What’s in Tegan’s Storage Locker?

The following essay was written earlier this year, ostensibly to commemorate the launch of my TikTok channel, and first saw print serialized over the first five issues of my new weekly newsletter, Volume 2 of The Hurting Gazette. The first volume was a digital magazine released through my blog across most of 2018, to an absolute chorus of crickets. The new volume has met with a significantly stronger response out of the gate, thank goodness. Every week sees the release of a raft of new writing from me, and you can have it all, along with links to everything I do, delivered fresh to your mailbox every week. New issue should be going out Wednesday this week, lord willing and the creek don’t rise. 

As always, if you like any of my writing, the best way to help is by subscribing to my Patreon. There’s a veritable ton of older material hiding behind the paywall - you’ll find a brief laundry list below. Still, my best and most favorite writing is always whatever I’m working on now. 

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Howdy, folks. My name is Tegan O’Neil, and I’ve been writing about comic books in one outlet or another for over twenty years. I’ve written about comics for longer than I’ve done anything else. You might have stumbled across The Hurting at some point - it’s still here, although these days it’s mostly where I put links to stuff. I’ve been published on and off in the pages of The Comics Journal since 2002. I’ve been part of multiple Eisner-winning teams of people writing about comics - in 2017, with the Onion’s AV Club, and again the next year, 2018, with the Journal’s website, TCJ.com. I have an interview with the author printed in the backmatter of the paperback of Abraham Josephine Riesmen’s biography of Stan Lee. (There’s even an extended version of that chat you can read right here, that at least a couple of you probably haven’t seen yet.) Most recently, some of you might even know me from TikTok, where I launched the channel Tegan Reads A Comic Book at the tail end of 2022. 

Now, believe it or not, those videos were in the works for about a year and a half before the channel even started. That’s right, dear readers - and I address here especially those loyal readers among you who have followed me for years, and even decades - a video channel had been on the drawing board for a very long time. The nature of the channel doesn’t really allow for any digressions about process or history, so here’s a more organized summation of thoughts regarding the last few years of my life, leading to the present moment. 

I always appreciated when the first or second issue of a new series came with a nice long essay in the back about the origin of the book. Even if it was half smoke being blown up our skirts, it still went a great deal towards personalizing the creators and bringing us readers closer to the world of the book. So too, hopefully, here as well. 

So - how did we end up here, together, today? Well, therein lies a tale. 

I’ve been buying comic books since I was two years old - the first one I remember being an issue of Batman my parents got me on a long car trip. From that moment on, I remember buying them frequently - or, asking for them to bought, as I was still very young. Now, of course when I was really young they had to compete with stuff like He-Man and the Transformers - but, when I found out they were making Transformers comic books, well. It was all over for me then. I know it’s a similar story for a lot of people my age. I wasn’t allowed to buy GI Joe, on account of it glorifying the military-industrial complex (though I did watch the cartoon, and caught up with the Marvel series as an adult, which of course turned out to be far more nuanced than my parents could have credited back in the Reagan 80s). But between those two venerable Hasbro franchises I was only one of a legion of kids who found themselves incidentally transformed into Marvel Zombies, due to the infinitely transferable phenomenon of brand loyalty. 

Right after that Gladstone began reprinting the work of Floyd Gottfredson, and especially Carl Barks - actual good comics to go alongside the Transformers and other various toy books which clogged the racks of the newsstands I frequented around Lake Tahoe. Shout out to the 7/11 at Carnelian Bay, right around the corner from my childhood home - I think it’s still there today, was last time I drove through. Of course, they haven’t sold comic books in 7/11 since at least the turn of the century, if not much earlier. 

Anyway. My story in that respect isn’t unique - if you’re in your forties and still read comics, chances are very good you went through similar rites of passage. We’re the generation that saw Optimus Prime die twice, after all - once, indelibly, on movie screens, and again, rather less indelibly, in the pages of the 24th issue of the Marvel Comics series. You never forget the first time a comic book instills you with blinding rage. 

Fast forward a few years to me as an adult. Again, maybe this is a familiar story: I left home, first for college and then, soon thereafter, for parts unknown - but my massive comic book collection was left behind with my parents. And here’s where the story gets interesting. Because, I didn’t see my comic book collection for over two decades, and in fact, I believed it lost for many years. My family had settled in the far reaches of Northern California, and that was where I attended middle school and graduated high school. So far, so good. But. My parents did not stay in the Mount Shasta area. A couple years after I left they moved southwards. That meant they moved my comic books without me, which was in hindsight above and beyond the call of duty for them, considering just how massive the collection had become. Well over a solid decade of allowance and lawn mowing and holiday money, congealed into many multiple cardboard long boxes. 

But, they didn’t put the collection in their new house. No. They rented out a storage unit for a number of items that didn’t fit in a house without a garage - skis and old toys and magazines and Christmas decorations - but, most significantly, those boxes of comics. And there they sat, for a very long time. Much longer than I could ever reasonably have expected. 

Somewhere along the line we fell behind on payments for the storage unit. Money was tight as often as not for my parents in that period, by then they were long retired and lived on a fixed income. I helped them when I could, but I was in college myself for much of it, having returned to get my degree much later. At some point the responsibility of paying for the unit passed to me. I was at that point living all the way across the country, in Massachusetts for almost ten years. Money was tight there, as well. Somehow or other, between my parents and myself, the ball was fumbled and the payments stopped. My life was fraught and busy, I think by then I had returned to school. I had various relationships and bad jobs, and even though I was still regularly reading comics, I wasn’t buying very many of them. Thankfully, one of the advantages of being a critic is that I had access  to comics to read even in thin times, people just sent them to me, or more often now, give me links. 

But - what I didn’t have was money to pay for the storage unit. So - they were gone. For years. Out of sight, out of mind.

You know how it works. If you stop paying for a storage unit you can’t expect but to see it pop up on an episode of Storage Wars down the line. And, frankly, at the time - I went through a significant period of mourning, when I believed those comics to be gone. I said goodbye to them. And I worked through those feelings of attachment and loss - I thought that I came out the other side of the experience with a greater appreciation both for what I still had and with less of a need to own and collect things. Losing my childhood comic book collection, through no one’s fault but my own, was a growth experience that hurt like hell at the time but which made me a better person. 

And then, of course, many years later, after I had been through this and come out the other side, I received a letter from the storage place asking me if I was ever going to pay any of the back rent on the damn locker. You can just imagine my surprise, not unmixed with a slight degree of consternation at having to pay many thousands of dollars of back rent. But: I had said goodbye to those comic books in good faith, believing they were lost to time. And then, turned out they weren’t so lost after all. They came back to me and that felt significant. I wasn’t going to lose them again, even as it would still be many years before we were actually reunited. 

So, even though I still didn’t have a lot of money, I somehow managed to pay down that debt, and have remained in more or less good stead with the storage place ever since. The funny part here, however, is that the comics still had adventures without me. I received a letter from the storage place somewhere along the line that they had backed one of their own trucks into the unit my parents had initially rented, so they had to move all our stuff themselves, into another unit. So, ultimately both my parents and the people who own the storage place had to move my massive comic book collection. I have never actually had to move it myself, which seems a neat trick.

As for me - well. After six years of grad school I was completely burnt out, burnt out and exhausted. It’s a sequence of events I’ve discussed at length elsewhere so I won’t belabor the point here. It just so happened that this also coincided with a downturn in the health for both of my parents. So, I went from teaching college to taking care of them, pretty much full-time. Another aspect of this period is that I went from being intensely involved with comics - reading most of everything released in the American mainstream and much beyond, week after week for many years, as was more or less my job while I was working for the AV Club - to reading almost nothing at all. 

Reading comics that way - reading so many comics that way, week after week for years, not out of joy or desire but out of obligation, because it was my job - well, it made me resent comics. Reading them almost exclusively on a computer screen for years at a time made me hate the medium. One of the better aspects of living on a farm in the middle of nowhere with my parents for a few years was choosing only to read what my editor sent me - which ended up sometimes being only two or three comics a month, total. During that period I came to call my reading habits “slow comics” - a joke, basically, which I nevertheless came to appreciate, because it was during this time that I set about in earnest to reengage with the medium to which I had ostensibly dedicated most of my life. 

I wrote a column for the Journal’s website, from 2018 to the middle of 2019, called “Ice Cream for Bedwetters,” which, again, I will say I believed in the moment to be a great name for a column. It was a memorable laugh line in 2017’s Logan movie that actually did tie-in with the themes I wanted to discuss during that very personal run of essays - learning to read comics again, basically. Getting in touch with what I enjoyed about the medium, looking past those years as a professional critic, decades of becoming cynical and jaundiced about every aspect of the hobby. I think over the course of those essays I really did begin to rekindle my joy and affection for the medium - I’m proud of those pieces, and of the book they form. Enough that I still hope to see it printed up one of these days, even if I end up doing it myself. 

It was also during the early days of this period that the four of us won the Eisner for the AV Club - Oliver Sava, our editor, along with Caitlin Rosberg, Shea Hennum, and myself. Talented folks who I am proud to consider my friends. Considering the subsequent half decade I had, that award and those associations gave me a great deal of comfort during a period when things weren’t going so great. As much as I was enjoying the gradual process of reengaging with comics, the context for my life was that my father had received a very bad diagnosis - we we were initially told Parkinson’s although more recent developments led to a more likely diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. And that was my reality for the next three years of my life, taking care of both of my parents during my dad’s slow but sure decline. 

Now, this is a massively depressing part of the story, no way around it. Long time readers might remember long periods of silence interspersed by bursts of productively from roughly 2019 through the next three years. I didn’t write much of anything through most of 2020. After that singularly enervating year - enervating for a number of reasons, some of which you all experienced alongside me, in addition to my own private struggles - I rallied in 2021. That year saw the advent of the so-called Summer of Tegan, during which I overcame grisly personal circumstances to produce around 80,000 words of comic book criticism in the space of about six months. A little longer than a summer, as a matter of fact, but this is comics and you should never let the facts get in the way of a good cover blurb. I started another book during that period - I mean, I’ve written a lot of books in the last few years, but specifically on the subject of comics, I started a book about Rogue that was intended as a kind of reading guide for the character and much of the last forty years of X-Men comics in general. That book is still unfinished - the first quarter or so is done, but hopefully, if you’re one of the folks waiting for me to pick up that baton again, the delay makes a little bit more sense now. Soon! I promise. 

Now, eventually all these threads converged towards the second half of 2021, with me straining mightily to maintain my momentum across an exhausting period where, in addition to writing that aforementioned 80,000 words of criticism, I was also providing round the clock care for my dad and my mom both. She wasn’t sick, yet, just run down. As was I. The writing I produced that year was for my own sense of pride as much as anything else, but all that work did the job and pushed me back into being fully invested again. The problem was, once I finished, I didn’t really know where to go from there. I wrapped up with an epic review of Simon Hanselmann’s Crisis Zone, the completion of which actually spanned a period of time in which I was hospitalized for what I later discovered was a hernia. So - I didn’t have it in me to continue at the fever pitch, or really any pitch at all. Paradoxically, even though I was back in the game, I was still spent.   

So I yielded to the flow of events, took my mother’s lead, and started watching a lot of YouTube. She moved over to YouTube for her primary TV when she figured out she could get better news and science and history programming than anything on the regular cable. Which, frankly, surprised me - I was never a big YouTube watcher, because I had assumed it was all just right wing propaganda and people yelling about video games. Well, there is a lot of both of those things, but to my surprise, they also had international news, and lectures from the world’s premiere universities - and yes, even comic book content. So, being mostly exhausted from running around like a chicken with my head cut off, I sat back and learned quite a bit. It was here that I finally found the missing piece that I’d been looking for - after the extended burnout it took years of hard dedicated work to rekindle my affection for comics, my desire to read them, my desire to write about them - but it wasn’t until I saw other people talking about them, showing them off, actually touching physical copies of the books instead of just leafing through digital files on a tablet - that I finally wanted to go back to the store myself. So, at the tail end of 2021, I did just that.

And, as I said earlier, the idea of a “pivot to video” had been percolating for a while before that. In the later half of ‘21 and the early months of ‘22, I devoted myself to learning the ins and outs of video production on my phone. I didn’t have the wherewithal to write much of anything at that period, and I certainly didn’t have the stability to begin broadcasting, but I did have well over an hour every day during which I walked the dog and was able to read about video on my phone. That’s when I learned how to use iMovies to edit footage, however rudimentary my skills. Doing a long circuit every day around the same farm made for a pretty predictable walk, so there was plenty of time for research. I produced at least a couple dozen sample videos, in my room - learning how to light, and how to mic, and how to talk on video - all of which took some time. I shared the results with only a couple people, but they can attest, there were full-length videos extant well over two years ago. Imagine my frustration to be ready to go, and yet unable to really start because - again, my days and my nights when I wasn’t reading comics and figuring out how to take videos were still devoted to caring for a man who didn’t always recognize me anymore. 

The Hurting began in the Winter of 2004 - the website celebrated it’s nineteenth birthday earlier this year, such as it is, but it’s basically my brand now. I’ve felt guilty for years that I haven’t been in a place to be able to resume daily blogging. I miss it. I miss having an outlet to talk about comic books that isn’t Twitter. That service has its definitely pluses, but as we’ve seen the past year it’s also become a much less stable place, especially for anyone trying to make their living through online promotion. Producing videos enabled me to return to doing what I enjoy most in this world - yakking about old comics for the entertainment of whoever feels like showing up and joining the fun. 

Because, I’m not just a comic book critic - I’ve worn many hats in my life. I was on the radio for half a decade in my twenties. I taught college for six years. Now, videos about old comic books aren’t quite criticism, and making TikTok videos isn’t quite broadcasting, and talking about comic book history and art theory on that forum isn’t precisely teaching - but they have elements of all those things. Seems a natural progression, from that perspective. 

With that said, producing videos - producing any kind of videos - entails a hell of a lot more work than “just” writing essays and posting them to my blog. The worst part of blogging for me was always dealing with pictures - all of which had to be tracked down and uploaded individually, a process which was never not a hassle and which grew progressively more taxing the more I wanted to talk about art. Videos are the perfect answer to that problem: if I want to talk about art in a video I can simply point at it with my finger. Now, of course, there’s a lot more that isn’t easier about the format. Which is why, hopefully, the videos lead to more remunerative feedback from a larger audience.  

Because yes, as much as I enjoy doing them, I’m also not investing all this time and effort merely out of the goodness of my heart. I have a Patreon, and as much as I appreciate every single person who has supported me over the last six years that I’ve had it, it’s nevertheless a small group I’d like to see grow. To that end I had goals for the channel - modest goals, I promise, but goals nonetheless, benchmarks I wanted to reach in order to make this considerable effort pay off. In terms of viewership on TikTok, I long since passed my initial benchmarks to continue with the process. I’d like to see steady growth for the Patreon, which hasn’t materialized even as the channel grows apace. Quite frustrating, in all honesty, to work harder than I had in at least a decade and be still unable to move that needle. I live a quiet life and my needs are few, and I’d like to grow the percentage of my income that comes directly from comic books. 

Because, if we’re being frank, we all know there’s not a lot of money in writing about comic books online. There’s not really any money in doing it anywhere for any venue. As much as I am genuinely thankful for every venue that does pay, we all know it’s just not enough to provide more than a little bit of mad money. And I say that knowing full well I’ve probably passed up opportunities for better gigs and slightly better pay - but “slightly better” is relative in this industry, and in any event those gigs don’t exist anymore. Imagine my surprise to come online and find people talking about comics and making money doing so. Again, not as much as anyone would like, but more money than can be made  sitting in front of the keyboard and diligently tapping on the keys. 

Now, I’ve been talking about comics, professionally, since 2002. I’ve been dong it online since 2004. That makes me incredibly old in internet years, I fully recognize. But I have adapted to the times. I started a TikTok for that very reason - it’s not a medium I felt myself naturally drawn to, but if there’s one theme I’ve picked up from the various writing communities on which I eavesdrop, it’s that any presence on TikTok, even half-hearted, reaps enormous dividends in terms of getting your name and your material in front of new people. I started doing daily reviews of new comics on my Twitter, and realized there was a market for just that thing. Sure enough, “Tegan Reads A Comic Book” has met a warm reception and continues to grow.

Although it may not have seemed like it at first, TikTok ultimately enabled me to return to daily blogging. I’m engaged and energized by writing about comics and sharing that enthusiasm. That part of it, at least, is pure joy.

Now, I’m not just a critic. I’ve been trying to make a go of it as a writer, full-stop, for a good long while. I went through life changes around 2016 that led me to reevaluate what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do with my life. What I really wanted, more than anything, what I always wanted, was just to be a writer. I spent the better part of a decade trying - most of my twenties - before returning to academia with my tail between my legs. (I’ve written about that demoralizing process before.) But that basically meant ignoring what I really wanted, and that’s about the least healthy thing for a body you can imagine. Frankly, it can be deadly. 

So, I’ve written quite a bit in my life, and especially these last few years. If you already know this stuff you can skip ahead, true believers - but for the sake for those new to the party: In the first place, I’ve spent the last few years compiling some of my older writing, into volumes available as inducement for joining my Patreon and supporting my ongoing efforts. There’s still and always an introductory anthology of my criticism available for free download on my Patreon - it’s called The Putative Hurting. All killer, no filler, just the hits from across twenty years. It’s a smaller version of The Portable Hurting, a more exhaustive look at my back pages, which also has more original material in the form of extended annotations and biographical notes. These in turn compliment a couple older anthologies - The Hurting Sampler and The Hurting Reliquary - also still available on the Patreon. 

Over the last few years I also wrote a few books of autobiographical criticism - I already mentioned the “Ice Cream for Bedwetters” column, the collected edition of which will be called Salting the Wounds and is actually the third volume in a series beginning with Tomorrow Is Always The Best Day Of My Life, and continuing through to Galaxy of Zeroes. (Those projects can be read via the links on the left side of the blog.) In a perfect world they’d sit snug next to one another in a fat slipcase, but in lieu of that you can envision the slipcase in your mind-palace. 

The latter is ostensibly built around Star Wars - but if you’d like a more focused collection of my Star Wars writing, without so much in the way of biographical or philosophical interludes, I can recommend The Republic is Crumbling, an anthology of the best of my writing on the subject. Now, before you ask the next obvious question, I’m currently completely estranged from that franchise, which was a pretty big focus of mine for much of my life. Let’s just say that Rise of Skywalker left a bad taste in my mouth and I haven’t seen anything produced since I saw that film in the theaters. Not a damn thing. I know I’ll go back, because those movies are in my blood as much as anything in comics, but I’m still not over that movie. I’m planning to remain mad about it probably for a considerable amount of time yet. 

There’s also a small book about They Might Be Giants on there - I actually wrote about music for years on another website, but hadn’t in a long time. Now, I am happy to report that this drought, at least, is over: I’m writing about music again, in the form of new installments of an old essay series from the blog, Everybody’s Rockin,’ presented in the pages of my new weekly newsletter, technically speaking Volume 2 of another old series, The Hurting Gazette. I’m going to be posting those new essays in this space, beginning next week. 

Now, as much as I enjoy criticism, and would love to have those books published eventually, I know full well they’re still niche items. I’m not going to make my fame in publishing with anthologies of old blog posts. To that effect, in 2018 I buckled down and started work on something that was at least in theory designed to be more readily commercial: I started writing fantasy, and began a series of books called The Array. The first six and a half of which are done, and also available behind the paywall of the Patreon. I put a lot of thought into how to write something that would sell, so of course I’ve been trying to sell them for over five years and not had a jot of success. 

It is the greatest ongoing frustration of my life that I have yet to find a receptive audience for a series of books that was designed to be as ingratiating and commercial as possible. It’d be one thing if they were purposefully obscurantist by design. But no, they’re my best good-faith attempt at accessibility. And I can’t pay people to read them. I’m still working at it - every week, pretty much without fail, for years (with a few gaps during the lowest periods of taking care of my parents when I wasn’t doing any writing work), I have sent out two or three or four queries, all of which have been rejected. But I’m still at it. Just got another rejection this morning (as of this writing), but I’m still at it. 

Because, ultimately, I have made many of the decisions in my life on the principle that the easiest way to break into comics is as a prose writer. The problem is, I got stuck at the part that entails breaking in as a prose writer. That was what I spent most of my twenties doing - and to be fair, I wasn’t a very good writer in my twenties. I wrote three or four books of bad cod realism, the kind of books an angry young person writes when they haven’t been to enough therapy. Given that it’s frankly a blessing I didn’t break in when I was 27. If I had had any success on the back of those immature, malformed books, I would almost certainly not still be any kind of writer today. In the fullness of hard-won experience I can say it was a blessing to fail when and how I did.

But, that failure nevertheless left scars, which is why I didn’t write any fiction for ten years. And  also why, when I did return to fiction, I had less than any interest in writing realism or naturalism or quote-unquote “literary” fiction - I spent my time in grad school studying primarily early twentieth century transatlantic modernism, and if there’s one thing I can say about that mode of fiction it’s that it doesn’t have much of a constituency in the early twenty-first century.

Ultimately my ongoing failure to sell my writing remains the spur that pushes me forward. If I had already met with success, I almost certainly would never have started a TikTok in the attempt to spread my name that way. I remain profoundly unsatisfied with my career, but that dissatisfaction is nevertheless what gets me out of bed in the morning. I see myself as a failure in absolute terms, but I’m not out of the game until I’m dead. Hope springs eternal. 

Anyway, you might be thinking - for someone whose ostensible long-term goal since the turn of the century has been to work in comics, you sure haven’t done a lot to make that goal a reality. Really only have yourself to blame there, hoss. To which I can only say, I know. I’ve lived a strange life relative to most people, and at multiple junctures I’ve made bad decisions based on faulty incentives and poor long term planning. I recognize that. But there’s nothing else really for it.

I still really want to write for the comics. Perhaps that a shameful admission for anyone who’s been at it as long as I have, whose seen as much as I have, who knows how the sausage is made about as well as anyone who hasn’t actually been in the factory. All that did nothing to dissuade me. I’m writing scripts now, teaching myself how to do it if nothing else - so far I’ve got five issues of The Journey of Jacqueline Thousand in the can, no artist, no publisher, not even a nibble of interest. But they’re there, and the first four issues are even free to read, right here, for anyone who wants to check it out. I’m not just flapping my wings to no effect, I’m trying my damndest to create movement through initiative.

Since 2019 I’ve thought a lot about Tom Spurgeon. He died that year, at the age of 50. He was the editor at the Journal when I started reading. We weren’t close - at all - but I can genuinely say what he accomplished over his life has influenced me more than just about any other writer. I thought about that a lot when I was first thinking about wanting to make the pivot into video - he was 36 years old when he began The Comics Reporter, significantly younger than I am now. The only thing we really had in common is that the Journal was central to our professional identities, and he was able to take that experience and use it as a springboard to accomplish great things in this field. I don’t feel as if I’ve built anything at all of value yet, not in the way he was able to give and give back to the medium and the community in a sustained fashion. I want to build something of value, something of significance. The TikTok channel maybe isn’t the final culmination of that desire, but it is a stepping stone on the way. 

In a perfect world the channel would have launched sometime in the middle of 2022, but that wasn’t in the cards. What happened instead is that my parents were forced to leave their home of seventeen years - I mentioned before that we lived on a farm, well, the farm changed hands and they didn’t need tenants in their farmhouse anymore. Now, we managed to stave that off for a good while, owing mostly to my dad’s health. We finally found a placement for him towards the end of the year. But it wasn’t any kind of clean win. If I wrote it in a book it would be pilloried for being a hackneyed development - but here we are. Partway through the year, when my mom and I were deep in the hunt for a new place too live, she started to cough. She was having trouble breathing. Eventually she went to the hospital.

All these years we had trudged forward for my dad’s benefit, consoling ourselves with the certainty that things would be better, that we would have time to relax once we managed to find a place for him to be taken care of. Catch up on our Star Trek. Because we weren’t up to it. We exhausted ourselves because there were no other options for him, and no other options for us. We provided him round the clock care long past the point when we had the ability to give him a good quality of life, and long after it had seriously affected our own quality of life, and our own health. It took a long time - the better part of a year after we made that fateful call - for them to find a placement. But by then my mom had been to the hospital. Received a chest X-ray and a rather definitive diagnosis. Lifelong smoker, on and off, nothing to be done. And from that point it was a quick slide down a steep hill - she received her diagnosis at the end of August and by the end of December she was gone. She died two days short of our final day at the old house, when I was in the middle of the most crucial time of the move, prior to being homeless by the first of the year.

She was given a longer prognosis than she eventually lasted. It’s the damnedest thing - she just disappeared one day, from right in front of my eyes. Once day she was there, and the next she wasn’t. Our last time together we spent watching some Star Trek, pretty much our favorite thing to do as a family since as far back as I remember. She read a couple comic books - looked over the Gil Kane Jungle Book, delighted to see such a resolutely loyal adaptation. Leafed through Sienkiewicz’s Shadow. Really enjoyed an issue of Gunslinger Spawn I picked up on a whim. We watched a lot of Comic Tropes, she thought he was quite amusing. I know I should have spent more of the last month before the move packing, so I wasn’t so rushed - but I also knew there just wasn’t going to be as much time as we’d hoped.

She was proud of me and of everything I did. In all brutal honesty I’ve regarded myself as a failure for a very long time. She didn’t think of me as a failure but it nonetheless hurts that she saw me fail so many times, with victories few and far between. I would have liked to succeed within her earshot.

I have in the past, bragged in a very self-deprecating manner, that moving is something I’m very good at. And I am, objectively speaking: I’ve moved so many times and in so many different circumstances that I really don’t get that upset at the prospect. I get focused, I get it done. It’s a system all its own. I suppose that was probably hubris, because this was the most difficult move of my life, and I once loaded a full size hot tub onto the back of a trailer with my ex-wife. Just my ex-wife, mind - honestly, thinking back on it now, I’m still impressed we were able to do that. But having your mom die during a move is, well, it’s rather an overwhelming experience, I’m going to be completely honest. In truth, I think having two such traumatic and exhausting events right on top of each other, after only having found placement for my dad in a facility for Alzheimer’s patients a handful of weeks earlier, somehow instilled a disassociated equilibrium across the actual events. There was too much going on for me to react to any of it. 

So, because the rental market is fucked literally everywhere I spent the first month of 2023 living in a Motel 6 while my aunt and I tracked down housing. With a few more animals than strictly allowed by the by-laws of the Motel 6 company. Although, I should also add, I lost two pets during that month as well, the dog so old she was unable to walk anymore without my holding up her back legs, and my own beloved 16-years-old cat succumbing to a stroke. In hindsight, it seems almost comical just how much tragedy was packed into such a small period of time. But it was also during that brief nightmarish season in hell that I finished the most recent volume of The Array, entitled Hell-World - fittingly, a horror story, all the misery and recrimination and fear of that miserable time, and a lifetime on top of it, wrapped up in a harrowing narrative. Took me three years to write the first 1/4 of that book, three weeks to write the final 3/4. A capstone to the worst days of my life. Purgative. Hopefully also scary! 

But that’s all done now. I’m living in a new apartment with my mother’s cats, mourning yes, but hopefully also living as bit. My mother saw early drafts of the channel, videos recorded in my room in the house on the almond farm. She liked what she saw. She thought it was a good idea, a good next step for my career. She liked listening to me talk about comic books, just as much in my early forties as when I was eight and bringing home paper sacks full of Marvel from the 7/11. Hopefully you like listening to me talk about comic books, too, because that’s what we’re going to be doing, hopefully for the foreseeable future. I even started a podcast, with my very good friend Claire Napier. On the subject of Top Cow, of all things. She just happened to be at my side, figuratively speaking, as I absorbed some of the hardest blows of my life, during those last hellish months on the almond farm. It’s nice to be able to build something new, for a change, and with a friend.   

 

Thanks for listening. Today and for as long as you’ll have me, I’ll be here. 

PS - For those who stuck with it this long, have a surprise.