My Life in the Bush of Wombats

I am hurrying to get my Hugo nominations in (deadline is March 31!) and made up this list of the f/sf comics stories that came out/wrapped up in 2015:

Bitch Planet Book One (issues 1-5), Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro
Bizzaro (issues 1-6), Heath Corson, Gustavo Duarte, et al
Book of Death: Fall of Harbinger, Joshua Dysart, Kano, et al.
Colder: The Bad Seed, Paul Tobin and Juan Ferreyra
Conan the Avenger: Blood Oasis (Conan the Avenger issues 16-19), Fred van Lente, Brian Ching, et al
Crossed Plus 100 vol. 1 (issues 1-6), Alan Moore, Gabriel Andrade, et al.
Empowered vol. 9, Adam Warren
Heart in a Box, Kel Thompson and Meredith McClaren
Here, Richard McGuire
Kaijumax Season One (issues 1-6), Zander Cannon
Knights of the Dinner Table: The Pwn Brian Express (through issue 222), Jolly Blackburn et al
Ms Marvel: Final Days, G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona
Mind MGMT (complete series), Matt Kindt
Prez: Corndog-in-Chief, Mark Russell, Ben Caldwell, and Mark Morales
Private Eye, Bryan K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin
Sandman: Overture, Neil Gaiman and J. H. Williams III
Satellite Sam, Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin
Sculptor, Scott McCloud
Secret Wars: Siege, Kieron Gillen, Filipe Andrade, et al.
Silver Surfer: Last Days (issues 11-15), Dan Slott and Mike Allred
Southern Cross, Becky Cloonan and Andy Belanger
The Life After vol. 2, Joshua Hale Fialkov and Gabo
Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel You Know It's True, Ryan North and Erica Henderson
Unwritten: Apocalypse, Mike Carey and Peter Gross
Wayward: Ties that Bind (issues 6-10), Jim Zub and Steven Cummings
Wicked and the Divine: Commercial Suicide (issues 12-17), Kieron Gillen, Jaime McKelvie, and many artists

I'm disappointed in myself that so few of the comics here are written by women (just 4 out of 26). I did read a lot of other comics written by women that didn't quite make this list, but I honestly would have expected better than 15% in my long list.

The following text was written by my friend Greg Costikyan and posted to his blog at Gamasutra. It was then deleted by Gamasutra. If Greg asks me to take it down, I will do so.

If you don't know what #GamerGate refers to and feel a morbid interest in the privilege-laden cruelty of the worst of the gaming community, I'd recommend starting with Video Games, Misogyny, and Terrorism: A Guide to Assholes and stopping there, too, then taking a long shower and, upon emerging, playing a good game with someone you love.

Gamersgate: STFU
by Greg Costikyan on 09/07/14 12:55:00 am

"As a male voice in the game industry," writes my daughter Vicky, "you should speak out about this."

Ouch.

I wanted to hold my tongue. Because when I let loose, it usually does me no favors. But she's right.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

What do you think you're defending? An industry in which greed-head executives make brain-dead games on a yearly basis that show little to no innovation from one title to the next? You fucking -want- Madden? And the next Call of Duty game, same as the last but with new content from hundreds of exploited drones working hours that destroy relationships because the suits think that's what they want?

For decades, we had a market that catered to Maxim-reading horny boy-men who bought games by developers who spent man-years on developing better physics to make tits bounce in the next beach volleyball title. For decades, we had shameless manager jackasses who thought the best way to market their titles was to hire high-breasted bimbos to pose and giggle at their booths at E3.

For decades, we had the best creative minds of our industry SHUT DOWN whenever they proposed the slightest design innovation, because increasing budgets meant all design risk must be minimized.

For decades, we had no way for people who wanted to do anything creative be able to find any path to market.

Finally, finally, and thank god, we have a viable path of market for indies, and a way for people who want to express themselves through games that will never sell in the millions to find a market. And you find that a PROBLEM?

What kind of blinkered idiots you are?

And of course, indies do whatever the fuck they can to get noticed, because they don't have MILLIONS OF MARKETING DOLLARS TO SPEND. What the fuck would you expect?

Let me explain something do you. Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision: Mutimillionare. Anna Anthrophy? Stroppy indie developer who probably has problems paying her rent. Who has the power here? What the fuck are you talking about?

There's some kind of conspiracy by the in-group to promote indie games at the expense of "real" games? What the fuck are you talking about? Who cares who Zoe Quinn fucked, or didn't fuck? It's none of your fucking business, unless you were one of the people involved, and most of you would give your left kidney to fuck her, if you had any brains. You are unlikely ever to touch anyone with an iota of her talent or intelligence.

And what does that even mean? Have you suddenly noticed that the game industry is undergoing weird changes as a result of this supposed conspiracy? The next Call of Duty being cancelled in favor of triple-A treatment of the next Anna Anthropy design?

Do people who actually care about whether games can be more than degraded violence porn for young men sometimes get together and talk about games that actually matter? And do they sometimes write about such games?

You're fucking right they do! And you should be fucking grateful that someday a more mature and interesting landscape of videogames may emerge from that! That's not what we call "conspiracy;" that's what we call "gamers who care about games."

And what is it with this mysoginistic bullshit?

I want to tell you some stories.

1. The studio head who invited me -and a female employee- to join them at a strip club at a conference, expecting we would all enjoy this as a 'fun time.'

2. The party given by an industry marketing firm where I and Dan Scherlis were approached by a scantily clad woman who was evidently hired to show their clients a good time (not necessarily including actual fornication) and had to explain that we were both involved with people we cared about, and actually were having a perfectly enjoyable time talking to each other.

3. The -very- gay friend of mine who was hired by another firm and started sweating when I approached their booth at a conference, in fear that I would reveal his sexual orientation to his new boss.

4. My friend, Dan Bunten, a seminal figure in early PC gaming, who decided he was a woman, and after extensive surgery, became Danielle Bunten Berry. "Shabbily treated" wouldn't even begin to describe it.

I have no idea why gender and such is even an issue in this conversation. Women have always been a minority in the games industry, to its loss; but they have never been entirely missing. Roberta Williams created the Sierra adventures. Brenda Garno, later Brathwaite, later Romero, was one of the key talents behind the Wizardry series.

If you look at recent IGDA surveys, 80+% of all jobs in the industry are held by men. This is a problem, particularly as industry surveys say that a majority of gamers are women. To be sure, they're playing Candy Crush and not Call of Duty, and maybe that doesn't qualify as a "real game" to you, but if so, fuck off. Games are games, games are good, and it's great that more people are playing them. Stop masturbating with your console controller and get a life.

Anita Sirkeesian has told some pretty obvious truths about the treatment of women in games; controversial ones, and others are free to debate them, but "debate" doesn't normally involve threats to rape or kill.

You can like, or not like, Zoe Quinn's work; tastes vary. But her sex life is not, and never has been, any of your fucking business.

Leigh Alexander is one of the most interesting journalists working in games.

This is bullshit, you are assholes, and shut the fuck up.

Deal with the fact that not all games are, or will be in the future, the same corporate crap that you apparently love so much. And understand that the money-grubbing entities who dole out this crap will continue to feed your fix, because it's a far larger market than is reached by the indie people, whom you despise and spit on, can possibly ever hope to reach.

You're attacking people who have problems making their rent, apparently in defense of people who make millions off your fanboy lusts; and somehow feel threatened by people who love games -- as I supposed you do -- but love games that are a little different.

You are assholes.

Worse, you are poor examples of men. Men, good men, defend women. They do not attack them.

To which end: To defend the honor of Anita Sirkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander, or yes, Anna Anthropy, I will be willing to meet any of you, on horse or afoot, with sword or pistol, at a time and place of your choosing.

It is time this stopped.

I remember nellorat once saying words to the effect of, “Christianity would be much better if it focused on the image of La Pietà instead of obsessing on the Crucifixion.”

I feel the same way about “There Is No Hope in Crime Alley” vis-à-vis The Dark Knight Returns.

Happy Batman day, Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff, Denny O’Neil and Dick Giordano, for all we, the superstitious and cowardly lot.

(This is not the most pretentious thing I have ever written about comics.)

I'm sure I'm the last person to prepare a nominating ballot, but here are 19 18 sf/f/h comics stories that were completed in 2013 that I suggest to your memory:

Alabaster: Wolves, Caitlin Kiernan & Steve Lieber
Archer & Armstrong: Far Faraway, Fred Van Lente & Pere Perez
BEDLAM vol. 1, Nick Spencer & Riley Rossmo
Chew: Bad Apples, John Layman & Rob Guillory
Colder, Paul Tobin & Juan Ferreyra
Dial H: Exchange, China Mieville & Mateus Santolouco
Doctor Who: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who, Paul Cornell & Jimmy Broxton
Empowered Volume 8, Adam Warren
Glory: War Torn, Joe Keatinge & Ross Campbell
Leaving Megalopolis, Gail Simone & Joe Califiore
Locke and Key: Alpha and Omega, Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
Mind MGMT: The Futurist, Matt Kindt
Morning Glories Season 1, Nick Spencer & Joe Eisma
Prophet: Empire, Brandon Graham & Simon Roy
Saucer Country: The Reticulan Candidate, Paul Cornell & Ryan Kelly
Storm Dogs, David Hine & Doug Braithwaite
Uber vol. 1, Kieron Gillen & Canaan White
Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship that Sank Twice, Michael Carey & Peter Gross
You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, Tom Gauld

(The Tom Gauld is actually a collection of single-page cartoons, but I'm pretty sure it still qualifies.)

ETA: I forgot about the Doctor Who comic because, although it came out on December 31, I didn't read it until the following week; thus it wasn't in my list of comics I read in 2013.

ETA again: I guess the Gauld isn't a "story" in any meaningful sense, so I'm nominating it for "Related Work" instead.

Going to be tough narrowing that down to 5.

My grandmother had a younger brother, Manny, who (with his lovely wife Katrina) had seven children. Five of my cousins* live in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and have been asking me to come visit them for, I exaggerate not at all, 27 years. Well, I'm finally here.

*Strictly speaking, they are my first-cousins-once-removed, but screw that. Cousins it is.

I am staying with cousin Wanda and her husband Ken in Southlake; they took me out for some superb BBQ at Feedstore BBQ on South White Chapel Blvd, which apparently really was a feed store that sold BBQ on the side until they realized where their strengths really lay. The ribs are among the best BBQ ribs I've ever had, and the fries and fried okra were very strong as well.

Today, my cousin Sylvia and her husband Roy took me to the one tourist attraction I really was not going to miss: Dealey Plaza. We spent about 15 minutes walking the site--the locations of the limousine on Elm Street are helpfully marked with Xs, and there were information hobos helpfully pointing out interesting things like the rail switching tower from which Lee Bowers thought he saw smoke behind the wall atop the Grassy Knoll. I stood by the pylon from which Zapruder made his film and realized that if someone HAD been shooting from there, he would have had to have known--he was, like, 5 feet away from the wall himself. So that was informative. Then we took the tour of the Sixth Floor Museum, which was surprisingly great. Besides the thrill of morbid authenticity of seeing the sniper's nest and the approximate view a shooter there would have had (you can't look out sniper's window, but you can look out an adjacent one), the museum itself is an extremely well-made JFK retrospective, covering his entire life, death, and legacy as well as the rounds of examination of the assassination. Display objects are well-chosen (e.g., cameras like those carried by the various witnesses; actual teletype rolls); the descriptions on the objects are well-written and fair; there are several extremely good short films on the subjects.

The exhibit doesn't flinch from the assassination; in one of the best pieces of the museum, a short hallway has stills from the Zapruder film on one wall and stills from another film from a reverse angle on the opposite wall. (I think this is the Nix film.) The exhibit presents a wide variety of alternate interpretations respectfully, if briefly. All in all, time and money very well-spent, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to one and all.

Tomorrow we are going to Fort Worth's landmark Mexican restaurant Joe T. Garcia's, and then I'm taking a bus to Austin. I'll be there overnight and then head down to San Antonio on Thursday for Worldcon.

My cousins are wonderful hosts, and it has been great spending many uninterrupted hours in their company, getting more of a sense of them as individuals. I highly recommend sharing ancestors with them.

Last Friday, I started noticing occasional pain in my left ribcage and shortness of breath. For reasons I've explained at length before, these are worrying symptoms, but they were so intermittent that I didn't reach the obvious conclusion. I was also occasionally coughing.

Well. By Wednesday evening, the pain and the shortness of breath were much more undeniable and were accompanied by thoughts of impending doom--the embolism trifecta. So when I got home--after a very uncomfortable train ride from Grand Central--I informed supergee & nellorat that I needed to go to the emergency room. I had intended to drive myself, but Nellorat said, "Call an ambulance--I'm not going to have you stopping breathing on the way."

The ambulance was there pretty quickly. I walked in, laid down on the stretcher, and they gave me oxygen and asked me questions. The key question, that hadn't occurred to me, was "Does it hurt when I touch you here?"--with "here" being a muscle group immediately to the left of my left nipple. Holy shit, did it ever! And it was clearly muscle pain, not pain within the lung. Which, frankly, solved the entire question, as far as I was concerned.

On Monday last (April 15), my ear/nose/throat doctor gave me a steroid shot in the hope that it would reduce my allergic response. I'm strongly allergic to aspergillum mold and mildly allergic to rat urine. The injection was quick and painless, but I've been sore at the injection site, my left triceps, ever since.

What I hadn't realized was that the pain was spreading to other muscles on my left side, especially in the shoulder and the chest. When the EMT touched the muscle (pretty sure it's the pectoralis major), he made me realize exactly how much pain I was carrying through the surface. I was in pain, yes, and breathing shallowly as a result.

But by that point, I had started down the ER path, and it wasn't really possible to step off. N. met me at the hospital, for which I'm eternally grateful. I was checked in, put on a bed in a hallway, and then basically ignored until midnight, at which point I told N. to go home, since it was clear that no one, including me, thought I was in any real danger. The night dragged on; there were several screaming children over the course of my stay, and I can barely even recreate how horrible it must be to be in screaming pain and too young to communicate about it. But at least the screaming covered up any snoring I engaged in as I dozed on my hallway bed.

I eventually got an ultrasound reading on my legs and (far later) a CAT scan with iodine contrast, pretty much the same diagnostics I got during my last embolism scare. There was absolutely no sign of unwanted clotting, so I was finally released around 5:30 AM on Thursday with a prescription of "take a lot of Naproxen right now and then a lot of ibuprofen over the next few days while the pain persists."

Lessons learned:

A) Steroid shots: don't just blindly accept them.
B) If possible, don't go to an ER in the evening.
C) If I think I have an embolism, tell them to do a full-body CAT rather than letting them waste time with an ultrasound. If there's a clot in my legs, the CAT will find it.
D) Bring a mass-market paperback rather than a heavy trade paperback. My left arm was very sore from the muscle problems, my right arm was sore from the IV, and my phone battery ran low long before I was sent home, so I had nothing to read for long periods.
E) Everyone should have a pussycat to keep them company. Oh, wait, I knew that one already.
F) I am so glad I have health insurance. I hate living in a country where that's an issue.

Here's a comics Kickstarter project that showed up on The Comics Beat today. It looks like an interesting project--pretty colored pencil work with a decent visual storytelling sense.

I doubt I'll be backing it.

Most of the Kickstarter projects I back are games, comics, or books. The books and games I back are almost always competitively priced with professional publications--because a lot of them are professional publications, from established companies using KS as a risk mitigator, or from new companies that have really thought through the business implications. Books likewise.

Comics, though--it really seems like the prices are chosen by "I'd like to make $X on this comic, let's just set the price wherever we want and hope for the best."

I groused a few days ago about how overpriced many comics Kickstarters are. This one--Elysia--looks like a poster-child for that. #25 ($38) plus #8 ($12) shipping for a 100-page, magazine-format, paperback color GN? That's INSANE, even before you take into account the fact that the creators are receiving approximately 90% of the cover price as opposed to the 50-60% they'd be receiving if they went through a distributor--in other words, they're making as much per copy as if it were an $55 book.

I don't expect a small press to be able to compete with the economies of scale available to Image or Dark Horse, let alone Marvel or DC. But an original 100-page color GN from Dark Horse would cost in the $25-30 range, and they aren't getting paid up front!

How do these prices make any sense at all?

Well, as I write this, Elysia is about 75% of the way to funding. Only 112 people have backed packages that concentrate on the comics themselves; about half of the funds come from another 14 buyers who have backed packages that include custom art, original art, Tuckerization, or a full customized story. (This is the big Magilla--at #5000, this one customer constitutes one-third of the funding so far.) The low-end rewards are for digital editions, which come closer to reasonable pricing, at #10 ($15) for the 100-page first chapter.

Maybe that's the problem? They're pricing the PDF high enough to not completely undercut the possibility of paper sales, but then they have to price the paper versions even higher because of the substantial printing costs, which leads to them leapfrogging themselves out of price competitiveness. But still, it's just too much money.

Ten years have passed.

For some reason, the rest of you have not united to kill America in our sleep for your own safety.

I can't understand why not. Thank you for your mercy; we don't deserve it.

After reviewing the 1000+ comics I read last year, I came up with a score of works that struck me as exceptional and that meet the qualifications of being science fiction or fantasy stories which were completed in 2012.

• Avengers Academy: Final Exam, by Christos Gaga, Andrea DeVito, et al
  
• Batgirl: The Darkest Reflection, by Gail Simone & Ardian Syaf
  
• The Boys: Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men, by Garth Ennis and Darrick Robertson
  
• Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred, by David Hine and Shaky Kane
  
• Castle Waiting, by Linda Medly
  
• Chew: Space Cakes, by John Layman and Rob Guillory
  
• Crossed: Wish You Were Here, by Si Spurrier and Javier Barreno
  
• Demon Knights: Seven Against the Dark, by Paul Cornell and Diogenes Neves
  
• Everything Burns, by Matt Fraction, Keirion Gillen, Alan David, et al
  
• Infernal Man-Thing: Screenplay of the Living Dead Man, by Steve Gerber and Kevin Nowlan
  
• iZombie: Repossessed, by Chris Roberson and Mike Allred
  
• Locke and Key: Clockworks, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodrigues
  
• Mind MGMT, by Matt Kindt
  
• New Deadwardians, by Dan Abnett and I. N. J. Culbard
  
• Prophet: Remission, by Brandon Graham, Simon Roy, et al
  
• RASL, by Jeff Smith
  
• Saucer Country: Run, by Paul Cornell and Ryan Kelly
  
• Snarked, by Roger Landridge
  
• Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
  
• Valen the Outcast, by Mark Alan Nelson and Matteo Scalera
  

It was very difficult to select 5 finalists from this list, and if I did it again tomorrow, I would probably choose at least slightly differently. I will say I was biased towards works that will not get another shot at nomination next year.

One of the pleasures of working on NYRSF is our weekly meetings, which are held at the offices of Tor Books in The Historic Flatiron Building^tm. A few months ago, I was walking down the hall and spotted Jim Frenkel, in for one of his quarterly visits from the wilds of Wisconsin, and we fell to talking. At one point, he mentioned that he had known one of his authors since before she was his assistant at Bluejay Books. We both laughed, because that was a long time ago--Bluejay lasted for about 3 years in the early 1980s, oh god, we're all so so old.

Later he mentioned his wife, who is the legendary Joan Vinge. And I had a weird realization that in some part of my brain I still think of Joan as a "new" writer... because she was a hot new writer just as I was starting to read science fiction seriously, just under 40 years ago. The 3 Vs of the 1970s--Joan Vinge, John Varley, and Vonda McIntyre--will forever be in my brain as "those hot youngsters" purely by the accident of me discovering them just as their careers took hold. Writers who came into prominence later--the early '80s hotshot whipper-snappers like Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, and the Ace Specials Musketeers of William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lucius Shepard--still have a faint glimmer of "aren't these guys pretty recent?" but by the time they came along, my brain had adapted to the idea that new writers were a part of the life of the field.

Not sure if this has any significance beyond "Wow, memory plays many silly tricks with time." But, uh, memory plays many silly tricks with time.