The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day XXXX: You're Not Surprised, Are You?

Time to face facts, and acknowledge that, for the time being, the 40 Years project is asleep. It's resting and waiting, like Cthulhu in R'lyeh, for the stars to align and the time to be right.

I love comics, and I'll always love comics, but right now my creative energies are aimed in a different direction. I've recorded and released 4 albums in the last 4 months and I've been building a large-scale, three-dimensional board game table for the 2nd edition of Arkham Horror that I'll be writing a bit about on my collecting blog once I've revived it.

I'm still reading and still jumping into the stranger parts of the comics hobby. But perhaps, after all this time, I've run out of interesting things to say about them. I'll be back, I'm sure. I'm still committed to the idea of reading my entire collection, and I may just do it without blogging for a while. Perhaps there'll be a once a month digest of the project, rather than a day by day journal. When I started the project, I was well into my doctoral work, and I thought the daily writing about comics was a good idea to help work out some of the things I was thinking about. I'll admit that once grad school crumbled, it became a bit more effort to write on a daily basis. And that was almost 5 years ago.

The world has changed significantly since I started this blog in 2008. My first proper entry in the Giant Box was an obituary of Steve "Howard the Duck, Man-Thing" Gerber. I wonder if it says anything that the first entry here was about something I consider to be one of the great tragedies of recent comics history? But since that time, we've all become embroiled in a tragedy larger than any of us could really conceive. Not just COVID, but also the divisions that have become starkly apparent since the election of Donald Trump and since the health measure protests around the world.

I honestly don't know if I could carry on a civil conversation with someone who was anti-vax or anti-mask. That refusal, to me at least, signals a fundamental selfishness that I think is anathemic to our continued positive evolution as a species. The way that Socialism and socialism have been vilified in our culture by those for whom money and power are be-all and end-all has radically fractured our societal ability to see community as an organism that requires care and sacrifice, just the same way that the individual body that makes up community does. It's things like this that, honestly, make me think that, sadly, either I or my offspring, will likely witness the collapse of our civilization and our species.

Fuck, I'm a cheery one, ain't I?

So before I go for a little while, some recommendations:

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4: Diamond Is Unbreakable - although I haven't watched the anime of Part 6 yet, Part 4 of this unabashedly insane and awesome series has so far been my favorite. It's got a creepy Twin Peaks-vibe to it that somehow meshes perfectly with the fashion and hyperbole that characterizes Jojo. I picked up a hardcover of the first volume of this storyline because I loved it so much. Jumping in at this point may be a bit confusing for a newcomer, but there's plenty of recap sites out there, I'm sure.

The Adventures of Tintin - a couple of years ago, one of my sisters-in-law got me a beautiful slip-cased edition of the complete adventures of Tintin. They're in a smaller format than the usual European albums, but still manage to reproduce the bandes beautifully. And I thought it was time for me to explore this seminal and revered strip.

Echolands, Ice Cream Man - these are the only two ongoing, contemporary titles I'm reading at the moment. ICM is apparently being adapted to TV, and I'm kind of non-committal about that. The comic is one of the coolest comics I've read, and uses the medium in wonderful ways. Echolands is J.H. Williams III doing a superhero-fantasy-scifi comic. Williams' use of different art styles to evoke what I see as different levels of mythic resonance for each character is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in comics. Have a look at his revelatory work on Detective Comics, where he helped to establish Batwoman. Or on Promethea. Or anywhere.

Right. I'm off. I'll be popping things up here every now and again when inspiration strikes, but like a good Calgarian when the snows have been falling since September, the 40YoCP is now in hibernation.

Onward.