270: a crying puddle of goo
Hullo.
Penultimate
Workworkwork
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
After a bit of a longer gap than usual, we're back with Immortal X-men #17. Juan Jose Ryp joins us, stepping in after Lucas ran off to that fancy Fall Of The House of X. I've loved Ryp since I saw his stuff over at Avatar – he's got that hyper-detailed European Horror vibe which is obviously a long way from what Immortal has generally been doing, but definitely is useful when we reach this part of the story. The white hot room is increasingly the danger room Apocalypse described.
This ties in tightly with Louise Simonson's Jean Grey mini, which finished last week - it was quite fun that some key scenes of here are hinted at in there. We're falling out of time and space as much as Jean is.
It's also me doing a bit of found-poetry sampledelic Al-ewing-y stuff with Marvel history in our Narrator as not-quite-all-there Jean. Here's the pages Marvel released as a preview – it's a few pages into the issue, where Jean kicks in.
For those who are interested in this kind of thing, Mark Turetsky does the heavy lifting and sources them all over at ComicXF. Clearly I wrote it with a deep dive in mind, and weird resonances, but I was at least as much thinking of captions-as-vibe in a poetic mode rather than anything else. By this point in the exercise, to keep the narrator conceit of Immortal I have to play some games to make it fit the story.
(I mean, this has been true all along, but more so now. There's narrators in Forever, but I'm using them in a different way – or I have in the first issue. We'll see what issue 2 turns out like. Maybe they'll be back in?)
Immortal 18 out in December, which ends Immortal, which is nicely timed. Having that sort of big conclusion by the end of the year is always a nice one.
Oh – the 36 player DIE megagame I previously mentioned? Due to the new announced railstrikes, we've had a few GM drop outs. If you're able to go to Dragonmeet (December 2nd) and are able to GM DIE (for money) do feel to fill in this form.
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Tom Ewing's Popular hits the 1000th UK number 1. This has been my favourite ongoing bits of music criticism this millennium, so it's great to see it get so far. The last few essays have been golden. The Elvis triptych are a great place to jump on and get a taste to see if you like.
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Graeme McMillan has never done Thought Bubble. He went, and wrote a bunch over at Popverse including this little piece that argues Thought Bubble is the most important comics convention around. Hard to argue, because I agree.
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[Lin Codega's new newsletter after they were let go by io9 in the mass layoffs[(https://clickbaiter.substack.com/p/ill-eat-shit-and-like-it). This is some bullshit. If information is power, these lay offs have made us all weaker.
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I really liked the latest Perverse, C's online poetry magazine.
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The latest Fantastika Journal has a long essay on DIE, Detoxifying Male Fantasy: Queer Navigation of a hostile genre landscape in the comic book DIE. You'll have to download the full issue if you want to read, as the single-piece download for the essay goes to the wrong place.
Shorter one than usual today – I need to get this out quickly, as I've got a few more things to do today, and it's not as if I'm going to have any more time tomorrow.
At the weekend C said it was four weeks until Christmas, which made me inwardly dissolve into a crying puddle of goo. I checked later, and it's actually five... which is simultaneously not much better (4 vs 5 weeks) and significantly better (25% more time!) It does mean that I'm going to have to be hyper organised to wrap everything I need to before the new year. I've even expressly marked on my calendar what I'm mainly working on every day until the holidays. That isn't usual. I can normally just wing it.
(The schedule is okay – if it was 4 weeks, there would be no room for any inevitable slippage at all, but 5 weeks makes it difficult, but possible if I'm organised. This week is draft 0 of a couple of scripts for a non-comics thing, next is finishing off TPF and some extra pages for the Stephanie thing. All of that is fun, in different ways. It's hard, but still good to do. And it's not even approaching the horror of Judgment Day.)
Anyway – that's why it's shorter. I have stuff to do. Yes, I spent the last hour writing up my idea for an RPG character, but that's actually for work, believe it or not. There's also some housework stuff I need to get back to - I'm slow cooking a butternut squash curry and I'm thinking it's cooking so slowly that I'm going to have to hustle and get something else to eat. Maybe we'll order pizza, because that's an absolutely reasonable thing to swap in for an actually (relatively) healthy vegetarian meal.
Anyway that's me, how are you doing? Really, that's great. Good for you, or terrible, depending on what you said.
...are you still here? Shoo! Shoo!
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
22.11.2023