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Hey all! I wanted to start off directing you all to this post on my patreon. I know times are tough for everyone, and I understand folks gotta tighten their belts. I’m trying to get my patreon to cover my student loan monthly payment and want to add more extras for people who support more. Right now, it is just reading my comics a month early. Also, to encourage folks to sign up, for all of June, I’m giving 10% off any backer level $2 or higher. Just use the code BDAY-26. 

This month I’ll be selling books at Books with Pictures Con on June 13th. It is free to attended, so if you are in Portland that weekend stop by. 

I’m gonna do another special stream this month. June 10th is my birthday and the Hugo awards gave voters codes for most of the games that were nominated. So I’m gonna play all the games for two hour each before I vote in the Hugos. I’ll start at 2pm pst. The games are:

• 2-4pm Dispatch 
• 4-6pm Expedition 33
• 6-8pm Hades 2
• 8-10pm Citizen Sleeper 2

I’ll be streaming on Twitch.

On Saturdays at 11 am PST, I usually watch a movie in my discord. They are all movies I haven’t seen. Anyone can pop in and watch along. This month we are watching:

• June 6 – I Saw The TV Glow
• June 13 – no movie I’m at BWPCon
• June 20 – The Talented Mr. Ripley
• June 27 – Call Me By Your Name 

Pop in with this link.

Other that the big special stream, I’ll also be streaming on these dates and times:

• Tuesday at 7pm – 10pm PST – Art times
• Wednesday at 7pm – 9pm PST – Art times
• Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Disco Elysium 

Join me on my twitch! 

I made a joke about it back when A Knight in the Seven Kingdoms first aired, but I’m now doing a podcast called Westeros Runs on Duncan. This is just for patreon backer. Two episodes are posted. I’ll be posting new episodes each Tuesday. 

I’m editing the Iron Circus comic Lie Machine, a nonfiction anthology about misinformation and propaganda. I’m also drawing a fairly short comic for it. So I’m getting ahead on Glass Diamonds, so I can take a month to focus on drawing it. It’s going to be called Look Upon My Works and Don’t Think About Me At All. It’s about quotes taken out of context. 

The movies I picked to show in my discord last month are all movies about tech in some way. I want to start having a theme to the movies I group together each month. So the first one was Johnny Mnemonic. It is a really stylish movie. I can definitely see why it influenced the cyberpunk genre. I particularly liked laser whip and the dolphin at the end. 

Then we watched Blackberry which is about the raise and fall of blackberry phones. I mainly checked it out because of Glenn Howerton. I heard he brought the some of that unhinged anger he uses to play Dennis in Always Sunny to this movie. He didn’t disappoint and is the highlight of the movie. One thing that I really appreciated is that both of the leads were needed to make the phone a success. There is a great scene early on where a pitch to Verizon is going poorly until they are both there. I also like that toward the end of the movie they are told they are about to go from the #1 phone to that phone people had before an iphone. It reminded me that toward the end of Sorcery 101, I had a scene where a character is boredly dicking around on their smartphone only to realize it was still 2006 in Sorcery 101. I had to look up what someone would have instead since the iphone wasn’t out then. And it was indeed a blackberry.

Then the following week we watched Her. It was a much more thoughtful movie that I expected. I thought it would be about a dude shaping/making his AI girlfriend and pull more from Pygmalion. Instead it was kinda the emotions of a relationship in a condensed manner. That focus made it more thoughtful and unique take on the artificial girlfriend. It also made both the main character and the digital girlfriend more sympathetic when she outgrew him because it was a more nature coarse of the relationship. I also liked how warm and bright the colors were. 

And the movies in my discord ended the month with Minority Report. It is a movie that looked really good, but should have been 40 minutes shorter. I read the novelle roughly a decade ago and the movie was way more convoluted then the source material. It really killed the pacing. 

While drawing I listened to the audiobook To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. It is the sequel to a book a read a year and a half ago. My complaint about the first book is that the main character was too nice for my taste, but now that she is more experienced she challenges things more in this follow up. So I was much more on board this book. Also, because she is pushing things about the status quote, some of her friends push back on her a little too. It made a lot of the relationships more dynamic in my opinion. It ends on a cliffhanger, which I found a little annoying, but I’m grabbing the next book as soon as it drops. 

I also checked out Foundation on Apple TV. I had read the book ages ago and when I heard it became a tv show, I thought there was no way it could be adapted well. But then I heard bits and pieces of people saying their were good parts. So before I end up turning Apple TV off and switch back to Netflix, I checked it out. It is kinda wild how good one half of the show is and how bad the other half is. It is also interesting that is kinda has the opposite problem of Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones got worse the further they got from the source material, where all of Foundation‘s best parts are completely original. If you are unfamiliar, Foundation is about a society started by a mathematician who claims to be able to predict the coarse of civilization with math. There are large time jumps between each conflict. So it is trying to make the point that the individuals don’t matter in the big picture. Which is interesting to read in prose, but TV likes to follow one character. If we keep jumping centuries ahead in time, you can’t have that. The main narrative from the books tries to solve that by having a sorta psychic chosen one who defeats the purpose of the big picture and weakens the whole narrative. On the other hand, Lee Pace plays a cloned emperor and the storylines focused on him and the other clones were super interesting. I assume it must have been fun for the actors because they could flex the different personalities of each clone. The picture above is one of the clones decided doing drugs and hanging out with animals is more interesting than ruling. It dealt with them struggling against how they are supposed to be one person but clearly aren’t, what their propose is while they try to maintain a failing empire, and existential crises. I kinda wish the show was just about them, because it is much better written than the rest of the show. 

While watching Foundation, I saw a lot of people talking up a new show Widow’s Bay. It’s a horror comedy about a small New England down. It does a great job balancing those two tones without it being jarring. Usually when horror and comedy get combined, it is more slapsticky. This is bit more character bit focused and lowkey. So it is exchanges like this.

That’s a wrap on this month. Thanks again for your support and once again, please let me know if there is anything that would catch your interest enough to back my patreon. 

Glass Diamonds page 80 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 84.

Glass Diamonds page 79 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 83.

Glass Diamonds page 78 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 82.

Hello new folks, I am the editor on the Iron Circus book Runaway to the Stars by Jay Eaton. It has been super successful and we wanna try to get folks interested in Runaway to the Stars to check out Iron Circus’s next kickstarter Goblin Throne by Mel Gillman. So Jay, Mel, and I are going to have dueling streams while we talk about all our comics. It will be Tuesday May 12 at 6:30 pm pst. I’ll be drawing on my twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/kelmcdonald

Also, I’m sending this out while I’m at Comic Con Oakland. So thanks everyone who stopped by at the show and welcome new people! If you signed up for Cautionary Fables, you can find that in my store or on the publisher Iron Circus‘s. If you signed up for The City Between (my werewolves in the future comic), you can read that on my site or on my patreon. 

On Saturdays at 11 am PST, I usually watch a movie in my discord. They are all movies I haven’t seen. Anyone can pop in and watch along. This month we are watching:

• May 16 – Blackberry
• May 23 – Her
• May 30 – Minority Report

Pop in with this link.

Other that the big special stream, I’ll also be streaming on these dates and times:

• Tuesday at 7pm – 10pm PST – Art times
• Wednesday at 7pm – 9pm PST – Art times
• Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Disco Elysium 

Join me on my twitch! 

My kickstarter finished up! It was a close call, but it made it. After things wrapped up, I got some fanart from Steve Lieber!

Before I got hired by Seven Seas and was made managing editor at Iron Circus, me and Meredith McClaren got our graphic novel Blue Moon picked up. But I very quickly got those two jobs and then buried by editorial work. It didn’t leave much time to write the script for Meredith. But now after 3 years, I’ve finally finished writing it! So I’m excited for the book to start moving forward at a quicker pace. 

Now I’m gonna focus on writing the next City Between story. Glass Diamonds will be done by the end of the year, so I want the next story ready to go. 

Last month’s movie watch parties started with Battle Royale. When starting the classic death game story, I was supered to learn that it is newer than I thought it was. I can definately see why it made an impact, but my opinion of it suffers a bit from having seen or read stuff that takes death games further. Because at the end of the day, I would have liked some more creativity in the violence of more explanation about why the death games exists. Wikipedia says the book goes into that more, so I might pick up the book at a later date. 

Then I played the 1931 Frankenstein movie. After seeing the Del Toro one and here all the discussion around it, I realized I hadn’t seen the 1931 version. It is a really beautiful film. One thing that struck me was that it didn’t have any non-diegetic music. I don’t know enough about film history to know would this have had an orchestra play a score like old silent films? Like did they do that for the really early films with sound? Or was there just no music intentionally? If someone knows film facts, let me know. 

I don’t like to get too be too repetitive with time period or tone from week to week. So I followed up a classic like Frankenstein with a very new movie, Death of a Unicorn. It was overall fine. I enjoyed it, but I wish it was more ridiculous. Like all the humor and scares were at an 8, but with such a silly premise (A father hits a unicorn with his car and then it turns out the blood has healing properties. So the father’s billionaire boss wants to sell unicorn blood to people. Which leads to other unicorns murdering the wanna be unicorn hunters, while the father and daughter are caught in the middle), I wanted everything to be at a 10. 

And last movie of the month was 9 to 5. All three actresses are legends, so unsurprisingly the movie is a lot of fun. I liked that each lady had a different background and problems but end up coming together in a way that feels natural. It didn’t leave me with much to say though. 

Another thing I watched that I also think is really good, but don’t have much to say is My Brother the Minotaur. It is the newest project by Cartoon Saloon. Their stuff is always beautiful. The story is a kid friendly mystery. It does good character work that keeps a fairly simplish engaging. 

While I had my Apple TV turned on (I rotate streaming services), I also checked out Pluribus. I’ve been only hearing great things about it, but it wasn’t a super high priority for me because I didn’t particularly like Breaking Bad (I found it kinda boring) but I did like Better Call Saul. While I like main characters that are bad people/unlikable, I would like to see them struggle internally a bit. So Jimmy in Better Call Saul trying to be good but continuously falling back on bad habits and fixating on grudges is way more appealing to Walt embracing his worse qualities. So I’m glad Pluribus is following more of Jimmy’s arc that Walt’s. I also like that the hivemind isn’t overtly hostile, while still terrifying. I saw some discussion online theorizing that the hivemind virus is something sent ahead of an alien invasion, but I hope that isn’t the case. Things are more interesting when it is focusing on just individuality being lost. And having Carol be such a mess while arguing against the hivemind reminds me a bit of The World’s End, the main character is even worse than Carol while arguing for individuality. 

And while working this month I had the audiobook All Accounts Settle by Drew Hayes. It is the last book in the series Fred the Vampire Accountant and was a stratifying send off. The whole series is fairly low stakes for the most part. I found it because I was trying to find urban fantasy books that aren’t about magic cops and aren’t romance. So some serialized short stories about a vampire accountant solving bureaucracy problems was exactly what I was looking for. The whole thing is full of stuff like Fred helps a haunted house gain ownership of itself, so it doesn’t have to worry about real estate developers trying to buy it. It is a fairly chill series with nice place to stop. 

I ended the month reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks, the first book in The Culture series. Last month, I read Player of Games based on my pal Blue Delliquanti’s rec. I’m glad I didn’t start with this one. While I enjoyed it, it really throws a lot at you at once. And the whole book is full of spies and double crosses. I think learning about the titular Culture in Player of Games, helped me get a handle on this book with a lot more narrative threads to keep track of. I might have bounced off the series if I had started here. 

Anyway, that is all. Thank you all for your support, both through the kickstarter and through my Patreon. Hang in there.