Welcome

This newsletter was originally meant to go out on October 30th, but then things got busy and I kind of just lacked the motivation to write in general (Read: Seasonal depression, various other depressions). But as the year comes to a close, I figured I’d kick my ass back into shape to fire one last newsletter out before the year ends, two months after the last one.

It’s All in the Helmet

I’ve been getting around to catching up on all the media that came out this year that ended up going onto my various to-read/view/play piles, and in that conquest, I finally got around to finishing Himitsu Sentai Gorenger (lit. Secret Squadron Five-rangers), which, as far as I can tell from my quick research, is the third of Shotaro Ishinomori’s to be legally translated to English, the first two being Cyborg 009 by Tokyopop way back when, and the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past manga. Feel free to correct me if there’s more. I’m not going to join the choir of critics who parrot echo the sentiment that Ishinomori is Japan’s Jack Kirby or anything, but to think that we Anglophones currently only have four translated works from the holder of the Guinness World record for Most Comics Published by One Author (of which only 3 are in print) is a disservice to both Ishinomori and ourselves.

Ceçi n’est pas un Kirby.

It’s doubly a shame, because Gorenger exemplifies Ishinomori’s strengths, further cementing his status as one of the greatest visual storytellers to ever live. Tezuka’s influences on his work are apparent, but Ishinomori takes his visual language to a whole new level, and nowhere is that better exemplified than in the design of the Gorenger helmets.

Gorenger is an interesting case where the manga came out at the same time as the show. Himitsu Sentai Gorenger (the show) started serialization in April of 1975, while Himitsu Sentai Gorenger (the manga) started serialization in May of 1975. This meant that the design work that went into Gorenger had to account for both television, a medium with colour, and print, a black-and-white medium. If there’s one thing the Super Sentai (and by extension, the Power Rangers) franchise’s spandex squadrons are known for, it’s the colourful variety amongst its various ranger teams. But what happens when that very same content is presented in a black-and-white format?

Ishinomori, genius he was, accounted for this when designing the five members of the team. Whilst sticking to a fairly consistent design for all the rangers neck-down, the biggest variation in the suits was in the helmets. Each helmet was adorned with not only a number denoting each ranger’s designation, but visually distinctive visors, each a different shape, to set the rangers apart. While the numbers added visual flair, the visor shapes made them easy to distinguish from a distance.

Even without colour, it’s easy to determine which ranger is which.

On top of this, Akarenger (the leader of the team) was given additional adornments on his helmet to set him apart as the leader of the group. This is actually brought up in the manga itself (Pages 146-147 in the Seven Seas translation), adding lore to the design of the suit. What’s interesting is that the philosophy of visually distinctive helmets carried on even after Ishinomori left the franchise as a whole after JAKQ Dengekitai. Even in recent seasons where the visor variation might not be apparent, they’re still in there. Take for instance, Ressha Sentai ToQger‘s helmets:

ToQger‘s helmet design is doubly genius thanks to the colour change mechanic the show introduced, which saw rangers swapping colours on the fly.

Ishinomori was a visual genius, and I hope more people will come to see that in the near future with these new English releases of his work.

2022, Year of the Blog

I’ve grown tired of scrolling through long deep dive Twitter threads. The segmented nature of the average twitter tweet thread isn’t conducive to putting out longform thoughts, and just makes me yearn for a simpler era where I could read these thoughts as one cohesive piece. What I’m saying is, Bring back blogs.

I’m not saying that doing so would stop the plethora of tepid analyses of British comics creators’ works that currently exist on Twitter, but the slower call-and-response nature of blogs might just be more conducive for the way we talk about comics and media in general.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that one Jay-Z Breakfast Club interview this year, and it’s wild to think about how spot-on he was about the internet age hastening the way we talk about and engage with media back in 2013, when social media was arguably still in its infancy. I’m hoping that with the Next Big Thing project, I can move back towards a slower format to converse through about comics.

Jay-Z on the Breakfast Club, 2013.

Rediscovering Pigs in a Blanket

I’ve recently rediscovered my love for Pigs in a Blanket (sausages/hot dogs wrapped in a pastry, not the sausages/hot dogs wrapped in a bacon those philistines in the United Kingdom associate the term with), after several years. I think the last time I made them was in high school for a potluck, where I used actual puff pastry and cocktail sausages to make them, but growing up in a low-class household, the budget option is what I grew up eating. Preservative-packed hot dogs and straight-from-the-can pillsbury crescent rolls sliced and diced up to make 28 Pigs in a Blanket for under $5.

My mom had mysteriously stopped making them at some point during my childhood (which I later found out was because she wanted to stave the family off processed foods), but I randomly felt the urge to make them again while at the grocery store one day a couple of weeks ago. I opted for the budget option once more, grabbing a pack of chicken hot dogs and a roll of regular-sized Pillsbury crescent roll dough, but this time garnishing with flavoured butter before sticking it into the oven, undoubtedly pushing it over the $5 threshold.

To this day I’m still not sure what exactly it was that spurred me to make them again after so long, but after having made them several times over the past few weeks, I’m glad I took that leap.

Race to the 2021 Finish Line

The issue with the capitalist death machine affording us barely enough time to live fulfilling lives outside of work is that you end up missing a lot of things as they happen, particularly with media releases. Even though I’ve watched 280 films (so far, according to my Letterboxd stats) this year, only 40 have actually been from this year itself. If I actually bothered to track what comics I’ve been reading, the ratio would arguably be around the same too. It results in a certain level of guilt when reading best-of-the-year lists and when forming my own, as I lament not being able to get to the things that came out this year fast enough.

Maybe it’s just that I’m bad at how I allocate my time, but in any case, there’s a lot that came out this year that I regret not being able to get around to, and hopefully I can knock those off my to-read/to-play/to-watch lists early next year.

What I’ve been:

Working On

One pandemic hobby I’ve picked up is model kit building. It’s not really work in the traditional sense that I associate this section with, but I am proud of the work I’ve put in with the numerous kits I’ve bought (please don’t ask how many, I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve dropped on this hobby), starting with Figure-Rise Standard kits and eventually graduating into proper Gunpla model kit building. Though it’s a solitary activity, I always use it as a nice excuse to hop on a call with friends to chat while streaming my building process.

The latest of my many sons.

Aside from that, the actual work I’ve been putting in has mainly been planning for 2022 and working out the logistics of various projects to see if they’re feasible with my current schedule. My YouTube channel (which I haven’t touched since October of last year) recently hit 100 subscribers, which got me thinking about making my return to the platform. There’s tons of ideas I’ve got in the backlog, but I’m also a different person now than I was back when I was making the first 6 videos on the channel, so I gotta look back on them and see what worked and what didn’t.

One more thing; I’ve got some future newsletters planned that revolve around user input, and the first of the bunch is a Comics Kickstarter census to see where things stand with the current state of comics on Kickstarter. I’d actually planned it way before Kickstarter made the decision to burn all their goodwill by pivoting to cryptocurrency, which really shot the census in the foot before it could even come out. Either way, I’m keeping it open until January 7th, 2022, and the answers from the census will be featured in the next newsletter, so if you’ve got the time, please do fill it out here: https://forms.gle/RNeb9WwNJhoYszfz6

Reading

I’ve been looking at a bunch of “Best of 2021” lists and it’s cemented two things for me:

• There are several people whose recommendations I cannot trust (Home Sick Pilots on a “Best of 2021” list? Really?)

• There’s a lot of good books that came out this year.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading.

• Himitsu Sentai Gorenger (Ishinomori): I’ve already done my whole schpeel about the design philosophy of this manga above, but I still want to talk about how strong of a visual storyteller Ishinomori was. Ishinomori’s style and flair is so unique, and you can see the influences of the artists he worked with and looked up to within his work, be it Tezuka’s cartoony eye-to-nose ratio, or evoking Shigeru Mizuki in his Link to the Past manga. There were several times where I had to stop to admire how contemporary the work was for something that’s 46 years old at this point. I really do hope that 2022 marks a boom in Ishinomori books getting localized in English so that more people can experience his work, particularly his non-tokusatsu work like Hokusai or Eros x SF.

• Various X-Men-related books (Various): I’m in a weird spot with X-Men comics right now, but to summarize:

  • Inferno: Every time an issue of Inferno comes out, it’s like that scene in Ratatouille where the food critic is teleported back to his childhood after taking a bite of the food, except it’s me being teleported back the the House of X/Powers of X era, back when I was genuinely excited for the future of the X-Line. Hickman’s going out on a strong note with Inferno, but I can’t help but to be left with a want for all that we’ll probably never end up seeing from Hickman’s original plan.

  • The Trial of Magneto: I reread the mini in one go yesterday, after feeling rather so-so about it when reading it as it came out. Suffice to say, ToM reads far better on a contiguous reread than it did as separate monthly issues. I still think the Kaiju segments were the worst part about the book, even if I have a better understanding of what they were meant to represent in the grand scheme of things. The first issue is genuinely one of the best issues of anything I’ve read all year, but the third and fourth issue were among the messiest. I think this is one book where the linewide data-page “mandate” works to the book’s detriment, as I felt they didn’t really add much to the story. Williams has such an amazing handle on both Scarlet Witch and Polaris, giving them them some of the best writing they’ve had in decades, and having them be drawn by Lucas Werneck? So good. In short, I don’t trust anyone who considers this a worse book than Excalibur, and I have high hopes for Williams’ Scarlet Witch.

  • Hellions: The Apex predator of X-books, in my humble opinion. There’s not really much else I can say other than how it just nailed its ending on such a stoic yet haunting note. It’s really a shame we’re not getting more of this next year.

  • S.W.O.R.D: While I’d consider S.W.O.R.D #1-6, as well as 8, among some of my favourite comics this year, the arc that started with issue 9 felt rather messy, like Ewing was being forced to wrap up whatever loose ends he had before the book was shunted into the relaunch machine alongside the rest of the X-books. Another part of it might just be the weird dilemma I’ve been having with Ewing’s work this year, where I’ll read an issue of a given Ewing-written series, think it’s great, then forget what had happened in that previous issue by the time the next one rolls around. All this to say, perhaps S.W.O.R.D might just read better on reread too. That being said, I enjoyed #10 and #11, and am still excited for what Ewing and Caselli have in store with X-Men Red (hopefully making it the first time a book with that title is actually good).

  • The Rest of them: I haven’t read Ayala and Reis’s New Mutants, but several people whose opinions I trust say it’s good, so I’ll get around to it eventually. As a whole though, I mainly feel apprehensive about the future of the Krakoa era of X-comics, especially without Hickman at the line. Of the 9 announced titles for the upcoming Destiny of X relaunch, only 4 really interest me (Immortal X-Men, Legion of X, New Mutants, X-Men Red), and the rest range from “books that don’t excite me” to Gerry Duggan’s X-Men. It’s the only standout book I feel is worth mentioning, simply due to how atrocious of a book it is. A lot of Duggan’s worst habits are on display with this book, from the tone-deaf orientalism/geopolitics to the horrendous, horrendous treatment of the female characters in the book. Even if you don’t compare it to what came before (which is hard to do, mind you), what we’re left with is a regressive comic in many regards. If this is the flagship for the X-line come next year, then lord have mercy on the mutants.

• Shang-Chi (Yang, Ruan, Tan, et. al.): Alright! I’m guilty! I’m stupid! I’m a total goof for having put off reading the Shang-Chi miniseries and subsequent ongoing series for so long, but I am so glad I finally got around to it before the year ended. Both Gene Luen Yang and Alyssa Wong have a really firm grasp on the character’s identity and are doing a lot to expand that corner of the Marvel Universe in ways I’m not seeing elsewhere. If you haven’t gotten around to reading it, you should. I really don’t know what else I can say.

Watching

• Memories of Murder: I rewatched Memories of Murder with friends a while back on a Criterion Blu-Ray (a nice little piece of environmental/contextual writing), several years after my last viewing. Suffice to say, I had a far different experience watching it now than I did way back when. For one, I’m not a teenager anymore (an era marked by me being dumb), me not catching subtextual/contextual links, and having a penchant for saying the same thing in different ways. Clearly, a lot of change has occurred over the years, and watching it in a world rife with true crime podcasts, as well as the fact that we know who the killer is now (something I didn’t know during my initial watch-through) definitely changes the context within which this movie exists for me. But then I also have the friends whose first time it was watching the movie, for whom a lot of the bigger points of tension, especially with that last scene, fell flat for them because of what we know now about the killer. It makes me wonder how people will go back and rewatch (or even watch for the first time) Zodiac, now that we know who the Zodiac Killer is.

• Ainu Mosir, Nomadland: Ainu Mosir and Nomadland are both films that have non-actors playing roles in each respective movie, but I feel that the “mechanic” (if you will) works far better in the former than in the latter. Perhaps it’s because I found Nomadland quite boring, but the documentarian style of Ainu Mosir works well to capture the intimate moments in Hokkaido’s Ainu community, whereas that same style falls flat in capturing Americana in Nomadland‘s United States. Of the two, I (obviously) recommend watching Ainu Mosir.

• Home Sweet Home Alone: I used to think Free Guy was going to be the worst movie I watched this year.

  Then I watched Home Sweet Home Alone.

  I actually binged all of the non-Macauley Culkin-led Home Alone movies before watching this one, and despite this having (assuming here, haven’t actually checked) the highest budget of those four movies, it’s tied for last place with Home Alone 4, and ironically, it’s for similar reasons. Home Alone 4 takes place in another universe in the Home Alone multiverse where not only is Kevin McAllister now an ultra-rich brat living in a literal mansion with tech to rival classic Disney Channel Original Movie Smart House, but his parents are divorced and Marv is played by French Stewart (wearing Harry’s clothes from Home Alone 1 instead of Marv’s, but again, Multiverse rules, not questioning it). Earth-HA4 Kevin is an unsympathetic protagonist, not only because he’s a little bitch, but because he’s a rich little bitch, thus making Home Alone 4‘s conflict a class struggle. Likewise, Max from Home Sweet Home Alone is a rich little bitch, but worse yet, he’s a rich British little bitch, making Home Sweet Home Alone‘s class struggle even more unsympathetic to him. Coupled with the fact that the “villains” (played by Rob Delaney and Ellie “KKK Prom Queen” Kemper) are actually just two middle class parents trying to get back an old heirloom that RBLB Max stole from them so they could sell it to pay off the mortgage on their house and not lose it— do you see the problem here? It truly is unfortunate that this movie came by at the very end of the year to swoop the satisfaction of giving Free Guy the “Worst Movie of the Year” treatment from me. I suppose we’ll never reach the high standards set by Home Alone 5: The Holiday Heist ever again.

• The Summit of the Gods (Le Sommet Des Dieux): Many people will probably rank Encanto or The Mitchells vs. The Machines as their favourite animated film this year, but for me, it would probably have to go to The Summit of the Gods (which you can watch on Netflix if for some crazy reason you haven’t already). As someone who enjoys Jiro Taniguchi’s work, I went into this with trepidation as I didn’t know how it’d turn out, but damn do the French know how to do Japanese source material justice, because they knocked it out of the park with this adaptation. Beautiful, beautiful animation coupled with a smartly streamlined version of the 5-volume story gives us a fantastic film that delves deep into the art of mountain climbing. It would be a shame for this to not be on anyone’s “Best of 2021” list.

• The Ip Man Tetrology: I rewatched all four Donnie Yen-led Ip Man movies recently after not having watched them for a long time. I used to think that the patriotic “Ip Man vs. the Foreign Invader” dynamic was only a thing that occurred in the latter three movies, but on rewatch I realized it’s been the franchise’s Modus Operandi since day 1. Ip Man 1 shows Ip Man fighting against Japanese Occupation of Chinese territory, Ip Man 2 had Ip Man fighting for the honour of Hong Kong’s Martial Arts community against the Western Boxing style, Ip Man 3 broke format slightly by focusing more on Ip Man dealing with the throes of time— just kidding, he fights against American Gentrification in Hong Kong by beating up Mike “Wifi is Unbreakable” Tyson, and Ip Man 4 closes out the saga with Ip Man defending Asian Americans in San Francisco against racists in both the affluent white community they’re forced to integrate within, and in the American Military. Even the spin-off, Master Z: Ip Man Legacy has Master Cheung Tin-Chi beat the shit out of Dave Bautista(‘s foreigner character, of course) for distributing drugs in Hong Kong. The action is obviously the best part about these movies, but the inherent “Hero vs. the foreign enemy” dynamic that lies at the core of all five of these movies is something that I understand far deeper on rewatch.

• Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger: At the time of writing this, Zenkaiger has roughly 7 episodes left until it’s end, and I’ve slowly been digging myself deeper and deeper into a state of despair about the reality that this show isn’t going to be around for much longer. This show got me through a lot of the tougher moments of 2021, and remains one of the highest highlights of 2021 for me. I’m frankly just not ready to let go of it yet.

• Kamen Rider Revice: On the other hand, I’m glad there’s still a lot left to go of Revice, because this show has been a total blast. It’s nice to finally have a Kamen Rider season with strong themes and characters with depth after the franchise took a weird, weird hiatus between September of 2020 and August of 2021. 16 episodes in, my fears that it would turn into another Build-type situation (a point I’m reserving for a future retrospective/analysis project of KR Build) have been assuaged. Excited to see where the series goes in the new year.

Playing

• Back 4 Blood: Not sure if it’s because the game has been patched enough to make it good, or if it was because I played it on recruit difficulty, but after playing Back 4 Blood recently with friends and finishing the main campaign, it’s honestly a good game? I think I’m more likely to go back to it rather than Left 4 Dead 2 at this point, though a lot of my experience is coloured by the fact that I played it through Xbox’s GamePass service. I probably wouldn’t get the game for more than $30 at this point. Fun game though!

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons: With the new slew of updates and DLC content, I went back and did a race through time to catch my Animal Crossing island up to the present day. I stopped playing in May of 2020, so I set my Switch’s system clock back to May of 2020, and completed an in-game day’s activities, skipped two weeks ahead, then rinsed and repeated until I got to the present day. The two-week interval made it so that I could skip ahead without villagers leaving the island, and let me catch up within 2 weeks. Was it worth it? Not sure, but minmaxing Animal Crossing ended up being a fun way to get through the game. But of the new updates, the Paradise Planning DLC might just be the best addition. Condensing the home design mechanic into one specific minigame with full access to Animal Crossing‘s furniture selection, while also giving a place to shuffle off former Island residents to so that you can visit them even after they’ve left your island, makes it a great addition to the game. Though after all that, New Horizons still leaves me wanting more from it. I still hesitate to call it a better iteration of Animal Crossing than New Leaf.

• Tetris Effect: Connected: Another Gamepass pick, and one that might rank amongst my GOTY candidates. If you think this is just Tetris then you are dead wrong. If I’m playing this game, I got my lights off, headphones on, and attention squarely on what’s going on in game. Tetris Effect: Connected is a game that requires immersion.

Listening to

• An Evening with Silk Sonic - Silk Sonic: I’ve been really enjoying Silk Sonic’s output this year, and their first album delivers the goods. The variety in beats and styles offers far less of a homogenous listen than I was expecting from the album.

• shut the fuck up talking to me - Zack Fox: No joke, this is the album that resonated the most with me this year. The way Fox bounces with each beat and gets into it with his lyrics is a cut above the average rap album from this year. Plus, it’s got this line:

  

Some cool links (that aren’t viruses, I swear)

• A cool retrospective article about the Gamecube on its 20th anniversary

• Have an existential crisis with this deep dive into link entropy on the internet

• The Internet Archive has graciously archived Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Brought to Light comics anthology here

• An article about Japan’s digital reckoning in the COVID age

• An engaging deep dive into the Wuxia film genre’s political roots

Question Corner!

No questions this time, I’ve already got enough of an existential crisis to deal with already.

Afterword

I keep forgetting how much time goes into actually writing these things. Probably wouldn’t take as long if I wrote them more often and made them shorter, but I am not a man of logic. It’s insane how Warren Ellis had the time to write a newsletter per week, write all those comics and shows at the same time, and still have time to be such an abhorrent human being. Anyway, that’s it for me this year, I’ll see you next year in the next newsletter, whenever it is that I get around to actually writing it. Until then, if you’ve got topic suggestions for future newsletters or questions for the Question Corner, you can ask them here.