an excellent central performance by Kaitlyn Dever, and manages to constantly wrongfoot you on where it might go. The ending didn’t fully work for me, but I appreciate that it emerged from a desire to try something new.
Bodies Bodies Bodies, on the other hand, was a pointless mess livened up with some millennial jokes. K and I spent half the movie wondering out loud what was going on, and not in a good way. It ties things up with a lively punchline, but the shaggy-dog story getting there is just not worth it. The script can’t decide whether it wants to be a character-based comedy of manners or a broad parody of current extremely-online culture, and it lands nowhere. There are a couple of decent musical cues, though.
Finally, I finished watching Seinfeld Season 8, for the first time, if you can believe it.
As a teenager, to my shame, I was a Friends person rather than a Seinfeld person. I thought Friends was sophisticated for having serialised arcs over Seinfeld’s episodic storytelling, and I found the latter’s characters largely unpleasant.
In my twenties, of course, I lost most of my regard for Friends, and found that Seinfeld’s sharper humour had dated much better. A couple of years ago, I decided to rewatch Seinfeld in the order of broadcast, and realised I’d in fact watched a lot more episodes as a kid than I’d expected.
Season 8 was the first season of which I’d seen nothing before, and I thoroughly admire a show that stays this smart, this sharp, and this willing to skewer its main characters in its eighth year. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Season 8 is the best season, but I’m sure it’s in the top 5 if not the top 3.
Jerry Seinfeld still cannot act, though, and continues to be the weak link in nearly every episode. After eight years, I can only assume it’s either a deliberate decision, or an act of breathtaking laziness that is to be admired.
Last week, I mentioned that the first third of Last Days freaked me out a little, and I got a couple of comments asking how I reconcile that with loving horror so much. It’s a surprising question – I thought liking horror means that one enjoys being freaked out once in a while, otherwise what’s the point?
The most effective horror for me is that which feels like it might invade reality at any second (which those parts of Last Days did for me, before the underwhelming rest of it), and the only thing that’s done that well enough that I had to take several breaks finishing it was the Chinese found footage horror film Incantation (I think it’s playing on Netflix?).
The fact that it is found footage is key – the fiction that it actually happened to someone. Incantation isn’t always well-made – there are several times when it breaks the found footage conceit (meaning there’s no possible way that footage was shot by someone within the universe of the film), and it’s not written very well.
But it’s the concept that works – that is primed to leap into reality in that uncanny way. After all (BIG FAT SPOILER ALERT) the idea is that the film itself is a curse that’s being deliberately passed on to you, the viewer, by the protagonist of the film.1
So the moment you began watching the movie, you were cursed, and you have to finish the film to find out whether you were released from it (the answer is, not quite, but good enough).
If you’ve got a vivid imagination, that is spooky. It’s also deliciously irresponsible on the part of the creators, or would be if the curse itself wasn’t fictional.
That’s it for the week, I think. Starting next week, I’m hoping to have two posts per week up here – one weekly status update, and one repost of an old piece, or something new.
- As I write this, I’m reminded of Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke’s Ultra Comics, which is a “haunted comic” that infects you when you open it. ↩︎
