Back again, still a lot less frequently than I'd like, but more than I expected. This time, a 30 year old fanzine that remains a visual delight, a podcast I enjoy about music I'm mostly unfamiliar with, a re-watch of an uneven but interesting TV show and a plan to get back into prose.
On the Fanzine Cover Files, let's take a look at AMAZING HEROES #164 [1989]. This time around it's a Swimsuit Special, the third annual appearance of the feature. It started as about a 50 page section of the magazine, and by this year had grown to over 100 pages. The year after this it was promoted to a separate publication instead of being part of the regular AH numbering (and without the timely regular AH news, coming comics and reviews features), lasting for three issues. After AH was cancelled the publisher Fantagraphics sold the name to another publisher, Spoof Comics, who published two more Swimsuit issues, but I've never seen those. If the regular AMAZING HEROES INTERVIEWS issues published by Spoof I saw are indicative I doubt I'm missing much.
The specials are all surprisingly fun. While a few artists always go for the predictable cheesecake (or to a lesser extent beefcake) poses, with "swimsuits" only slightly more revealing than the normal costumes the characters wear, most of them go for something clever or funny, either with their own characters in different situations or taking the opportunity to do fan art for characters they wouldn't normally draw. The cover this time is Mitch O'Connell drawing Bettie Page, or a reasonable facsimile. O'Connell was bringing his retro-advertising style to a lot of covers and pin-ups in comics around this time, and it looks really sharp and eye-catching here.
A lot of other great images, most never seen anywhere else, are inside. José Luis GarcÃa-López is a highlight, a rare chance to see him outside of the confines of DC comic with a well-rendered science fiction image. Mike Mignola does a very different view of Darkseid. Donna Barr does a great Desert Peach page, a bit of a callback to one of the classic Peach stories. Evan Dorkin is a regular in these books, with always detailed and funny gags with his characters (most of which I think he's included in various reprints). Charles Vess does a pretty stunning tribute to Rupert The Bear artist Alfred Bestall and Eric Shanower does the same for Winsor McCay's Little Nemo (something he'd return to in his work a few times over the years). And literally over a hundred more. It's a great cross-section of the world of American comics in the late 1980s.
On the podcast recommendation front, I'm a recent recruit to the
Who Cares About The Rock Hall podcast, hosted by Kristen Studard and Joe Kwaczala. Joe is an avid follower of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (the ephemeral Hall, not the Cleveland based museum) while Kristen is apathetic about it. Well, initially she is. As the podcast has gone on over the last year and a half she's gotten oddly more knowledgeable about the Hall, more invested in the inductions and more hostile towards the whole megillah.
I started listening it to it recently because Jimmy Pardo, of the previously recommended Never Not Funny, was a guest on a few episodes. Those episodes were about Iron Maiden and a fantasy draft the 2020 nominations. I enjoyed those quite a bit, so I looked through the back catalog for other guests or musical acts I was interested in (the standard episode is that they take an un-inducted musical act and discuss their career with a guest who has some interest in that act, with an eye towards whether that act should or will eventually be inducted into the Hall. Other episodes look at the current nominations, current inductees or past induction ceremonies and other Hall topics). After listening to a few that I had a particular interest in I kept enjoying it enough that I widened my episode selection, and pretty soon was listening to every episode. It'll take a while to catch up, but it'll be worth it. It's a lot of fun, even if you don't know anything about the particular focus of each episode, and has been a good way for me to learn about a lot of music from that last 30 years, where I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge (for the most part my musical tastes ossified back in 1990, so most eligible but un-inducted acts aren't that familiar to me). I admit that when I go to listen to a few songs from those acts I'm usually not sold on them, but I do walk away with more appreciation for their history and influence.
So try a few random episodes based on your tastes and see if it appeals to you, and soon maybe you'll be talking about FYEs and FYNs and the NomCom and their giant hoagies.
Obviously a lot of my TV interest for the last little while has been THE GOOD PLACE, with my rewatch leading up to the final four episodes on-going. On a related note, shortly before that I finished a watch/re-watch of LOST, the 2004-2010 show. It comes up occasionally on the Good Place podcast, with creator Michael Schur in particular mentioning a few times that when creating his show he talked occasionally to LOST co-creator Damon Lindelof about some of the experiences he had with that show and THE LEFTOVERS, which both have some structural similarities to THE GOOD PLACE (all three are in the general category of "mystery box shows" and have a similar use of flashbacks to fill in background and reinforce the modern day narrative).
I'd also been wanting to revisit the show for a while, and that seems to be something in the cultural zeitgeist for a bit, with several podcasts and on-line articles about it popping up. For me, I watched most of the show when it was new, but I missed at least a dozen of the 121 episodes, and watched others out of order as re-runs. Back then it wasn't quite as easy to catch up to missing episodes, so sometimes when I decided to watch the show after missing a few weeks I'd just find quick on-line summaries of what I missed. And note that while some of the missing episodes were for scheduling reasons, others were because I found it to be a very uneven show, and would regularly give it up in disgust, only to be drawn back in by a general interest and a lack of anything else worth watching.
So I finally got down to watching the entire thing, some for the first time ever and all in order for the first time. For the most part I watched two or three episodes a day, usually with at least a few hours between episodes, never back-to-back episodes. That seemed to be a pretty good pace, which kept up the forward momentum of the plot, and usually wiped out the bad taste that the less interesting episodes left quickly. Certainly a better pace than the original weekly release, with gaps as long as eight months between seasons, and conversely overlong double episodes as season finales. There were still a few long stretches where nothing much was happening and I considered giving up, but ultimately I made it to the end.
Ah, the end. Like I said, there does seem to be some sort of critical re-evaluation of LOST. I haven't really looked into it in depth, so I'm not sure if the consensus that the ending sucked has changed. It certainly hasn't for me. The only thing I can say is that it's not as bad as the culmination of two months of viewing as it was of six years. For the most part my feelings are the same as they ever were, but milder. The whole parallel universe purgatory of the final season still feels like a bit of a cop-out, and the resolution of the island plot needed some important stuff to be established much earlier to be satisfying (I used to think maybe some crucial stuff came in episodes I missed, but that turned out not to be the case). Anyway, it was still an interesting show, and probably a show more important to the evolution of American television in this century than anyone realized at the time, maybe worth the time to watch it, but could have been much stronger if it was half as many episodes and had some clue as to where it was going from the start, instead of making it up as it went along and treading water for much of the time.
I think I might even try another re-watch in a few years, maybe a more leisurely one and with one of the many LOST re-watch podcasts to accompany it. Are any of them well recommended?
I have to say, lately I've been regretting that I don't make nearly as much time for prose reading, either fiction or non-fiction, as I did in the past. Not sure why that is. I think I'm going to try to change that in the near future. I've got a few different tactics I'm going to try.
One is that I'm going to try to take at least a half-hour a day to re-read something I already know I love. I've certainly got enough old books sitting on shelves and in boxes that I know have given my great pleasure in the past. I mean, I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels at least three times each in the first decade that I read them, and I think it's been at least fifteen years since I read any of them. So maybe those, Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers books, a few others, those should get me back into the habit.
I think I'll also try to get into the habit of listening to audiobooks. Now that they're much more readily available and convenient, I think they might be something I can enjoy, given how much I enjoy podcasts. I can get a huge variety of them from the Toronto Library on their Libby app on physically on standalone readers. I think for this I'll try to concentrate on non-fiction, maybe another half-hour or so a day.
If those two go well, I'm going to try to spend a little time this month working up a list of maybe a hundred books I want to read next year. I don't expect that's remotely possible, but if I can get even a third of that it'll be a lot better than I've managed in quite a while. Recommendations welcome.
