2024 so far + throwaway thoughts
Going out of order from the intended plan! The next newsletter was going to be my big 2023 wrapup, but a clutch of comics I was curious about from Ritesh's list I figured were no-goes have turned out to be available at my library, so that'll still be a little longer. So in the meantime, I'm moving up what was gonna be April's post.
Among other things, I want the newsletter to serve as a more comprehensive catalogue for myself of what I've been reading and watching in a given year, so here are some notable manga/OGNs/trades I've read since the beginning of 2024:
When Our Eyes Meet...A Women's Love Anthology: These were all really sweet little stories, except for one that honestly felt like a borderline homophobic fever dream but skimming out just enough to avoid a 'someone should in fact intervene here' conclusion. I can't imagine that was the intent, so I was just left sorta baffled.
How Do We Relationship Vol. 1: Totally charming college romance, I decided not to proceed further since it apparently goes into significantly more serious territory - which I don't doubt it could handle ably, but it wasn't what I signed up for, and it didn't grab me enough that I was willing to see through the tonal shift - but I found the original proof-of-concept one-off online and that was a totally satisfying 'conclusion'.
The Kingdom of the Gods/Burning Hell: The initial period piece zombie adventure written by Kim Eun-hee (I think? I'm seeing her as providing the initial idea online, but I swear Youn In-wan was listed as providing it in the edition I read with her as the scriptwriter) was a decent if largely forgettable little escapade. But the backup action-horror feature by Youn In-Wan with mutual artist Yang Kyung-il is one of the rawest things I have ever read; I don't even want to reveal the premise, but depending on your stomach for the grisly, this is 100% worth a library checkout, and I may want to look into their other collaborations Blade of the Phantom Master and Defense Devil.
To Your Eternity Vol. 1-3: Honestly not entirely sure what to make of it yet, especially as it feels like the kind of comic where the very premise is going to slowly but radically shift over time. But some gorgeous art and properly heartwrenching moments mean I'll be happy to see where it leads.
Secret: The most significant Hickman book I hadn't read yet (besides the final act of East of West, which I still wanna track down a hardcover of someday), his collab here with the much-missed Ryan Bodenheim isn't one of the absolute must-haves of his oeuvre, but as a fan felt like slipping under a warm blanket.
Gachiakuta Vol. 1: New battle manga I thought looked worth giving a shot, but sadly this one hasn't got the juice folks, rote as rote gets for the execution of these sorts of things. Especially as shame as Kei Urana's designs and sequential work occasionally pop with some real visceral kinetic energy, if he improves his scripts or hooks up with the right writer I could see him becoming someone interesting down the line.
Heartstopper: I checked out the first couple volumes of Alice Oseman's hit sometime last year and thought it was cute but not so much so I was gonna pay continuous attention to it. However, now it's got that 'UK's fastest-selling graphic novel ever' status affixed to it, so I'm occasionally reading it on Webtoons so as to stay abreast of the zeitgeist. And, y'know, still cute!
Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku Vol. 1: Completely rules. I was delighted with Kaku's tragically short-lived Ayashimon and wanted to check out his prior work, and I actually love this even more. Brutal, funny, wrenching, loaded to bear with great characters and fun ideas, this is a pretty much perfect adult action serial, highest recommendation.
The Liminal Zone: My first Junji Ito, I suspect this wasn't an ideal entry point but I enjoyed everything in here to varying degrees, especially the one in the forest.
Friday Book One: The First Day of Christmas: 'Brubaker/Martin riff on stuff like Nancy Drew' sounded like a sure thing but I honestly didn't care for this at all, big disappointment.
I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee: Scioli doesn't have the passion for the subject to hoist this above 'rote recitation of the history' the way his previous Kirby book (usually) managed, but the extended montage-y nature of the back chunk of the book does an increasingly effective job of portraying Stan as a man ultimately adrift and helpless within the riptide of his own unfurling place in pop culture.
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End Vol. 1-2: Ended up checking this out due to Tradespotting's endorsement and I'm glad I did, some lovely work here perfect for sedate bedtime reading.
Chainsaw Man Chapter 1: Most of what's listed here have been library checkouts, but I read one chapter of this and immediately knew I'm buying the boxset and catching up at my earliest convenience in time for Vol. 15 (which drops on my birthday!). I've been hearing for years this was the IT comic of this moment in time, and after the slightest dip into yeah you all were not fucking around.
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind Deluxe Edition Vol. 1 (the equivalent of Vol. 1-4): Finally started reading this classic, and given my limited experience with Miyazaki, I was expecting a 'mystical journey' type of story and was not exactly braced for the kind of war comic where one character will be giving another CPR and has to spit out the blood the recipient is vomiting into their mouth. Maybe not exactly on my frequency but absolutely top-tier work, I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
Camelot 3000: This has been on my list of stuff to finally get to since having watched Excalibur in 2022 and getting a foothold in Arthuriana, and despite affection for both creators I did not care much for this one at all. Kind of the embodiment of my issues with the Bronze Age despite being at best on the tail end of that, Brian Bolland people doing dramatic, sexy, cool, horrifying things with Gardner Fox dialogue vomiting out of their mouths...but the end is one of the hardest things I've ever read, so who is to say if it's good or bad? Anyway I expect to finally do a collective reread of Gillen and Mora's Once & Future in the not-too-distant future following this, so that'll be nice.
Is Love The Answer?: One-volume manga that caught my eye and it was really sweet, I quite enjoyed it.
The Tea Dragon Society: For whatever reason my LCS was selling copies of this at the counter despite being printed four years ago and I'm glad it was. Sedate would be the word for it in much the same way as Frieren despite being a very different kind of comic, with the 'pamphlet' format suiting it incredibly well. I'll for sure check out its two followups, The Tea Dragon Festival and The Tea Dragon Tapestry, if I ever come across them.
Lunar New Year Love Story: The new Gene Yang book, this time illustrated by Leuyen Pham, I don't think it'll make my best of 2024 but I did quite like it. If anything the titular love story was the least interesting part to me - very, well, teenagery - but there's an argument to be made that's somewhat deliberate, with the love story in question only serving as a representation for and gateway to main character Val's larger struggle in opening up given the pain those same efforts have caused everyone else in her life. By all means worth checking out.
Vinland Saga Vol. 1: One of the other big recognized modern classics that, as I evidently enter my manga era, I knew I had to check out. I'm not immediately deeply emotionally engaged with it to the extent other readers might be - though it definitely does have me engaged - but the sheer power of the craft is completely undeniable, I'm for sure in this for the long haul.
In Utero: My first Chris Gooch, definitely not my last, tidily effective little tale of alienation and friendship wrapped up in my favorite kind of sharp, atmospheric sci-fi thriller comics.
Sand Land: I read Akira Toriyama's one-off book about a bunch of goofs in a tank - which he immediately regretted because it turns out drawing a tank is a pain in the ass - a long time ago, but with the unthinkable news of his passing I wanted to reread something of his. Another testament on a pile of them that he was, in fact, the best to ever do it.
As a sidenote, on the cinematic side this year I've so far watched Princess Arete (a 2001 anime that was free on Youtube for a month, an utterly gorgeous treat worth tracking down), French Roast (a 2008 Oscar-nominated animated short, fun little thing), and Adaptation (a Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman 2002 film starring Nicolas Cage as Kaufman depicting his own effort to make this movie, a masterpiece and immediately one of my favorite movies, highest recommendation).
The other classic I've tried for the first time in 2024 along with everything above (and one not-so-classic I'll also be discussing bellow). Funny thing about Akira is I could swear I gave it a shot years and years ago - the early bits feel familiar, or maybe I just flipped through it casually - but I must've decided against it as too intense and weird for me at the time. Shame on me because this is as good as I'd always heard, Otomo's aesthetic fingerprints are all over pop culture and the book hauls.
What most stuck out to me as a sign of just how good this is was a throwaway moment that would normally represent 'bad' storytelling: when Tetsuo accuses Kaneda at a critical moment of having always been bossy, when this is barely if at all indicated by the previous text. It feels facile for that lack of support. But we have no real reason to doubt it either: Kaneda's a piece of shit. A casual attempted rapist who pays no mind to the classmate he knocked up and who (thus far seems to have) quickly and fairly cheerfully acclimated himself to killing to survive, while not one-dimensionally vile it's easy to believe any accusations of asshole behavior made against him. And he and Tetsuo are products of their environment in the bluntest possible fashion, dumped in a crumbling school and told to their faces by authority figures no one has any interest or faith in their future, while the powers that be are spending enough money to buy enough bombs to destroy the Earth "hundreds of times over" in a futile effort to control an even greater power still. And for all that effort, everything they've desperately hoarded fell out of their hands into the generation they fucked over and poisoned, the power to rock or break the world now belonging to shallow little dipshits ready to kill each other over one of them maybe having been too bossy to the other awhile back. It's subtle, powerful communication of just how absurd and tragic the stakes are here.
(Knowing little of what's coming, I assume it's going to be pretty thematically significant the big powers here look like the old men who run the world, but are in fact themselves just helpless barely-comprehending kids.)
My final text to discuss this time around; my unashamed childhood love of the Ultimate line and my deeply ashamed childhood love of Supreme Power collided in finally finding that time they beat the snot out of each other on a half-off shelf. Pure coming-home comics for me, prime-era Bendis and JMS could write this kind of trash joy cape comics drama in their sleep and I'd happily eat it up forever. Then the last three issues it dies bad on the vine as I pretty much assumed it would coming from late-00s Loeb, but as predictable as it was, there was one thing I didn't see coming that sort of fascinated me:
It turns out there are right and wrong ways to use Greg Land.
Here's a truth about Greg Land: I kinda love him, or at least the work from his heyday on the likes of his year on Ultimate Fantastic Four that was a seminal read for me growing up. I'm 100% aware of all of his flaws but when I see his stuff I understand a little the people who rock with Liefeld to this day. What he does is flashy and overpolished and cartoonishly bursting with meathead vigor and it scratches an itch in my brain little else quite does, and even obvious tracing aside, what he does is what idiot AI bros think ‘their’ 'work' does. Put him on a big dopey mid 2000s comic about a bunch of slick rebooted superheroes getting into crass chaos, and it completely sincerely feels right.
That energy is something some creators know how to use, or at least function in spite of. You can think Land’s style and ethos suck but typically as long as you know what you're doing he’ll get his end of it done too, which is why thoughtful craftsmen like Gillen and Ewing were able to deal with him, whereas pair him with a tepid writer and it’s going to be basically unreadable. Bendis and JMS get how to script for Land’s widescreen bullshit, even managing to let him get garishly overdynamic with the talking head scenes; Loeb crowds the pages with generic posing aside from the odd ‘right, right, this is widescreen, gotcha’ double page splash and Land’s too cramped to make anything work, and the chatting dissolves to generic back-and-forth when Loeb stuffs full exchanges in single panels instead of stretching them out to let Land go crazy with the expressions. I realized the problem is he’s basically overstuffing it with junk dialogue and totally blunt ‘and then this happened, and then THIS happened’ execution that ain't great on its own but is cataclysmic as applied to this style, whereas Bendis and JMS understood Land was maximalist enough for the both of them and let him off the leash as needed.
I didn't know until reading this I had that many thoughts on the subject of Greg Land, but along with a reminder that we all have our out of left field favorites, it's often worth some effort to pick apart the stuff that most would dismiss as crap. If nothing else, there are some occasionally interesting gradations to these things.
I had my first big Superman brainstorm in awhile that I discussed with some friends at the time, and I figured it's something folks who follow me would probably be interested. I mull over the animating impulses behind how people think about and use the character plenty, and I think a lot of things we've observed over the years, such as but not limited to:
The collective fandom need for the complete Zack Snyder story, or at least a movie where he fights a sufficiently enormous space monster.
The 'son of Superman' narrative taking hold across multiple media such that it's even able to take off most of all with a non-Superman character in Invincible.
A subset of fandom I can personally attest to the existence of who very seriously go 'yeah you know where Superman should spend way more time? ALMERAC. Or WARWORLD. Those are where he can have his Game of Thrones adventures!'
Requests for an all-encompassing The Life & Times Of-type project, or to relitigate the origin again on a bigger scale than before ala what Batman got with Zero Year, or to give him a Hush covering all the major touchstones of the 'lore' even though there's already a common consensus among the same types who would request such a thing that Up, Up, and Away! pretty much fulfills that function.
...are to greater and lesser degrees prompted by a gnawing, unspoken, largely unrealized feeling there is no Superman Epic.
The obvious instinctive answer before you even think through the implications of that is 'ok but All-Star', but for all its evocations and grandeur, it's almost aggressively provincial by big Superman story standards, mostly concerned with personal drama and minor dust-ups confined to our humble solar system - the two big widescreen fight issues in #7 and #11 are pretty much everyone's least favorites, and the quest to another realm in #8 is basically a shitpost. Morrison's Action is closer in spite of our guy's lousy costume for half of it, but too (semi-deliberately) fragmentary to give that feeling - if anything Superman in there is the Frodo to Mxyzptlk's Aragorn, and he doesn't even know it. Fourth World and New Frontier he's the supporting figure in others' stories; Up In The Sky is essentially a series of short stories with a common theme rather than Woman of Tomorrow's stronger narrative spine; Swan, bless him, isn't the guy who gets a story like Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? to popularly regarded 'epic' status; Exile, Warworld, and Space Age are loaded with weighty signifiers and hit a lot of you'd imagine theoretically relevant beats, but are overly niche conceptually (and imo juiceless); Red Son and Secret Identity are obviously offbrand; Birthright and other origins tread the most familiar ground and that makes them feel too small-scale to fit the bill; Death is just a big punchup across a bunch of neighborhoods. Superman Beyond is probably what it actually 'should' be, but it's simply too obscure since DC didn't follow Morrison's plan to collect and market it as its own OGN that could function independent of Final Crisis.
Batman, GL, Thor, Daredevil, Hulk, the Avengers, the X-Men, they've all got Epics, touching on every major aspect of their worlds and pushing it all to the most dizzying possible heights. Some more than one. Some even have sub-epics within their larger ones! But the ostensibly biggest, most important, most central figure of the genre doesn't have a thing that obviously matches that sense of sweep and ostentatious import without huge caveats, no appropriately grandiose Ultimate Showdown For All He Stands For Against Gravest Odds perennial or long-running beloved run or coherent movie series or prestige TV series. For awhile '78 was The Superman Epic plain and simple, but that was a matter of presentation and doing what it was doing for the first time, which inevitably faded; the Maggin novels fit the bill pretty well around the same time for dorks like me but are MAJORLY out of the way. What did fulfill the function pretty unambiguously for a good long time was Kingdom Come, a lush and massive story involving Superman's whole world traversing across realms and eras with apocalyptic stakes, opening with him alone in the last remains of Krypton and ending with him a citizen of Earth again as Clark reborn in Smallville. But we've pretty comprehensively kicked that by the wayside compared to the years of mentioning it in the same breath as Watchmen and DKR, and without realizing it, left a gaping hole in the iconography of the 'myth'. Snyder like it or not was in the business of filling that hole, on a much larger scale than Kingdom Come ever did in the first place on the public stage, but got cut off halfway. And so without being able to fully articulate the sort of childish, primal notion of "I want the biggest, most important thing to have ever happened to the biggest, most important superhero, to happen", people go spinning off into a dozen semi-related theses and pitches.
Unrelated to artistic quality, but I imagine a lot of this would be a lot quieter if Morrison had done those All-Star spinoffs they considered at one point, and if we're really going for it on purely these terms turning Mechano Man into good 'ol Metallo so everything 'classically important' would be fully acknowledged. Superman's big first adventure as an upstart ascending to his throne in SUPERMAN VERSUS SATAN, his most meaningful feats and final stand in THE 12 LABORS OF SUPERMAN, the tale of a new hero rising in his place in THE SON OF SUPERMAN, and the revelation of the ultimate legacy of his efforts in THE MEN OF TOMORROW, all under the ALL-STAR SUPERMAN banner, one big sprawling thing nobody would contest as the absolute definitive Superman text covering the whole thing tip to tail. As is, the 'definitive' Superman story exists in the unbridgeable gaps between Morrison's stuff, however you square that in your head (heck, I'm pretty sure I do differently from Morrison).
Even that would have been temporary though; Superman encompasses too much, shifts too much, and is even at his baseline too radically recontextualized by the march of time for any truly final statement on the character to stand. By all means there might be something to fill that void again for awhile! Maybe Gunn dropping the Legacy from the 2025 movie's title and defaulting to the simple, definitive Superman suggests he's swinging for the fences in a way that'll really pay off. My Adventures With Superman seems like it wants to operate in that arena, starting on Earth but very gradually unfurling Superman's backstory, recognizable touchstones, and escalating threats against the backdrop of some some epochal cosmic war connected to his Kryptonian roots; it doesn't have the budget or cultural reach for the time being to achieve those aspirations to the extent they might want, but with its popularity and surprising success I wouldn't be shocked if it stuck to a generation as 'their' Superman story. Maybe WB isn't lying that Coates is still puttering on his standalone movie. Mark Millar repeatedly said he wanted to take his stab at it sson, though after his big public Comicsgate-ish blowup last December I doubt it's in the cards. Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch are making their run with The Last Days of Lex Luthor even if I imagine the stakes are too intimate and the structure too obviously checklisty for it to occupy that slot, much as I'm enjoying it. Tom King hasn't made any secret he's pretty much just marking his time until he can do his big Superman thing, and word on the street is Scott Snyder's taking another shot soon. Personally I'm rooting for that Juni Ba 1938-far future story he mentioned wanting to do last year. But eventually creators will fiddle around with him some more, and our collective social thoughts on the ideas Superman exists in reaction to and the ideas that exist in reaction to Superman will all shuffle around, and we'll be back at square one. And y'know, that's pretty neat.
But in the meantime if someone could write this thing and get everyone to calm the hell down, that'd also be swell.
And that's that for now! Ton of reading still ahead, which feels a bit silly when my thoughts on the various 2023 books will be a lot more concise than the 2022 writeups were, but if the point of this is mainly 'hey, here are some good comics you may want to check out' I'd like to really make the rounds. Anyway, I was also saving something for that post in the spirit of 'and as we put 2023 behind us and move into the new year...' but it fits here just as well: I have another new script to offer paying illustration work on! The horror one I mentioned last year was accepted awhile back, and I let the artist there know they can work on it casually at their leisure. I put together another for something that didn't work out and now I've got a four-pager burning a hole in my pocket, reach out to me if you'd be up for doing something a little odd and impressionistic for what's thus far been a rate of $100 a page.