CAPTAIN AMERICA, Annual 9 (Thomas / Valentino, et al; Marvel, 1990)
Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-)read it, write about it, and publish the resultant review / memory / whatever. Earlier installments live here.
(Box05): One of the first issues that sent me into this 34-year comics collecting spiral, its Iron Man blasting Cap cover drawing nine-year-old me to the stand at The Grocery Bag in Millersburg, OH, one of two local 90s gateways to the comics world but the only one that had Smurf Ice Cream (vanilla colored blue with Smurf blood or something) and an omnipresent smell of wet cardboard (unrelated to Smurf ice cream, probably) wafting about but the comic itself, revisited after 33 years: if CIVIL WAR was an entertaining Cap-v-Iron Man throwdown, it's got nothing on TERMINUS FACTOR's volcano-creature tainted fish-fry-laden Cap-v-Iron fisticuffs in a small mountain town: did the first chapter of CIVIL WAR end with an angry, red-eyed, tainted-fish-infected bear striking a pre-Image Jim Valentino-drawn pose after killing a deer while an Anti-Monitor lookalike hovered overhead? I think not. By virtue of a pre-COCAINE BEAR cocaine bear, it wins. Millar, eat your heart out.
The two other stories – a WWII-flashback by Randall Frenz and a pre-Spidey Mark Bagley and a prelude to the NOMAD limited series (which ends with Jack Monroe assuming the mullet and eye-dilation sunglasses look that would define the EXTREME nineties) – are, as per most annuals, largely forgettable – following tainted-fish Cap-Iron Man throwdown is nothing if not an unenviable task but it does bring up a point: I've long been dismayed that annuals were (and are) treated as an afterthought, a fifth-week stuffing of second-rate material to fill space, a lost opportunity. Feels like every approach has been tried – company-wide crossovers in the nineties, but even those were second-rate (BLOODLINES, anyone?), the "story behind the story" approach (Superboy Prime punched a wall and reanimated Jason Todd) in the naughties, etc etc – but nothing ever felt right.
Clearly, the only solution is more tainted-fish-fry cocaine bears.
so yeah about that time I passed judgement on reMarkable-as-journal way back in Sunday's newsletter
A conversation with my closest friend brought me round to reconsidering it and I can report that, in spite of a few hiccups, the reMarkable is not only my journal again, but something different, something I had in the back of my head that I wanted to do but never knew how to do until now: a combination of my journal with my planner/timeblocking and – and here's the big change, thanks to the advantages of continuous scroll digital notes – my rough drafts / thinking vomits of the day's work: this is, i think, the best representation of my day and my brain – one that cannot be replicated on paper and one that takes advantage of the remarkable's unique abilities.
Taking it one step further: I've since combined all of this with Obsidian's Daily Notes feature, making a PDF of the previous day's scroll and embedding it on the sheet made for the day, along with that day's Attendance Card and accompanying alt text. I then add tags (or copy them from the ones I give in reMarkable, as, unfortunately tags aren't imported on a PDF conversion).
Result being a happy think place that combines the best of analog (oh, that Lamy EMR pen) and digital (continuous scroll FTW) to create something i didn't know i wanted or needed until now I can't imagine working without it.
but what i really want to do is…
Recognizing, as I toil away at this Main Thing, that, were I able to draw (I gave up on finding collaborators after two decades of false starts and other innumerable failures) at a level at which I could realize what I'm writing in panel and figure and form (a level, that is, beyond (though not much beyond) my beloved Attendance Cards) as I see it when I'm writing the words, there's no question that 97% of I'm doing now would be comics. Part of the struggle in the writing process of MT is, I think, that I'm trying to capture in words and in rhythm what I'm seeing in silence and failing, to my standards, rather miserably. Solutions, TBD.
flowermove/20230717
Second backyard project of the summer has commenced with the (long-time-coming) moving and downsizing of the biggest flowerbed in the backyard (part of which is visible on the left of the first photo) – weeding it has become more trouble than it's worth: shifting half to the pond's edge to make a full round of daylilies, with K's pergola outdoor-room and pond at the center, while the other half will remain and be shaped as the very large and immovable plants dictate.
Managed to get the first soil / topsoil coat / churn and rocks transplanted to form the edge today. Remainder of topsoil + another churn next. And then the transplanting…