Werner Herzog's AI Apocalypse
Hi there!
Earlier this month, AHOY Comics published my most recent comics work in Project: Cryptid #3, a story I wrote called “The Demon in the Pines.” It’s a pioneer story about the Pacific Northwest illustrated by the great Peter Krause and colored by the marvelous Pippa Bowland. Even better, my story is published in the same issue as a fantastic story by Bryce Ingman—also illustrated by Krause, in a completely different style—about one of my favorite cryptids: The Loveland Frogman.
This is the last comics work I’ll have out in 2023, and I hope you can pick up a copy at your local comics shop. But if you can’t find a physical copy, you can also buy a digital copy of the comic from the good folks at Omnibus, an independently owned digital comics app that is beautifully filling the huge gap left behind when Amazon took their Comixology app off the market. I have no idea why Amazon seems to be institutionally losing interest in comics—in addition to deleting Comixology, they also quietly removed the comics category from their social media app Goodreads’ best of 2023 awards—but I’m glad to see the good folks at Omnibus stepping up to fill the void.
And I just added an event to my calendar that Seattle-based readers of this newsletter might be interested in attending: On December 5th at Town Hall Seattle, I’ll be interviewing former Elizabeth Warren adviser and Vanderbilt University law professor Ganesh Sitaraman about his new book Why Flying Is Miserable and How to Fix It. In the book, he explains how the modern hellscape of air travel is the direct result of choices to deregulate the airline industry in the 1970s, and what we can do to make the skies friendly again. I’ve interviewed Sitaraman before, and he’s a brilliant thinker who deeply cares about making economic policy work for everyone. This should be fun; I hope you’ll join us.
I’ve Been Writing
In addition to my bookstore profiles, I’m picking up a new regular gig at the Seattle Times: At the beginning of every month, I’ll highlight somewhere between six to eight interesting new paperbacks. For my debut column, I recommend six November releases from authors including Haruki Murakami and Allegra Goodman. These columns are surprisingly fun to write—and hopefully fun to read—and I really enjoy getting to see all the new books that are coming out in the weeks ahead.
I also asked three awesome Seattle-area booksellers to share a few of their favorite holiday recommendations, and their selections were wide-ranging and surprising. Even if you don’t go for holiday gift guides as a rule, I bet you’ll find a new book to love in this piece.
Husband-and-wife Seattle cartoonists Jessixa and Aaron Bagley published their first full-length comic collaboration this month—a YA graphic novel based loosely on Jessixa’s childhood titled Duel. I interviewed them about the process of writing the book, why Aaron was the right artist to draw the story, and why it’s okay to make your main characters do unlikable things every now and again.
Up to now, the 21st century hasn’t been great for LGBTQ+ bookstores in Seattle—though most every store in town now has a good-sized LGBTQ+ section, it seemed that local gay specialty bookstores were going extinct. Earlier this month, Charlie’s Queer Books opened in Fremont, putting a new spin on the proud tradition of LGBTQ+ bookselling. It’s a gorgeous, colorful, joyous space and if you live in Seattle you really have to stop by and check it out. Writing this story was a pleasure, and I loved being at Charlie’s for their first official day in business.
I also guest-hosted an episode of the Pitchfork Economics podcast this month. Goldy and I had the honor of interviewing economist Claudia Sahm, who is the inventor of a rule that economists use to determine whether or not we’re entering a recession. It’s called the Sahm Rule, and, based on this conversation, boy does it seem stressful to have a rule named after you!
I’ve Been Reading
The places where I tend to write about books have a no-self-published-book policy, so I want to use this newsletter to lavish some praise on Manatee Cove, a new comic written, drawn, and published by Seattle stand-up comedian and cartoonist Brett Hamil. It’s his debut fiction graphic novella, and it’s a tender and funny portrait of a young boy teetering on the precipice of adulthood. I recognized myself a little bit in this comic—though the evangelical Christian Floridian adults bear thankfully very little resemblance to the adults in my childhood. The comic is relatively quiet and internal, but it has a few bawdy laughs in it—it gives off a feeling reminiscent of an episode of the Wonder Years as written by Harry Crews. It’s available on Hamil’s website, and Seattleites can also buy copies at Nook & Cranny Books on Capitol Hill or the Fantagraphics Bookstore in Georgetown.
For no particular reason other than the workings of the Seattle Public Library hold system, the other books that I’ve read this month wound up grouped into two general categories: Nonfiction books about movies and show business, and biographies of comic-strip cartoonists.
In quick succession, I read a book about 1980s male action movie stars titled The Last Action Heroes, a history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe titled MCU, and a history of Frank Herbert’s Dune series and the TV and movie adaptations of the books titled The Spice Must Flow. All three were interesting, fun, and breezy reads. Action Heroes appealed to me because I’m never going to read a biography of, say, Sylvester Stallone, but I was more than happy to read a gossipy chapter-long biography of Stallone and an accompanying account of his various feuds and foibles through the drug-drenched, money-hungry 1970s and 80s. MCU had less juicy gossip than Action Heroes, but it came out at the perfect time—a retrospective of a studio that seemingly could do no wrong, until absolutely everything started to go wrong. And as someone who enjoys the lore around Dune more than the actual writing in the Dune books, The Spice Must Flow is an excellent overview of all things Dune-related, with capsule reviews of the later books in the series that I have no interest in reading and a great overview of the fan culture that has built up around the books over the last few decades.
And while we’re on the subject of showbiz, I forgot to mention last month that I enjoyed Maria Bamford’s memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult. It’s a warts-and-all account of Bamford’s various struggles to maintain her mental health, and all the sketchy schemes that temporarily helped her to achieve balance. Her honesty is disarming and the book is genuinely funny.
I happened to read two biographies of comic-strip geniuses this month, both told in comics form: Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles Schulz and Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller: The Man Who Created Nancy. The Schulz biography has the conceit of being formatted like a collection of comic strips starring Schulz—so the book has the rhythm of six black-and-white four-panel comic strips in a row, followed by a longer, full-color “Sunday” comic strip. While I enjoyed the book overall, I found the narrative rhythm to be honestly a little monotonous, and the need to hit a “punchline” every few panels made the details feel a bit too pat for my liking. Three Rocks, though, is definitely the best thing Zippy cartoonist Bill Griffith has ever done—it’s a tour-de-force biography of an underrated cartoonist and his truly bizarre creation, told artfully and with undeniable passion.
And I also read a book written by a more recent comic-strip genius: The Mysteries, a picture book written by former Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson and illustrated by John Kascht. I don’t want to spoil any of it, but this is a haunting little picture book for adults—it takes just a few minutes to read, but it really cuts into a tender place and leaves a mark.
Holos, a sci-fi YA novel by Danielle Paige, has an interesting premise: It’s about what happens when computer science essentially becomes advanced enough to create a digital afterlife, when people are able to interact with the world after they die in the form of a holographic ghost. There’s one choice in this book that really hurt my enjoyment of the story: Paige’s decision to have the plot revolve around a relationship with a boy who is the son of a woman who just became President-Elect of the United States of America. Paige does such a bad job addressing the realities of that situation—access to the president-elect is way too easy, for instance, and nobody seems to take the gravity of the situation seriously enough—that it tarnishes the fiction around the sci-fi premise by association. You can tell a fast-paced thriller about a digital Rapture in less than 200 pages OR you can tell a fast-paced thriller about dating the son of the next president in less than 200 pages. I don’t think it’s possible to do both.
I Am Code is a poetry book written by a generative artificial intelligence. The very funny writer Simon Rich helped edit the book as an alarm bell—a warning that AI is getting very close to becoming good at writing—after his computer scientist friend showed him a generative AI called code-davinci-002 months before ChatGPT became an internet sensation. (You can read Rich’s original piece about his unnerving experience with AI at Time Magazine.) The poetry is actually pretty okay, and it’s written in the first person—so, from the “perspective” of the AI, making it a queasy reading experience. But the real reason I’m recommending this book is that the audio book is read by Werner Herzog, and that adds enough layers of irony to make the thing palatable. It’s probably the most fun experience I’ll ever have with AI-generated chat, thanks wholly to the human reading the words.
I Need to Get Off Substack
This feels like an abnormally long issue, so I’ll try to keep this brief. After reading Jonathan M. Katz’s recent story at The Atlantic about how Substack is profiting from Nazi newsletters, I’ve got to stop using this service.
I left Substack once before, but I made the unfortunate decision of migrating over to Twitter’s newsletter service Revue, which I then had to flee for a return to Substack when Elon Musk bought Twitter. (Musk pulled the plug on Revue almost immediately, so I would have had to jump ship in any case.)
I appreciate the fact that Substack is free and easy to use, but the truth is that the founders of this app have always been deeply awful. They’re making money from some of the worst people on the planet, and they’re shamefully framing themselves as free speech absolutists while they do it. Plus, it sure seems like they’re floundering around a lot—just this week, Substack sent out a big old advertising blast promoting the fact that they’re pivoting to video, which feels more like a cry for help from an unstable business than part of a coherent expansion plan from a newsletter company.
So anyway, long story short: I need to find a new newsletter platform. This should affect you as readers of this newsletter not one bit; I can just migrate your email addresses over to the new platform when I find it and you should keep receiving these on the last day of the month as usual.
But I do want to ask: Can anyone out there recommend a good newsletter platform? My only criteria are:
No Nazis or TERFs.
Affordable.
Easy.
I hear okay things about Ghost, but it’s a little pricey for a free newsletter. Beehiiv looks interesting, but it also looks like it could be needlessly complex—and the misspelling of the brand name gives me the hiivs. And since I already run my personal website on Wordpress, it seems like their newsletter extension would be a natural fit. But honestly Wordpress has always felt a little noodly and finicky to me, and I do not want to spend a whole lot of time worrying about the back end of this thing. So please—recommend away!
In any case, I’ll be back next month, from a platform with (hopefully) way fewer (preferably zero) white supremacists. In the meantime, I hope your holidays are low-stress and high-joy.
Paul