Newsletter: Mini-episode, mini-reviews

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Mutation Vectors

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Status Update

Just taking a break from everything else on my plate to plug the last podcast episode and share a few thoughts on some recent media.

Sewer Mutant Podcast: Tribute to Glen Hammonds, the most important man in Outlaw Comics

This one’s a mini-episode, with me going solo again to talk about the late Glen Hammonds, an obscure figure in the development and popularization of Outlaw Comics. Hammonds, who passed away of pancreatic cancer in 2020, was the proprietor of the comics retailer, wholesaler, and publisher Raw Comics and was a legit patron of the Outlaw Comics arts, spending thousands of dollars a year commissioning art to help the artists make a living.

I also updated my 2020 article on Hammonds with a little more information about his work on the early 1990s alternative newspaper Syn.

Next up: John and I do a Steve Gerber double feature on The Legion of Night and Void Indigo. We both liked one, but not the other. Can you guess which?

Media Diet

Tabs

  • Jacobin: Hardt and Negri’s Empire Got Everything Wrong. A look at the legacy of Empire. The headline oversells it as Hardt and Negri did get some stuff right, as acknowledged in the actual article. The article’s less about what they got “wrong” than what they simply didn’t address.

Books

  • A Violent Masterpiece. This is Jordan Harper’s most obviously James Ellroy-inspired novel yet. All jagged prose and Burroughsian street philosophy. LA gutter culture, what I expected out of Everybody Knows. It really is Harper’s violent masterpiece. Apparently he’s planning another book in this sequence. Maybe he’ll end up with his own LA quartet?
  • Terminal issues 1 and 2. Written by Robert Kirkman and Joe Casey with art by Andy Kubert. This is apparently an homage to 1990s Image superteam comics like Youngblood and WildCATS, but it lacks the manic energy those books had. It’s frankly a little dull. I only read the second issue because the ending of issue 1 was pretty surprising, but the second issue was even more boring than the first. It reminds me a lot of late 90s superteam books like Rising Stars and The Authority, which I found dull, despite having ostensibly good writing.
  • Mama Came Callin’ written by Ezra Claytan Daniels with art by Camilla Sucre. This was a fun little mystery story, even if it didn’t live up to Daniels’s masterpiece Upgrade Soul (one of my all-time favorites). The art didn’t do a lot for me, but it got the job done. This is Sucre’s first professional comics work, so I’ll be keeping an eye on her work.

TV and Film

  • Resident Evil. Director Zach Cregger’s Barbarian was my favorite movie of 2022 and his Weapons was my favorite of 2025. I didn’t like Resident Evil nearly as much as his other two movies, but that’s probably an unfair comparison. This was a reboot of an adaptation of a valuable video game franchise, not an auteur prestige horror film. It’s very good for what it is, with some outstanding body horror at the end. It’s tonally a bit inconsistent, but it works. (Fun fact: The Resident Evil franchise started with a 1989 NES game called Sweet Home)
  • Euphoria season 2: I hadn’t planned on watching this, but gave it a shot and got sucked in. Sam Levinson is good at making compelling, if shallow, TV. I enjoyed this coming right off A Violent Masterpiece because it explores a similar intersection between high Hollywood and LA low-life culture and how sleazy and fake the whole enterprise is. At least one actress from the show (Chloe Cherry) is/was a porn actress as well, which makes Euphoria the thing it’s engaging with: Hollywood tapping into sex work for entertainment, content that is basically porn but pretends that it isn’t. It draws an interesting parallel between Hollywood agents/managers and pimps, but can’t seem to make up its mind whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. If the season had anything to say besides “God is good, and so is gunning down drug dealers,” I missed it. It felt like an effort to cram conservative talking points inside a pornographic coating.

Logoff

Ah well, once again that’s quite enough out of me. I gotta get this cyberpunk zine done!

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