Earlier today (Tuesday), I was sifting through the upcoming releases and agonizing that nothing was catching my fancy. I couldn’t exactly do another piece about Batman 89 since JP pretty much said all that could be said about that book and its strong nostalgic ties and I’m also trying to not run the “Last Week In DC Today” bit into the ground.
EiC Andy Burns suggested I vent my spleen on the current trend of comics creators going to Substack. To which I responded, “What’s a sub stack?” Additionally, I wasn’t about to get up earlier than usual on Wednesday to write about how I cried watching Chadwick Boseman’s performance on this week’s What If…?, it should be taken as fact that this will happen regardless of when I watch it. I could stoop to Buzzfeed territory and do a listicle of Top 5 Things That Make Me Cry but I fear this could be used against me in the future.
Currently, I’m debating the merits of two very similar colors I could paint my living room in a group chat with friends. It’s a dead heat between “Distant Shore” and “English Hollyhock” and if I’m being honest the differences are almost imperceptible. Both exist in the blue colour family and one may be slightly darker. My friends were getting ready to stage an intervention over me wanting to paint the room a tasteful but albeit “Basic Bitch” grey colour that no doubt wormed its way into my subconscious when viewing home listings for about a year straight. At one point I had acquiesced to doing an accent wall (whatever that is) to add some color to the room but I’ve since learned to love embracing colour…barely.
I’m probably going with “English Hollyhock” because it has the more ridiculous name of the two. “Oh, do you like the colour? It’s English Hollyhock.” I can’t see my enjoyment flagging while repeating that over a period of years, possibly decades. Whatever I wind up with I’m sure it’ll be a damn sight better than the myriad of terrible design choices the previous owners of my house made. My bathroom is currently a nightmare and for the first time it’s not because of something I did to it.
This column could rapidly be becoming the Russian roulette of columns on this site. Sometimes it’s a nuanced take on comics issues of the day and sometimes it’s me rambling on about paint colors and alluding to clogging my toilet until I hit the necessary word count for SEO. For the love of Zod, if you’re an indie comics creator get at me and save me from myself and the abject boringness of mainstream comics. Show me something weird, challenge my perceptions and biases. I am bored and I’m rapidly making this everyone’s problem and I refuse to better myself by fixing it on my own.
Incidentally, I’ll be taking my first proper vacation in years after next week’s column.
Hey, Star Wars
Disney+ dropped a nice full length trailer for Star Wars: Visions Tuesday and I am geeked for it. Have a look:
First off, pretty cool, eh? There is a right and wrong answer to that rhetorical question and I haven’t stopped to check the pulse of the internet to decide what the general consensus is on it.
It’s well known that I LOVE when something different is done with Star Wars. Get weird with the space wizard franchise, it’s a galaxy with almost no rules and in recent years it’s really excelled when they start pushing the boundaries of what Star Wars can be. Franchises like Star Trek have always been couched more in the the “science” part of “sci-fi” but Star Wars, by its creators admission, has always been essentially a fairytale. The word “can’t” shouldn’t exist when talking about what Star Wars is capable of.
The Star Wars: Visions trailer looks to be full of over the top anime goodness in my humble estimation. I would class myself as a casual anime fan in that I have both Cowboy BeBop AND Akira on Blu-ray and hold the uncontroversial opinion that Studio Ghibli beats the pants off Disney any day of the week. I try not to bring anime up in polite conversation because I’ve heard that if you utter the question, “Do you like anime?” aloud a cat girl body pillow will instantly appear in your room. In reality, I’m scared that going all-in on another hobby could well and truly break me.
So there you have it. I’m curious just how wild Disney will allow this pony to run but it’s a promising sign that they released the trailer in both Japanese and English. I sincerely hope this isn’t a one-and-done event and that we’ll get more interesting things like this that’ll push the boundaries of what Star Wars is perceived to be.
