I haven't updated this blog in so long and I have really missed it, even though I don't think anyone reads it because no one reads blogs anymore, everyone has substack and medium or patreon or whatever and why have we strayed so far from LiveJournal? Why? The unfortunate result of straying from LiveJournal is that I make too many posts per day to Facebook. I have so many books checked out from the library right now AND YET all I want to read are these John Bellairs books! I had The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt when I was a kid. I have no idea where I got it. Sometimes I would read books aloud to my mom while she was driving and I remember reading the beginning of this one to her because I didn't understand the reference to "Come On-A My House". (I also remember reading Superfudge (?) to her and skipping parts of it...censoring a child's book that I, a child, was reading to my mother...that's wild.) What I did not know when I was a kid was that there are many Johnny Dixon mysteries. I only knew of this one. Then I was at a Friends of the Library sale and picked up the next book in the series, which I was not that into! I don't remember why. I think I read it on the plane ride to Florida and then left it in a Little Free Library at some point. These covers by Edward Gorey are so iconic. It's unfortunate that the ebook covers are super generic and don't have the pop that this one has. Hoopla has all of these books and I re-read The Mummy, The Will, and The Crypt & it was almost like reading it new because I only really remembered the end, and not even the ending, just the part where Johnny is exploring the crypt and the church. The ending was only slightly satisfying. The occult elements in John Bellairs books do not seem fully formed to me. I don't know. I am just in the mood for this and nothing else will do!! I just checked out The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost. 'The Rose-Hip Fairy', from Flower Fairies of the Autumn, Cicely Mary Baker. Last week a lady smashed into me with her SUV and it's the second time someone has hit me with their car here. I have a very large bruise that is healing well. People ask me if I'm going to sue her and for what? So I can talk to the cops?? And then go to court?? For an indeterminate amount of stress? I had to weigh the pros and cons but I am tired of getting hit by people operating two-ton vehicles that they have no business operating if they can't pay attention to the world around them. Anyway I would like to stop living in the city and become a flower fairy. It seems pretty good. No shoes. Too small to get hit by cars. Sunshine, vibing with some plants, hanging out in a tree, playing tricks on humans. I am and have always been a country mouse. And I am okay with that.
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I had to go see my family for Christmas. This may have been an error. I was there for far too long and I also was caught in the Southwest Airlines holiday fiasco, so I got back "home" two days later than I was originally supposed to. "You are at your mom's? You need to come up w/a new plan. Moms are alright for a little while," texted a friend from Kentucky. Well, here we are. It was kind of weird to be on the other side of Florida. They had a cute bookstore, though. I spent a lot of time and money in there. I picked up The Crossing Places because it was on the shelf of staff picks at Tombolo Books. I happened to flip it over and read the back cover, which is something that I don't always do. (The cover I posted here is not the cover that I saw in the store; this cover is much better.) This was a fun mystery. I did not figure it out (the red herring was kind of wild and large), the main character was a delight, and it made me wish that I'd had an actually good Archaeology professor in college (I withdrew from that class on the advice of an Archaeology graduate student - the professor was using a workbook from the 1980s for our class assignments and was clearly not reading our papers). It was a fun, quick read, and I'm actually looking forward to more books with this character.
I LOVED LOVED LOVED Sunless Solstice. I love a spooky Christmas story from the English countryside! This had a variety of fun ghostly stories that take place around Christmas - the British Library publishes these and there are three other books themed around Christmas-time. I have two of them on order. It was cold in Florida at the time I was reading these, and it made me just want to be next to a fireplace, drinking some mulled wine and eating fine cheeses. They're older tales, so it surprised me that one was directly about demonology - it seems more like a modern subject. When I was about halfway through Sunless Solstice I went back to the bookstore and bought Randalls Round. It was sort of Lovecraftian in that there were a lot of indescribable terrors. As one keeps reading Randalls Round, a pattern begins to emerge of the stories ending in a place where they feel distinctly unfinished. There was a very intriguing story called 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas' that really ended leaving me with so many questions: Then what? Did the American sell the house? Did they try to find out what the treasure was? Are you just living in a house with a weird tentacle creature in your walls? If you like closure in a spooky story, this is not the book for you - I might go so far as to say that in some stories the story ends directly at the conflict. There are two stories included with Randalls Round that may or may not be the work of the same author, but those two stories have full conclusions so it seems unlikely. I have mixed feelings about it. I also picked up Tolkien's Letters from Father Christmas (it was the last one). This is the only thing by Tolkien I've ever read. It reminds me that Tolkien was into Santa Claus and C.S. Lewis thought Santa was dumb...I feel like I read that somewhere...if you don't have time for Santa Claus you're Feliz Navi-dead to me. This is a collection of the letters Tolkien wrote to his children. They are super delightful, they include characters and drawings and he would design stamps for the envelopes and all. I haven't finished this one yet, but I'm inspired to start writing my own. Hope you had a meaningful Chanuka! I love this little joke from Gotham Central #10! I was looking to see if I could get the second installment of Friday (it's out at my brother's library, but not on Hoopla at my library), and when I searched for Ed Brubaker I found this book and read the first eleven issues yesterday. It's really good - Batman sometimes makes a brief appearance, but usually you'll see only his foot or his silhouette as he's making an exit. I really enjoyed the second story arc with the Firebug and the unsolved murder (which also has a great joke): Another thing that I liked about Gotham Central is that it focuses on the Major Crimes Unit (abbreviated as MCU, which my brain always reads now as Marvel Comics Universe, oops), and so when cops from other departments fail to solve a robbery they just say it was Catwoman and then the case gets pushed to the MCU (who knows it wasn't Catwoman). It's a good time, for a police procedural. The art is great, also - when you read a lot of superhero comics, there are a lot of comic book artists who basically draw the same features on everyone and it's up to the colorist for the reader to tell them apart. Michael Lark, however, does a terrific job - different faces, different body types, I really like how he draws Sergeant Davies. Sometimes he's a little heavy with the brush in some panels, though, and the reader loses clarity from expression, but it's better than flipping back and forth wondering which character is which because they all look alike.
Speaking of clarity of expression, I'm still reading Love and Rockets, just bouncing around from issue to issue at the moment because I'm looking at the way Jaime Hernandez draws expressions. As a kid I read a lot of Archie comics and that influence is apparent in the expressions (Archie makes a cameo backstage at a wrestling match in one issue, iirc), so I've been reading a lot of those, too, just to look at the expressions - the older Archie stories are more expressively drawn, but luckily the digests have a range of stories from different time periods. Have a happy Friday! I woke up today on the wrong side of the bed and I'm ready for naptime. Last week I read Love & Rockets Volume 9: Esperanza and it was, for some reason, wildly depressing and I wound up leaving work early. I mean, it's terrific. I had mainly read the earlier Locas comics, so I was looking for this volume because I knew about Vivian 'Frogmouth' Solis but had never read a story with Frogmouth in it. (Volume 9 is her debut.) I love Jaime Hernandez so much and I'm not sure why this collection made me so sad. I guess, like Maggie, I am also getting older. I finished the first arc of Fatale, which is kind of an occult horror/crime story by everyone's favorite crime writer Ed Brubaker. I like it all right, but I'm not sure if I will keep going - I probably will just to find out the secret of Josephine - I'm sure that part of this is purposeful, but I have a really difficult time keeping the Characters That Are Not Josephine straight in my mind. Everyone in this book is expendable, and almost everyone dies in some horrible way, so it's hard for me to keep track of which man it is that's dying in that particular issue and why or if it matters. In the first issue, there is a murder in which the murder victim is posed to look like the tarot card The Hanged Man, and there are some other references to blood magic, but unfortunately the occult aspect of the story is kind of vague by the end of the first arc. Maybe all of that will be explained in the next story arc. After finishing that first arc of Fatale I tried to get into some Phantom Lady as a palate cleanser. A lot of people actually die in Phantom Lady, which I guess is the pre-comics-code world for you. I like that she has a little black light mirror that blinds people. I'm surprised that no one recognizes her, especially her boyfriend, because she has no mask or anything to conceal her identity, she just changes from street clothes into her skimpy costume. I guess they're banking on the idea that debutante and senator's daughter Sandra Knight wouldn't wear something that scandalous. And, of course, her outfit is quite scandalous - one of the covers was featured in Seduction of the Innocent. (This is how I know about Phantom Lady - her famous 'headlights', as Dr. Wertham put it). A very cool design element of Phantom Lady comics is the opening page will be in a monotone, either blue or red: It's very striking and beautiful!
Phantom Lady was illustrated by Matt Baker, who is considered one of the first (if not the first) African-American comic book artists. I don't know a lot about him, but it's something I discovered while looking into the history of Phantom Lady! You can read more about him here and here.
I wish Twitter was on the verge of implosion every day so I could log in to weebly and have my metrics say views are up 400%. (I also had someone follow me on LiveJournal, and the thrill of having someone follow me on LJ in 2022 cannot be overstated.)
I finished a sketchbook!
Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman, passed away November 10th, which is why I have been on the Batman kick I've been on. I really loved Batman: The Animated Series, and have been watching/re-watching those episodes (there are some that I haven't seen yet). Mask of the Phantasm was a fun time; I had never seen that one before, either, which is kind of hard to believe, but it's one of those movies I never got around to.
Catwoman is a pretty solid book all around. Every time I pick it up, it's good or even great. I remembered reading this series as it was coming out, because I liked Darwyn Cooke's art - now, on the re-read, I realize this run was written by Ed Brubaker. It's really terrific, down to the lettering. There's an issue where Selina sends her roommate, Holly, out to collect some information, and Holly is looking at the East End of Gotham through a recovering addict's eyes - her thoughts are presented as captions in what I'm assuming is a handwriting font that really pulls the reader in to her point of view. I don't know if it would have been as successful, honestly, without that handwritten element:
Ed Brubaker is great at telling a crime story and he's currently doing Friday, which is a book I talked about back in this post. This particular arc was a sticky situation for everyone involved, especially Holly, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this run. I think there's on more issue with Brubaker writing it, though. I'll have to see what else he's done; I had never paid too much attention to or followed comic book writers until I started reading The Department of Truth. The art has to be good before I can focus on the storyline.
Hello! It has been a long time since I have updated, mostly because no one really reads this blog except for maybe three people. And I am one of those three people.
I have been reading a lot of comics lately, so let me tell you about what I've been getting into. ♡ My coworker loaned me a hardcover biography of Jack Kirby, which has been very inspirational but also kind of sad in terms of how much Jack Kirby got the fuzzy end of the lollipop. I started reading superhero comics in the '90s, but also bought vintage comic books from the antique store (mostly '70s era Wonder Woman and the third volume of Marvel's Red Sonja), so the Kirby influence was evident in what I was reading - I mean, I was renting the VHS tape of How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way from Blockbuster, and Marvel was reprinting the old Kirby comics around the late '90s as well. The art in the biography is terrific so I picked up a secondhand copy to use as a reference and I'm waiting for it to get here. Jack Kirby was wildly prolific and there were several projects that he was involved with in one way or another that I wasn't familiar with - one was a comic called Black Magic (or True Amazing Accounts of Black Magic) and another was The Strange World of Your Dreams. I love comics from the 1950s, and these two titles are okay, but they do not compare to another comic that I was reading pretty recently from the '50s whose title now escapes me. Many of the titles are very similar, so it's hard to remember if it was Strange or Weird or any number of synonyms combined with Tales or Stories or another similar synonym. ♡ Hoopla recommended Batman:Noel, which had very lovely art and opened up beautifully with a snowy Gotham city scene. The art was more realistic for a Batman book, which is something that I don't always care for, but it was very well done and I think that having a realistic style contributes to how horrifying Batman villains can be. Both the artist and the colorist deserve every accolade. It was an interesting take on A Christmas Carol. I liked that Batman was gradually coming down with walking pneumonia because he is, after all, a human being who gets sick. Not enough sick days in superhero comics in my opinion. ♡ After Batman:Noel, I read Catwoman: When In Rome, which was fine. I liked that the artists were inspired by fashion illustrator Rene Gruau when making this book - I really love Rene Gruau's illustrations, and it goes well with the mood of the character of Catwoman and her glamorous lifestyle. The book looks as though it was done either with watercolor or ink wash - there was a little feeling of not quite being comfortable with the drawing style, which is more of a vibe and difficult to explain. Because it's based on this illustrative work of Gruau, things are a little more stylized, but not as stylized as the art of, say, Darwyn Cooke. The storyline was all right, a little mob story, a little weirdness with the Riddler. I read that first and then went on to Batman:Hush. Batman:Hush was terrific. I was trying to piece together who did it and why the whole time and never got it until the end. It really involves all these different villains in amazing ways without feeling too forced (this was how I felt about Wonder Woman & Justice League Dark: The Witching Hour), is just a wonderful detective story, we have some very good spicy moments with Bat & Cat, it's a great story by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's art is fine. Jim Lee is someone I definitely looked up to in the 90s when he was super popular with the run on X-Men and then with his work at Image, but today I'm just like, Oh this is Jim Lee and everyone looks the same. The only way you can distinguish between Jim Lee characters is basically the coloring, everyone has the same body structure and facial features, especially the ladies. They are all babes, but they look exactly the same. Anyway, if you like Batman, this was a really good one. I don't even think you would need a firm grasp of continuity - things are pretty well explained if some of the context is unclear. ♡ Even though I have been reading all these fun Bat & Cat comics, I have also been doing some indie reading. Hoopla had the Madman collection and I started on that because I never had read Madman back in the '90s. I knew of it, but had never actually picked it up. It's very much a fun indie comic of its time, just a zany romp with competing mad scientists and Madman himself, who is a reanimated zombie in a superhero costume who uses weapons like lead-filled yo-yos and a slingshot. It's fun. You can't take it too seriously. ♡ I REALLY LOVED indie comic Hell Phone by Benji Nate. I can't wait for the next installment! I must know what happens. Cute art, engaging storyline, fun friends in adorable grave robbing outfits. It's a must. It had a blurb from Liz Suburbia, and it's in a similar vein to Suburbia's comic Sacred Heart, which I also really liked. I read Hell Phone on hoopla, but it is also available to read on WebToons. Even though my birthday is the day before Halloween, I don't really care about Halloween that much anymore. I would like Halloween a lot more if I could go trick or treating as an adult. Trick or treating is really superior, because it's a mixed bag of candy - you can get good candy, you can wind up with some bad candy, some house might "forget" it was Halloween and you could wind up with a Pop-Tart or a Little Debbie Cake. You get to wear a costume and show it off to a multitude of people who oooh and aaah over you and reward you with mystery candy. However, for some dumb reason it's socially unacceptable to trick or treat if you're older than a teenager; I just think that if you are putting in the effort to have a cool costume and walk around then you should get candy like everyone else. (Effort! Not a dumb t-shirt that says 'This IS my costume', you shoulda just stayed home.) Although this is an unpopular opinion among my peers, I have in me about two weeks of 'spooky season' that occur somewhere around September, and then it's gone and I am Ready For Christmas. My personal schedule in terms of Holidays That Matter are: - Christmas - New Year's Eve - Valentine's Day - Nowruz - Summer - Hurricane Season - Back to Christmas and so on. Halloween is for children, as my mother would say. Anyway, in the two weeks worth of Ooky Spooky vibes I have, I'll watch some spooky movies. It is not Halloween without Ernest Scared Stupid, imo. I made a spreadsheet of old spooky movies - black and white preferred - and I recently watched Santo vs. The Vampire Women from 1962. Santo vs. The Vampire Women was an absolute delight and it only would have been more delightful if Santo had lost and the vampire women had continued as planned. This is 1962 so all the vampire women are gorgeous and their waists are snatched. The vampire Queen looks like Cher and Kim Kardashian and I would absolutely let her murder me so I don't see why everyone else has a problem. This movie was a terrific time and I really enjoyed the occult aspects of the vampire women - they're covered in cake makeup and have ratty wigs until they drink blood that has been blessed under the full moon, and the vampire queen's consort only appears as a devilish shadow on the wall. It's just these little fun details that aren't really explained, but that are so atmospheric and leave a bit to the viewer's imagination.
There are some wrestling scenes with Santo but they go on for a long time and are not very well shot. If I were to remake this movie, I would just have some very good wrestling scenes but then have Santo immediately decimated by vampires. Then we could have vampire Santo. Why didn't anyone think this through? It's nice to be back in the home state and it feels sometimes like I never left. I hadn't seen my mother or my BFF in five years. "It feels like you were always here," said my BFF. We went to the mall. We ate dumplings. Her kids have grown up into hilarious jokesters with no mercy and I love them. "You're a good hugger, Aunt Royal," they'd say. It was terrific. Now I am currently bothering famous anime podcaster Daryl Surat in his home. He has been working on panels for Anime Festival Orlando and I have been moving all of his stuff around. We did do an NES stream the night I got in. I am only good at Super Mario Brothers 3 and I am not good at anything else. (I am not even good at Dr. Mario.) On the plane ride to Florida I re-read Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. The thing about Written on the Body is that for whatever reason, the covers are not very good. There is an ebook version with pomegranate seeds, which is probably the best design-wise but not particularly germane with the book itself. My copy's cover looks like someone made it in five minutes. The one pictured above is, I mean, Just Okay. This is a really terrific, passionate, sad book, with some unexpected humor thrown in that takes the reader by surprise. I laughed aloud at a couple of segments just because I wasn't anticipating a little joke. I hadn't read this book in ages, and I'd forgotten how it ended, which made it a nice plane read because it was almost like reading a new book. I think I wrote about picking this up before on this blog, but this was a book that I lost in one of my many moves and one of my friends was kind enough to re-buy it for me from my wish list of things I have lost because the post office stole them or someone else stole them or they got thrown away. Anyway, like all of the Sleeping Beauty books, this was such a treat. Just a delight. Every time there would be some new punishment for some or another hot naked pleasure slave (consensual!), I would start laughing with glee and Daryl Surat would look over at me and dryly remark that Anne Rice wasn't known for her comedy writing. There is an absolutely wild plot spin towards the end of the book that I was one hundred percent not anticipating and I personally found it silly and hilarious, but I'm sure that, as with most silly and hilarious ideas, someone out there finds it the most arousing thing on the planet and good for them. The plot element was very brief, which was a bit surprising because I'm sure Anne Rice could've turned that into Book #6 all on its own. Maybe that was the plan. I guess we'll never know. With the passing of Anne Rice, we'll have no more Sleeping Beauty books, which is a shame because they're so wonderful and I didn't want this one to end. I'm glad she decided for whatever reason to write a sequel to her old trilogy - it was so fun, and they all are. I wish these could be a show or a movie but it would have to be either a very high budget porn or an anime series and I would watch either of those.
Good-bye, Camp Q, merry Camp Q. Good-bye, plain unwholesome food, good-bye Charlie boy. David Sedaris did a signing and my brother went because I lost my signed visual compendium in my last move. I am getting ready to move again, after a whole roller coaster of a week that ran me through the gamut of human emotion and also through the wringer. I'm headed home and I'm very pleased, because I was staring homelessness directly in the face for a hot second. Here's what I have been into lately. The Wojnarowicz documentary was absolutely amazing and part of the reason it is so wonderful is that David Wojnarowicz was so prolific in terms of the recording of his own life and times. We have his journals, tape journals, collages, paintings, videos; footage of the band he played in, his answering machine tapes. It's sad, it's lovely, magnificent. I'm so grateful that all of these tapes have been preserved so that he can narrate his own life even after his death. (The thirty-year anniversary of his death is approaching, on July 22nd.) I check out anything that looks interesting at work and Friday was one of those things. It's a very engaging story with mystery-solving teens, and I always love a good mystery-solving teen (key word here is good - there are plenty of mediocre mystery-solving teen tales). I like the 1970s style world they're in and the dynamic Teen Detective names. This one ends on a cliffhanger and I can't wait for the next one. Another comic I've really enjoyed lately is Harrow County. The picture I've used here is the first TPB, which caught my eye because I thought it was a reference to hag-riding. It's a really lovely comic that's done in ink and watercolor - the artist actually uses waterproof ink and watercolors OVER the ink, which I thought was absolutely unreal. There are a number of fun witches, monsters, curses, and magic that happens all in this little farmland setting. What I like about both Friday and Harrow County is that there are little sketches and thumbnails and things like that in the back - I love little behind the scenes glimpses at how artists work on composition and character creation. There's an arcade here in Lexington and it has a lot of old games I had not heard of (Gorf??), but my new favorite is Crystal Castles. I had never heard of Crystal Castles, because I didn't have an Atari growing up (and didn't know anyone who had one). I still don't really know what I'm doing or what's going on in this game. The trees chase me. The bees chase me. There's a witch. I pick up little dots. Are they tabs of LSD? Is that why trees are chasing me? I don't know, but it's a good time. I'm actually brainstorming out a piece for the first time in a while. It's strange, because in the past I've just sat down and let them come out and haven't fiddled with them too terribly much. This one, I think, might be a little different, but I don't want to over- or under-work it...I guess we'll see how it turns out.
"My done!!" is what my three year old cousin used to yell at me when he was finished on the potty. That is also how I feel about being done with grad school. (Finally all this shit is over.)
actual image of me
"What have you been doing with your free time, Royal?" my coworker asked today. Well, that's a great question. I wake up every morning and am grateful that I don't have to do homework or check my school email. I read for pleasure (not that I was reading for school. I mean, I was doing the absolutel least), go outside, roller skate, look at lunar eclipses, and tell myself I'll clean my apartment later.
My most recent obsession is watching people make houses and shelters on youtube so I'm going to drop some of those videos here.
I liked this guy's little oven and night mode feral hog camera.
These two!! Absolutely obsessed. Their well! Their little catfish pond! Tree-as-ladder!
I liked this one because it had a lady and because she also made a little stove.
I am hoping to get back into some studio work soon, but I have been doing some other catching up like all the personal correspondence that I let drop over the past month or so. Also I am allowing myself to check out as many books as I want which is already becoming absurd. But in a good way.
On to the next adventure! xo Royal |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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