Comic Cuts — 7 February 2025

I've had a bit of a lazy week and haven't moved as far forward as I should have. That said, corrections have been made to the first volume of our next project and I've busied myself finalising the text for the introductions of the second volume, which have required some trimming.

The first of two pieces that are going into volume two is almost done. I spent a whole afternoon on the opening page, which was going to be a dramatic spread of a brooding graveyard, but the end result was not nearly as good as I'd imagined. The next version was much better, but still wasn't quite right and I had to rethink again. I'm now on version 3, and I'm much happier now having switched to a three column format. You'll see, hopefully sometime in March.

One of my lazy days was partly spent re-reading Daredevil from the beginning of the Brian Michael Bendis era (2001). DD was the one comic I kept buying when I all-but quit American comics in around 2000, although I had been heavily cutting back during the previous five years until I was reading (a) Daredevil; (b) anything by Bendis, Alan Moore or Ed Brubaker. I would occasionally dip into a series that looked fun, but even that petered out after a few years.

Nowadays, my comic book reading is pretty much limited to whatever Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips put out. My current re-reading plan is to complete the Bendis and Brubaker eras (the 2000s) and then check out the more recent work of Chip Zdarsky (2019-23), which are available in two omnibus editions.

Mel and I are also working our way through the Daredevil TV show that Netflix put out in 2015-18. We watched season one last year and we're currently at the end of season two. We'll get to season three in the not-too-distant future, ahead of the relaunch on Disney+—Daredevil: Born Again—which is due to start on 4 March for a nine week run. So we should be able to get through three before bingeing Born Again.

The other show I'm watching is High Potential, which, coincidentally, is produced by Drew Goddard, who produced the Netflix Daredevil show. The two couldn't be more different (which is why I pair them together). This is a lighter-hearted, brighter, more bubbly police procedural with a fish-out-of-water female lead. She's a single mum of three kids with a 160 IQ who is taken on as a consultant on the agreement that her new boss will investigate the disappearance of her first husband many years earlier.

Its mystery of the week format means I can dip in and out whenever I fancy something light and fluffy.

When I heard about it, I thought it sounded a bit like a French show I'd heard about, Miss Holmes. This was about Sherlock's granddaughter who has a low-level job with the police but who proves to be invaluable in solving a case. Now, I have to admit that I've only seen half an episode because the auto-generated subtitles were absolutely awful, out of sync with the action and just meaningless in some instances. no point in watching a mystery show if you can't follow the plot...

However, I've just checked to see if there was any connection and it turns out that there was a French-Belgian show called HPI: Haut potential intellectuel that began broadcasting in 2021. By nefarious means I have tracked down some episodes where the subtitles seem OK, so I'll give that a watch over the next few days.

Also part of my lazy weekend, I managed to read a good chunk of Death in the Headlines, a 1951 crime thriller by Robert Sharp, who will be the subject of an essay at some point in the future. And I also started reading A Passion for Passion by Alice Fraser, which I have been waiting on for years since it was announced by Unbound. We're long-time fans of Fraser (podcaster with The Bugle, The Gargle) and always loved the "adverts" she produced for D'Ancey LaGarde's romantasy sci-fi novels (always with "a supernatural twist"). They're the sort of hot 'n' sexy books released as e-books with Fabio-inspired AI covers. You can hear a selection of them here... but only if you don't mind multiple mentions of voluptuous creamy breasts, voluminous penises and the need to bang.