I Went Almost Viral On Twitter Dot Com And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
Hey! Hi! Hello! Based on the numbers available to me, this is going to be the first installment of the newsletter for a lot of you out there, and I really really wanted to make it an easy point of entry into the kind of things I do here. Sadly, the lovely comic book shops in the heart of Paris' Quartier Latin where I buy my comics for the week got caught up in this week's latest chapter of the Supplypocalypse, and so I find myself with nothing whatsoever to review. This is highly unusual, and so before anything else, I'd like to give to anyone wishing to know what they signed up for a selection of pieces from the past few months that should give you an idea of the kind of things I do here.
Issue #18, "Advance notice to all Luxury Comics retailers re: PROFESSOR MONSTER #1", starts with a very dumb comedy piece making fun of the draconian policies of one particular limited run comic book publisher, but it also has a review of Rorschach #8 that I really like because it gets into something that I hadn't seen discussed elsewhere.
Issue #23, "One Must Imagine Batman Fucking", is an all-too earnest polemic about an all-too stupid subject, and I feel that's as meat-and-potatoes as comic book industry coverage can get. If you really want to know the kind of stuff I aim for, I think that this is just about the perfect issue to showcase that.
Issue #25, "Totino's Presents: The Pride Month 2021 Post-Game Wrap-Up Show", is mostly about the jokes, until it isn't. I have done a few negative reviews over the course of this newsletter, and I think the X-Factor #10 review in this is the one I like the most, because it's pretty clinical. Sometimes these books fail and it's interesting. (Seek out the reviews of Not All Robots #1 and Batman: Reptilian #4 if you want to see a wider spectrum of negative reviews!)
Issue #30, "EXTRA EXTRA! SUBSTACK SMELLS!", is maybe the one newsletter I'm the most proud of. As the title implies, it's a fairly humorless takedown of Substack's approach to comics, from an economic, technical, and moral standpoint. It's as serious as I can get, which I think is worth doing sometimes.
Assuming that everyone is now as caught up as they wish to be, let us move past the unfortunate absence of any new comic to review, and return to the business of business. After all, cool people keep saying that a room full of vacuum and a room full of air look the same, and so now it is up to me to turn air into gold. This is HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS. Welcome.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: IF YOUR FAVORITE KIERON GILLEN COMIC IS S.W.O.R.D. YOU HAVE A VERY SPECIFIC TAKE ON WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL BEAST SHOULD BE. IT IS WRONG.
Unions: they're good! You can wax poetic about the magic of comic books as a shared event, you can salute the many underappreciated workers that make minor miracles happen on any given Wednesday, and you can go on for a while about the moral necessity of listening to those workers when they band together and speak with one voice, but it feels almost pointless, doesn't it? Unions are just self-evidently good, a fact that any decent human being could have told you long before any satirical-adjacent newsletter-shaped rambling manifesto did the job. The very basest thing these people demand is the ability and the means to do their jobs better! They want to be successful, and they understand that improving their working conditions is the only way by which this can happen! It's easy! It's simple! It's foolproof! I don't know why you would disagree, unless you were a particularly slug-like greedy hypocrite that valued turning a quick buck over the stated values you founded your business on.
Anyway, this week Todd McFarlane announced his own NFT Marketplace. Devon Aoki is a co-founder. Their first item is going to be a picture of Spawn with bad hair. Are you excited? It's a picture of Spawn with bad hair! Why aren't you excited? They're using a clean blockchain! Well, it's about as clean as anything is, in the business of turning all human endeavor into goods that can be bought and sold in speculative bubble markets by rich people who have very legitimate reasons for laundering large sums of cash. It's the Image Comics model all over again! Power to the creators! Well, mostly the power for creators to take a little bit off the top of every transaction. It's for the fans! Specifically the fans of numbers and ledgers, because that's all you're really buying when you buy one of those non-fungible tokens. It's a wholly indecent waste of time, and if you don't believe me I have a pretty good satirical-adjacent newsletter-shaped rambling manifesto about it. (It looks a bit messy because it was brought over from Substack; yeah, I did go through my fair share of scams)
Anyway, back to the main point: unions! The salaried workers at Image Comics formed a union! It's called Comic Book Workers United! Their goals, if met, would be a net positive for the comic book industry as a whole. Surely, the founders of Image Comics, a publisher that built its name on creatives taking their power back from ungrateful multi-million dollar corporations, is going to be all for it, right? What? They aren't recognizing the union? They're putting up administrative hurdles? Well, golly gee, I daresay that this sucks! Guess we better keep the fight up, and keep calling out Image Comics for what is very transparently odious bullshit! Guess I have to put out a newsletter, supply issues be damned! Well, wants and needs, and all that. I really gotta learn how to be one of the cool people someday.
In the meanwhile, that's all from me this week! Hopefully there's more next week! Thank you again for giving a shot to the dumb newsletter I do, mostly as a longer and dumber version of the jokes I make on Twitter Dot Com. If you liked it, stay tuned! Tell your friends! We have fun! I'm not always rambly and impenetrable and annoying! We can be cool, so long as you HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!