BoMB Dropped; Summer Festival Appearances; and a What I'm Reading Triple Feature
Making books and sharing books
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I’ve been working on the non-art side of being an independent author: preparing for print and printing, submitting for the Ignatz Award, and soon distribution to a few local comic shops. I’m looking forward to finishing up with those and then getting started on my next project!
And of course, writing Zeno’s Arrow posts takes time, too. In today’s newsletter:
What I’m Reading - a triple feature today
Thanks for reading, and see you next time-
Blood of My Blood Books Have Landed
Printing of Blood of My Blood is done and I have the books in hand! Here’s a peek:
I’ve added them to my shop, so swing by if you’d like to support my work. Many thanks if you do—as an author, direct sales are the most beneficial.
I’ll also be stocking some of my local comic shops with a few copies, so if you’d like to support a LCS, Blood of My Blood will be available to purchase in a few brick and mortar stores, too. I’ll update you as they go up.
Come See Me At the Summer Comics and Zine Fests
When the days roll lazily long1 and the breeze breathes warm, it’s summertime in Seattle and high season for festivals.
Oh hey! I’ll be tabling at a couple this summer!
Mark your calendars and I hope to see you in a few months:
July 12 - Hot Off the Press
July 20 - Seattle Zine Fest
I’ll follow up with more details closer to those dates. And I’m applying to another one. Stay tuned.
What I’m Reading
Viewfinder, by Jon Chu and Jeremy McCarter
Jon Chu is best known for his work directing Crazy Rich Asians and the movie version of the musical Wicked. In his memoir2, Viewfinder, Chu shares the story of his journey from immigrant child growing up in Silicon Valley to heading up some of the biggest movies in recent years.
But what makes his story stand out is that it’s not just a hagiographical story of his rise to prominence, though he has plenty of great name-dropping anecdotes. Chu tells the story of his personal evolution from someone who strove hard to keep his head down and assimilate—to be allowed to direct the biggest mainstream titles in Hollywood—to finally reckoning with and embracing his Asian, and more specifically Asian-American identity.
If you, like me, got misty-eyed when the Mandarin rendition of Coldplay’s song Yellow played as the credits to Crazy Rich Asians rolled, you’ll enjoy Chu’s telling of the road to making the movie. Thank goodness his personal letter to Coldplay convinced them to change their minds about granting Chu permission to use the song in the movie.
The Incal, by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius)
I found out about The Incal, first published in the 1980s, by chance a couple months ago thanks to social media and randomly seeing a comics artist mention picking it up for the first time and realizing why it’s so lauded for its art. Legendary comics art? I definitely want to see it, then. It turns out The Incal, and more broadly the artist Moebius, is also considered to have influenced much of science fiction since.
As for The Incal, though, it’s an interesting creation that I recommend in a sort-of odd way. The line art is fantastic—I’m picking up a copy just for that. The writing is pretty weak—it seems like most of the story is a vehicle for sharing a phantasmagoria of interesting sci-fi concepts and elements pulled from a range of spiritual and mystic traditions, zipping from event to event with unearned developments. But the ending wraps everything up in a really interesting twist, that makes the bulk of the weakly written saga go down a little easier.
Side note: this page from The Incal seems to depict something like the Apple Watch decades before it existed. The design of the watch looks like an Apple Watch, if a little boxier, and the character wearing it is like a social media influencer, constantly broadcasting news to his followers, and is devasted to lose his connection to the galaxy via the tiny screen when it spontaneously explodes.
Coming to Wholeness, by Connirae Andreas
If you’re new to meditation and looking for an easy entry point, or have always struggled with meditation but wish you could do it, Andreas’s wholeness meditation could be a great method for you. And that’s not to say that the technique is less effective than others just because it might be easier to pick up.
A friend who is an experienced meditator suggested this book to me for an interesting new approach to mindfulness meditation. I gave it a try and I like it. I think the technique is easier to stick with than others and is presented in a way that shows new practitioners its connection to their lives directly.
Very long in Seattle—during our longest days of the year we get 16 hours of daylight.
Viewfinder is actually co-written by Jon Chu and Jeremy McCarter. McCarter appears to be a writer who specializes in collaborating with high profile musical-related creatives to write non-fiction books about their work, since he also co-wrote Hamilton: the Revolution with Lin-Manuel Miranda, and In the Heights: Finding Home with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Chu directed the movie version of In the Heights, so there’s a Miranda thread connecting all of those.