Whatever Happened To This Week's Newsletter?
I had been planning this particular installment of the newsletter for a while. In fact, it was the first piece I began sketching out when I began laying out what the newsletter would be, with a comedy-adjacent piece about the news up top, followed by hot-take reviews of the week’s most reviewable singles. I’m not gonna go into the particulars of it, because it can still work for next week, and I like the jokes I already wrote for it. That still leaves us with this week’s newsletter, which is none of these things, for reasons that I’m going to go into as way of apology.
I. THE POLAR VORTEX
As I write these words, on the evening of February 10th, Northern Europe, in which the very comfy grey armchair serving as the HYBC HQ resides, is under the throes of extreme weather events caused by a deviation in the trajectory of the polar vortex. And because of it, the plane carrying the physical copies of this week’s releases was grounded. With no new comics to pick up at the shops, I can’t do my job very well. Some will tell me that there’s other, more convenient ways to read a comic online, which is true, and which I know for having used them before. However, it is my strongly-held belief there are things in comics that can only work in the physical, tricks of pacing and layout that you can only see when you read a page in whole before you read it in parts. There are things that you can only glimpse in the action of the page turn. And it is my belief that I would not be a good critic if I allowed for these things to be lost. So, even if I read a digital copy first, I like to give the physical version a good once-over in case I miss anything. Plus it gets me out of the house.
II. I AM NOT REVIEWING MARVEL BOOKS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
I was finishing up last week’s newsletter when people began to notice that Joe Bennett, a far-right Bolsonaro supporter with a history of ignorant and transphobic statements, had put, voluntarily or not, anti-semitic imagery in the background of The Immortal Hulk #43, that the editorial staff at Marvel had failed to notice until the issue saw print. The situation was grave enough that it demanded action on the part of Marvel comics, not just because of the context of Joe Bennett’s statements, but because a similar incident had occurred almost four years earlier, when Ardian Syaf put references to religious fundamentalist hate protests from Indonesia in the background of X-Men Gold #1. An apology was issued, the page was altered, and then, nothing. Obviously, these measures are good, and I have no problem with them. However, they’re the bare fucking minimum, and the bare fucking minimum is nowhere near enough, especially when we’re dealing with anti-semitism, and especially in a context of prior incidents.
As such, I can’t in good conscience feature Marvel comics in the newsletter. Not until more significant action is taken. It’s a bummer, it sucks, but I’d rather that than business as usual, where something like that can happen again.
III. ALSO, FUCK BRANDON GRAHAM
This is way less of an impediment to the running of the newsletter than the previous two items, but Brandon Graham, creator of the recently released RAIN LIKE HAMMERS from Image Comics, used the threat of a Cease & Desist to force Women Write About Comics to remove their reporting on allegations that have been made against him going back to at least 2018. I shouldn’t have to tell you how much this fucking sucks. This is silencing people and creating a shitty climate of fear in order to protect yourself from anything that might stand in the way of you going out there and predating on people again. It’s flat-out making the comic book industry a worse place to be in. It’s hurting people. Fuck that and fuck you, Brandon Graham. Fuck everyone that’s enabling you, and if that has to include Image Comics, who have somehow decided that you’re still worth publishing SOMEHOW, then fuck Image Comics.
IV. DOES ANYONE IN THIS INDUSTRY ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THE WELL-BEING OF WORKERS IN THIS INDUSTRY?
Nobody at Image seems to care what Brandon Graham is doing. Joe Bennett is, so far, only getting a slap on the wrist, if that. DC just announced that Geoff Johns is writing a new Stargirl special, as we begin to reckon with the scale of the abuse he has enabled during his tenure at the very top of the business, both in comics and in movies. Seems to me like no one gives a shit! If you’ve been in this industry for long enough, you can be a total asshole and no one will even dare to tell you to go away! I feel like that’s a problem! It’s hurting the industry, and worse, it’s hurting people! We can talk all day about consumer habits, trends, the state of comics as a hobby, marketing, and everything else, and not know what we’re doing with any of those to save the industry. But here’s something simple: get the fuckers out! We don’t need them, we don’t want them, they only make things worse, let’s get serious about this and kick them the fuck out! It’s maybe the easiest thing in the world. Why are we failing at it constantly? It’s hard to write a comedy-adjacent goof-em-up newsletter when the industry is so dedicated on being a total bummer, especially when it all happens in the span of a week.
V. OKAY, FINE, I’LL GIVE YOU MY HOT TAKE ON RORSCHACH #5
It’s been fairly well established by now that Rorschach is a series about comics, and more specifically, that it’s a series about the relation between us, our stories, history, and politics — not any ideology in particular, at least so far, but the process through which ideas end up shaping society. Rorschach #5, in considering the would-be victim, asks us to consider for whose benefit the whole thing happens. This being comics, the answer is, unsurprisingly: for the benefit of a guy who’s sitting on the can.
Governor Turley wants a deep-state conspiracy ready to stop him by any means necessary. A story as simple as the one he tells on the campaign trail, simple as Fornes and Stewart’s two-page splash of him on the stump. The problem with stories, of course, is that they aren’t the truth. When the masked men came to Vietnam, they turned the truth of the events into their stories. A young soldier’s body count turns into a quip about Borges, and an easy punchline about Pontius Pirate. When the young soldier crosses path with the masked men again, it’s in the middle of someone else’s story, specifically, Doctor Manhattan’s flashback from Watchmen #2.
What happens, when you only see the world through the prism of story? When the truth is, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, an inconvenience? What do you see, when you look for a pattern among these overlapping stories of masked men becoming more than themselves and the people telling their stories? Is it anything, or is it all a joke? If it’s a joke, why aren’t you laughing? And where are the curtains? Well, we’re barely halfway there.
Well, that’s literally all I had to say about this week. Sorry it’s not more. Actually maybe I’m not sorry. I did warn you I would play it by ear. Either way, eye on the prize, like, comment AND subscribe, keep fighting the good fight, and, at the end of it all, HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.