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
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.