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Status Update
The first pages for the Sewer Mutant Cyberpunk Spectacular zine are coming in and I’m really excited about it. Somewhere early in my adult life I stopped getting excited about things and started getting anxious instead. Even about things I’m looking forward to. But I’m excited about this, and it’s giving me energy to tackle all the other things I’ve got stacking up.
The deadline isn’t until August 30, so there’s still time to get something into the zine, so drop me a line if you’d like to contribute art, short comics, or articles/reviews/essays about cyberpunk comic books.
New at Sewer Mutant
- Up next: Elfquest
Superheroes in the age of Luigi Mangione
Review: Absolute Green Arrow issues 1 and 2
Written by Pornsak Pichetshote, art by Rafael Albuquerque
The pitch: Someone in a Green Arrow costume is murdering billionaires (analogs for Jeffrey Epstein and Martin Shkreli so far). Oliver Queen (Green Arrow in the mainline DC universe) is dead before the beginning of issue 1, so it’s probably not him. So who is behind the mask?
I was a little worried that this would be mostly a schadenfreude type thing. There could be something satisfying in a comic where billionaires just get murdered but, apart from being a bit simplistic and on the nose.
Fortunately there’s more going on. The book actually focuses on Dinah Lance (Black Canary in the mainline universe) investigating the murders and struggling with her own conflicted feelings about the killings. It’s comics for the era of Luigi Mangione. I hope it goes somewhere interesting. It’s tempting to believe that simply killing these people will make things better. But would killing the rich actually change the system? And what becomes of us as we cheer on murderers? It’s the age-old question: Can we fight monsters without becoming monsters?
It reminds me of my favorite bit from Grendel: God and the Devil, which will take some time to get to on the podcast. Here’s Suggested for Mature Readers on the conclusion to the story:
Sophisticated Orion who did everything in his considerable power to confront monsters without becoming one; even he eventually found there was no other path. He resisted aggression in the face of evil. He resisted it in the face of persecution, of exile, of personal tragedy. Still, in the endgame, violence was not just effective but absolutely necessary.
And if it’s that’s true for him? For a prince of society, with every means at his disposal? Then how can his opposite, a man at the carbon-crushed bottom of the underclass, possibly go any other way?
I’m interested in what Pichetshote concludes.
Review: Absolute Catwoman issue 1
Written by Che Grayson and Scott Snyder, art by Bengal.
I heard Absolute Catwoman described as having all the things that the Batman of the Absolute universe doesn’t have: A butler, a mansion, a “Cat cave,” etc. That wasn’t particularly appealing, as it sounded like it would make the Absolute universe less special by just shifting things from one character to another. But fortunately, it turns out that’s an oversimplification. Absolute Catwoman is still Catwoman, not Batman.
It’s too early to say much, other than that I enjoyed the first issue and it left me wanting more.
Media Diet
Tabs
Film
- The Furious: Some of the best, possibly THE best, martial arts action choreography I’ve ever seen. But so brutally, graphically violent that I have a hard time recommending it without reservations. The movie makes it quite clear from the beginning that this is the sort of movie where anything can happen, including the deaths of children (though fortunately the violence towards children is less graphic and more restrained than much else that happens on screen). There’s a gruesome torture scene midway through, and some particularly disturbing violence towards the end (For those who have seen it, I’m talking about the mansion scene, but not the main thing that happens in that scene). If you love action films and over the top choreo and can stomach the violence, you gotta see this.
TV
Recent viewing we’ve enjoyed:
- The Bear
- Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed
- Sugar season 2
- A Thousand Blows
Three out of four of those have characters named “Sugar.” In addition to being the year of the fucked up wedding, 2026 is the year of Sugar.
Books
- I’m almost done with Feed by Mira Grant. I guess it’s been just long enough since the worst of 2020 that I can handle long form pandemic fiction (I noped out of Fireman by Joe Hill, but I think that was in 2021). More next time, maybe.
Logoff
Don’t forget my new FIST adventure, available free on Itch.io. And with that, that’s quite enough out of me.