#quarterly-review

[mjohnso]

Quarterly Debut Review: Q4 2023

Quarterly Debut Reviews are a supplementary series to my biannual Periodic Rookie Group Reports, which are published quarterly. Each installment covers three rookie groups that debuted over the past three months. For this third installment, I covered NiziU (October), Peony (November), and Golden Girls (December).

As always, a full list of rookie groups that have debuted thus far in 2023 is available here: 2023 Rookie Groups Debuts

October / NiziU Debut: October 30, 2023 Debut Song: “HEARTRIS”

NiziU made history when their Korean debut song, “HEARTRIS” won the Champion Song title on the November 8, 2023, episode of MBC M’s Show Champion. With their win, the group not only became the first foreign group to do so but also tied their labelmate ITZY’s record, becoming the fourth fastest girl group to win first place on a music show following their debut.

They may or may not have also been the first j-pop group to accomplish this feat. Whether or not they qualify will vary from person to person, depending on their classification of NiziU as there is no consensus. This is not due to any lack of spirited debate on the issue, as both the j-pop and k-pop camps have made their cases. The former points to their focus on the Japanese market, their debut in Korea notwithstanding, their songs sung only in Japanese, and the fact that they have, again until recently, never widely promoted within the k-pop system. As for the latter, they highlight the group’s connections to JYP Entertainment, including their hand in the group’s origin through the survival show Nizi Project, and that the group’s lineup features several former trainees from the label. Then there is the fact that the group, like many produced through survival shows with ties to Korean agencies, sometimes pulls both visually and sonically from k-pop.

Treating this issue as a matter of either/or maybe the wrong answer to the question of what NiziU "is". Instead, a better approach may be to treat the group as fitting into both. That is like the k-pop girl groups that over a decade ago promoted in both Korea and Japan they fall into what San Jung and Yukie Hiarata in their 2011 paper “Conflicting Desires: K-pop Girl Group Flows in Japan in the Era of Web 2.0” described as “an ambivalent third space between the domestic and the foreign.” Writing about SNSD and KARA who like NiziU muddled categories whose borders once seemed so firm, they wrote: 

Another aspect of the new way of embracing K-pop in Japan is demonstrated through how K-pop is now placed in an ambivalent third space between the domestic and the foreign within the Japanese pop music scene. At the 2011 Japan Gold Disc Awards, SNSD was awarded the New Artist of the Year Award in the Japanese music division (hougaku bumon), while KARA was awarded the New Artist of the Year in the foreign music division (yougaku bumon).1 It was a significant result considering the fact that both of the groups are from Korea: in Japan, yougaku usually refers to ‘Western’ music. BoA and TVXQ, who are overwhelmingly popular in Japan, are perceived as K-pop idols as they are from Korea, yet at the same time are treated as J-pop idols within the paradigm of Western vs. Japanese. The article “Is K-pop Japanese music (hougaku)? Or foreign music (yougaku)?” in Asahi Shinbun suggests that K-pop girl groups such as KARA and SNSD cannot be categorised as either Western or Japanese pop because they are extremely successful even when they sing in Korean (Miyamoto 2011).

NiziU's place in this third space is evident in the mouthful of words that are used to introduce the group. Never referred to as a k-pop or j-pop group, they are often called JYP Entertainment's Japanese girl group. The 'JYP' part emphasizes their link and history to the Korean market hailing from one of the Big 4 agencies, while describing them as Japanese highlights their difference from other JYP groups and their connection to the j-pop industry. Neither side cancels out the other but exists together, each side a part of the group's identity.

November / Peony Debut: November 23, 2023 Debut Song: “Checkmate”

I did not expect to be writing about the Future Idol Asia project again this year but then they debuted their ninth girl group of the year, Peony. In retrospect though, I should have known better. Three years into the project and with a total of 40 groups under their belt, Rainbow E&M is an old hand at this thanks to their system (See: 2023 Q1 and 2023 Q2). Under it they scaled their project from three groups in 2021 to 19 new groups in 2022, which accounted for 25% of all groups that debuted that year. Now, this year has seen the debut of 12 new groups, accounting for 13% of the new groups that debuted. No other agency debuting new groups today has yet to match their number for this year or last year.

Rainbow E&M appears to have every intention of matching this same pace, or at least trying to in 2024. In June and July, they began posting on their official Instagram audition advertisements to recruit new participants, between the ages of 12 and 18 for their group that would debut in January 2024. By August, they were recruiting for their groups that are to debut in February and March, while their September and October posts mention a May group. Their posts from November and December are for those interested in joining their June group. If they manage to pull off this schedule, they will have debuted a group in at least five of the six months in the first half of the year.

According to the timetable deduced from these posts, Rainbow E&M will start looking for groups to fill out their roster for the second half of the year between January and February 2024, even as they are debuting their first group. Trainees, after all, are the lifeblood of this project. Their system only runs if there are trainees to feed through it to create groups to market to agencies at their showcases, which need new groups. The more trainees they can fit into their showcase, the better the chances that one will be asked to audition for other agencies. Then, to connect it to a point I made in my 2023 Q3 post regarding their showcase, they can use their trainees' association with these agencies to market their program and its success to recruit even more participants to their project, allowing them to produce even more groups, and continue the cycle.

December / Golden Girls Debut: December 1, 2023 Debut Song: “One Last Time”

Most entertainment agencies know not to debut new groups in December. Between the end of the year, award shows and festivals, holiday performances, and winter releases, audience's attention is anywhere but new groups. It is better to wait until the first quarter of the new year when a group’s debut has a better chance of finding fans.

Of course, not all agencies heed this advice. Most years, a few groups risk their future on an end-of-the-year debut, albeit with varying results. For some, their December release will mark both the beginning and end of a career, while for others, it will have no discernible effect. For example, the band Xdinary Heroes suffered little for the timing of their year-end debut in 2021, likely due to their association with JYP Entertainment. Similarly, JYP Entertainment’s super girl group Golden Girls, created from the KBS show with the same name and composed of bona fide legends Insooni, Park Mi-kyung, Shin Hyo-beom, and Lee Eun-mi, has proven immune to any of the downsides of a December 1st debut. The group won the Rookie Award in the ‘Show and Variety’ category at the 2023 KBS Entertainment Awards and recently announced their intention to tour in 2024.

Yet despite the show's association with a top entertainment agency, airing on one of Korea's three major networks, and the individual members' storied careers, it was not treated as a guarantee that Golden Girls would not meet the fate of so many other December debuts. Or at least that was the narrative surrounding the show early on. A promotional trailer released in October showed JYP meeting with each of the future members who initially dismissed the idea, with Hyo Bum calling it crazy and Insooni dubbing his then-dream group a “grandma group." Although all four singers eventually agreed to participate, that was not the end of the trouble surrounding production. As JYP explained on a November episode of MBC FM4U’s Kim Shin Young’s Noon Song of Hope, while KBS had approved the show, they required additional outside investment. And much like with the members, JYP found most companies were skeptical that his idea would work, although—as evidenced by the show's existence past episode two—some came around.

Perhaps they heard an early version of the group's debut song "One Last Time," which opens with the members singing about stagnation and their fear of the unknown. Then it builds to a chorus that provides a blueprint for breaking out of that rut, instructing listeners to, “Pour it all out Shout/Scream together/Go crazy like this is the time/Wake up and fight.” Take a chance on the unknown since as Eunmi sings, "Any challenge you haven't tried is a failure/Any chance you hesitate is a waste." So back that reality show with the eyebrow-raising, but not entirely new, idea to create a group of older women promoting a youth-centric industry. Debut a rookie group in December. Don’t, as Insooni sings, let any regrets remain.

[cctinsleybaxter]

fisherman trent rezn-oar i wanna gut you like a mackerel

[leonardcohenofficial]

what if i actually started using letterboxd for real

[charliespringverse]

i think it should be possible to scream without making any noise or disturbing anyone or inviting any questions . just sometimes . as a treat .

[cool-as-steel]

i think women should also get to perish in terrible submarine-related incidents. tragic submarine death should not be a men-only field.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kate Beaton's "Ducks"

It’s been more than a decade since I began thrilling to Kate Beaton’s spectacular, hilarious snark-history webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” pioneering work that mixed deceptively simple lines, superb facial expressions, and devastating historical humor:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/23/hark-a-vagrant-the-book/

Beaton developed Hark! into a more explicit political allegory, managing the near-impossible trick of being trenchant and topical while still being explosively funny. Her second Hark! collection, Step Aside, Pops, remains essential reading, if only for her brilliant “straw feminists”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/15/step-aside-pops-a-new-hark-a-vagrant-collection-that-delights-and-dazzles/

Beaton is nothing if not versatile. In 2015, she published The Princess and the Pony, a picture book that I read to my own daughter — and which inspired me to write my own first picture book, Poesy the Monster-Slayer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/

Beaton, then, has a long history of crossing genres in her graphic novels, so the fact that she published a memoir in graphic novel form is no surprise. But that memoir, Ducks: Two Years In the Oil Sands, still marks a departure for her, trading explosive laughs for subtle, keen observations about labor, climate and gender:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them.

Beaton’s memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation.

The story that follows is — naturally — wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with — and empathy for — the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

Early reviews of Ducks rightly praised it for this subtlety and ambivalence. This is a book that makes no easy characterizations, and while it has villains — a content warning, the book depicts multiple sexual assaults — it carefully apportions blame in the mix of individual failings and a brutal system.

This is as true for the environmental tale as it is for the labor story: the tar sands are the world’s filthiest oil, an energy source that is only viable when oil prices peak, because extracting and refining that oil is so energy-intensive. The slow, implacable, irreversible impact that burning Canadian oil has on our shared planet is diffuse and takes place over long timescales, making it hard to measure and attribute.

But the impact of the tar sands on the bodies and minds of the workers in the oil patch, on the First Nations whose land is stolen and despoiled in service to oil, and on the politics of Canada are far more immediate. Beaton paints all this in with the subtlest of brushstrokes, a thousand delicate cuts that leave the reader bleeding in sympathy by the time the tale is told.

Beaton’s memoir is a political and social triumph, a subtle knife that cuts at our carefully cultivated blind-spots about industry, labor, energy, gender, and the climate. But it’s also — and not incidentally — a narrative and artistic triumph.

In other words, Beaton’s not just telling an important story, she’s also telling a fantastically engrossing story — a page-turner, filled with human drama, delicious tension, likable and complex characters, all the elements of a first-rate tale.

Likewise, Beaton’s art is perfectly on point. Hark!’s secret weapon was always Beaton’s gift for drawing deceptively simple human faces whose facial expressions were indescribably, superbly perfect, conveying irreducible mixtures of emotion and sentiment. If anything, Ducks does this even better. I think you could remix this book so that it’s just a series of facial expressions and you’d still convey all the major emotional beats of the story.

Graphic memoirs have emerged as a potent and important genre in this century. And women have led that genre, starting with books like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006):

https://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-fun-home/

But also the increasingly autobiographical work of Lynda Barry, culminating in her 2008 One! Hundred! Demons!:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/one-hundred-demons/

(which should really be read alongside her masterwork on creativity, 2019’s Making Comics):

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/05/lynda-barrys-making-comics-is-one-of-the-best-most-practical-books-ever-written-about-creativity/

In 2014, we got Cece Bell’s wonderful El Deafo:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/11/25/el-deafo-moving-fresh-ya-comic-book-memoir-about-growing-up-deaf/

Which was part of the lineage that includes the work of Lucy Knisley, especially later volumes like 2020’s Stepping Stones:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/09/enhanced-rock-weathering/#knisley

Along with Jen Wang’s 2019 Stargazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/25/stargazing-jen-wangs-semi-autobiographical-graphic-novel-for-young-readers-is-a-complex-tale-of-identity-talent-and-loyalty/

2019 was actually a bumper-crop year for stupendous graphic memoirs by women, rounded out by Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/hot-comb/

And don’t forget 2017’s dazzling My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

This rapidly expanding, enthralling canon is one of the most exciting literary trends of this century, and Ducks stands with the best of it.

[Image ID: The cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of Kate Beaton's 'Ducks.']

[thoughtportal]

The Price of Paperless

Table of Contents

Here Everything is Poison

By J. Malcolm Garcia, Photography by Darren McCollester

Fall 2010

Cold winds carry lead-filled dust from a nearby slagheap, a hundred million tonnes of toxic tailings, and scatter it on clothes hanging from laundry lines, on open buckets of drinking water, on the dirt children play in, and on the feral dogs running down alleys in this former French army barracks housing about 250 displaced Roma men, women, and children.

Editor’s Desk

The Price of the Paperless Revolution

By Ted Genoways

Reporting

Jharia Burning

By Allison Joyce, Photography by Allison Joyce

The Pit

By Nathaniel Miller

Father Copper

By Annie Murphy, Photography by Rodrigo Llano

Mother of God, Child of Zeus

By Jessica Benko, Photography by Bear Guerra

Digging Out

By Elliott D. Woods, Photography by Elliott D. Woods

The Solution: Bolivia’s Lithium Dreams

By Matthew Power, Photography by Fabio Cuttica

Tin Fever

By Delphine Schrank, Photography by Mark Craemer

Here Everything is Poison

By J. Malcolm Garcia, Photography by Darren McCollester

Essays

The Devil’s Tail: Reading From the Lives of Authors

By Robert Boyers

Fiction

Favorite Son

By Jennifer Haigh

The Digger

By Samanta Schweblin, Translated by Daniel Alarcon

Poetry

The Man

By Patrick Phillips

Work-Clothes Quilt

By Patrick Phillips

Tailing Dam of Baotou Steel

By Qin Xiaoyu

The Book of Lost Railroad Photographs

By Amy Beeder

Criticism

The Age of Inequality

By Oscar Villalon

The Activist Novelist

By Jacob Silverman

The Triumph of Capitalism

By Brian Sholis

Multimedia

The Underground Giant: Life in the Hard Rock Mines of Quebec and Ontario

By Louie Palu, Photography by Louie Palu

[mylittleredgirl]

that corporate jargon fandom post ruined me because i really can't think of another way to say this. i am experiencing scope creep for real on those ask prompt ficlets. blowing all my milestones. rip to my user engagement touchpoints. i just wanted to diversify my fic offerings. this was not in the strategic plan

[jakeperalta]

work tomorrow

[tumblasha]

vacation review: taiwan

overall rating: ★★★★/5

cities visited (chronologically): taipei, taichung, kaohsiung, taitung

the good parts

i got to see Moomf (micosu oomf)

i got over the "i can't visit a country if i don't know the language" feeling

nature everywhere

night markets were so fun!

at least half of the population wears a mask at all times (even outside of taipei where the air quality is nicer!)

every train station + tourist spot had a stamp area so now i have a lil booklet filled with taiwanese stamps :,)

food! especially boba and soups :DD -so much liquid.

traveling on the back of a scooter is so mind-numbing, i love being a passenger princess

the bad parts

taipei's air pollution is a lil sad but def not the worst

getting over the jetlag and post-vacation sadness T_T

they killed that duck that i saw in that one tumblr post

overall summary

i think that taiwan is an excellent place for people of all places to visit! especially if you know english, everyone is really nice to english-speakers and makes an effort to gesture-speak or google translate through every conversation

this may be insensitive, but i think that the "made in taipei" brand (country pride of having many ~cultural influences) really works for tourism. previously, i saw friends and co-workers take their japan trip and do all the kawaii things (sanrio store, snoopy cafe, studio ghibli museum, etc), and got sad. taichung really embraces manga, anime, and other kawaii-adjacent things, and it satisfied my desire to go to japan. i've been having a hard time with co-existing with appreciating the good side of japan (mostly art and media) and learning abt the bad sides (colonial history), so it was nice being able to get a positive experience with low "double-think"

on post-vacation sadness

idk why but this was the first time that i came back from a vacation and i was Sad. like, maybe it's bc i got my period mid-trip and it was some weird post-period hormonal thing?? but i doubt it

looking back, i think that i have never truly been Alone until this trip? when i solo traveled in sp+pt, i was able to talk to the people in the hostel and go out with them. i wasn't able to talk to anybody bc a majority of the tourists spoke either mandarin or japanese, and idk either of those languages. i think that i was alone with my thoughts for too long -> leading to being on my phone too much -> leading to random bursts of crying (?) that lasted through a week after coming back to the US. it was bad enough that i took off all my jewelry and almost cut my hair X|

also any instagram posts that mentions taiwan / east asia kinda ruins my whole day. i wanna go backkkkkk

lessons learned

it's okay to be lost emotionally and physically! being alone is a constant battle of self-love and The Void

i need more international friends bc visiting them in their free time + their country of residence in their work time is so fun

i need to take more pictures of myself! i think somewhere in this trip i convinced myself to download dating apps again and i have no good pics. i also can't post a "taiwan photodump" on insta :(

tl;dr: go to taiwan! but go with friends!!

[anonymusbosch]

here's a tech tidbit for the day. in large part, the US's current lack of green energy isn't because the tech doesn't exist or that the tech isn't cheap/competitive with fossil fuels - it's because of bureaucratic tangles and permitting delays. Right now it can take new power projects five full years just to get approved to connect to the power grid. (On average, it's taking 3.7 years).

As of the end of 2021, there was over a terawatt of green energy storage waiting to get approval to connect to the grid. That's more than all the energy currently generated in the US. For the most part, these aren't completed projects waiting to connect - they're projects that are ready to build waiting for approval before they break ground, or are partially built and getting their application in so that they're not waiting between construction and transmission. Many requests in the queue will never get built (some because they can't afford to wait in line for five years, or lose land rights, or have their interconnect denied, or require costly restudies after design changes, or for unrelated reasons) but even if the historical rate of 25% of them were to succeed, that's still hundreds of gigawatts of power and enough to more-than-replace all the coal plants in the US.

That's not the only obstacle to construction (see also: transmission capacity, load balancing, environmental studies, permitting, and a host of other factors). To be clear: waving a magic wand and lifting this particular barrier wouldn't mean green energy right away forever. But this problem is a decent representative of the type of obstacle green energy faces. Generation and transmission of energy are - largely - cheap and efficient. Getting systems approved and integrated across a morass of local, state, and federal governments, utility companies, and ISOs? Slow and hard.

[mjohnso]

Quarterly Debut Review: Q1 2023

Quarterly Debut Reviews are a new supplementary series to my biannual Periodic Rookie Group Reports, which as the title indicates will be published quarterly. Each installment will cover three rookie groups that debuted over the past three months, one from each month. For this first installment, I covered MAVE: (January), HAWW (February), and Delight (March).

As always, a full list of rookie groups that have debuted thus far in 2023 is available here: 2023 Rookie Groups Debuts

January / MAVE: Debut: January 5, 2023 Debut Song: “Pandora”

As with the debut of every virtual idol group, MAVE:’s debut was greeted with what I refer to as The Question: “Will they eventually render human idols obsolete and thereby replace them?” Treating it as a simple yes/no question, I would say no, probably not. But if I consider this a more open-ended question, I would have a different answer arguing that this is the wrong question to be asking. That is, rather than asking if they will replace idols, it is more salient to ask if Metaverse Entertainment even intends to.

At least in the case of Kakao Entertainment, which partnered with Metaverse Entertainment (itself a subsidiary of the gaming company Netmarble F&C) to create the group, I would say no. Instead, I suspect their interest in creating a virtual idol group stems from the same reason they set about acquiring SM Entertainment earlier this year. Much as the that acquisition of gives them access to SM’s stable of talent to feature in original content for Kakao branded platforms and apps, so can the same be said about virtual idols like MAVE:. Kakao has already given us an idea of how this might look with the group. A month after their debut, they announced a MAVE webtoon that would be published through Kakao Webtoon and Kakao Page.

This is not the extent of their plans for a group like MAVE. It is likely they will take a page from Japanese VTubers like Kizuna Ai or anime idols from media mix projects, whose status as fictional characters allows them to appear across a range of properties. This is all to say that it would not be surprising if in the future MAVE: branches out into television shows and video games, all delivered through Kakao’s suite of apps.

February / HAWW Debut: February 23, 2023 Debut Song: “How Are You”

Even as the rest of the industry has made strides toward recovering from the shock of the pandemic, boy group debuts have remained a stubborn exception. Their numbers dropped 39% from 2019 to 2021, slipping to a low of 22 groups total for 2021 and 2022. Hence why the debut of every new boy group in 2023 takes on such outsized importance. Each holds the possibility that they will be the one to herald or mark the reversal of this downward trend.

Unfortunately, HAWW is no such herald. Their debut was not part of a wave as much as a trickle; they were the only boy group to debut in February. They were the fifth boy group to debut in 2023 out of a total of seven boy groups that debuted during the first quarter of the year. For the sake of comparison, eleven girl groups debuted in total over the first quarter, with four girl groups debuting in February alone.

Yet of all the few boy groups that have debuted thus far, HAWW is the perfect group to offer as a chaser to such dour news. Casting the members as what amounts to emotional support k-pop boys, the group describes themselves as a “healing group” that seeks to soothe listeners through their music. Their debut song, “How Are You” is very much in service to this goal. Lyrically, it addresses a significant other asking how their day went, although it keeps the identity of said significant other vague. It could be anyone, including the listener, which is the point. Their music is not meant for just a small group or those willing to buy into their lore or multi-month debut rollout but for everyone.

March / Delight Debut: March 31, 2023 Debut Song: “Neverland”

Condolences to that YouTuber commenter who pleaded with Rainbow E&M to please stop debuting new groups—three years on, they show no indication of stopping soon. This is because the groups under the Future Idol Asia umbrella are not being debuted and promoted as traditional girl groups. Their existence is purely taxonomic. Groups are the most efficient way to organize and present the greatest number of trainees at the Future Idol Asia showcase, the centerpiece of the Future Idol Asia project (For more about the Future Idol Asia project, see Periodic Rookie Groups Report No. 20).

Understanding this is the nature of the Future Idol Asia groups explains the aesthetic choices of these groups, like their budget music videos. As it would not make financial sense to sink money into expensive music videos with elaborate sets or effects for temporary groups, they tend to recycle the same formula: photo rental studio + choreography version inter-cut with close-up shots + maximum two outfit changes.

That applies to the naming conventions for the groups well. Their names tend towards the unoriginal and SEO-averse. Many of the Future Idol Asia groups share their names with the title of at least one k-pop song (Memoria and “Memoria,” Black Rose and “Black Rose,” and Dream Girl and “Dream Girl” and “Dream Girls”). In this respect, Delight is an especially unfortunate choice for a group. In 2013, another girl group debuted with that same name, and despite disbanding in 2015, still crowds them out of YouTube search results. Key and Rolling Quartz have released songs titled “Delight,” while CSR, Baekhyun, and Daesung have released albums with that name. Meanwhile, the name of SF9’s 2022 tour was Live Fantasy #4 [Delight]. This does raise the question of why bother naming the groups at all, although I suspect it is partly because Delight sounds better than Group #22. It may also have something to do with the fact that while Rainbow E&M is not chiefly marketing to a general audience, they are trying to sell these trainees to outside agencies. Names decrease the chances that an agency will confuse one group for, but also individuates them, clearly dividing one group from another.

[randomcomicbookreading]

Underwater #3 (1995)

Underwater is one of the few unfinished Chester Brown's works, hence it has never been compiled in graphic novel format. The only phisical evidence for its existence is the original comic book series where it was periodically published by chapters.

Neither plot nor author's aims are easy to understand starting with chapter three. Underwater is deliberately surrealist, its dialogue is written in a bizarrely distorted version of English, and a single chapter is too few pages long to draw any kind of conclusion.

In fact, the Underwarter episode is so short because it only fills half of the book. The second half belongs to another legendary unfinished work by Brown, nothing less than the Christian Gospels comic adaptation!. Particularly, these 13 pages adapt the "fedding the multitude" miracle according Gospel of Matthew.

It's known that Brown's graphic translation of Jesus' life has a very special feature among others in any medium: The mood and look of Jesus changes depending on the particular gospel writer he is adapting. Clearly, the chosen depiction for Matthew's part is quite uncommon: semi-bald, older than usual, serious (almost angry) face... I am tremendously curious about the other alternative versions and the autor's reasons to choose those characterizations. I'll look for more chapters of Underwater and Yummy Fur on the Internet, hoping that Chester Brown take the decision to finish any of those works in order to see it reprinted .

Purchased at Gosh! (Soho, London) for  £3.50

[digital-skeletons]

a wizard staff meeting

[sparksflys]

.

[graysonnightwing]

god i love orphaning things on ao3 dot org