What I'm Up To, March/April '24 (Aardvark Aftermath Special)

Hello friends!

I was going to share one of these updates at the end of the month as usual, but it would just have been "I've been doing nothing except the fucking Cerebus blog posts" and now at least I can say "I've finished the fucking Cerebus blog posts"

This took over my writing time in ways that were - appropriate to the project - vaguely unhealthy. It's a tough comic to think about, I'm a bit shocked I wrote so much about it. It seems to have indirectly sparked an outbreak of Cerebus discourse on Bluesky which, thankfully, isn't immediately traceable back to me so my actual mentions aren't full of people saying "why the hell does anyone care about this thing in 2024?" I think there have only been a couple of people, there or in the comments, drifting near the edges of the "maybe Dave Sim had a point?" discourse whirlpool, and I've resisted engaging.

But! People liked it! It got glowing reviews from some critics and thinkers I respect a lot, which is lovely. It seems to have gone down almost better among people who didn't read the comic than people who did, which is a very good and very unexpected sign. (Or it might mean actual readers think I'm a bullshit artist)

I think it's been valuable for me because it's dampened my self-doubt a bit around two things. First, my ability to write well critically about things that aren't pop music. Second, my ability to write something sustained - 60,000 words is the length of a slim but viable book.

What do I do with these? One obvious thing is to turn the aardverk stuff into a book. I don't particularly want to do this, at least not yet, because I want to get out of Dave Sim's head for a good long time. And also because I don't really want my first self-published book to be about it. The optics, you know?

That's not to say I haven't thought about self-publishing - turning Popular into a series of books, for instance, which would mean revisiting and rewriting a lot of the earlier material. Would that be fun? I'm not sure. I like being independent. I don't like editing. I think some of the stigma around DIY publishing has vanished a bit, but some is definitely still there. Would I be better off pitching selections from Popular as a book to publishers? Should I pitch something else? How much of my instinctive "I don't want to" is reasonable, how much is fear, how much is laziness?

All questions which feel more urgent now I've actually written something sustained, as I say.

I guess the other question is: what next? Not "what book should I write", what do I want to write about next? Aside from No.1 singles, which I'm going to get back to, honest!

The projects I feel most motivated by are ones where there's a real mix of high and low points and where the structure forces me to look at both. I like things where the ostensible subject hides other subjects - the Cerebus stuff was mostly about Cerebus but it was also about how that comic was a lens on the history of direct market comics in the 80s and 90s. I want something I feel some kind of personal connection to, of course. And obviously you need enough substance to make individual entries feel meaty without getting bogged down in fannish trivia.

Most of the things I have a vague yearning to write about don't necessarily meet all these criteria:

• The Moomins - books, comics, multimedia

• The first 10 years of 2000AD (this has been a dream project for ages but feels like very well trodden ground, at least the "big names")

• The Narnia books, with a bit of digging around British culture in the 50s, not a period I know much about

• A bigger project on 80s comics

These are all also childish and nostalgic in some way, though, which is another mark against them: while I know I could do a decent job, it's swimming with, not against, some tides in the culture I don't generally appreciate.

I don't know, I'll keep you updated or just be struck by inspiration at some point.

I'll post another of these updates at the end of the month and I hope there WILL be some movement on Popular to report now the aardvark has breathed his last.