It’s hard to explain just why this is so late. The events of the Saturday I’ve been meaning to tell you about took place four weeks ago, on the 2nd, but after a fitful start of four paragraphs I felt myself unable to describe the day without either going into wearying novelistic detail or being so barebones as to be pointless. And every time I thought about trying I would shie away nervously, my attention gathered by one or another ongoing projects, to which that Saturday came to feel more and more irrelevant.

But I refuse to allow myself to give up on this, as I have on so many other projects in the past, so I am forcing myself to sit down in a cafe and bang out this newsletter whether or not it feels like it has a point, and then to embark on the follow-up work that I’ll discuss later, and the uncertainty of which may have been the real source of my hesitation.

The bare outline of what I did on the 2nd is: I got up early in order to welcome a plumber to fix a persistent bathroom drip, inevitably waited two hours from when I had been told to expect him, and once the drip was sorted, headed out to the Irish American Heritage Center in the Mayfair neighborhood to walk through the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) for the first time in almost a decade, spent a generous budget on work I’d never have known existed otherwise, and then realized to my surprise that I had enough time to return home to drop off my now heavy bag before heading back out to the Loop and visiting the Goodman Theater for the first time, where I saw an electric performance of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

I’ll start with that performance, which has inevitably grown a bit shadowy in my mind after a month. The show I saw had an understudy in the title performance (as well as in some of the white roles), but checking reviews for the show I couldn't really believe I had a lesser experience: if nothing else, Wydetta Carter (the understudy) is closer to a physical match to Gertrude Pridgett Rainey than E. Faye Butler (the star praised in the press).

I’ve been meaning to see or read the play for the two decades or so that I’ve known about it; Wilson’s Century Cycle has been on an Amazon wishlist for most of my adult life, and a copy of the Viola Davis film is on one of my external hard drives. But despite a few moments of unclarity (I was in a distant seat, and am partly deaf, so I missed bits of the dialog) I can’t regret that my first encounter with the material was in its native form, on the stage. It’s a magnificent piece of theater, reckoning with the various currents — commercial, artistic, spiritual, carnal, communitarian, egocentric, racial, religious — that flowed into the blues, jazz more broadly, and by extension all the long history of African-American music that has been packaged and sold by white men. The song that gives the play its title — or more concretely the recording of the song which the play dramatizes — has been part of the fabric my life for a quarter of a century, and while I haven’t done the reading to know how much of Wilson’s relation of events is imaginary, the explanation he provides for what has always seemed like an odd, out-of-genre choice (the record's spoken-word introduction) is dramatically if not historically true. The equipment of the era made records closer to live performance than they have been since the introduction of multi-track recording, and the production letting many of the performances of the recordings play out in full turns nailing the record into a theatrical event, as thrilling as a high-wire act.

Now, of course, I want to see all the rest of Wilson’s Century Cycle — the only other of which I’ve encountered in any form is seeing Denzel Washington’s Fences in the theater — on stage. It looks like I’ve missed a lot of chances to do so in the decade that I’ve lived in Chicago. Regrets, I’ve had a slew.

I won’t try to describe the atmosphere at CAKE earlier in the day, except to note that as soon as I stepped into the exhibitor’s hall I realized that the jacket I had worn because the day was cool would need to come off.

Although I consider myself, in terms of aesthetic partisanship, an alternative comics person rather than a mainstream comics fan, what I have actually spent the bulk of my cartooning time, attention, and budget on over the past two decades is comics history, which means I have only the haziest conception of developments in alt/arts comics since the mid-2000s. I recognized no more than three of the exhibitors at CAKE 2026 (Eddie Campbell, Kevin Huizenga, Spike Troutman), but I’d given myself a budget of $200 and after an hour of walking up and down the stalls I came away with a dozen or so books (including one set given to me for free, shout out to Annie: one of the first people to welcome me to Chicago, even if she no longer lives here) which I want to spent the next few weeks reading and writing about.

Although I’m a bit nervous about that: I have an idiosyncratic but relatively harsh aesthetic temperament when it comes to comics, and while everything I bought looked attractive on a flip through, sitting down and paying attention to narrative, voice and sequence can all too often be disappointing. I don't want to be in the position of being one the few people anywhere to notice a work online and also being scathingly negative — so I’m going to put an effort into finding positive things to say, to imagine my way into the aesthetic universe where they make sense, which is how I’ve sometimes described my approach to pop. Those reviews will be happening on Bluesky, although I may end up bundling them in this newsletter if anyone’s interested.

Oh, and the bathroom drip has started back up again since the plumber’s visit.

I have my ticket for the next outing. I hope to be more prompt in detailing it.