Category Archives: Comics

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On the Radio

I believe I’ve mentioned before that over the past year or so, I’ve become a big fan of NPR and its local station WAMU. On Saturday, when I was driving home after the Washington Sinfonietta’s concert, I had the radio on (I think it was “All Things Considered”) and I got a very pleasant little shock. A woman was talking about her comfort food tradition involving spoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk, and how it stemmed from someone sending a can to her and her mother. (And how she would ask her mother about the war in Hungary every time she was allowed one of the spoonfuls.)

I was thinking to myself, “Where have I heard this story before?” and then a split-second before they mentioned the storyteller’s name, I realized where. It was the lovely Miriam Katin, whom I know through comics. She’d actually turned that story into “The Seven Sweet Spoonfuls of Understanding” which ran in one of the Monkeysuit anthologies. Even hitting to home some more, it was seeing her comics there that made me comment in a review of mine that she should really submit something to one of Drawn & Quarterly’s anthologies. Which she did… and not only had a story published there (which was then nominated for an Eisner Award the following year!), but her debut graphic novel We Are On Our Own as well. It’s a small, small world!

(You can listen to the story online at this link. It’s well worth it!)

And secondly, I was looking at WAMU’s schedule today and saw a note that they were making minor schedule adjustements in 2009. I clicked on that link, and the changes were mostly on early Sunday mornings, in part to fill the hole from two cancelled shows: The Infinite Mind, and Calling All Pets. And I have to admit that my first response to the latter being cancelled was, “Awwwww!” Except that, well, I never actually listened to more than the last five minutes of it. It was usually what was playing as I drove to my running group early in the morning.

It was a split second later that I then realized that what I really cared about was not so much that Calling All Pets was on, but rather, that Car Talk was not on. Seriously, I think I wrote off NPR for years because every time I turned it on, it was the weekend and it was Car Talk. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I’m sure there are people reading this who listen to it every week, and to them I say, “Better you than me.”

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Easy to Please

There are many, many reasons why I love making spicy black bean soup in my slow cooker. First, it makes my entire apartment smell like spices and deliciousness and when I come home from work (or running, or anywhere else) and it’s cooking away, I just get all excited. Second, I always have tons of left-overs, the majority of which goes into my freezer in plastic containers so that I can pull one out at a moment’s notice, heat it up, and have tasty homemade black bean soup.

But right now, at the start of the process of making the soup, I’m at another one of the reasons. When I put the dried black beans in a container and fill it up with water, I actually get a little giddy when a few hours later, almost all the water is gone (even though the beans were originally submerged by several inches of water) and there’s just a cascade of beans staring at me. Inevitably I add more water, some more of which will get absorbed. And tomorrow morning, when I dump the remaining water out, it’s going to be indigo colored and make me grin as it goes down the drain.

Easy to please, that’s me. (The recipe is after the jump at the bottom of the post.)

On an unrelated note, with the marathon in three weekends (my ankle feels much better today, by the way!), I’m trying to see how far ahead I can get with my reviews for Read About Comics. Now normally I’m writing a week ahead, so that this weekend I wrote reviews for November 10-14. For this weekend and the two remaining weekends before the trip up to Philly, though, I’m going to try and write one extra review that gets held in reserve. That way, when the marathon actually hits, I’ll be so far ahead that I can take a full week off from writing and there won’t be a blip on the schedule at all. We’ll see how that goes.

Continue reading Easy to Please→

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Sound-Effect Bonanza

And now, actual sound-effects from the latest issue of The Incredible Hercules (issue #122, to be precise), from Marvel Comics.

Saying that this book doesn’t take itself terribly seriously (and is more than a bit tongue-in-cheek) is, as you’ll quickly discover, the understatement of the century. Boy, is this book fantastic.

  • Kasploooom!
  • Skrrakkkabadooom!
  • Crakkajamma!
  • Sploingbrraahhhm
  • Shrakwash!
  • Skrim! Skraam!
  • Shakaaam!
  • Schmackooom!
  • Gwap!
  • Frmrrrl
  • Aqwooooommm
  • Splurrrgoi
  • Lqwwwrrrggh
  • Kakkakkraakk
  • Obrrrrg!
  • Unlrrqq!

Oh, how I love this comic.

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Almost Back Up to Speed

Well, happily, it seemed that a second good night’s sleep was what I needed more than anything else. I went to bed really early last night, and today I had enough energy for an abbreviated version of my normal Monday gym visit. (30 min on rowing machine, and 15 min on the elliptical (instead of 30).) So far, so good.

As an added bonus, NPR’s All Things Considered is offering up one of Liz Phair’s recent concerts (where she plays all of Exile in Guyville) on their website so I’ve been listening to that for the last hour or so. She’s on the final song of her encore (“Polyester Bride”) and it’s making me appreciate her that much more.

Per usual, now that I am a little more lucid/rational I am kicking myself for having barely talked to so many different people at SPX—it’s amazing how quickly two days can whip by. (And no, I am not pushing for a three-day show so that I can chat with everyone a lot more.) And there’s always at least one or two artists whom I manage to miss entirely. How does that happen? This time Kate Beaton and Paul Hornschemeier somehow fell to the wayside. Darn it.

And of course, I have a wealth of new books. Well, not that many. Normally I just buy mini-comics, and occasionally other things pressed into my hands. I mostly stuck with that, although I did make an exception and bought a bonanza of books from Fanfare/Ponent Mon, because Diamond (the main distributor to comic book stores) seems to forever be out of stock of their catalog. Amusingly almost everything I bought was by (or co-authored by) Jiro Taniguchi: The Quest for the Missing Girl, all three volumes of The Times of Botchan (can’t get enough of that Meija Era Japan, it seems), and a replacement copy of The Walking Man. (Plus Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary, the non-fiction account of Azuma’s two sojourns as a homeless person, plus a trip to rehab.) Plus, a birthday present and a Christmas present were procured, so it’s nice to check those off the list now.

Now if I could just finish getting rid of the excess junk that has built up in my home over the last month, I’d be set. If nothing else I finally need to mail Dave those promised statues, which will not only get those out of the house but also the packing peanuts that I’ve been saving for that very thing. Little by little…

Best of all, Charlie is now home from the Portland Marathon, where he rocked out a new personal record: 3:58:57. Wow. How fantastic is that? I’m so proud of him.

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A New Look for Me

Steampunk Greg

…well, perhaps not.

Anyway, SPX was a lot of fun. It was also extremely exhausting, to put it mildly. And sure enough, all day I’ve felt like I’ve been run over by a mack truck, and my throat is raspy and all yucky. (And that’s with having skipped the gym this morning and sleeping in two more hours.) Hopefully tomorrow will bring back more strength.

And I have promised (promised!) people that soon I will start back up Wine-Book Wednesdays. Honest. But yeah, it was a good time even if it involved running myself ragged. This was also the first time since 2003 (the last year I was Executive Director) that I stayed at the hotel during SPX. It felt a little odd to do so after all this time. But somehow right. So there we go.

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No, I’m Not Going to Comic-Con

Earlier this week I had a dream about Comic-Con out in San Diego.

Karon and I had shown up to check into our room at the hotel, except the hotel had run out of rooms ages ago. So instead, everyone was being assigned a space on the hotel lobby floor where a sleeping bag was set up for us. And we didn’t even bat an eye, because that level of too-many-people insanity just seemed normal in a show that draws over 100,000 people each day.

And that is why I’m not going to Comic-Con. Sorry.

(Smell some rancid sweat and pay $15 for a bottle of water for me, though!)

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What It Is

After a really wonderful morning (a running session, a walk over to the farmer’s market, a stroll home while eating a vegetable empanada, the breeze blowing and the sky almost entirely clear), I’ve found myself with a distinct lack of energy. I suspect the number of early mornings this week (including having to be up in Emmitsburg, MD by 8:30am yesterday, ugh) has finally caught up with me. (Which also kind of stinks because I have a birthday shindig on the calendar tonight and I don’t know if I have the energy to go.)

So I’ve been sitting home and reading Lynda Barry’s brand new book What It Is for the fourth or fifth time this week and it’s amazing how much this is resonating with me. I loved her book One Hundred Demons (it suddenly opened my eyes to what an amazing writer she is) but What It Is goes above and beyond that, talking so much about creativity and imagination and how we often self-censor ourselves. There’s a page in which she’s talking about how she started changing her behavior around other people, that really struck me.

By the 6th grade I stopped doing ordinary things in front of people. It had been ordinary to sing, kids are singing all the time when they are little, but then something happens. It’s not that we stop singing. I still sang. I just made sure I was alone when I did it, and I made sure I never did it accidentally. That thing we call “bursting into song.” I believe this happens to most of us. We are still singing, but secretly and all alone.

And that’s when it suddenly hit me that it’s one of the things I love so much about Charlie. I don’t think he ever censors himself that way. When he and Julie and I drove down to the Outer Banks Marathon, within about 30 seconds of us all being in my car he’d suddenly burst into song, and I remember Julie saying something along the lines of, “Oooh, this is going to be a fun ride.” And I always groan a lot when he does it, but you know what? I really rather envy his being able to do so, and most of the time it makes me smile.

Anyway, I’ll have a review of What It Is run later this week on Read About Comics, but I’m going to give everyone a sneak preview right here: BUY THIS BOOK. I suspect it’s going to be my favorite book (drawn or otherwise) of the entire year. It’s about creativity, and ourselves, and the world around us, and everything in-between, and it’s fantastic.