Submet Industries

Not quite a month away from the personal blog. Sadly, this is better than my usual attempts. Shall we?

01. July sees the building of personal insanity to a fever pitch. I’ve become quite enamoured with using my birthday as a personal launching point of sorts, taking the opportunity of ticking ever closer to the unending void to regroup and conquer a new year. In the past, the results have been mixed. I suspect this year will be more of the same. However.

02. Keep an eye on Variant Edition for some very exciting news. As it stands, I’m counting down to the site’s launch on August 1st on various bits of social media. In the five days running up to the launch, I’ll be unleashing the premise of the thing, and what I hope to accomplish with it… for the immediate future, anyway. As always, stay tuned for more.

03. My articles over at Comics Beat keep running. I usually aim for one in depth piece a week, alongside several smaller bits, as it fits my purview. Expect links to a piece on how and why some launches and relaunches work, and why others explode on the runway.

04. As for Comics! The Blog? It’s still humming along. You’ll notice that many of the regular features have disappeared slowly over the past while. I doubt that will change any time soon – the creative juices, they are changing, and there are some personal circumstances that are preventing the blog from functioning at full capacity. I should note: this doesn’t mean things won’t keep going there, nor does it mean that James and I still aren’t interested in doing the bloggity things or hanging with each other. Nothing has changed on the WHY we do the site, just maybe the HOW. Look for bigger and better as we go.

05. As for this blog? I think I’ll finally start using it for what I intended – a catch all for my stuff, as well as the occasional exclusive article. It looks like more and more of my efforts will be focused on a wider variety of sites soon enough, so it will be nice to have a place that acts as a nice firm glove, catching all the… articles that… baseball metaphor. But yeah, like I said, we’ll see how that goes. Until tomorrow, good folks…

Well that was a day. How about we get this over with?

01. SUDDENLY

You ever have one of those days where people just seem to keep coming at you? Today felt a lot like that. I’m mostly just minding my business, attempting to do my various jobs, paying or otherwise, and then it starts happening, all at once. An asshole on the internet tells me I’m being a dick to his kids because I except some actual god damn journalism from a so called journalist – and he didn’t fact check an article before clicking the send button. Did I mention his kids? Shit no. Although maybe I did say a good slogan for his site would be “It Feels Right”, because hey, if it feels like the truth, that’s good enough, right? Whatever. That got me in a bad mood. Then shittier things started happening on the internet, but look, trolls are trolls, and you shouldn’t feed them, right? And all of this is feeding on a bit of anger that popped up yesterday when someone saw fit to talk shit about me and my ordering in the store to a co-worker. The person in question is one of those types who squirrels things away, putting aside five books a week and picking up three. They’re the type who asks for items to be ordered and then hmms and haws when they come in and never, ever buys them. The talking shit about the ordering got to me for other reasons that I won’t go into, but suffice to say, in this case, it was amusing to hear them say that.

What I’m getting at is the fact that I’m a bit frustrated at this point, and nothing seems to be calming me down. I’m just lucky I have people in my life like Danica and James and a pretty good boss in Heidi, who went to the mat for me in the comment section of an article today, otherwise I’m pretty sure I’d be a ball of anger, and this post would have had a lot more swears. Anyway.

02. PREVIOUSLY

• Yesterday, Danica and I started our First Whoochiversay for our podcast, Doctor Whooch. In celebration, we drank a lot, watched the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, and made fun of Eric Roberts. A lot. It was some of the most fun I’ve had recording the podcast.
• Dark Horse announced new printings of New York Four/Five and Demo from Brian Wood, and while I still have opinions on him, I’m glad those books will be available for purchase once more. Demo was what sold me on the concept of comics outside of the Big Two, and I love the idea of it doing something similar for someone else.

03. MEANWHILE

We might be seeing a Rat Queens cartoon at some point! That has me pretty jazzed. I could see it as a nice addition to Fox’ current line-up (in a weird way). I would watch the hell out of that.

04. SOMETIME! IN THE FUTURE!

This weekend is the New York Comic Con – Special Edition, and I’m going to be covering news for Comics Beat as it happens… ish. There’s the small matter of also interviewing Kieron Gillen in advance of Wednesday’s release of The Wicked & The Divine. So there’s that, which is nice.

05. ELSEWHERE

His shaking, calloused hands reach for the keys.

“A little bit of Louie tonight, I think,” he says.

Another day goes, and with it we’re all one step closer to the inevitable void. How was your day?

01. SUDDENLY

I’ve been digging my hands into more of the history of the medium lately. Between the discount that I get from the store, and the volume of historical volumes coming out lately, the process is getting quite easy – but I still need to make more of an effort to sit down and really get my hands into it. One day I’d love to write a history book myself, but I’ve always had to push myself to do anything that involves heat research. First, I figure, I’m going to get a hold of my deadlines (hello, daily posts), and then I can work on the more in depth stuff. Baby steps.

Anyway, this week I brought home the gorgeous witzend collection Fantagraphics put out, featuring the entirety of Wally Wood’s self published magazine series, and as always with the books from Fantagraphics, there’s a ton of contextual pieces to go along with the contents. So great.

Another thing that made it’s way home was Comics – A Global History, 1968 to the Present, which you can find a bit more about here. It’s gonna fill the international gap that I have in my collection a little bit. I should really find more things along that line, as I doubt it covers EVERYTHING in just over 300 pages.

02. PREVIOUSLY

Last week, Marvel announced that Rocket Raccoon #1 had managed to garner over 300,000 initial orders, which is a thing that’s happening. I did a commentary piece on how that number was a reflection of Marvel’s amazing marketing over at Comics Beat just before the news broke that roughly half the order came from a single source. Naturally, the comment section was fun. Turns out the orders don’t count if the comics were ordered by a service designed to get nerdy product into the hands of people who would probably enjoy said nerdy product? At the end of it all, I came out of it realizing my first article still stood – Marvel’s current marketing is dynamite, and the results are evident.

03. MEANWHILE

My lovely girlfriend Danica has been having a great week over at her Live Within Your Space blog. I’m usually astounded by the breadth of her knowledge when it comes to design and layout and organizing and all that, and the best part? She’s still growing and exploring. The blog is all process and it’s really, really cool – and I’d say that even if we weren’t living together. I particularly recommend Tuesday’s post about styling objects, but you should definitely check out her whole blog.

04. SOMETIME! IN THE FUTURE!

Future projects? For next week, I think there’s a piece in me about trying to work with comic publishers as a retailer, and how the industry really shouldn’t be the “us vs. them” thing that so many people keep pushing for. We’re all going to sell a lot more books working together, are we not? That, and I really, really, really need to re-read Casanova and get on writing those Pa-Zow! articles I promised back when Comics! The Blog started. Hopefully a few will be ready by the time the official on-sale date for the next volume is announced.

05. ELSEWHERE

Smiling, she turns, expecting him beside her. He’s not there, she notes. Not there. Not really. Yet still, a memory lingers, with a lopsided grin of crooked teeth, and sweet, adoring eyes.

She closes her eyes and lets her fingers float along the keys. It’s been a while since she’s played. He had taught her. They always played together.