Welcome

Life moves fast, but Sonic moves faster. It's been a while since the last newsletter, but rest assured, I've been doing absolutely nothing in the interim to make up for it. Kidding, kidding, but I said last time that this edition of the newsletter would be the one where I detail where my life and work is headed next, and I'm here to do so.

I timed this with the release of my final (I'll get to that) piece for Comic Book Herald (I'll get to that too) so everything ties up nice and neatly. Just like the classic New Year's tradition of stripping to the nude and entering the new year without any of the baggage (literal, figurative) from the previous year, I'm closing up whatever loose ends I've got with this era before I move onto the next. Anyways, let's get into it.

The Long Goodbye

Long story short, I'm taking an indefinite hiatus from doing comics crit. I don't wanna call it a definitive end, mainly due to a fear of the finality of things, but also just in case I change my mind down the line and do eventually come back to it. But anyway, my Comic Book Herald piece (which is down in Putting Out, if you wanna figure out what exactly I'm referring to) is the last big piece I'll be putting out before this hiatus. I put a bunch of time into it (and thanks again to CBH Dave for his patience with me throughout all this) and I'm hoping I made at least two good points in it.

I prematurely ended up announcing this hiatus on Twitter a few days ago, but the truth is that my goal was always for my time in comics crit to be a temporary thing. When I started doing this roughly a year ago, I'd just been a few months into making YouTube videos, and saw comics crit as a nice little sabbatical for me to hone my skills in so I wouldn't sound like a complete idiot in my videos. It was very much a "drop into the comics crit hyperbolic time chamber, train for x amount of time, and come out yoked and ready to rumble" kind of thing, so I always had an end in mind, even if this might've been a bit earlier than I'd initally intended.

That being said, that's not the only reason I'm taking a break. Truth of the matter is, I'm burnt out on the whole thing. Much like any broken system, comics crit is built to whittle away at those who work within it, and much like many before me, I simply just reached a point where I wasn't getting anything out of it both in terms of fulfilment and fun, and decided it was time to pivot. There's a lot of factors for the burnout, but I think the biggest one was just the looming sense of futility that hung over me.

I went from a playful, often-joking resentment towards the previous generation of comics critics for not having left behind anything for subsequent generations to learn from, to realizing why they'd not left anything in the first place. I always found it weird when people would refer to former comics crits like David Brothers and David Uzumeri as though they're dead soldiers, when in reality, they're still very much still alive, albeit having moved on to other endeavours. The treatment of media critique as some kind of noblesse oblige is in part responsible for the burnout that many critics might feel, and I'm really not sure how that can be remedied.

Comics crit is a relentless, uphill battle, and one that minority creators are forced to play on hard mode because at the end of the day it, much like the industry it seeks to critique, plays to a white hegemony. Hopefully that's not too controversial statement, but it's one I find to be true. It's hard to put on a persona, to shave down parts of who I am, and to play to the whims of the community just in order to fit in. I made the conscious decision to write under the "Lan M" alias instead of my real name because I knew that's what'd make me marketable and palatable to the community. Comics crit has a real whiteness problem, and I've seen many BIPOC writers and readers be burnt by that very whiteness over the past year, and even before that.

It's hard to look in the face of all that and say "Yeah, I can fix this" when you don't even look like the majority of the people who hold sway in the community. BIPOC writers who do manage to eke out a name for themselves in the community are propped up as success stories while others are hounded, harassed, and diminished elsewhere. And this isn't an indictment of the former group; they deserve their prestige, and they too suffer from being held up as counter-examples against the argument that this pseudo-industry is broken.

The comics crit community is far more interested in propping its soft little unfunny white boys up rather than actually investing in diverse voices. I should also acknowledge that this isn't exclusive to comics crit; I've seen the way that white people in the comics community go after creators like Vita Ayala under the guise of righteous justice. The need to be seen as "one of the good ones" has poisoned the way these people treat minority creators, and it sickens me at every level.

But if you've read this far, and you're thinking "wow Lan, you're taking this way too seriously", you're right! I really shouldn't be, because guess what? This isn't my job. This isn't even my side job, because I rarely get paid to write comics crit! There is so little money flowing through comics crit! It's always frustrating to see people lament about comics crit not being good enough, because there are very few resources to actually make it good enough.

So many comics-adjacent sites that you and I as readers read through either don't pay their writers or pay their writers far below a wage that can be considered decent, and that's not entirely their fault. When the only forms of revenue these days are Patreon and site adspace (which barely pays enough to cover the costs of, it makes sense why sites are forced to just push as much content out as possible and rely on clickbaity headlines to hit. It's a broken system; always has been, probably will be for the foreseeable future.

But on the note of taking comics crit too seriously, I feel like a lot of the sore points I've encountered throughout the comics crit community have been as a result of people taking this shit too seriously. If you're pushing people away and going against your own beliefs just to maintain an air of professionalism and peace in comics crit, you really do need to take a step back and re-evaluate the situation, and your role in it.

That's enough of a rant about comics crit for now, but hopefully I've managed to enunciate exactly why I'm taking the break I am. I hate feeling like this is just some show of weakness or cowardice, but with the time away, I'm working on disabusing myself of the general cynicism I seem to currently have towards these things, and bettering my own mental health. Cynicism is for the old era, not the new one.

The Next Big Thing

Boy, that was far more long-winded than I intended, but now that I've stripped myself of all that baggage, it's time to move on to The Next Big Thing, full commando. My grand plan. (It's not that serious)

What I Will Be Working On

The Life of Reilly

The Life of Reilly (a play on the idiom "The Life of Riley) is a blog from writer Andrew Goletz and former Marvel editor Glenn Greenberg. It's a 35-part series that offers insight into the behind-the-scenes of the infamous Spider-Man Clone Saga from the 90s. It's a pretty insightful read regardless of where you stand on the Clone Saga, but the only form is currently exists in is that original blog. The authors expressed an intent to turn it into a book, but aside from some updates from 2010 saying that they're working on it, it hasn't come to fruition.

My plan? Take the blog, clean up the text, and format it into a book. The goal is to create a free (def not looking to make any profit off this) digital oeuvre, both for easy reference, and to help me practice my InDesign skills. I also considered doing the same thing for Alan Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes pitch, but god is that a dense manuscript. I might still do that one day though, who knows.

LansVids

Like I said before, I've got a YouTube channel that I made back when Diamond was shutting down temporarily. I uploaded to it roughly monthly before I started doing comics crit more frequently, leaving less time to actually spend making those videos. While I'm not gonna get back to making them immediately, I do want to get back to making them at a regular pace again. I think there's a lot of good that I can do with the channel, it's just a matter of finding that motivation to keep growing it.

What It All Builds Up To

The previous two things seem pretty unrelated at first glance, but they're actually prep for something else entirely. Even though I'm done writing about comics, I'm not out of the game entirely just yet. If there's one thing I've realized over the past few months, it's that the Twitter comics community is far smaller than it thinks itself to be. When you see things like a "Best Spider-Man run" poll's top two spots dominated by runs written by Dan Slott, you begin to realize there's more to comics-adjacent media than what's on Twitter.

So what am I trying to say? I want to make something that's not just for Twitter. Something that can be shared around, and be enjoyed by the layperson without feeling like there's some kind of barrier to entry. It's quite idealistic, I know, but I want to spend the time both building my skills (through projects like the Life of Reilly book) and an audience (through the YouTube Channel), and make something that won't just get swept up amongst the countless comics-adjacent sites that exist today.

I keep calling it something because I'm not 100% solid on the format just yet, but I (amongst a couple of friends/co-planners) am eyeing a possible digital magazine. Currently, only PanelXPanel occupies the space, and while I think it's a fantastic mag, it definitely hits a certain niche that might not be accessible to everyone. I don't want to go the complete opposite direction with something akin to Wizard magazine, but something more in the middle, like what the Comic Foundry magazine was, when that still existed.

I also want to focus on bringing diverse voices and talents into the fold with this project too, and especially those who don't already have published work elsewhere. This'll mean having to scout out that talent, which is also something I'll have to learn to do (or just find someone good enough to designate that too). Putting out calls for pitches doesn't really nab writers the way one might think it does; the anxiety and doubt of "Am I talented enough to pitch for this?" can often get in the way of a writer actually making that leap, and there's gotta be a better way to assuage that fear.

While nothing's really set in stone at the moment (not even the title), I'm excited to see what this project turns out to be, and hope you'll be there to support it.

But What About The Newsletter?

The newsletter isn't going anywhere. I still want to write about esoteric topics, and I'll do so, just at a far less rigid schedule. I initially considered making a Patreon to move to newsletter to, but I didn't feel comfortable setting all that up until I built up the YouTube channel a bit. Though, Twitter has introduced a new newsletter platform through Revue, so that might be something I look into.

What I've been:

Putting Out

Only one big thing I put out since last time, and it came out today! Back in March, I noticed that the number of Tokusatsu comics had ballooned, and that this trend had been helmed primarily by white creators. I pitched this back to Dave over at Comic Book Herald back in late April, but flopped about actually writing it for the better part of two months, because of a bunch of factors, like my day job getting busy, doing research, then dropping all that research because it didn't fit what I wanted to say, then pivoting my thesis multiple times — a lot.

But it's nice to have it finally done and out there, because it definitely weighed over me for the past couple of months as "the last big thing I gotta do before I move on". The toughest part was toeing the line of nuance between "these books are good, ergo this is fine" and "these books shouldn't be allowed to exist at all", and I'm hoping I didn't lean too heavily into the former. I watched a lot of Tokusatsu in the period of time where I was writing this piece, both Japanese and American, which helped me expand my horizons about what the genre could be.

Playing

Minecraft: No Dream, no Corpse, none of that SMP shit. Just me and the boys, mining. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, me and my friends have been closing the gap that the lockdown caused through online games, and Minecraft is just the latest of the bunch. We've already done Terraria, so why not Terraria in 3d? I'm not sure what it is, but I swear the survival mode has gotten much harder since the last time I played it. The skeletons have to have some kind of aimbot, because those motherfuckers keep getting me at the craziest angles.

Reading

Muji

Mujirushi (Urasawa): I've been buying a lot of manga lately, and I picked up Mujirushi for $10 during one of the many Kijiji deals I did. I'm a big fan of Urasawa's work but I didn't know of this book until I got it blindly. I'm also a big fan of done-in-one manga, which made this a quick read for me. I liked it a lot, though not as much as Urasawa's more well-known work. Urasawa masterfully captures the small ennuis and huge misfortunes of life incredibly well, and his characters here toe the line between stupidity and genius with an intriguing wobble. Definitely got my bang for my buck.
S.W.O.R.D, Guardians of the Galaxy (Ewing et. al.): I've sung enough praises about Ewing's writing already, but hell, why not sing some more. I was reading S.W.O.R.D #7 this week when I came across a scene, and if you've read the issue already, you know what scene I'm referring to, which made me go "Oh SHIT". The realization that that moment had been planned and built up to over a year in advance in Empyre just further solidified Ewing as one of the most macroscopically-thinking writer in the industry these days. No one else comes close to the level of care that Ewing puts into constructing these years-long sagas across his various books. Both Guardians and S.W.O.R.D handle the Hellfire Gala shift(s) so smoothly, and just leaves me wanting more from the rest of...well, everything Big 2.
Dragon Drive (Sakura): At the time of this writing, I've got just one volume left of the 14-volume series, and overall, I definitely liked it. More than Megaman NT Warrior, but less than most other Shonen manga. The plot is very commercialized Shonen Jump fare, but I really like the Yu-Gi-Oh-esque timeskip/cast shuffle halfway through the series. The first half of the series follows one protagonist while the latter half follows another, which keeps the storytelling fresh. Unlike NT Warrior (which I still liked), this series definitely feels like less of a chore to read. I was gonna write a whole article about the series before everything changed, but I think I might revisit it sometime in the future.

Watching

Zenk

Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger: I still love the show as much as I did any other time I wrote about it in this newspaper, but with the season slowly approaching its halfway point, it's really settled in how much the show prioritizes the episodic comedic format over the more serialized and grounded plots from previous seasons. Aside from little tidbits here and there, there isn't really anything moving the overarching plot (if there is one) forward. It's not a detriment to the show, at least not yet, but definitely interesting to note. Also, wow has this show been far more conservative with its mechs than previous seasons. There's been 3 mechs (or megazords, for western context) in almost 20 episodes, with 2 new formations coming soon. I'm sure a lot of the season's money is coming from the other paraphernalia, like the Sentai gears, but it's wild to see how pared-down the toy offerings are for a show that's literally made to sell toys.

The Half Year Dash: I've watched a lot since last time, and there's frankly way too much for me to give brief thoughts about, so I'm just going to list what I watched. If you want my thoughts on a particular movie, just let me know, and I can elaborate on it in the next newsletter. Can you believe I've watched more movies in this past month alone than in the entire first half of 2021?

July 4: Luca
July 5: Kung Fu Panda 1 & 2
July 6: Burning (2018)
July 7: Moonrise Kingdom, Little Miss Sunshine
July 8: Murder on the Orient Express, The Hunt (2012)
July 9: Kung Fu Panda 3, Princess Mononoke, Godzilla (2014), Godzilla: King of Monsters
July 10: Psychokinesis
July 11: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
July 12: Raya and the Last Dragon
July 13: The King of Comedy, King of Comedy, Rush Hour
July 14: Infernal Affairs, Hotel Artemis
July 15: Scooby Doo & Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, Hotel Mumbai
July 16: Spirited Away
July 17: Isle of Dogs
July 18: Speed
July 19: Sonic the Hedgehog
July 20: Back to the Future
July 21: Back to the Future II & III
July 22: Rocky, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
July 23: Avengement, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
July 24: Friday
July 25: The Nightmare Before Christmas
July 26: Tron & Tron: Legacy
July 27: Furie
July 28: Another Round
July 29: Die Hard, The Green Knight
July 30: The Last Blockbuster, Upgrade, Queen and Slim

Listening to

Vince Staples (album) - Vince Staples: Great album with stellar production work from Kenny Beats. An album I'll keep coming back to frequently.
The House is Burning (album) - Isaiah: TDE's output these past couple of years has been pretty dry, what with SZA and Kendrick Lamar being MIA, and Schoolboy Q's Crash Talk being.......yeah. But this album has put that dry spell to an end with bangers throughout the album. This year's shaping up to be a really good one for music.

Question Corner: Clearing the Question queue

That's right, every single question left over my question box is getting answered here.

Q: Why didn’t you answer the cop question?

A: Ah yes, this is referring to the very first Question Corner Question, "Biggest cop in comics crit?". Well, simply put, I had to think about it, and after careful consideration, I've found my answer: Gary Groth. I will not be taking any other questions about this for the time being.

Q: What does journalism in comics look like?

A: Whoof, this is a loaded question. I should preface this by saying that I had to google what exactly "journalism" is before I could even begin to tackle this question. I should also preface this by saying that I don't consider myself to be a comics journalist (or even a comics critic) in any way, shape, or form. But I think the big idea, at least as it pertains to the current state of "comics journalism", is that journalism doesn't exist in comics in anywhere near the same capacity as it does anywhere else. Comics "journalism" is so far behind any other mode of journalism, and it's primarily because of the huge lack of money flowing through it. Simple as.

There's also other factors like access journalism (which has gotten better over the past few years, but read David Uzumeri, the #1 comics critic in Toronto, talking about it here) and just the relative closeness that comics creators have to comics-adjacent outlets, which can primarily be attributed to how small a community the comics community is.

Y'know, something, something ethics in comics journalism or whatever, but it's wild how little investigative journalism there is in the comics industry. I made an attempt to do something like it when I did my piece on the DC Writers' Workshop, and found it incredibly hard to navigate (though a lot of that is on me not having the resources/know-how to dive in deeper). But even that is something that's held back by a lack of money and resources, as investigative journalists in the real world have lawyers and other resources to protect them in their line of work.

So what does journalism in comics look like? I mentioned it above already, but it's a broken thing, a broke thing, a thing that's been in a fugue state for god knows how long, but one that has the potential to do good, if handled with care.

Q: What word do you spell wrong the most?

A: Hmmm, I'm not sure, since I've usually got autocorrect and red squiggly lines correcting my spelling before I can even fully grasp that I've made the error. I do also happen to be a former spelling bee champ (read: nerd), so I think my final answer will be: Keigen Rea's name. Not even Aftershock Comics can spell his name right.

Q: What kind of shoes do you wear?

A: I'm not much of a sneakerhead, but when I get shoes, I usually buy them to last at least two to three years. I've been weirdly loyal to Nike's Pegasus line of shoes, starting with a pair of green Pegasus 33s back in 2016, before moving onto a pair of black Pegasus 35s (which weren't great for the arch of my foot, in retrospect) in 2018, and I just recently got two pairs, one a blue-ish pair of Pegasus 38s, and a black pair of Air Maxes. I got these all at outlet malls for like, half the regular price that these shoes tend to go for, so it's worth it in the end.

Q: What's your favorite piece of right wing art?

A: Ben Garrison's tribute to Kobe Bryant's passing: KOBE

Q: Who's your favorite kpop idol?

A: Hmmm, good question. Y'know, I actually used to be kinda into Super Junior when I was in 7th grade, actually. Quickly googles I gotta say, it's gotta be Jennie from Blackpink.