Well another month has come and gone. I'll be 41 years old in a few weeks. So there's that. Things are busy. 2023 is a busy year. I got to go to Las Vegas for my day job last week. I've never been there as an adult and man that is one weird city. Still, it was a good trip overall and my boss is happy.
On the comics front... Updates on LandLine continue. Looks we'll be getting to Season 3 here on Zestworld before you even know it. Before I even know it. Absolutely wild.
I've been working steadily on a different project that will hopefully be available soon. I'm pretty proud of it. I think it's some of the best work I've ever done.
Here's a page, without context:
So that's coming along swimmingly. Look for updates on that this summer.
What am I reading? Lots of great comics coming out these days. It was recently Free Comic Book Day, the highlights for me were Titan's new CONAN THE BARBARIAN series which had its introductory issue #0. The artwork here is absolutely glorious. If you told me this book was a lost work by the great John Buscema, I'd absolutely believe you. Just look at this gorgeousness:
Speaking of Conan, if you're following me on Twitter you may have noticed that I'm doing a long re-read of Marvel's original CONAN THE BARBARIAN series from the 1970s. You can follow along with that here.
The other highlight of FCBD for me was the prologue issue for IDW's "Star Trek: Day of Blood" crossover. One of the shocking twists of this story so far (which is laid out in two ongoing series, "Star Trek" and "Star Trek: Defiant") is that Worf's son Alexander has joined a notorious Klingon terrorist group called the Red Path. The FCBD issue goes a little bit more into detail of his initial motivations, participating in a bloody slaughter on a Klingon colony world.
DC Comics has a really interesting Superman story happening now called "Superman: Lost." In it, Superman goes missing for a period of time after a mission with the Justice League goes wrong. When he returns, he's been deeply traumatized and reveals to Lois and Batman that while he was only gone a short while for them, from his perspective he was gone for years. The series follows Superman in the present dealing with the emotional fallout, and also a series of flashbacks about his strange alien odyssey while he was gone. It's not your typical Superman adventure, though it does have a lot of those trappings. Check that one out if you're interested.
Over at Marvel, the Predator series has picked up again. While it's kind of lame that we have issue #1 again and it's really issue #6, the story and art are still good. In this series, we're following a human whose family was killed years ealier by a Predator, and she's hunting the specific one that killed them. In this second arc, Theta (as she's known) stumbles upon a Predator hunting preserve (like in the movie "Predators") and rescues a group of humans, some of whom have been frozen in cryogenic sleep for hundreds of years. It's an interesting way to twist the premise of this series and introduce new wrinkles.
Elsewhere, this weekend I finally caught GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, VOL. 3 and let me tell you that was one fine sci-fi adventure film. I still think the first "Guardians" is the best of the three, but this one was really good. I also took an extra personal day and went to witness FAST X, the tenth FAST & FURIOUS film and it was exactly the kind of glorious stupidity I've come to expect and love about this series. If you ever wrote off Jason Momoa as an actor, check this one out because he's absolutely having the time of his life. There's no real depth to his character, of course, but man he is funny in this.
Well, that's the update for May. Again, be sure to subscribe to LandLine for those weekly updates. And look for the other project's announcement too... See you in June.