Lunar Seafarer
Lots Of Good Comics Updates In This One, Thankfully
Hi. I’m Danny and it’s been about two weeks since I watched a blow-up doll win a wrestling match.
This Month’s Soundtrack
I’m obsessed with the new records from 100 gecs and Caroline Polachek but let’s also listen to this pleasantly weird little ditty from Ween. I never really got into Ween but I probably should!
Sweet Little Resistance
Oh hey, we had a successful Kickstarter! I should have spread the word via this newsletter but I put off writing this update for so long that the campaign came and went. But it got funded! After the dismal failure that was Survivant #2’s KS campaign, it was nice to have one in the win column, even if my contribution to it was relatively minor.
Sweet Little Resistance is a seven-issue series of minicomics following a group of magical girls who work in a coffee shop.
Elizabeth wrote it, Lisa Sterle designed the characters, I lettered and designed the book, and the art’s by a rotating cast that includes my Battle Jacket collaborator Meaghan Carter and a host of others.
It was at a particularly dismal Emerald City Comic Con in 2016 where SLR was born. We’d gotten so fed up with so-called comic pros acting kind of dickish (especially to Elizabeth) that we said “fuck it” and ditched the show early. In a coffee shop down the road, we started talking about the magical girl comics that were all the rage at the time, like Zodiac Starforce.
It seemed like all anyone was willing to do with the genre was make a comic that looked and felt exactly like Sailor Moon. Surely there was a way to make a magical girl comic that didn’t seem like a knock-off of the most popular representation of the genre.
Elizabeth succeeded, in my opinion. Sweet Little Resistance has the tropes — a group of girls with abilities, the power of friendship, etc — but it doesn’t limit itself to being Sailor-Moon-but-shittier. The fact that the girls are told by their mentor that they’re basically destined to be Manic Pixie Dream Girls to bolster men’s success gives the book a raison detre beyond facile homage.
Which isn’t to throw the whole trend under the bus. Did you ever read Magical Beatdown by Jenn Woodall? IT SHREDS.
Convention Days
Four months into 2023, and we’ve already done two conventions. Not a lot by normal creator standards, but a lot by my standards, considering I pretty much vowed to do zero this year.
Good news, though! They both went really well.
First up was the Arizona Comic Book Arts Festival, a one-day purely comics-focused show in a shriner’s hall in Phoenix. Very low-key, but it had a great lineup of talent like Mitch Gerads, people I don’t remember, and ME. Ended up doing shockingly well sales-wise, met some cool creators, hung out with some homies. Got to meet (in person!) Nick Cagnetti, who did the covers for my upcoming Paradox Arms and who created the dope Pink Lemonade for Oni. It’s a pretty small show but totally worth it, especially because everyone’s there to check out comic book shit.
Then, back in CA for WonderCon, which I believe is short for “Wonderful Convention.” Longtime readers of this newsletter that only has like four installments may remember that WonderCon 2022 was absolutely dismal, as we were relegated to the graveyard of aspiring IP that is the Small Press area. This year we were successfully placed in Artists Alley, and actually had a good time. Sales were good and vibes weren’t totally bizarre, which is all I ask of my conventioning experience. We even did BarCon (the obligatory post-show hotel bar hang), which we hadn’t done in a few years. I know a lot of people in the biz hate it (and for good reason), but I honestly kind of missed it.
I read some Twitter thread a couple months ago about how creators who table at bigger shows are setting themselves up for heartbreak because indie comics get lost in the noise of celebrities and ‘sclusies, and that smaller comics-focused shows are the way to go. That honestly sounds correct to me.
Shit I’ve Been Working On
Just Another Swamp Song: is aaaaalmost done. The interior pages are all lettered and CJ is finishing up all the covers/inside covers. Crowdfunding campaign laucnhes in mid-May (LORD WILLIN’) through Zoop this time. I wanted to give them a spin since they specifically focus on comics.
Survivant: Lots of progress on this one. Mark’s pretty much finished coloring #2, Jhomar’s started drawing #3, and I’ve plotted out #4 and #5. I had already figured out where the story was going long ago so this final plotting involved cooking up a beat-by-beat bullet point list with scenes, dialogue notes, and even page allocations for each scene.
Big Fucking Hammer: Diana’s drawn several pages of whatever the next issue is that needs to come out. Gotta take some time to letter them. Guess what? They look fantastic.
Battle Jacket: Sent the pitch out to every viable publisher accepting submissions. We’ll see.
New Shit: At the Arizona show, I felt inspired enough to jot some a bunch of new ideas and concepts. Some of it is vague stuff like “I wanna do a thing with Videodrome vibes” but there was one concept I got super stoked for. So stoked that I did some WORLD BUILDING for it. It’s cool.
Big Trouble In Little China Is Probably My Favorite Carpenter
I’ve got that Super Yaki hat that says DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER in the Halloween font and sometimes people ask me what my favorite movie by the Carpmeister is. Halloween’s great, Prince of Darkness is fucking awesome, I gotta rewatch Escape From New York… but as of now, I’ve gotta say it might be Big Trouble In Little China.
First of all, the movie’s so completely bonkers and left-field that I can’t believe it got made in the 1980s. As our doofus American trucker discovers a world of overpowered Chinese wizards, warring street gangs, and randomly occurring monsters, Big Trouble ends up being a zany, go-for broke affair that anticipates stuff like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Every time I watch Big Trouble it becomes more clear how useless Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton is in the movie. He’s got all the bravado of your average macho action hero — he even affects a John Wayne voice — but spends nearly the entire movie tripping over shit and getting knocked out. Meanwhile, his buddy Wang Chi, played by Dennis Dun, is the actual hero of the picture, with the girl to save and all the cool fighting moves. We really failed as a society by not making Dennis Dun a leading man.
Also, I’m like 80% sure that Kim Cattrall'’s character, Gracie Law, was supposed to be Asian in the script, but have yet to find confirmation.
Other stuff I’ve been digging lately:
Once Upon A Time At The End of The World: I’m not gonna lie: this might be my favorite comic going right now. Much like how we could use magical girl stories that aren’t carbon copies of Sailor Moon, we need post-apocalyptic stories that aren’t totally beholden to Mad Max. Once Upon A Time really scratches that itch, following two teens — a hardened survivalist and a naive dreamer — as they navigate the wasteland. It’s about five issues in and we’ve already had a run-in with a group of killer boy scouts. It’s also funny? I love it.
Garden State. Haven’t watch this flick since the mid-2000s, when I was the right age for that movie to come out and work for me. I never succumbed to the film student contrarianism of “this is the worst movie ever made,” and I’m glad to find that it’s held up really well. The soundtrack rules, it’s not as “quirky” as Letterboxd users complain, and I maintain that Natalie Portman’s character is NOT a Manic Pixie Dream girl.
Stargirl: Finished Season 3, saw it ended with a card that said “Never the end…” which is a bit of a cliche way to end a superhero comic, especially if it’s been cancelled prematurely. So when that popped up, I was like, “Wait, is the show OVER?” and it turns out it got cancelled. I’m gonna be real with y’all — I was sincerely upset that Stargirl got cancelled, which I haven’t felt in a looong time. It was such a fun, unabashedly DC Comics show that never seemed like it was ashamed of being capeshit. They had the fucking Ultra-Humanite, and they regularly said his name. THEY WORE ACTUAL SUPERHERO COSTUMES INSTEAD OF HOODIES.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: AMC Theatres (who, I’m told, make movies better) was showing this presumably because Michelle Yeoh was nominated for an Oscar. I hadn’t seen it since it was in theatres in like 2000. I liked it then, but this time I was blown away by just how great it is. It’s got big themes and a prestige-y sheen, but it’s also so of-its-genre that it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to “elevate” it. I really admire that. I want to make a superhero comic like Crouching Tiger, a sincere effort that feels weighty and serious but isn’t necessarily trying to “subvert” the genre a la Watchmen. I love Watchmen, but still.
Daredevil: Been getting the Chip Zdarsky run from the library, and it’s good! I’m only two volumes in so far, but it’s such a classic Daredevil comic. While Kingpin’s politicking in the underworld, Matt’s a hot mess who gets a girlfriend that complicates his life even more than it already is. There’s more going on that distinguishes it from previous runs, but it really delivers for readers like me who enjoy the simple things in life, like seeing Matt Murdock fuck up his life and get his ass beat.
Ravenswood: Our still-ongoing viewing of Pretty Little Liars has led us to this, a short-lived supernatural spin-off starring Caleb, the best boyfriend from PLL. Pretty Little Liars is basically Twin Peaks if Laura Palmer was the villain, and Ravenswood is like all the ridiculous shit from Twin Peaks season 2 but as a teen drama and so much more explicitly supernatural and also very stupid. It’s Not Very Good and most of the teens are extremely boring compared to the cast of Pretty Little Liars, but it was fun for 10 episodes.
“The Industry”
The latest Comics Twitter Discourse was the dumbest of all — people needing to chime in on whether “comics” are a medium or a genre. It seems pretty obvious to me: some people use “comics” as shorthand for “superhero comics” or otherwise lump all comics together into one group despite the sheer breadth of stories and genres within the medium. It’s like if “movies” only signified “romcoms” to the general public. That kind of thing. And those who make comics that aren’t genre adventure comics don’t want their work to be pigeonholed as insubstantial just because they’re drawn.
Why is this even a debate? I don’t know, as far as I can tell some fucking critic decided to complicate things into a state of incoherence.
Comics Twitter is always an Iliad of stupidity. The Tweet that launched a thousand takes.
Sports
What is “bad wrestling”? There are guys whose maneuvers don’t look convincing or whatever, but it’s rare to see someone totally shit the bed in the ring. Check out the video above, where this dude Lance Von Erich gives one of the most clueless performances you’ll ever see, to the point where it’s actually a physical danger to his opponent. It’s bewildering.
WrestleMania went down in LA earlier this month, so there were loads of shows happening all over town to capitalize on the face that a huge number of wrestling fans were all going to be in one place. We drove up for some non-Mania events: Japanese comedy shit, dirtbag indie wrestling, and NXT. It was a blast, then we drove back to SD and I watched ‘Mania the way it was meant to be seen: on TV.
Have you ever heard of the World Bodybuilding Federation? Basically, WWE boss Vince McMahon tried to take over the sport of bodybuilding using the same underhanded, scummy tactics that he used to dominate the wrestling business, and failed miserably in the process.
I wrote an article about it that I think is kind of fun.
Buy My Comic
BattleArc 2088 is a 40-page one-shot drawn by Brett Marcus Cook, and is inspired by cyberpunk anime like Bubblegum Crisis. It’s the story of Zell, a former scientist in nanotechnology who ends up becoming a cyborg-fighting superhero working against the megacorporation where she used to work.
What happens when you’re fighting to save a world that’s secretly changed without you even knowing?
Anyway, It’s Time To Duel
As Usual,
Danny