Weeknotes 1.4 (Jan 29, 2020)

Look at that… a whole month of actually doing these updates every week. A person could make a habit out of this.

Feeling and Thinking:

I’m starting to catch up with little bits of my life I’ve had to put off for months: making doctor’s appointments, taking things to the post office to be mailed, fixing things around the apartment. Everything I mean to do takes 100x times longer to actually get to than it should, which frustrates me. I know, I know, it’s my disease, it’s not me. (Still feels like I should blame me, though.) Finally crossing a few things off my very long to-do list has been… comforting.

Watching:

This week has been terrible for pain so I stayed in and caught up on some of my queue while drawing/emailing/anything else I could do without moving much. I watched the whole season of October Faction on Netflix, and all of The Witcher. I watched the final two eps of the CW Crossover event (I’d seen the first three in December). I’m staying current with CW’s Nancy Drew, Legacies, and Batwoman each week too.

I don’t love Batwoman but I’m giving it a shot this season because it’s doing enough novel things I want to see where it goes, and support more media with lesbian superheroes, multiple black main characters, Asian social media darlings, female villains that aren’t all about weaponizing sex appeal, etc etc. Maybe this show will never rise to the level I’m hoping for, but you have to vote with your wallets (or eyeballs) now if you want to see more interesting work in the future.

Legacies and Nancy Drew are still both exactly as advertised: tonally consistent gems that delight me each time I watch. There are very few shows I watch as they happen instead of waiting for the season to be over so I can binge it online a year later. (Technically I watch these via the CW app, but I tune in as soon as they drop every week.)

October Faction was a surprise. It’s humans v monsters v giant faceless evil army, with the nice twist of being at least half told through the PoV of the parents who’ve been married 20 years. They had a weight to their relationship, familiarity and flaws, you don’t usually get to see in a team of monster hunters; they were my favorite part. I hadn’t heard anything about October Faction until I saw it on Netflix, gave it a shot. I like it, and I hope it gets renewed. It went to a few predictable places, but it was solid throughout.

I was afraid I wound’t love The Witcher because I’m terribly hype-adverse. If “everyone” pushes me to watch or read something, I usually don’t. (I’ll catch up later, once the pressure is off.) Everyone raved about The Witcher, but I gave it a chance anyway. And I did love it. It’s dark but well-thought out, corrects some things from the games/books I didn’t like, is bloody and sexy without overly focusing on either of those things. Henry Cavill is excellent as the terse witcher, by the way.

Reading:

Not as much as usual. Warren Ellis’s advice for pitching comic books, a great essay on how Cuphead (the video game) can’t separate itself from the racism of the art style it emulates, and another about the connection between bombs and bras. Links below; each one is worth reading.

Extra Bits:

I finished the page of bones and climbing flowers I mentioned last week:

References:

• “Some Advice on Pitching from Warren Ellis“, Comic Book Script Archive (date unknown)
• “Cuphead and the Racist Spectre of Fleischer Animation“, Unwinnable, Yussef Cole, Nov 10, 2017.
• “Containing Explosives: The Cold War Link between Bombs and Breasts“, Nursing Clio, Emily O’Donnell-Pazderka, Jan 14, 2020.