Oh, hey....

Wow, it’s been a bit, hasn’t it? I gotta say, I knew even as I was typing the phrase “I think there might be two of these this weekend” that I was quite likely dooming myself…but, if it helps, even I didn’t think it was going to be, you know, two whole months.

Don’t worry: I don’t blame you if you didn’t notice. (So many negatives!) I mean, the world is just—or at least my very fucked-up neck of it—the world is spellbinding in its terribleness. I can’t tell if it’s just being so close to sixty and the slowing-downness of my brain as well as, you know, all the breath-taking awfulness but it just feels like the days are screaming by. Screaming.

Of course, I feel like I should account for my whereabouts: health ailments have been doubling up on me so back in April I know only caught a cold but an amazing case of conjunctivitis. And then this week I not only had a weird and sudden bout of tooth pain but my knee more or less went out on me—I had lightly sprained it but after a few weeks it wasn’t better, it was worse.

And the job has been a bit of a fucker…or maybe my mindset with regards to work has been a bit, um, well, not unhealthy but…not healthy, you know? Lots of opening my phone upon waking up to make sure people are in place and things are rolling.

I guess management always must have a certain amount of “your reach is always going to exceed your grasp” going on with it, because you’re responsible for other people’s work product while not being those people but my department operates basically twenty hours a day during the regular workweek and, even though not as many hours, also on Saturday and Sunday…and lately stuff has been happening even further outside my grasp—lots of stressful next to midnight shit, and stuff left over for people to pick up who are new and fully capable of being lost and befuddled during what are my sleeping hours. It’s very, very easy to get locked into the “shit, is everything ok?” mode for work, and I suspect that’s all the more true when you throw in the “uh, is the American empire really dying, and am I a total shit for being pissed about the idea I might have to work until I die?” The deck is stacked for doomscrolling at scales large and small.

But, you know, outside of all that? I literally get to wake up curled up next to my wife and dog every morning. We can walk two blocks and stare at the ocean and see seals and dolphins and these amazing pelican/heron things that glide in formation, skating sideways through the sky together. I’m truly and genuinely grateful for my life, even as I’m mortified and ashamed and angry and grief-riddled about how badly this country got conned during the course of my life.

Anyway.

It’d be nice if I could have a smooth transition here—to go from talking about this weird state of grace from which i get to watch the smoke on the horizon to talking about the video games I’ve been playing but…well, let’s just chalk it up to my being rusty after two months of inactivity.

And by “inactivity,” I mean….playing a lot of Hades? Again? Not quite sure now my thinking got me from “ah, I loved this game where I collected insects and lolled about in the summer of a rural Japanese village” to “this almost weaponized roguelike of a button-masher lovingly enrobed in Greek myth”? Hades, as you probably know, has you playing as Zagreus, the son of Hades, trying to battle his way out of the land of the dead so he can find his true mother. It’s roguelike—lots of dying on the part of the main character but always with something gained so you can come closer and closer to beating what seems absolutely unbeatable. And the gamemakers designed that experience in part so you can fully explore the characters and narrative, because you’re always returning to throne room of Hades, the same place and the same people each time you die, and so you have a chance to get to know them better, to understand your situation better.

It’s a really fun game and very clever—you’re playing the same scenarios over and over, so of course your character is going to befriend Sisyphus—and I played it back during the pandemic for a hundred hours or so, despite not being really any good.

I’m not saying I’m better this time through but at least I know what I’m supposed to be doing, and not above checking advice out on the internet, so I’ve put in almost the same amount of time and this time managed to get to the “true ending,” and the threesome, and the ending credits. Of course, you can still play after that and there are more goals to achieve but I’d like to think I’m done. (Just in time for Hades 2 to drop in the next few months.) And I’ll be honest: both right after the threesome scene and the end credits, one of my first thoughts was, “welp, gotta get another newsletter out.”

And but so: comics.

I think the other thing kinda stalling me out on sitting down and writing another one of these was being caught between two options I wasn’t very fond of: listing out all my comics and giving shout-outs to a few I think are noteworthy wasn’t appealing at the beginning of March—there was like one book I kind of wanted to mention that I read back in February? And now that it’s many months down the road, I don’t think anyone really wants to see a list of four hundred plus comics, even if I compressed them the way I have?

But I’m also strangely resistant to writing, I dunno, capsule reviews, which seems to me the only viable alternative? I don’t know why—maybe it’s because it’s one of those things I’ve done for decades, on and off, to so little effect, by and large?

On the other hand, I’m assuming you’re here because you either do like hearing about what I’m reading or don’t mind it? I dunno. So, yeah. At the risk of driving myself insane, let me just try talking about some comics without, like, I don’t know, listing them or reviewing them or…whatever the hell it is I usually do.

So. The book I read back in February is this OGN, Enter The Blue. You know how DC and Marvel both have done sponsored comics? Stuff like “The DC Heroes celebrate KFC by having Colonel Sanders defeat Doomsday” or “Spider-Man Warns You About Chlamydia”? Back when I was a kid, the electric utility would give out free comics in class that were, like, “The Brady Bunch travel back in time and meet Ben Franklin and here’s a diagram so you can make your own kite.”

Enter The Blue is delightful to me because it’s exactly that, except it’s a graphic novel written and drawn by Dave Chisholm about…Blue Note Records. More specifically, it’s about a young jazz musician who in order to save her mentor must learn the secret history of Blue Note Records and enter a magical realm outside time. With all respect to Chisholm, the book is very serviceable YA Vertigo-lite until you get to what for me is the kind of crazy “oh yeah, Blue Note Records commissioned a graphic novel to explain their legacy and maybe expand on it a bit by talking about how it also functions as a guide to transcend time and space.” I think there’s something kind of fun about seeing that and knowing it’s a kissing cousin to “Superman and TRS-80 Kids battle the sinister menace of Doc Dial-Up.”

To skip from that to my current obsession, the “I read it just last week and I’m so in love with it:” Firefly Wedding by Oreco Tachibana, published by Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint. The second volume just came out and I read the first volume the day before because (god help me) Amazon’s algorithm put it in front of my face and I went, “eh, why not?”

It’s a historical romance, though a very twisted variation—a young, sickly noblewoman is stolen from her family and is to be killed until she persuades her killer to instead protect her. She of course just wants to get home and is obsessed with saving her family by entering into an arranged marriage with someone of high prestige. But in order to do so, she has to get a seemingly amoral killer to befriend her which she does by…promising to marry him.

It’s a fun book in a very dark way—I gotta say when I started getting into manga, I had no idea one of the recurring tropes I’d encounter would be “private island of trapped prostitutes”—but the real engine is Tachibana’s cartooning: her work really reminds me of Jaime Hernandez in its clean, confident lines and amazing character work. I just tore through the first two volumes, and now I have a choice—go read the scanlations, or wait until fucking July for volume three, and then (presumably) volume four a few months after that.

Up until, I dunno, last year, it wouldn’t have been a choice. But sometime around the time I was staring down the barrel of K Manga’s horrible “oh sure, you can be current on this title as long as you pay twice for each chapter because we’re cutting it in half to get more money from you,” I decided, fuck it, I’ll just commit to buying all the volumes of Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro as I would usually and go read it online elsewhere.

Putting aside how this is a bit of a major ethical deviation from the first five and half decades of my life, one of the things that’s disconcerting about doing this is how every title I’ve done it with so far has stopped publication within a month of me starting to do so. Nagatoro wrapped up not long after I started reading it online last year and still has two volumes to be published here in the US (one of which comes out this month, in fact).

But an even bigger blow was My Dress-Up Darling, another romantic comedy I got tired of waiting on and which shut down with a shocking suddenness. Subplots, secondary character arcs, all kinds of stuff got jammed to the side as soon as the main couple finally got together. It’s kind of a shame because unlike Nagatoro which really did run its course, MDUD gives every indication of the manga-ka stepping back because her physical or mental health was totally collapsing. (It’s a shame this isn’t a podcast with Graeme, as he would help unpack how unreliable a narrator I am—my groundwork for said collapse is a couple of back-of-the-volume pieces where the creator talks about being overwhelmed, but also an amazing turn in the narrative, right before the finale, where the main character goes on to literally shout that it’s ok to just do what you love without turning it into a profession and in fact probably absolutely better.

So yeah, part of me is afraid to read Firefly Wedding online because if I do, it’s just gonna end, and probably after the sickly beautiful noblewoman yells to the sky that it’s not worth achieving your goals if it means all your hair falls out and you can’t eat solid food any more.

Speaking of which, the last few months have had me kind of plowing my way through big old handful of Marvel series. If you remember, I was reading both the ROM Spaceknight omnibii and the Micronauts, and I don’t know if I got to really talk about how crazy it is that ROM was the more satisfying book to me, overall? I guess it’s not surprising because Mantlo gets to end the story the way he wants (even if he had to wrap it up a bit early—I think he had a lot more “here’s what happened to the rest of the Spaceknights” stories up his sleeve). But also part of it is, you know, Steve Ditko ain’t hay. You get some pretty amazing inkers on his run—P. Craig Russell pops up several times!—but although Ditko maybe wouldn’t be my first pick for a cosmic epic, he and Mantlo are both eschewing nuance and going big and a lot of it works.

Ya know….I could go on. And my hope is I will—soon!—but I realize I’m just a smidge over 2k words and, you know, I’m not a professional. Probably a good idea to wrap this while I’m ahead, and not make any noises about when I’ll be back (in the hopes that means I’ll be back sooner…)

I hope you’re well!

-Jeff