Catching up, followups, followthrough
How busy have I been the last few months such that I’m just now posting this?
I kept a running tally of my notable media intake besides single-issue comics since I last shared in April, and this ended up way too much to coherently cover, so anybody on Patreon, feel free to ask me to elaborate on any of them in a subsequent post.
Comics: Nijigahara Holograph, Opus, Tokyo These Days Vol. 1-2, Boys Run The Riot Vol. 1-4, Blankets, Pearl Vol. 1, Kaya Book One, Vinland Saga Vol. 2-3, Alice in Borderland Vol. 1-2, Sensor, eve, the Treasure of the Black Swan, Ranger Reject Vol. 10, Choujin X Vol. 6, Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man 17-21/22-26, Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector In The World, Fire Punch Vol. 1-3, Eden II, The Serrated Knife, Curses, The Boxer Vol. 5-6, To Your Eternity Vol. 4, The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Vol. 4, The Modular Man, Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong, Blue Period Vol. 1-9 (1-4 being rereads now that I’ve bought the series), Bleach Vol. 29-32, Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku Vol. 3-4, hirayasumi Vol. 1, WOE: A Housecat’s Story Of Despair, Kommix
TV: Doctor Who, My Adventures With Superman, A Gentleman In Moscow, Batman: Caped Crusader
Prose (long): Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023, Culture and Imperialism (wasn’t able to do all four chapters while I had it out of the library - this is a dense one! - so so far I’ve done Chapter One, OVERLAPPING TERRITORIES, INTERTWINED HISTORIES, and Chapter Two, CONSOLIDATED VISIONS), The Dark Forest (Part I: The Wallfacers)
Prose (short): Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World (I’ve had Vandana Singh’s Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories on my list of stuff to check out for some time), World Memory, Amnesty, The Help Hotline, The Book of Martha
Online videos: The Amazing Digital Circus, not in front of the babysitter
Movies: The Fall Guy, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Fruitvale Station
Mulling over Al Ewing further since my previous post focused on him, I’ve come to a foundational realization of what it is he’s good at. I maintain my stance that he’s really good at most of the business of making comic books and that in part it’s because of that it’s been difficult to point to any one factor as ‘his thing’. But at last, I cracked what it is he excels at above all:
Haunted Men.
His novel work before making the hop to American comics with El Sombra and Doc Thunder. Taking Jennifer Blood from Garth Ennis and making it about a Haunted Woman so in denial of that reality she destroys her entire world. Loki (half the time), Blue Marvel as the Haunted Superman and one of his Marvel go-tos, Nova and Rocket and the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Magneto. Hulk as his breakout. Georges Malik as the POV of the first and best book of We Only Find Them When They’re Dead. Doctor Doom every chance he gets, his cartoonish sense of humor and grandiosity and aptitude for self-flagellating self-important torment finding their perfect point of union. If you give Al Ewing a guy whose every choice in his life is still burning in his side like a knife, whose every instinct to pull himself out of the tailspin drives it down deeper? The saddest of bastards, whose only desire left is salvation and whose only remaining conviction is that he doesn’t deserve it? That’s where he goes from ‘if you like Al Ewing, pick up ___’ to ‘this is a must-buy’. Aside from the raft of depressing noir titles he should be pumping out, unfortunately this means he should be put on Batman immediately.
Following up on a couple other things that have developed since I last wrote about them: Justin asked about my coming to terms with a sense of perpetual anticlimax surrounding big two at this point, and I forgot to mention that there’s a real sense for me that as shared universe I’m invested in, Marvel concluded for me with Secret Wars (2015), and DC with Future State (the latter with Superman and The Authority and the soon-concluding Ram V Detective Comics as lovely epilogues); anything on top of those is just gravy in that regard. By the same token, for instance, I think of My Adventures With Superman and The Batman Epic Crime Saga as the definitive current interpretations of those characters, and anything besides those are nice but not what really matters.
Though speaking of new interpretations, and following up on another recent ask of Justin’s:
Well. I feel like it would probably take 30 seconds to explain why doing the New 52 and Rebirth (or more accurately the third tiny pseudo-Rebirth in a row) at the same time isn’t the smartest, but here we are. I really, really don’t get what the unifying pitch to this is meant to be in practice beyond ‘whatever Scott thought sounded sick’, especially opposite Ultimate, but as for the individual books:
Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta: This sounds intensely dopey but it looks gorgeous and I can’t imagine this won’t be some kind of fun.
Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman: I haven’t checked out anything of Thompson’s in a long time, but I like Sherman and the pitch is potentially interesting, so what the heck.
Absolute Superman by Jason Aaron and Rafa Sandoval: Man idk, I’m kinda potentially into this. About a decade and change late though it may be, there’s an aesthetic commitment to this as Edgelord Superman that the New 52 and Snyder both couldn’t bring themselves to embrace; Sandoval looks comfier drawing this than he ever did with the regular Superman if you ask me. And Aaron’s had a lot of misses lately to be sure, but if he really buckles down and approaches this as a ‘serious’ take with the kind of pared-down clarity of something like his original PunisherMAX run with Steve Dillon rather than following his current inclination towards overwrought pulp prose, I think he could be a really, really interesting fit for the material.
Absolute Flash by Jeff Lemire and Nick Robles: I’m a hater of Lemire on capes, but I have to admit Wally sans Barry is an opportunity for some truly meaningful character definition, and if it’s in the form of Wally dealing with his dad who sucks, that might actually be the kind of thing Jeff is a good fit for. In any case probably worth it for Robles alone.
Absolute Green Lantern by Al Ewing and Jahnoy Lindsay: I called when he was first being rumored that if anyone was going to go ‘so this is an Earth-Two to Earth-One hop? So this should be a new character then’ it’d be Al. Apparently Hal is going to be in this too though along with John and Jo…Al…make him haunted, Al…
So I guess I’m curious about all of these even if I’m not sold on it as a line. Aside from those obviously V/Cagle New Gods is going to be An Event, I’m very curious to see if Watters can pull off the kind of miracle rehab with Soy on Nightwing that Spurrier has with The Flash, Waid and Mora on Justice League Unlimited should be fun, and hey, I’ll take a year’s worth of Waid/Henry Action Comics condensed into three months. As batting averages go for this sort of linewide facelift, not bad. Not beating the ‘oh direct-market monthly single-issue superhero comics are ENDING-ending sooner rather than later’ allegations when you talk about this as a VALIANT EFFORT to DEFY THE CAPE-SKEPTICS though.
Farewell to Shortbox, a publisher of fun and fine contemporary comics. I like to think I would’ve gotten around to them at some point the way my attention has been going recently, but I decided to avail myself of their going out of business sale, and committed via Patreon vote to finding something to say about them. Along with what wound up my main object of interest critically speaking, I grabbed (with many of these still being available through the likes of Silver Sprocket):
Cuckoo/Homunculus: A pair of fun sci-fi stories by Joe Sparrow, not much to say but I dug them both, very comfy reads.
Minotaar: Definitely felt consciously in the tradition of Giant Days, which is hardly a bad thing. Kinda comic that melts in your mouth like cotton candy.
Pass the Baton: ‘s alright.
She Would Feel The Same: I’m not sure if I’m the right person or in the right place for what this was going for, but I can imagine it hitting like a truck for those who are.
At The Edge Of The Stream At Dusk: Very different vibe, but similar conclusion to the above.
a cat’s day: Cute, one or two moments that really landed for me, but I can’t say I was overly taken with it.
Mending a Rift: Cozy, but not much there there imo.
Don’t Go Without Me (+ What Is Left + Con Temor, Con Ternura): …well god damn. I loved Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s work on Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me with the Tamakis but hadn’t connected the dots that she was the cartoonist here until after the fact, and these were astonishing, my favorite of the batch. What Is Left while strong didn’t land for me as powerfully as the others, but Con Temor, Con Ternura and the titular Don’t Go Without Me completely knocked me on my ass, lush and poetic and overwhelmingly intimate and as haunting as it feels healing. I’m going to have to order her Golden Record from Silver Sprocket in the VERY near future, excellent chance I missed out on one of 2023’s best after all. Also, minor spoiler, I would like to ask her if she also played Chain of Memories growing up.
Sobek: Oh Stokoe, you just know how to make me happy don’t you.
Beneath The Dead Oak Tree: Another comic by Emily Carroll, the creator of my 2023 favorite a Guest in the House, and it moves with an elegant, measured rhythm in its limited space that made it feel like a fairy tale I’d grown up hearing a hundred times. I see a lot of her other work is freely available on her website, so I’ll have to get to those.
What prompted the most thought in me however was the very first comic I cracked open:
As a critic and a reader, I’ve come to realize how preoccupied I am with context. I like to write about things where I know and can place the subject within a larger web of connections and influences and consequences; it’s a part of why I’ve been reading so much more far-afield work as you can see above than I have in years past, trying to expand the context I can work with. I like when a preexisting context is heavily informing when I’m engaging with in ways surprising and inevitable, which is probably part of why I’m drawn to big shared universes.
And having come to realize that about myself recently, moving by Luis Yang served as a reminder of the power of context on the scale of an isolated short story. Its ability to not just clarify but further complicate, to open up how you read into something in transformative and unique ways, rather than the simplicity of ‘well, now that you know a little more, it all makes sense’. Every line, every passing interaction, every choice of shading and outline and framing of space, can be reframed with the right reason to reconsider, and in this case it turned an already moving, atmospheric short into a piece of art I imagine I’ll be referring back to for years to come for the power of its demonstration.
Sean Dillon
What is your process when writing a comic script?
Generally, I free-associate a list of ideas and beats I want to hit as a baseline to refer to kept at the top of the script until it’s done. Then I bullet-point out what I want to do in order, and expand on those further and further - guesstimating how much goes on each page accounting for dialogue and layout and character breathing room, getting out the basic dialogue prior to fine-tuning, etc. - until I’ve outlined the full story with a preliminary understanding of what’ll be happening on each page. It’s from there I start writing it out ‘properly’.
Okay! Been awhile, but I know what I’m doing next and I no longer have a readthrough on the scale the Shortbox books presented ahead of me, so Primary Color Horizons should be returning to the slightly steadier one-a-month clip we’ve grown accustomed to.