Get In Loser

Happy 2024!

If Star Trek is to be believed, it should be a banger.

On this, Will Burrows makes some excellent art out of the intersection between Star Trek and progressive politics. You can support him by buying Bell Riots 2024 stickers and pins. Pick up the O’Brien Union poster while you’re at it.

If this intro hasn’t left you feeling completely bemused and alienated, this book - A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine - might be up your street!

Anyway. It’s a new year and I thought I’d ease back into work with a look back at 2023. If nothing else, it’s a nice excuse to do some new warm up illustrations.

I’m always a little suspicious about End of Year posts around this time of year. A lot of it comes across as Productivity Porn and I don’t like boiling down my past twelve months into a quantifiable amount of work/achievements. It feels reductive. But I do think it is important to acknowledge milestones, set new goals, and take stock every now and then.

Maybe my reticence this year comes from feeling like my 2023 was a little on the unproductive side. Don’t get me wrong, I made two comics I’m extremely proud of (I’m a Luddite, and the forthcoming Introduction to Charts that is currently at the printers), and managed to write and draw a whole month of horror reviews in October. But by and large the year felt like I was in a holding pattern. I’ve been developing two pitches for comics I’m working on (one an anthology, the other my next solo book), setting other comic projects in motion, and slowly reigniting my illustration career after putting it on hold while working on Suzanne. As such, it felt like a year without a specific direction. But I think I needed that. It was a year of recalibration and trying to find time for things outside of work - like regular exercise! 

Some of this feeling may well be a bit of burnout from Suzanne. My creative brain recharging. That might explain how basic and unchallenging my year in culture felt. I struggled to read as much as I usually do, and found myself rewatching a lot of comfort TV. Like I say, I think I probably needed this. 

Looking Ahead

2024 already feels different. I’m reading much more already and devouring films on Mubi - both of which are already prompting ideas and solutions to the comic projects I’ve been mulling over.

This year, I’m hoping to pursue more illustration work again. I’d particularly like to be doing more book covers and editorial work.

I’m also hoping to make more significant progress on my next solo book (and the other comic projects I’ve started working on). One way I’m actively trying to make that happen is to dedicate at least one day every week to that work - no matter how busy I get.

Moving on. Let’s talk about my favourite culture from 2023!

TV

I finally caught Covid this year, having been lucky enough to avoid it until now. It hit me hard, taking me out of commission for almost all of August. As such, I found myself doing what I did a lot this year whenever I was ill or feeling burned out: watching detective shows. Which can be tricky when you’ve grown tired of, or can no longer so easily overlook, Copaganda. For better or worse, these shows are comfort TV to me and I ended up rewatching Veronica Mars, Elementary and, maybe most relevant here, Columbo. 

“This is my school. If you go here, your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California, a town without a middle class.” - Veronica Mars

Diving back into mid 2000s teen PI show Veronica Mars had me worried it wouldn’t hold up. But it broadly did. I love the class warfare, the ways in which the themes and subtexts of a traditional film noir are mapped onto a teen high school drama, the wit, the cast, the fashion, and the depiction of a cruel, corrupt police department (or in this case, sheriff department).

I’d recommend this great Skip Intro video for more about that aspect of the show. The most interesting observation being that the procedural cop show, formalised by Dragnet, was a bastardisation of film noir that came out of the Blacklist era. All the class consciousness and critiques of America were chipped away to make room for a repeatable, weekly slice of conservative propaganda. Veronica Mars’ film noir trappings was an act of reclamation!

Still, it is not without its flaws. As with any show from the early-mid 2000s, you’ll need to wade through some problematic waters now and again.

I attempted a quick iPad illustration while rewatching it which I was fairly happy with. I was going for an old pulp crime thriller cover which encouraged me to experiment with using text in Procreate.

“I know, it's because I keep asking these questions, but I'll tell ya, I can't help myself. It's a habit.” - Lieutenant Columbo

Columbo’s How-Solve-It structure shouldn’t work, or at least shouldn’t work multiple times. But it does. Thanks to some excellent writing and the performances of Peter Falk and the guest star murderer. Just watch this scene with Falk’s pal, John Cassavetes - who can barely hide his delight watching his friend work - as Columbo slyly accuses Cassavetes of having a financial motive to kill. The blocking in this scene is lovely, with Columbo slowly coming to dominate the space.

If this comfort watch is familiar to you, you may enjoy this excellent comic by Joe Chouinard in which Columbo attempts to solve a murder in Seattle that features a famous radio psychiatrist: I Hear The Blues A-Killin’.

I made a couple of attempts at sketching Falk and struggled to really capture his essence. His physicality. This was my most successful:

All of this atypical detective chat brings me, in a very roundabout way, to my first pick from 2023:

Poker Face

Poker Face was a welcome nod towards done-in-one, case-of-the-week storytelling that has been slightly abandoned in the age of bingeable, serialised 8-10 episode seasons of TV.

Having grown up craving more serialisation and shorter seasons, I’m surprised to find myself wanting the exact opposite recently. I want my televisual storytelling to take its time, find unexpected character relationships, let episodes luxuriate in the setting without the constant churn of plot. I want actors and writers to have the time to discover and reveal parts of the narrative that wouldn’t have been found in a 6 episode drive-by. Bring back budget-saving bottle episodes! Bring back episodes featuring the lower tier characters because the main players were ill that week!

Have a narrative arc to the season sure, but let episodes be episodes - satisfying and complete on their own terms and not just a small piece of a bigger puzzle.

Poker Face, while not having a 22 episode season (I think that particular model of old TV has largely died) still felt refreshing by embracing a sort of Incredible Hulk/The Fugitive “New Town New Story” episodic rhythm.

The return of the How-Solve-It required a performer who could carry it, and Natasha Lyonne was an inspired Peter Falk substitute. Not every episode worked but it was almost always delightful thanks to Lyonne, some beautiful costume and production design, and neat little nostalgic touches like the year being displayed in soft-focused yellow Roman numerals during the credits (I’m an easy mark).

Clearly, Rian Johnson and the writers thought about ways of solving the Copaganda problem for modern detective shows and it was nice to be able to watch a protagonist solve puzzles and unmask murderers without the involvement (by and large) of the police. The truth is more compelling to Charlie, rather than some sort of retributive justice, and that felt important.

Deadloch

Another 2023 detective show that I enjoyed was Deadloch. An Australian crime comedy that once had the working title of “Funny Broadchurch” which should tell you everything you need to know. While the satirical jabs at grim, Scandi-noir-esque detective fiction is sharp and well observed, the actual murder mystery itself is excellently constructed and the writers stick the landing better than 90% of the shows Deadloch is lampooning. Any show that has throwaway background gags like this deserves your time and attention imo:

The Bear

100% not a detective show, but without a doubt the best TV show I watched this year was season two of The Bear.

As you might be able to tell from the illustration (above) that I got made into a print, I loved the first season. So I went into season two a little nervous that the creative team could keep the quality level as high. But I shouldn’t have worried.

In a season full of bold, intriguing and surprising choices, I think my favourite was in making the thematic throughline of the season all about apprenticeship. The Bear is about a lot of things but ultimately, to me, it's a show about the joy of creation and making something in service of another. Finding community and fulfilment in making something for other people to enjoy. But what the sophomore season put front and centre was how we can do that better by learning from other people and paying it forward by teaching others. It was beautiful and I can’t wait to see what this show does next.

The Rest

• The final season of Succession was pretty much perfect but by this stage, you’re either a fan of the show and already know that, or you can’t understand why people watched 40 hours of a show about awful billionaires being awful.

• I enjoyed the messiness of Yellowjackets season 2. Some plotlines worked, some didn’t, but the mix of Geriatric Millennial Bait needle drops, horror, and exploration of female friendship still hits the spot for me.

• Slow Horses continued to tickle that Le Carré meets The Thick of It itch I didn’t know I had. Such a solid cast who nail every acerbic line and weary eye roll. I also really appreciate, in the age of the Volume, some actual London location shooting.

• The Last of Us didn’t, in my opinion, make an airtight case for the necessity of a tv adaptation. But when it did, as in Episode 3, it was when it deviated from the game and told stories in a way the original couldn’t. I hope the creative team lean into this in future seasons.

• Murder at the End of the World was okay but I found myself frustrated by the credulousness of the show. It seemed to believe, in the year 2023, that tech billionaires are actual geniuses. Toxic and abusive geniuses yes, but geniuses nonetheless. Capable of developing the sort of sentient AI that the tech world wants us to believe is just around the corner. When we have the antics of everyone’s least favourite Divorced Man single-handedly disproving the Great Man Theory with every calamitous tweet, I find stories like this unforgivable. Especially in the wake of Glass Onion. Regardless, I watched the whole thing and sketched this of Emma Corrin’s Darby Hart despite my ambivalence towards the show.

  

I’ve written way too much already so I’ll save my favourite books, films and music of 2023 for next time!