SPECTATORS - Part 119

Plus, best books of the 21st century?

What did you spectate this weekend?

Brian here, and along with watching an unhealthy amount of Olympics, I went to see the coming-of-age film Dìdi (set in the distant past of 2008), which was very moving. Excellent performances, especially from Joan Chen, who I’ve been a fan of since Twin Peaks.

Anyway, lots to discuss tonight, but first, let’s get to the reason you’re here: new pages of Spectators from artist/so-creator Niko Henrichon and letterer Fonografiks, as our ghostly protagonists Val and Sam follow an intriguing new storyline, one that’s beginning just as the world appears to be ending.

Spectators 282 283

3.47MB ∙ PDF file

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Spectators 282 283

1.84MB ∙ CBZ file

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Read now

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Who beckons? Find out next Monday.

For now, thanks to the many of you who joined Exploding Giraffe last week, especially those of you who became paid subscribers in The Tower.

Niko generously offered to give away this stunning page of his hand-painted original artwork (normally only available for purchase over at Essential Sequential) to one of you equally generous paid subscribers, and our intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe randomly selected…

Everett R.!

Congrats, Everett, and welcome to our weird little family. We’ll be giving away many more fabulous prizes in our remaining months together, so it’s not too late to join the party:

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Last week, I was blown away to learn that Saga #67 sold out instantly at our distributor (thank you!), but if your local store is out of copies, never fear, our friends at Image Comics are rushing out a second printing that will be back on stands with Saga #68 later this month (and without a different “variant” cover to compel/trick readers into buying another copy, just a subtle new title treatment from the always elegant Fonografiks).

Exploding Giraffe is still the only place you’ll be able to get comics signed on/defaced by yours truly, and at least one of this week’s lucky winners will also get a sketch, perhaps my career best:

Here are the SIX commenters randomly selected by Genesis to receive those semiprecious items, with responses taken from last week’s fascinating and hilarious chat with those of you in The Tower about our past/present summer jobs:

Robert P.:

I dug graves. Most of the time it is with a backhoe but in certain sections you have to do it by hand. Also, there was a section where couples were buried on top of each other so you had to dig down to the original burial. Most of the time it is groundskeeping though. The exciting part is most of the crew are felons who can’t get jobs elsewhere — one was later tried on a very public murder trial. If you ever decide digging graves is for you, one tip: don’t drink the ground water.

Leah:

I spent three summers in a meat factory. My friend worked in weiners, where she got to be weiner inspector. I worked in packaging, where an old Russian guy taught me how to sharpen my knife and the foreman tested new pepperoni recipes on us. A couple summers later, a bunch of students carved naughty words into the hot dogs (you can’t read them until you cook them, hilarious) - so they took away our knives and the weiner inspector position. Alas.

AdamFSU32:

During summer break in college I worked in a warehouse in FL (crazy hot as you can imagine) and built cremation boxes (yep) and boxes to ship coffins in. We sometimes had funeral homes bring us coffins directly that were oversized and we had to build boxes AROUND them so that they could be loaded onto a plane. In those instances the coffins were not empty. 😬

Fernando:

It was at a retail store selling clothes to teenagers. I was a teenager myself, so it wasn’t so bad. The most memorable thing I saw was a young guy come in the store, browse a while, check his surroundings, and promptly pull down the tube top of a mannequin, exposing the breast. He proceeded to lick a nipple that wasn’t there. The mannequins did not have nipples. Matter of fact, the mannequins didn’t have a gender, save for the clothes it was wearing….The good old days?

Mike R.:

My summer job, in 1986, was to be a student intern in the archives at the Armed Forces Medical Museum in Washington, DC. It’s now the National Museum of Health and Medicine, but started in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum. When I worked there, it was on the campus of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, having been tossed off the National Mall by Mrs. Lady Bird Johnson. When I interviewed, the archivist showed me stereograph photos of venereal disease from the 1870s, and when they didn’t bother me, I got the job. I worked there as a student, and eventually returned to run the archives for a couple of decades. I still work for the federal government in history of medicine.

Pat D.:

I worked a summer at the Hagan Daas factory in NJ. Most days it was wrapping full pallets as the pints came off the line. The ice cream was (still is?) a liquid and then put into the pints and then it passed through a massive zig zag of machinery in a subzero room and it emerged frozen. One day a liquid pint squished in the cold room and it froze the machinery into a stuck position. I guess all of the other workers were union because they would not fix it. So the supervisor made me and my buddy put on sub zero suits, gave us an ice scraper, and told us we had to scrape it off. They kept us in there for a strict 5 minutes and then we were relieved by the next shift. It was a 100+ degree day. So we spend about and hour going from extreme heat to extreme cold. Worst headache of my life. But we got a discount on the ice cream so my dad always felt it was my best job.

And I thought my brief stint at Baskin-Robbins scooping butter pecan for boomers was challenging!

Thanks to everyone who responded, and Genesis will be reaching out for winners’ mailing addresses later this week.

I’ll try to give away as many of my comp copies as possible for these next few issues of Saga, so please alert your friends and neighbors:

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Changing gears, I was sad to hear about the passing of comic book/Cleveland legend Joyce Brabner, a writer/editor who helped create several important nonfiction comics, including Brought to Light, the highly influential (to me, certainly) critical look at the C.I.A., which contains one of my all-time favorite stories written by Brabner’s friend Alan Moore.

The original art to that story’s final page by the incomparable Bill Sienkiewicz.

Joyce Brabner also happened to be married to the late Harvey Pekar (Joyce was memorably portrayed by actress Hope Davis in the film adaptation of American Splendor), and she collaborated with her husband on multiple projects, including Our Cancer Year and the underrated (and criminally out of print?!) Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland:

Magnificent artwork by Joseph Remnant.

Gone too soon. My deepest condolences to all who loved her.

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Finally this week, did you check out the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” a list voted on by “503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review”?

(If you get pummeled by a paywall, Tertulia has the complete list, though I think the Old Gray Lady is still worth subscribing to.)

Art is not a competition and I think ranking creators is silly… but I have to admit that I’m powerless against the gravitational pull of a nice list.

And I was humbled by just how few of those selections I’ve read (crushed by my overly literate wife’s final tally of 30), though at least I’m able to brag that I own original artwork from both of the list’s very deserving graphic novels…

…and I even helped write an authorized quasi-sequel/spinoff to one of the list’s high-ranking novels:

But I’m mostly curious about YOU: Have you read any books from that list, and if so, how many? And what books/graphic novels that didn’t make the cut would you have included?

Regardless of your final score (feel free to just tell us what you watched this weekend if you’d rather not reveal your shame!), Genesis will randomly select a couple of responders to win this gorgeous new shirt featuring Fiona Staples’ cover artwork to Saga Chapter 67 (which you can also get as a classy print), and this design is only available during the month of August, exclusively at our Official Saga Threadless Shop:

I look forward to catching up with you Tower members in the chat, and everyone else, enjoy these remaining dog days of summer, and Niko and I will see you back here next Monday evening for more free Spectators.

Peace,

BKV