TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE September/13 - Thinking About Endings
Also: a detailed breakdown of my day..zzzzzzz.
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2021 -- beyond.
Changing gears, with a big clunk.
I’m letting that script for [THE SHARP INK PROJECT] rest a minute, so have got time to dive back into the SHE Vol. 2 script for that final touch up and so that’s been my mind and week. I’ve got some really good notes, and some interesting ways to make them happen, so I just gotta knuckle down and do the work.
The notebook is on my desk, I’m clearing email and turning around to it, ink is laying tracks. Hopefully it all comes together.
I just proofed the letters for BLACK BEACON #4, and reread my script for #5 to make sure all is well and the width of the track lines doesn’t change between issues, and I can confirm this series just gets better with every issue. I really love what Seb and i are building, and building towards.
All of this has been slower than I’d like, but I have to admit my brain is a little bit mushier due to remote teaching. The days feels exceptionally full of concentration, so mustering a bunch of it at 4am isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it’s the life I chose, not the life that chose me. I can still see things moving, so it’s all a win at this point.
I will also hint: all of this comic work exists around not just a day job, but a day job that’s hyper-escalated at the moment in a lockdown, and has come with a temp promotion to do whole school stuff, *and* coincides with me changing jobs. Hell, pretty much changing an entire career path, so it’s very very busy in my brain, with a lot of timelines and work outcomes floating in an ocean of anxiety. There’s excitement in the water, but it feels like I’ve gotta paddle really hard through a few weeks [months] of stuff before I can bask in it.
This just means, for now, I’ll take the wins I can, will lower my targets [especially with the writing], and will focus on getting through all of this smoothly, not perfectly.
Soon, I can write about this work change and explain how insanely awesome it is. It’s a nice feeling to challenge myself.
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The days, they go on and on, they never end.
I was reading Zac Thompson’s newsletter [always good, like his comics, go sub now] and he broke down his day, and reading it I nearly broke down.
To summarise, he gets 2 hours of reading time, 2 hours to outline and noodle with story, and then like 5 hours to script. With an hour lunch break. As I wallowed in my inability to take in such glorious ideas of “time” and because it’s good to get things out of your head, I decided to break down my day in the same way he did. At least looking at this tells me why I’m not as successful in comics as I’d like to be, but also tells me why I’m hopefully being somewhat successful in other parts of my life that I should rank as highly as being able to put some words into tiny works of art that sequentially tell a story. Here’s the short breakdown.
4am - write
6am - exercise
6:30am - start the day/breakfast
7:30am - the workday of teaching begins
5:30pm - return to family/dinner
8:30pm - kids are in bed/marriage time
10pm - sleep.
Okay, and here’s the stupidly exhaustive unpacking of all this...enter at your own peril.
4am - wake up and write.
I make a coffee, dress appropriately for whatever kind of 1 degree weather I might be facing,and shuffle into the office.
As my mind clears, I usually clear some email out, and then look at my Bullet Journal to look at the 1-2 things I might have on my docket that day. Sometimes it’s just to script a few pages, sometimes it’s sending invoices, sometimes it’s just story breaking in a notebook. *All* of the comic writing business occurs in this time.
6am - exercise
I’ve taken to exercising in my office because the kids are normally up watching cartoons and I don’t want to bother them. For those wondering how I maintain this delightful form [insert sexy DJ Squalls gif here] it’s two days of dumbbells and two days of medicine ball. I supplement with a walk most days, and some ninja warrior monkeying around with the kids, too.
I usually listen to a podcast in this time, the daily Coronacast keeps me up to date on Covid info in Australia, and at the moment I’ve been on a kick of Stephen King-based podcasts, so it’s The Kingcast, or Kingsligers [all about The Dark Tower], or The Company of the Mad [all about The Stand].
Wednesday is the exception, wherein I skip exercise and write for an extra 30 minutes.
6:30am - coffee and breakfast and go, go, GO!
Last lockdown, I started a tradition of having a slower start to the day because I didn’t have to commute to work, and so I’d wake the wife with a coffee and we’d chat. Well, we just kept that routine ever since, and it’s served us well into this latest lockdown. I’ll eat breakfast, help the kids if it’s the wife’s day to work, and otherwise just get myself ready to teach for the day.
7:30am - teach.
This start time might fluctuate - but it’s pretty firm in the Old Calendar as I’d be driving to work, and it currently starts here as I message parents and students about the day ahead - but generally from this time I’m ‘on the job.’
I’ll be Mr Lindsay most days until about 5:30pm. The old days would have the commute here [more podcast], prep the classroom and the day’s lessons, teach from 9-3pm, with two breaks in there to eat, prep more lessons, or go on playground duty wherein I wander about and chat with kids and help where needed. I’d then use the afternoon to liaise with colleagues, tend to whole school ICT issues, or create more lesson stuff and try to either innovate the new, or just mark student work on the old.
In lockdown, it’s more like create lesson content from 7:30-10:30am, which means making digital files, filming instructional videos that explain it to the kids [Screencastify is a boss program for that, where you can annotate what you are showing as you do it], and just future thinking about online teaching/learning.
I’ll have a Google Meet daily with my class at 10:30am for half an hour. Always fun, we all need the connection. Once finished, I’ll try to tackle a few small jobs as well as have a break for a snack at this time and stand up from the computer before often having a 12:30pm meeting of some kind [I have 3 scheduled in each week, but often it’s cut back to 2]. If no meeting, I’ll try to make more resources for the kids, or future plan for the staff.
I try to squeeze lunch somewhere in the middle of the day, maybe even go into the backyard with the kids, get some sunlight, and I’m definitely settled back to the desk by 2pm, usually well before.
2-5:30pm becomes a time of finishing any jobs left over from the morning, and then marking student work as it comes in. I keep a comprehensive spreadsheet of student work completion, and quality, and then I leave feedback on their work samples - either big ups, or giving constructive thoughts. I approve a lot of the work for their parents to see, too. Then I take examples, and add up totals of work completed, and I make a short video giving praise to the kids who worked so hard, and showing them what quality output looks like by showcasing actual work from the day. I make sure everyone gets a time in a video in every week, and I make sure I’m as excited about what they are doing as I can possibly emote through this stony frowned facade. I make the video on Flipgrid because you can add stickers to the screen and gifs and text, it’s fun, and really easy. That video goes live the next morning for parents/kids to see, and I have a hit rate of every kid watching it every day, and some parents, too.
Why every parent doesn’t want 5 minutes of me every morning being excited, I don’t know. And I won’t be asking.
5:30pm - family time.
The wife and kids get whatever is left of me as I shamble out of the office at this time. Usually the kids want to play, so we go outside, and we enter this nebulous time of play, dinner, more play, preparing for bed with showers and tv and bedtime reading, and I usually emerge from this familial bubble around 8:30pm.
Lately, while the kids watch something on tv, I’ll do a little more school work to just stay ahead of the game.
8:30pm - slide into the night.
I got to sleep by 10pm most nights, if not a touch before. So this time here becomes time to finish any tidying of the house [if needed, which it usually isn’t], so I’ll maybe watch a little tv with the wife, or chat with her about *things* [anything from the state of the world, to the day we each had, to the state of our bank account, or other huge/trivial matters that arise when conducting the life of running a family while working and trying to stay sane and clean in a pandemic]. Often it’ll end with ~20 minutes of reading in bed, just in time to give me the 6 hours of shut eye I need before hitting that 4am alarm again.
And for those who have asked before, yes, it’s a 4am start every day, weekends, Father’s Day, my birthday, every day.
*exhale* and I wonder why I’m tired. But I’m also keeping projects ticking along, my kids still love spending time with me, I love spending time with my wife, and our house is a great place to be, and I still have a job [one in which I got a temp promotion during lockdown to assist with online teaching, and one which also has big news coming up].
While I wish I was writing 4 different projects at once, and absolutely crushing it with offers from Marvel, and Image, and others, I have to consciously reflect that I’m happy to have the many things I have, and should be thankful for them.
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ASD&D.
Sadly, not a lot of action here. I read through some of the final solo writing RPG zines I’d bought and printed off, and have them all finally graded and annotated with their style and genre and content and such.
I was stoked to find 9 of them were good enough to get an A grade outta me, so that’s a good chunk of really awesome pieces of inspiration, and hopefully fodder I can use in the classroom.
The next steps will be to run some in class, but also to hopefully write one of my own.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
This comic about a post-9/11 world is fascinating - a quick read, and one in which I considered, for what might be the first time, that the US has such a dismantled and dysfunctional education system, and yet we’ve let the products of this system become the leaders of the world and its train of thought. Now the following talks about “the US” a lot, but I don’t mean every US citizen, I mean the crumbled structures of their capitalist leadership. This isn’t shade at people, there are many amazing and spectacularly informed Americans, but this is a short lambast of their general ideology [and not even a majority of it, to be honest, just the loudest part].
The US Military became these ‘world cops,’ shoving their nose into everyone’s business for a century, trying to squash Communism at every turn, trying to set up democracy in their image, and just fucking it up nearly every time along the way. Their record of “victory” in wars is atrocious.
Alongside that, they also push out the most media that’s consumed in “Western” countries, and don’t ever think that movies and tv and music don’t have an influence on how we see the world. Enough media hated on unions that there’s now a whole swathe of people who hate unions - just *all* unions, which I find insane. Hate a corrupt union, in the specific, sure, but the concept of people banding together for a better hand at negotiating for rights, why would you hate that? The kind of thinking that “All unions are money/power hoarding assholes” became the same thinking that every Muslim guy with a beard is a terrorist, thanks to a few decades of that being the only representation on screens. Views on drugs, people with darker skin, certain cities/countries, it’s all heavily influenced by movies/media because often that’s the only interaction people have with those elements of the world, so it’s natural to take your views from your favourite characters, as we also do from our parents, until we’re old enough to engage with the world and form our own views.
Think about how many lone wolf vigilante cop-style characters we viewed in action movies over the past 50 years, and think about the generation of gun-toting Americans who are no doubt a product of this power fantasy.
So, we let this view, this force, come from a country that has spent decades running an education system that’s nowhere near first class in the world. Why have we been listening to this voice? Well, there’s probably a reason - the babble effect means that in an absence of leadership most people will turn to the person who talks the most. Not the person most qualified, not the person with the proper traits, no, the person who makes the most noise with their mouthhole. Insane. But I think that’s happened for the US because they sure have a national identity of talking, and on the global stage it had been a while since an empire had tried to really push and expand, and in that moment they stood at the front, atop their terrorist nuclear bombs, and spoke, a lot, and the world listened. Not in every country, but US thought has been the leading thought for media, news, views, since as long as I can remember.
I get the feeling [the hope] that might change, because it needs to. If they can’t even inform themselves very well, why would we want them solely informing us? I think a shift in their own perspective, as well as different media consumption diets from around the world will be a good thing in the coming years to come.
Body Horror and Cronenberg/Barker - a quick read, but one with a few good thoughts/quotes.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD - this flick, it’s interesting and worth diving into. But I think that’s to pick it apart as much to celebrate it. I definitely liked the movie, there’s plenty to love, but there are slices of it that just don’t gel with my brain. It feels longer than it needs to be, extended shots of people walking, driving, existing do a lot for mood and character, but at over two and a half hours, I couldn’t help but wish some had been trimmed, and I don’t think we’d have lost much in those cuts. Does the bloat ruin the flick? No. But it makes it feel like something else. Just a thought.
The main characters are both captivating, and each gets a chance to shine. DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, an aging Western star watching the world pass him by. There’s a whole sequence of him flubbing his lines and then coming back to shine that is genuinely beautiful. Watching his panic set in the moment he screws a line is so real, and in the end he’s elated to the point of tears when some tv director tells him he loved a take, and following on that some 8 year old also tells him it’s the best acting she’s ever seen, which is hilarious because she’s 8, how much acting has she really seen, and even though she’s precocious, what does she really know from quality. She’s most likely just regurgitating the world around her in a firm voice, as many precocious 8yo’s do, and she seems to at the start when she talks about needing to stay in character on set, even while not filming. But it’s this low level of acceptance that gets DiCaprio’s Dalton teary-eyed. That tells you everything you need to know about the character.
Then there’s Pitt’s stuntman, who is the opposite because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks, he only wants to stay with Dalton. He just wants to keep having this one connection, whereas Dalton wants to connect with the whole damn world, though you have to wonder if that’s true. It could just be Dalton wants to be “accepted.” It’s not art he’s seeking, it’s fame. Pitt’s central sequence might be his walk through the ranch where the Manson Family lives, and his determination to check that everything is alright. You have to wonder about his motives here. Does he really give a shit? Or is he genuinely worried that some old Hollywood guy is being taken advantage of? Does Pitt’s Booth worry about being taken advantage of because that’s how he felt with his wife, powerless? His wife who berated him, made him feel like less, and who it strongly seems he killed, and got away with the murder. What is Booth’s motivation except to see that people get their chance to shine. He’s not really about shining himself, he just lives with his dog, works behind the scenes for Dalton, but he wants the best for others, perhaps as he never got that for himself. Perhaps. His character arc feels a little more nebulous for me, he’s more a tool for Dalton’s arc of desperately wanting to feel accepted, to feel worthwhile through external validation. And, I guess, how hard that can be in a world, and an industry, where those external people, their metrics of success, and the whole social climate can continue to change.
As a recreation of a time period, Tarantino perfects every little moment. From the neon signs, to the dog food labels, to the ice maker, to the tape decks. He’s so steeped in nostalgia and wanting to recreate his formative years that it’s impressive, and immersive, but that’s not the story. And I think that's where I fall over on his work sometimes. He’s so obsessed with not just “what’s cool” but what he absolutely “believes is cool” that he thinks everyone else will care. And it does work. Michael Madsen sipping a soda or milkshake or whatever it was in RESERVOIR DOGS works. The briefcase with the bright light works. The minutiae is his work. But it’s not the story. So I found myself looking past the set dressing and thinking about the two guys at the heart of this story, and I locked into the way Tarantino shows their tension and desperation on the screen, the way they clash with this world they find themselves in, and I can see how genius he is as a storyteller. He drags you into it all, and there are some truly masterful moments on the screen. But they aren’t the whole time, and perhaps that’s too much to ask.
I will say, for the final sequence, I think the story works best if you assume that whole violent nightmare is an acid-induced trip, and not real. SPOILERS: but Booth smokes an acid-dipper cigarette and comes home to trip out and feed his dog at Dalton’s house. Three of the Manson Family enter to kill whoever is in the house after Dalton screams at the group in the street because of their shitbox car. Booth goes on a one-man killing spree that’s exceptionally difficult to watch as the dog can crushes one woman’s nose, and then the dog attacks two of them viciously, while Booth grabs one by the hair and slams her head into every surface he can find.
There are a few things that lead me towards leaning on the side of this being a trip hallucination and not real:
Firstly, well, the Manson Family didn’t enter this house in real life, they went up the hill to the Polanski residence. But that’s pretty thin.
Secondly, Booth has his dog’s food in Dalton’s cabinet, and I just don’t get why he’d have it there. I’ve been told Booth housesits for Dalton, so he’s stay there, so he’d have food there, but I don’t quite know if I buy it. It feels like an inconsistency that’s large enough for me to wonder if Booth went home and then made up this violent fantasy to make himself feel better.
Thirdly, this fantasy completely fixes everything for both Booth and Dalton, very sweetly. Booth gets to use his physicality to help/save his friend, literally his job as a stunt double. Booth also no doubt sets himself up to maintain his connection with Dalton after this when the whole point of this drunken night was to say goodbye as Dalton wouldn’t be able to justify having him around anymore for money and marital constraints. Now, sure, they could have remained friends, pals, whatever, but it would have waned. With this bond, they’re forged for life as brothers of war *and* it raises Dalton’s profile, which means Booth in turn will probably get more work with him, too.
This fantasy also allows Dalton to fulfill his fantasy in that by surviving, and killing one of the family members, he’s invited up for drinks to the Polanski house. He’s finally being accepted by the new Hollywood, something he clearly desperately yearns for. So this fantasy wraps both of those character journeys up perfectly for them both.
Fourthly, why the hell would Dalton still have a working flamethrower from a movie he’d previously made? That seems like some bullshit macho made up thing a guy would want to believe, or would hope for, because it’s the most bad ass he’s ever seen his friend.
Fifthly, the sequence is just so brutally violent to two women, and nowhere near as much to the man, and I can’t help but think that suits Booth’s particular flavour of masculinity as we’ve already seen that hated his wife deeply [enough to kill her with a harpoon gun], and Kurt Russell’s wife, played by Zoe Bell, also hats him and gets him fired. He picks up the hitchhiker who’s clearly a sexual catfish there to lure him to a ranch full of women living a life of duping and manipulating men. Hell, even his best buddy is about to cut their relationship because he’s married some woman he met while filming in Italy. I think Booth isn’t a big fan of women, so him smashing some young hippie girl’s head to paste on every surface in the house check out as a fantasy he’d quite enjoy, especially deep in the acid-unlocked bowels of his brain. He even lets his buddy get into the action by torching the other woman alive in his pool.
And sixthly, this whole flick is a fairy tale, and, well, fairy tales are not true. Neither is this ending.
This is completely just a personal read, I’m not trying to state it as fact, but it was fun to analyse and dive into. If I ever rewatch this flick, it’ll be to further analyse this hypothesis from the start and see what kind of a case I could really build.
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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
BLACK BEACON #3 is scheduled for release on September 22
ETERNAL hits shelves for a second time on September 29
EVERFROST #4 wraps everything up on October 6
It’s a busy few weeks ahead, and I’m excited for all of it.
Excellent newletter as always. I particualarly enjoy the bit about American Americanism. I live in a country that has been raised on the concepts of 'American exceptionalism' which basically means that 'we are the exception to every rule (including our own).' It's particularly fascinating seeing how people react to our broken system from the outside. I hate it, I hope to one day get away from it, and I thank your for dropping some realistic perspective on it all.
From at least one American that agrees with the rest of the world, thank you. Have a great one man. I look forward to the next one!
P.S. I love Zac Thompson's books and newsletter as well!