I Am Not A Good Person

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Part Three of an ongoing series. Catch up with parts One and Two.

If you like my writing, please consider a donation to my Patreon.

 

I’m mean. I’m petty. I fly off the handle at the smallest provocation. I antagonize people who have done nothing to earn my antagonism. I nurse grudges and remember every specious imagined slight. I am passive-aggressive and casually cruel to the people around me. I try my best to not do these things but I feel that I am never in control of my emotions.

That’s what I used to believe about myself. This was the person I thought I was and the face I presented to the rest of the world. I believed with all my heart that I was a terrible person. I didn’t want to be but I felt helpless to change. I accepted it as a given that there was something wrong with me.

Gimme Some Truth

Part 2 of an ongoing series. Catch up with Part 1 here. 

If you like my writing, please consider a donation to my Patreon. 

You lose a lot by telling the truth. Lies fester. 
This is especially true of the lies you tell yourself.
The truth is never quite so kind as we’d like.

Do you want to get understood? /

Do you want one thing or are you looking for sainthood? /

Do you run when it's just getting good?

“Outlier” is the sixth track off Spoon’s 2014 album They Want My Soul. After four years away Spoon had lapsed into semi-hiatus. Side projects multiplied. The album was good but only just “good” in the context of Spoon’s previous decade, where Spoon released five albums that are also five of the decade’s best. Part of this can be attributed to the record’s production, a more traditional rock sound that saps much of the energy. It is exchanged for a conventional rock presence that never quite coheres. Being Spoon it is still quite listenable. One of the album’s standouts – and one of the few to make good use of the album’s maximal inclinations – “Outlier” immediately attracted interest among reviewers for the seemingly devastating put-down,

And I remember when you walked out of Garden State /
'Cause you had taste, you had taste /
You had no time to waste.

One Hundred and Sixty Four Days

Part 1 of an ongoing series. Follow up with Part 2 here. 

If you like my writing, please consider a donation to my Patreon.

It’s the evening of April 30th of this year. I’m sitting on the edge of my bathtub smoking. I smoke almost every day. I am standing on the edge of an abyss. Everything feels wrong and I have no idea why. I’m covered in molasses, dragged to earth. I have strange ideas, strange fantasies. Nothing makes sense. I don’t know why.

    

I turn my head and hear a voice. It’s all in my head. I hear it as clear as if it were being whispered in my ear.

*

Question Time II: Back By Popular Demand

Matthew E asks: "Have you read _Bandette_? What do you think?"

I do not read books that glorify Crime or the Crime Lifestyle.

theotheradamford asks: "I have a couple-few:

- What did you think of Rebirth (a little obvious I know), or more broadly the circumstances around the leak?

- Another kind of obvious one, but dovetailing on your recent blah, what do you think comics blogging will look like in the next little while? Is podcasting the new blogging? Would you ever podcast about comics?

- I would love to hear your thoughts, if any, on Green Lantern: Mosaic."

I answer your first question at length here, as a matter of fact. There is the possibility of me doing something more long-form for the AV Club about the actual titles they've released to date - but it's been such a busy few weeks I am desperately behind and need to catch up before I could say anything at all.

The next one is complicated. Comics blogging, as I (and possibly you?) think of it, is basically dead. There will always be single-proprietor websites offering commentary on every little thing, and recently the number seems to have stabilized after dropping pretty drastically. Group blogs, especially ones sponsored by larger sites, became the next big thing, but who knows how much more juice they have them. Together, the two types of blogs don't really resemble the world of blogging of a decade ago - it's far more streamlined, with far less interblog chatter. Individual writers are more or less left alone to follow their personal whims and interests.

(Come to think of it, I was actually one of the pioneers of using my personal comics blog for slightly more formal essay and op-ed writing, so if you want a culprit for comics bloggers turning inward and engaging less and less with any kind of "community," I'm as guilty as anyone.)

More and more people with interesting things to say find themselves tossed into professional or semi-professional status, where they use some kind of early attention as a writer as a way to gain entry into some facet of the industry. This type of move almost always leads to a precipitous fall in productivity as a comics blogger (unless the job is specifically one that includes writing about comics), if not just a hard stop altogether. I can understand the reticence not to want to write about comics online when you draw a paycheck from a company that works in the field. There's also the more quotidian fact that if someone used to write about comics for fun they might not want to spend their free time writing about them anymore if they also spend their work time thinking about them. They probably have lots of non-comics hobbies to fill the time.

I admit I feel a little bit of this last one myself. No one is ever going to accuse my writing for the AV Club of redefining the face of comics commentary, but it's fun, remunerative, and occasionally I even get to say something of merit. (Not that almost 3,000 words on the soundtrack to Batman Forever isn't worthy of merit.) Sometimes after I fulfill my commitments to the site, I just don't want to write even more about comics for free.

And this is the problem with comics blogging, in its classic form: you make no money doing it, your audience is minuscule compared to what you get at even a middle-tier pop culture site, and your only satisfaction comes from the work itself. Blogging was big for a while as the hot new nerd hobby, but that was a long time ago. I still talk about comics a lot on Twitter, which you guys probably know. I love Twitter. But Twitter is showing its age, too. I have a Tumblr which I never update, and I never bothered with Instagram. I don't know what Snapchat even is.

All of which is to say: Twitter isn't going anywhere, even if the clientele and business model might change as the platform evolves. Same for blogging: there will always be "bloggers" paid and amateur, but what they may look like in just five short years from now is impossible to say. For all we know, the next evolution in micro-blogging is just about to sweep the internet and I'll find my greatest ever success as a writer using Hurkle-Durkle.

Podcasting? I tried that a couple times a few years ago. I didn't really know what I was doing and even though I got some good feedback I was dissatisfied with the experiment. But the format didn't go away (which I didn't see coming), and actually seems to be sticking around for a while, so . . . who knows. We'll see. Sometimes the future brings us strange and unexpected gifts.

And Mosaic? I think I read part of an issue, which I should remedy at some point. But do you remember how bad the Green Lantern books were at the time? There is a reason why the series was given a hard reboot with Emerald Twilight, and that's why I passed on giving the spinoff a chance. I think in hindsight Mosaic was a few years ahead of its time: it's the kind of book you could imagine seeing shelved next to Starman and Chase more easily than the company's frankly uninspired early 90s midlist. But I'll put it on The List (it's a very long list).

Question Time

Ryan Howard asks: "Based on the recommendation of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell, I picked up the two-part LOTDK story Masks out of a quarter bin. What are some other underappreciated LOTDK issues to buy this way? My annual con retailers have that series in droves. Alternatively, what are some other ridiculously cheap and easy to find comics issues that have been unjustly forgotten?"

Ah, an easy one!

The simple answer is that there was a lot of good stuff published in Legends of the Dark Knight over the book's almost-two-decades of existence. Even poor storylines still held some interest by virtue of the fact that most of the run had decent-to-great art. Even a terrible story like "Venom" still had Trevor Von Eeden on it, and that's more than enough reason to give it a recommendation. (It's still bad, though.)

Truth be told, I was never a regular reader of the book. I checked in periodically if something looked good - or, just as often, surreptitiously read it off the shelf. But there are still a few highlights I can recommend.

Kevin O'Neill appeared in the book a couple times, accompanied by Bat-Mite. Long before Morrison reintroduced the guy during R.I.P., Alan Grant and O'Neill were the first to smuggle the Silver Age imp into the post-Crisis universe, in LOTDK #38, and later in a stand alone one-shot called Mitefall, a pseudo-parody of the "Knightfall" storyline. Both of these were also recently reprinted in a thick paperback alongside the World's Funnest one-shot and a handful of other Bat-Mite (and Mxyzptlk) tales, and which is definitely worth buying

With issue #50 the series dropped its "Year One" conceit entirely by allowing the book to use Batman's real rogue's gallery. Issue #50 is a Joker story - and you guys know how I feel about Joker stories - but it's actually really good, one of my favorite featuring the character. It's another Dennis O'Neil joint, but this time with Bret Blevins, easily one of the most underrated artists of the last thirty years. I'm going to totally surprise you and recommend another Joker story, from a little over a year later - "Going Sane" by J.M. DeMatteis and Joe Staton, beginning in #65 and running for four issues. This one usually makes an appearance on any list of the best Joker stories, and it's also one of the few times to my knowledge that DeMatteis has written Batman. DeMatteis is underrated like Blevins, although in DeMatteis' case it's even more unforgivable as he has maintained a reasonably high profile in the industry throughout his entire career.

Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy later returned to the book with a direct sequel to their earlier "Prey," which just beats out the uneven "Gothic" as the best story in the book's early run; "Terror" ran for five issues beginning with #137. I'm going to completely ruin any credibility I have by finishing up by recommending yet another Joker story, "The Demon Laughs," which ran from #142-145. It's not a classic for the ages but it does have the Joker vs. R'as al Ghul, with art by Jim Aparo, and a story by Chuck Dixon. Dixon is a guilty pleasure, I suppose you'd say, and he wrote a lot of Batman in the 90s.

As for the rest of the run, at this point my sketchy knowledge runs out entirely. I know the book was published until 2007, but i don't even remember seeing it on the shelves. It looks like they were still publishing good stuff right up until the end - Seth Fisher had an arc in the book's second-to-last year, I see, and even up to the very last issue they had the likes of Christos Gage and Phil Winslade teaming up on a Deadshot story. And oh yeah, issue #200 had Eddie Campbell writing a Joker story for Bart Sears.

While it may not always have worked, LOTDK is still the gold-standard for these kinds of rotating-creator anthologies. No other character has ever been able to sustain this kind of book for long periods of time. Certainly, much of that has to do with the fact that Batman is Batman - but still, the attempt was made for a surprisingly long time to keep the book special. This was slowly eroded later on in the series' run when it began to tie-in with the Bat-books frequent crossovers throughout the 90s and early 00s - kind of hard to sell a book as an exclusive monthly event when you're selling part 178 of "Knightsend." But the commercial license afforded by putting Batman's name on the cover did allow creators to do some interesting stories which would otherwise never have had a home. It's a rare issue of the series that doesn't have something to offer.

As to the implied question of whether I'll ever return to write more about the series? We'll see. Long-time readers know that old features have a habit of resurfacing at the oddest times. I admit that I got bogged down in Mike W. Barr and Bart Sears' "Faith," wherein Batman enlists a street gang to help beat people up. I could have told you that was a bad idea, Batman, but you didn't listen.