Moving on: Why I’m not reviewing Don Rosa Library Volume 3

Content warning: Description of C-PTSD flashback, and someone’s last moments in a hospital.

I’m holding The Amazing Spider-Man Library Volume 1 from Taschen in my hands, metaphorically speaking. The book’s so enormous I need a flat surface to read it. But I’ve never felt quite so conflicted about receiving a book before.

I bought it, in a way, as a Christmas present to myself. I bought it with money I got from a refund of the Don Rosa Library Volume 3’s indiegogo money, which is now over 11 years old, and some of my own cash. I did so because every time I saw some non-update on the title, I felt a squeezing in my chest. Heat began to flood my body, and my mind began to back up from my body. At worst, I remembered the quiet, somber sounds of a hospital room. My hearing is strong enough that filtering out the machines was terrible, but it was even harder… God, so much harder, when sounds began to stop, and an involuntary breath was the last one my dad ever took.

I feel this because the book was a Christmas present from my dad in 2012. He waited for years along with me, to see the followup to the book that got me started in comics journalism. It never came out, and I doubt it ever will. The most recent update I got shattered any faith or confidence I had that the creator of the book would ever release it, get help with it, or release the assets to another publisher. Fantagraphics, perhaps. I digress.

When I was doing the Don Rosa in Review series, I decided to put it on hiatus for the third Don Rosa book. I figured looking at his past works would inform my understanding of the material he did later in his career. This is never going to happen under the current conditions.

This is no fault of Don’s. He isn’t the publisher, isn’t creatively involved, he’s just a retired writer and artist who provided materials to someone who failed to deliver.

There isn’t a hidden review here. This is just a post I’m making to get it out of my system, and leave whatever I do decide to talk about with the Amazing Spider-Man Library untainted.

I don’t know how anyone handles grief. I’m not saying you can’t, I’m saying I don’t actually understand how people handle it. Absolute knowledge isn’t present on this one. But if I am to offer any advice… if there’s someone you care about who died, take a look around at your life, your home, garage, attic, wherever it is, consder this.

Look for a project you left unfinished, something you always wanted to do with them, something they loved that just reminds you of them. Really examine what’s in front of you, and one way or another, finish it. Make your ending, because the world can’t create it for you. You have to say “This is the end” and take that step forward without equivocation. Hesitation, sure. I can understand that. It’s not easy or simple. But you might find joy in it.

More importantly, if it’s ended, either by removing it from your life or by taking on that unfinished business, you’re being honest with yourself. And above all else, you know you’re not punishing yourself by wondering what you would have done if they’d been there with you.

See you next time.

No Need For Sonic! – A happy commission story.

I had the good fortune to get a commission from Rik Mack, who has been in the Sonic fandom for a long while and is currently an inker for the IDW Sonic series (check out the Tails’ 30th Anniversary Special, on sale now, and I get nothing for plugging it!) You may recognize him from his restoration of Sonic Universe #95, which went unpublished due to Archie making a series of absolutely crazy decisions and losing the license. Sort of a Fallout Van Buren situation, but without Fallout New Vegas to make up for it on IDW’s part. (Seriously, I get why it’s not happening, but that is a bummer.)

I’ll be honest: I’m writing this article as a part two to my Ken Penders commission article, because this was a great experience with a professional and a great final piece. The chance to break down the piece’s individual components are a lot of fun, and I doubt I’ll ever have the chance to do something like this in the bonus features of a Fantagraphics collection. Here’s the commission: No Need For Sonic!

No Need for Sonic! – Rik Mack, 2022

My Stance on Pirating: It’s a Good Thing

Book publishers are filing suit against archive.org for lending copies of books out to users. This has restarted the argument against piracy as a broad concept, and I am incredibly frustrated by the shortsightedness of the arguments against piracy. I’m not here to dissect this particular lawsuit, but to explain my thoughts on pirating, the ethos of which is pretty simple.

Piracy is good, a moral imperative for the preservation of art, and can be done responsibly. But, so the people who create the art you love can survive, you should also pay people for their work if you have the opportunity. And the way to explain this best is to start with the Wii-U.

Xenoblade Chronicles is an RPG released for the Wii, 3DS and Switch that is shockingly popular. I can’t buy two out of those three versions new anymore, but the Switch version is better anyway, right? There’s more content, it runs off the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 engine, and almost everything has been upgraded in terms of presentation and gameplay.

The Wii version has historical value in examining the career of writer and executive director Tetsuya Takahashi, of course. His changes in storytelling from Xenogears to Xenosaga to Xenoblade showcase completely different storytelling styles, and the way he chose to handle a game within the Wii’s limits allow for a greater understanding of the way art is produced. And yes, the Switch version does have presentation differences like not having the trees blow in the wind that alter the tone set in the original, along with other differences in character models and music. But there are even three more Xenoblade games for the Switch to look at, so what’s the big deal anyway? That’s close enough to everything as it is, all consolidated on one system. Except it isn’t, because there’s a fourth Xenoblade game that’s not on the Switch…

Ken Penders: A commission story and a warning

Some people say that art is created through suffering. This is a straight up lie, and usually said by people who don’t want to pay artists a living wage. However, I can say that in at least one instance, the creation of a piece of art managed to cause me significant suffering. With his commissions and prints now sort-of-open, I’m going to give you a heavy warning about how a commission from Sonic the Hedgehog writer/artist Ken Penders was one of the worst experiences of 2020.

Terry and the Pirates, Irresponsible Publishing, and Racism

I cannot tell you how mad I am about the new “Terry and the Pirates Master Collection.” The comic itself is collected beautifully, and I’d love to talk about it in more detail, but a series of poor decisions that were either thoughtless, racist, or both means that I’m discussing those instead of the paper quality or the colors on the Sunday strips.

Let me be clear from the jump: this was an irresponsible, racist reprint effort. Editorial completely failed to consider the effects of real people, and by writing on the subject of ‘how to correctly read Terry’ kept digging themselves in to a hole throughout the process in ways that were solvable without altering the content of the reprints.

I knew this could be a problem after my interview last year with editor Bruce Canwell, well before I got the books. You can check out the interview here, but here’s a quick refresher on how that went.

Interviewing Bruce Canwell: Terry and the Pirates The Master Collection, Race, and Responsibility

Content Warning – This article discusses and depicts racist content in regards to Chinese people and Chinese-Americans, Black Americans, racial slurs, stereotypes and caricatures in comics. There are mentions of police shootings and lynchings. This also discusses the merits of preserving art with racist content.

Special thanks to Professor Jonathan Gray of the School of Visual Arts NYC. Without his professional and academic background within comics, the questions I hoped to ask would not have been possible. Please check out his site at www.jongraywb.com for more information on him and his work.

This interview is going to be different than the others I’ve posted. I didn’t want it to be. Discussing the new, oversized Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection with its spectacular new coloring was meant to be a standard interview. The Library of American Comics co-founder and editor Bruce Canwell did fit my preferred subject – bringing in an expert to talk about their craft in detail. And he was pleasant, thoughtful, and took time to answer my questions fully and thoroughly. As I happen to really enjoy Terry and the Pirates, this was great. Everything was going fine, right up until I asked how he felt about the responsibilities of publishing an older comic with racist content. At that point, it all went very very wrong.

How To Collect – New Teen Titans

Welcome to “How to Collect,” a series of articles about how to collect a comic book series in trade paperback, with all the irritating research done for you, to make sure you have the best, most thorough collection of great comics possible. To start us off, let’s talk about the 1980s The New Teen Titans.

The New Teen Titans #1

Created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, The New Teen Titans had Wolfman on plot and writing duties, and Perez on plot and pencils for the first third of its run (and other incredible talents to follow). George Perez is the man, and that’s enough for anybody to read the series.

Garfield, Sarcasm, and Autism

 

People give Garfield a lot of shit.

I don’t understand it, personally. The comic has been running for forty years. Forty years! Forty years ago, the Atari 2600 hadn’t been released. Forty years ago, the idea of a new Star Wars movie was a novelty, not an expectation. Forty years ago, my parents hadn’t met yet. There’s got to be something to a comic strip that’s gone on for forty years. I mean, we kept Nancy around for 36 years practically as a benchwarmer for someone who could fill Ernie Bushmiller’s shoes, and after that wait Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy is arguably the best thing in the newspaper today.

For me, the importance of this forty year old comic strip is that it allowed a young autistic kid to understand what sarcasm was.

Getting the Chair

I got something really cool today.

Yes, it’s comics related, I guess, but it’s also an important piece of how I work as a person.

Writing is a very strange, very weird act. Take a look at what Stephen King did with his writing room sometime and you’ll see what I mean. But for me, I need someplace relatively free of distractions. When you have a limited living space, this means getting… creative.

See, I tell Kay this frequently enough, but my very best college assignments were done in the bathroom. It’s quiet. Peaceful. No distractions, just me, a laptop, and occasionally a TV tray so I wasn’t hunched over. Laptops are not meant for laps, people, especially after six hours. It’s also where I did a lot of reading as a kid, despite the grumbling of other people.

So when I felt like I needed a space to write separate from a computer with the entire internet and Metal Gear Solid V on it, I found a floor chair. A floor chair is exactly what it sounds like: a chair without legs, so it goes on the floor. It’s currently folded up against the wall between my bed and Shelf 9 of 22, and will stay there very likely until I move. That spot is smaller than any bathroom stall you’ll find outside of an airport, but far more comfortable.

Here’s why the floor chair, my little six-changer, is amazing.

AwesomeCon & SpringCon 2019 – Little Con-goer, Big City

Writing about AwesomeCon 2019 took me a not insignificant amount of time. Partly because this was the first ‘big’ convention I’d gone to, and trying to keep track of everything was overwhelming, but partly because I didn’t know how to properly articulate how it felt. It was only when I went to my local convention, SpringCon, that I was able to find the words. While AwesomeCon gets close to the six-digit mark in attendance, SpringCon is just a few thousand people throughout its two day run. Where there are panelists and events at AwesomeCon ranging from She-Ra screenings to a fudge stand, SpringCon is entirely focused on comics. And while my brother went with me to SpringCon, he had little to no interest in comics and spent most of his time browsing manga and playtesting a card game.

It’s not that I have anything against an event like AwesomeCon. I actually enjoyed myself quite a bit. The problem is that I live in Minnesota, and SpringCon is the biggest comic convention we’ve got. But in order to talk about my thoughts on either of them, I’m going to have to talk about both of them.