Tag: newsletter

Greeting everyone! And a special welcome to everyone who signed up for my newsletter at San Diego Comic Con. Here is a run down of my stuff for you new folks:

• The City Between is my webcomic about werewolves in the future. It updates Wednesdays. The current story is titled Glass Diamonds. It is free to read on my website, or you can follow my patreon to get it emailed to you. 
• Blue Moon is a werewolf romance graphic novel I’m writing and Meredith McClaren is going to draw. 
• Cautionary Fables and Fairytales is a kid-friendly folklore anthology series I edit and organize for Iron Circus Comics. Each volume focuses on a different continent. 
• Sorcery 101 is my old webcomic. It is finished and is about an inept sorcerer learning magic from a grumpy vampire. 

I have two day jobs. One is as an editor for Seven Seas, so I’ll occasionally share manga I’m editing for them. I’m also the managing editor at Iron Circus Comics. I like folklore, fantasy, and especially like werewolves.

The biggest thing I’m doing this month is I’ll be at Worldcon again! Mostly I’ll be on or attending panels. I rather liked Worldcon the last to times I attended. Its panels were more focused on craft and talking themes in ways that are pretty rare at comic conventions. So I’m excited get more involved in it in the future. My schedule is posted above, but if the screenshot is too small to read, here it is typed up. 

• Thursday 4:30 pm – Current Landscape of Speculative Fiction Comic and Graphic Novels – It’s gonna be a discussion of how science fiction and fantasy are handled across comics as the medium has grown to have a much wider variety. I’m moderating and did so last year. I love talking about what makes comic unique as a medium. 
• Friday 12:00 pm – Queerness in Comics: Representation vs Metaphor – Another panel I’m moderating. I’m gonna pick the brain of several creators and academics about how comics handle queerness and when metaphors aren’t cutting it. 
• Friday 6pm – The Indie Comics Panel: The Big 25% – This is myself and several other indie comic creators talking indie comics. Pretty straight forward. 
• Saturday 12:00 pm – The Comic Book Sommelier – This panel is myself and a couple of other well read folks in the comic industry making recommendations to the audience. I did it last year and it was a lot of fun. Basically members of the audience get up and say “I really liked x book” or “I am a big fan of x movie” and the panel tells them comics to check out. 
• Saturday 9:00 pm – Table Talk – this is basically anyone can sign up and have a semi private chat with me about whatever. If you are going to Worldcon, please sign up and talk comics with me!
• Sunday 3:00pm – Life Goes One: Profit vs Sustainability in Creative Projects – This is the last one I’m moderating. It’s about making a living off art in our current capitalist hellscape. This one isn’t just comic people, it is a mix of different types of creatives that are all fighting to keep afloat. 

So if you are going to Worldcon, give my panels a look. 

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:

• Aug 14 – Eyes Wide Shut
• Aug 21 – Fatal Attraction
• Aug 28 – No movie because I’m at Worldcon 

Pop in with this link.

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! 

And one August 20th from 5:30pm PST – 8pm PST, my twitch will be hosting a countdown stream for Iron Circus’s current Kickstarter Unsounded book 3 and 4. I’ll be talking to Unsounded’s creator Ashley Cope and S.E. Case the creator of Rigsby, WI (which will be Iron Circus next Kickstarter). That talk will also be on my Twitch. 

Glass Diamonds is almost done, there’s like 10 more pages. So right now my creative focus is mostly on writing the next story Brittle Beast. It’s gonna be about Jeff and Sina from Better to Find You With. I think it is gonna be 100ish pages. 

I do need to play a lot of catch up because of time off for San Diego Comic Con. I mostly had a good time but it takes a lot out of me. Alina and Sam who I share a table with always do Gencon right after, and I don’t know how they do it. Sales were a little down, but I kinda expected that since the economy is in the toilet and everyone is tightening their belts. I appreciate everyone that bought someone though. I saw some good cosplays. Above are two guys that did a great Smoke and Stack from Sinners. I showed some friends the Werewolf Bar in San Diego (the main image the newsletter is their signage). The food is so so but they have some fun deco. Wolves on all the support beams and the bathroom wallpaper is pages of the comic Werewolf by Night. 

I drove to San Diego Comic Con. That is 2 days of driving both ways. On the ride down me and my copilot Grace listened to the first Dungeon Crawler Carl. I have heard a lot of people praise it, but Kate Ashwin’s rec pushed me over (check out her kickstarter by the way). She had the same reservations as me, basically a lot of books that run on videogame rules are a bit samey and are mostly concerned with being a power fantasy. So far Carl hasn’t been too power fantasy focused, by being a death game to comment on the grim realities of capitalist exploitation. It stops from getting to depressing with over the top humor. It makes for a good mix, especially in the audiobook. The guy reading the audiobook had amazing delivery and comedic timing. I think I would have been lukewarm on the book if not for the audiobook reader’s line delivery. 

Since I drove to San Diego Comic Con, there was time for me and my pal Grace to stop at that Academy Award Museum to see the Jaws exhibit. They had a lot of the concept art and storyboards. There was also several props and technically drawing of the shark. There was a collection of foreign movie posters. The museum also had exhibits on Marlyn Monroe, production design on the Barbie movie, and costume design in general. I uploaded pictures I took at the Jaws exhibit and the other exhibits to my google drive. There are also pictures of cosplayers too. 

On the drive back from San Diego, Grace and I listened to A Stitch in Time by Andrew Robinson. It is a Star Trek novel about Garak from DS9 helping rebuild Cardassia after it was wrecked by the Dominion. Deep Space Nine is my favorite Star Trek and I had heard several Trek fans talk this one up. It is very interesting because while it’s about Garak realizing the fascism Cardassia engaged in is a dead end and self destructive ideology it isn’t a redemption story. So Garak still doesn’t think the murders he did for the State are bad things. It is a unique way of handling deprograming from a lifetime of fascist propaganda. 

We finished our road time by listening to the start of The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer anthology. I enjoyed it but ultimately think I was missing something. Turns out I was. They tie into a movie I haven’t seen. So this one I’ll probably revisit after seeing the movie. 

Last month while trying to get ahead for San Diego Comics Con, the discord movies were The Lighthouse and it was one hell of a ride. I remember people talking about how great both William Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in it. Watching them both lose their mind was a treat. I’ve had mixed feelings on Eggers movies, but this was definitely my favorite I’ve seen so far. I think in Nosferatu didn’t go weird enough and it was part of why I’m on the fence about his coming werewolf movie. But this movie really digs into the weird as Pattinson loses it. 

Then we watched War of the Roses. I founded out about this movie because on stream I told my pal Joe about the episode of Always Sunny where Mac and Dennis move to the suburbs and go insane. They responded by asking if the dog eating joke is a reference to War of the Roses. After looking it up, sure enough the whole episode is based off War of the Roses. I was expecting a wilder movie, but I liked the War of the Roses starts more subdued. It makes the end when things get wild funnier by contrast. I had been told it was about a divorced couple fighting over who gets the house and neither of them can leave. The slow build up to the characters getting divorced paints a good picture that grounds the wild fight later. I really ended up liking it all around. 

For now I’m off to continue playing catch up from San Diego combined with trying to get ahead for Worldcon. Thanks everyone for your support. Have a good one. 

Hey folks! It is that time of year. I’ll be at San Diego Comic Con selling stuff. On July 22nd-26th, you can find me at the same table as last year, booth 1229 with Alina Pete and Sam Logan. Kory Bing was also going to with us, but she broke her arm and can’t make it. Since she now has a medical bill and is missing out on San Diego sales, check out her store if you can. 

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:

• July 11 – The Lighthouse
• July 18 – War of the Roses
• July 25 – No movie because I’m at comic con 

Pop in with this link.

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! 

A couple of years ago Iron Circus crowdfunded a game jam. I did the art for one called Teething, a time management puzzle where you are a single parent of a child werewolf. It and 5 other games are finally on sale on steam! So please grab yourself a copy. 

I mentioned last month that I’ve been doing a limited podcast about a Knight in the Seven Kingdoms called Westeros Runs on Duncan. We’ve finished up and you can listen to the whole thing on my patreon. 

I’d still like to get my patreon’s monthly amount high enough to pay my student loan bill each month. People asked for scripts, so once Glass Diamonds is done, I’m going to start posting my script a page at a time. I want to wait until after Glass Diamonds wraps because I do put spoilers in my scripts. So I don’t want the script for the current story to get posted while it is still updating. There is about 20 pages left in Glass Diamonds, so that will probably start in 2027. 

The other thing people asked for is for a graphic novel book club. I’ll start planning that some time in September or October. Right now, I’m slightly too swamped to get the ball rolling. I gotta make sure I’m ahead of schedule for travel. I’ll probably post a poll in September and then we can meet in October. 

June was a busy month for me what with it being my birthday. I did play all the game nominated for the Hugos. I played them on my birthday stream. Most of them I played 2 hours of. So I think I didn’t scratch the surface of Expedition 33. I’ll probably stream that after I’m done with Disco Elysium. I enjoyed Hades 2 and will probably go back to it. I bounced off Dispatch pretty hard. Then the final game Citizen Sleeper 2 was my favorite. I actually played through the whole thing off stream that weekend. If you haven’t played it or the first one, you play as a robot on the run. Each day you get 5 dice rolls to do your tasks that day and it acts as a metaphor. 

In my discord last month, we watched queer movies for Pride Month. I started with I Saw the TV Glow because a lot of people told me to watch it last year, especially since I really like Buffy. I ended up liking the movie until the end. The lighting and cinematography were grab, but the abruptness really took me out of the movie. kinda wish either it had ended with the final monolog or if it had continued a little bit more to show the main character even older. That kinda soured me on the movie. 

We followed it up with the movie Call Me By Your Name. I went into that movie only knowing two things, that it was a gay romance and there was a problematic age gap. While this movie did a great job building the relationship of between the two leads, I think they really should have made the younger guy a few years older. The plot didn’t really need him to be a teenager, so I can see why people had a problem with the age gap. It isn’t really addressed or effect things in the story. So it left me think they should have avoided the whole thing. 

Then we wrapped the discord movies with a double feature of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Saltburn. I watched them back to back because a youtuber I like, Broey Deschanel, did a video comparing the two movies. I wanted to see if I agreed with her analysis. And folks, watching Saltburn right after The Talented Mr. Ripley really highlights the weaknesses of Saltburn. The Talented Mr. Ripley was very gripping as it followed Tom getting deeper and deeper in his con, while Saltburn ultimately felt shallow and unfocused. 

And to wrap up what I watched/enjoyed this month, the youtuber Matt Baume did a deep dive into the path and history to marriage equality. It is really long but does going over all the starts and set backs that happened along the way. It is really informative. 

That’s it for this month. Thank you all for your support. Have a good one. 

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. 

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. 

Hi there everyone! Shards of Reflection is still kickstarting and it has roughly a week to make 2k. Please spread the where ever you can. 

And for folks that met me at Wondercon, thank you for getting my books and signing up for the newsletter. Here’s a run down of what I do. 

• The City Between is my webcomic about werewolves in the future. It updates Wednesdays. The current story is titled Glass Diamonds. It is free to read on my website, or you can follow my patreon to get it emailed to you. 
• Blue Moon is a werewolf romance graphic novel I’m writing and Meredith McClaren is going to draw. 
• Cautionary Fables and Fairytales is a kid-friendly folklore anthology series I edit and organize for Iron Circus Comics. 
• You are the Chosen One is a fantasy comic that is exclusive to my patreon but is currently on hold until I’ve gotten a few other things off my plate. 

I have two day jobs. One is as an editor for Seven Seas, so I’ll occasionally share manga I’m editing for them. I’m also the managing editor at Iron Circus Comics. I like folklore, fantasy, and especially like werewolves.

This month I’m mostly gonna recharge from doing cons. But I will be at Comic Con Oakland at the start of May. So incase I don’t have May’s newsletter out by then, catch me there on May 9th and 10th. 

But while I rest up for that, join me as I watch some movies on Saturday afternoons. Here’s what I’m watching

• April 4 – Battle Royale
• April 11 – Frankenstein (1931)
• April 18 – Death of a Unicorn
• April 25 – 9 to 5

All the movies start at 11am pacific time. You can join by clicking here.

And as usual, I’ll be streaming, thought I changed some of the times. 

Everything else will be the streaming schedule:

• Tuesday at 7pm – 10pm PST – Art times
• Wednesday at 7pm – 9pm PST – Art times
• Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Baldur’s Gate 3

Join me on my twitch! 

I enjoyed Wondercon. I’ll probably go next year. It being more spread out/having wider aisles made it feel nicer to browse and walk around. I saw some good costumes. I posted them all on my blusky. But here’s an especially good werewolf. 

One fun thing that happened at Wondercon is I have a stuff wolf that props up copies of Can I Pet Your Werewolf. A little girl asked me what the wolf’s name was. I told her he is a wolf and since wolves are wild animals they don’t have names. Little girl DID NOT like that answer. So I guess next time a kid asks me the wolf’s name I should have an answer. I’m thinking Talbot. 

Between the two big conventions, I’ve been thinking a lot about Buffy. If you didn’t here, Hulu canceled the Buffy reboot they were planning. Jessie Gender did a run down of everything as well as her thoughts its cancelation is mainly due to misogyny. I agree with her that misogyny is probably what ultimately killed it, I think this project was doomed from the start. Now I am a huge Buffy fan and it was obviously a big influence on what I create, but when I first heard about the reboot and Sarah Michelle Gellar was playing Buffy in it, I thought that was a bad decision. In general, I want new stuff to get made rather than infinite reboots/sequels. Then even if you are doing a reboot, if the intent is to get a new generation into Buffy, having SMG there is bogging the series down with a continuity and creating a barrier to entry. And if new teens aren’t the plan, they just want the old audience back, then why are we focusing on a new Slayer? Jessie mentions in her video the executives claimed Zhao was a bad fit for the show, but her work is pretty well known with all the successes she’s been having. So why didn’t the executives figure out she was a bad fit from the start? Jessie is right to say that is on them for not knowing what they wanted and not trusting Zhao to do her job. But that trying to have it both ways mismanagement was something I thought was coming since the announcement that Sarah Michelle Gellar was returning as Buffy. If they have to reboot Buffy, they need a fresh start. But this is a lot of text. So here’s some old drawings I did for a Buffy art test. 

This month I watched All About Eve. A lot of youtubers I watch that I watch have mentioned it. I can see why because like Casablanca last month, this movie is kinda classics are classics for a reason. I especially liked the costuming being used to mislead the viewer. Like Bette Davis’s character is in all these dark dresses that mixed with her sharp eyebrows that give her a real villainous look. Then Anne Baxter is dressed like an ingenue with most modest light colors at first. Then half way through she starts wearing dresses that mimic Bette Davis’s and it is around the same time the audience is completely clued into Anne Baxter’s character being a villain. 

The week after I showed my discord something completely different. We watched Annihilation. I over all liked the movie but it left me with a lot of questions. I wouldn’t call them plots holes, more stuff I wondered about that I assume the movie just didn’t have room for. It made me want to check out the books. I was really impressed with Gina Rodriguez in the movie. I had only seen her in Jane the Virgin before. So seeing her lose it the way she does in Annihilation was impressive. Also, as scary as the bear monster was, I find the alligator with extra teeth more unnerving. 

I did more reading this month. I accidentally let my to read pile get bigger than I like. The book club I’m in read Reel to Real by bell hooks. The book is a collection of her criticism of various movies. Most of the movies were ones I hadn’t seen. So it mostly just made me add to my movies to see list. It also made me wish bell hooks lived longer because I would have loved to have read her thoughts on more recent movies like American Fiction and Moonlight. 

After Reel to Real, I jumped into A Ruin, Great and Free by Cadwell Turnbull. It is the final book in his trilogy that started with No Gods, No Monsters. It continues to work on a big picture community look at the supernatural that I don’t see very often, while not becoming too detached from his characters personal humanity. I immediately wanted go back and reread the series from the start. 

This month had the release of a new Seanan McGuire book Butterfly Effects. It is the 15th book in her Incryptid series, so I wouldn’t recommend jumping into it cold. The series as a whole is about a family of cryptozoologists. A lot of the plot in this particular book is resolving things from a few books before. The main thing I found interesting is the antagonists are a hivemind but part of the hivemind is trying to rebel. So the logistic of a rebellion in a society that is all psychically connected was interesting to dig at. 

Final book I read was Player of Games by Ian M Banks. Two of my friends, Spike Trotman and Blue Delliquanti, have talked up the Culture Series to me. I don’t have a lot to say about Player of Games by itself, other than I liked it. Blue told me to start with this one and it is an easy into. I’m intrigued and will end up reading more Culture Novels. So I might have more to say when I’m deeper in. 

That’s it for this month. Thanks as always for your support and once again, please spread the word about my Kickstarter.