I’m on Spring Break this week! We’re going to the beach! Much fun, so excite!
That’s looking forward though. Looking back on the week, things were aggressively fine. The mask mandate ended, and there was not massive social upheaval at work as kids and staff quietly divided themselves up into the done-with-maskers and the nope-not-yet crowd (as well as a smaller third group I think of as the contextuals who let the present moment dictate whether they were masked up or not). Apparently the messaging about witholding judgment of other peoples’ decisions worked well enough. Hooray. We’ll see how things look after a couple weeks and there’s been time to track whether we see a rise in infections coinciding with dropping indoor mask requirements. Otherwise, work was fine, I did some fanart that I like pretty well, and we’re finally opening up into spring time after the long winter.
Art
I finished a comic page, and it looks pretty good, but I haven’t shared it yet because I haven’t written the rest of the story that it goes with. Given how slowly I produce pages, I’d rather not put out an unfinished thing when there’s still a lot of planning and writing left to do (let alone actually drawing the thing). The stuff I have shared this week is all fanart based on the new Hellfire Gala looks that dropped in anticipation of the big one shot they’re doing at the end of June. Wolverine’s look is the obvious banger of the set, and I rushed to get a piece together based on the main cover preview before Marvel revealed the piece with a full look at her outfit. There are some front details that I missed because they just weren’t visible in the reference I worked from, but I think I did a strong piece. I’m doing my best to remain proud of my work without despairing over it only making a small splash on Twitter. The algorithm hates everyone, so I’m keeping in mind that it’s not personal. Also, I’m very much not a professional artist, so I constantly have to temper my expectations against the reality that I can’t produce stuff as flashy as what other folks who get paid for their work do. I also did a portrait of Magik that was fun (I got a specific compliment on the eyes, which was satisfying since that’s an element I tried to do better than normal), although as I’ve complained on Twitter, I’m just not super into the all-black Alien bodysuit thing. Anyway, here’s my work on Twitter.
Comics
Setting aside anticipation for a thing that happens in three months, I felt like it was a pretty fun comics week. I read the two latest issues of Eternals, which continues to do exactly what I want Kieron Gillen books to do, and I’m slowly getting excited about the “Judgment Day” event that’s going to happen over the summer. I don’t usually care one way or another about events, but it’s Gillen doing his thing with X-Men and Eternals, so I’m sure it’ll be a blast. Also probably upsetting. Never get too attached to anyone in a Kieron Gillen story; they will probably suffer horribly and then you will have to deal with the psychic damage.
My primary reading for the week was to finish the Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti run on Harley Quinn. I had heard for a while that it was a good run that does a lot of rehabilitate the character into a lovable anti-hero, and I’d say that overall it hits those beats pretty well. Having finished it now, I’m not sure if it was entirely my thing, but it was a fun diversion from the usual superhero melodrama I typically enjoy. It was a shame that their last arc is collected in a trade with the beginning of Frank Tieri’s run, so I ended my reading with some stories by him that are significantly less good. He seems to get the emotional core of Conner & Palmiotti’s version of Harley, but he’s also the kind of straight male writer who clearly has no problem throwing in casual homophobic jokes and hiding behind the fact that he’s writing a book that’s supposed to feel grimy as a defense. Final takeaways for me are that it was a fun detour into material for a character whose mainstream presentation has been kind of shallow in recent years (aside from the animated series, which is truly a gem), but there’s not enough there to keep me coming back.
Books
I’m still plugging away through The Somebody People, and I finally got through the first part the other night. It was kind of rough doing about two hundred pages of “so this is where we are now” with the characters that survived from The Nobody People. I was surprised by how refreshing it felt to reach an interlude about Kevin Bishop and Raymond Glover; it honestly felt like a completely different story for about fifteen pages before the casual existential horror set back in. On the bright side, it’s Spring Break, and I need a beach book, so I think I’ll make some good progress on this one.
Media
Rachael and I watched Soul last weekend as the latest in our ongoing Pixar catch up project. It was good! I’d say its primary appeal is visual, although the story was sweet, and probably a little more memorable than Onward was.
We finished watching the second season of Space Force, which was definitely better overall than the first season. I think pivoting into a more Parks & Recreation vibe where everyone is generally competent and likes working together was a good choice. If it gets a third season, I’d enjoy spending more time with these characters now.
While we’re in the process of giving old shows another chance, we’ve also begun watching the second season of Sex Education. This show’s deeply strange because it does a lot of really good work presenting the current state of what good sex ed looks like in charming ways, but it also seems to have a big problem with not going to the queer tragedy well for Eric’s subplots. We’re only about halfway through the second season right now, and both Rachael and I are not thrilled with Eric getting romantically involved with the boy who bullied and assaulted him in the first season. I’m hoping the show understands that we shouldn’t feel good about this development, but we’ll see where it goes.
Pandemic
I think I actually put most of my thoughts about this in the intro this week. Hard not to think about it when much of the meat space trend seems to revolve around trying very hard not to think about it. Don’t think about pink polar bears, yeah?
Coffee Shops
I have not been to a coffee shop this week.