I’ve decided to start calling these “weeknotes”, since the term makes a lot more sense, especially if I want to do shorter daily updates.
Things are slowly settling down. My back pain is down to nil, for the moment, so I’m glad I took the decision to … er … go back into semi-retirement, I suppose. I’m particularly glad about my decision to schedule April such that I was doing partial books rather than waiting for each book’s art to be finished (if you remember from my last newsletter, I was working on six books that all had to be submitted around the third week of April but all of whose art was yet to be finished). This took a potentially frantic month and turned it into a surprisingly relaxed and stress-free month where I not only worked on 200 pages without hurting myself, but could even take a week off to take care of my dad.
Emotionally it was a bit of a tough month, dealing with my dad’s continuing health decline, but thankfully, towards the end, it was enlivened by lots of catching up with friends.
The end of the month also marked K and my first anniversary, which we celebrated with a little date night. I cannot stress enough how grateful I am to have her to share my life with.
May looks to be around as busy as April, but will hopefully not include any family health issues. We live in hope.
First of all, the redesign of the blog that I’ve been promising for ages has been deployed. I decided to forgo the monospace style in favour of something that’s … erm … actually easy to read – I’ve always found Stratechery to be easy on the eyes, so I went for Freight Sans. I also felt like the page-wide layout of the posts had far too many characters per line, and I wanted to add a traditional blog sidebar (I might even add a blogroll to it, one of these days), so now you get the sidebar everywhere on the site. Finally, a lot of the previous design just looked bad because I had deployed the website in a hurry and hadn’t realised that WordPress’s new block editor doesn’t use the same template for every page, so all my careful design of the main page hadn’t reflected in the other pages at all.
I’m still tinkering with the design – some of the line spacing is off, there were a few elements (like the blockquote style) that I forgot about entirely, and there are elements that look different on the site than they did in the development environment. Plus I want to bump up the text size a bit to accommodate mobile phones. But overall, I’m quite happy with this.
As mentioned, I posted my Feb/March reading roundup to the blog, because I missed sending updates in those months. You can read that here.
I’ve also been posting near-daily status updates on the blog, which I won’t be sending via the newsletter. These are just updates on what I’m up to on any particular day, plus links to whatever I found interesting that day – it’s a blogging experiment, I suppose. I’ll be tinkering with the backend of the blog to categorise those as “status updates” while all my weekly posts will be updated to be “weeknotes”.
I’m not linking to these updates – you can either visit the blog to check them out, or get them via RSS feeds, which I’m told are definitely, positively coming back.
Last week saw the release of The Six Fingers #3 with Dan Watters, Sumit Kumar, Lee Loughridge and Tom Muller, Spectregraph #1 with James Tynion IV and Christian Ward, Dawnrunner #2 with Ram V, Evan Cagle and Dave Stewart and w0rldtr33 #9 with James Tynion IV, Fernando Blanco, Jordie Bellaire and Dylan Todd are released today.
This week saw the collected edition of The White Trees: A Blacksand Tale with Chip Zdarsky, Kris Anka and Matt Wilson, and the first part of its sequel – The Whisper Queen: A Blacksand Tale #1, which is lettered by my friend Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, but which uses my font “Mighty Mouse”.
I’ve continued to read more comics than in the last year, which I’m happy with. I have slightly different standards now – I judge the writing more on the basis of how it interacts with the art, and I find myself looking at the art a lot more than reading the stories. I’m fine with this, though, because the idea is that I’m not just judging these as stories, but as comics specifically.
Incredible Hulk Vol. 1 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson & Nic Klein: A pleasant back-to-basics horror story, but the star is Nic Klein’s art. I’ve been watching in near-awe as Nic has pulled back from painting his own work and figured out how to create incredibly dynamic black-and-white art that gains colour in his collaboration with Matt Wilson. I’ve always been a fan of Nic’s, but his journey over Deadpool, Thor and now Incredible Hulk has been inspiring. I think Nic has drawn more epic images in his runs on the latter two books than most artists do in a career.
Wytches by Scott Snyder & Jock: A very enjoyable low-key horror story, though I felt by the end that I would’ve loved to see more of the worldbuilding on the page. I suppose this world is going to be expanded on in the upcoming animated tv show.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga by Chris Claremont & John Byrne: I had high hopes for this one – it’s nigh-legendary within superhero comics, after all – but I must admit to coming away from it mostly unimpressed. Maybe I’m used to the psychological depth of modern superhero characters, but it felt like not enough time was being spent on Jean’s psychological turmoil, and many parts of the story felt rushed just to get to the conclusion. I acknowledge, of course, that these are the shoulders on which modern superhero comics were built, but maybe this has been hyped up so much that I couldn’t but be disappointed.
X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont & Brent Anderson: This was better than Dark Phoenix, partly because the story is much more focused and grounded (down to it being a one-shot graphic novel rather than a multi-thread ongoing comic), and partly because Steve Oliffe’s colours over Brent Anderson’s work are much higher quality than you’d find in a monthly comic of the same era (once again down to this being a graphic novel and therefore aimed for print on better paper to compete with European BD of the same time). Claremont is yet to fully grow on me – I like his plotting, but his text-heavy writing style grates on me (if I’m supposed to read that many words on a page, they better be really good). I have a feeling I might get used to it, though, which I’d like, because I’m planning to catch up on a lot more X-Men reading once I’m done with Krakoa.
Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon & John Cassaday: I was reading this for some context on Abigail Brand, who turns up both in Gillen’s run on SWORD/Uncanny X-Men and in Al Ewing’s Krakoa era books SWORD and X-Men: Red. I read the first few issues of this when it was originally coming out, and honestly, it reads better than I remembered it, and has aged surprisingly well. Whedon has far more control over the comics page than one might expect given he hadn’t written many comics before this, and other than a bit of a scramble towards the end, where the climax becomes extremely plotty and the characters get a bit lost, Whedon has a good handle on the characters and how they function, and manages to end the whole endeavour on a trademark bittersweet note.
On the art side, I should admit I find Cassaday’s art erratic at the best of times. His women tend to look the same – a fault he shares with many, usually male, superhero artists – and it is said that on occasion his editors would make him draw an issue backwards because his art would deteriorate as he had to draw faster as the deadline got closer. Like many other photorealistic artists, he doesn’t have a “simpler” style to lean on when crunch arrives, so the hastily drawn art ends up looking like a cruder version of his better-executed work. Thankfully, when he’s at full power, he shares the ability with Alex Ross to make very ridiculous things look real and epic, and he has an able collaborator in Laura Martin, one of the best in the business. This is on display at its best towards the end of the run, in the last few pages, when they manage to sell one of Whedon’s biggest swings with a confidence you rarely see in superhero comics.
Enjoyable stuff, all in all.
Only one film last week:
Avengers: Endgame: Every time I watch the fun, pulpy barnburner that is Avengers: Infinity War, I convince myself that maybe, just maybe, Endgame wasn’t that bad, and that I might enjoy it this time, if I give it one more go.
Alas, no. This is a dour, joyless slog of a film that fritters away all the goodwill accrued by Infinity War, which is funny because it’s written and directed by the exact same group of people. There are several mystifying decisions. The five-year gap, for example, which not only undercuts the final heroic victory but also casts a pall of melancholy over everything that comes after Endgame – one could charitably say it prefigures the pandemic, but it doesn’t sit well with the triumphalism of superhero stories. The final fight being not against Thanos-as-he-is, but a Thanos-as-he-was, making the climactic mean so much less because all your heroes are fighting some other guy, in essence. Both of these could be seen as experiments in (comparative) psychological realism or subversion, but that’s not what they are meant to be – they’re just bad story choices.
But as I seem to keep saying these days, people seem to have liked it, so what do I know.
That’s it for this week. Next week will have more films and tv, I think.
