White Whales and Space Utopias
CETACEAN NEEDED
I honestly wasn't expecting to drop another one of these so soon, but remember how, in the last issue, I said that a new issue of Nightbeach would probably be the first new comic to drop in 2024? Well, turns out I wasn't lying!
Nightbeach is kind of the result of, basically, brain dribblings. Back in the 90s, as students of pop culture know, BAYWATCH, starring David Hasselhoff, was one of the biggest shows around--a cheeseball basic-cable action....or, uh, action-adjacent show (?) about lifeguards that seems to have succeeded primarily on the merits of Pamela Anderson running in slow-motion. I never watched an episode, properly speaking, and yet it was ALWAYS ON when I turned on the TV. It was like I was being haunted by it.
A privileged few are aware that there was a spinoff show, BAYWATCH NIGHTS, also starring Hasselhoff as the same character, but now moonlighting as a private eye (!?!?) But wait, it gets better. This was also the era of The X-Files, so when the show's ratings started to sag, the second season retooled itself as a similar paranormal-investigation series. This, again, having evolved from a show about lifeguards.
I learned this information a while back without having actually seen the show, and Nightbeach sprung more or less fully formed into my consciousness. (I've since seen Baywatch Nights. It's not much like my comic. It's kinda dull, really, though I'm told there's some pretty batsh*t stuff in a couple of the later episodes.)
Anyway, Nightbeach is the very serious and intense story of Brick Ronson, his crack team of lifeguards, and their efforts to guard Enigma Beach from the paranormal threats that menace it on a regular basis. It was created by me and Dan Butler. This latest issue is written by me with art by Kelvin Sue. It sinks a line into the history of Brick and Nightbeach, and what it pulls to the surface might be some things left down in the briny deep.
Subscribers to my Patreon at the $2 level or higher can read this 26-page issue right now:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/nightbeach-issue-97992446
That's actually not all the comics from me this week, either! I quietly dropped the first issue of Starforce Pentacle on Global Comix earlier--there was a link in the previous newsletter, but I wanted to give it a little more focus here.
Starforce Pentacle was a comic I started in 2017 (Jeez!). Inspired by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison's attempts to work "chaos magick" through the medium of comics, I decided to tackle some of these ideas myself, even though I had basically no idea how chaos magick works...but from what I understand, that's not actually much of an impediment to doing it. Every chapter was exactly 5 pages long (with other repetitions of "5" throughout the comic in various ways), contains charged magickal symbols, and tries to grapple with various ideas about how we get things out of our head and into the world, which always sounded like a pretty good description of creativity to me. I've come to the conclusion that "magick" is a form of helping the magician understand and direct the way his creative workings--in my case, comics--can impact the world at large, though no one will ever be able to fully control this. I figured I might as well go big or go home, so Starforce Pentacle became a magickal working to help make the world a better place and improve my own life.
If this sounds like bullshit, it probably is! But does it work? It...sort of did, in my opinion. I didn't fix the world but I'm doing a lot better now than I was in 2017...I'm engaged (both in the "involved in things" and "preparing to get married" senses), I'm productive, and I'm pretty content with life most days. Whether a utopian world comes into being because I published this comic is yet to be determined, but it's probably about 50-50, right?
So what's Starforce Pentacle about? It's about a girl who accidentally summons a gang of intergalactic anarchist agents and sets them loose to destroy and thus save planet Earth. It's the ultimate realization of the stuff Captain Kirk did as a magical working. If space travel and SF technology is basically magic anyway, then surely the best space heroes are wizards, right?
SP was never properly finished--much of the strip is still uncoloured, and I need to do some tweaking of the art--so consider this a refined second draft. I'll be updating it monthly, and the first issue is below!
https://globalcomix.com/c/starforce-pentacle/chapters/en/1/1
If Nightbeach wasn't enough to convince you to get on board my Patreon, there's also my podcast, What Mad Universe?!?
Every two weeks, me and pal Philip Rice sit down with a book or book series from the checkered history of genre and pulp fiction. Sometimes they're staples of the SF or fantasy genres, sometimes they're bizarre obscurities. Either way, we use it as a springboard to look at some of the familiar tropes and ideas that have woven their way throughout pop culture and what place the work might occupy in that particular weaving.
The latest episode episode is a big one, on Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. Speaking of space utopias! We always make the podcast available a little earlier (and in some cases, like this one, in expanded form) for Patreon subscribers. You can check it out here! (Or click the image above for the episodes that are already available to the public.)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-mad-chapter-98060888?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_linkStay Phantasmic!
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