2024-W44 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• A lot of driving around, scheduling, picking up, dropping off, coordinating this week.
• Bought my first ever incentive variant cover. Dan Panosian’s beautiful variant of Absolute Wonder Woman (2024) #1. It was $50CAD. I don’t think this will be a rabbit hole. I seriously don’t. I think I felt a need to grab this after Hourglass couldn’t get me one because… this cover kinda represents something special for me. It was when I truly felt genuine excitement for DC. It was a bit of the catalyst. And now I’m deep into the DC universe.
• Shopping for a new laptop. Narrowed it down to realizing I don’t need a Macbook Pro. Don’t really need a M4 chip. Well, to be more clear, I don’t need a M4 Pro chip and I don’t want a 14" screen either. If they had made a M4 chip with a 16" there might be a different conversation here. As such, I will stick with a M3 on a 15" Macbook Air. Also, didn’t fully understand unified RAM vs. DDR RAM until at least thirty minutes of research.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹

Fooled around with THBs with The Court Magician (2018) by Sarah Pinsker. Came up with some iterations. I now have iterations of THBs for three different short stories. This doesn’t mean I’m actually writing stories, so that’s not a positive development. Is it a development in the right direction? Maybe. I mean, on Thursday, I ended up playing with another way of prompting my brain to think stories via all of the first season’s episodes of Adventure Time (2010-2018). Fairly certain this is procrastinating at this point.

Four Thousand Weeks

It’s been an interesting week of logistics. Monday morning, electricity went out in Port Moody, locking me out of the office for ninety minutes. Later, I decide to hunt down Dan Panosian’s inventive variant cover of Absolute Wonder Woman (2024) #1. Keith Awcock at Tazmanian Comics, my first ever LCS, from when I was eleven has a copy. I debate driving to get it. I end up doing it because I wrapped up work, but because I’m an idiot and didn’t look at the hours, it was closed. So Tuesday rolls around, I do it again. It is… a trip to see Keith. I think back to the last three decades of how I’ve floated in and out of Taz Comics, through four locations.

Wednesday was my MIL’s birthday dinner. Eldest didn’t get off until six, but I was tasked with picking up the cake, rushed to Henderson – on the drive there, I was freaking out and stressed because the bakery closed at seven, it’s cutting close, I’m stuck in a traffic jam, it’s a quarter to before I turn into Henderson – I drop him off to pick up said cake, thinking this is maximum efficiency since I had to rush over to middle one’s high school to get her. Only when I get back to the restaurant, and not seeing eldest, I’m texting, and he tells me the bakery is in the mall not here. I felt so stupid. My middle one accuses me of not knowing my different Asian bakeries. I don’t.

Thursday, Halloween. Left early from work to ease the stress my wife is having over all unannounced, fuzzy planning the two teenagers have. Eldest is going to one party, middle one to another one directly after school, youngest is the only one going trick-or-treating, and I’m on candy duty in one of the busiest blocks in the neighborhood. Seven boxes of candy from Costco. All gone by quarter-to-eight. I close up shop. Shower. And then I go get the middle one. Eldest doesn’t ping us until quarter-to-nine. Wife gets him and I crash. And because of Wed/Thu, script reviews for work piles up. Friday is a barrage of meetings until four. It’s only then that I start catching up. I don’t get home until quarter-to-nine. Late dinner. Saturday I’m at the bank in the morning, brunch in the late morning, Costco in the afternoon, then Toyota to fix the Highlander passenger side mirror, and Save On, and then picking up sashimi in the evening.

Just a lot of logistics this week.

All the while – getting up at four on weekdays. Managed to cram in story development. No writing still. I need to break this pattern, but story development is better than the last several months of theory.

Book Reading

• STILL NO NOVEL READING - Ahahaha. We already have a DNF for the StoryGraph Buddy Read of Too Like the Lightning (2016). Did not read an additional short story this week. No instead, I kept reading comics. I knocked off a few more issues of The New Gods (1971). I dug into My Greatest Adventures (1955) issues #80-85 because I wanted to see the origins of Doom Patrol. It was delightful. Rita Farr/Elasti-Girl is actually smart, was developed enough to question her role as a woman and career, and is not hit on by either Negative Man/Larry Trainor nor Robotman/Cliff Steele. Kinda surprising for 1964? Or not? I dunno. I don’t know my feminist history. But it’s cool. The Chief/Niles Caulder is mercurial and funny. And General Immortus is a funny villain. Ah Silver Age comics.
• This week’s pulls was very low. I guess all the publishers realize when you have five Wednesdays in a month to not flood the stores and hurt their customers’ wallets? I had two one-shots and an issue of NYX. Both one-shots were very much meh. Or mid, as the kids say. I broke it down in my analogue, questioning why they both didn’t work for me. The short of it – Swamp Thing/Poison Ivy didn’t have clues that built on each other, didn’t theorize between each clue, and then the backstory felt unearned, and it just felt like… OK, the woods killed the victim, but why? As for Devour, I never got to build sympathy for the granddaughter, so by the time she’s recruited into the family tradition (which is a horrifying event), I was like, I don’t care? So both were just disappointing making for a very disappointing week of physical comics. NYX #4, however, was great. Prodigy is writing academic essays while the action is happening, and I just can’t but love the intellectual discussion on mutantdom. And another one drops in two weeks? I don’t get the Marvel drop schedule. It’s just so chaotic. Probably because I’m subbed to every X-title. But adjectiveless and uncanny is eighteen issues? But others are twelve? Why?
• Started Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s run of Batman (2011-2016) on Saturday. Oh. My. God. Talk about an artist at the height of their powers. Every single panel of Capullo is top notch. Just gorgeous. And of course, the Court of Owls as a villain is just brilliant.

Comic Book Issues Tracking

Archive of all EOW reports here