Welcome

*Chanting* TRAINS! TRAINS! TRAINS! TRAINS! It’s been far too long, but it’s finally here. The one about trains. Gonna try and keep things as brief as possible outside of this week’s topic because the next edition’s gonna be a big one.

The #1 Transit System in North America

As a thoroughbred Torontonian, I’m thoroughly familiar with Toronto’s public transit system, run by the Toronto Transit Commission, or TTC for short. It’s what I would use to go to and from both high school and almost all of university, and it’s what anyone who actually wants to go to downtown Toronto in a timely manner ends up using.

I’ve got a lot of fond memories from my time Riding the Rocket (the official motto of the TTC, I kid you not), from being called a “Popcorn Pimp” by a crackhead on the bus in ninth grade, to having to walk 3km to school because the bus drivers on the route that went to my school all decided not to come that day, to being packed like sardines on a subway platform (to the point where people were leaning right off the edge of the platform) because the previous train went out of commission, dropping all its passengers at a packed subway station downtown. In other words, a fantastic transit system. But 2017 brought a huge surprise as the TTC was named the #1 Transit System of the Year in all of North America by the American Public Transportation Association.

I was shook. To quote Future in his seminal, prescient masterpiece “Mask Off”: Ain’t no way, ain’t no fuckin’ way. There was no way that a transit system which had buses and trains breaking down on a daily basis could possibly be the best transit system in not only Canada, but Canada and the United States.

But then I looked at the competition.

It only really settled in when talking to a friend around two years later. He was an Ottawan staying in Toronto for the duration of our internship, which meant taking the TTC daily to get to work. He exclaimed to me how much better Toronto’s transit system was than Ottawa’s, a large part of which had to do with the former’s reach. For reference, here’s OCTranspo’s (Ottawa’s transit system) coverage:

Note: These are LRT lines, not Subway lines.

And here’s the TTC’s coverage:

Note: The Blue line is Scarborough’s rickety old LRT, which has been using the same train cars that it used when it opened 36 years ago, and is to date the only part of the TTC which has remained without any expansion or update. I took it to work every day for four months in 2017.

Another Note: This map also doesn’t show the city’s streetcar system, which extends pretty broadly below the green line in that map. OCTranspo doesn’t have one.

It was only after that conversation that I began to seek out the horror stories about other transit systems in North America. It’s insane to think about how far behind the rest of the world North America has fallen when it comes to even just rail transit in general. Something like Japan or China’s high speed rail system would make going from Toronto to Montreal (not that I would want to set foot in Quebec on my own volition) far less of a drag than it currently is, yet more time is spent entertaining bonehead ideas like Musk’s death tunnels than towards actually making mobility easier for the public.

It’s gonna be interesting to see how Toronto’s upcoming Eglinton LRT system, a system that’s been under construction since I started high school 9 years ago, shifts transit even further when that does eventually open after the imminent collapse of civilization. Until then, I’ll be a bit more considerate when the bus driver notices me running after the bus and chooses to accelerate even faster.

What I’ve been:

Working On

The good news is that work on the Last Big Piece is winding down, so hopefully that first draft should be good for the end of next week. But as I was working on it this week, I kinda realized how much tougher it is for me to write something when I lack conviction or confidence in what I’m writing about. I know, shocking, right? I think with this piece, the further I went into the rabbit hole with research, the less confident about the point I was trying to make.

But the past week’s events (surrounding X-Factor #10) had me thinking more about the role of comics criticism, especially in online rhetoric, and the responsibility that writers and critics have when putting out a piece of work. I don’t know, I’m hoping that this piece will be a good note to go out on, but I’m more interested in what’s beyond it at this point.

Speaking of which, the next newsletter is going to go more into what that beyond is, and what that means for the state of the newsletter itself.

Playing

• Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations: I finished the game this week, and overall, I really enjoyed it! I’m not sure how I’d rank the trilogy of Ace Attorney games, because each game has their good cases and boring cases, so maybe I’ll rank all 24 cases in a future newsletter or something, I’m not sure. But, the narrative thread in this last game in the trilogy was woven incredibly well, both between the cases within this game and cases from previous games. There’s a very good sense of finality and completion as you hit the last case’s final moments. I do want to pick up the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, which comes out this month for the Switch, but I’m not sure if I wanna pay $54CAD for it.

Reading

• Dragon Drive Vol. 1 (Sakura): Funny enough, like Megaman NT Warrior, I picked up this entire series from the library in prep for a piece/column that I was going to do, but fell through (or maybe it didn’t, we’ll see). Either way, I’m going through it now, taking notes, and also just revisiting the nostalgia of this run. I’m not much of a Shonen kinda guy nowadays, mainly because I find the pacing a tad hard to get back into with a lot of runs, but Dragon Drive does get right to the meat of what it’s about within its first volume, which is great. Who knows, you might see a piece from me about this series somewhere in the future.
• X-Factor #10 (Williams, Baldeon, Messina, Werneck, Silva): I’m not gonna comment on the big thing surrounding race and the portrayal/handling of black queer death in this book, as frankly it’s not my place. There are black critics out there who deserve to, and have done a much better job at addressing the matter than I ever could (or any of the white critics who reviewed this comic unfortunately have chosen to), like Charles PM over at i09: X-Factor’s Final Issue Was an Ugly Low Point for Marvel’s Queer Representation. Still excited for Trial of Magneto though.

Watching

• Lupin: I know I’m late to the game with this one, but I blazed through this series over the course of two days and loved it. I love heist movies, and I love the Lupin dynamic (see: Lupinranger vs. Patranger from the last newsletter), so this show was an instant hit for me. It’s a rarity in that it’s one of the few hour-long Netflix shows that actually kept me engaged for the full hour; something Netflix’s Marvel shows wish they could do.
• Loki: I caught up with the show this week and still like it four episodes in; something Disney Plus’ Falcon & the Winter Soldier wishes it could do. The cliffhanger from Episode 4 does leave me with some unease about whether the show will stick its landing or devolve into standard MCU fare.

I’ve also been doing this thing called the “Half Year Dash”, where I watch at least a movie a day for the latter half of the year in an attempt to clear out my watchlists across various streaming platforms. I’ve got a script that throws a random movie at me every day for me to watch. Let’s see how long I keep with this.

The Half Year Dash:

• July 1st: She’s Gotta Have It: Loved it. Fun, snappy dialogue, very natural and engaging cinematography. Greer’s the Gaslight, Jamie’s the Gatekeep, and Mars is a bit too unemployed to be a Girlboss, but the focus of the movie, Nola, is a fantastic protag.
• July 2nd: Army of the Dead: Dumb, insane, but all-in-all: incredibly fun. Tig Notaro rocks, Dave Bautista’s fantastic, and the dynamic between Vanderohe and Dieter is great. The zombie designs are all fantastic, and the mix of humour and action were great.
• July 3rd: First Love: My first Takashi Miike in a long while, and one that I hadn’t actually seen yet. I’m not sure if it’s my favourite Miike film yet, but it’s got all the makings of a great Miike film. It’s a bit slow at the start but really finds its groove roughly a third into its playtime. The focus on the movie’s various characters is distributed pretty well throughout.

Listening to

• Call Me If You Get Lost (album) - Tyler, the Creator
• Fuck it, that’s all I’m recommending this week

Question Corner!

More questions, more questions! Here’s one from anonymous reader #5:

Q: If you’re Disney or Discovery (I think that’s who runs DC), what are the pros & cons of putting effort into trilogies when these 6-8 episode mini-series on Disney+ are proving to be successful? Do you see this in a similar light to the discussion of how comics are collected?

A: It’s an interesting thing because the trilogy format has traditionally been a thing in movies. I didn’t really think about it before I compiled the list for the Half Year Dash, but there is a cleanliness to a trilogy, which just feels rooted in the fundamentals of logic. Jokes tend to land on the third beat, the rule of thirds dominates photography; there’s just something about threes that work so well.

However, trilogies and 6-8-episode “prestige” seasons aren’t the same. Even though three 90-minute movies and 6 45-minute episodes both equal 270 total minutes of content, the storytelling formats are wholly different. It’s the same as a 6-issue trade vs. an Original Graphic Novel. Breaking it up into smaller episodes means accounting for more start and endpoints, and sectioning the story off in a manner where each piece breaks off cleanly. Funny enough, my Next Big Thing will involve talking about this stuff, so uh, wait and see? I’ve already rambled way too much about this here.

Afterword

I know I’ve been talking about The Next Big Thing and What Comes Beyond, and while it all sounds ominous (or like I’m some underground rapper at the foot of your bed saying, “Big things coming soon” over and over again), it’s mainly because actually prepping for these things has taken a while, and has raised questions faster than I can find answers for them.

But that changes with the next newsletter.

The next edition will be the Next Big Thing newsletter, pretty much detailing what I’ve got in the works for the foreseeable future, answer every question that I haven’t been able to answer yet (till then, submit them here, and talk about the future of this newsletter. It probably won’t be in two weeks, but it’ll be soon, once I’m ready to announce things. But until then, have yourselves a great weekend.