It's Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened
It's Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened
I’ve been thinking about, well, a bunch of stuff – so I’m writing about them here. Some are comics-related, some are not. You can handle it.
SIMPS-O-RAMA
A few months ago I started rewatching The Simpsons from the start of their series…of events.
I was a fan from the very beginning, but stopped watching somewhere around season 20, and now that I’m in the middle of season 14, I’m beginning to remember why.
The peak for me was probably season eight. I tend to look at the list of episodes in a season to see how many of them were truly memorable, and where I’m at now, it tends to be about one or two episodes per season. Most of the rest elicit a mere chuckle or two. (Side note: Why do the episode descriptions read like they were written by AI? Weren’t they written already? It’s weird, I tells ya!)
I shudder to think I still have 22 seasons to go. How far I get remains to be seen.
MARVEL COLLECTED EDITIONS
What’s your favorite format for collecting collected editions of your favorite comics? (Was that even a sentence?) For the past couple of years, mine has been the Marvel Epic Collections.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, Marvel calls them Epic collections, but they have nothing to do with Epic Illustrated or the Epic Comics titles. What they are is trade paperback collections of around 20 comics, currently priced at $49.99.
I was never a big fan of the Marvel Masterworks, mostly due to their number of issues / price proposition. And Omnibuses are pretty unwieldy for actual reading.
Anyway, I started buying the Epic Collections mostly to assemble a run of The Avengers from the era I loved as a fan, from the start till about issue #190. Marvel publishes the Epic Collections out of order, but they did get all of these volumes out, with volume 11 reaching well past the stuff I liked the best and into some pretty dodgy stories. I’ve been reading them through from the beginning, and I’m now up to about issue #60, which is some very good material from writer Roy Thomas and artists John Buscema and others.
At the start I was “live tweeting” (on Bluesky – we don’t have a phrase for it on that platform) the issues as I read them, just because they were so chaotic and crazy. I stopped doing that when I got close to issue #40, because the stories started making too much sense, the characters didn’t do quite so many insane things just to move the plot forward, and the rampant sexism had grown a little less rampant.
Along the way I’ve kind of gotten addicted to these Epic Collections. Like, I wasn’t going to buy the Iron Man volumes, even though that was my single favorite comic when I was a kid, but it’s hard to say “I really shouldn’t” when I find the books at half price. And recently I picked up a bunch of Daredevil volumes at half price, even though that’s a series I never paid that much attention to! Oh, and Amazing Spider-Man, a series I haven’t read since the early 1980s, even though back then I had a complete run of the first 200 issues. So now I’m looking for copies of the volumes that have gone out of print. Such is the life of a collector…
NOBODY LIKES TO CALL IT YACHT ROCK
A few weeks back I watched the HBO – sorry, “Max” – documentary Yacht Rock, which was both annoying and illuminating. It was great to see all these fantastic musicians get their due, but grating that they were shown through the lens of a retroactively invented subgenre called “Yacht Rock,” which was made up for a series of comedy sketches.
Honestly, the comedians who made up the whole Yacht Rock schtick based it on two things: Darryl Dragon from the Captain and Tennille wore a boating captain’s hat, and Christopher Cross had a song called “Sailing.” They tied it all together by dint of the fact that many of the songs under scrutiny had a certain smooth jazz quality (well duh, the same session musicians played on a lot of those tracks) and that a lot of the white, male, not so young singers were singing (in these songs, at least) about a certain yearning to be free.
It’s a case of confirmation bias for the sake of some laughs. Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and others wrote and performed tons of songs that don’t fit that profile, but the filmmakers ignored that to make their concept sound valid.
The musician / teacher / YouTuber Rick Beato posted a great video called “Yacht Rock Is Bullsh*t” a few months back, which explains what’s wrong about this film better than I can. Worth watching. And I was on Donald Fagen’s side when he told the narrator to go fuck himself.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE WEEKEND
I love that gif. There’s something so odd about Daniel Craig’s gesture.
Anyway, this weekend I finished two books: one published and one…not yet. The first was “The Bat,” the first Harry Hole detective novel by Norwegian novelist Jo Nesbø. I wish I liked it more, but I found it hard to follow in some places because (a) it’s book one of the series, but it’s all set in Australia, which means you have to adjust to a Norwegian point of view on another unfamiliar foreign locale, and (b) the detective goes on a bender that blurs what’s going on. Oh, and the climax of the story, where the killer gets eaten by a shark was pretty over the top, even if I get the symbolism of having a predator kill a predator.
Nevertheless, there was enough to like about it that I probably will go back for at least one more title in the series.
The other book is a novel called “Crushing Debt,” written by my wife, Julia Roberts. It’s about the financial advisor on a reality show called “Crushing Debt,” her own mounting debt; the show’s sleazy host, who’s her long-ago crush; the colorful assortment of contestants and behind the scenes types who make the show work; and the baked-in financial inequities of this here modern-day Amurica. This was the second read I gave the manuscript, and I still like it a lot. Fingers crossed that it gets published soon!
WHAT IS THE GREATEST GIFT?
For me, it’s this.
You laugh, but it was my birthday a few days ago, and I thought to myself once more, “what is the best gift I’ve ever gotten?”
I like to think I run a tidy shop here at home, so when I was given this double-headed, six-foot extendable Swiffer capable of reaching cobwebs at the very pinnacle of the high ceilings in our house, well, I about fainted! I’ve had it a couple of years, and I never tire of using it. About once a week, I gleefully open it up and reach for whatever schmutz is bothering me. As a certified short person, it makes me very happy indeed.
That’s gonna wrap things up for this week. But hey, tell your friends, restack, give me likes, and hey, how about sending me a little money? I’ve been at this close to a year and I could use some more paying subscribers, please and thank you! (More non-paying subscribers would be good as well.)
I'm liking the DC Finest books a lot -- about 100 more pages than the Epics for $10 less, and better package design. But they're both good formats.
I think my favorite, over the years, was a format DC used for some Kirby reprints. About 400 pages, hardcover, on a nice creamy matte paper that felt soft enough that the colors weren't garish but good enough that the blacks printed a solid black. A very nice package.
And DC's been doing facsimiles of old tabloid comics, but just did one that was never a tabloid back in the day -- the UNTOLD LEGEND OF THE BATMAN mini-series. It looks great on that paper and on that size, so I hope they do more projects that way. JLA 200? DETECTIVE 500?
It was an HBO documentary that you watched on Max. Cheers, pal.