post-post-modern-man asked: You might have answered this elsewhere already, and I missed it, but it's the current Giant Days storyline a re-run? Maybe this is a refresher for Part 3? I swear I've read the beginning of it it before, the part where it was mostly Ed Gemmel, but the past week or so with the party and Esther confronting Steve is not registering in my memory. If so, part of me is grateful that I can't recall it clearly, it's like I'm really getting my money's worth (especially with it being free). Thanks!
The first week was a re-run (filling my normal week break after a Bad Machinery), the rest has been ALL NEW 4-YOU!
Getting Bad Machinery Volume 1 outside N. America
I’ve had a number of messages from people struggling to get the Bad Machinery book outside the USA, particularly in the UK and Australia. Here’s what to do:
1. If you have a local comic shop, they can order it for you if it’s not in stock. Just ask! It’s in the system.
2. In the UK? Amazon.co.uk has it. If you use this link, I get a little bit of extra cash that way. Hate Amazon’s tax-dodging ways? Use Foyles.
3. In Australia? Kings Comics has it. I’m afraid you can only get the hardcover direct from Topatoco or direct from Oni Press.
If you want a personalised book, I will be selling adhesive personalised bookplates from the beginning of May.
The Loud Family, “Sister Sleep”
Girl, being close hurts
so I’ve called from the outskirts
with road noise from a phone booth
so we won’t hear the whole truthScott Miller is one of the most verifiably underrated songwriters ever, at least in terms of who knew about him compared to who, in a just world, should have known about them. Call it Big Star Syndrome, especially apt since that band was an obvious influence on both of Miller’s projects, Game Theory and The Loud Family.
The Loud Family were integral to my emotional survival strategy during my college years. Scott Miller taught me that brainy multisyllabic lyrics had a place in pop music, along with unironic guitar hooks. That pop music could be funny and still take itself seriously. That fiendishly clever writing could also be unfathomably sad (I was still a year away from discovering David Foster Wallace). That a fragile, vulnerable falsetto, from the right singer, is its own kind of agile virtuosity. That sometimes a sunshine-bright 4/4 chorus is, perversely, just as effective at helping you get over an unrequited crush as a moody ambient dirge. Sometimes better.
last few holidays, I was only thinking
how to get away, numb the chat with drinking
still thinking like a son, saying something clever
they’re here to push against, they won’t be foreverTwo of the people whose opinions I respect most in the world, my best friend Wes and the inimitable music writer Glenn MacDonald, introduced me to the Loud Family and burnished my appreciation for Miller’s songwriting. Aimee Mann performed with and celebrated him. Eons before it was obligatory for indie-rock artists to interact with their fans on social media, Miller had a Q&A column on his website where he answered questions about everything from the San Francisco power-pop scene to post-structuralism to David Foster Wallace to 9/11. I asked him a dumb question about prog rock and he answered that he was an unabashed Yes fan.
For a few years in the late 90s, it seemed to me like the hook was returning to pop music and music was getting smart again—smart being an admittedly fraught term, but here meant in the most open-armed, least elitist way possible. I temporarily put my Difficult Music—prog, ambient, noise, post-hardcore—behind me and drank Scott Miller’s kool-aid.
The Loud Family laid dormant for most of the past decade. Every once in a while I’d do a web search to see if Miller was up to anything, but in an age saturated with 90s indie revivalism and reunions, there was hardly a blip from him. Obviously I didn’t listen hard enough, because I didn’t know about his book until tonight.
I’m now belatedly realizing that Scott Miller was the third part of a kind of holy trinity, along with Wallace and my own father, who inspired me to become a writer, to value narrative symmetry and elegance of expression, to take risks, and most of all to be vulnerable by letting others read my words. The early results of my efforts were horrifyingly jejune, but that’s inevitable, they were a necessary first step in my evolution as a thinker and a person. My dad taught me to love reading and passed on to me a gift with words; Miller taught me to appreciate wordplay and allusion; Wallace taught me to have fun while still Meaning Every Word.
So yeah, I guess I’m feeling pretty bereft tonight.
There’s no way to a quasar
they’re flung out from us too far
just by chance, maybe not more
we could touch what we lived for
ferociousleaf asked: OK, so Giant days has me seriously distraught right now, I'm an 18 year old male why are you making me feel these things!? But yeah love the comics, keep up the awesome work.
Thank you! I need my readers to run the gamut of emotions, up here in my ivory tower, all I can do is pull levers and watch the madness unfold below.
scornographer asked: What's the deal with Susan Ptolemy's razor sharp fangs? Random character trait, or is there some Erin Winters supernatural business afoot?
Susan shows that you don’t have to have great teeth to be a great person.
I can think of few better suited to a New Yorker cover than Luke. And it’s a great one. Here’s to many more!
My cover for The New Yorker’s Journeys issue
undeadoctopus asked: Why doesn't The Case of the Unwelcome Visitor have a little book cover yet like the other stories?
I invite you to guess the answer to this one (it has one now)
