Stella’s A Lager And Boy She Is Always Downed

Featuring: AN EXCLUSIVE COVER REVEAL

Hi. I’m Danny. I write comics and my favorite author is the guy who types stuff into Project Gutenberg.

That Los Campesinos! You Like Is Coming Back In Style

After a grueling seven-year gap, one of my all-time faves are back with a new record, All Hell. Los Campesinos! have always been remarkably consistent, and once I got to the moment in Track 1 (“The Coin-Op Guillotine”) where Gareth sings “But the last thing said while we lay in bed/Is that I love when you invoke my death" I knew the boys were truly back in town.

I never fully vibed with emo — particularly the My Chemical Romance (who I like now), Hawthorne Heights, Taking Back Sunday strain — but Los Campesinos! certainly captures what I like about the genre, but without the gothic posturing and simmering misogyny. The lyrics are about as over-the-top as what is generally excepted as emo, but in a more energetic, clever, indie dirtbag way. Like if Morrissey never read poetry and also wasn’t a shithead.

I think a lot about that line Kieron Gillen wrote about them in one of my favorite comics, Phonogram: “They’re never going to be BIG big. But they’re going to be big to some people.” That always made a lot of sense to me.

Just Another Swamp Song Is Done

By the time this newsletter drops, the fulfillment phase of the Just Another Swamp Song Kickstarter campaign should be done, with both physical and digital copies of the book going out to backers. I committed to getting these out faster than Kickstarters of the past, and I’m happy to say I succeeded.

The printed copies look amazing, and I’m especially happy with how the tabloid print turned out. The paper stock is thiccccccccc

What’s next? Planning out the Survivant #2 Kickstarter, which is set to drop later this month (currently set for September 17th!)

Here’s what the cover looks like:

The Home Stretch

Speaking of Survivant, I literally just finished writing the big finale, Issue #5. It’s all VERY First Draft, but this motherfucker’s going to be 40 pages. That sounds ill-advised or like I should make this a six-issue series, but here’s a cool thing about indie comics: you can do whatever the you want. There is literally nobody in charge of me, so the last issue of my comic can be as long as it needs to be.

That said, I’m probably going to break it into two issues. Which means eight extra pages to fill! A COMIC WRITER’S DREAM

Right now, I think we’re in a good place with the series. I’m currently lettering #2 ahead of the Kickstarter launch, and Jhomar’s already drawn five pages of #3 and working on the next batch. I had a lot of roadblocks when it comes to getting comics out, but it feels like we’re back on track.

And once writing this issue’s done, I can focus better on other projects, including shit that’s seemingly fallen by the wayside. Big Fucking Hammer, maybe? I really miss that one.

Nobody Listens To Techno

Seems like my big thing lately is reading public domain literature. Listen, my day job is slow as fuck, okay? It started with me subscribing to Dracula Daily, which publishes every entry from Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel in real time. It turns out that a few paragraphs a day (or, in some cases, an extremely terse telegram) weren’t enough for me, so I decided to check out another classic: Moby Dick.

Herman Melville’s novel of whaling and whaling accessories has A Reputation, mainly that it consists of interminable passages of everything you never wanted to know about killing a whale with a boat. I don’t know who’s responsible for perpetuating this, but they should be in jail. It’s kind of like The Wire — everyone tells you that it’s The Best Show On Television, but nobody tells you how legitimately enjoyable it is.

The reality is that Moby Dick is not only entertaining, but ridiculously funny. I knew we were in for a treat when Ishmael wrote in the literal first paragraph of the book that he tends to set sail whenever his melancholy has him “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses” or “methodically knocking people's hats off.”

While it’s true that there are definitely chapters devoted to the nitty-gritty of whaling concerns, even those are pretty entertaining — in one such chapter, he pretty much says that manatees are bullshit and don’t count as whales.

One of the most wild things about the book is how Melville experiments with form. While most of it is a traditional first-person narrative, there are chapters that totally break that format, including one that’s written like a play, complete with stage directions. I’m the world’s dumbest English major, but that seems way ahead of its time.

Here’s another thing they don’t tell you: ISHMAEL FUCKS QUEEQUEG.

Also, the penultimate chapter of this book is one of the greatest things I’ve ever read. We all know that Moby Dick wins and obliterates The Pequod, but the last image we’re left with of the sinking ship is unforgettable, morbid and — yes — hilarious.

What’s Best In Life

Having finished Moby Dick, I decided to read something more light and pulpy: Robert E. Howard’s original Conan The Barbarian stories, all of which you can find online via Project Gutenberg and its international counterparts.

I’m not done with all of them yet, but here’s what I think so far, most of which I imagine is painfully obvious to hardcore fans, delivered in classic AV Club random thought format:

• It’s easy to look down on pulp shit because it’s “not literary,” but I feel like these sci-fi/fantasy writers are all huge fucking nerds, so there’s a literary bent to this stuff even if on a surface level it’s about a hulking, half-naked dude cleaving men’s skulls in twain.

• I’d say it’s comparable to Tolkien. The fictional Hyborian Age is not unlike Middle-Earth, though the approaches are certainly different (straightforward adventure fiction vs. Tokien’s Whole Thing). Then again, to oversimplify to an offensive degree, Howard kind of invented the genre that Tolkien played in.

• Being pulp fiction written in the 1930s, it’s unsurprisingly racist! Some of it is just run-of-the-mill stereotyping (every culture in the Hyborian Age has a modern equivalent), but there’s also the odd statement or aside that’s totally buckwild. There are accounts that Howard got less racist as he got older and more well-traveled, which makes sense.

• Conan’s a fascinating hero. “Barbarian” has a certain connotation — i.e. a big dumb violent brute — but he’s highly principled, with loads of street smarts. In a lot of ways, the amount of travel and experience he’s had makes him better educated than the representatives of the “civilized” world he encounters. That’s probably obvious to the hardcore fans, but still!

• My favorite bit is in “Queen of the Black Coast,” which opens with Conan on the run from the law because he refused to sell out his buddy for killing a guy who tried to assault his girlfriend, a killing that Conan felt was totally justified. Recounting the story after the fact, Conan straight up says, “Your ‘civilized laws’ make no god damn sense, and the judge was being a dick, so I got pissed, killed that motherfucker, and hauled ass.”

• I also love this bit from “The Devil In Iron” where the big bad — a supernatural deity trapped in a robot body — could have been killed, but some ancient ruler decided to keep him in a state of suspended animation because he saw the being’s existence as a good way to keep his own people in line. The story in question would not have happened had not selfishly kept this thing around as a political tool.

• Also, there’s a story that straight up ends with Conan saying, “Jesus Christ, fuck these wizard feuds. I need some wine.” It sounds like I’m being flippant, but those are literally the sentiments he expresses, albeit in more flowery dialogue.

Having read a good chunk of those, I decided to marathon the relevant films:

• Conan The Barbarian (1982): This film fucks so hard. It’s probably sacrilege to Howard devotees, but I was shocked by how great this movie was. If you’re like me, you go in thinking that it’s going to be an Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie™, but it’s actually a product of the post-Star Wars era rather than the ‘80s action movie boom. In terms of vibe, it’s closer to The Green Knight than Commando. John Milius is a madman. Also, the score is one of the greatest I’ve ever heard. It is the “ending of Moby Dick” of movie scores.

• Conan The Destroyer (1984): The shitty sequel! Totally enjoyable, but definitely more populist and stupid than its honestly transcendent predecessor. Definitely has more in common with your average D&D campaign. You’d think given the title it’d be hardcore, but it’s not.

• Red Sonja (1985): As a fan of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flicks, I was very amused that Ernie Reyes Jr. plays the boy-king with no kingdom in this. Brigitte Nielsen looks dope as Sonja, but I was shocked to find out that Arnold plays a different character than Conan for copyright reasons. All three of these 1980s efforts are Dino DeLaurentis productions, so I like them all on principle because you never know when you’re going to see some outrageously beautiful bit of production design. But the original is the only GOOD one.

• Conan The Barbarian (2011): Jason Momoa is excellent casting for this role, for sure, and the flick is sufficiently bloody and violent. The movie opens with a sword penetrating Conan’s mom’s womb with fetus Conan inside of it — THAT’S CRAZY. While enjoyable, it’s so by-the-numbers and owes a ton to 300 and Lord of the Rings. It’s a bit how like John Carter, where it’s impossible for this movie adaptation of an antique foundational genre work to NOT be informed by the more famous films that were inspired by it to begin with (like Carter with Star Wars). Does that make sense?

Jesus, I talked for way too long about this shit and I know nobody reading this even remotely cares. Thanks for politely scrolling past while I indulged myself!

Battle Chasers

I said I’d talk about Joe Madureira’s infamous fantasy comic Battle Chasers in the last newsletter, and I’m a man who keeps his promises, provided you ignore all the times where I didn’t.

For years I only knew this comic as “the one with the big titties that was consistently late if it ever came out at all,” but I’m in some cursed phase of my life where I gotta go back and check out 1990s comics that I learned about in Wizard but bothered to read. So I guess Hepcats and Akiko are in my future.

Full disclosure: I was in middle school when these books were coming out, and my go-to eye candy hot girl comic from Image Comics’ Cliffhanger! imprint was Danger Girl. So, it’s not like I was above this sort of thing by any stretch.

At some point in the past decade or so, Image put out a collection of all the Battle Chasers content that actually came out, and I was shocked to find out how excellent it was. Joe Mad’s designs are undoubtedly anime inspired, but they’re remarkably distinct rather than reading like pastiche. They’re all so great. Basically, they’re the Conan the Barbarian (1982) score of character designs.

Also, the redhead with the big boobs? She’s not nearly as prominent in the comics as Wizard Magazine led me to believe.

Battle Chasers proves to be a fun and compelling narrative, but it’s ultimately disappointing because the epic fantasy story doesn’t go anywhere because the series is pretty much unfinished due to Madureira’s interests being diverted to other projects.

I guess it’s appropriate that the most complete Battle Chasers work is a video game.

Also, it turns out new issues have come out? In recent years? “Recent” as in “several years after the COVID-19 virus was deemed a pandemic”? I gotta track those down.

Buy My Comics

Now that the Kickstarter stuff for Just Another Swamp Song is out the door, the comic is now available for anyone who wants to check it out: