Some Debris I Found In My Carpet

Hello You.

Welcome to another message from the mailing list. It’s been a busy April, hence why this is coming to you in May. I had a week where every night had something going on at different points throughout the country and its all been pretty tiring. At one point my car’s brake pads finally gave in and I had to have it overhauled.

I tell you what though. My ability to get it all done and come out the other side feeling pretty damn good is something I am proud of.

Recognise the good stuff.

Topics wise this month we are looking at the following:

1) What I’ve been up to.

2) Sharing and the internet.

3) Meaning over Materiality in Writing and Art.

4) Nick’s Music Corner.

Some cryptic shit there, but if you understand what any of these things mean and want to prioritise them over one another please skip a head, if not, lets hit this thing.

Both the Coco Comic Con and Derby Zine Festival were excellent and I have extreme gratitude towards the organisers for creating such inclusive and friendly events. I know I met a few of you there as membership of this Newsletter is the only social media I push these days, and meeting you was excellent.

Especially you.

I have no other appearances planned at the moment but if I am coming to your town I will be sure to tell you. At the moment I am knuckling down and trying to get some academic work done. I have a few presentations coming up that mark the first big step for my PhD and I am applying to every Conference that might slightly line up with my area of research. Public speaking is something I enjoy and am pretty good at, so I am not going to miss the opportunity to go to places and be a smart arse. I’m also working on some fiction writing off the back of my recent rejuvenation of my love of words.

A recurring theme recently for me seems to be learning how to do things that were once easy. The thing that’s made me aware of this process was my recent chest infection. I spent a week completely immobile in March and as a result had to rearrange a planned Half-Marathon. I have had to go way back to the basics of movement in order to learn how to run again. The first run back was horrible. I doubled over coughing, thinking I was going to vomit. I had to learn how to breathe properly again, and even though I am back up to 5ks I am still much slower than I was. The aftermath of these plodding runs comes with a burning in my chest as I feel my reduced lung capacity. But by taking small steps I am getting there and am hoping to run the Leeds 10k again in June. 

I realised this is the same process I used to get back into writing taking it back to basics and writing small unimportant stuff. I’ve been bogged down in the ritual of creation for a purpose and moving past that has been wonderful. I have also started to use my sketchbook more. Rather than thinking in terms of finished pieces I have taken to doing random crowd drawing and apparently; Robots.

Another things I’ve started doing is reading daily, something I’ve been doing every day since March. This is a skill I had thought lost since the end of my Undergraduate degree, where your reading has to have a very specific purpose. I had spates of reading, especially when I used to commute, but it was very book dependant. Now I am having a wonderful time making space to read before bed as part of addressing my lack of sleep hygiene.

In large part I owe the formation of these habits to an App my sister recommended me at a New Years Eve party. The app is called Finch and is an extremely twee Tamagotchi style digital pet whose welfare is tied to a series of goals you give yourself. You start out slow, the pet requiring a small amount of daily input to fulfil its daily quest where it learns something about the world and returns to you with a philosophical question that is supposed to inspire self reflection. As it grows it needs more energy, so you set more goals, and build more habits and become more aware of the positive changes you can make to your life. Whilst I get the feeling I am very much not the target audience, people I know would probably imagine me using a blank excel spreadsheet to manage my life habits rather than a cute bird thing, its had a profound impact on me and helped me improve my sleep, my creative practice, my nutrition, and my outlook.

I’m not advocating it would work for you, but it has for me, and I feel much better for it. So in summary that’s how I’m doing.

I was having a conversation about “social media” with a friend the other day and how most of it is a gruelling nightmare. We settled on the idea that the best creator/fan interaction taking place on the internet as of right now is Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files. If you’re unfamiliar, Nick Cave has a website where you can ask him questions and he answers them. The tag line is “You can ask me anything. There will be no moderator. This will be between me and you”. Its not a Reddit Ask Me Anything were questions are posited immediately and then responded to with a similar urgency. I imagine some of the questions sit with him a while before he gets round to answering them, whether read or unread. Nick Cave has been gifted with age and comfort. This means his youthful rage has been tempered by time and he could never work again and be wealthy until they put him in a fancy casket. As a result of this when the answers come they are honest, considered, and meaningful. In a world where known artists and creators like Florence Welch are being forced to cultivate viral moments on platforms like Tiktok and unknown creators have to give more and more of themselves to gaming the algorithm to get noticed the Red Hand Files feels like a refreshing thing.

Sure, I am aware that this is not something everyone can do. This mailing list has a meagre following and on average 45% of people who receive it don’t open it. If my career hinged on you reading this in order to buy my latest album or comic then I’d probably starve to death. Nick Cave has a following of thousands earned as the product of a decades long career whose birth would no longer be possible thanks to the rampage of capitalism in the music industry. The Red Hand Files are a privilege not a marketing method. They’re the end point of a career well spent not the start point of one. So the question begs, why have I brought it up?

Well you probably know I rarely use Instagram these days, I deleted my Twitter account, and I post on Blue Sky maybe twice a day and usually to say a silly joke. I would rather dig my own appendix out and feed it to a sausage dog than look at Tiktok, let alone record a video for it. The idea of it makes me feel unclean spiritually. But this Newsletter is something I look forward to writing. It feels like I can say things properly, articulate things in a way that is not possible in an increasingly truncated internet. I can write near enough 4000 words and I can see that people will read it. That means a lot to me and I do not want any of you to think I take your presence for granted. Additionally the recent work I have been producing has lead to me sharing my feelings and life in a way I am not always comfortable with. When I was on the internet and drinking heavily, I would routinely barf my emotions into the internet’s toilet without a care. One particularly bad incident lead to a respected and moderately famous comic book professional sending me a Direct Message asking me if I was okay, his was a humiliating but not sobering experience. I suppose I link these things together in my head; Poor Mental Health and public discussion of my mental health.

This doesn’t need to be the case and its something I am coming to terms with. My recent work on diary comics and essay comics has lead to me sharing some stuff that makes me feel vulnerable. But the response I have received from people who have read it, the perspective it has given them on either their own behaviour or the behaviour of others has been a much needed encouragement. And this has just been from a few little crops I put on Instagram to keep the feed alive.

So the reason I think the Red Hand Files is so great is because of the fact it is considered, measured, and above all else, vulnerable. It humanises the author and shows they’re a fallible flesh and blood individual. Ultimately I think it achieves this through a moderator, despite what Nick says in his websites by-line, and that Moderator is time. Time allows for the processing of a question and the creation of a truthful answer. A therapist once told me that you should name and know your feelings, and by understanding them you can understand why you feel them.

Humanity is something that social media bosses are eager to synthesise, via low fi viral moments and toxic positivity. But the immediacy of these things does not encourage processing of the emotion. It doesn’t allow you to actually feel anything, instead creating an exhibition of reactions. The humanity that Social media bosses desperately crave is something that is gained not by everyone talking at once, but by taking turns to speak out and taking the time to think about what we are saying and how we say it, and in doing so we should be able to understand why we are saying it. Feel everything and then let it go.

With that in mind for you today I would like to share three pages from a project I am working on as part of my PhD research that will form a experimental and brutally honest work sometime later this year;

I had the great pleasure of reading Jon Lock’s contribution to 2000AD cannon in the latest issue of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic.

(Though its no longer the latest issue as I think two more have come out since I write this as its a weekly comic)

Jon Lock (interviewed here on the 2000AD website talking about his influences and failing to mention me once) is a writer who I greatly admire as both an artist and a person. I’ve known them going on 9 years now, I remember them being a big part of my first year exhibiting at Thought Bubble when they came and bought one of everything at the Madius table, but I’d say our friendship has been much closer over the past two years. Getting to know him has been a pleasure, and this is weird to write because the dude is probably going to be reading this right now. Right this very second. Right this very instance.

Anyway, his 2000ad comes as part of their Terror Tales series, a long running one shot style segment in the vein of their previous Future Shocks segment. Future Shocks was a place where a lot of comic creators of note started out, writing brief sci-fi stories usually with a M. Night Shyamalan style twist at the end. Now in this brave new world we have Terror Tales, which is exactly the same but for Horror. I’m going to level with you, I find most short genre comic book work to be uninspiring, as people focus more on the twist in the tale than the story itself. Jon however knows a thing or two about the formation of a story and delivers a cool story that works well in isolation and also serves as a great jumping off point if a wider story was to unfold from here.

I think Jon’s success comes from his ability to recognise the importance of an objects meaning over its materiality. This is something that came up in conversation with my girlfriend recently regarding a condition I have called Aphantasia. In short, I have no visual imagination. If you close your eyes and imagine a cow, there will be a real variety to the ways that cow can manifest itself to you. Some people will see a picture of a cow, others an outline, others a shadow, and some people, like me, will see nothing at all. I cannot picture things in my head, which is why I think I rely so heavily on art as a method of self expression. I need to visualise stuff in reality because I cannot do it in my mind. My girlfriend mean while has something closer to Hyperphasia. She can not only imagine the cow but put it in the room with her. She can imagine its sounds, smells, behaviour, and feel it’s presence even though its imaginary. Her synaesthesia grants her this gift, but also means that she is left in a bit of a philosophical quandary when I say I cannot picture a cow in my head; How do you know its a cow if you cannot imagine a cow?

My answer in short is that whilst I cannot imagine a cows’ materiality (ie: Its smell, colour, shape, sound) I can create a representation of what a cow means. I can describe a cow. I can define a cow. I can contextualise a cow as a milk producing bovine that moos, produces methane gas and manure, has kind eyes, is the reason I bought Harvest Moon on the Game Boy Advance as a kid, as the creature that once headbutted my sister whilst she wore a cute T-Shirt with a cow on it that had originally been bought by my Grandma for me but I had grown out of. I suppose this could be tied to the philosophical idea of Phenomenology, or the study of things are they appear and are experienced consciously by the individual. The meaning of a cow is unique to the individual, but exists separately beyond the physical materiality of its bovine existence.

This is to me is where Jon’s strength lies and I’m going to use two examples from his self-published work Afterlife Inc (Available from all good book sellers) to prove it. Afterlife Inc is the story of Jack Fortune, a con artist who dies and finds that the After Life is a land of chaos and disarray. Using his charm, charisma, and psychological manipulation skills, he turns it into a thriving and orderly business that naturally, puts him at the top of a pyramid. But being in charge comes at a price, as the more organised and powerful his company becomes, the more organised and powerful his oppositions become, and the threats and catastrophes he faces are all the more reality shattering and complicated. The book started out life as a series of shorter tales connected together by the characters and universe he so brilliantly crafts, and I believe I once heard that the reason for this was one of budget. It was easier form him to pay an artist to draw 7 pages for him and then save up and pay someone for 7 more pages than hock up the cash for a full 20 page issue at once. The benefit to us as the reader is we get a a slow nuanced approach to story telling that builds a universe through these scenes rather than jumps in and tells us immediately a huge story.

The two stories I want to talk about are Elementary from the early days of After Life Inc’s history, and The Golden Age, which I believe was an exclusive comic made for the release of the second hardback collected edition The Book Of Death. Both are interesting stories as they use already existing characters in clever ways to tell new stories.

Elementary tells us the tale of a serial killer striking out at victims within the Afterlife, and an unlikely figure who comes forth to help solve the mystery. I think you should have guessed from the title of the issue that its Sherlock Holmes. The fictional detective comes forth to solve the murders, despite the fact everyone in the story knows that Sherlock isn’t and cannot be real. The second story, The Golden Age, features Superman. More accurately Super Men, as hundreds of different versions of the character come to the Afterlife and create havoc that is eventually cleared up by the “real” Superman. The embodiment of what it is to be Superman, the Superman of “The Golden Age”.

What I think is interesting about these two stories is that they assume that you know who these figures are, and for good reason. These are two of the most instantly recognisable pop culture figures in the history of the human race. I cannot remember who said it, but I once heard someone state that Super
Man, Mickey Mouse, and Bob Dylan were the three great fictional American Characters. If you’ve grown up in the Western World you know who these two guys are, know their deal, and know what they do and roughly, how they do it.

Jon wastes no time telling us who they are, and instead uses the stories to talk about what they mean, not just in terms of their inherent philosophies but also what they mean to the characters in the story. The final reveal of why Sherlock is in the Afterlife is an emotionally impactful one and plays off the importance of the character as an escape from reality into a world of adventurous fiction. The Golden Age ends by underlining the importance of heroes, and how the root of heroism is in the act of doing good rather than achieving great things. Jon knows these characters, assumes we know these characters, and instead looks to their meaning over their materialism. Everyone has a unique experience of Super Man and Sherlock Holmes as entities, but their existence as fictional characters means they have a deeper forced phenomenology crafted by decades or writers. When Superman turns up, you know what to expect. Whether its BBC’s Sherlock, CBS’s Elementary, or even HBO’s House when a Holmes like figure enters the frame we have an understanding of what sort of story this is going to be because we immediately understand the phenomenology of that character.

In Jon’s Terror Tale he leaps in immediately with a shady government organisation, men is black suits, folk tales, other worlds, and doesn’t labour too much on telling us that back story of these entities, because we know them and understand them from our lived experiences through the cultural unconscious we have existed in all our lives. Instead he gets to telling us what they mean in the context of his story and gives us a new view on what they mean from his short lived reality.

I think this is a skill that is missing from a lot of writers hungry to tell their stories in comics. Everyone knows who Batman is, everyone knows who Superman is, everyone knows who Iron Man is. They have a cultural weight beyond the existence of them as characters. The best stories I have always believed are the ones that recognise this character as what they are and explore the meaning of the character rather than trying to alter and mutate their materiality. Grant Morrison once said;

His understanding of the character is why All Star Superman is arguably the best Super Man of all time. Jonathan Hickman’s understanding of what the X-men mean as a group is why for me the Krakoan age of X-men comics has been excellent. Its also the reason why comic books like Michael Fiffe’s Copra work so well. Wanting to write his own Suicide Squad big Superhero team book but not being able to, Fiffe wrote the multi-volume story Copra about a team of heroes targeted by the government and villainous forces a like, surviving on the knife edge of a creative world of adventure. Rather than labour over the characters as needing explaining and introducing, we have someone show up who is a “Punisher type character” or a “Deadshot type character” and as a comic book fan with an understanding of the world we can instantly get their deal and accept their place in this narrative. We don’t need repeated origin stories or explanations of why they behave the way they do. Fiffe says himself in an interview with Paste magazine that: “…I’m channelling these pre-existing voices in order to reach something new, something personal even”. 

The comic book collective unconscious has a huge weight to it now across all spheres of entertainment, rather than focus on reinvention of materiality, I think a great way of creating excellent narratives is to reinvent and challenge the meaning of these figures. You can use these archetypes to have your narrative commence In Medias Res, rather than labour on the origins of characters that we already know the jist of. Look at Invincible for example, the comic series by Ryan Ottley and Robert Kirkman, that introduces us to Omniman a character we all know is Super Man, and then uses that as the basis for an exploration of Super Mans character by turning this accepted Phenomenology against us.

The philosopher John Locke (Do you see what I did here?) states that the only thing we experience in immediacy is ideas. We are born with our minds as a blank slate and through interaction with the world around us we build up a store of experiences that inform our relationship with the world. The universe is presented through the prism of our experience, and when we look at a tomato we see it as red because we have an understanding of the meaning of the term Red rather than because the object itself holds any discernible property of the colour. As a writer you can use this to your advantage which is something that poets know all too well. The archetypal nature of characters, whether a concrete fiction like Super Man, or a societal fiction like the existence of Men in Black, can be used as a shortcut to telling a better story, utilising not just the short hand of its materiality but also its wider meaning.

Welcome back to music corner, a list of recommendations of music I have discovered during the month that you might like. But also written down in a place I won’t forget about it later on.

• Best band I discovered this month is the self proclaimed “interdimensional plague metal” band Castle Rat. Dressing in chain mail and leather armour they sing songs about swords and sorcery. The absolute commitment to being very camp is something that appeals to me and I have listened to their debut album Into the Realm many times since it came out last month. The band have a whole surrounding mythology about defending the realm from the Rat Reaperess that I eat up with a big spoon, but sound like Black Sabbath being played through a Frank Frazetta painting.

• The unpronounceable Tonsstartsband have put out 17 albums between 2009 and 2021, all of which I have not given a deep dive into other than their debut A When. They combine factors from a lot of differing genres, but mainly employ sleezy garage rock with some sample based fun on top of it. Some songs get close to Lemon Jelly electronic territory, but most stay in the Can psychedelic lane.

• I was introduced to the music of Caroline Rose this month. Whilst they have a new album out this very year I was listening to 2018’s Loner, an album of spirited indie pop music. Each song has a real punch to it, contagious listenable music that isn’t afraid to address meaningful topics. Greed, the service industry, and the male gaze all come under the gun and are explored in catchy ways.

Well thanks for stopping by. As always please tell your friends about this newsletter if you enjoy it. Maybe post on social media. Maybe talk about it on your newsletter. Maybe start your own newsletter, which is something I thoroughly recommend. I love a long read more and more these days.

I hope this signal finds you Earthling.

As always, yours faithfully.

Nick Gonzo.

[email protected]