Renegades & Aardvarks

(For a list of all comics in this blog series, click here.)

I’ve been doing these blog series for the last few years where I’m re-reading comics from the 80s: First I did Fantagraphics, because I really wanted to re-read Love & Rockets one more time, and then the whole idea of setting up a challenge appealed to me: I was going to (re-)read all the pamphlets Fantagraphics had published, and just jot a few words as a reading log for each series.

That was a lot of fun, because Fantagraphics has published such a wide range of comics, and quite a few of them are brilliant. Even the abject failures are interesting in some way.

I did some other companies, too, because… well… I’m not quite sure. Some were more interesting than others.

But now I’m re-reading Renegade Comics. And Aardvark-Vanaheim.

*sigh*

The reason is pretty simple: I was looking at the shortboxes, and I realised that I had basically everything that Renegade had published. And if I were going to do Renegade, I might as well do Aardvark-Vanaheim, too. And if I do Aardvark-Vanaheim, I might as well re-read Cerebus, too, which is something I really hadn’t planned on ever doing again. Not because there isn’t good stuff in Cerebus: There’s a ton of it. But the sheer weight of the hare-brained sophistry Sim sprinkles over it all is hard to take.

So.

But on the other hand, Aardvark-Vanaheim’s other comics are all really good, and I do want to revisit them. The things Deni Loubert published after she started are… super strange. I remember some of them being so odd that I couldn’t fathom how anybody would publish them, but I was still fascinated by them at the time.

So I do want to re-read those comics, and then it’d kinda ruin the entire Exciting High Concept of this blog series if I didn’t reread Cerebus, the mothership, too, so I’m going to do that.

There’s really not that many series — just about sixty, and Cerebus is more than half the number of issues all by itself.

So this blog series shouldn’t take more than a couple of months, he said hopefully — I’ll be aiming for one post per day.

And by that time this whole corona thing is over, right, and I can go to Hawaii?

RIGHT?

7×10%

In the previous blog post in the series “Lars Humblebrags A Lot” in late December, I claimed I was going to take a break from Emacs bug spelunking…

… and as you can see, I did. For a couple of weeks, and then they pull me back in!

This time around I got the brilliant idea of downloading all the bug reports, and then sorting them by how many responses they’d gotten. (Because the debbugs interface doesn’t have that in its er database. Allegedly.)

And then I’ve basically been going through the messages that have one (1) response. And it turns out that one-response bug reports is a rich seam to mine: It means that somebody has thought a bit about a bug, perhaps done some analysis, but then not actually fixed it, because reasons.

That means less thinking for me, which is good, because thinking -> branes hurtz.

So that’s fun: Fixing a bunch of itsy bitsy bugs/wishlist items (and a couple bigger ones), and hopefully not introducing too many new bugs.

So that was 297 bugs… so we started at 2975 open bugs, and we’re now at 2855 bugs, so that’s only a reduction of 4%… which means that a bunch of new reports were opened (and not fixed).

… which this plot seems to bear out (the “closed within week” percentage has been dropping the last month).

Anyway! Time for a holiday break, and I can go… er… uhm… can I go to the shop? Perhaps?

Perhaps not?

*sigh*

January Music

Music I’ve bought in January.

*gasp* I just discovered that Mimi Goese released an album last year with Ben Neill! So I got it yesterday and have been playing it on repeat since.

It’s really good! I’ve been a huge fan of Goese ever since her album Soak in the mid 90s:

Unfortunately, she seems to be on a “one album per decade” release schedule. More, Mimi, more!

So what else have I been buying this month… Oh yeah, another batch of Mort Aux Vaches CDs… they’re a lot of fun…

Oh, yeah: A new Boris with Merzbow album:

It’s more song-structured than most of their collaborations (without just being Boris playing their tunes while Merzbow is making noise, which some of their things have felt like. Not that that’s a bad thing).

Otherwise, it’s the usual mix of new and old albums, and I haven’t actually had time to listen to them a lot, because I’ve been listening to older albums all month long. One album that stood out on first listen was the Little Annie Anxiety & Hiro Kone album:

And the new Liturgy sounded good?

Lots of stuff! Stuff!

MCMXXXIX XXVII: On Borrowed Time

On Borrowed Time. Harold S. Bucquet. 1939.

So this is about… death and stuff? I’m guessing he’s the guy in the first scene.

I’m actually not quite sure what’s going on in this movie, but I am a bit befuddled. There’s a lot of shouting, and people being angry, but the plot just seems… unclear.

I mean, except the bit about the old guy dying.

The unrestored transfer doesn’t help, because it’s all so washed out.

MCMXXXIX XXIX: Each Dawn I Die

Each Dawn I Die. William Keighley. 1939.

Cagney!

And he’s not a crook!? Is that even legal!?

OK, but he’s sentence anyway. *phew*

(I didn’t know it’s a sci-fi movie — he’s sentenced for drunken driving (and killing some other people while driving (it’s a frame!)), and as we all know, that just doesn’t happen in the US. Killing somebody (if you’re driving a car) is more like a youthful lark kind of thing in the US court system, I think.)

This is great! It’s so noir it’s leaking ink.

He said it! He said the line!

I love this movie.

Man, the casting here is great. It’s got like … a dozen? great guys totally basking in their roles as tough/not-so-tough hoodlums in jail. It’s so much fun to watch.

The bit that feels false is the bit with the warden: He’s tsk tsks the beating of prisoners, but he puts them into “The Hole” (where they’re chained in an awkward position, in darkness, all day) — he’s a total monster. But he’s also this avuncular figure. Like… somehow that makes the torture better? It just makes it more gruesome.

Fan. tastic.

This blog post is part of the 1939
series
.