SPECTATORS - Part 92
Plus, the secret of BKV's middle name?!?
I love this line by Cormac McCarthy from No Country for Old Men: “You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
Brian here, and though I successfully dodged jury duty last week, I was instead struck by a hilarious number of unexpected and decidedly unlucky new challenges. But all is relatively well, and my crew and I are still kicking, so no complaints from this cosmically fortunate boy, just grateful for all the strong people in my life.
And two of my strongest friends/collaborators are artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon and letterer/de facto editor Fonografiks, who were both burning the midnight oil to bring you this MLK Day installment of Spectators, as our spectral protagonists Val and Sam debrief with Lita the Friendly Ghost and her oddly familiar companion.
As always, you generous paid subscribers in The Tower can download/keep all new pages as we go, and Spectators remains free to read online for everybody, with all past vignettes still available via our Exploding Giraffe Archives.
I love Niko’s version of Teddy—from roughly the midpoint of the late President’s life—so much.
A few eagle-eyed readers “dinged” us for having the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt (removed in 2020) still in front of our futuristic Museum of Natural History a few scenes ago, but there are no mistakes in comics, only opportunities for creators to award themselves No-Prizes by revealing their alleged errors were of course part of the plan all along.
You’re welcome.
In last week’s private chat thread with The Tower, I asked if you had any surprises—joyful or otherwise—over the break, and I was very sorry to hear just how many of you have already experienced grief and hardship this early into 2024.
Feels like this Year of the Dragon (which will be the apparently unlucky fourth of my life) is going to be a particularly rough one for just about the entire planet, so let’s all try extra hard to look out for each other.
I know it ain’t much, but here are some free signed copies of Saga vol 11 for a few of you Tower commenters, as randomly selected by our back-from-safari intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe.
First up, Lisa wrote:
I get a nice long break since I’m an elementary school teacher. I was so exhausted, sapped of all creative juices, and dazed when school ended. I aimed to spend quality time with my family and myself. I was ready for some fun. To kick off the fun I bought 4 fart ninjas for stocking stuffers and made the mistake of taking out the plastic ribbon to test them all. When I went to hide them under my side of the bed they kept going off and I had a hilarious time trying to come up with an explanation for what all that noise was one night before I figured out how to turn them all off in their boxes.
And reader Ghus'Marvel shared:
Well, at age 40, I spent Solstice doing mushrooms for the first time. It was an amazing and unforgettable experience. I have never experienced so much joy. I live in the dark, cold, and rainy place and the mushrooms worked the magic for the whole 2 weeks of winter break by making it the least depressing depths of winter. I was so happy and still am. All I have to do is refer back to my 🍄 trip and remember all my joy and that everything is going to be okay. So it was a great winter break and now I’ll be a better person, mom, friend and teacher for it!
Finally, since I asked how everyone’s “winter break” was, George L. gently reminded me:
Summer break for those of us in the bottom half of the globe, so it was three weeks of swimming in the sea with my nine year-old, spending time with family, and finally getting around to watching Peaky Blinders when I was up at 2am with our 11 month-old. Also really enjoyed the first trade of Chip Zdarsky’s Public Domain.
Sorry, George! Guess my attempt to be nondenominational about the holiday negated half the planet.
I’m the worst.
Did you try watching any of that (purportedly) AI-created George Carlin standup special?
I completely understand if that’s not something you’re ready to support with a click, but I couldn’t look away.
Longtime readers may remember that I’m borderline obsessed with the rapidly impending possibility of artificial intelligence one day replacing me and my ilk. Still, I’m not totally convinced that this Carlin special was actually written by “Dudesy,” the supposedly proprietary A.I. that “hosts” a podcast with comedians Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen.
I wouldn’t put it past these two kayfabe-keeping entertainers to write much of this material themselves and then try to provocatively persuade their audience that it was written by A.I., a zany reversal of all the students out there trying to convince their teachers that A.I. didn’t write their homework.
Regardless, if A.I. was only responsible for the crudely synthesized voice of Carlin and the computer-generated imagery accompanying this special, it’s already a worrying jump forward from where we were less than a year ago.
And look, if A.I. really did write all of these jokes, with little to no additional guidance or editing from its human handlers, then even though this special doesn’t hold a candle to the actual Carlin, this is another GIANT leap through the looking glass.
How long before you can ask ChatGPT to write and draw its version of the next forty issues of Saga? How long before they don’t completely suck?
I fear much sooner than I ever dreamed when I wrote my first naive post about A.I. comics way back in the innocent days of 2022:
A few days ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and all-around excellent dude Michael Chabon sent me this surprising recent Jeopardy! answer:
So cool.
The novel in question is, of course, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (whose deluxe edition illustrated by Chris Samnee is now available for 50% off through the Folio Society; thanks to reader Johnny Hall for the tip!), but the comic-book miniseries The Escapists was a quasi-sequel to K&C that artists Jason Shawn Alexander, Steve Rolston, Philip Bond, Eduardo Barreto, and yours truly created for our old friends at Dark Horse:
This is probably my favorite “work-for-hire” comic, especially because it helped crystalize why I wanted to tell more new stories instead of constantly revisiting other people’s characters, even ones to whom I have a deep nostalgic connection.
Anyway, seeing that old title pop up reminded me of a question from longtime Tower contributor Hanno F.:
Did you know that your middle name means “basement” in German?
Wait, what the hell is Hanno talking about, and what does it have to do with Michael Chabon?
The relatively shocking, possibly truthful answers to those questions after our privacy-ensuring paywall.
But first, your Question of the Week: We’ve already discussed our favorite new comics, but have you started/finished any great novels (without pictures) this new year?
Whether you’ve read zero books or ten already, Genesis will send a signed copy of that hard-to-find Escapists collection to one of you randomly selected Tower members, cool?
Everyone else, stay safe this week, and Niko, Fonografiks and I will see you back here next Monday evening for more free Spectators!