October: (Not So) Spooky Season

Howdy folks,

It’s Halloween, and while in previous years I have wholeheartedly embraced the Spooky Season (with a month-long programme of horror movies and a general sense of joy and excitement), this year has been decidedly un-spooky.

The Usual

Given my absolute lack of time for anything this year, I gave up on doing a Shocktober programme pretty early – I didn’t have the wherewithal to curate a month of horror movies, design a booklet and actually sit down to watch them all. By my count, I’ve watched a grand total of 4 horror movies this month – Matriarch (which was great), the Hammer Horror version of The Mummy, The Rule of Jenny Pen (which I saw as the secret movie at Sheffield’s fantastic ‘Celluloid Screams’ festival and which was absolutely fantastic) and Immaculate (which I also enjoyed). I’ll talk more about those a bit later on!

On the plus side, things are feeling a bit less overwhelming – I had my assessment for the Data Analyst apprenticeship I’ve spent the past 13 or so months working on alongside my day job, and found out that I passed that with flying colours and a Distinction, so that’s a big weight off my mind. I’ve largely completed the fulfilment for Secrets of the Majestic (and have just sent an update out about that) and can hopefully relax a bit now and get excited for the launch shenanigans at Thought Bubble, and all the Brigantia Vol. 2 books are printed and piled up in my house so I can start fulfilling that campaign in earnest. Essentially it’s just admin work to be done on both those projects, and that’s great because I can switch my brain off a bit and just get things packaged up!

Currently the only thing on my slate for next year (and beyond) is SENGOKU with Andrew Browne – and that’s all written, so we just need to get a pitch together and see if there’s any interest. I’m excited to see how the pages come together (and looking forward to running yet another Kickstarter campaign for it because no publishers are interested..!)

The Record

• Logo designed and 12 pages lettered for Of Ichor & Bone (Asa Wheatley/Sammy Ward/JP Jordan)

Asa’s shared the cover with my logo design on it and pages for the story will be hitting his Patreon, so head on over and subscribe to that if you want to read a chivalric fantasy/horror one-shot comic influenced by Dark Souls, The Green Knight and more. We’ve made some strong stylistic choices with the lettering so I’m hopeful that it works for people!

Cover for Of Ichor & Bone by Asa Wheatley, Sammy Ward, JP Jordan, Chris Mole and Claire Napier. A female knight is wrapped up by a plant-like tentacle monster.

The Tunes

We’re starting off a bit softer than usual with a new track from Canadian “nicest man alive” Devin Townsend, from his new album ‘PowerNerd‘ (great title, fun album). Next is a blast from the past with the remastered version of this track from Mastodon’s excellent Crack the Skye album – I know the original back to front and this definitely sounds a bit crisper and bigger. Blood Incantation are up next with a track off their (wild) new album – I’ve listened to it twice and I still don’t really think I can describe it effectively! Haunt are up next with some throwback heavy metal and a suitably spooky album cover, followed by my favourite track from my favourite band’s best (IMO) album – I’m incredibly excited to see The Ocean playing this (and the rest of Pelagial) live tomorrow at Damnation Festival, it’s basically a perfect album for me. MASTER BOOT RECORD are up next to pound the cobwebs out of your brain with their very heavy electronica/chiptune death metal, and they’re followed by Japanese “brutal blackgaze” from Kokeshi – a Spotify discovery that I’ve enjoyed a lot this month. Woe are an American black metal band that I supported with Ba’al this month in London – very nice guys, and mammoth tremolo picking skills on show here. Lastly, we’re closing things out with two softer cuts – the BBC Proms version of Dog Days Are Over by Florence + The Machine (I highly, highly recommend you watch the full Symphony of Lungs performance on iPlayer/YouTube because it is absolutely spellbinding and had me tearing up more than once – a truly magical experience!) and some classic Pink Floyd with Comfortably Numb, after a friend put it firmly in my head. Definitely not the worst pair of earworms to have to contend with!

Quick Hits

It’s a new section! I’m going to do some micro-reviews for the horror movies I watched this month, because this is my newsletter and nobody can stop me 😤

Matriarch (2022): definitely a slow-burn/tension horror rather than a jump scare one, but very effective at it – Kate Dickie remains undefeated in the category of “terrifying and eldritch mother figures”, capping off a trifecta that includes The Vvitch, The Green Knight and now this. I enjoyed the folkloric elements too, and some gross practical effects to boot.

The Mummy (1959): You know exactly what you’re getting with a Hammer Horror picture, and Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee never disappoint. Not scary in the slightest, but Lee does a great job using his physicality and size to overpower his victims and certainly looks creepy enough!

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024): This absolutely fucking shook me. Set in a care home in New Zealand, where an arrogant and self-important judge (played by Geoffrey Rush) has been sent after suffering a debilitating stroke. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone because it’s so new, but John Lithgow is incredible as one of the other (creepy doll-toting) patients. The utterly crushing horror of essentially being jailed in your own body, reverting back to childlike behaviours and wasting away at the end of your life with nobody listening to you or believing you ruined me. It could have done with about 25 mins shaving off the runtime, but I wholeheartedly recommend that you seek this one out!

Immaculate (2024): Sydney Sweeney stars as a young American nun who travels to a sinister convent in Italy for a new start. Not as much OTT Catholicism as I might have liked (but my bar for that sort of thing has been thoroughly skewed by the Blasphemous games, which I love) but it definitely ratchets up the unpleasantness as things go from bad to worse. Sweeney is also very good – I think this is the first thing I’ve seen her in although she seems to be everywhere at the moment, and she throws herself into the more gruesome bits with gusto. The last scene in particular is HEAVY (in a good way!) Overall a solid movie, and at 89 mins it didn’t overstay its welcome at all.

That’s all from me for this month, I’ve rambled enough – enjoy your All Hallow’s Eve whatever you’re doing with it, and thanks for reading!

All the best,

Chris

September 30, 2024

September 2024: End of an Era

Hey folks,

I once again find myself up against it and writing this right before my self-imposed deadline of “the last day of the month”, for reasons that are hopefully clear and apparent! Let’s get into it…

The Usual

This month saw the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign for Brigantia Vol. 2, and as you might expect, it’s put me in quite an introspective mood. The first issue came out in 2016, and while I appreciate that 8 years is an extremely long lead time for a 6-issue series, doing the whole thing on the side of day jobs and a million other commitments should probably count as a mitigating factor. Even with how long it’s taken, I’m very proud of the story – and if this volume ends up being the last comic I put out (not an unrealistic possibility!) I’d say it’s a pretty good way to sign off. It’s wild to look back at what I hoped for the series when I started writing it (released through Image was one dream), and my ambitions have dramatically scaled back as the world has knocked chunks out of my mental health and made this whole game much harder and less enjoyable the past 8 years. Now, I’m happy just to get it into your hands and put a satisfying full stop on the whole thing!

Anyway, the book is with the printer as I write this – I’ll have the digital ready to go as soon as Kickstarter finish up their processing bits and bobs and it should be sorted in plenty of time for Thought Bubble. I’m also closing in on completing fulfilment for Secrets of the Majestic – all the UK pledges have been posted out (except for the ones which are being picked up in person at Thought Bubble, and they’re all packaged up) and I’m making a start on non-UK pledges this week. Trying to fulfil two Kickstarters in one year always seemed like a wild idea, and I can confirm that it’s not the least stressful thing in the world, but at least it clears my slate without anything spilling over into 2025!

Once all the toilet books are out I can (hopefully) start looking forward to all the wild stuff we have planned for the convention weekend – specifically the Secrets of the Majestic exhibition at the Mercer Gallery, which has been a lot of fun to work on. We’ll be having an opening on the 15th November (the Friday evening before the con kicks off in earnest) which I’m hoping a lot of the creators will be able to attend, so if you want to hobnob with a bunch of toilet freaks, admire pages from the book and ask me why I came up with such a ridiculous idea in the first place – don’t miss it!

The Tunes

It’s that rarest of things, an all-metal playlist! And yes, I’m starting this one off with one of my own songs, but there’s a good reason for it – somebody used a brief snippet of the heavy intro for this on an Instagram reel that went mini-viral last month and the result is that at time of writing, my old band Northern Oak have almost 3000 monthly listeners on streaming – not bad given that we split up in 2016 and never reached a fraction of those numbers back then! Anyway, I’m still very proud of this song and it has some of my best riffs in it, so there. Next we go into a couple of black metal blast songs – new Kanonenfieber (an extremely anti-war one-man BM project from Germany), followed by the atmoblack of Autumn Nostalgie and Fen, both of whom I’m looking forward to seeing live in the not-too-distant future. Bolt Thrower are in here as a tribute to the excellent Space Marine 2 which I’ve been playing this month, and they’re followed by a new Linkin Park song which goes harder than I think any of us were expecting – the new vocalist is never going to replace Chester, but she’s doing a great job based on the two singles they’ve released thus far. New Devin Townsend is always worth the time, especially when he’s going for more of an uncomplicated metal sound, and I really enjoyed the Mastodon/Lamb of God collab – it basically sounds like Leviathan-era Mastodon, and since that’s the best Mastodon album (a point that the other members of Ba’al do not agree on!) it works for me. I have a soft spot for this Testament album and their particular brand of bouncy thrash metal, and on the theme of “bands that a teenage Chris built his whole identity around”, we’re closing out with a track from the new Nightwish album that’s also very enjoyable.

The Links

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-capitalism-incentivizes-the-destruction-of-art

I particularly enjoyed this longer-read article about how capitalism is a destructive force, spun out of all the hoo-hah over the cancelled Coyote vs. Acme movie, and it made me contemplative – without wishing to sound like a boomer, a lot of movies these days are shit, and there’s a real surge towards lowest common denominator, focus-tested to fuck storytelling where the goal (from the perspective of the people funding the whole thing) is to make as much money as possible, not to actually produce a good movie. Ironically, that approach doesn’t appear to be paying dividends with the number of “sure thing” blockbusters that have flopped dramatically in the past few years rising all the time – yes, the pandemic absolutely played a part in some of that, but I think that a lot of audiences are savvy enough to recognise when they’re seeing something inauthentic or jaded. There’s probably an equivalent for this in comics as well, but I don’t consider myself qualified enough to talk about that so I’ll let someone smarter than me run with it..!

And that’s all from me for this month – it’s extremely soggy, I’ve spent large chunks of today stamping around in the rain both with a dog and on the way to-and-from work, and right now the sofa and a hearty pasta/bacon/cheese/veg dish is calling my name. Enjoy the rest of your weeks!

All the best,

Chris

August 31, 2024

August 2024: Full Steam Ahead

Hey folks,

I’ll try and keep this month’s newsletter relatively short, because I appreciate that I’ve already bombarded you with Kickstarter spam last week and I don’t want to take the piss. And to be fair, most of what I have to share relates to the Kickstarter so I’m pretty much banging the same drum (and will be for the next 21 days..!)

The Usual

We’ve just crossed the one-week threshold of the campaign for Brigantia Vol. 2 and it’s looking pretty healthy – £2663 pledged and 88% funded at time of writing. There are no sure bets but I’m fairly confident (based on those numbers) that we’ll be able to get it over the line! That total is in large part due to a stratospheric first day which saw us raise almost £1800 in the first 24 hours, a frankly ridiculous number which I am extraordinarily grateful for. Early bird tiers work!

The rush of positive posts and comments about the series also warmed the cockles of my heart – creating stuff is an incredibly isolating and demoralising experience at times, because you pour your entire self into a project (comics, music, whatever) and obsess over it until it’s done – and you do all of that not knowing whether people will like it, hate it or (at worst) be totally indifferent to it. I’m not saying that I need everyone to be nice to me about the things I write, but it can genuinely help keep the demons at bay for all of us if we’re reminded that people do like our stuff and want to read/hear/enjoy more of it.

Anyway, please do check out the campaign and climb on board if you haven’t already – the funding period ends on 22nd September and I’m almost done with the layout, so the book should be able to go to print pretty sharpish. Oh, and Kieron Gillen’s writing a foreword for it, isn’t that nice?

The first few copies of SECRETS OF THE MAJESTIC have also landed on doormats – I sent out a couple just to get the hang of this newfangled Click & Drop/thermal label printer setup that I’m using. It seems deceptively easy, but the books appear to have arrived safely, so all good to go! Here’s evidence:

A screenshot of a tweet by Jordan Collver

The Tunes

It’s a surprisingly metal-light playlist this month! Only a few overtly heavy tracks on here, mainly because I’ve spent most of the back half of the month listening to the Alien: Romulus soundtrack after thoroughly enjoying the movie (if I had a Letterboxd account my review would be “Uncomfortably vaginal. 4/5.”) We kick things off with a great, dark, atmospheric piece from that OST before steering into videogame territory with this re-orchestrated track from Breath of the Wild, one of the best Zelda games. Next is a nice, moody ambient break courtesy of Kyle Preston (a Spotify discovery) before I indulge my inner (lapsed) Mancunian with what is, in my opinion, the best Oasis song. I know that Oasis are a hot topic at the moment, and I’ll be the first to say they’re problematic, but listening to them reminds me of where I’m from and the years I spent kicking around Stockport and Manchester as a teenager – it’s a very specific kind of nostalgia that I’m now old enough to appreciate. I’m not paying through the nose to see them live because it’ll be a trainwreck, but I’ll happily listen to this tune!

Moving on – I’ve long appreciated Bob Marley even if I don’t know a lot of reggae artists outside of him, so I only discovered this month that his grandson YG Marley also makes music – and it’s a nice, laid-back jam for summer written with his mother, the sublime Lauryn Hill. I first heard of Stateless courtesy of one of their songs being on a radio station in the videogame Sleeping Dogs (a fantastic Hong Kong action/open-world game, by the by) and they’ve remained a favourite, this song in particular. The Appleseed Cast are one of those bands I’ve never seen or heard anywhere else, but I picked up a CD in HMV when I was younger on the strength of the artwork – I guess I’d describe them as post-indie? The whole album is worth your time! Glassing open up the heavy closing section of this playlist with their furious blackened sludge, before we get into new Opeth (they brought the death metal growls back! And stopped trying so hard to sound like a shit 70s prog band! Thank fuck!!) and closing things out, the ferocious Egyptian death metal assault of Nile, perhaps the greatest example of “write music about something you’re passionate about” considering how they’ve basically been guitarist/vocalist Karl Sanders’ Egyptian history/mythology thesis for the last 30 years. I pre-ordered a fancy Anubis statue version of this album (see below) – worth the money? No. Extremely cool? You’re damn right:

The Links

Just one link this time, for a long-read article about the absolute shitshow that is AI and LLMs from a writer who clearly knows what they’re talking about: wheresyoured.at/burst-damage

I (and probably a lot of other creatives) feel like a real bunch of Cassandras about this whole AI mess – it’s a terrible idea, the results are awful and even if they get “as good as done by a human”, I cannot express strongly enough how much I reject that. I don’t want to read a book from a facsimile of a human, or listen to a song compiled by a computer to try and sound like a human made it – I want to experience art created BY HUMANS, with all their mess and flaws and complex emotions. And that’s without even getting into the devastating environmental impact all these models are having.

If you’d said to me when I was 12 that my adulthood would be spent raging at the shattering collapse of our planet’s ecosystem, exacerbated by feckless and immoral techbros pumping out emissions just so that your mad uncle could generate a shit picture of Donald Trump in a Captain America costume, I’d probably just have walked into the sea off Broadstairs while visiting my grandparents and been done with it. Roll over, thou grate and restless ocean – roll over the LOT.

Anyway, this article is full of excellent lines skewering those immoral techbros and pointing out just how wobbly the whole structure of “generative AI” is. I for one sincerely hope it collapses in the next 12 months, much like NFTs and crypto currency. Not to be a luddite or anything, but some new technology is just bad and shouldn’t be encouraged?

And that’s all for this month – by the time the next edition rolls around I’ll (hopefully) be celebrating another successful Kickstarter campaign. Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Chris

July 31, 2024

July 2024: Proof is in the Pudding

Howdy, folks!

If June was a depressing month, July has largely continued that trend, and I write this a day or two after a full-on anxiety attack that is leading to me finally seeking actual medical help for the anxiety and depression that I’ve been ignoring for the past few years. That isn’t especially relevant to the rest of the newsletter but I wanted to provide some context in case I don’t seem like my usual chirpy self, online or otherwise! Anyway, here goes:

The Usual

We’ll keep solely to the comics side of things: after sending out the digital copies to all our backers, I now have boxes and boxes of SECRETS OF THE MAJESTIC sitting in my spare room, ready to be packaged up and sent out. Rich (Surname?) at Comic Printing UK has once again done an incredible job – the book looks fantastic, the art is gorgeous throughout and it has a very “prestige” feel (for a book about toilets). Here’s evidence of the great unboxing:

Turns out it's really not difficult to video a PILE O' BOXES (even when you have a very curious rottweiler baby staring at you). UNBOOOOOXXXXX @ComicPrintingUK!! pic.twitter.com/7VSBTfeWVU
— Chris 'Human Cryptid' Mole ☀️ (@ChrisManji) July 29, 2024

I’ve given myself plenty of time before the official launch at Thought Bubble to sort out fulfilment, which is nice because it means some of the pressure is off and I can take my time getting the books packed up.

In the meantime, it’s time for a hard pivot into BRIGANTIA land – I’ve just received Hassan’s letters for the final part of the story in my inbox this morning, and the pages look absolutely fantastic. I know I’m biased, but to me it’s an artistic team firing on all cylinders (and now with an Eisner-winning letterer in the mix for some added sheen!) To prove I’m not just blowing smoke, here are a couple of exclusive sneaky peeks:

Brigantia gazes out at the ruined Otherworld.

Brigantia gazes in horror as the legend of the Fomorians unfolds.

Veteris towers over Anna, unleashing his fury at her.

Lines: Alaire Racicot / Colours: Rebecca Nalty / Letters: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Lastly, here’s something that’s very much still in the slow cooker – Andrew’s completed his pencils/roughs for the opening sequence of SENGOKU, our samurai story about war, family and the cult of bushido. We wanted to open the book with the sort of classic showdown that you’d see in a chanbara movie before starting to deconstruct things. The current goal is to complete this intro sequence then probably try funding the full book through KS – it’s a 64-page one-shot graphic novel so hopefully that’ll be achievable.

Here’s a sneaky peek, anyway:

The Record

The only creative thing I’ve written this month is this newsletter, and it’s debatable as to whether that counts. Oh well!

The Tunes

I’ve spent a goodly amount of time this month playing Dredge, a very satisfying (and creepy) cosmic horror fishing sim, meaning that this opening track has been firmly stuck in my head. That leads us into some new Childish Gambino, from the final album – a fitting send-off for a project that has produced a lot of fantastic music. Next up is new Pijn, the passion project of Joe Clayton (nicest man in metal, who we recorded the latest Ba’al release with) – this whole album is just a sumptuous joy to listen to. If you watched the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics you probably saw Gojira absolutely melting some faces off – they’ve been one of the best bands around for a long time (this track is a banger off their third album, from 2005) so it was great to see them get such a big stage. Staying on the topic of “2000s metal”, here’s a new remixed/reimagined version of the classic Laid to Rest by Lamb of God & HEALTH – it goes harder than it has any right to (and the original song goes pretty hard!) And because I’ve been listening to a lot of comfort food music, a couple more classic tracks for you – my personal favourite Turisas song off their best album (The Varangian Way) followed by a complete pop-punk 180 courtesy of The Offspring. Lastly, we’re into a closing trip of “more obscure shit” – Belore is a one-man band making big symphonic/atmospheric black metal and recently got announced for the one festival I’m planning to go to next year (Fortress Festival), so I’m excited to see them on stage. Hail Spirit Noir’s new album is great – not as catchy and immediate for me as their previous releases, so more of a grower, but it has some real standout tracks. And finally we have Wormwood closing things out with some melodic black metal (and some rather sub-par album artwork, but we’ll let them off)!

The Links

Going to share something inspiring/hopeful today – I was vaguely aware of The Ocean Cleanup project, but I had a nosy at their website due to a link in a work email and they’re honestly doing great work. The oceans are so important to the overall health and climate of our planet, so cleaning up the massive amount of plastic pollution that gets poured into them is a mammoth task but they’ve been grinding away at it and making real progress – go and have a browse and remind yourself that there are a lot of very smart and good people hammering away at trying to make the world a better place:

https://theoceancleanup.com

And that’s all from me for this month – have a great August and let’s hope the Kickstarter fulfilment gods smile down on me!

All the best,

Chris

June 30, 2024

June 2024: Blink and You’ll Miss It

Howdy, folks!

As the title suggests – this June feels like it flew by, plunging on a downward trajectory into a very shitty abyss. I’ll try not to be too maudlin or woe-is-me, but I’ve spent a big chunk of this month being very depressed and that combined with various other things has really impacted both my productivity and my joie de vivre. Let’s get into it!

The Usual

After my high spirits about a new puppy in last month’s newsletter, that idea quickly crashed to earth when the Dogs Trust told us that they considered our house/neighbourhood too busy for the dog we were particularly interested in, which was honestly pretty crushing for both of us given the emotional investment we’d already made into her. I can’t blame them for wanting the best for each dog, but I do think they were being a bit overly cautious. Anyway, after a few weeks of being thoroughly miserable about it we dusted ourselves off and have now adopted a different dog from a different kennels – Max the Rottweiler, who is a big gangly soppy ball of affection and has already begun following me all over the house like a canine shadow. He is a Very Good Boy and I would kill and/or die for him.

On the work front, this month saw a formal rejection from Mad Cave for the NO SPACE LIKE HOME pitch I put together with Tango and JP Jordan at the start of the year. In all honesty I’d been expecting the rejection due to the very long delay in their response, but it’s still gutting to see it in black and white – especially considering how much time and emotional energy I’ve put into that story. I’m terrible at judging my own work (because I tend to think everything I’ve written is shit, to a greater or lesser degree, and no amount of positive affirmation has ever managed to shift that belief) but I firmly believe that issue #1 of NO SPACE LIKE HOME is up there as one of the best things I’ve ever written and having the whole story thrown back is a huge knockout punch to my self-belief. I don’t want the story to just sit on the shelf never getting made, but it also seems crystal clear to me that I’ll never be good/desirable enough to get anything picked up by a publisher from the very-small pool of publishers that aren’t predatory/awful. Which means self-publishing, as brutally expensive and draining and stressful as it is, is my only recourse. And frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn any more.

For the time being I’m slapping a great big ‘???’ over that project (and anything else I had in the pitching stages) in favour of just getting my few in-flight projects (the toilet book, Brigantia Vol. 2) cleared off the table. After that, at the end of this year, we’ll see – but it definitely feels like the depression is winning and I’ve reached the end of the road on the comics front.

In lighter news, the digital/backer PDF of Secrets of the Majestic is 95% finished, and should be 100% very soon – if I can tear myself away from trying to settle in the aforementioned Very Good (but also Very Anxious) puppy. All the design pages are done and the layout is locked in, so it’s just a case of compiling the whole thing and then getting it out to our very patient and kind Kickstarter backers. I’m very happy with it overall – I know every anthology editor raves about the stories in their book but I genuinely think there’s a great spread of fantastic tales in here, and it’ll have a nice professional sheen to it. Because when I set out to make a stupid book full of toilet puns, I do it properly 😤

The Record

• 8 pages lettered for The Phoenix
• 7 pages lettered for Secrets of the Majestic

Just lettering this month, although I have also written various bits and pieces for Secrets of the Majestic as part of the book design work – mostly gently trolling Rich from Comic Printing UK in the acknowledgements, tbf. It’s hard to try and write any outlines or pages when you’re convinced that everything you write is shit…

The Tunes

As per my mental state this month, the playlist is very full of “comfort food” tracks. Starting things off, it’s one of the greatest rock songs ever written from Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s favourite movie (seriously, ask him about School of Rock, he’s watched it about as many times as I’ve watched Pacific Rim (approaching triple figures at this point!)) followed by another of the greatest rock songs ever written courtesy of Prince. After that we take a hard turn into power metal territory with Twilight Force who are cheesy fun, and then summer-time black metal with new Alcest. I’ve never really rated Alcest, and I still don’t get all the hype, but this track does have a nice sunshine feel and lovely, soaring clean vocals. Modern Technology are an Adlai recommendation who are very very good – a 2-piece with just bass, drums, a filthy sludgy tone and lots of shouting. Inherits the Void (atmospheric/melodic black metal) and Ulcerate (melodic death metal) take us into the extreme section of the playlist, before Janelle Monae takes us back out of it – I scored some free tickets to go and see her in Manchester at the start of July (on the same night as the general election, to be precise), so it’ll be delightful to come out of a Janelle Monae gig and find out just how brutally the Tories have lost. The Deku Trio produce smooth jazz versions of Zelda songs which is just delightful and relaxing, and to close things out we have some medieval lo-fi hip hop courtesy of Thaehan – I discovered that there’s apparently a medieval-themed LoFi Girl channel (https://www.youtube.com/live/_uMuuHk_KkQ?si=HPG_dZIf39uE0JpI) and honestly I’ve never seen anything quite so tailored for me in my entire life? Except maybe that Japanese Samurai Gourmet show on Netflix. Anyway, this is my hole, it was made for me, etc etc.

The Links

Just the one link this time – my good friend Asa Wheatley is currently in the Kickstarter mines running a campaign for book four of his Sagas of the Shield Maiden series. We’re into the final hours of the campaign, and they have a solid chunk of ground to make up. I contributed some positive blurb about the series, and have backed every book because they’re beautifully put together and Asa (and all the artists he’s worked with) have poured their hearts and souls into it. If you haven’t backed it already, please go here and chuck in some coins so we can get this thing over the finish line:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/asawheatley/sagas-of-the-shield-maiden-book-four

In my (probably not that controversial) opinion, the Kickstarter comics space should be for books like this – the sort of thing you wouldn’t see in the direct market, with a strong creative vision behind it. Every time I see an established publisher with a dedicated PR/marketing department raising millions of pounds on KS I die a little inside, because it feels like they’re sucking all the oxygen and attention away from the smaller projects which still look professional and on par with anything a publisher might put out, but are being managed by one/a few people. Anyway, rant over..!

And that’s that on that, as the saying goes. Have a good rest of your weekend, keep your eyes peeled for a digital PDF in the next few weeks if you’re a Secrets of the Majestic backer and try to stay hydrated. I should really take my own advice…

All the best,

Chris

May 1, 2024

April 2024: Summer is Icumen In

Howdy, folks!

It looks like we’re (finally) turning the corner into some warmer weather here in the UK, which is sure to have a real impact on my mood – I’m very tired of being freezing cold all the time (because I’m too Yorkshire to put the heating on), so the mercury rising will hopefully lighten me up a little..!

The Usual

Coco Con in Lancaster at the start of the month was lovely, with a bunch of good people hanging out in a nice venue and with great footfall to boot. I did much better than I was expecting sales-wise, and had some great conversations with people while there (both exhibitors and punters). I’m looking forward to the next event the Coco team put on already!

The main focus of my time at the moment, however, is a (relatively) big piece of news – the Brigantia Vol. 2 campaign is being assembled, and we have a pre-launch link! Go here to sign up – I’m aiming for a mid-June launch, and will get all the layout/design work done on the book around then so it’s ready to send off to print as soon as the campaign wraps. Cast your eyes downwards for a reveal of the front cover, by the prodigiously-talented duo of Alaire Racicot and Rebecca Nalty (who have also illustrated all the pages in the book):

The cover for Brigantia Vol. 2. Brigantia is menaced by the evil Veteris and Balor of the Fomorians. — Art by Alaire Racicot, colours by Rebecca Nalty

I’ll be banging the drum as loudly as I can for this one – it’s the concluding part of Brigantia’s story, and I think it contains some of my best and most emotionally affecting work yet. Plus the artwork is absolutely gorgeous and I’m excited to share it with people! I’ll share a few more sneak peeks in the coming months, so watch out for those.

Most of the stories for Secrets of the Majestic are now complete, with a few that’ll be done in the next week or two – all the creative teams have been fantastic about meeting the deadline and/or keeping me informed about their progress, so it’s been remarkably straightforward keeping this on track. I have some layout work (and lettering) to do for the anthology as well, so I sense that I’m going to be spending a lot of my evenings and weekends over the coming months glued to the computer..!

I was inordinately proud of this toilet roll caption box for a Secrets of the Majestic story…

The Record

• 6 pages lettered (Secrets of the Majestic)
• Various bits of design for the Brigantia Vol. 2 Kickstarter and book layout and the Secrets of the Majestic layout

Once again, no pages written this month, but I’ve come to terms with that – I’m going to stop beating myself up about it because I have more than enough on my plate as it is. There’s no value in forcing myself to write for the sake of it – if the desire to do so comes back then great, but I won’t chase it.

The Tunes

I was obviously going to put a Final Fantasy 7 track on here – but annoyingly the Lifestream theme which has been embedded in my head isn’t on streaming yet, so this is a worthy second choice! New John Carpenter is always something to celebrate, and the master of synth doesn’t disappoint with this track. I realised the other day that I hadn’t listened to Blood Ceremony in ages – this is off their latest album, a lovely little slice of witchy psych-rock with flutes. The John 5 album this next track comes from is one of very few guitarist solo albums that I like because he actually wrote a bunch of songs, not just incessant shredding – and all the songs are serial killer themed, for the true crime heads out there. I was getting frustrated with difficult videogames this month so I decided to replay Ocarina of Time, which is why we have Dragonforce with an intensely nerdy song full of Zelda references up next – delightfully cheesy. Sonja came out with one of my surprise favourite albums of 2023, so I’m excited to hear more music from them – this continues the claustrophobic, kind-of sexy heavy metal vibes of their debut. Beginning the black metal section of the playlist, Vorga make huge, atmospheric BM with fantastic production values and a cosmic theme – all things I love! They’re followed by some classic Watain with a song that I go back to on the regular (when I feel like I need a bit of that there Satanism), and then a new Zeal & Ardor track which goes in a very different direction. Lastly, I’m putting my own band Ba’al’s new single on here because I can – Ornamental Doll is off our new EP (‘Soft Eyes‘) which comes out on May 3rd. I’m extremely proud of the three tracks on the EP, and we’ve had some great reviews for it already – if you’re interested, we’re having a listening party over on the Ripcord Records Bandcamp page this evening where you can hear the EP in full and chat to us about it. And you can pre-order the album or grab it on Friday (Bandcamp Friday!) – either digitally from the Ba’al Bandcamp, or as a lovely physical CD from Ripcord Records.

The Links

First, a couple of promotional shout-outs for friends – Asa Wheatley is running the next Sagas of the Shield Maiden campaign next month, and you’re not going to want to miss this one – every book is a polished selection of fighting viking tales, and a joy to look at. Go here to sign up for the pre-launch!

Nick Bryan is also gearing up for a stint in the Kickstarter mines with The Collected Letters of Courier Z – I had a sneaky advance look at this and it’s a lot of fun, a collection of whacky sci-fi shorts about a very frazzled planet-hopping space postie. Hit the sign-up link here!

Next up, something a bit more intellectual – this was a very interesting long-read article about the history of Arab Jews and their solidarity with Palestine: https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24122304/israel-hamas-war-gaza-palestine-arab-jews-mizrahi-solidarity

I know embarrassingly little about the history of the middle east (because I’ve never studied it academically, and never felt the inclination to go and learn about it outside of those studies) so I learned a fair few things from this article that resonate quite loudly, considering what’s happening in the region today.

Thanks for reading – please sign up to the Brigantia Kickstarter, check out the new Ba’al release and have a great month. Summer is icumen in!

All the best,

Chris

March 31, 2024

March 2024: The Cry of the Planet

Howdy, folks!

It’ll be a pretty short newsletter this month – I have a few things to write about, but I’m also going through some real creative doldrums at the moment so it’s a struggle to come up with anything interesting! We’ll start with some updates, as per…

The Usual

A Kickstarter campaign with a story of mine in went live on Friday, and it’s very worth your time – Killtopia: Nano Jams!

If you’re not familiar with Killtopia, it’s the cyberpunk/sci-fi brainchild of writer Dave Cook – set in a futuristic Neo-Tokyo full of satirical parallels with our world today. Nano Jams is a collection of short stories set in that city, with myself and a collection of other writers and artists tackling media and its myriad problems through a cyberpunk lens. My story is called Virtual Duality (with the amazing Mau Mora on art and Micah Myers on letters) and it’s about videogames, trolling and how sometimes the game gets far too real…

Please check out the campaign and back if you’re interested – Dave has a spotless record on Kickstarter so it’s very worth your time/money, and there are a lot of very good pals of mine on the creative roster: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bust/killtopia-nano-jams-a-cyberpunk-comic-anthology

Next week I’ll be at my first con of the year – Coco Comics Con in Lancaster, run by the lovely chaps at Coco Comics. It was a delight to be invited to this one and I’m looking forward to catching up with people – those creative doldrums I mentioned earlier are biting hard at the moment so I’m hoping that talking comics for a day will reignite some of the fire in me.
Me, at me, in 2024
Progress continues on Secrets of the Majestic – I’m getting pages in, a couple of the stories are all done and lettered, and there’s some really cool stuff in the planning stages for our prospective launch in November. I don’t want to share any more until the details are ironed out and everything’s in place, but all I will say is… keep some space clear on your Friday evening if you’re attending Thought Bubble this year..! 👀🚽

The Rest

I’m going to rip up the usual format for the rest of the newsletter this month, because a) it’s a long Easter weekend and I can do what I want and b) I haven’t really accomplished anything of note on the writing/lettering front, and I haven’t been keeping track of what I’ve been listening to. So instead, I’m going to write about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, and specifically about the idea of going back to your old work and trying to reimagine it. For anyone who’s midway through: don’t worry, I haven’t finished it yet so I’m not going to spoil the ending!!

Remakes are a tale as old as time at this point – Hollywood in particular is incredibly guilty of wheeling out the same franchises again, and again, and again, with the end product inevitably reeking of cynicism and corporate interference. The term has become associated with cashgrabs, trading on nostalgia and a longing for days gone by to try and wring money out of us – in a way it’s representative of a larger cultural malaise that hangs over Western civilisation specifically, where there’s a clear sense that the “glory days” are behind us and we’re all just staring down the barrel of a gun marked “climate extinction”.

I was conscious of all of this on going into Final Fantasy 7: Remake, a complete top-to-bottom reworking and reimagining of probably my favourite RPG of all time – a weird, kooky, very Japanese and yet globally relatable tale about the slow death of a planet due to its natural resources being mined for energy (sensing a theme here..?) and the lovable anime-haired moppets tasked with saving it. I steeled myself for it to be as cynical and as phoned-in as those Hollywood remakes, trading on our fond memories of the original.

And then Aerith showed up and I started full-on ugly crying because everything about her re-introduction was perfect, and I immediately realised how much it would devastate me having to watch the story play out again (spoilers for a game that was released in 1997, sorry not sorry: Aerith is killed by the game’s big bad, Sephiroth, at the end of the second act. She essentially sacrifices herself to restore the flow of energy within the planet so it can fight off the horrific calamity he wants to bring about. It is emotionally devastating.)

But as I continued to play through, dazzled by the amount of time, effort and care that had been poured into the game, I realised that the developers were up to something – not content with just fully realising a vision that suffered due to technological constraints in the late 90s, they were also playing with my memory of the story and how events unfolded. Don’t get me wrong – some of the sections are very faithful to the original, but with sharper and more mature writing (the Barret/Dyne scene in particular absolutely nailed what I was hoping for). But there’s a sense that instead of sticking to the story religiously, the writers decided to experiment with it. The original game is possibly one of the finest examples of an “unreliable narrator” trope in fiction, with some big twists baked into the story, and with this grand project to reimagine the game it feels like the developers are challenging us as players – what do you remember? What is real and what is imaginary? And crucially: what if things were different?

I’m genuinely torn about this in a way that I haven’t been about a videogame in a very long time – on the one hand, Aerith’s death was one of the most powerful and emotionally charged bits of storytelling I’d ever encountered, and part of me wants to see how it unfolds now that the developers can do whatever they want graphically. My own internal memory/version of FF7 has Aerith dying burned into it. But on the other, there’s a real sense of possibility here – they know that we all think we know what’s going to happen, and have managed to make it seem genuinely possible that fate might be altered and she might survive. Her sense of gentle sadness and resignation that was communicated merely through text dialogue in 1997 has been refined and deepened, and as a character she’s much more developed – so I want to see her live on, much as it would dramatically change the entire final act of a story that I’ve fondly experienced many, many times before and potentially make the last part of the story into a completely different experience.

Bringing this back around – I completely understand the desire to revisit your earlier work and see if you can just… do it better. Some of the earliest songs I recorded with Northern Oak have absolutely awful production (because I didn’t know what I was doing) and I think would benefit massively from a revamp, with all the technology and knowledge now at my disposal. But I can say with certainty that I wouldn’t have the will to completely rewrite them because even if some of the riffs are flawed or the lyrics aren’t perfect, they’re a microcosm of who I was and who we were at that time. Going back to something which holds such a special place for so many people and choosing to just shove your hands in and jumble it up is an incredibly bold decision, and whether it pans out or not, I’m very glad that the developers decided to make it. They could have made a carbon copy of the original game with PS5-level graphics and printed money – instead they chose to reimagine the whole concept of a cynical remake and create something much more interesting.

(this piece may become immediately dated depending on what happens when I finish the game at some point tomorrow..!)

—

Turns out I had more to write about than I thought..! Thanks for reading (if you got this far), and enjoy the rest of the long weekend if you get one. Back at it on Tuesday..!

All the best,

Chris

February 29, 2024

February 2024: Island Time

Howdy, folks!

February has rolled inexorably to a close (with an extra day this year, which really threw me off when I was typing this newsletter up!) and while I took a chunk of the month off for a very deserved break, some other stuff has been happening around the margins. Let’s get into it!

The Usual

I’m conscious that I’m in the incredibly privileged position of having parents who are quite well-off, which is the only reason I was able to manage the holiday I did this month – I spent a week in Barbados staying at an apartment they own the lease on and therefore didn’t have to pay for any accommodation (big phew!) That aside, it was an absolute godsend for my stress levels – I’d reached what felt like a breaking point at the end of January, with the stress of day job/an additional data analysis course on top of the day job/two bands regularly practicing/comics stuff all conspiring to make me feel like an absolute desiccated husk. A week soaking up 30° heat and sunshine, eating lots of delicious seafood, drinking rum, splashing in the sea and sending a grand total of 2 emails (I tried to stop myself!) was absolutely what the doctor ordered, and I feel much, much better for it. The rest of 2024 needs to watch out because I’m back, baby 😤

A photo of palm trees against an ocean, at sunset — The view from the road next to our apartment

That aside, I don’t have much to report on the project front – pages are starting to come together for SECRETS OF THE MAJESTIC, and I had a very exciting email relating to it last week which will be excellent if it all comes together, but BRIGANTIA VOL. 2 is still sitting with our hyper-talented letterer Hass to fit into his schedule. At the moment I’m still on course to have both books ready for Thought Bubble in November – the Brigantia KS will be in a few months once the whole book is finished, so I’ll spend about a month before launch date pushing the campaign link in everyone’s faces. Keep ’em peeled!

Also, because it’s a Leap Day today – I’m running a one-day-only sale on my webstore. Head to www.chrismole.bigcartel.com and use the code FEB29 for a 10% discount, today only!

The Record

– 4 pages lettered for The Phoenix
– 4 pages lettered for Secrets of the Majestic
– More emails than you can shake a stick at

Again, no writing progress this month – but that’s fine, I’m focusing on getting some of the projects which are already in motion cleared and out into the world before I start writing anything new. Know your limits!

The Tunes

Hell of a mixed bag this month! We’re starting off with something light from The Offspring, purely because “you gotta keep yourself hydrated” was stuck in my head for the entire holiday. Next up, it’s the ultimate cheesy power metal band Dragonforce covering Taylor Swift – A+, perfect, no notes. They’re followed by some heavy shit, starting with new solo material from black metal maestro Ihsahn (of Emperor fame) and followed by some antifa BM from Woe, a band that Ba’al have recently bagged a support slot for in London later this year. Next up is some excellent atmos black metal from Sunken who most of the band absolutely adore, and then we’re onto Ellende who also scratch that atmospheric BM itch. Last up in the run of heavy shit is a new track from Borknagar, one of my favourite bands and possessed of a distinctly unique sound. We then take a massive 180 – I finally watched Barbie on the plane over, so I now know and appreciate the song I’m Just Ken in all it’s glory. Finally, we’re closing out with my two favourite tracks featuring Barbados’ number one export, the mighty Rihanna (who they’re so proud of, they’ve made an “Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador”) – Bitch Better Have My Money, with a message we can all appreciate, and her cameo with The Lonely Island as a bank-robbing stunner saddled with Andy Samberg’s useless Shy Ronnie. Ha-haaa!

The Links

With thanks to Ritesh Babu who originally shared this one: https://vajra.me/2022/03/17/the-extractivism-of-setting-and-the-traitors-text/

It’s a bit of a deep read (and I’ll need to read it a few more times to fully grasp it), with a specific focus on speculative fiction and non-native authors playing in a jungle they can only lay claim to through colonialism, but I found this piece useful for interrogating the use of setting in your (my) own work. It’s something that has been at the forefront of my mind recently, with finishing the script for SENGOKU and the arrival two days ago of the new Shōgun series (which I am INCREDIBLY excited for) – how to tell stories set in a specific place/time that you have no inherent connection to without indulging that colonialist mindset? I hope I managed to arrive at the same conclusion as this article with SENGOKU, but time will tell (once I’ve found a suitable Japanese sensitivity reader to give me their take on it..!)

—

That’s all for this month – thanks for reading, enjoy your weekends and let’s hope spring starts to roll in properly next month!

All the best,

Chris

January 31, 2024

January 2024: Plots and Plans

Howdy, folks!

We’ve made it through the longest month and 2024 is well and truly underway – I’m particularly looking forward to a holiday in a couple of weeks (sunshine, beaches and lots of rum are in my immediate future) so I’ve been trying to get my ducks in a row before that! Let’s get to it…

The Usual

The earlier part of the month brought about a sudden flurry of movement on one project – Mad Cave Studios have opened up their creator portal for submissions, so Tango and I decided to take the plunge and send them our pitch for NO SPACE LIKE HOME (previously working-titled “Space Cowboys”). We have some pitch pages, with colours by JP Jordan and letters by Rob Jones (who both did an incredible job getting these together at short notice) and I’m quite happy with the pitch itself – it’s always hard to try and explain any story (particularly a very emotional one for you) to an unseen audience, but I think we made a strong case for why they should pick it up. Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope..!

On top of that, Rebecca turned in the final coloured pages for Brigantia #6, which means we can get those over to Hass for lettering. That’ll be in a few months, which gives me time to get the design work done on the book – the pages are looking absolutely beautiful already, and I’m very excited to share them with everyone. I’ve been reaching out to various folks for pin-ups/prints to go with the inevitable Kickstarter campaign, and I think I have a very strong line-up in place – I figured it was worth pushing the boat out given how much time, effort (and money 😬) I’ve poured into this story.

And on top of that, in a bizarre twist which hopefully bodes well for the rest of this year, I can now add “featured in the Harrogate Advertiser” to my CV: https://www.harrogateadvertiser.co.uk/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/harrogates-greatest-loo-inspires-new-book-by-famous-comic-book-writers-and-artists-4486034

I found out about the story thanks to a message on the Kickstarter campaign, and it was a wild couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon – a bit of digging later and I discovered that the hotel’s marketing team found out about the book and asked their PR firm to write a press release, leading to this coverage. I’m mostly extremely glad that they’re not going to sue me for doing a comic about their toilet..! 😂

The Record

Given all the above, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that I’ve had a very unproductive month with actually getting pages down. But in my defence – I’ve got more than a few irons in the fire and I’d like to get some of them fully forged before I dive into writing anything else!

The Tunes

We’re kicking things off this month with some of that old-timey music – Bobby Darin with Beyond the Sea, which got inexplicably stuck in my head for nearly a week. Not complaining, mind! From there it’s into dungeon synth kinda territory – Arcanist make music that sounds like the soundtrack to a fucked up fantasy game but with some black metal touches. I can’t really describe it, but I think you’ll enjoy it! After that it’s The Night Watch with some proggy instrumental metal, before we take a hard left turn into mainstream territory – Tribute was one of the songs I played on this month at an event called Sparstock, where some of my best friends organise a whole evening of scratch cover bands to play all sorts of tunes, with nobody knowing the whole setlist except them. It’s always a delightful time, and it was fun shredding this on an acoustic and doing Jack Black high kicks across the stage! Oasis are up next because shut up, I like Oasis, okay? This song in particular is my favourite of theirs, despite having Liam Gallagher on lead vocals. Even a broken clock can sing twice a day..! I saw a great little documentary on YouTube with Keanu “The Internet’s Boyfriend” Reeves talking about his bass playing, which led me to actually check out his band Dogstar – and you know what? It’s good stuff – clearly not just a vanity project for him. Following that it’s another Keanu-adjacent track – I’ve been sucked into Cyberpunk 2077 and this track, PonPon Shit, remains the catchiest song on the soundtrack by far. Lastly we get a l’il trio of extreme metal to close things out – Japanese folk metal from Ryujin which is actually heavy, featuring Trivium’s Matthew Heafy on vocals; followed by Strapping Young Lad with another song I played at Sparstock (and a lot of fun it was too) and finishing with some crushingly heavy doom from Lee Dorian and With the Dead.

The Links

Here’s an article about why the modern Internet is fucking shit: https://gizmodo.com/interview-with-geocities-founder-on-the-new-web-tiktok-1849179509

We had it SO GOOD, you guys. I had a Geocities page (it was a little shrine to manga that I liked, and I would painstakingly scan some of my favourite pages from manga I was reading and then write about them and why I liked them. It was wholesome as fuck) and I genuinely miss that whole vibe every time I think about how bad social media is these days.

I’ve actually got the beginnings of an idea for a mystery/horror story with Geocities pages as the delivery mechanism, so at some point I need to sit down and work that out (and how possible it is to approximate the style, with Geocities itself long gone to the big LAN party in the sky), but in the meantime – enjoy the nostalgia!

—

That’s all from me for this month – Barbados beckons, and hopefully when I get back I’ll feel like I’ve actually caught up on all the relaxing I failed to do over Christmas/New Year. Here’s hoping..!

Take care of yourselves,

Chris

December 31, 2023

December 2023: Time Goes By

Hey folks,

It’s that time of year again! As is tradition, this month’s newsletter will be more of a “2023 round-up” one – a place of reflection on what I’ve done this year and some thoughts for 2024.

The Usual

Re-reading last year’s entry for December, I was clearly in quite an introspective mood, but I feel confident in saying that I’ve taken my own advice to heart – I deliberately tried to avoid focusing too hard on what I have and haven’t achieved this year, and while my list of comics-based “wins” is shorter as a result, I can still point to a number of items ticked off the proverbial to-do list.

All this is in the face of a world that seems to continue sliding into the shit, both here in the UK (where we’re still, somehow, suffering under an utterly corrupt Tory government) and across the rest of the planet. War in Ukraine (still), attempted genocide in Palestine, the ongoing climate crisis and the continual existence, somehow, of fascists in every corner of the globe. It’s overwhelming sometimes, and it’s been a real struggle to keep trying to write and create against all of that noise and a continually worsening economic background here in the UK. Hopefully we can kick out the Tories this coming spring (and replace them with a Labour party who are almost as bad, wheee, isn’t it fun not to have a viable left-wing party to vote for??) but even with that, I don’t know how many more comics I have left in me. I’m definitely shortening my mental project list and trying to focus on what’s achievable to stave off burnout.

On the agenda for next year:
– Crowdfunder for Brigantia Volume 2! Very excited to share this one with folks!
– Complete and release Secrets of the Majestic at Thought Bubble 2024!
– Exhibit at a couple of conventions
– Hopefully release two EPs (one with Powerhouse, one with Ba’al) and potentially even an album, if we can secure a good record label for it…
– Play some gigs in places I haven’t played before!

The Record

Pages written: 62 (2022 total: 71)
Pages lettered: 84 (2022 total: 78)
Anthology pitches: 1 (not counting the one I’m running myself!)
Miscellaneous: Ran two successful crowdfunding campaigns (the Art of Professor Elemental, a hardback collection of a huge chunk of comics written/edited by me and Secrets of the Majestic, a very niche anthology about a toilet). Recorded one album and one EP with Ba’al (totalling about 90 minutes of music) and one EP with Powerhouse (another 30 minutes). Played multiple festivals with both bands, plus went on tour with Ba’al in October across England, Wales and Scotland.

Again, my lettering output has outpaced my writing this year thanks to a chunk of work for The Phoenix and a few anthology shorts (including, for the first time, one that I didn’t write!), but I’m quite pleased that I’ve finally managed to finish up a first draft for SENGOKU – given how long I’ve been working on/thinking about it, it feels good to finally have a completed story, much as it will need polishing up and refining. My next challenge will be to find someone suitable to edit/act as a sensitivity reader – it’s very important to me that this story feels authentic, and doesn’t make the kind of mistakes that many stories about Japan written by white people make. That means this one will stay in the pot for a little while longer yet..!

The Tunes

The playlist this month is a mixed bag – some of it has been on my rotation for December, the rest comprises tracks that I’ve particularly enjoyed this year. We’re starting off hard with metal from Naeramarth, Svalbard, Atheist, Crypta and Wounds of Recollection, before it segues into synthier territory with Gunship (this song is impossibly catchy), Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan and The Ocean – we then close out with Naoki Sato’s phenomenal theme from Godzilla Minus One and a big finish from Masayoshi Soken (from the FFXIV soundtrack).

2023’s Top 5 Things

Because I had fun with this last year, we’re bringing it back – my top 5 things of the year, whether a movie, comic, album or an experience. Let’s go:

5. Golden Rage Vol. 1 (comic) – Here’s a thing that people may not know about me – I really, really like Golden Girls. We started watching it a little while back for some wholesome sitcom entertainment and it has quickly endeared itself to me (plus the theme song is a banger). So when I saw that the pitch for this comic was “Golden Girls meets Battle Royale”, well… I don’t think I’ve ever slapped my money down faster. The writing is fantastic, it’s great to see a collection of older female protagonists, and Lauren Knight (who I collaborated with on a story for Sharp Wit & The Company of Women, which is now in Previews, AHHHHH) knocks it out of the park on art duties. Get on it!

The album cover for Unicorn by the band Gunship

4. Gunship – Unicorn (album) – I’ve listened to A LOT of albums from this year (around 207, to be precise) but this one is squarely at the top. Synthwave beats and a truly stellar list of guest stars (including Carpenter Brut, John Carpenter and HEALTH) are the starting point, but this has stuck with me because it’s absolutely rammed full of extremely memorable hooks and uplifting choruses. The production is beautiful (big, glistening, neon-soaked) and it keeps serving up bangers well into the runtime. Don’t sleep on this if you haven’t already heard it!

The poster for the movie The Saint of Second Chances

3. The Saint of Second Chances (movie) – I was curious about this purely because I’ve enjoyed a few movies about baseball in the past, even though I don’t really follow the sport – little did I realise that it’d leave me an emotional, sobbing wreck on the sofa. It’s a documentary about Mike Veeck, the son of a famous baseball owner who invented the concept of promotional nights (most notably the ‘Disco Demolition Night’ for the Chicago White Sox that ended in a riot) and later went on to run an independent team in Minnesota. I won’t spoil anything else about it here, but I can’t recommend this enough as a story about second chances and trying to do the right thing.

2. Blasphemous (game) – I’m a bit late to the party with this one, but what a party it is. Blasphemous is a Metroidvania type game (where you run around a 2D map, exploring, platforming and smiting enemies) – what makes it unique is how incredibly gothic and Catholic it is. The premise is essentially that a mysterious Miracle has unleashed judgement on a medieval world tormented by a corrupt Church, turning it into a hellish domain full of tortured souls seeking repentance or oblivion – and you, as the Penitent One full of clemency, must embark on a pilgrimage across this land. Honestly, the worldbuilding in this game is intoxicating and I love how incredibly grim it is – it’s full of phenomenal writing and characters that made me go “what the fuck is THAT” on multiple occasions. If you’d like a challenging (somewhat Dark Souls-like) gaming experience in a truly compelling world, I can’t recommend this highly enough. Now watch Blasphemous 2 be in this list next year..!

A photo of a band on stage lit up by blue lighting as a crowd cheers them — Ba’al on the main stage at Sheffield Corporation for the Heel Turn Festival

1. Playing gigs – I’ve been trying to figure out which gig this year was my favourite, and honestly, there are a number of strong contenders for that crown. Playing some big folk festivals (Whitby and Towersey) with Powerhouse was a lot of fun and meant I got out to rock some very big stages, while a number of Ba’al shows this year hit the triple sweet spot of great venue/big crowds/solid performance. So instead of choosing just one, I’m giving this slot to the overall experience of playing live – much as I sometimes feel shattered afterwards, I love playing gigs and connecting with an audience. It’s a chance to embody the emotion in the music and manifest it, and I sincerely hope I can continue to play bigger and better shows next year.

—

And that’s a wrap on 2023, folks! Thank you as always for reading my rambles this year (if you made it this far) – I hope you’ve enjoyed them. As another chapter of the heavy, heavy book of history closes, remember: you made it to the end of 2023, and that means you can do ANYTHING.

I’d like to close things out with one link for you – a list of actually good things that happened this year, because while it’s important to be realistic, it’s also important to have hope for the future: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/28/24003198/10-good-things-that-happened-in-2023

Have a good evening, whether you’re celebrating or tucked up at home with a good book, and we’ll speak again in 2024!

All the best,