Attendance at Otakon 2025 (August 8 - 10, Washington, DC) seemed to be down from last year's record number of 46,000 people -- well, that or the check-in/screening process has gotten even more streamlined, 'cause there was hardly any waiting in line for anything over the weekend. (I saw longer lines waiting to get into the revolving sushi bar in Chinatown than I did for anything at the con.)

Each year there's an overwhelming favorite among cosplay characters, and this was the year of Buggy the Clown -- a charismatic, self-obsessed fool who's somehow gathered a large, loyal crew of followers with an unshakeable faith in their leader's nonexistent wisdom and strength. The cosplayers were equally divided between Buggy in his pirate captain garb and Buggy in his prison uniform. Interesting. Conspicuous by his absence this year: Batman, although there was one guy in an excellent Superman costume.

It was  flatrat who uncharacteristically went on a shopping spree in the Dealer's Room, coming home with a cute Nanachi figurine and an armload of out-of-print Blu-rays, but even I managed to score a couple of discs I've been hunting, for a change. No such luck on the manga, though: it's amazing that so many vendors show up with the same shit, and not one of them carries any of the books I want to read. (This is why I still rely on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)

Neither of us was up to wandering around the huge convention center in search of particular panels and screenings; we found the AMV theater and pretty much stayed there, enjoying a staggering variety of music videos. One of the standouts had Tony Tony Chopper singing "Let It Go," which made me wonder, why is it that two of the last three Disney animated movies -- Wish (2023) and Elio (2025) -- came and went without anyone noticing?

The show we sat through twice was "Anime Openings that SLAP!," a selection of anime openings with great theme songs. The shows are all over the map: comedy, horror, action, fantasy, romantic soap opera...any kind of show can have a rockin' theme song. It was a greatest hits lineup, including but not limited to The Apothecary Diaries, Beastars, BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, Black Butler: Book of Circus, Chainsaw Man, Dan Da Dan, Dr. Stone, Fire Force, Fullmetal Alchemist, Jujutsu Kaisen, Kill la Kill, Lucky Star, Mob Psycho 100, Naruto, Ouran High School Host Club, Soul Eater, Tokyo Ghoul, Vinland Saga, Yu Yu Hakusho, Btooom!, K-On!, Haikyuu!!, Yuri!!! on Ice, and Serial Experiments Lain (the opening is what finally convinced me to order this 1998 science fiction series that, along with Satoshi Kon's animated thriller Perfect Blue (1997), predicted how the internet would swallow us whole).

Sunday afternoon, we chose to pack it in and come home early. The previous day it had been very pleasant to relax in our favorite bar, but $60 plus tip was excessive for a couple shots of whiskey and a beer chaser. It was better to sit down and unwind at home, where the booze flowed freely (and much more cheaply), and where we could catch up on the isekai foodie show Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill. Imagine a 21st century guy who likes to cook getting stuck in a D&D fantasy setting where his only skill -- the ability to magically order groceries from his homeworld online -- allows him to survive and thrive in a world of monsters. You either like this stuff or you don't. Anime has really grown on us.

Wow -- open a box I haven't looked in for 20 years, and there are my old issues of Shanda the Panda, Wild Life, Genus Male -- and the 2002 Howard the Duck miniseries by Steve Gerber and Phil Winslade.

You may never've seen the original HtD comics from the 1970s, a satirical riff on pop culture and politics that became a surprise bestseller for Marvel (and spawned both a newspaper comic strip and a George Lucas movie that's somehow better than I remember it). I haven't read the original series in decades, but I agree with the Amazon reviewer who opined that if the great cultural critic HL Mencken had been around in the '70s, he would've recognized a kindred spirit in Howard the Duck.

Created by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik as a throwaway character, Howard's a born malcontent, an intellectual with none of the privileges of academia or the professional elite. A freak cosmic accident whisks him from Duckworld and deposits him in the human world, where he becomes a literal alien, the ultimate illegal immigrant. His only weapons are his wits, and they're trained on his greatest enemy, middlebrow culture -- the well-intentioned art, stories, and political narratives that keep us "contented in our stupidity, but neither happy nor free." (Howard seems to be, at least spiritually, a student of Dwight Macdonald.)

Published just as the adults-only underground comix of the '70s were transitioning to the creator-owned independent comics of the '80s, HtD was emblematic of the changes that American comics were going through: hipper, smarter, more skeptical of the values their creators (and readers) had been raised on. Still, Gerber's conflicts with Marvel led to him being kicked off the book, then turning around and suing the company over ownership of the character. The lawsuit dragged on for two years before the litigants reached a settlement, after which Howard was effectively limited to a series of cameos for the next two decades.

In 2002, Gerber and artist Phil Winslade (with superb cover paintings by Glenn Fabry) concocted a six-issue sendup of the edgy, "alternative" comics of the time, with Howard drawn as a giant rodent for most of the story -- a slap at Disney as well as a nod to Gerber's own 1980 graphic novel, Stewart the Rat (Gerber never forgave Disney for forcing Howard to wear pants, claiming people would confuse him with Donald Duck). The final issue, in which Howard literally has a conversation with God, is worth the price of the series, but you get the sense that the writer has taken the character -- initially based on a college friend but for many years now Gerber's cartoon alter ego -- as far as either of them could go.

If the point of Gerber's stories is that the absurdity of existence means there's a thin line between tragedy and farce, the 2015 HtD revival by Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones is almost comforting by comparison. It's not about spoofing other people's work, it's about treating Howard as part of the Marvel Universe, awkwardly interacting with its other characters. He's now a private detective who spends much of his time hanging out with superheroes, but whatever.

A couple of eye-opening articles at ScreenRant.com explain, in clear and chilling detail, why you're going to see fewer published comics, and why the ones you do see are about to get more expensive.

Here's the brief version: around the turn of the millenium, Diamond Comic Distributors drove its remaining competitors out of business, thereby gaining a monopoly on the distribution of comic books and graphic novels in the U.S. (As middlemen between publishers and retailers, they were exempt from America's antitrust laws.) Nobody liked Diamond, but everyone needed them; they got the publishers' product to their retail clients, and they offered retailers a wider variety of products, including independently published comics, than they would've had otherwise.

Diamond's twenty-year stranglehold on the comics industry came to an end with the COVID-19 pandemic. With consumers staying at home instead of going out to buy comics, Diamond suspended all distribution activities and -- probably the last straw -- began withholding payments to publishers. That's when DC publisher (now president) Jim Lee did the unthinkable: he cut ties with Diamond and signed new distribution deals with publishing industry giant Penguin Random House (bookstores) and the Merkler family's Lunar Distribution (direct market). Smelling blood in the water, Marvel and Image followed suit, and Diamond, having lost its three biggest clients, staggered on for a few more years before filing for bankruptcy in February 2025. (Diamond's assets were purchased in March by the global distribution company Alliance Entertainment, a former music retailer.)

And with Diamond out of the picture, independent creator/publishers now find it effectively impossible to get their books distributed at all.

And then along came Trump's tariffs. Since all the major comics publishers -- Marvel, DC, Image, BOOM! Studios, Dark Horse, Dynamite Entertainment, IDW Publishing, Mad Cave Studios, and Oni Press -- print their slender, single-issue comics ("floppies") in Canada, and their trade paperback and omnibus collections in China, the prices on these items will soon be going up.

What this means for the future of the comics industry, I dunno. I'd be better off asking those artists who went all in on digital self-publishing years ago, and have managed to make a living at it.

https://screenrant.com/us-tariffs-c.....ays-explainer/

https://screenrant.com/comics-indus.....ruptcy-op-ed/7

Sometimes what's left unsaid is just as important as what's discussed out loud. For example, Daniel Friedman's speculative essay on the dark, tragic history of Goofy's family, based on a close reading of the 1950s theatrical shorts, the TV series Goof Troop (1992), the 1995 theatrical flop A Goofy Movie, and its straight-to-video sequel, An Extremely Goofy Movie (2000):

https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/5/20.....ression-disney

...and you thought Bruce Wayne had it tough?

"It is a truth universally acknowledged among book critics that the most memorable lines in many novels contain the word fuck...I have saved these lines up, and present some of them here."

Garner's Quotations: a Modern Miscellany, compiled by Dwight Garner (Picador, 2020, 978-1-250-80022-0)

How're you doing, apart from the end of liberal capitalist democracy?
-- Ali Smith, Spring

Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.
-- Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
-- Dorothy Parker, attributed

No problem is insoluble given a big enough plastic bag.
-- Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

And off he fucked.
-- Kingsley Amis, attributed, after having told someone to fuck off

Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us.
-- Ryan Scott, on Twitter

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
-- Philip Larkin

I'm looking for my dignity. Don't laugh.
-- Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh

A guy's not really your boyfriend until he's thrown up on you.
-- Patti Smith

The pitter-patter of a police helicopter overhead
Looking for you.
-- Frederick Seidel, "The Ezra Pound Look-Alike"

My favorite ethnic group is smart.
-- Dagoberto Gilb, interview

Do you try to listen to classical music but feel you don't ever really advance past knowing it's better than it sounds?
-- Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell.
-- Anna Burns, Milkman

There are fuckers and fuckees.
-- John Lennon

Did you know you can trick people into being more interesting by being more interesting yourself?
-- Elisa Gabbert, "New Theories on Boredom"

It's very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.
-- Harold Pinter, interview

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.
-- Dylan Thomas

We talked filth for a pleasant half hour.
-- William Boyd, Any Human Heart

The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm.
-- John D. MacDonald, The Dreadful Lemon Sky

Everybody thinks they're good at sucking dick but they're not, usually.
-- Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture.
-- Pauline Kael

If it was your custom to wait a year or so after a new book was published in hardcover to buy the inevitable paperback edition, Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal has some bad news for you. The five major publishing houses (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) are phasing out trade paperback releases of new nonfiction hardcovers, and on top of that, by the end of 2025, mass market (spinner rack size) paperbacks will no longer be published or distributed at all. (Mass market paperbacks aren't profitable, 'cause only older people still buy them.)

What's this all about? Well, publishers, dedicated to cutting costs, make twice as much money selling a new hardcover as a new paperback, and trade paperback sales have been declining (by over 40% over the last five years, according to Trachtenberg) as e-books, and especially audiobooks, have become increasingly popular.

For now, it isn't fiction paperbacks that're on the endangered list: paperback sales of thrillers, romance, fantasy, and romantasy are brisk, and publishers are putting their time and resources into promoting those genres, not to mention the tireless promotion of their rosters of big name literary authors (and their latest guaranteed bestsellers). It's hardcover books in less popular categories -- history, criticism, political analysis, art, science, philosophy -- that publishers are no longer interested in releasing as paperbacks. The profit margins are slimmer, retailers are ordering books in smaller quantities, and let's not forget that Amazon will often sell a new hardcover for the price of a paperback.

So who's gonna be hurt by the gradual disappearance of the trade paperback? Readers will have fewer choices, of course, but it's the authors -- little-known authors, established authors with small but loyal audiences -- who'll feel the brunt of this business decision. There'll be no "second life" for books with a delayed paperback release; a book will have to sell well in its first five months in hardcover, and the author will have to promote the hell out of it, online and in person, as best they can (because that's no longer the publisher's job). If it doesn't sell, it disappears.

You may be thinking, Well I don't read any of that stuff anyway; it's no skin off my nose. There's nothing I can say to that. There'll be a brave new literary landscape of fewer options, and an exponential increase in more of the same. Good time to be a writer, ennit?

Came downstairs this morning to an unusual sight: a hawk, perched on a pole in our backyard, devouring whatever it had caught for breakfast. My husband had the presence of mind to shoot a brief video of our guest, from the kitchen door, while I provided the mood-spoiling soundtrack of a teaspoon clattering idiotically in the background. So no, the video isn't ready for prime time.

Y'know that person who was a powerful influence on your younger self, but now you can't really talk to them anymore?

So I finally read Dave Sim's The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (with Carson Grubaugh; Living the Line, 2021, 978-1-7368-6050-2), "a metaphysical history of comics photorealism." Let's be clear: this is a book-length essay, in comics form, about a style of comics art. Or rather, it starts out that way until it morphs into an essay about an obsession, and then into a feverish warning about how the obsession destroys the obsessor. Fun reading it ain't. But that's the thing about artistic genius: if you follow it at all, you follow it down paths you never would've thought of taking.

Sim, closely studying reprints of classic comic strips, identifies a school of photorealistic drawing headed by Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Milt Caniff (Steve Canyon), and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby) -- the three artists who would exert an outsize influence on nearly every notable comic book artist of the 20th century. Dissatisfied with his own overworked pen lines, Sim begins tracing panels of their work, especially Raymond's, teaching himself how the older artists mastered the difficult art of brush inking.

This would be interesting in and of itself, but then there's the matter of the bizarre 1956 car crash that killed Raymond and seriously injured his friend and colleague, Stan Drake. And the more Sim thinks about it, the less the accident makes sense. He's an amateur psychologist/detective working a seventy-year-old cold case, combined with an analytical history of comics realism. (Sim doesn't care how well or how badly a strip is written, only how well it's drawn.) The book is already bursting at the seams, but things haven't gotten weird enough yet.

That's when Sim goes on an 85-page tangent about the author of Gone With the Wind, effectively a new book that could've been called "The Strange Life of Margaret Mitchell." His obsession with the life and work of the American novelist is where his...robust...beliefs about feminism and gender take over the narrative (as you knew they would, this being Dave Sim). By now, we're waist-deep in occult metaphysics, conspiratorial scenarios, and Nth level comic book geekdom in the service of a graphic novel jeremiad, but before we're led to any conclusion about the strange death of Alex Raymond, Sim abandons his incomplete (and incompletable?) book; his wrist gives out, and besides, he's broke. Alex Raymond isn't paying Dave Sim's bills.

That's when Alabama painter and art teacher Carson Grubaugh steps in to turn Sim's remaining notes and sketches into a "conclusion" -- or as much of a conclusion as we're likely to get -- for this book. I think it's worth reading, because artistic genius follows its own path; not to do so is to invite stagnation and self-destruction. But is it good? What is "good" in the context of genius?

This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you.

You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean.

And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs.

And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact…you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…from a pile of "stuff."

This is the one clip from The Devil Wears Prada that everyone's seen. I think about it sometimes, like when I'm pulling on today's black jeans and t-shirt, or when someone around me feels a need to trumpet their contrarian opinions on subjects they know nothing about. Because loudly proclaiming your "individuality" somehow automatically makes you more interesting.

The books on fashion illustration I've been reading are informative. Yes, fashion illustrators rely on those stick-thin, elongated bodies on which clothes always look good, but these artists know that their task is to provoke an emotional reaction in the viewer. Everyone wants to look good, and in the fantasy world the artwork presents, the viewer imagines themselves, however fleetingly -- just long enough to feel something, some longing, some resolve to take their appearance up a notch. It's not much different from the time and effort that comic book artists and animators put into designing and executing characters' costumes. They have to be eyecatching, appealing statements about who the characters are and what motivates them.

What you wear is a code that others can read, whether they choose to do so or not.

When it comes to artbooks, graphic design, formerly known as commercial illustration, is where the action is, or at least where the after-market prices quickly become ridiculous. (Buy your artbooks while they're still in print, folks.) I'll begin with Gary Lovisi's DAMES, DOLLS & DELINQUENTS (Krause, 2009), a gallery of lurid cover art from exploitation paperbacks of the '50s and '60s -- femmes fatale, juvenile delinquents, cheating wives, nymphos, thrillseekers, dopefiends, women in peril, and hard-as-nails lesbians -- they're all on display here, and a side-by-side comparison of a couple of original cover paintings with their muddy little reproductions shows us how much of the detail and beauty of this pulp art was lost from the moment the paperbacks first hit the store shelves.

It's pure camp -- every pose, every situation, every title is so over the top you can't take any of it seriously. Same goes for the covers in Susan Stryker's QUEER PULP (Chronicle, 2001), a scholarly history of the gay/lesbian exploitation novels of the '50s and '60s, reproducing covers with laugh out loud come-on text from the publishers: "It was a haven for oddballs...sex weirdos in search of offbeat thrills!" (Hangout for Queers, 1965). "A novel of obsessive desire -- the nightmare world of the trans-sexual!" (I Want What I Want, 1968). "Most men fall in love with women -- but some men fall in love with themselves!" (Muscle Boy, 1958).

Another scholarly tome, B. Astrid Daley and Adam Parfrey's cover gallery, SIN-A-RAMA (Feral House, 2016) examines the history of the softcore sleaze sex paperbacks of the '60s, a history that would've been lost without the time and effort of several dedicated collectors of this trash. Uniquely unsatisfying pornography, the covers always promised more than the stories were allowed to deliver, yet the books permitted a dedicated cadre of young, professional genre fiction writers (including Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Donald Westlake, and Lawrence Block) to earn a comfortable living when their magazine markets abruptly dried up in the late 1950s. There's something salacious here for everyone: "His nights belonged to the man-hungry widow who paid his salary...his days to her hot-eyed daughter who wouldn't leave him alone!" (Handy-Man, 1965).

The obscenity charges brought against the softcore smut publishers ironically led to several liberal-minded, free speech victories in court, paving the way for the stroke books of the '70s and '80s. Crude, rude, aimed squarely at readers craving in-your-face, hardcore sex scenes, there was no time for come-on text or coy descriptions: a black and white cover drawing and a three- or four-word title had to inform the customer exactly what they were getting, with no ambiguity whatsoever. Michael R. Goss's YOUNG LUSTY SLUTS! (Erotic Print Society, 2004) presents covers from (mostly) 1972 - 1989, boasting such titles as Mom Loves Big Ones, The Best Balling Daughter, Stepsister's Skillful Mouth, The Landlady's Dog, The Nun and the Choirboy, Dark Meat Eaters, and Anal Rider. (No gay male one-handers included, unless you count Switch-Hittin' Summer.)

Cinema Sewer editor Robin Bougie's two-volume GRAPHIC THRILLS: AMERICAN XXX MOVIE POSTERS 1970 - 1985 (FAB Press, 2014/15) appreciates the craft that went into designing movie posters to attract the raincoat crowd; in fact, he appreciates it more than the poster artists themselves, most of whom don't want to be found, let alone interviewed. The posters are compiled and annotated by a connoisseur of smut, who argues that these feature-length porn films, good, bad, or mediocre, are part of America's pop culture heritage. I'm sympathetic to that argument, even when the movie, the poster, or both, are virtually worthless. That these films exist at all is because of economic factors; they're commodities that once made a number of people (but never the performers) a lot of money, and now they're objects of nostalgia for collectors. But nostalgia for what?

Isn't it difficult telling one porn movie from another? Aren't the titles more or less interchangeable? Is there anything about Inspirations (1982) or Expectations (1977) or Sexcapades (1983) that grabs you and makes an impression, besides the poster art? Home video and the internet upended the business model for the adult film industry; now they profit by selling subscriptions to the sites hosting the porn, selling your data to third parties, third party advertising, etc. Maybe the old XXX movies and posters really do seem like reminders of a simpler, more "innocent" time. Nostalgia is a comforting illusion.

Dusting off some of those art books at the back of my shelf, I'm revisiting some of my influences and inspirations from my days as a beginner. Let's start with the great erotic science fiction artist Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri (1944 - ) and his character Druuna -- a beautiful, strangely masochistic woman struggling to survive in a diseased, dystopian world of sadistic mutants, madmen, and perverts. Drawn with highly detailed, painstaking pen work, the Druuna stories don't make much sense, but that isn't the point. The point is that nobody draws the female figure better than Serpieri, and the raven-haired Druuna is the Platonic Ideal of porn stars, as if there was anything platonic about her adventures.

Bill Ward's fantasy women, their pneumatic breasts barely contained by their skintight dresses, tottering along on five-inch stiletto heels with a cigarette holder in their opera-gloved hands, are the ultimate fetish objects. Ward (1919 - 1998), whose artistic priority was always the next quick sale, mastered an unusual, high speed drawing technique of Conté crayon on large sheets of newsprint. Even in the 1950s, those big sheets were a headache for magazine printers, but the charcoal-like effects were gorgeous to look at, and publishers, especially at Ward's home turf of the Humorama line of men's digests, wanted as much of the artist's output as he could provide.

Ward's only real rival in the cartoon pin-up business, Jack Cole (1914 - 1958), started out as a neophyte comic book artist who rose through the ranks and went on to create Plastic Man, then reinvented himself as a neophyte gag cartoonist whose beautiful women, rendered in a virtuoso ink wash technique, lead him from Humorama to Hugh Hefner's brand new Playboy magazine, where his stunning watercolor paintings were a monthly highlight. I envied the hell out of Cole's brushwork -- too bad I didn't bust my ass trying to emulate it. Cole was on the verge of reinventing himself yet again, this time as a successful syndicated newspaper strip cartoonist, when he inexplicably committed suicide at the age of 43.

Dan DeCarlo (1919 - 2001), a struggling young illustrator, spent a weekend preparing a sample comic book page, then took that and his portfolio to the Timely Comics offices, where editor Stan Lee hired him on the spot. Quickly becoming a specialist in teen humor comics, the impossibly prolific DeCarlo not only picked up extra work at other companies (including Archie Comics), but he became a leading contributor of erotic gag cartoons to the Humorama digests as well. There's a thin line separating DeCarlo's fun-but-innocent high school girls from the blatantly sexualized women of his pin-up cartoons; you don't have to look too closely at some of those gag panels to see very buxom, adult versions of Betty and Veronica. By 1958, DeCarlo had taken a full-time job at Archie Comics, where he went on to become the company's definitive artist (creating Josie and the Pussycats as well).

So how did so many masters of Good Girl art come to influence a gay, furry cartoonist who likes to draw boys? Who was putting all their knowledge, craft, and hunger for success into drawing the sexually objectified men I liked to look at and wanted to make the subject of my own pictures?

Long story short: no one. Oh, there was Tom of Finland, but his work always bored me. Burne Hogarth's Tarzan was strapping but sexless, and while there were numerous, superbly talented cartoonists and illustrators who could execute generic, square-jawed Action Guys in their sleep, I was basically adrift. By the time I discovered the erotic gay illustrators Harry Bush and Sadao Hasegawa, I'd cobbled together a style of my own, for better or worse.

It never fails: just as you're mopping up the blood of the last heretic and you're beginning to think all your problems are solved, things get worse. In Cult of the Lamb: The First Verse (Oni Press, 2024, 978-1-63715-522-6), the sacrificial Lamb is resurrected as vengeance incarnate, until they get their first heady taste of actual worship. Worship makes the Lamb more powerful, and power is addictive.

One can see the theme here -- that religion exists on a continuum in which the faith of the followers fuels and sustains an endless series of atrocities directed by one sect against another. That this is depicted in a graphic novel with cute cartoon animals who live in a world of murder, mutilation, maggots, and literal shit is arresting enough, but (British) writer Alex Paknadel and (Canadian) artist Troy Little invest the story with genuine, heartbreaking emotion as well. There's a point in this book where I had tears in my eyes and that...well, that was unexpected.

Judge Dredd, a science fiction satire that predicted today's militarized police forces, is the series that kickstarted artist Brian Bolland's career. Working on the comic from 1977 to 1981, he learned that his meticulous attention to detail was not suited for the industry's expected page-a-day production rate, but what pages he drew during his run! Judge Dredd by Brian Bolland: Masterpiece Edition (Rebellion, 2024, 978-1-83786-194-1) presents high-resolution scans of 93 of Bolland's surviving, fully inked pages from the British weekly 2000 A.D.

No complete stories here, but you do get to see Bolland's seamless blend of sardonic humor, dynamic action, grotesque, cartoonish exaggeration, and clean-line hyperrealism on display in several story arcs, including The Cursed Earth (Dredd faces off against a homicidal Col. Sanders), The Day the Law Died, The Judge Child Quest, and Judge Death Lives. There's a generous selection of cover art from the American Judge Dredd Monthly (where Bolland goes out of his way to put the humorless Dredd into absurd situations and poses), 2000 A.D. Monthly, and eleven pages of Walter the Wobot backup strips. A generous gallery of groundbreaking art at a more than reasonable price -- don't wait too long to pick up a copy.

https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Lamb-Vo.....sr_1_1?s=books
https://www.amazon.com/Judge-Dredd-.....943/ref=sr_1_1

It seems that 45 years after the fact, people are being taken by surprise at how painful a gut punch the Watership Down movie (1978) can be:

https://www.fatherly.com/entertainm.....ids-and-family

I can't blame them. Whatever you were expecting when you started watching, this movie goes beyond it, and then some. I wrote my own brief review of the Blu-ray (Criterion Collection) release some years ago:

Martin Rosen's Pastoral Symphony

WATERSHIP DOWN is a simple adventure story about a group of rabbits seeking a new place to call home -- simple, that is, until you see that it's part political allegory and part POW escape thriller, woven together with a trickster creation myth and the kind of death-haunted theology one could imagine in the lives of a prey species at the mercy of a world of predators.

Is this a kids' movie? Sure, for thoughtful, older kids who won't be freaked out by seeing some of life's harsher realities on the screen.

[Director] Martin Rosen's second and last animated feature, The Plague Dogs (a 1984 film also based on a Richard Adams novel), took those "harsher realities" to their limits in a story of two escaped laboratory animals on the run, to the extent where I haven't watched it again in decades ; I'm not sure I want to subject myself to that imagery again. (One could call it Harlan Ellison syndrome.)

Watership Down argues, in the starkest possible terms, that life for the least privileged among us is bleak but not hopeless; I'd say that's more than most movies or shows can, or would even try to, give us.

The world needed a cute sheep twink, so I stepped up and provided one. I don't make model sheets for my characters, but it might be fun to do one for Chaz, even though he doesn't need it -- he's easy to draw.

I'm cutting back my hours at work so I can spend more time drawing. This should mean that my posts will become a little more frequent (and better drawn) in the coming months, fingers crossed.

I still have all of those pencils, sketchpads, and electric erasers I bought years ago, but now I go out carrying only one hardcover sketchbook, one Prismacolor lead holder, and one Staedtler clic eraser (a lead holder's like a mechanical pencil, but with thicker leads for drawing). The goal is to get good results using very simple tools, and to keep the number of those tools to a minimum. Yesterday afternoon I sat in a parking lot drawing a porn cartoon, and the results weren't horrible.

Could someone point me towards a baby-steps tutorial for coloring scanned lineart using Photoshop Layers? So far, I haven't figured out how to accomplish even the most basic tasks using that tool (I can't see my own lineart!), and it's embarrassing. I'd read the Layers manual, if one existed.

Well, this was educational -- for me, anyway:

https://newrepublic.com/article/188.....ost-everything

Something before bedtime. So I start off with Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a piece of music I'm still trying to learn to like, and follow that with a faceless Martinu piano concerto that might deserve a better listener than me, but my mind did wander a lot.

Then I put on Bartok's Divertimento for strings, and the difference is startling, It's a half-hour dialogue between string orchestra and string quintet, and if drawings were sound, this would be a large-scale drawing in carbon, charcoal, and graphite pencils: velvety blacks, mysterious grays, and silvery highlights that shift and sparkle amidst the darkness. It's music that no one else could've written, a sound world of Bartok's own, and it all but embarrasses the Martinu out of existence.

It put me in a good mood. Funny how music can do that.

America's longest-running magazine, Scientific American -- which began publication in 1845 -- made unwelcome headlines this week. On Friday, its editor in chief stepped down after having posted an online rant calling Trump supporters "the meanest, dumbest, most bigoted group" of people, and then calling them "fascists" to boot.

This bit of public venting did no one any favors -- in fact, it merely confirmed what Trump's people already believe Democrats and the left think of them anyway. It's clear that the Democratic Party has no idea how to talk to poor, working-, or even middle-class people anymore, but if you're busy demonizing your political opposites because you can't speak to them in their own language, then you don't really have anything better to offer, do you?

I've done okay living a life of the mind, but sometimes this thinking stuff can be a drag, man.

Occam's Razor applied:

https://newrepublic.com/post/188197.....-landscape-fox

REPUBLICANS

Everything that went wrong in your life? It's THEIR fault, and we're gonna make them pay! We're gonna fix everything, and make everything right, and no one's ever gonna make you feel small again, I promise. You're strong, beautiful people, beautiful people, and I love you, I really love you. Now would you mind getting on your knees and sticking your tongue way up my ass? Please? I'd really appreciate it.

DEMOCRATS

Tell me, you ignorant scumbags, why don't you like me?

There it goes: you lose your temper while someone tries to explain why they're the exception to the rule, and before you know it, the old toxic personality has emerged to steer the moment into an emotional shipwreck. At least this time, you had the grace to apologize a few minutes later, but still.

Surely it's not THAT difficult to act like a human being instead of an asshole, but intolerance is the ulcer that flares up, the allergic reaction to the object of your prejudice. You can manage it, but you can't will it away. Word by word, deed by deed, you build your own life, determining whether that life is useful or useless to anyone else. Pissing people off -- what good does that do? Bringing other people down -- is that what it takes to make you feel alive?

(Sidebar: if your heroes are the talking heads on a screen, remember -- these are performers, paid to mouth whatever words are put in front of them. Their job is to make you, the audience, feel what they want you to feel.)

There's nothing very smart or very satisfying about gratuitous cruelty. It doesn't help anyone. Don't go there. Now for the hard part: you've gotta take your own advice.

Everybody will help you
discover what you set out to find
but if I can save you any time
come on, give it to me
I'll keep it with mine
-- Bob Dylan

Up on the hill
they think I'm okay
or so they say
-- Steely Dan

In the land of make believe
you're mine tonight
although you are far away
In the land of make believe
I'm holding you tight
-- Dusty Springfield

...it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
and God, I know I'm one
-- The Animals

He looks as good in a skirt as he does in jeans
-- Pansy Division

Well, you tried it just for once
found it all right for kicks
but now you found out
that it's a habit that sticks

And you're an orgasm addict
you're an orgasm addict
-- The Buzzcocks

Think it over, ooh
Life ain't a four-leaf clover, ooh
-- The Emotions

There are times when all the world's asleep
the questions run too deep
for such a simple man
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am
-- Supertramp

Everybody needs a change
A chance to check out the new
but you're the only one to see
the changes you take yourself through
-- Stevie Wonder

The world's a mess it's in my kiss
(How high the moon? Well, I wish I was.)
-- X

Seems the more I travel from the foam to the gravel
as the nets unravel, all exotic fish I find, like

Jason and the Argonauts
(There may be no golden fleece) but human riches I'll release, like
Jason and the Argonauts
(There may be no golden fleece) but human riches I'll release
-- XTC

Where you been lately?
There's a new kid in town
Everybody loves him, don't they?
He's holding her and you're still around
-- The Eagles

I'll be alright without you
-- Journey

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
-- John Lennon

It's a dumb song
but I'll write it anyway
It's an old mistake
but we always make it -- why do we?

This time it'll be alright
This time it'll be okay
-- Sleater-Kinney

If you want to see me, well baby you know that I'm not around
but if you want to feel me why don'tcha just turn around
I'm by the window where the light is
-- Lou Reed

Now, each of us has his own special gift
and you know this was meant to be true
and if you don't underestimate me
I won't underestimate you
-- Bob Dylan

Otakon, 2 - 4 August 2024, Washington, DC -- Day 1

There were over 42,000 attendees at last year's anime/manga/cosplay/J-pop extravaganza; this year's attendance is clearly gonna shatter that record, given today's hour-long wait to get into the Dealers' Room. The convention center closed off access to the Middle Rotunda concourse after a capacity crowd had filled that room shortly after the noon opening. By the time we were allowed in, the crowd was still thick and the air was barely breathable. There were endless displays of cosplay accessories, wall hangings, figurines, decorative weaponry, art prints, costume jewelry, game cartridges, manga (so many vendors, and so few of the series I'm now reading), and something new this year: confectionary. You can't go wrong selling candy and soda to this crowd.

The two dealers who still bothered to bring anime DVDs and Blu-rays were clearly trying to sell down their years-old inventory at premium prices, but the real action was at that vendor who specialized in a large selection of hard-to-find hentai magazines; business is always brisk at that table. 'Rat and I wandered into a panel discussion of the literary in-joke packed action series, Bungo Stray Dogs: it was about the RL authors who had inspired some of the more interesting and objectionable characters in the show, and that didn't even include the guy who's sleeping with his sister.

We found a bar that serves good booze; I had Don Julio reposado on the rocks (twenty bucks, and worth it), and they had one of 'Rat's favorite ryes, Angels' Envy. We got back in time for a screening of something called My Dress-Up Darling, which turned out to be a hilarious, romantic, odd couple cosplay comedy. A sushi dinner, and after that we weren't up for anything except going home for a nightcap.

Otakon -- Day 2

On the second day of Otakon my true love texted me: six fursuiters, Gerudo Link, four Tokyo Ghouls, three Pikachus, two Batmen, and a Doctor Octopus (not to mention innumerable Demon Slayers, One Piece characters, Chainsaw Men, and shonen maids). As Japanese voice actor Shinnosuke Tachibana marveled during the standing room only Blue Lock panel, "There're more cosplayers here than there are in Japan!" The Washington Convention Center is a huge venue, but if Otakon eventually outgrows it -- as it might -- and moves to another city, we're gonna be a couple of very sad puppies.

Otakon -- Day 3

A leisurely breakfast and a relaxed stroll to the convention center, where we were just in time for a program of LGBTQ+ anime music videos, reviving fond memories of Yuri!!! on Ice, Princess Jellyfish, and Revolutionary Girl Utena, plus intriguing footage from shows I haven't seen yet, including Buddy Daddies and Dance Dance Danseur. An hour of this year's audience favorite AMVs followed, and the room was packed, with Spy x Family and Jujutsu Kaisen getting the lion's share of attention from fans and video editors.

A perfunctory stroll through the rapidly emptying Dealers' Room, and then it was time to call it a day. We sat at home, texting family, watching Olympics coverage and enjoying our beers, reflecting on another Otakon weekend well spent; then capping the evening with a couple episodes of Pinky and the Brain, and me realizing: Pinky's my hero.

I'm seldom without my MP3 player. (My what?) Where else am I going to find an acceptable, custom-tailored playlist that takes in Redbone and the Asrael Symphony? Certainly not on any streaming service: algorithms have no taste, no curiosity, and no historical perspective. So hit shuffle play on this week's selection of tunes, and you might hear something like this:

Culture Club/The Medal Song
Another buoyant Culture Club calypso, beautifully sung by Boy George. So what if the lyrics are, as usual, barely comprehensible? It's not the first time a set of falling-out-of-love lyrics have gotten listeners onto a dance floor.

Charlie Rich/Lonely Weekends
As music writer Dean Rudland put it, Charlie Rich's sides for the Smash label are "the records you wish Elvis had been making in the '60s." The updated rockabilly of "Lonely Weekends" is one side of a complex (and perpetually underrated) musical personality that was equally at home in country, jazz, and R&B. (I only wish that most rockabilly performers could sing as well as Charlie Rich.)

Ashford & Simpson/Is It Still Good to Ya?
We need to talk. A couple realizes, in their mutual boredom, that they may have come to the end of their road together, so is it time for a drastic change? This is a heart-rending breakup song, and a reminder that the true test of performers isn't to express their feelings, but to make their audience feel what the performers want them to feel.

XTC/Burning with Optimism's Flames
Could Andy Partridge be too clever a songwriter for his own good? Since XTC consistently matches hyperliterate lyrics with driving rhythms and instantly memorable tunes, the result is pretty much my ideal rock band, but let's not get hyperbolic. This song is "typical" XTC, lyrics not quite grounded in reality: the verse steps into a rhythmic minefield that vocalist Partridge navigates with almost contemptuous ease; the chorus celebrates a woman who's demonstrably not all there, not that the song's erotomaniac climax cares.

The Stylistics/People Make the World Go Round
It's the sound of producer/arranger Thom Bell's wind chimes, strings, and marimba, Russell Thompkins Jr's falsetto vocals, and Linda Creed's ambivalent lyrics ("changing people's heads around/Go underground young man") coming together to prove that there's a thin line between a long-term plan for subversion and defeatism. Philly Soul with a troubled conscience.

The Pretenders/My City was Gone
The singer comes back to Ohio to find that everything she remembered and loved about it has been sold out and destroyed by fast-buck politicians. The song, betrayal articulated, is built on a funky instrumental vamp that opened Rush Limbaugh's show for over a decade, without permission or the payment of royalties. (It turned out that songwriter/vocalist Chrissie Hynde's dad was a fan of Rush's show.) Rush, being Rush, couldn't leave well enough alone and finally got around to hurling on-air personal insults at Hynde, at which point her lawyers stepped in and twisted his arm. He had to pony up $100,000 in unpaid royalties, and the singer forced him to donate the entire sum to PETA, an organization Rush despised. Who says there's no such thing as poetic justice?

Oh yeah, it's a great song, too.

Let me state for the record: I've never read THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951). I haven't gone out of my way to avoid it, I've simply never felt like picking it up. So while I won't write about books I haven't read, I'll gladly share what critic Jonathan Yardley has to say about it in his delightful essay collection SECOND READING: NOTABLE AND NEGLECTED BOOKS REVISITED (2011):

"THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is now, just about anywhere you ask, an 'American classic,' right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst...The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.

"[T]he novel raises more questions than it answers. Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as 'a symbol of purity and sensitivity' (as The Oxford Companion to American Literature puts it) when he's merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

"It is required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment...and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought. [It] touches adolescents' emotional buttons without putting their minds to work.

"From first page to last, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an exercise in button-pushing, and the biggest button it pushes is the adolescent's uncertainty and insecurity as he or she perches precariously between childhood...and adulthood, which is the great phony unknown. Indeed a case can be made that THE CATCHER IN THE RYE created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. He established whining rebellion as essential to adolescence and it has remained such ever since."

Wow. I'll only mention that one of the best and darkest jokes in Tom Carson's GILLIGAN'S WAKE (2003) imagines Holden Caulfield growing up to become John Lennon's assassin.

(Any attempt at political finger pointing in replies to this journal will be taken as proof that you have utterly failed to recognize yourself.)

It's a shame how few of these movies I've seen. My tastes run more to The Transporter (2002), the first of three fun, gloriously stupid movies about a professional driver/martial arts master who, in a cool as fuck black suit and tie, MacGyvers weapons out of found objects and wipes the floor with dozens of opponents. Obviously it's a movie aimed squarely at teenaged boys, and the one woman in the picture is a prize to be won or lost (it wouldn't matter much to our hero either way).

But say I'm in the mood for something different -- say, one of the many, many movies about women in dysfunctional romances, or women squabbling with their sisters, or women shocked to learn they're turning into their mothers, or women learning the hard way to own their own talent and to stop being someone else's doormat. Where do I start?

Here's where I remembered that copy of Cinematherapy: The Girls' Guide to Movies for Every Mood that's been gathering dust next to my shelves for years; I finally started to read it a few days ago. Authors Nancy Peske and Beverly West briefly criticize 300 or so movies with an irresistible combination of insight and snark, arguing with tongue only slightly in cheek that "movies are more than entertainment: they're self-medication."

"[W}e women have a tangle of spiritual resonance, emotional history, and psychological nuance to unravel while browsing...the shelves at our local video store," the authors assert in their introduction, a gender essentialist postcard from the '90s. "Men, of course, don't have this problem because they have only two moods: on and off." Sure, sure. Fewer and fewer people believe that gender and sexuality are fixed categories: now they're a spectrum that folks can travel across, as they always were. But this was 1999. Besides, I'm learning things about movies I've never seen.

"Feeling ugly, dorky, crazy, totally inept at relationships? Here's one that'll inspire you: Based on the true story of award-winning New Zealand writer Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (1990) is the story of a late bloomer, an artist whose severe lack of social skills and confidence nearly cripples her, but who nevertheless achieves great critical success."

"Let's see: unselfish, fiscally responsible, respectful of her rules and tastes regarding decor, good to the kid, effective bouncer at the door. Death, apparently, does wonders for a man's character." (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1947)

Or Aliens (1986): "Not a good film to watch before your overbearing mother picks up the kids for the weekend."

The possibilities are endless, but I won't be getting (back) to these movies anytime soon -- I still have to finish binge-watching Naruto, y'know.