New Blackbraid EP is out today! You can order a copy right here on their Bandcamp for Bandcamp Friday!
Blackbraid III has become one of my all-time favorite records, and hearing this EP, I can tell that my fervor is only going to continue to mount with each subsequent release.
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After falling in love with James Gunn's Peacemaker series recently, I've actually started a "Shawn Was Wrong" segment on Drinking with Comics. DC finally has its head out of its arse. Need more proof?
I cannot believe they've made Green Lantern something I am interested in! Now that's f**king magick, baby!
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Beyondfest Chicago announced the lineup and hopefully, about ten hours after this posts, I'll have tickets for a handful of screenings.
None of the films I have my eye on are ones I know nothing about. Always the best way to see any movie.
That said, the film Normal has one familiar variable: Bob Odenkirk. Here's a trailer:
I've been a fan of Odenkirk's since Mr. Brown made me a lifelong disciple of Mr. Show back in the 90s. It's been a joy to see his film career evolve the way it has.
Playlist:
Tool - Undertow
Foxy Shazam - Dark Blue Night
sunn O))) - Eponymous (pre-release singles)
Matte Black - I'm Waving, Not Drowning
Blackbraid - III
Blut Aus Nord - Ethereal Horizons
Blackbraid - Nocturnal Womb (pre-release single)
Jucifer - Lambs EP
Pixies - The Night the Zombies Came
Melvins - Houdini Live '05
Barry Adamson - Scala! OST
Fever Ray - The Lake/Wrong Flower EP
Card:
Back on the Thoth (But you can still order Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot HERE.)
• Ace of Wands
• Ace of Disks
• I: The Magus
Notice how the numbers read 911? Weird, right?
The two Aces are breakthroughs, so watch for gains and new creative ground (my Will tends to center on creation). The Magus is the flex that makes it happen. Magick.
From their now ten-year-old album Gore. Been a while since I've listened to this one, and one listen put it right back into regular rotation.
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With all the big-budget stuff James Gunn is doing for DC that I'm only just now getting in on, I had an urge to go back and rewatch his 2010 film Super.
Man, does this hold up! So F*cked up, but Super also has a lot of heart. It's a push-pull with where this one takes you, and I'm happy I finally added a Blu-ray copy to my shelves. Everyone involved gives fantastic performance, and even though it makes you uncomfortable and uneasy, a strange affirmation of humanity seeps in at the end. If Gunn has a superhero ability, that's it right there.
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Also, I'm about 150 pages into Project Hail Mary. My cousin's husband put this on my radar last summer, and I finally grabbed a copy from Clarksville Bookshoppe a couple of months ago.
Just getting around to it now - possibly the last non-Stephen King or research-related read I'll have for the foreseeable future if I really double down and go with this Dark Tower/The Talisman re-read in anticipation of Other Worlds Than These. As promised, Andy Weir is a fantastic author and this is a fantastic read. Very light for something so infused with actual scientific data. The day I purchased this was my clue that a film was on the immediate horizon, so I'm squeezing this in before the March 20th release date.
Playlist:
Tangerine Dream - Sorcerer OST
Various - An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music/Second A-Chronology Vol 2 (Disc1)
Low Cut Connie - Art Dealers
Lou Reed - Eponymous
Fever Ray - The Bride EP
Melvins & Napalm Death - Tossing Coins Into The Fountain Of Fuck (single)
Helmet - Aftertaste
Blut Aus Nord - Ethereal Horizons
Adam Kesher - Local Girl (Hatchmatik Remix)
Faith No More - Angel Dust
Deftones - Gore
Rob Zombie - The Great Satan
Rammstein - Reise, Reise
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Let Love In
Foxy Shazam - Eponymous
Ghostland Observatory - Paparazzi Lightning
Team Human w/ Douglas Rushkoff - Chapel Perilous w/ Gabriel Kennedy & Grant Morrison
Card:
I've been doing daily spreads with the Thoth deck, as well as before-bed single-card draws. The Two of Disks went face-up on my bedside table on Friday and I only just relinquished it.
A change to the way I'm doing some 'Earthly' things will do me some good; that's enough of a kick in the pants to run with an idea I had recently. I'm getting pretty regular practice with spreadsheet creation and manipulation at work these days and I thought it might be advantageous to try adapting some of that stuff for personal functions. Primarily, money.
I've really been 'feeling' CDs lately. I think January/February always inspires me to return to a state of mind that reaches through time and connects to the mid-to-late 00s, when the internet was amazing, and the world hadn't yet shifted into a post-apocalyptic paradigm.
At the time, shortly before I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, I was finishing up years of playing in bands and gigging pretty regularly. I met a lot of bands this way, and one of the fiercest was Amherst, Massachusetts' Read Yellow.
I either saw or opened for these guys at Chicago's Fireside Bowl. Read Yellow had a big, noisy sound slightly reminiscent of Sonic Youth, but that comparison sells Read Yellow short. This band has such energy! When you exist for an extended length of time inside a live indie circuit, one thing you often find - and it definitely plagued a band or two of my own - some bands who have fireball energy live don't always find a way to translate that to a recording.
NOT the case here.
Although Read Yellow broke up years ago (I just double-checked), their website is still up, which definitely suggests someone in the group understands the need to keep their flame burning, even dimly, for future generations to find.
NCBD:
BIG week this week at the comic shop.
This cover says it all! Looking ahead on this book's solicitations, Kirkman is building something epic with Megatron. The increased focus on his volatile madness we've seen over the last few issues is about to burst, and it should make for some awesome reading along the way. Also, I'm still just blown away by Thundercracker defecting to the Autobots. So cool!
A Lovecraft adaptation in mini-series form, it's been a couple of years since I read the original short story, The Thing on the Doorstep, but I'm really interested in how it will translate here, maybe because we never did get that Richard Stanley cinematic version he talked about doing after The Color Out of Space.
Having just caught back up on this book and found Splinter resurrected, I'm very curious how this is going to play out. On the surface, I don't love the idea of long-dead characters coming back from the dead, but I'm willing to give Turtles the benefit of the doubt.
Ever wanted to see a priest kick the Mafia's ass? This is the book for you! Loved the first issue, can't wait to dig into number two!
Larry Hama's GIJOE: A Real American Hero hits another milestone, and to celebrate, he's apparently introducing two new Joes! Being that we're free and clear of toy tie-ins, unless Classified wants to take a nod from Hama, I'm pretty intrigued. What would two new Joes in 2026 look like? We'll find out today!
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As I alluded to in Monday's post, my ventures into the DC Absolute universe have dovetailed with something... else. Let me explain.
This past Sunday, I woke up feeling burnt out. Reading a Substack newsletter from John Pavlovitz about the absolutely blatant racism of the *ahem* superbowl halftime alternative cooked up by magacunts and kid rock,* I found myself overwhelmed again by the "We can't fix this" mantra that has pretty much played on a steady loop in my subconscious since 2018. I don't doom scroll; I don't really 'scroll' all that much at all anymore, but what I have been doing is looking through the various newsletters I receive in my email. I happened on a new one from Grant Morrison's Xanaduum, and falling into the prosiac embrace of a man whose writing I was once obsessed with, I felt the urge to walk over to the bookshelf and pick up his 2011 treatise on Super Heroes as hopeful, psychological antibodies for the modern disaster.
Not looking to add yet another book to the "currently" or even "soon to be" reading piles, instead, I re-read the introduction and was reminded why Morrison once spoke so strongly to me. The bomb had begun as an idea and humanity had worked to give it material form. So too, could another idea - one infinitely more powerful than a mere bomb - be conjured into our lives to stave off the destructive potential assailing us?
Being that Morrison wrote about this way back in 2011 - when things were infinitely less F*cked than they are now - I had to ask myself, might I not need something like this now? Might I not benefit from exposure to something all-powerful and brimming with, of all things, hope?
It was with that in mind that I hit play on James Gunn's Superman laster that day.
All I can say is, always happy to be proven wrong.
In my defense, I have long answered the friends who assured me this film was great and that I was missing out with a patented, "I know it's great, I just don't care." So I simply reached a point in my lfie when I do care, and the film definitely worked its magic on me.
My good friend Chris Saunders asked me to elaborate what I liked about the film and I rattled off the following list:
- That Nick Hoult's Lex Luthor was clearly designed to look like Grant Morrison was the film's evil doer
- That Coresweat somehow managed to avoid all the stupid foibles all other good-natured attempts at Supes have fallen prey to (from what I saw in Snyder's Batman V. Superman, his wasn't good-natured or cloddish, he (and Snyder) just had too much to prove by taking the chacter dark.
- That Rachel Brosnahan was born to play the role of Lois Lane
- That Gunn cast Wendell Pierce as Perry White
- That Edi Gathegi's Mr. Terrific stole every scene he was in
- That Nathan Fillion's Guy Gardner cut and attitude were spot on
- That Pruitt Taylor Vince played Pa Kent
- The Monkeys!
- "Thanks, bitch!"
Honestly, I'm shocked how much I liked this, but I'm not sure why. Apparently, my love of James Gunn far outweighs my detestation of Superman as a character.
For more, Mike and I discuss the film at length in the latest episode of Drinking with Comics, which I'll embed here in a few hours when it posts to youtube.
* So proud that my long-time friend Cap'm Jack once cut KR's tires in a Michigan venue parking lot! I loved that story at the time - back when this cunt was first getting national exposure - but I love it even more now.
Playlist:
Mountain Realm - Stoneharrow
Drab Majesty - Careless
Mr. Bungle - California
Mr. Bungle - Disco Volante
Mr. Bungle - Eponymous
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity
Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol.1
Mountain Realm - Rustborn
Mountain Realm - Frostfall
Atrium Carceri - Kapnobatai
David Lee Roth - Crazy from the Heat EP
David Lee Roth - A Little Ain't Enough
Helmet - Aftertaste
Blut Aus Nord - Ethereal Horizons
Corrosion of Conformity - Deliverance
sunn O))) - Glory Black (pre-release single)
Card:
From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.
• XVII: The Star
• XX: The Aeon
• XXI: The Universe
The reason I waited to discuss this was so I could have already talked about James Gunn's Superman, Grant Morrison's Super Gods, and this idea that I might be able to use these larger-than-life characters to help assuage the fears and neuroses.
The Star - thinking bigger can act as cleansing. The figure on the card is literally washing themself in the rivers of cosmic confidence.
The Aeon - Pass from one ruling paradigm to another, or it's never too late to change, no matter how difficult it is. No matter how big a change it requires.
The Universe - Think macrocosmic, not microcosmic.
I'm going to pursue an interest in superheroes again - especially Superman - as a way to try and tip the scales and shake off some of the unhealthy mental 'doom plaque' that's built up since, oh, 2016. I'm going to read and enjoy in an active, not a passive manner, where I imagine the foes the super gods are fighting are the foes to the healthy world I want to inhabit, both in my head and outside the walls of my house. It might be a fool's errand, but it's what Superman would do. (since when do I say things like that? Well, maybe it's time I incorporated that kind of thinking into my life.)
A recent discovery about which I know very little other than the fact that I really dig this album. Black Mare's Bandcamp is HERE, and there still appear to be vinyl copies of her 2020 record Death Magick Mother.
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I saw two huge movies this weekend and the results are not what I expected at all. First up, David Lowery's The Green Knight
From my Letterbxd review:"Gorgeous. A must on a big screen. Andrew Droz Palermo deserves so many awards. There are some technical issues I had with the way it’s written and directed, as well as a few scenes that felt like missteps - to quote Peter Griffin, “the movie insists upon itself” - but overall this is a beautiful attempt at Pure Cinema, which can NEVER be a bad thing."
Next, James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, which I would have been perfectly content to - just like the first one - never watch until a confluence of events made me curious enough to try.
The result? Possibly my favorite comic book movie ever. Wow. Just wow.
Playlist:
Pilot Priest and Electric Youth - Come True OST
The Plimsouls - Everywhere At Once
King Woman - Celestial Blues
Bloodslide - How Glad I Am (single)
Yob- Clearing the Path to Ascend
Sacred Reich - Independent
College - Teenage Color EP
Polica - Give You the Ghost
David Lee Roth - Apple Music Essentials
Windhand - Soma
Droids Attack - Sci-Fi or Die
Black Mare - Field of the Host
Dead Milkmen - Welcome to the End of the World
The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
Card:
The Alchemical marriage - recognizing disparate and/or complementary elements and bringing them together to marry their strengths in a way that supports the great work. That's kind of a hoighty toighty, old school Aleister Crowley interpretation - High Magick and all that rigamarole, but it applies. I'm seeking to write an extremely short story for submission to an anthology. Brevity is definitely not where my overall strength in writing lies. However, I'm excellent at slicing and dicing in the edit. So... edit in the head, before the fingers hit the keys.
...is the topic of discussion in this week's edition of Thee Comic Column on Joup. However, this is not a review of the film, so much as an exploration of what this movie means to comics and how time and technology have, specifically in the case of Sci Fi, affected the way we interpret Story.
