Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past few days.

I think the translation of Svetoft’s Spa (from Fantagraphics) got a bit of attention last year?

This is very different — it’s more of a shaggy dog gangster/heist/macduffin thig…

But with the grotesques you’d expect.

It’s good — it’s funny, unsettling, kinda exciting. But I have to say that I was more confused than the author had even intended (and I think a lot of the confusion was intended). But there’s two dozen characters, and they mostly look like random variations. That is, they all have distinctive features, but from a very limited palette, so you have to concentrate on like “right, that’s the one with the stache and the square glasses and the grey hair, not the one with the stache and the round glasses the and black hair”.

This is a very handsome book. For the first couple of years, New York Review Comics books were kinda indifferent physically (while they reprinted excellent stuff), but that’s changed — more care is being taken these days.

The reproduction on this is great.

So, McMillan is somebody I’ve encountered in some 70s underground comics, but haven’t really paid much attention to. His comics are quite interesting, but to me, they lack a sense of direction — sure, they’re pleasantly absurd and way out there, but…

Anyway.

I’ve been slacking off on my French comics reading the past month, but I got three Spirous done the past few days.

The special issue on The Smurfs was smurfin’ hard to smurf, because of all the smurf.

These are three pretty good issues, but as usual, The Fabrices win.

There’s something about the format of these DC collection that make me pick them up, even though I don’t really have much hope that they’re going to be, like, good…

This collection starts with Batgirl #7, because I’m sure that makes lots of sense.

But this was actually not bad. I mean, I couldn’t really tell what all the drama was about, because it seems like there’s a gazillion plot threads from 75 years of continuity being spun here, but that’s fine.

So I read half the book before I realised that I didn’t really care, and then I dropped it, but it’s not bad. It moves fast. I think my main problem ended up being the artwork, which doesn’t do anything for me.

Yes! I got a ton of floppies.

Of them, the Ryan North crossover continues to entertain.

I found the humour in this Lower Decks issue to be pretty strange, and then I realised that it’s because Ryan North has left the book. I mean, it’s not bad or anything, but…

It’s annoying when the creators you follow drop out, but I guess the super-hero books North are writing pays 100x for 100th of the work required (jokes are hard), so I’m not surprised.

Al Ewing/Steve Lieber’s Metamorpho gets even weirder. I know! It shouldn’t be possible, but it is. It’s very good.

I don’t know exactly why I picked this up…

… but I’m totally impressed by the artwork. It’s very now.

It’s very… Moebius via Simon Roy? With more than a dash of James Stokoe? Or something? Whatever the inspiration, it looks totally on point. It’s fun to look at, and it reads so well.

The story, on the other hand… well, it’s not bad? It’s very… uhm… Yeah, it’s basically The Incal, but different. Private dick, love interests, MacGuffins, betrayals, cosmicness… all that stuff. It’s pretty good.

This is a strange one.

It’s slice of life humour from a Swedish comics artist who lives in Japan. So she does these things that are about how strange Japanese customs seem to her (or vice versa).

These were published in Japan first, and there’s half a dozen volumes out, apparently? So it’s a success. However, I just found it kinda… eh… The things she points out are so obvious — there’s nothing really interesting? And the way it’s presented is also just so… OK, there’s four panels per “issue” she’s explaining. And then there’s a single panel “after comic”, and then there’s that speech bubble in the left hand corner where she basically reiterates what she’s just told us.

Like a recap. As if this is going to be on a test.

It’s maddening, so I tried skipping that bit while reading the book, but I still only lasted 50 pages.

OK, that’s it.

Book Club 2025: Irresistible Forces edited by Catherine Asaro

I bought this around 2009 (because of the Bujold short story), but then never got around to reading the book because I have a tendency to put off short story collections in favour of reading novels. But I strangely felt like reading some short stories now, so here we go.

First of all, the feel of the book is just odd. It’s published by Penguin, but the book is printed on totally white paper, and the binding is stiff and awkward — not like a Penguin book at all. It feels like an early print-on-demand book… Oh yeah, it doesn’t mention a printer but just says “Made in the USA, Lexington, KY” on the final page. Yeah, I guess it’s a POD book — I didn’t know that they even had those in 2009. Perhaps I bought this later?

The reason I bought this book is obviously the first story — Winterfair Gifts by Lois Macmaster Bujold. And it’s great! I read the entire thing with a smile plastered on my face. It’s centred on Loic and Taura… and ends with (not much of a spoiler) the Vorkosigan marriage. It’s amazing that Bujold would put something like this in a short story, and one published in a collection like this. My guess is that 99.97% of the people who bought this did it for the same reason as me — the Bujold story.

Because, let me tell you — the rest really isn’t up to snuff. I made a valiant attempt at reading the second story, by Mary Jo Putney, and got halfway through it before realising that I really didn’t care at all. And after losing faith in the editor like that, I dropped each subsequent story earlier and earlier.

So I didn’t much like the rest of the book, but it’s worth it just for the Bujold story. But it’s included in the Miles in Love omnibus, so I guess you don’t have to buy this.

Editor Asaro talks in the introduction about how controversial it was it mix science fiction/fantasy with romance (as all the stories here do), but I guess that’s no longer the case, 20 years later: Apparently romantasy is the major seller in fantasy these days? So she won.

Irresistible Forces (2004) edited by Catherine Asaro (buy new, buy used, 3.52 on Goodreads)

[Edit a couple days later.]

Hey! While doing an “audit” of my bookcase of unread books (I thought I had a lot of books marked as “unread” in my database that I’d read; and it turned out I had about 20, but there were 28 ones that I hadn’t registered at all, so now I have 437 unread books, oh where was I) and I found another copy of this book. And this one was properly printed! I’d probably have liked it more if I’d read this edition instead.

Comics Daze

Wow, it’s been a month since I read some comics last… it’s been busy.

jasmine.4.t: You Are The Morning

14:14: Them-Shaped Clouds by Max Huffman (Cram Books)

This is very funny.

It’s a collection of shorter pieces, but they work extremely well together. It feels like one of those classic single person anthologies. Class!

Bill Callahan: Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

14:27: Nekropolis by Knut Larsson (Sanatorium Förlag)

This is a dreamlike book about being a cartoonist.

It has sort of 70s underground vibes, but way more extended than those comics were. It’s pretty good.

14:40: Not Read For Real Life by Ding Pao-Yen (Glacier Bay Books)

This is also very dreamlike.

It’s a collection of short pieces that are thematically linked, and it’s really well done. It’s got a proper mood going on.

14:54: The Other Side Vol. 1 (Desert Island)

Oh, this is like a catalogue of tattoos you can get?

Hm… should I get any of these?

It’s fun.

Barbara Morgenstern: Innocence and Desolation (The Fish Prints Reworks)

14:56: Hate Revisited! by Peter Bagge (Fantagraphics)

What with the distributor meltdown and how my comics suppliers seem to have died off more or less, I only managed to get one issue of the series when it was published, so I bought the collected edition instead.

The printing on this is weird — it’s like it’s smudged? Especially the lettering? But that’s impossible these days, so I guess it’s the artwork itself? Was this, like, done almost at printed size or something? I guess it might be a deliberate choice — to make the look more “punk”.

Oh, other people have noted this, too.

It shifts between looking at the characters in the 80s/90s and at the present time in a very considered way. It’s a good read, but it’s not actually funny, so that’s a disappointment. (Except for the Stretchpants stuff at the end — I’m surprised Bagge included that — it seems specially designed to piss people off.)

I think the response to this series was pretty muted?

16:10: Christmas in DC 2023 by Stipan Tadić (Cram Books)

This is classic travelogue autobio.

I really like the art, and the flow is great.

The Ex: Starters Alternators

16:26: Š! #56 (Kuš)

I got this from here.

I think this is the first black and white issue of this anthology?

As usual, it’s good stuff, but I particularly liked the above piece.

And look! I got a lil ecureuil in my Kinder Surprise!

The pieces in this issue are tend towards being more abstract than usual…

And there’s a lil micro comic included.

Very nice.

Xiu Xiu: My Forever

16:45: Wake Up, Pixoto by Weng Pixin (Drawn & Quarterly)

Love the colours… I guess she’s talking about being an autobio comics artist and the responsibilities…

So it’s the classic setting for an autobio comics artist — art school. The storytelling is kinda choppy?

But a bigger problem is that everything feels so thoroughly digested before being presented to the reader — we’re not just getting the events as they occurred to her while they were occurring. Instead everything is being informed by her later thoughts about the events, and that’s just downright annoying after a while.

She also uses that old trick of incorporating a critique of the book in the book itself to defuse any subsequent criticism.

The book is about an art teacher that gathered a bunch of students and ex-students around him and held court — what the author describes as an “everyday cult”. To me he just sounded like a blowhard asshole, and it’s incomprehensible to me why these kids would subject themselves to his boring lectures. The author tries to explain this by handwaving to “the culture”, but…

I can understand wanting to make a book out of the experience, but in the end, I just found the book to be deathly dull.

Snapped Ankles: Dancing In Transit: Live 2025

18:06: Technocrat Tales by Johnny Damm

I got this from here.

This book juxtaposes quotes from various tech morons (Musk, Thiel, Altman) with old comics art (and images).

I’ve really enjoyed Damm’s previous books, but this was just a chore to get through, because the quotes (all real) are just so moronic… There’s nothing there. The earlier books — for instance the one that used quotes from cops — were more gripping.

m(h)aol: Something Soft

18:15: Mycelium Wassonii by Brian Blomerth (Lystring)

Love the artwork!

And the characters’ movements are so expressive. It’s like 30s cartooning, I guess? Fantastic, anyway.

The book is about mushrooms in general, and then the last part is about psychedelic mushrooms, which I guess is kinda predictable (given the art style).

It’s good, though.

18:32: Leone by Max Burlingame (Cram Books)

Yeah, I got all these Cram books from here.

I like the artwork.

The stories are very confusing indeed.

Little Simz: Lotus

18:41: Karmopolis by Nick Bertozzi (Top Shelf)

This is a very inventive book about an even more carcentric society than ours.

It’s fun, but… it’s just so oddly structured. It’s in four parts, and the first part is a complete adventure. Then the last three are a MacGuffin search adventure, that ends with a reveal that we already knew from the first part.

Just very odd.

19:05: Raging Clouds by Yudori (Fantagraphics)

Uhm… I guess this is one of those European “manga” books?

The storytelling is just… it’s the choppiest ever. Nothing flows naturally — not scene to scene, not dialogue to dialogue. It reads like a random jumble that’s been dribbled into the page. I tried reading a couple pages right-to-left to see whether they made more sense that way, but nope.

Aww!

No, I can’t take this any more — I had to ditch this after 50 pages.

Perhaps I’m just hangry? I should probably make some food.

Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto: Electric War

19:38: Tvånsmässiga behov by Lars Sjunnesson (Sanatorium Förlag)

This is apparently a collection of previously published pieces.

Most of them are one pagers, but there’s also longer stuff.

I like the art work in general — it’s got a stark thing going on. But it’s mostly gags, and the gags aren’t really that funny, for the most part?

20:09: Big Gamble Rainbow Highway by Connie Meyers (Cram Books)

This is a horror story.

And it’s scary! I like it.

Chat Pile: God’s Country

20:15: Carl Becomes Flesh (Cram Books)

This kinda looks like David Sandlin? I can’t find any name in the book…

See?

And there’s a little booklet in the book. Nice.

20:23: The End

And perhaps that’s enough comics for today.

Battle Ground, ACPI

This is the continuing story of me trying to watch some movies…

So here’s my setup: I have two RAID machines.

The old one has two fanless 4x disk cabinets. It was perfect — I’ve used it for half a decade, but the RAID card died, and the BIOS on the new card doesn’t allow me to spin down the disks, which started this journey.

The new RAID machine is more traditional — it has fans and stuff, but doesn’t make that much noise. Especially since I’m going to place it in the home office, so I don’t have to listen to it.

The new one is a mirror of the old one. I’m using the RAID to store movies I rip from Blurays/DVDs I buy, and I watch the movies from there.

Given that more than 95% of the time I’m not watching movies, I really prefer to spin down the disks and let them rest. Presumably they’ll last longer that way. (Indeed, the ones in the old RAID setup have survived more than half a decade without a hitch.)

So I can play movies from either of these machines, and the other one can be semi-permanently off (unless I’m running a backup). Get the setup?

OK.

But which one to use for watching movies? And how to spin things down?

Well, on the old machine, there’s only one option now: Suspend the entire machine, and use Wake-on-LAN. (Side note — I love the Archlinux wiki — it has such detailed information on all Linuxey things I’m wondering about. And I don’t even use Arch.)

The old machine has an LSI card, and it’s so enterprisey that it takes five minutes to boot. Which makes experimenting with the machine a bit tiresome.

Especially since I had to get into the BIOS several times to experiment with things, but it turns out that if you set “PCIE Devices Power On” to “Enabled”, then Wake-on-LAN works.

That is, if I send a Wake-on-LAN package to it, it switches the screen on immediately and answers ping. But it takes about two and a half minutes for userland to wake up, and the machine to be usable.

Do I want to wait two and a half minutes before watching a movie? Hm.

OK, let’s look at the new RAID machine. On that one, I could theoretically just spin the disks down, and then accessing via NFS would wake them up, and I wouldn’t have to do any explicit waking.

But the machine has fans, and that’s not optimal.

And the fans can’t be spun down manually.

So let’s try to suspend (S3) the machine… and that works fine. Except for this:

The fans keep going. And waking up from suspend takes 30 seconds before userland is available. (It seems to spend this time spinning up the disks.)

30 seconds isn’t bad, but the fans…?

And there doesn’t seem to be anything in the BIOS of this X13SCL-IF motherboard to control the fans, as far as I can tell.

So what about hibernate? If I hibernate instead of suspending the machine, then the fans stop after a couple minutes. But it uses 2 minutes to wake up from hibernation, because it basically has to do a full boot (and Supermicro motherboard are really, really slow to boot).

*sigh*

To sum up:

  • Old RAID suspend: 150 seconds.
  • New RAID suspend: 30 seconds, but fans run continuously.
  • New RAID hibernate: 120 seconds.

There really doesn’t seem to be any perfect solution here. Well, I had the perfect solution, but that stopped working and there seems to be no way to get that back.

Hardware sure is frustrating.

But considering I did have the perfect solution (i.e., disks spin down automatically, and I don’t have to futz with wake-on-LAN, and there’s no fans), can I recreate that with a new RAID/SATA card, perhaps?

A modern SAS card (for eight disks) uses Mini SAS SFF-8644 connectors. My disk cabinets don’t:

That connector is an SFF-8470, which is also called Infiniband/SAS. There are SFF-8644 to SFF-8470 cables, but this is the only one I could find:

And it’s no longer being produced.

Amazon lists the same cable — must be from the same producer going by the image — and says “usually ships within 6 to 7 months”. So I don’t think this actually exists (any more).

So… could I just swap out the backplate on the RAID cabinet to a SFF-8644 backplate? (Are those things called “backplates”?) Like…

But how would I mount this? Use a Dremel on the thing to get it to fit? Hm.

As far as I can tell, these various Mini SAS connectors are all electrically compatible — it’s just a form factor issue? (I’m not at all sure, though.)

The cable I have today looks like this:

Does an adapter from Mini SAS SFF-8088 (that’s the one on the right) to SFF-8644 exist?

Yes!!

But… I’d need two of those since there are two cables, and there’s only room for one of those?

OK, they don’t actually need to be installed anywhere, I guess, but just letting them bop around would be kinda sloppy…. er…

Oh oh oh! I’m thinking extra super stupidly here. I don’t need an external Mini SATA card if I’m going to use the SFF-8088 cable anyway — I need an internal Mini SATA card (which I already bought while testing stuff out on the new RAID machine) and then a converter. Does that exist?

YES!!!!

So I just need two of those and everything should, like, work! And there’s room for that in the old machine.

And this is cheap, too — these two gadgets are the only things I have to buy to test this out.

*orders gadgets*

So now I just have to wait for Genuine Modules to deliver… *drums fingers*

Oh, I should have gotten this instead — but I guess it doesn’t really matter.

[To be continued.]

[Update two days later:]

After waking the old RAID system from sleep after two days, I got this:

2025-08-13T17:02:10.165445+02:00 big-tex kernel: EXT4-fs error (device md0): __ext4_find_entry:1639: inode #2: comm nfsd: reading directory lblock 0
2025-08-13T17:02:10.169424+02:00 big-tex kernel: Buffer I/O error on dev md0, logical block 0, lost sync page write
2025-08-13T17:02:10.169440+02:00 big-tex kernel: EXT4-fs (md0): I/O error while writing superblock

It fixed itself after a couple reboots, but I guess that RAID card (or disk cabinet) doesn’t like sleeping for a long time.