Other Comics News Parade-O-Links 02052021

 (The Overwhelming Motörhead Rock Commando July 1980.)

Here are some things I found interesting in the world of minicomics, comic books, graphic novels, small press, self publishing, zines, webcomics, cartoons, digital comics, other, etc. during the week weeks ending 02052021. 

• Hello sisters and brothers and undecided others and welcome to another episode of your Other Comics News Parade-O-Links.  My name is Shano and I'll be your host.  Remember over a month ago when fired up the file under other machine and I was going to start posting these things again?  Me either. 
• No one close to me died since our last episode so, progress. 
• Marvel and DC superheroes trend on the social meeds every day but it's rare when the comics trend and even rarer when a specific comic book trends so when it does you know it's either going to be misogyny or racism.  Immortal Hulk #43 decided to go with the racism this go round.  Everyone makes mistakes but racism is almost never a mistake and there are some mistakes you don't get to make if Disney is paying you. 
• In dumb comics movie click bait news: Nah, that's just stupid. 
• Speaking of things that are not comics, that HBO Max deal has finally added the greatest DC Comics based TV show of all time, Batman: The Brave and the Bold.  Check it out heathens. 
• I just got a phone call from my close personal friend Doctor Fauci and he gave me some great news.  America's most wholesome cartoonist, Josh Latta, has a new book out.  Suck on that 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease.
• Well, it's finally happened.  Ashley Holt has finally gotten so sick of your bullshit he's left the country.  This country has two Carolinas and neither one of them were good enough for our man Ashley.  Good luck Germany! 
• Do you guys read the comics?  I read the comics.  What comics do you guys read?  Maybe respond in the comments.  LOL HAH HAH HAH no one is ever going to respond in the comments.  Maybe twitter though.  I've been reading a lot of oddball late 80s stuff lately like post-Crisis Suicide Squad and the pre-Grant Morrison* Doom Patrol.  (With the intention of going through the Morrison stuff again afterwards because I'm obsessed with that Doom Patrol TV show.)  Been reading lots of comics with characters in brown and orange costumes in stories where they go into cold war era made up jungle islands. That was a weird period in comics, before DC thought these things had value, before the movies, when they were just like, "well, all these non-primary color characters are never going to catch on so we may as well dump them in a team and kill one of them off every issue".  Fun stuff. I recommend you go to Ollie's and buy the first few trade paperbacks of both series for about $3 each.
• Speaking Doom Patrol, you guys have watched the first two seasons of the TV show now right?  It's the best right?  What do you want to see in the 3rd season?  I want Doom Force.  

• And speaking of other things that are not comic books, sure, yeah, I like WandaVision just fine.  I like it better when they don't explain things for the normies.  I don't want the normies to have anything else.  They have sports.  That's enough. I think showing us the MCU "real world" outside of Westview as a catastrophic mistake for the show.  Those scenes are poorly written and poorly acted and just look like low budget television.  The stuff of Wanda's creation inside Westview, which is supposed to be low budget television looks fantastic.  Just, spare us the MCU please.  
• My MCU ranking goes as follows 1) The ones where Iron Man plays AC/DC. 2) The ones where Captain America takes his shirt off. 3) WandaVision.
• That Vision "content" you really wanted. 

• If I hadn't been trapped in the Trump version of Westview for the past year I might have given you guys a list of my favorite comics from 2020 and I probably would have mentioned Jeremy Massie's Holler.  You can get on board with the 3rd issue now. 
• Current reigning defending best at drawing on Earth, Brad McGinty, recently did the cover of We Do What We Want 2. It's great and the magazine is a lot of fun.  The magazine has an article where Gerard Way talks about his The Real Ghostbusters toys.  I didn't make that up.  For real, if you like the things that are the good things then you will enjoy this magazine.  Also, if you like the things that are rad you will like this High on Fire t-shirt Brad did for the Holy Mountain Printing folks. 
• The great Annie Koyama is leaving escaping  changing her relationship with comics.  Our man Rob Clough weighed in on her impressive legacy. 
• Related, Ed Kanerva and RJ Case are also fleeing pursuing their future endeavors. 
• 24 Hour Comics Day went down again and I read a lot of the comics but when I think about it, most of what I saw were from the folks I follow on twitter and Instagram that are already posting comics weekly or more frequently in that format so, really, the day just felt like any other day in my social media feed.  A lot of folks have really mastered Instagram's 10 photo limit for posting comics in a reader friendly cell pad pod phone environment.  I'm thinking about folks like the world's most dangerous man Henry Eudy, your dad Mike Dawson, that lady at the petting zoo Lisa Hanawalt , your favorite teacher Mayday Trippe, that dude you used to work with Gabby Schulz, that dude on the bus Josh Bayer, that dude you know who has transcended flesh and draws with his mind now Patrick Dean and so many more just killing it every day.  I salute you doers of things. 

THE BEST NEW COMIC I READ THIS WEEK

Malarkey #5 by November Garcia available at Birdcage Bottom Books

This is a great looking minicomics sized collection of comics with bigfancycomics production.  These are mostly diary style comics with a few more ambitious art comics pages to mix it up.  Garcia's color stuff is really interesting.  Like that fantastic cover where it looks like it's raining what could be bubble gum or guts depending on how dark your day was. Thematically this issue is dealing with, well, kind of 2020 in a nutshell.  Death and the plague and how you just have to deal with it.  I think we call can relate.  Also, there are jokes. 

• Before we go we'd better check on our boy Francis and make sure he's okay.

• Remember pals, life is hard.  Never stop running unless it's to pick up a friend.  Read comics and chew Glorp every day and you'll keep on livin' until you're dead. 

Your best pal ever,

Shannon Smith

p.s. I write comics.  Do you make comics?  Maybe you should hire me to write comics. 
p.p.s Say you want a leader but you can't seem to make up your mind. I think you'd better close it and let me guide you to my twitter feed.
p.p.p.s.  Yeah, I do Instagram too.  Maybe if 100,000 of you follow me there I'll be as famous as the average Cambodian teenager with a milk ring collection. 

Other Comics News Parade-O-Links 09182016

(2001 A Space Odyssey issue 10.  Cover by Jack Kirby 1977.  Image stolen from Kevin Metz. )

Here are some things I found interesting in the world of minicomics, comic books, graphic novels, small press, self publishing, zines, webcomics, cartoons, digital comics, other, etc. during the week ending 09182016.

"Spock, I've found that evil usually triumphs - unless good is very, very careful." -Dr. Leonard H. McCoy.

• Hello sisters and brothers of teh intronets and welcome to another episode of your Other Comics News Parade-O-Links.  My name is Shannon and I'll be your host.  I have to start this episode off with an apology.  I know most of you woke up Sunday morning, got out of bed, shared breakfast with your non-gender specific significant other, read the Sunday funnies then logged on to the internets to read the Other Comics News Parade-O-Links like all good humans do but you were then horrified to find that the Parade-O-Links was not there.  I'm sorry.  I got busy.  And today's Parade will be short.  Let's call it minimal.  That makes it sound more intentional and less like failure.  All I can do is say that I'm sorry and promise that I will always disappoint you frequently.  I spent much of the weekend at the annual Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion  on the VA/TN state line in Bristol. It was neat. Crowded, but neat.  Lots of hillbilly hipsters.  Hipbillies. Craft beer, craft crafts, foods on sticks,  country and bluegrass upstarts, country and bluegrass legends.  It was a good time.  And look, country music ain't my thing but I appreciate it when it's good and there was plenty that was good.  I recommend it.  The highlight for me was seeing blues legend Buddy Guy perform.  He was fantastic. 

• This weekend the indie comics and small press world turned it's lonely eyes to the Small Press Expo (a.k.a. SPX) in Bethesda, MD.  I didn't go.  I haven't been since they moved to the lotter for their table reservations.  My number just hasn't came up. And, as much as I'd like to attend, September and October are busiest months of the year for me.  But, lots of folks whet and I saw some neat things on the old twudder and instacrack.  I'm sure we'll see some reports roll in this week.  I can't wait to see the best pictures of people cosplaying as the carpet or as those two old horror movie looking architects in that painting everyone takes a picture of.   The Comics Reporter has your Ignatz winners.  I was hoping that Gabby Schulz's Sick would win because it is one of the best comics I've ever read. I hadn't read most of the nominees because minicomics are a wierd regional kinda thing and graphic novels are too expensive. 

• Speaking of comics shows, Adam and Shawn of The Dollar Bin have part 2 of their DragonCon adventure.  Part 2 of their podcast focuses on the comics related part of the convention.  The fact that you can do a podcast on the comics related part of DragonCon shows that the show has improved a lot in recent years.  When I lived in Atlanta, it was just a cosplay show with comics shoved in corner of a basement.  I remember one year when Carmine Infantino, Julius Schwartz, Darth Vader and Chewbacca were crammed into a space in the basement about the size of a Ford Focus while upstairs, in a huge convention room, literal porn stars had 8 foot tables to themselves. But, from listening to The Dollar Bin, it appears that things have improved and that DragonCon may indeed be a show worth checking out for comics enthusiasts and creators. The episode also has a great story about Shawn meeting the great Jim Steranko.  (ABS.  Always be Sterankoing.)
• We are all going to die.

• A lot of talk the past few weeks about Raina Telgemeier's new book Ghosts.  Most of it high praise but a little bit of negativity.  I haven't read it.  I am not a child.  Also, graphic novels = expensive etc.  My comic reading kids kind of jumped from Archie to Kate Beaton and manga before these YA graphic novels were really a thing so that window was missed by my household.  My youngest reads Yo-Kai Watch manga.  I gotta say, it's hard to get them to give american intermediate or young adult graphic novels when they've already been introduced to books that are vastly more visually stimulating.  I've tried.  It's not my fault.

• There are a lot of things I've enjoyed while file under other was on hiatus and I hope to get to a lot of it throughout the rest of 2016. One thing that I've been really pretty lousy about pointing out are the webcomics I enjoy.  Pals Jeremy Massie and Matthew Smith have a new comic online called Amazing Age. They are now up to a 1st issue's worth of pages so it's a good time to check it out for before the next pages roll out.  Page one is here. 

• And now ladies and gentlemen...

THE BEST Pretty Good NEW COMIC I READ THIS WEEK


Doom Patrol (volume who knows because publishers don't even keep track anymore) issue 1 by Gerard Way, Nick Derington, Tamra Bonvillain, Todd Klein and several other people.  Published by DC Comics.  $3.99

The reason I struck through the word "best" in the header above is because I think I only read one new comic this week and calling a thing the "best" when you only sampled one of them is kind of silly.  But it's a pretty good comic.  I enjoyed it. I should enjoy it because the thing is pretty much made for me and/or my offspring. I'm a 90s Grant Morrison acolyte and this thing is essentially a tribute to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and Invisibles but made for current teens like my kids.  It's kind of like The Batman Adventures version of Morrison's Doom Patrol.  And I think it's perfect that DC has put Gerard Way in charge of this thing and this Young Animal line of comics because Grant Morrison may have very well invented Gerard Way.  Some of the youngs might not know about this but, in the 90s, we had rock star comics creators.  No, they were not comics creators that were actual rock n' roll performers, but they were creators that carried themselves, portrayed themselves and were treated much like rock stars.  The Image guys were like west coast American rock stars.  They had expensive cars, they hung out with rappers and sports stars and did TV commercials.  But the DC Vertigo creators were the cool UK rock stars with the black leather jackets, combat boots and tight shiny pants. Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison were the prototype for Gerard Way.  He is their dream become manifest. He is a literal rock star making comics.  Which, also gives me a chance to repeat one of my favorite jokes; "How do you break into comics?  Become moderately successful in any entertainment field other than comics, then ask." 
And please don't think I'm dismissing Gerard Way here.  He's doing good work in this comic.  He has history with Morrison and has clearly done his homework.  All the right references and hints and teases are there.  This comic feels like the Netflix re-boot of your favorite old TV show.  It's mostly a new cast but they brought back enough of the old faces to make it feel like a family reunion.  There are panels where my Grant Morrison-fan reflexes kicked in and my "hey, they're ripping off Morrison" alert went off and I had to remind myself that it is supposed to do that.  
Derington's art is fine enough.  Kind of a stripped down kid friendly version of what you would have expected to see in a 90s Doom Patrol.  A Philip Bond or Cameron Stewart might have been a better fit but it's okay.
My fourteen year old daughter likes My Chemical Romance.  She's in the high school band and they play one of their songs.  She want's to read this comic.  Grant Morrison, your creation has succeeded. 

• And finally... Francis likes a girl that's like a cheeseburger. 

• Remember pals, life is hard.  Read comics every day, chew Glorp every day and you'll keep on livin' until your dead. 

Your best pal ever,
Shannon Smith

p.s. I write comics.  Do you make comics?  Maybe you should hire me to write comics. 

p.p.s Say you want a leader but you can't seem to make up your mind. I think you'd better close it and let me guide you to my twitter feed.

p.p.p.s. Let's pretend we went to high school together on facebook.

p.p.p.p.s. Google + is another place you can read the same thing I posted here.

p.p.p.p.p.s. I'll tumblr for ya.

p.p.p.p.p.p.s.  Yeah, I do Instagram too.  I guess it's a law or something.

Into the Supercontext part 1: Doom Patrol 54

Hello friends.  Welcome to a series of posts I'm going to call Into the Supercontext.  What does that mean?  I am not sure.  Maybe we will figure it out.  Maybe we will not.  It is probably not important.  What is important is that I explain to you what exactly the Don Heck I plan on doing. 

THE PLAN:  Read the entire run of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles before the world ends on December 22, 2012.  Whatever that means.  The Invisibles is about... a lot of things.  It's about the 90s.  It's about 2012.  It's about the past.  It's about the future.  It's about revolution.  It's aboutt the status quo.  It's about the individual.  It's about the collective.  It's about all of our fears.  It's about all of our hopes and dreams.  It is a comic book.

I invite you to read along.  I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments section below or tweet them at me on the twitter.

For me, this is a re-read.  Maybe it will be for you as well.  Maybe you have never read it before.  I will be reading it in its original serialized print format.  Maybe you will read it in trade paper backs or in the new Omnibus.  Or maybe you will just read this series of posts without reading The Invisibles at all kind of like  Grandpa reading the TV Guide in The Lost Boys.  That is A Okay.  There are no rules in this thing.  

It is not my intention for this to be a critical analysis of the work or a scholarly investigation.  It is just a re-read.  I know the series well.  It is my all time favorite comic book series.  What I am personally most curious about exploring in this re-read is how it holds up now that we are all currently living in the future the series predicted.  The series ran between 1994 and 2000.  I was a very different person in 2000 than I was in 1994.  The world was very different as well.  The world turned upside down in the late 90s.  Our tools we use to interact with the world changed.  Then in 2001 a year after the series was over the world turned upside down again.  No new normal has yet been established.  Our new normal is constant change.  Now in the year 2012 I am an entirely different person again than I was in 2000. I do believe that perception shapes our reality so I'm curious to see how 2012 me reacts to this work.

Before we start, one small bit of housekeeping.  I intend to lean heavily on the Barbelith library of Invisibles related resources as I go through this.  You can go ahead and assume that anything clever I point out in this series probably came from Barbelith's issue guides.  Thank you very much to Tom Coates and all of the contributors for their thorough study of the work.

So, let's get started.  We will begin at the beginning.  Wait.  That is way to obvious.  Let's start before the beginning.  Let's start with one of the comics Grant Morrison wrote before The Invisibles.  Let's start with  Doom Patrol.  

 "The word 'BARBELiTH' is derived from a dream I had when I was about 20 or 21 and coincided with my first structured 'magical' experiences and a minor nervous breakdown (in the dream, BARBELiTH was the name of some higher dimension or alternate reality). Like a lot of stuff in INVISIBLES I used the name unconsciously when I needed something to call the red circle that represents our Universe's placental twin. I'd taken the etymology as far as 'bearded stone', which seems much less interesting and less weirdly appropriate than 'alien stone'. My real life is getting more like the comic every day (in ways I should have suspected but didn't really expect on this scale). There's more on the red circle and its many meanings in DOOM PATROL #54, I just realised. That issue was written in near-trance so fuck only knows what's been trying to get through all these years."- Grant Morrison, July 7, 1998.

Doom Patrol Issue 54. 
"Aenigma Regis".  Writen by Grant Morrison.  Layouts by Richard Case.  Finishes by Stan Woch.  Cover by Gavin Wilson.  Published by DC Comics in 1992.

It is 1992.  George H. W. Bush is President of the United States.  Boris Yeltsin is President of Russia.  John Major is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  Bush pukes on the Prime Minister of Japan.  Yeltsin pukes on whoever he damn well pleases.  The Soviet Union has collapsed.  Bush and Yeltsin announce that they will no longer point nukes at each other.  The Cold War is over.  The New World Order is in control.  Bill Clinton is running for President.  (SPOILER:  He wins.)  War in Bosnia.  263 dead coal miners in Turkey. South Africa ends apartheid.  LA riots for six days after the Rodney King trial. NAFTA is signed.  A shootout at Ruby Ridge.  Image comics changes everything.  Sinead O'Connor rips up a photo of the Pope.  Batman Returns.  Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs.  Clint Eastwood shoots down the Duck of Death.  Agent Dale Cooper is in the Red Room.  The Singles soundtrack is played in thousands of dorm rooms.  Ozzy Osbourne retires. (SPOILER: It didn't take.)  Nirvana is the biggest band in the world.  (This pisses off Axel Rose.  A lot.)  Kurt and Courtney have a baby.  Johnny Carson says goodbye.  Joe Shuster, Peyo, William Gaines and Martin Goodman die.  Prince Charles and Lady Di separate.  Queen Elizabeth declares the year annus horribillis.  Let's hope she does not read The Invisibles.


(Grant Morrison with hair and some unknown writer named Neil.  Image stolen from some guy's myspace page.)

And... if you were alive in 1992 you could buy a hot fresh copy of the Grant Morrison written Doom Patrol complete with freaky photo collage cover boasting that it is suggested for mature readers.  This thing is about as Vertigo as comics get but Vertigo does not exist yet.  Grant Morrison is not Grant Morrison MBE the writer of JlA, X-Men, All-Star Superman or any of that stuff.  He's not even bald yet.   He has Arkham Asylum and Animal Man under his belt and is handed the keys to the C level DC comics property Doom Patrol.  Not a lot of people are paying attention so anything goes.  And it did.  To the dark side of the moon. 

"IAMTHEINVISIBLEFIRETHATWORKSINSECRET"

Well, hi there invisiblefirethatworksinsecret.  How do you do?

This comic is bonkers people.  Maybe, possibly, perhaps if you had read the first 53 issues of Doom Patrol this thing might make some sense but I doubt it.  What we are presented with here is a comic book where Negative Man, you know, the DC comics guy with the spooky black energy powers and the bandages all over his face, yeah, that guy... no wait scratch that.  He's not really Negative Man any more.  The star of this comic is the merging of a man, a woman and that crazy energy stuff.  They are merged together into a "divine hermaphrodite" named Rebis.  

I know.  I know.  I'm right there with ya buddy.  And see, if you picked up this comic in 1992 without being up to date on the latest in hermaphrodite super heroes you would be totally lost.  This is before teh intronets and before comics put those explanatory "our story so far" things at the front of the books.  No, you open this comic up and you get super hermaphrodite floating around on the dark side of the moon.  

Like ya do.

So, Rebis is floating about the moon dealing with all the horrific mental scenarios and split personality issues one must deal with when they are a super freak made up of three beings.  This comic is multiple streams of consciousness at war and love and sex with each other.  Multiple personality hallucinations blending in on each other.  We witness conception and child birth, life and death and everything in between. 

Birth, death and rebirth are ideas we will deal with again (and again) in The Invisibles.  We see an Ouroboros, the symbol of regeneration.  A snake eating itself.  We see snakes on an Apollo moon lander.  Space sex.  Negative being birth.  Double headed hermaphrodite fighting itself.  Negative being transvestite prostitute.

And on page seven we see Barbelith.   A red dot.  A red dot that lives on the dark side of the moon.  Red bleeding into black.  Or is the black bleeding into the red?  

"STOP.  STOP SAYS THE RED LIGHT.  NO, IT'S THE BUTTON.  THIS IS HOW THEY START THE FINAL WAR.  A TOUCH ON THE BUTTON.  TONGUE ON THE BUTTON.  MOTHER'S NIPPLE, LOOMING UP LIKE A SUN.  MATTER DISSOLVING IN THE CORE OF THE SUN, IN THE SOLAR FURNACE.  THE NUCLEAR BRIDAL CHAMBER.  IT'S COMING!"  

It's coming.  It always seems to be coming doesn't it?

After our man Rebis walks through all of this madness he goes beyond the Apollo moon lander to see what is really out there just like the astronauts in an awful Michael Bay movie would years later.  He/she/it finds a crater with a twin tree holding a glowing radiant orb.  There is a gold ring around the tree.  There is a body at the base of the tree.  It is merged with the tree and branches grow form its head.  It has box containing artifacts from all of Rebis' lives.  Rebis digs deeper and on the final page pulls out and holds in the air a giant glowing green egg.  Something will be born.  In a future issue?

What does it all mean?  I have no idea.  But something is coming.  Something will be born.  And Barbelith waits for us on the dark side of the moon.  Barbeltih waits for us in future issues of The Invisibles.

"I FELT HIM IN THE SUN, IN THE COSMIC RAYS.  I COULDN'T CONTROL THE MONSTROSITIES FORM OUTSIDE, THE SPASMS OF THE RAVISHED SOLAR SYSTEM.  MY ASTRONOMY IN HER HOT MOUTH.  THE DREAD MONSTER DISCOVERS THE SEXUAL INTRUDERS.  TWO PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD?  NO.  THERE'S ONLY ME.  NO ONE BUT ME.  THERE WILL BE SOME AMAZING RESULTS..."

Tune in next time dear reader as we explore the first issue of The Invisibles.  "Dead Beatles".     

Your best pal ever,

Shannon Smith

p.s. Say you want a leader but you can't seem to make up your mind. I think you'd better close it and let me guide you to my twitter feed.

p.p.s. Let's pretend we went to high school together on facebook.

p.p.p.s. Google + is another place you can read the same thing I posted here.

p.p.p.p.s. I'll tumblr for ya.