Welcome

It's biweekly now! I swear this'll be the last schedule change (and hopefully only schedule change), just so that I've got more to talk about in the "What I've been" section. But in the meantime, here's this week's topic.

No Exit

Saying no is hard. I've been regularly going to my LCS (Local Comic Shop) since around early 2018, I wanna say. It's a nice little shop in a plaza out in the middle of Scarberia Scarborough. It used to be two separate shops, a book shop and a comic shop, with the LCS owner Troy, a very nice and kind gentleman, running the comic shop in the basement of the store, and his mom running the book shop up top.

With Covid's arrival, and his mom being of elderly age, they shut down the book shop side of the store, making it a full-time comic shop. The shop's regulars are a diverse and colourful cast of characters, from your parents dragging their children along every week for their weekly pull to your (blegh) hardcore speculators grabbing every variant of most every comic on the shelf. All this to say, it's a shop that I do hold a relative amount of attachment to. Whenever I talk about dismantling the direct market, it's always with an asterisk; the asterisk denoting that I wish no ill will towards my LCS, and hope that they manage to survive whatever rapture awaits the direct market. Is this coloured by the 15% discount that Troy gives me? No. Yes. Maybe. I don't know!

I first started a pull list in May of 2018. I'd just finished my second year of university, I was broke, and I'd been meaning to start a pull list for a while, so I did, with two series: Venom, and Immortal Hulk. Now remember, this was 2018. Cates had just finished a widely-lauded run on Doctor Strange and was making his way up the superstar writer ladder. Meanwhile, I was a dumb bitch making his way up the student debt ladder. So yeah, I put Venom on my pull list, and three years later, there it still is.

There's at least three points at which I could have made my exit; I could have dropped it right after Absolute Carnage, I could've dropped it after the big 25th issue, or I could have dropped it before King in Black hit. But I didn't. Because it's hard to tell my LCS owner to drop a book from my pull. In recent years, my pull list has become something of a refuge for low-selling books. I tend to pull books that don't seem like they'd sell well (as I'd initially thought prior to pulling both Immortal Hulk and Venom), in hopes that my one (1) sale would help keep those books alive. I do this in spite of the fact that comic sales are counted by the number of comics sold to a shop, and not to customers. Like I said before, I'm a bit of a dumb bitch. The point I'm getting at though is that most of the time, books fly off my pull list simply by virtue of their short lifespans. 2019's Ghost Rider lasted less than a year on my pull list. This makes things easy for me because it means I don't have to do the dirty deed of telling Troy to his face that I want a book taken off my pull list.

I think the advent causing such a shift in the way the store's run is what makes me hesitate to take any book off my list at this point. Small businesses are struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic, and I wanna be able to help keep the store alive as long as possible (see: the asterisk I was talking about above). But, this isn't to say I haven't taken books off my pull list in the past year. Why, just recently I took Iron Man off my pull list.....and subsequently put Way of X on it. Baby Steps. Honestly, I wouldn't have to be concerned with this if Cates had just kept writing a high-quality Venom run.

But alas.

What I've been:

Working On

My labor is starting to come to fruition, and I've got more on the way. The stuff that I had released these past couple of weeks aren't all too critical, in my opinion, so I might shift gears and put my thinking hat on for the next piece or two. I really do need to get to work on editing that Austen interview, because it's been two months at this point.

Putting Out

Big week for Lan M releases, specifically for my friends over at Gatecrashers Inc. Corp. Ent. LLC. They're great, and they deserve the love that a lot of bigger sites tend to get in their stead. But anyways, enough about them, let's talk about me:

• Bug Man Incarnate: A Definitive Guide for Getting Into Kamen Rider - Am I up my own ass, calling this a definitive guide? Probably. But I think this is probably the most in-depth I could go without explicitly linking to the various sites I get my Kamen Rider content from (nyaa.si, https://live.ozc-anime.com/, krdl.moe, WHOOPS). If any of my incessant KR talk in these newsletters has piqued your interest in the series, definitely check this out.
• Fun-Size Round-Table: Radiant Black #3 - An incredibly interesting and fun new format birthed from the minds of three Gatecrasher Geniuses, I hopped in to plop out my thoughts on the latest issue of Radiant Black. Their goal is to make this a weekly series, so you should definitely keep this one on your radar.
• Here Are Our Picks For The 93rd Academy Awards - Did the absolute batshit insane thing of offering my opinions on movies. As I am something of an iconoclast myself, I went against the grain: Honestly, if The One and Only Ivan, a movie I watched for ~15 minutes maximum before decided the monky looked nice, wins, I'd....I honestly don't know how I'd react.

Reading

• Friend of the Devil (Brubaker, Philips): The second in the Reckless series, and just as gripping of a story as the first one. Full disclosure, I read this on the toilet for what felt like a full hour because I was just that immersed by the story. These intermittent OGNs from the Brubaker/Phillips duo really make you feel like you sat down and watched a good spaghetti western, even if the books don't do anything particularly new.
• Way of X #1 (Spurrier, Quinn, Tartaglia, Cowles): If I were to cull down the current line of X-books down to just 6 books (something that should happen, IMO), Way of X would easily be in the top 3 comics that survive the culling. I feel like it does a lot of the heavy lifting and question-addressing that a lot of other X-books over the past year should have been doing. Centering Krakoa's flaws around Xavier as a figurehead is a very good move, and looks like it'll pay off in the long term.

Watching

• Kamen Rider Decade: The season ended off on a cliffhanger, and an incredibly messy one at that. In the end, I'd probably put Decade in the C-tier of Kamen Rider shows.
• Kamen Rider W: One of, if not my favourite season of the show. I'm a sucker for detective fiction, and the cast is incredibly strong and plays well off one another. That last episode is an emotional gutpunch.
• Kamen Rider OOO: A bit rougher around the edges than W, but still a very enjoyable watch so far. What sucks is my entire watch-through this time around has been coloured by my friend Tyler (y'know, in case he finds himself reading this) telling me that the protagonist looks like he listens to Beck, which I mean, yeah.
• The Falcon & The Winter Soldier: Now that the season's done, I think I'd put TFATWS (or CAATWS) in the C-tier of the MCU. Absolute middle-of-the-road, standard MCU fare. Without spoiling much, I found a lot of the overarching plots kinda middling, but there were a few moments that were genuinely well done. I think the Isaiah Bradley parts of the show were among the better moments. Sam's new fit though? Great.

Listening to

• Funny Thing - Thundercat
• Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe (Remix) - Kendrick Lamar feat. Jay-Z
• Dance In The Dark - Rina Sawayama
• Now Til Infinity - GRIZ

Afterword

Sorry for the late newsletter too, life got busy. But, if you have any questions for me, submit them here, and hopefully I can supplement my lack of content with an ongoing Q&A section. Next time, I'll have another esoteric topic for you to chew on, but until then, have yourselves a great weekend.