Hello, this is the second i am david brothers newsletter!
If I’ve rigged it right, replies to these emails go to me directly. How long should these be? Should I pick one subject and stick to it? Is there anything beautiful left in the world? Is the new Danny Brown album good? Did I remember to tick Open in a New Tab for all these links? These questions and others go unanswered below.
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Here’s four things of no particular relation:
–KENTA vs Satoshi Kojima at Wrestle Kingdom 15: I have a lot of affection for Bullet Club KENTA. KENTA is probably my favorite pro wrestler, and this era featured effective heel tactics and backstage promos that have me convinced KENTA took a ton of improv classes while WWE was wasting his time. He was a jerk as a young guy, but in his middle age? He’s a monster. His entrance tune Cicatriz is a good workout tune too. I wore a KENTA shirt to the signing yesterday.
–I have been slacking on finishing painting a model kit for over a month now. I just need to paint Hyaku-Shiki’s chest blue! Get on with it. I’m doing the entire kit drybrushed over black primer, for a nasty metal look. I have a hunch it won’t photograph well but it’s looking good. When I do it.
–Death Stranding 2, (from Hideo Kojima, et al.): I sorta-kinda beat this in the middle of the night on Twitch the other day. I’ll have thoughts on this next time, but my shortest, spoiler-free take is that Hideo Kojima saw what Konami was doing with Metal Gear and decided to show them the limits of imitation. I’m talking David Mazzucchelli drawing Batman: Year One compared to the last time I myself (a fellow David) tried to draw Batman.
–I’ve got just enough Chrome tabs open that youtube videos only play with a choppy framerate. There is no lesson for me to learn here because they play fine on my TV and my phone, so I’m gonna keep on stacking tabs until the sun turns cold. It’s you or me, Google, and it ain’t gonna be me.
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With a Triple Take, my confidence explodes out of control:
I’ve been playing Apex Legends for a few years now, almost twenty of the “seasons” of the game. It started as a solo thing I did during the pandemic to be doing something instead of nothing and eventually morphed into the Monday Night Game With the Trio. Parallel to that, I’ve been learning Adobe Premiere for video editing for various reasons, mostly talking about comics or video games online.
I’ve been merging the two interests by making a little highlight reel—we’re okay, these are just nice bits and wins to celebrate—set to music. It’s not quite full AMV status, but I’m always thinking of anime music videos and (don’t laugh) Koyaanisqatsi (1982) when working on these. “What technique do I need to know to get this idea across?” is heavy on my mind, and that movie really rearranged my brain when I finally saw it.
I finished the video for Apex Legends season 26 a couple days after the season ended, blending my footage with their footage into what’s hopefully a pleasant sequence. Either way, it’s great practice and a good vibe, similar to how editing the Mangasplaining podcast (working on the backlog!) is mostly about listening to my friends laugh while they talk about comics.
Here’s “Apex Legends, season 26 (Showdown): Have you heard iron sound?”, featuring Alafía’s “The Blacksmith.”
“Apex Legends, season 26 (Takeover): Have you heard iron sound?” [embedded video]
On to the next. I’ve been slacking on playing a bit on my own, but seeing how my friends are performing makes me want to start getting reps in again. Luckily there’s 25 hours in a day.
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Tens of people have been asking, what is David genre:
I recently read Victor Santos’s Ginger’s Revenge, a one-shot story published on Panel Syndicate. It’s a story about a teen girl who has turned herself into a killing machine to get revenge on her absent father, who has himself become a major figure in organized crime. It’s set in the United Kingdom, so guns are treated with all due respect, and it is a fairly dense 57 pages.
I think I’d like to write about it at length in the near future, because I had a hoot of a time reading it. A “hoot” is a term critics use when a book keeps pushing all their buttons and they spend as much time laughing as reading a story. Do non-critics know about this? Calling a story a hoot is one of the highest honors.
I’ve been joking about how some stories are “David genre” for more years than I remember now. Enough that friends and readers have brought me books they think might be David genre and been absolutely right, even if not for the exact reasons they imagined. It’s a fuzzy category because I’m a fuzzy guy, but the loose idea is that it’s something like John Wick (2014) or The Killer (1989), but also like Jiro Taniguchi’s A Journal of My Father, or The Wrestler (2008), or Rei Hiroe’s Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail. I can do one of those conspiracy wall things when discussing the appeal of any of this stuff.
David genre is about masculinity and growth, complicated father-and-child relationships, and people dying in acrobatic or inventive ways. It’s the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” when The Misfit says, “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
The stories aren’t dumb. They may be direct or unsubtle, or maybe I’m responding to a perceived subtlety in a mostly unsubtle work, but there’s real texture there. Not really a lot of sex, I guess, now that I’m listing things off. Wonder what that’s about…?
Anyway, David genre is a very tongue-in-cheek thing, basically “hey this seems like something you’d like” from my friends, but it’s been fun trying to discover the edges of it for my self, what qualifies as a David genre story and what’s just a cheap holiday in somebody else’s misery. “Writer, know thy self,” right? What do I like and why?
Ginger’s Revenge is a great example of a David genre book, from the storytelling on down. I’m the son of a single mom, so there’s a real charge to fatherhood revenge tales, even if my own relationship with my father is good. It’s not a clear-cut good versus evil story, a conceit I think is pretty lousy in stories about normal people. Ginger isn’t perfect and her father isn’t Lucifer. She is tremendously competent though, a power fantasy I truly enjoy. She came to do a job and is focused on the job. There are other bits and pieces throughout here that click with me, elements of hard boiled storytelling and more extreme action stuff.
The visual storytelling is extremely David genre. Santos is working with a limited palette, making Ginger’s shock of orange hair a compelling design element. Other colors squeeze in as needed—blood red, moody yellow, a very appealing tracksuit green—but the comic feels great, like a speedy black & white comic even with all the color. There’s something special about black & white comics that really play with spot blacks and contrast, and Santos has an excellent grasp on both. The color isn’t icing on the cake or a flourish. It’s something more substantial than that that I haven’t put my finger on yet. It’s like a spoiler on a car, maybe. It has great aesthetic appeal that sometimes obscures what the functionality it brings to the total package…? I’m figuring out how to say how much and why I like this still. That’s not quite it. To be continued.
Ginger’s Revenge is an excellent example of the David genre, and I’m probably gonna have more to say about it soon. Please start using David genre in conversation with friends and family so that I can get some leverage in Hollywood and wherever it is they make comic books these days. I want to curate something.
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I don’t have a good subtitle for this one but it’s a pleasant anecdote:
In the last newsletter, I mentioned having a signing with some fantastic artists. James Harren ended up not being able to make it, but Nick Dragotta and Daniel Warren Johnson came to Oakland’s very own Cape & Cowl Comics for the signing. Getting a face-first look at what Absolute Batman means to people was really enlightening. There were new readers, lapsed readers, and ones who were just like, man, this is the perfect escalation or evolution.
Absolute Batman was definitely a huge deal at the signing, but it was nice to meet readers of Time Waits and Good Devils while I was there, and especially people who picked up All-Negro Comics. A few of them mentioned that I’d talked them into it back in August, which is amazing. Variants and cape comics are buzzy right now, so independent, creator-owned work can be tough to market. It really means a lot when someone walks up and say that they catch what you’re throwing. I was one of several people who told DWJ that Do A Powerbomb! made me cry over the course of the day. (I don’t write tearjerkers, but people said nice things to me too.) A good story is better than just about anything, is what I’m saying. Connecting via art.
The signing ended up being seven hours, from 1400 til just after 2100. I’m typing this on Sunday evening and I’m still beat. (I did technically go for a bike ride earlier today though.)
My first signing ever was the Image+ release party at Cape & Cowl ten years ago, and I’ve done a few cons and a couple signings since then. I’m still working with single digits here, and more than anything else, it’s always really nice talking to people about comics and things they like. I was really feeling it by the end, and I really need to do a better job of remembering I have an occasionally bum knee in the moment, but man, the good vibes were off the charts. I drew a lot of Snoopy heads for a lot of people. (You gotta be a real brave soul to draw Batman next to these dudes.)
Another reason I feel fortunate in life in general is that I’ve made friends with people who are ludicrously good artists but still very free with their time and experience. I’m always mooching tips off people, and I like seeing them work with readers too. A highlight of the signing was seeing a ten year old girl with a sketchbook held close to her chest and getting to flip through it. That’s the stuff that gets me and keeps me hyped up about comics.
We hit the Art of Manga exhibition earlier that, my second time seeing the exhibit at the DeYoung and first time since it opened. It was medium-high packed at ten in the morning over a month after it opened, which was great to see. I was trying to profile the crowd, seeing if younger readers were responding to Jiro Taniguchi or who was blown away by Mari Yamazaki. I didn’t learn anything though. It was really mostly just looking at people and making up stories about them in my head. “Oh that kid would probably love Hotel Harbour View. That old lady, she seems like a real One Piece fan.” Bad methodology but I saw a bunch of people with sketchbooks walking around.
I had a good time on Saturday. Please buy one hundred thousand copies of Good Devils: Don’t Play Fair With Evil at your earliest convenience so I can do it again.
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Here are some quick hits for you to check out:
–Claire Napier’s Cosy Witch Book (Brutal) chapter 1: I’m a Claire Napier fan. There’s a drawing of a house in here that’s great, and “It was a dark and normal night” is the kind of caption that makes my eyes narrow and makes my interest pique.
–Robert Wilson’s “Dreamhouse”: The Kickstarter for Robert Wilson’s graphic novella “Dreamhouse” is a good one. Get in there. A24 is a good point of comparison for fans of that lane of scary stories. Unrelated to “Dreamhouse” beyond a craft level, I bought this screenprint of the best mecha in Gundam from Wilson a long while back and got it framed. I really dig it and like his work. Please give the “Dreamhouse” Kickstarter a long look.
–Giannis Milonogiannis’s sketchbooks & new game: Artist and game designer Giannis Milonogiannis has been a creator to watch for years. Old City Blues is a favorite. Such clean, cool designs. You can download his sketchbooks if you scroll down here a bit and you can download Birdcage, a story-driven arcade shooter, on Steam a little later this month. Wishlist it. It looks dope. I am very bad at these kinds of games but I’m gonna cop this.
–Lupe Fiasco’s “WAV Files”: “WAV Files” is a song where the sea, stars, and trees apologize for their role in being slave ships, carrying them on their waves, and twinkling on them from above. Listening to nature apologize and beg forgiveness is a nice train of thought. There’s a roll call of slave ships in the middle of the song that made me feel pretty bad (complimentary).
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Actually I want to zoom in on that one a little bit:
I liked the trees portion of “WAV Files” a lot, actually. There’s something about the apology here that’s really stuck with me, and Lupe’s delivery throughout the song is great, but really clicks here for me.
Summon the forest
Talkin’ to trees, “Now, how could you be in the chorus
With something so horrid?
You became boards for the floors and the doors of the warships”
Anthropomorphic, the forest returned with a match
Made from itself and said, “Burn us with that”
Then left again and came back with a axe
“We can serve you as furniture or furnace us black,” ayy
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If you haven’t had enough, here’s a few thousand more words:
–I wrote about Jorge Jimenez & Matt Fraction’s Batman #1 for Steve Morris at Shelfdust. I take what feels like a big swing but your mileage may vary if you aren’t an ’80s baby like me.
-I’ve been doing letterboxd as a way to warm up. I started with a rigid format and now I kind of just do whatever, like a thousand words on a few aspects of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025). I’m usually good for a couple reviews a month.
–I mentioned Mon Oncle (1958) last week. I forgot that I said it could momentarily cure depression when I wrote about it. It’s true though.
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A medium-length bike ride the day after a long signing…I did this to my self:
The new Danny Brown is good btw. He’s the latest rapper I enjoyed when I was younger who ended up finding some kinda peace as they got older. It’s great when black dudes get to a stage where life is good.
That’s it.