253: Andy Kelly is very good at the internet
Hullo.
End of future grimness, start of present grimness
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
1000 years in three months comes to an end, with Sins of Sinister: Dominion, where Paco, Lucas and myself wrap this up. It's been a journey. I think Si, Al and myself managed to chart this weird little space, while giving a lot of space to linger in people's minds. I hope it'll turn up in conversations a lot, in the “remember when...” way. It's that kind of book. It's a horror story, I think, but also a funny one. Is it the most 2000AD-infused crossover Marvel have ever done? Possibly.
I suspect I'll be chewing it over myself for some time – you can make comparisons to a lot of things, but none of them really get what it is. I found myself thinking this morning one odd thing about my own contributions – that, in reality, my issues are actually a 5 issue mini, with these two oversized issues as bookends. Structurally speaking, that's an interesting pressure.
Anyway – the Storm System under siege, the scale ever more escalating as the battle of Moira reach a climax and then we see exactly how all this changes Krakoa. It's all a lot. Both Paco and Lucas do some wonderful imagery herein.
Let's just show the opening splash...
...which gives the vibe, right?
You can read the rest of the preview here
Next week? Immortal X-men #11, where we pick up where this left off. What now for the Quiet Council, drenched in Sin?
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I don't read the Quietus as often as I should. However, when I do read it, I'm always glad I did. It approaches music in a way that we desperately need, and never fails to give a stage to stuff that really needs one. They're on a subscriber drive – they needing 350 more subs to prevent closing down. That'd be a huge loss. If you're an occasional reader, you should consider throwing coins at them. If you're not a reader at all, you should explore them and see what you think.
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Samantha Greer writes about her 7-8 years as a games journalist, which is depressing stuff. It's always been a difficult job unless you're very lucky, and it's only become ever more so.
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It's the 200th AIPT X-men Monday and they get basically all of us to talk about stuff. Al wins for his Marvel Snap gag, and be sure to hang around for Cerebro's Connor Goldsmith's loveletter to the Krakoan age at the end.
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Mark Stewart passed this week. Here's Nick Cave writing about him, and how much he loved the Pop Group and their impact on the early Birthday Party. The Pop Group are one of the bands that I listened too intensely for a certain periods of my life - just before and after I left Bristol. They are one of the fundamental Bristol Bands for me – for all their inaccessibility, and weird angled aggression, they lie right at the bottom of the tree which what's so great about Bristol and Bristol music grew from. I'm thinking about moving out of London, and listening to the Pop Group reminds me why I really did dig that town.
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Big FP piece on the Teixeira leaks, what they mean, and other examples of it. “Beginning in 2021, for example, secret information about weapons systems design and performance has repeatedly been posted to forums related to War Thunder, a massively multiplayer combat video game featuring highly realistic weapons. Hoping to win arguments about such details as a tank turret’s rotation speed or cajole developers into improving the realism of virtual weapons, players have posted classified armor blueprints, restricted manuals for F-16 fighter jets, and Chinese tank specifications. War Thunder’s developers have had to implore users to stop posting classified materials to the game’s forums.” There's been a lot about why he had access to the stuff, but why someone would leak it is something. Seeing people who we'd have likely have banned from the RPS forums causing the chaos is yet more weirdness of the 21st century.
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This is an excellent piece about The Northern Boys at the White Pube, which really captures a lot. People even older than I am, putting it out there, rapping about depression, self-hatred, hilariously. “The Northern Boys make comedy songs but they’re bruised black and blue; lyrics often more worrying than funny; whiplash as coping mechanism, like going on an old rollercoaster because it looks like it’s about to fall apart so it’s going to be more fun.” It almost makes me sad I have't managed to dance to this in public yet. Party Time was made for Tbubz.
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Finally, Andy Kelly is very good at the internet: If Alien (1979) ended with the credits music from Nintendo DS game Aliens Infestation (2011)
I'm going to keep this one short. I've got a few more things I'd like to get done today, as well as Iris' afternoon nap-walk, and my desire to hammer out a thousands words on Otis Reading will have to be put on hold.
Oh – out today is The Witches of World War 2.
By Paul Cornell, Valeria Burzo and Jordie Bellaire . It's an original graphic novel from TKO, and about the British Government's use of occultists during world war 2. To stress - it's real world fiction, not fantasy. I'm only half way through so far, but it's using the array of occultists in this period wonderfully – but also really humanly. For example, this is walking a great line with Crowley, who is an absolute shit without being pantomime (or rather, making clear he's doing pantomime when he's doing pantomime, the big ol' ham.) I’m looking forward to finishing reading it later.
Work has been strained. C got food poisoning, so the whole week was panic stations to make sure everything was fine. Thankfully, she's recovered now. I really only managed to get my keynote for TAGGS done, which seemed to go down well – it's a 10,000 talk which I'm sure I'll publish somewhere eventually. Probably here. I have also been thinking about whether it's time to reboot a blog. Not to write anything new for, probably, but to give a more public facing link of the best stuff from my newsletter, and perhaps to dig out some pieces from my old blog. I'm aware it's actively strange that sort-of historically important essays like The New Games Journalism are only really available in archive.org. I'll probably correct the spelling of Hemingway if I do that.
This week I'm picking up the slack from last week, properly digging into a new seeekrit project. It's going well so far – it's all synopsis work, which I'll get over next week. We'll see what they make of it. I've also been properly doing some schedule planning stuff – reaching out to artists about possible projects, talking to my publishers about my plans. I had an artist respond positively to something I suggested ages ago, which is really exciting – they're someone who I worked with a long time ago on a project I loved, and this would us finally be doing something bigger together. I suspect it won't be until 2025, but I'll be at work this year on it.
After I finish these synopsis, I'll be moving onto more deep plotting stuff. The future of X stuff is pretty intricate, and I need to get it all nailed down. That'll be for most of May, alongside writing a few more scripts.
Oh - I laughed. As predicted, the RPG stuff last week made me drop just a few subs to put me back until the payment increase threshold. This is now officially a game. Can I push it up and down to get the message from buttondown about my rates changing every week?
Finally, I just read an advance of Chip's Public Domain 7, and it is my everything. If you feel your life is missing something, and you don't read Public Domain, it's probably it. If you do read Public Domain, and you feel you're missing something, it's probably existential malaise, I'm sorry, it's hard, 21st century, eh?
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London.
26.4.2023