Ah, my old enemy…the blank page. Our weekly battle where I spit in the very face of god and bring forth something from the void of nothing.
Or, I just blather on until I hit my personally predetermined word count for that week. Fun fact: whatever the word count ends up being, I go out of my way to make sure it ends in “69.” Nice.
Super Team International ‘88
Scott O. Brown (W)
Carlos Gabriel Diaz (A)
Hey, it’s a KICKSTARTER ALERT! I haven’t done one of these in a spell…or maybe I have? I still exist outside of the confines of the normal flow of time.
Here’s the blurb for Super Team International ’88:
STI’88 is the story of the World’s Most Mediocre Super Team as they try to rally together to defeat the machinations of VILE. In the first issue, after being forged in the crucible of unpublished, universe shattering, superhero crossovers, the All-New SUPER TEAM INTERNATIONAL bands together to stop threats domestic and chronological… assuming they can stop bickering amongst each other long enough to avoid destroying the local donut shop.
One of the perks of writing H&V (of which there are several) is getting hipped to cool under the radar comics such as this. It’s a pitch-perfect send up of another superhero book of note with “International” in the title. It’s a well crafted parody that you could mistake for a book of that era (the 80’s) if you weren’t paying attention.
This is where YOU come in! As of right now, they’re Kickstarter-ing issue #4 which means they’re on the back half of this six issue run! They’re so close to the finish line and maybe you should kick in a few bucks to help get them there…Like I just did!
Inside
Like I mentioned above, I now exist outside of the confines of time. This may make me retroactively look clever since Loki premiers tomorrow (at time of writing) / today (at time of reading) and there are some time travel shenanigans going on in that show as I am lead to believe.
My point is that I feel like I’m missing a day or a week constantly. I had started this section with “Last week I…” only upon writing that down I realized that it was indeed not last week but maybe two weeks ago. As a reader the big buy-in you all participate in is believing what I write is explicitly true when in some cases I don’t even know if it is or isn’t. Except for the “69” thing, that is most certainly true. I’ve really written myself into a corner here with this joke.
At some point in the not too distant past, Bo Burnham released his most recent special Inside which is sort of a follow-up/companion piece to his last special Make Happy. Inside was filmed by Burnham alone without a crew or audience during the 2020 lockdown and it is…a journey.
I often have trouble with reacting to things that are “of the now” especially when I’m putting my opinions out there on the internet in an easily searchable format. I’m just glad I wasn’t actively blogging when The Phantom Menace came out or there might be some text that would come back to haunt me.
After Make Happy came out on Netflix some five years ago, Burnham took a break to focus on other projects like directing (Eighth Grade) and acting (Promising Young Woman). Make Happy seemed like a decent capstone to his standup career…but then along came Inside.
There’s nothing I would love more than to lavish praise upon Inside and declare it a work of brilliant genius but I have to live with it for a while. At the very least I can say that it’s one of my favorite specials I’ve seen in quite a while and I don’t quite know if I can call it comedy. Inside covers a lot of ground in just an hour and twenty-seven minutes and while it starts off funny it quickly slides into something else.
I wouldn’t say (publicly) that I identified too closely with anything in the special and that the year 2020 could be boiled down into one monolithic experience that encompasses everything and everyone. But Inside captures how the year was for one person and, understandably, it gets rough. There are ups and downs throughout and maybe some moments of legitimate honesty and it something worth seeing.
This column was 769 words long. Nice.
