I'm not 100% sure if this is SQÜRL remixing Boris or what, but I LOVE it. From the upcoming Todo Muere SBXV, which you can order from Sacred Bones Records HERE.
NCBD:
Here's tomorrow's haul for NCBD:
New Steve Niles. Always a good thing.
I am so psyched and surprised Marvel is doing a Black, White & Blood for Moon Knight! Can't wait.
I've begun to get a bit freaked out when a Reckless book hits the stands. When you figure Brubaker and Phillips drop them every six months, well, I feel like those months are flying by. Whatever. I love this series.
So now I have three weeks a month with an X-book. If you had told me last year at this time that this is where I'd be, I'd have laughed. Look who's laughing now, eh?
K is a big fan of the 90s X-Men cartoon, so I'm thinking I'll grab this for her. I doubt she has time to catch up on all the House/Powers stuff, so this will be an interesting way for her to experience some of the thrill, but with the versions of the characters she knows and loves.
This is one of the best adaptations of a short story I've come across. Kind of reminds me of that old I Am Legend Prestige format that - bringing it back around without even realizing it at first - Steve Niles did in the early 90s with Elman Brown. Just a solid retelling with some interesting tweaks thrown in here and there.
I always start reading the Sandman Universe titles and never finish. We'll see how this one goes. One thing is for sure: I love me some Corinthian.
Yeah, I guess Michael Graves is a proud boy or whatever now, but once upon a time his unfortunate nationalist tendencies hadn't floated to the surface yet and he took over as the first Misfits singer I gave a shit about since Danzig.
Wait, maybe he was the first after Danzig? I don't even remember anymore. Whatever. Either way, I had to post this track because of what you'll see in the next section of this post below. Regardless of his politics - which mind you, is mostly third-person related to me - I adore his two albums with the Misfits.
Read:
From the final page of Marvel Comics' new Spider-Punk mini-series. What an idea - a Misfits-inspired revamp of Taskmaster!
Dollar Bin:
If you've followed any of my comic/pop culture writings for long enough, you've heard me talk about my affinity for Marvel's 1986 failed New Universe line. I remember the ads building hype for this as if they were published yesterday:
I tried a few of the New Universe titles when they first dropped, but none of them moved the needle enough to make me spend my allowance on them monthly. Then, something amazing happened:
The Starbrand character accidentally nuked the city of Pittsburgh and the entire line of books changed, basically became a terrifying allegory for 80s Cold War Nuclear Panic. It was amazing!
After the one-shot graphic novel that changed the status quo of the line - aptly titled The Pitt - the 8 books in the NU turned into four, and things got dark AF. Shortly after came the four-part, Prestige Format series The War, which I believe ended the first iteration of Marvel's New Universe.
When these were coming out, I know I had books 1 and 2 of The War, but I don't remember having 3 and 4. I can't imagine why I wouldn't have bought them, but who knows. I'm pretty sure I don't still have now, although similarly I don't remember ever parting with them. Recently however, I found books 3 and 4 in the Dollar Bin at the Bug. Score! Now I just have to either find or re-buy the others and I can finally read the entire series.
Plastic:
Speaking of Marvel Comics - Jesus F*&king Christ do I want this:
Thanks to Mr. Brown for sending the advert for this my way. I'm not sure I'm ready to pony up $275 bucks for this, but... damn! If it had been anyone but Man-Thing, I wouldn't even be entertaining the idea. I'll always have a fascination with Slime/Swamp/Sewer characters (what does that say about me???).
The psychedelic variant of Marvel's Man-Thing drops tomorrow from Mondo.
Playlist:
Carpenter Brut - Leather Terror
Metallica - Ride the Lightning
Megadeth - Rust in Peace
QOTSA - Era Vulgaris
Svarte Greiner - Devolving Trust
Blut Aus Nord - That Cannot Be Dreamed
Mark Lanegan Band - Here Comes That Weird Chill
Helmet - Aftertaste
Zeal and Ardor - Eponymous
Reflections - The Color Clear
Ghost Bath - Moon Lover
Steve Moore - Bliss OST
Card:
I don't even have it in me to interpret this at the moment, but it looks like a pretty big warning about letting emotional pile-up affect carefully laid plans.
I completely forgot the new Carpenter Brut dropped earlier this month! Thankfully, a message from my good friend Jacob reminded me, and, after several days of indulging in Leather Terror, can say this is easily my favorite of Mr. Brut's work. Every song is great; here's my current fav, a kind of classic darkwave synth nightmare with a killer beat.
I really want the double red vinyl for this one, but being that there's an almost thirty dollar shipping fee on it from the UK, I'm sticking to the digital release for now. Also, vinyl lust aside, Leather Terror is another example of an album that I do not believe warrants the double vinyl format. Three songs on a side? I feel like constantly flipping a record like this detracts from the experience of listening to it. Regardless, if you want to, you can order it HERE.
READ:
Warren Ellis recently posted a Pay-What-You-Want, 10K short story on his Orbital Operations site. The story is called Watchtower, and you can read it HERE. I have no idea what it's about; doesn't matter. It's Warren Ellis, and it's far too infrequent we get a piece of prose from the man (not a complaint; he's a busy dude who writes for a living).
I've mentioned it here before, but his Orbital Operations newsletter is one of my favorite things in life. His musings on the writing process are among my favorite things to read, and I've discovered quite a bit of good music and literature through the recommendations he includes. If I had to pick a favorite of his work... well, I can't. It's all just too good. But you can sign up for the newsletter HERE and you can start with either his first prose novel Crooked Little VeinHERE, his semi-recent revamp of DC's Wildstorm line - which is free on Kindle Unlimited and Comixology at the moment and TOTALLY worth your time; unlike anything you'd expect a DC comic to be - HERE, or just click over to Netflix and fire up his Castlevania series, which I really do need to finally finish.
I'm way overdue for a re-read on this one, and it's been kinda calling my name from the shelf.
Watch:
A group of my friends were able to hit the movies on Saturday afternoon for the last scheduled showtime of Goran Stolevski's new film You Won't Be Alone.
Talk about not what I expected at all.
I really enjoyed this one, though, in a way where I can tell you, a lot of people may not feel the same. Especially with the somewhat misleading trailer. You Won't Be Alone requires a certain level of commitment from its audience, and its journey is one that really takes you on a personal journey with the main character, alternately played by several different people, but mostly helmed by Sara Klimoska. The story of a young girl who is kidnapped by a witch and turned into one of the hag's own shapeshifting kind, this is not a Horror movie, but a journey to find a life denied, and it's quite beautiful. I'll admit, I (and pretty much everyone I was with) had a hard time for the first 30 minutes, but after that, I adjusted to the rhythms and mission of the film and really kind of fell in love.
That's not to say there aren't Horrific elements. However, that is most definitely not the point here. The Horror is a life denied, not the blood and guts. That said, the film's take on witches is one of pretty extreme Body Horror at times, and it can be quite visceral.
I believe I've posted the trailer here before, however, I'd rather just go with the poster, as it's not misleading in the least. I get that they have to turn the trailer into something that will put people in seats at the theatre, but I really think there might be some backlash on this one.
Playlist:
Carpenter Brut - Leather Terror
Amigo the Devil - Everything is Fine
The Veils - Total Depravity
Grinderman - Eponymous
Scratch Acid - Berserker EP
Huey Lewis & the News - Sports
The National - High Violet
Nurse with Wound - Soliloquy for Lilith
Revocation - The Outer Ones
Orville Peck - Bronco
Card:
Yesterday, for the first time in weeks I slept over nine hours. I feel like that recharged some batteries, and the coming week doesn't look quite so bleak as the last one did going into it. This card sometimes denotes inner power, and I'm guessing that recharge will help balance me for the week's ordeals.
New music from the always crushing Helms Alee! I became a bit obsessed with these guys in the spring of 2019. Work sent me to our branch in Spokane, Washington. It was my first time there, and I kind of fell in love with the place. Different cities have different textures, and Spokane's texture is one of earth, rocky brutishness, so you'll understand when I tell you that every night I walked to The Steamplant for dinner and downed multiple pints of their wonderful Octoberfest - a fluke it was still on tap in April! Afterward, I would walk around the city with my ear pods in, either jamming Alee, Jaye Jayle, or Melvins.
New album Keep This Be the Way drops on Sargent House Records April 29th; you can pre-order a copy HERE.
Watch:
Here's the trailer for what is, in my opinion, an underseen Horror gem, Colm McCarthy's Outcast.
Kind of an Urban decay folk Horror piece, I caught this one a few years ago and loved it. Now that it's finally returned to Shudder, I can't recommend it enough. If McCarthy's name sounds familiar, it's because he went on to direct the film adaptation of M.R. Carey's novel The Girl with All the Gifts, Black Mirror's The Black Museum episode, and a bunch of Peaky Blinders and Ripper Street episodes.
Read:
Tom Johnstone's new novel Song of Salome is out on Omnium Gatherum, and although I've never read his fiction before, I've heard a handful of positive reviews for his debut collection Last Stop: Wellsbourne, also published by Omnium back in 2017. Here's the description; I think you'll see why it sold me:
"Maybe it's better if some movies stay lost. It's 1965, and Herb Fry is reminiscing about the time about twenty years before when a reclusive collector sent him to track down a movie that shouldn't exist. The studio destroyed every copy after its tragic first screening. But we all know lost movies have a habit of being found. Prepare yourself for a trip into the cinema's heart of darkness to discover an early talkie whose soundtrack is a killer."
Available on the Omnium website linked above, or wherever you get your books!
Playlist:
Quicksand - Slip
Bauhaus - Drink the New Wine (single)
Bauhaus - Go Away White
Bauhaus - Boys (single)
Alien Sex Fiend - The Legendary Batcave Tapes
Pike Vs the Automaton - Eponymous
Black Sabbath - Technical Ecstasy
The Smiths - How Soon is Now (single)
Godflesh - Post Self
Carpenter Brut - Leather Terror
Helms Alee - Keep This be the Way pre-release singles
Card:
Everything is fluid as I finally received the answer to a question from a few weeks back. If you'll recall, I kept pulling the Hierophant and shortly thereafter spoke about my daily diet of caffeine and heavy metal and how it appears to be affecting my ability to get good sleep. In trying to help me interpret these pulls, my good friend Missi mentioned the card was probably trying to tell me that I was hung up on something that was ultimately getting in the way.
See where I'm going with this yet?
My morning ritual has always been making a full 30+ ounces of coffee first thing, drinking it over the course of my twenty minute drive to work and the first hour or so of my day, then proceeding to make more.
And more.
I probably drink between 50 and 65 oz of coffee a day, and I think this is the problem (ya think?). Soooo - beginning yesterday, I am now eschewing that first 30 oz, instead waiting to have my first cup when I arrive at work.
I remember when I was a bartender back in the early 2000s. My regulars - mostly middle-ageders - would watch me drink pot after pot of black coffee and remark how one day, that would change. I always thought that sounded insane, however, I think I have arrived at that exact place. I'd never give up black coffee, same as I'd never give up beer, but I definitely need to cut back. My fitbit tells me my heartrate is normally in the 80-90 range throughout the day, which, when I tell people that, usually gives them pause. Yes, I'm forty-six and starting to feel it.
The newer guys at work are all in their early 20s, but they can seem to get enough of 80s pop radio. I think I've heard Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over" everyday for a least two weeks, and the fact that I seem to just love it more and more - after loving it for most of my life now - really says something about what a great tune this is. Kinda has a similar feeling to Tears for Fears, and it makes me wonder how much it was influenced by Orzabel, Stanley and Hughes, whose Songs From The Big Chair came out about a year before Crowded House's eponymous debut. Either way, great song.
NCBD:
Dude! It has felt like a goddamn year since the previous issue! Seriously, Jed McKay's masterstroke of bringing in the House of Secrets as Moon Knight's new Midnight Mission has me 100% over my wishy-washy attitude toward this title. ALL IN!
Am I just sucking Marvel's dick at this point? Maybe. But I have to admit, I'm curious as hell.
I've missed Vault. The moment I saw the title and cover, I knew I'd be giving this book a shot.
I've been geeking out so f*&king hard over Immortal X-Men that I almost forgot the tapestry of interstellar espionage, politics, and betrayal picks back up this month where S.W.O.R.D. volume two left off a few months ago.
Read:
I was not lucky enough to score this variant when Symbiote Spider-Man: Crossroads issue #1 came out. I didn't even know it existed until I just did an image search for this post. However, after finally tracking down the fifth issue of this series, I did a re-read and can tell you, THIS is my favorite era of Spider-Man. Black costume, pre-Venom, 80s NYC. And it meshes perfectly with one of my favorite Hulk eras - his exile to the Crossroads, circa early 300s, written by the inimitable Bill Mantlo. All that Hobby Shop SciFi stuff I was attempting to explain in the previous post? Mantlo was definitely one of the architects of that for me, and it makes perfect sense that the man who inherited The Incredible Hulk from him - Peter David himself - wrote a story that perfectly meshes several major eras of these characters into one really cool story. And yeah, it has Devil Dinosaur in it, too! Can't beat it, 'nuff said!
Sweden's Watain has a new album on the horizon and the new single features Farida Lemouchi from The Devil's Blood and Molasses on guest vocals for part of the song. "We Remain" strikes me as the kind of track you need to hear in the context of the entire album that surrounds it in order to fully appreciate it, but it's a spooky track, with elements of The Devil's Blood and even a hint of Type O in the keys near the end.
Always great to hear Farida's vocals. Also, really cool video, directed by Johan Bååth. You can pre-order the new album The Agony and Ecstasy of Watain from Nuclear Blast records HERE.
Dollar Bin:
After a rough couple days at work last week, I spent about a good half hour flipping through the dollar bins at my home away from home, Manhattan Beach's The Comic Bug. Here's one of the gems I walked away with:
Jim Starlin's Dreadstar, published by Marvel's Epic Comics - sort of their version of Vertigo before there was a Vertigo - was a book I saw on comic shop shelves back in the 80s when I first started going to Heroland Comics in Worth, Illinois (the location attached to the Post Office on the Southwest corner of 11th and Harlem), and All American comics in Orland Park, on the second floor of a long-gone strip mall somewhere around 151st and LaGrange. These were the first two shops I ever frequented, and I'd make my poor Mother wait in the car while I went in and looked around for probably over an hour somedays, soaking in all the books that intrigued me but I couldn't afford to spend my money on. Dreadstar registered as something I might be into but wasn't quite sure; I've always dug SciFi, but when I was younger I was quite discerning when it came to anything I thought might be second-tier compared to my (then) first love, Star Wars*. In the last few years, I've really begun to look at the various waves of SciFi that hit post-Lucas, seeing a lot of it as forming a sort of genre in and of itself. The smelting pool of comics, TSR role-playing games, arcade games and knock-off SciFi movies (Creature, I'm looking at you, albeit with something approximating love) have formed a kind of gestalt in my mind, a nostalgic feeling that there was something very special brewing with the more street-level, hobby/comic shop SciFi than I'd previously given credit. This gestalt has become something of an unachievable haunting; I try to think about it in defining, cohesive terms. I try to channel its atmosphere, tone and texture. I fail to do any of this with any degree of accuracy that allows me to completely possess it. So when I see a book like Dreadstar that I associate with being possibly instrumental to this nearly ineffable sub-genre I loosely refer to as simply Hobby Shop SciFi in my head, I grab it.
Thus, I picked up issues three and four of Dreadstar and sat just flipping through the pages, enraptured by what I'd found for a mere dollar. These books feel like a piece of history. SciFi history. 80s history. My history. And maybe that's what all this comes down to, a nostalgic tickle I can't scratch; a deeply entrenched tapestry of memories and memory triggers that move further away the more I try to reach them. Because, you know, you can't reach the past, you can only catch occasional glimpses from our limited, human perspective. And isn't that what an awful lot of SciFi tries to undermine and eclipse?
*Don't even get me started on how much condescension I reserve for pretty much every iteration of Star Trek.
Balance is definitely something I struggle with these days. It's not just the ever-present, background hum of anxiety and existential horror the world of 2022 elicits, it's my reliance on caffeine and heavy metal to get me through the day, which works, but is also difficult to come down from even 15 hours after I wake up. Sleep is a luxury that I do not get enough of, and my ongoing deficit has been wreaking havoc with my cognitive skills and motor functions. I spend so much time during the day re-revving my engine that it's hard to 'chill' later on. I would resort to smoking ludicrous amounts of dope, except I'm trying not to smoke based on my lung condition, and the tincture I have has unpredictable onset times and effects.
Goddamn if I don't still love every track on Deftones' 2012 (ten years!!!) Koi No Yokan.
Watch:
Tobe Hooper's 1981 carnival-themed slasher flick Funhouse just came back to Shudder, and I had forgotten how insane this flick is. The third act climax alone is enough to leave me going, "Jesus, this is totally f*%king coo-coo. If you haven't seen this one - or if like me it'd been a while - it's definitely a good time to revisit.
Read:
I spent the latter half of this week completely enraptured by and re-reading the first issue of Kieron Gillen's Immortal X-Men.
One of the things I liked least about this new, Krakoan era of the X-books is the change in the portrayal of Mr. Sinister. I have always been a HUGE fan of the old-school Sinister introduced in the Claremont-era of Uncanny, with his limited appearances enhancing his, well, sinister aspect. He reeked of dark schemes and unparalleled violence. Now, however, Sinister almost feels like comedic relief at times, and I experienced a considerable degree of cognitive dissonance at this new persona during HoX/PoX. However, Gillen has changed that with this issue, which is entirely from Sinister's perspective and drops the Godfather of all reveals in the book's final page. I literally exclaimed out loud when I reached the end, and have been picking at the ramifications ever since.
I've been so into this, I did something I never do - I took to youtube to try and find people talking about this. (I'll be honest, I'm so tempted to try and restart Drinking with Comics, call it the Immortal Drinking with Comics, and only talk about this, however, there's a host of reasons I can think of not to do that, so I'm staying on the sidelines and listening to others talk. So far, this is the best video I've found.
Playlist:
The Mysterines - Reeling
The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
King Woman - Doubt EP
Cypress Hill - Back in Black
Perturbator - I Am the Night
U2 - The Joshua Tree
U2 - War
Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral
Entropy - Liminal
Deafheaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
Deafheaven - Infinite Granite
Jim Williams - Titane OST
Ministry - Moral Hygiene
David Bowie - Scary Monsters
Ghost - Impera
The Devil's Blood - The Thousandfold Epicentre
Ghost - Infestissumam
The Besnard Lakes - ... Are the Roaring Night
Boy Harsher - Careful
Jackie Wilson - Higher and Higher
Tears for Fears - The Tipping Point
Quicksand - Slip
Deftones - Koi No Yokan
Card:
Past: Making ideas actionable
Present: Continue to work at what I've put in motion
Future: The work isn't enough. This will require an inner guidance, known to most as intuition.
Pretty spot-on with what I'm working on, which I believe is soon to reach its conclusion.
