If you're reading this, I'd like to thank you for taking a chance on this newsletter. The idea came to me some time ago as I came across a realization:
Twitter sucks as a platform to be voicing my genuine thoughts and feelings.
It simply is not a platform built for discussions, or waxing poetic about whatever topic I want; at least, not for me. The format is too short, and I can't be arsed to divide my thoughts out across multiple 280-character chunks in a way that won't be misconstrued by some stranger on the internet. Twitter's for me being an absolute dumbass, my serious thoughts are for my articles that people (usually) pay me for.
But I also couldn't be pitching those ideas and thoughts to the various editors I work with, since sometimes those ideas are just that: ideas; products of my stream of consciousness that lack structure. I realized opening a Medium account would be too tiresome, so I decided to go for the more intimate option of opening a newsletter, mainly as a means to getting thoughts off my head and in print without airing it to the whole internet.
Naming this was probably the hardest thing. For two whole seconds, I considered cheekily naming this Spherical Speculations, but I realized that I'd be setting myself up for career failure with that one. I tried iterating through all the possible puns I could generate with my pen name, and looked at the way other smarter people were naming their newsletters. I opted for a title that would stand out, a title that would aptly describe the content of my newsletter, which was something....esoteric. I hear your groans and unsubscription attempts already, and I apologize in advance.
In terms of goals for this newsletter, I want to give readers something to chew on, let off extant thoughts, and peel the curtain back just a tad on the things I'm working on, all free from the whims of the tight reins of the eldritch being that is the editor. I've yet to determine a proper rhythm for how I'll be releasing these, except that I won't be spamming your inboxes. Also, this one will be long as I drain the reservoir for all it's worth, but future entries will be shorter, I swear.
Memory is a fickle thing. I consider myself to be something of a selectively forgetful person myself, being able to remember events from when I was a toddler, yet unable to remember minor tasks while scrolling through Twitter. Hell, even writing this has been an exercise in remembering the points I wanted to bring up when I initially decided on this topic. But memory's been on the mind (ironically) thanks to a bunch of things I've been watching and reading this week.
I'm currently in the midst of a Kamen Rider marathon, which came straight off the heels of a recent Power Rangers marathon (I've already written about the latter and I've got one more in the pipeline for it).
The Power Rangers marathon does factor into this topic. It was spurred by me noticing that Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, the first season of the show that I watched in full, was on Netflix (where it sadly isn't anymore). The nostalgia-induced foray back into that one season to see how it aged turned into me slowly working through all the other seasons I'd watched as a child, which then turned into me working through every season of the near-30-year-old franchise. After I'd finished the latest season, Beast Morphers (a season I liked, in case you were curious), I was filled with a bit of melancholy and emptiness, having finished the marathon I'd started just a month and a half earlier.
So of course I did what any smart person would do and immediately dived into another series to fill that hole, which ended up with me rewatching various seasons of Kamen Rider, and watching some for the first time.
[Skip this if you don't want to have to endure my pocket history of Kamen Rider]
For the uninitiated, Kamen Rider is a Tokusatsu show in the vein of Power Rangers and Ultraman, created by Shotaro Ishinomori back in 1971. No giant robots, no giant kaiju, just a guy (or multiple guys and gals, depending on the season) in a suit, beating the shit out of monsters.
It did get two American adaptations (just as its sister series, Super Sentai, did with Power Rangers), the first being a rather uh....it was an adaptation, alright. After Saban had adapted the latest KR series at the time, Kamen Rider Black RX into the short-lived Masked Rider, Saban et. al. did what Americans do best and they stopped trying. It would get another adaptation in the mid-2000s for the CW called Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight, adapting Kamen Rider Ryuki. I haven't watched it yet (though it's sitting very legally on my hard drive), but I've heard mixed things about it.
Toei, the company responsible for producing Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, has been staunchly averse to bringing Kamen Rider to the West, leaving any and all means of accessing the series in the West under the category of "Very not legal". With this year being the series' 50th anniversary, they have started uploading the first two episodes of various seasons to their YouTube channel, fully subbed in English, and it looks like they've got more plans for next week too.
[Okay, you can stop skipping now]
I've been hop-skipping around the series chronology, watching the seasons that interest me the most at a given time, and the most recent season I've finished is Kamen Rider Den-O. It's about a teen (the titular Kamen Rider Den-O), his four genie demons, and their time-travelling train as they traverse time to save time. They're joined by his kinda-brother-in-law, a man out of time fighting against his own looming erasure from existence.
It's a season that hit me emotionally far more times than I was expecting it to, especially given the premise (trains). It tackles concepts like living in the present, found families, and memory. Most importantly, it reinvigorated the resentment I have towards North America's averseness to trains.
What does it mean to forget what's important to you, and is a person truly dead if they're not forgotten? What power does a memory hold, and how does time affect memory? The series presents people and Imagin (the aforementioned genie demons' species) forgotten by everyone in the real world as lost, transient beings, drifting endlessly in the sands of time. It got me thinking about that old adage of a person dying twice: once at the end of their life, and again when the last person to remember them dies.
My grandfather died early last year. In some regards, one could call it lucky that he managed to catch the last train out before COVID really hit, but I digress. I remember a lot of things about him: what he looked like, what kind of person he was, and oddly enough, what he sounded like. But I always wonder about, and am sometimes scared of, what it would be like to forget that.
Sri Lankans don't really have the best archive of familial histories (both due to tradition and a little thing called British-colonialism-induced-civil-war-devastation), so the concept of preserving these things has been a rather recent concept. My mom (bless her heart) loves to document things by taking pictures and videos of everything, even the most mundane events. I'm sure that she has some recording of my grandfather somewhere on some SD card or something, and I always wonder if the anxiety of ensuring that our family is documented well enough for future generations to look back on is something that hangs over her. With older generations getting well, older, the opportunities to preserve these stories becomes more and more of a difficult task. I would like to sit down with the older generation of my family soon and document these stories in a nice big tome to pass onto future generations, but alas, time (and travel restrictions) is a fickle thing.
My memory is what got me to the point of watching this show: the memories of watching Power Rangers in my childhood provoked me to try and relive that experience in rewatching it, which in turn spurred me to try and revisit another era of my history in rewatching Kamen Rider. The whole debate surrounding weaponizing nostalgia is a whole can of worms in and of itself, but frankly, I've been finding a lot of comfort in revisiting these shows, so... *shrugs*.
But the audiovisual realm isn't the only medium to induce thinking thoughts about memory for me this week, as two (yes, count 'em, two) comics I read this week induced similar thoughts.
[Spoilers for X-Men #19 and King in Black: Ghost Rider inbound]
X-Men #19: While I don't think it's the highest of highs when it comes to Hickman's roller coaster of an X-Men run, this was still an issue that hit for me. The issue was rather weak when it came to things like Laura-verine, particularly in how it appeals to the male gaze and removes her voice and autonomy, but its focus on Synch as the issue's narrator and protagonist was done quite well.
Hickman's got a huge focus on the long-term with this era of the X-Men franchise, from looking ahead thousands of years into the future of mutantkind to lobbing out ideas haphazardly throughout his run to pick up a year or two down the line. This issue's focus on how Synch's memories persisted after several centuries of struggle and endurance really connected with me. The importance of Synch's memory, both in the knowledge provided to Krakoa, and also the memories he chooses to cherish after those centuries of pain, but more importantly, love, carries a tacit weight.
Synch is the only person to emerge from the Vault with his memories intact, meaning only he carries the memories of who Laura and Darwin, his two colleagues, were in that Vault. The latter two emerge from their pods reset to the state they were at prior to entering the Vault, effectively leaving them as two wholly different people than the ones Synch knew not too long ago. But in some sense, the versions of them that died in the Vault still live, both in what they were able to accomplish, and through what Synch remembers of them.
In an era where mutants have seemingly achieved physical immortality, the choice to focus on conceptual immortality sets this issue apart from the rest of the run.
King in Black: Ghost Rider: this is a story that angers me. Not the story, or the way it's written, drawn, lettered, coloured, etc., but rather, what it represents. My good friend (A title I'm using lest he find himself reading this) Rob has already written a splendid article that basically encapsulates a lot of the feelings I have towards this capstone issue. But now that the issue's out, the cards have been set (and reset), and that chapter has been seemingly closed, I figured it's time for a bit of a post-mortem.
Ghost Rider (2019) wasn't a perfect run, but it wasn't a long one either, lasting 7 main issues, one special issue, and an annual-turned-one-shot. But it came swinging with big ideas and big promises, seeking to nurture an underfed portion of the Marvel mythos. To cut the run so short feels like the decrepit corporate hands have come down slashing and chopping, cutting this plant off at its stem before it could even blossom. The issue itself reads like the dying gasps of a soul escaping its mortal vessel, begging to the reader to give it another chance. Seeing all these ideas cut off and rendered to the abyss reminded me of the sands of time from Kamen Rider Den-O; like many ideas before it, and many to eventually befall this same fate, these concepts are now stuck in purgatory, roaming the sands of time endlessly until a future writer remembers their existence.
As the comics industry hits its second 90s (another Heroes Reborn, another Clone Saga, another short-term bubble for artists to fall for, get burned, and destroy the industry with) a lot of those roaming ideas have returned, for better or worse. I didn't exist for most of the 90s, so I don't have the same nostalgia for Donny Cates et. al. bringing back, say, Scream, as the regulars at my local comic shop might. But to them, Cates, and those who remember these characters and these stories, their return holds importance to them, insofar as their return also creates new memories for newer generations to latch onto.
Memory holds such an incredible power, and it's a power that moves mountains in the comics industry. I'm not sure which writer will be the first to pull Death Rider or King of Hell Johnny Blaze out from the sands of time, but I'll be sure to remember it.
Not a lot, honestly. I'm Lazy, okay? I'm currently in a conceptual phase, thinking out ideas for future pieces and seeing which ones are worth pursuing. I'm at a point where I've got a sizeable backlog, so I've always got something to work on, so again, it really all boils down to my unwillingness to actually work on those things. I've also been trying to recuperate my drive to just sit down and work on writing, which has been thrown out of whack with my job throwing the schedule I'd been following for almost a year out of whack.
But as I'm easing into a groove with work, things are starting to smooth out with my writing workflow (as evidenced with this newsletter). There's a lot of projects that I'm excited to delve into in the near future; my main hope is that all of them are able to get published. I think my next big goal is to expand my horizons and write for as many outlets as I can before the end of the year. But as a nice little tease, here are some tentative titles for a few of them; see if you can guess what each one is about:
The one project I can and will talk about, for the sake of lighting a fire under my ass to get it done, is the interview I conducted with Chuck Austen almost two months ago (fuck), which I've been trying to eke away at to make the transcription presentable enough to be published. Good news is that Chuck was very nice and insightful during the interview, and I hope to be able to get that across through this interview series (we talked for almost 3 hours). Once I figure out a workflow that'll allow me to play-pause the recorded audio without having to exit out of Google Docs, it's just a matter of sitting down and blasting through it.
If you've made it this far, and are choosing to stay subscribed after reading all this: thank you, truly. Being able to just spill my thoughts and knowing someone, somewhere is reading it puts my mind at ease. I promise that future iterations will not be nearly as long, and will hopefully be less dour. If you've got any questions or whatever, I've included an email that you can reply to (ohara.lan98@gmail.com), because I'm always interested in opening up a conversation about these things, and if I get enough, I might just turn it into a Q&A portion of the newsletter? I'm all for giving life advice I'm not qualified to give, so shoot your questions my way! But until next time, have a great week.