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Brass Sun was one of the 'new' strips on the block when I started reading the prog in late 2011/early 2012, and holds a very special significance as a result of that, being among the first ongoing strips I got to engage in from the ground up.

The fact a decade on I'm still eagerly awaiting the next instalment despite all the delays is testament to how powerful that feeling is, one of the greats of the prog in my estimation.

Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump, passed away due to surgical complications at 68 years of age.

We can go back and forth between who is 'the' most influential comics creative. Is it Kirby, Moore? maybe Miller or Eisner? Salient arguments can be made for all of these and more, but has anyone else in the industry had world leaders acknowledging their contributions to culture and the arts?
We lost one of the greats this week, a real generation defining figure.

This reads like the type of comic I would have wanted in my life as a kid, and even got that little excited fizzle you feel when discovering something like that, anything that can awaken that sort of unfiltered glee in my blackened sick bones must surely have 'the juice'*. Maybe we're all just kids at heart.

Six volumes you say? Oh I think I can make room for that on the 'too read' pile.

*Are kids still saying that, god I'm getting old.

Palestine: A Video Essay by Shaun

Probably one of the best at-arms-length reflections on the ongoing massacre and Israels damnable attempts to downplay or outright whitewash it, and in addition to the evergreen issue at hand it also addresses something I see precious few people considering, that of the antisemitic policies of Israeli law enforcement and the IDF in the Gaza strip and West bank that either proactively decry the governments actions or offer aid to Palestinians in their immediate communities.
Harrowing, monstrous.

Oh aye Doomsday goes hard. It plays out like a zero budget genre project in the vein of Michael J Murphy and gives it a cash injection without skimping on the absurdity.
It is, as previously stated, pap but the sort of big budget genre pomposity that we sadly just don't see major studious taking a risk on anymore.

Some real weirdos here

Aye, you don't want to know what some of them get up to with their iPods and a block of Wensleydale! 

Oy! I told you what happens in the Lawless Secret Hot Tub Party stays in the Lawless Secret Hot Tub Party!

Some real weirdos here

I blame the lack of news regarding a Dredd show myself.

Urgh! My absolute worse nightmare, my sympathies Jade.
I sometimes get anxious I make too much noise, I live on the top floor of a low rise and only share a wall with one neighbour, and a hallway with another. But its the people below me I worry for, loud footsteps, the weekly washing machine cycle, I even took the time the check with the residents right below me when I got stereo speakers that it wasn't too loud. It's not hard to not be a dick about such things especially when you've already been made aware of noise disruption concerns.

Dantes development begins surprisingly early one, even before Tsar Wars.
Before rereading the series for a 'ahem' post on another 'ahem' thread, I was cautiously aware a few things may just not feel great by my modern sensibilities but you know what, nowhere near as much as I would have thought. The weirdest stuff is mostly condensed into that first volume/batch of stories.

Oh.

Oh this is going in the 'prioritise for this year' pile. Indisputably, undoubtedly my kind of bad times.
Any excuse to finally get around to reading more Eisner.
Thanks as always, Colin! Wonderful write up.

Excellent write ups as ever Colin. Gunning for Hits is absolutely going on the reading list.

Left field question but is the 2006-7 limited series 52 making the list? Don't know why that ones been in my head lately, recall it getting a lot of buzz in the years following its conclusion and one I always meant to get around to reading.

Phantasms, holistic conspiracies and why the British gentrified-privatised infrastructure sucks.

TRUE DETECTIVES

Found the season 1 bluray going for crazy cheap in Fopp so decided to finally see what all the hubbub is about. You would have thought the promise of a southern gothic neo-noir engorged in the philosophical pessimism of one Thomas Ligotti (among our greatest living writers) would have placed this higher on my priority/urgency list, but I'm weary of prestige dramas offering much and delivering little. It has been known to happen, after all.

Suffice to say my concerns where not only dispelled, but ejected with prejudice onto the tarmac and promptly pulverised.
The show is, not to put too fine a point on it, I bit fuckin' good 'innit?

I really should read Johnny red at some point, everything about it sings as something I'd vibe with.

[The Zone of Interest]

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Glazar has this unusual capacity to produce works that sort of rapidly bloom inside you.
The banality of evil is such a well trodden ground that for the first 30 mins of The Zone of Interest I found myself wondering on more than a few occasions 'so we're just going to be doing this again, reaffirming that fascists are some of the most boring none entities to ever waste air?'. And for the majority of the film thats generally seemed to be the treatise, this IS a banal family-work drama that just so happens to be about some of the most evil creatures to ever blight this planet, set to the ever encroaching soundtrack of ceaseless human suffering, always heard yet forever unseen, divided by walls either literal, metaphysical or fixed by the constraints of the eye-lens.
And then that final sequence hits, and the whole thing is cast in a new, temporal light.
I wasn't sure if I liked The Zone of Interest, I'm also not really sure if it challenged me in one way or another, but its certainly made me feel something...I'll have to think on that and return to it someday.
Then I slept on it, and found myself incapable of thinking about it. There's a deeply raw, piercing effect at play here. Deeply effecting, potentially distressing.
A cold, black sun at the heart of a dead cosmos.