You Had The Eggs, Right?

This Newsletter Has Nothing To Do With Barbershop: The Series

Hi. I’m Danny Djeljosevic, I make comics and am marginally better than Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

A SONG FOR DANGER DIABOLIK FANS

Here’s Rob49 and Cardi B rapping about fucking on piles of money. NO SUBTEXT.

And here’s a Mannequin Pussy song I heard immediately after on my free trial of Sirius satellite radio. Hearing these songs in succession gave me so much strength.

Survivant #2 Again Again

Since the last time my newsletter dropped, an entire Kickstarter campaign came and went! I probably should’ve sent out a short newsletter alongside the launch, but I was too busy being annoying on every social media app I use. Except TikTok — I just don’t have the time to make videos.

Longtime readers may remember a previous attempt at Kickstarting Survivant #2, which coincided with Elon Musk buying Twitter in 2022 and everyone immediately quitting the app. Needless to say, we fell horrifically short of our goal. Two years and several successful Kickstarters later, we were able to get the project back on track with a new campaign with a much more manageable goal.

Despite the lower bar, the comeback wasn’t easy, and the often-grueling middle chunk of the campaign was somehow more grueling than previous ones. Chalk it up to it being (A) the second issue (B) of a weird book (C) that followed another Kickstarter campaign that ended a couple months prior. Running Kickstarters is an experimental process at best, so there’s always something to learn or tweak or do better next time.

But I’ll reserve any further crowdfunding insights for the unlikely event someone asks me to be on a Kickstarter panel at a comic convention. Or the next time I run a campaign and feel the need to do a post-mortem on my newsletter. Whichever comes first. Probably the latter.

On to the creative side of things. During the aforementioned more-grueling-than-previous middle chunk, a brutal, no-holds-barred steel cage match ensued between The Potential Funding Snafu and My Desire To Finish This Fucking Comic, and the result saw an unlikely victor emerge: Maybe I Should Rewrite The Rest Of This Comic.

So far, I’ve managed to compress, remix, and generally revise issues 3 and 4 into a solid 32-page affair without sacrificing very much at all. Next up are the final two issues, which will then become an equally large Survivant #4 to close it out.

But I don’t want to make it sound like I’m cutting my losses and crapping out the rest. Sure, the initial motivation is that I’m not sure I want to scratch and claw through four more Kickstarter campaigns when I’ve got so many other projects I want to bring to fruition, but I’m also really excited about the idea of taking all this as-yet-unkilned clay and re-molding it into something better and more impactful.

It’s a cool challenge — can I streamline the remaining material without losing what I think makes Survivant unique? So far, the answer is yes!

“The Industry”

IDW rolled out a new logo earlier this week, and the result is that people think it’s dumb and looks bad! Lots of things in this world, especially in comics, are dumb and look bad, but it’s wild what a furor this particular dumb and bad-looking thing inspired. I don’t feel like I’ve ever heard people discuss Idea and Design Works this much.

As someone who’s received several paychecks from IDW, I have to say that I actually love it! I’m lying. I think the swoopy shape of the IDW is very cool and dynamic, but like everyone else talking about it, it doesn’t read as IDW, even with that line breaking it up in the middle. The letters combining make me think of the new WWE SmackDown logo, but that one works because it still evokes previously established logos:

With so many things that become topics du jour, I was unsatisfied by the discourse. Lots of shitty jokes and poor insight from nerds with no expertise, some unfavorable comparisons to the early 2010s DC “peel” logo that was similarly controversial but WAY more readable and successful. My personal annoyance with other people aside, what really matters is that people are often reading it as “IUD” or “LD,” which is not great! Those are different letters from the letters they intended!

Maybe they could have done something evocative of the messy but certainly unique “lightbulb” logo from… whenever this was.

Speaking of the DC “peel” logo, back in the day Dylan Todd — good homie and Survivant logo designer — wrote a terrific critique of that logo for Comics Alliance, a piece that I still think about every now and again. Just a well thought-out, insightful, nuanced evaluation of the thing — what works, what doesn’t, and what its particular uses are.

*Huey Lewis Voice* I Got A New Cat

This cryptid inhabiting my window is Jennifer’s Body. Elizabeth calls her Body-ko and I just address her as JENNIFER in an accusatory tone.

Like every cat that’s ever lived, she sucks!

The Media Consumption Must Flow

I’m going to “““briefly””” talk about shit I read, watched, or listened to but never bothered to Tweet (or Skeet) about:

DC’s The Golden Age (James Robinson/Paul Smith) shoots to be a thought-provoking, history-steeped post-Moore “Watchmen of the Justice Society” but doesn’t feel like it has the breathing room to really get there. Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier was more successful in tackling the Cold War paranoia trappings.

After LOVING the Denis Villenueve movies, ya boy has finally gotten into reading Dune. Rather than talk about the plot, world-building, or literally anything about the story itself, one thing that struck me was that Frank Herbert writes a lot of illuminating/explanatory thoughts the way that comic book writers used to write thought balloons. I think that’s neat!

Also, between reading his afterword in the first book and learning how he handled the novels he wrote after his father’s death, I’m pretty sure Brian Herbert really fucking hates his dad.

When Harry Met Sally has more in common with that Judd Apatow wave of crude-but-sweet romantic comedies than I could have imagined. I already knew about the ham sandwich orgasm scene, obviously, but the frank sex talk in that film were pretty surprising to me.

I saw Joker 2. When the first one dropped, there was so much Discourse and hand-wringing about how it — a pretty obvious ode to ‘70s Scorsese flicks — was going to be some sort of clarion call for incels. Five years later, Todd Phillips puts out a sequel that seems to say “Yeah, I agreed with you, obviously” and so much of what I’ve seen about it is Discourse and hand-wringing about why Phillips “betrayed the fans.” (?) I’ve got a lot of thoughts about the past couple decades of “fan as brand manager,” and they’re almost all overwhelmingly negative!

Also read the latest Star Wars High Republic novel, which I think is called Temptation of the Force. It’s so funny whenever an interesting character — a rogue, scoundrel, or generally annoying, self-absorbed person — shows up and the Jedi start harrumphing and get all judgy about them. It doesn’t matter if the guy actually turns out to be a traitor, it still makes the Jedi seem like the most boring people on the planet.

That’s all I got this time. Go buy Just Another Swamp Song if you haven’t already!