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Glass Diamonds page 43 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 47.

I’ll be at Rose City Comic Con this weekend! I’m table C31. It will be my last convention for the year. So come say hi!

The big thing is Rose City, as mentioned above. 

Everything else will be the streaming schedule:

• Tuesday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Art times
• Wednesday at 4pm – 6pm PST – Art times
• Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Baldur’s Gate 3

Those will be on my twitch. I ended up removing the Wolf & Bones Comic Club streams because Bones doesn’t want to livestream it. They feel a pressure to be entertaining. So we are still gonna keep reading, but I’m just gonna type up summaries and post them in my newsletter rather than stop all together. 

I am still doing movie afternoons on my discord. They will be Saturday’s at 11am PST. Since I’ll be at Rose City, I’m skipping this coming Saturday. But after that we’re gonna watch Perfect Blue and then My Cousin Vinny. Both are movies I haven’t seen before. Anyone is free to join. 

Worldcon was the main thing I did last month. The panels I was on weren’t recorded but I did do a quick summary of them on Blusky. 

I’m glad Rose City is my last convention for the year. I need to finish some stuff. So I’m glad I get to dig in and not go anywhere. I need to do some planning for next year. 

Basically, I usually go to Emerald City Comic Con and share an exhibitor table with some friends. But we got waitlisted. So we all signed up for Artist Alley, which is cheaper but more of a gamble (Reedpop has been rejecting a lot of people who were regulars at their shows). Just this morning I got an email that we were moved off the waitlist, but our booth is smaller and more expensive. It also might be in the basement. So me and the friends I share the Emerald City table with got to decide between sure thing that is smaller, more expensive, and in a crappy spot or take a gamble on getting into artist alley. 

Being in this situation is making me rethink conventions in general. They are really the only place I sell copies of my books outside of Kickstarters. But I don’t have a lot of time to go to them like I used to. For newer followers, I used to make most of my money from conventions but I also used to attend a lot more. I had to cut back after getting hired by Seven Seas.

Part of why they sell best at conventions is because I gave selling my undivided attention. I don’t really have time to do that to push my online store. I know part of playing the online hustle is never shutting up about it. Or keeping chatting up about anything. But I’ve never been real good at engaging people online/via text. It is why I started streaming. I have an easier time chatting verbally. And I like discussions about craft, storytelling, and meaning. It’s why Bones and I started comic club streams is. But I do love sitting down and chatting about the art of story telling whether in comics, prose, TV, or movies. 

So I gotta think of some ways to engage the internet more so that more folks are signing up for this newsletter, backing my patreon, and buying my books. Getting dicked around by Reedpop has kinda forced me to stop back burnering that. 

Anyway, to prep for recommending comics on one of my Worldcon panels, I tried to make a dent in my to read comic pile. I started with The Power Fantasy by Kieron Gillen and Casper Wijngaard. I really liked Die and Wicked + Divine, so this was an easy sell to me. If you are unfamiliar, it is about extremely powerful superhumans and how that level of power in individuals is unsafe for the world, no matter how good the superhuman’s intentions are. I like that it digs more into the emotional state of characters as well as how the world views them. Like one of characters is having a gallery show and wants to know what a critic thinks of her paintings. But how can she ever get an honest opinion on her work when she can destroy a continent? There were a couple of places that I wished things were more decompressed, but I think that is just my personal tastes being at odds with the monthly comic format. 

I also grabbed Absolute Batman by Scott Synder and Nick Dragotta. Nick always knocks it out of the park art wise. (I still think everyone should check out Ghost Cage. It is super underrated.) The frantic tiny panels and well placed spot blacks really the brutality of this Batman. I do think it is a little silly that Batman can’t say fuck though.

In my discord, one of our movie Saturdays was Isle of Dogs. I wasn’t super into the movie honestly. While it looked good and the stop motion was great, the story didn’t really grab me. It felt very much like things were happening because the plot needed them to happen, rather than having strong motives from anyone (other than the little boy looking for his dog). There were a few jokes that landed, but not really enough to make the movie stick with me. 

A much more fun movie featured during the Saturday afternoon movies, was Love Lies Bleeding. I’ve been summing it up to friends who haven’t seen it as watch some lesbians be bad at crime. It was a good mix of romance and action. It also had some fun surreal moments to display how drugs are effecting Katy O’Brian’s character. It also plays off, you can tell when the main characters are screwing up their various crimes and that adds to the drama. 

This month, I saw Jaws for the first time. A local theater was showing it in 35mm for the anniversary. In probably the coldest take ever, Jaws is really good. :3 It does a great job slowly building tension with a slower start. It had more humor than I expected. I really liked that it took all three of the guys to take down Jaws at the end. It could have easily dismissed Hooper’s scientific knowledge or Quint’s hands on experience. So I did appreciate that both of them had to contribute to the solution. 

Something I prioritized watching as soon as it came out was Long Story Short. It’s by Raphel Bob-Waksberg who is one of the creators of Bojack Horseman. Since Bojack is one of my favorite shows, Long Story Short was high on my to watch priority list. It didn’t disappoint. The show tells the story of a family out of order to paint a picture of a mildly dysfunctional family. I say mildly because part of what I like about it is while they hurt each other, it is in ways where it is clear they don’t realize it. So it makes a situation where none of them are the “bad guys.” There is a subtly and complicatedness to the characters that I really like. 

Then for something very different I checked out a werewolf romance book, Fan Service by Rosie Danan. I found it because it was included in one of Read With Cindy’s review videos. The plot is the lead of a Teen Wolf/Supernatural style show has been out of work since the show was canceled 17 years before the story starts. He becomes a werewolf and the only person he can think of that would know about werewolves is the woman who runs the fan wiki for the show he was on. I went in expecting some silly/trashy fun. It completely delivered on that. 

And lastly, I saw the musical Some Like It Hot. It’s based off the Tony Curtis/Marilyn Monroe movie. It’s a movie I really like and I had heard that they tweaked the story so that Jerry/Daphne realizes they are nonbinary, so it was something I had wanted to see. The change works really well and there is a great song about Jerry/Daphne’s realization. Giving Jerry/Daphne more story means they had to shorten Joe and Sugar’s romance. But that works in a musical since song montages can imply a lot happening quickly. What really blew me away was the choreography. There is a chase scene with the mobsters after the main characters that involves some movable door props. Everything was timed so tightly and has a really great slapstick routine. If you can catch it while touring, I highly recommend it.  

Thanks all for the month. Have a good one and thanks for your support. 

Glass Diamonds page 42 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 46.

Glass Diamonds page 41 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 45.

Glass Diamonds page 40 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 44.