As I've noted before in a few different places, earlier this year I began using my "media server" (i.e. an old laptop that I've thrown a bunch of music and video files on) to host a local comics database as well as any digital comics I have. And since my prior database died back in 2019, I was not only several years out of date with cataloging of my collection but my data set had developed some problems from my various attempts to reconfigure it for different databases. So for the past month and a half, I've been re-cataloging my entire comics collection.

This has been exceptionally tedious. It's easy enough to tick the box next to Avengers #372 to mark it in my database, but anything that's a little more off the beaten path and isn't already in the database requires a decent amount of data entry. One of the last books I had to manually enter last night was Jason Walz's Homesick, which was an Eisner Award nominee back in 2014! Over a decade and you don't have Eisner nominees included yet?!

Having to input any single issue or graphic novel isn't that big a deal. But you multiply that by hundreds or thousands, and it gets repetitious. And annoying when some of those issues are exceptionally-small-run mini-comics where the creator didn't even bother to include any information on the comic itself besides the URL of their now-several-years-defunct Tumblr. There's been more than a couple instances where literally the only reference I can find anywhere online to the comic is an old blog post I myself made when I first acquired it!

But as tedious as it's been and continues to be -- a month and a half with virtually all of my free time going towards cataloging, and I've logged nearly 20,000 individual pamphlet comics and 2,000 graphic novels with at least a few thousand more to go -- and despite my complaints here, I will say that it's also been very enlightening. By having to go through each book one by one, I'm better familiarizing myself with my collection. Books that I didn't realize were limited editions, autographs I didn't know I had, obscure mini-comics by creators very early in their careers before they got any notoriety... My copy of Hicksville is signed to me personally by Dylan Horrocks and includes a color sketch of the lighthouse, and I don't even remember ever meeting Horrocks! It's like a book from Hicksville itself!

Some of this comes from the volume of books in my collection, some from the passage of time since I picked these up in the first place, and some from the nature of how I acquired other people's collections in a more bulk process. But it's the first time I've really sat down and actually examined my entire collection since the last time I did a full inventory 20 years ago. (I checked; I made a post here on this blog about starting to use ComicBookDB back in June 2006!) Which, on the one hand is bad because I really should be more familiar with my collection, but on the other hand is understandable because it's a good sized collection that would take a much larger, more concerted, more ongoing effort to fully become familiar with. Which takes away from the actual reading and research that I get comics for in the first place!

I had Kurt Busiek once tell me that he's not a comic book collector; he's just a voracious comic book reader who just doesn't get rid of his comics. I feel similarly. I don't get these comics to collect them; I get them to read! This collection angle -- the cataloging of everything -- is more about being able to understand and find things I need/want to revisit when I come across something I need to cross-reference. Whether that's an old story being referenced by a new one, or an old work by a creator who I just re-discovered via their newer work, or part of a general research project I might be working on. The entire point of my setting up my own library was to actively make it a working library; the cataloging is part of that, both by recording what's in the library and by forcing me to become more personally familiar with everything.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: How to Survive the End of the World Review
https://ift.tt/2VwC7MJ

Kleefeld on Comics: There Will Come Soft Rains
https://ift.tt/i5YvHI1

Kleefeld on Comics: Cave Painting Inches Closer to Comics
https://ift.tt/d3ZT7Vh

Kleefeld on Comics: Ad Populum Is Burning Money
https://ift.tt/ZH7bkCs

Kleefeld on Comics: These Kids Today...
https://ift.tt/60jA5bm

I've happened across more than a few instances recently of comics fans who are out there talking about their favorite hobby online. They've got their own channel/outlet and they're doing their own takes on Jimmy Olsen and Jack Kirby and the Eternals and Wally Wood and any/everything to do with comics. There's nothing new with this, of course; fans have been talking about comics LOOONG before the internet was even a thing, so it makes sense that it would translate online. In fact, many -- if not most -- of my interactions online back in the late '90s centered around talking about comics. I began my own Fantastic Four themed site in 1996, and I spent time discussing characters and creators and issues both past and present on a variety of message boards. Several of the people I talked with back then are still in my circle, and I still talk with them about comics.

But these folks I've come across more recently are a bit different. Beyond the obvious things like their using social media, which wasn't even a thing back in the day, but rather... well, basically that they weren't even there back in the day. I don't mean that as a slight or anything; they're simply too young (probably not even born in some cases) to have been part of the conversations I was having back in 1996. For them, Jack Kirby has always been a legend that already passed away, Chris Claremont has always been a former X-Men writer, Image Comics has always held a significant piece of the comics market, mega-crossover events have always been the norm, Wednesday was always New Comics Day, etc. The people who I've been discussing comics with have obviously aged with me and, while there may be as much 10-15 years between us in age, there was still enough overlap that we saw many of the same comics experiences in real time. We read Watchmen as a monthly serial, we watched as Judge Dredd get juggled from Eagle Comics to Quality Comics to Fleetway Comics, we saw DC run a 1-900 kill-your-partner hotline to vote on Robin's life, we debated whether Marvel Comics would sell off some of their characters to help get them out of bankruptcy, we saw comics drawn on a computer for the very first time... Even there were several years between us, we had those touchstones that were part of our comics background and makeup.

By contrast, I just caught a video providing an overview of the original Secret Wars series. It wasn't a review exactly, it didn't reveal any previously hidden background details, it didn't have any new interviews with the original creators; it was just an overview of what happened and some of the context around it. That's a piece that would never have occured to me to write because... well, why? Everyone I know read it as it came out back in the '80s. More poignently, I would never think to write a piece like that because there's little for me to learn in the process. I read the comics back then, I read articles about the comics back then. From a strictly fact/content basis, I could've dashed off the same info of the video I watched without even doing research.

But then, there's the real key difference. These people I'm talking about? They've got the perspective of someone in their late 20s/early 30s. Meaning a) they're reading these stories in a notably different (post-Y2K, post-9/11, post-comiXology) context, and b) they have a different form and style of communication than we older folks do. The most obvious differences are a much heavier dose of snark and the regular use of (borderline reliance on) cutaway gags. I'm not opposed to these ideas, mind you; I'm conversant enough in their language that I get it, even though it's not engrained nearly enough for me to sound natural or casual with it. Those are both styles that really didn't show up on my radar until I was an adult and had a writing/communicating style already pretty firmly established; they're just not an inherent part of my media background.

That combination of things is what I find striking. That they're talking about comics that are just part of my background growing up, as well as having a better set of language components to speak to a younger crowd. I haven't noticed much of a difference between myself (firmly planted in Gen X) and Millennials, but I do see a much more pronounced break between Millennials and Gen Z. (Well, as pronounced as these type of broad generational classifications allow; I expect several of these people I'm seeing are technically Millennials, albeit ones from the tail end of that period.) There's a markedly different approach they're taking, one that's more media-literate, where digital editing has always been the norm and remixing content is something they've been doing they're whole lives.

To a degree, this has always been how aging works, right? Folks get older and start seeing how younger people are doing things differently? "These kids today..." and so on. I think it's much more noticeable now, though, because younger folks have access to a much wider platform than literally any generation before them. My initial thought when I saw some of these videos were out there was to question why they were doing them; the topics they're spelling out in the titles have been covered to death already. Which they have, but by older people who don't speak Gen Z fluently. These younger folks use a different media language, and it takes someone speaking in that vernacular to connect in a way that an old fart like myself wouldn't.

Ultimately, my point is that, while it's easy to dismiss "these kids today" as being wholly unoriginal and simply re-hashing the discussions we had decades ago, they're actually having different talks. Ones that come from a different media landscape. Ones that come with an entirely different way to unpack its baggage. Ones that still rely on and reference those discussions we had on USENET, but with emojis and memes and Snapchat filters instead of just, you know, Courier.

Maybe it's easier for me since I was never "with it" in any capacity, and no one listened to me even when I was a marketable demographic. But don't dismiss "these kids today" as just covering the same ground you covered decades ago. There's some new and interesting approaches out there, and I'm eager to hear more of what these folks have to say.

Well, lookee there! A settlement from the painfully long-running Diamond bankruptcy nonsense! Heidi MacDonald has a good summary of everything if you haven't read about it yet. There have been a variety of non-news events regarding legal motions being filed and such, but we haven't had a real update on this story in over a year.

But the short, short version of what this most recent development is: Diamond will return all the books that have been sitting in their warehouses back to the publishers, and give them the money they made from selling the books they didn't have the right to sell. It's essentially a "best case" scenario as far as the publishers are concerned, and I suspect that any non-invested parties would recognize this as the "correct" outcome.

But it leaves me still scratching my head a bit. Back in June of last year, I wondered a bit at what Ad Populum's game was. None of the decisions they were making in the wake of actually buying Diamond made sense to me. Not just in a "I can't see what their gameplan is" way, but in a "looking at this through an MBA lens, every one of their decisions is 180° wrong and you would only choose to do that if you were actively trying to destroy the business" way. This settlement falls into the same category.

Don't get me wrong. Like I said, this is the "correct" outcome here. But this is from a settlement, not a ruling. Ad Populum conceded that they absolutely should not make any money on the inventory they had in stock. But if they weren't going to fight for that, and they closed -- not sold, just closed -- tbe portions of the business that were profitable... what do they have? Like, seriously, after all this over the past year and a half, Ad Populum spent something like $20 million plus a year's worth of court and legal fees for... what? The Diamond logo and maybe some cheap warehouse and office space? You'd think that if Ad Populum's intent was a (poorly conceived) attempt to just get a hold of the backstock cheaply and make money off selling that, they wouldn't have settled the matter; it would've gone before a judge who would force them to return all the inventory. But no, like virtually every other aspect of this whole mess, they basically just gave up even the potential revenue opportunity.

Seriously, this sounds like the plot of Brewster's Millions where the entire point was just to waste a crap-ton of money as quickly as possible.

The only other explanations I can think of is that someone at Ad Populum has a grudge against someone at (old) Diamond and wants to make sure they watch the company die in the worst way possible, or it's part of some money laundering scheme. Every single decision Ad Populum has made in this over the past year and a half has been the absolute worst decision you could make if you were trying to actually purchase an exisitng business and try to make some money off it. Unles there is a LOT of super-secret, shady AF, illegal stuff going on that isn't publicly known, I don't see any way Ad Populum doesn't lose every single dime they've sunk into this venture.

A few years ago, I posted about how archeologists realized that some paleolithic cave paintings were actually done as multiple images on top of one other that were something akin to crude animation when viewed in flickering firelight. A newer report takes a look at the "rules" of cave paintings in the Basque region of Spain and found that certain animals are almost always depicted pointing the same direction. Horses almost always faced to the right and bison almost always faced to the left, for examples. This remained consistent regardless of the orientation of the figure; if it was drawn sideways or upside-down, a horse's head would still be faced to its left.

Furthermore, some animals tended to show up more centrally in the various compositions than others. Bison were featured most prominently in this way, with horses also frequently taking a central visual position.

Now, we don't know what that actually means or what significance it might have. The centrality of some figures suggests a greater level of importance, but we don't know what meaning to ascribe to which direction they happen to be facing. But that it remained consistent over 500 different paintings across nine cave systems shows that it was deliberate. And that it likely wasn't just the random preference of a single artist.

The researchers here were mainly concerned with nailing down a solid, quantitative methodolgy for looking at these cave paintings, moreso than trying to parse out their original meaning. Hence there are no conclusions discussing specific intent or messaging. But the key thing to note here is that these artists from tens of thousands of years ago had developed a set of graphic rules for their storytelling. They're obviously not the same set of graphic rules we have for comics as we know them today, but they are a set of shared rules that everyone understood.

The same way that stars circling above a character's head means they're dazed or dizzy. The same way a set of grawlixes in a word balloon means a character is swearing. The same way a word balloon shows how a character is talking! None of those things are strictly reprsentational. These are all just a shared set of graphic rules we all have learned to understand.

Does that mean cavemen were creating comics thousands of years ago? No. Like I said, we don't know what these particular cave paintings mean, let alone if they can be understood in any sort of narrative sense. But they were following a set of shared rules, of the sort that you need to establish in order for comics to even work, making the two close cousins if nothing else!

Ray Bradbury's work has been adapted into comics form many times. And, although I find his original prose story much more effective from a narrative perspective, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is incredibly evocative and almost demands to be visualized. The story was first published in 1950, with the EC Comics adaptation coming out three years later. But the whole thing is set on August 4, 2026 so I thought it worthwhile to share it with you today since it is, sadly, still revelant...

Possibly the single most impressive thing about Katy Doughty's How to Survive the End of the World is that she spends 256 pages talking about different ways the entire world either could or almost did end, and she manages to keep things cheerful and upbeat the entire time. I mean, even when Douglas Adams -- an iconically funny writer who had written for Monty Python -- wrote about the planet blowing up, he still had the sole survivor reflect, in a typically understated British fashion, "I'm a bit upset about that." Doughty doesn't even flinch that much.

The book is divided up into section based on the types of end of world scenarios. Plagues, climate collapse, AI/killer robots, etc. In each case, Doughty walks through how those scenarios would play out, often basing things on past precedent. The bubonic plague, the dinosaurs getting wiped out, and so on. (Obviously not so much past precedent on the killer robots, though.) She walks through both how each situations would arise, and what scientists have worked/are working on as possible counter measures. And rather than just saying, "hey, I did my own research on this; trust me," she brings in interviews she conducted with experts, letting them explain in their own words how things would play out. That's actually part of how she's able to remain positive throughout the book; scientists tend to be a hopeful lot, exploring possible solutions. And in some cases, they just pull out a mathematical reality check and say, "we actually calculated the odds of this happening and it's statistically zero."

Doughty doesn't just focus on the "immediate" issues either. She talks about the Earth getting swallowed by our sun as it eventually expands despite that being some 5 billion years in the future and even the eventual collapse of the entire universe that's so far in the future as to be functionally incalcuable. And despite even these certainties, Doughty takes the route of hope essentially saying that we should do the most with whatever time we do have.

What Doughty does exceptionally well throughout the book -- beyong just being positive -- is relaying a lot of fairly robust scientific information in exceptionally easy-to-understand language. It makes the book a surprisingly light read, despite the subject matter. It probably helps, too, that she uses a relatively cartoony style so that even the most horrific scenarios that she postulates on aren't rendered in a disturbing or grotesque fashion. Both of these things make the book incredibly approachable for virtually everyone.

If I had to offer a critcism, it would be in what she leaves out. She talks about ideas that people often consider extinction level events, and she makes note of how even in some of the worst case scenarios, they would not indeed be that devastating. What she doesn't really cover, though, is how awful and difficult it might be for those people who survive. She talks in terms of humanity writ large, and not people at an individual level. The bubonic plague didn't kill everyone, for example, but that's not much comfort for the people it did kill. Now, is it even possible to write a book that covers both the global and individual view of all these scenarios? Probably not. But Doughty does tend to gloss over that the individual level impacts that I think most people would prioritize in the midst of these scenarios. I mean, if killer robots do come for us, I think everyone's individual first priority is going to be, "how do I not get killed" over "how will humanity survive?"

But in a world where virtually every news headline screams about another way things are going to shit, and how doomsday is arond every corner, Doughty does a good job of keeping a check on the grand scheme of everything. There's a lot we don't have to worry ourselves with. And these days, I think every reason we have to move something into the "crap I don't have to fret over" column is worth taking advantange of; there's a lot of stuff we do need to worry about, so any opportunity to alleviate any of it is worth it.

How to Survive the End of the World actually came out a few months ago from Penguin Random House, so it should be readily available from your favorite bookseller. It retails for $19.99 US in paperback and $33.99 US in hardcover.