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MUTATION VECTORS

Status Update

I’m back from a wedding in Texas and some time visiting in-laws in Wyoming. This was, thankfully, not a fucked up wedding. But I’m having a bit of a time getting back into the flow of things.

The cyberpunk zine is coming along nicely. I have three different eight-page comics stories in hand, plus an excerpt from Fortress. I’m still expecting another comic and some text pieces. I’m sharing some sneak peaks on Instagram, but the real deal won’t be ready til fall and will be print-only for at least a year.

New at Sewer Mutant

Our first episode on ElfQuest is up: We were joined by artist and illustrator Elinore Edge to talk about the first two volumes of ElfQuest: Fire and Flight and Forbidden Grove. We talk about the epic series’ themes of home and belonging, Wendy Pini’s incredible art and how it stood out against a sea of “house style” art from the big two, and how ElfQuest was the first comic to follow what is now the standard storytelling structure for most comics, especially independent comics.

That is to say, it was a long-form story with a planned ending split up into discrete story arcs to be reprinted in perfect bound volumes. Or put another way, they appear to have invented the idea of telling a long form comics story as both single issues and TPBs. TPBs and graphic novels existed before ElfQuest, and so did story arcs. But comics were either ongoing series with no planned ending that went on until they were canceled, or they were fairly short finite series. I didn’t think of this until after we recorded, but this is also the same model that prestige television now follows: episodes form seasons and season form a larger overarching work.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

Stephen Miller hates juries

I’ve been trying to write less about politics unless there’s a comics angle, largely because I don’t think I have a lot to add to an already crowded discourse. But I want to highlight some recent comments from Stephen Miller that I think are particularly alarming.

They came during the recent and widely mocked summit on left-wing violence. The Executive Disorder podcast has good coverage of the event, and journalist and comics writer Spencer Ackerman has a good take on the federal government’s efforts to crack down on left and liberal organizations as the War on Terror’s final and inevitable form (there’s the comics angle, however thin).

There’s reason for concern in all of this, but I found this bit from Miller is what I found particularly alarming:

We’ve seen in the United States, again and again, individuals who are part of left-wing organizations who’ve committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement, who’ve been brought to court, where clear evidence has been presented against them, that the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons. When you’ve reached that point, it demonstrates how deeply the cancer has begun to infest your society, where people have created an internal rationalization structure to justify unsanctioned violence against the state and state actors to achieve a political end.

The full transcript can be found here.

For context: The AP did an analysis of why so many cases against protestors and bystanders against ICE collapsed last year:

Several factors help explain the mixed record. Sometimes prosecutors have failed to win grand jury indictments required to prosecute someone on a felony. In other instances, videos and testimony have called into question the initial allegations, resulting in prosecutors downgrading offenses. In dozens of cases, officers suffered only minor injuries, or no injuries at all, undercutting a key component of the felony assault charge that requires the potential for serious bodily harm.

The Trump administration has been hostile to the entire concept of separation of powers since the jump, and increasingly at odds with the judicial system this go round. But Miller’s rhetoric here, essentially suggesting that any jury decision he doesn’t like is the result of foreign, left-wing terrorist indoctrination, represents an escalation.

Media Diet

TV and Film

We saw Nolan’s The Odyssey and I don’t have anything to add to the discourse, other than to say it’s very good and packed with great performances.
I’ve been all in on Cape Fear since episode one, though I can understand why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. We haven’t finished it yet, so there’s still room for it to whiff, but I like the first half. It seems like everything coming out this year is so unhinged that the most subversive thing to do at this point would be to make a properly hinged movie or TV show.
Speaking of which: I Heart Boosters may take the cake for most unhinged movie or TV show in 2026. I think it was a bit much for my tastes (which is saying something), but there’s quite a bit to like in it, from the performances to the dialectical materialist sci-fi concepts (that I really wish more had been done with). If you liked Sorry to Bother You you have at least some idea what to expect.

Logoff

Alright, well that’s quite enough out of me.

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