Against the evil Galactic Empire.
Chapter 6. Unleash the bug army!
I birthed 200 children and let them raise themselves on my roof.
Stuff I didn’t write! - Little Tulip.
Sweet Drinks!
Grifter comes to Gotham… In the future!
Batman’s friend Croc-Man lends a hand!
Wonderful funnyman The Joker teams up with wonderful artist Josh Hixson!
It’s beginning to heat up here in New York which means I am beginning to hate it here, as I have every summer of my entire life. But I have a little garden up on my roof and I go up there in the evening to water and am slowly reminded why I love this city all over again. The skyline, and the sounds, and the smells (some of them). Just the energy really. It sounds like a cliche, and maybe it is, but New York moves in weird ways.
I know it’s not for everyone, but I have been to hundreds of cities and towns across 48 states and 22 countries in my life, and there is something very unique about New York. Has any other city, besides maybe Paris, been given a starring role in so many stories? I sometimes wonder what my life would be like, or what my work would be like, if I lived in another place. It’s so foreign to me. My dad lived here and wrote tv shows and books about this city. My mom lived here and wrote a movie about it. I grew up around writers and artists who felt the city was vital to who they were and what they made. And I grew up here listening to the bands who helped shape this city, watching stories about the criminals who ran these streets and people who fell in love on them, and reading about the heroes who flew above them and lived under them. Some of the things I am working on now are directly about New York City, and some are just an abstract love letter to it, but I am trying to make sure everything I do feels like it could only be written here. We’ll see how that goes.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “Did he just say he has a garden? Doesn’t he dislike plants? And nature? And being outside? And pretty much everything a garden is about?” The answer to that is complicated. While yes, I am 100% an “indoor kid” by nature, I have really learned to love taking care of a garden. Especially this past year. It’s a nice, sort of mindless thing to tend to that helps me mentally reset after (or in the middle of) a long workday, and it offers visible positive change. Spending a year+ inside it was really nice to have something I could see growing and prospering and see my impact on it. It is a kind of low risk responsibility that I can really enjoy that still fills me with a sense of nurturing that feels nice. I think this is what those of you with kids feel, but if I leave town for a week and they all dry out and bake in the sun I won’t go to prison. And when it’s all said and done I should have lots of food I can bring to my local community fridge or throw off my roof at dudes who make their cars backfire on purpose.
But my garden has bugs and I hate it. So I’ve decided to fight fire with fire, which in this case is other bugs. Specifically Praying Mantisses. Mantisees? Mantisi? Whatever. I bought a Praying Mantis egg in a little plastic tub to protect my garden. And then I waited. And waited. But now the beautiful little defenders of my garden have hatched, like perfect baby angels. Unfortunately they hatched at like 2AM on a rainy night and if you leave them in that little tub too long they eat each other, which is also like baby angels, but that’s a story for another day. Either way I had to go up to my roof to unleash them. Now my 100-200 little warriors are up there fighting for the lives of my plants while fighting for their own lives. Real heroes don’t wear capes. They hatch out of gross egg sacks and are sort of see-through at first.
Enhance!
On to the section where I talk about stuff I’ve been reading. This weeks selection was completely not what I expected but I loved it.
LITTLE TULIP by American novelist Jerome Charyn and French artist François Boucq is a brutal and atmospheric tale about a Russian immigrant to New York who works as a tattooer and a police sketch artist. As the story unfolds our lead character becomes obsessed with a series of violent murders in his neighborhood that lead to him examining his upbringing in a Siberian gulag. The story is shockingly brutal at times, but what emerges is a portrait of a mysterious and driven man who found comfort and protection in his art.
I first came across Boucq’s art reading his book THE BOUNCER with Alejandro Jodorowsky and I was immediately in love. He has an amazing ability to capture setting, mood, and atmosphere. You can practically smell the pages. And his characters hit that sweet spot bordering between caricature and reality, giving everyone a very unique feel. Likewise Charyn’s writing paints vivid pictures of a world of cruel characters and the people they prey on that borders on cartoonish but never crosses the line. There is a palpable sense of dread that unfolds as the story begins to pick up speed.
But like the titular little tulip that emerges from the labor camp, hope begins to creep in through small cracks in the stories grim facade. It’s here that the book shines. It reminds us that there is power in the things we overcome and there is beauty in the scars they leave us with.
The next part of this here thing is a section that so many of you asked for and I honestly can’t tell if you are making fun of me. But if you were the jokes on all of us because I’m doing it now, and now you all have to read it. Or you could just stop reading… And I would still have written it… Which I guess means the jokes really only on me. You win… If you were joking. And I guess you also win if you were serious. Anyway…
When I used to work in a comic shop my co-worker, the great John Petrie, gave me the wonderfully creepy nickname “Sweet Drinks” because of my love of chocolate milk and chocolate milk adjacent beverages. I don’t want to say I’m an expert on the subject, so I will just say it’s real embarrassing for them that the Big 2 (Nesquick and Hershey’s) haven’t brought me in to consult on their fucking awful excuses for chocolate milk. Regardless, this section will be where I review various sweet drinks. Buckle up. It’s about to get fucking wild in here.
BATTENKILL VALLEY CHOCOLATE MILK.
Let’s start with the basics. I didn’t know where Battenkill was but it’s a cool name so I googled it. It’s on the NY/VT border, so pretty damn far from me. I got it from a lady who does wholesale grocery pickups direct from vendors and then sells to people in the neighborhood. I don’t really know where she got it, but let’s just assume it was all legal.
Sometimes I worry about getting “local farm” chocolate milks from not my “local” because they have a tendency to go off, but this was fresh. This was a 16 oz pasteurized chocolate milk in a plastic bottle. Do I prefer a glass bottle? Obviously. But since I never return them and end up with a whole area of my apartment full of glass bottles I am supposed to return to god knows where, maybe this was a blessing in disguise.
16 oz is a weird size because you know you’re not supposed to drink it in one sitting, but also you know you’re going to. This is what we here at this newsletter call the “screw you size.” Anyway, I beat the odds and drank it over a couple of days. Not sure why you’d want to know that, but I’m thorough.
As for the drink itself, I quite enjoyed it. It was definitely thick and creamy, as most creamery chocolate milks are tending towards these days. It was quite sweet but the sweetness was undercut by notes of Vanilla that really broadened the flavors. A slight smokiness helped give the sense of an authentic “farm” milk but added little else. It was rich, but not cloyingly so. The fact that the richness didn’t overpower the taste, and the subtlety of the vanilla, worked together to create a strong sipping chocolate. This is the kind of chocolate milk you might drink on a romantic evening on the French Riviera or maybe on your yacht watching the sunset over the Maldives. I drank it in my dirty-ass apartment and that was fine.
I would definitely pick it up again, but might wait until cooler weather. A chocolate milk like this is great when there are hints of a chill in the air.
And finally, I have a few things out this week. Two digitally and one in comic shops. Eventually they will all be in comic shops though.
I haven’t seen it to confirm this, but I believe that the FUTURE STATE: NEXT BATMAN tpb is out this week and features both of the FUTURE STATE: GRIFTER issues I wrote. If you missed them when they were coming out, you can grab them here. I think? And if I’m wrong you still get a cool Batman book made by a lot of great people.
As I mentioned last week my chapter of LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT drops this week. It’s myself, Cian Tormey, and Matt Hollingsworth doing a moody “flooded Gotham” story. It’s worth it for the art alone. It’s out Friday on digital sites and in a few months in comic shops. You can digitally preorder it here.
Lastly the second chapter of THE JOKER PRESENTS: THE PUZZLEBOX is out on Tuesday digitally (and in a couple months in comic shops!). For this one the amazing Josh Hixson joins myself, superstar series artists Jesús Merino & Ulises Arreola, and exquisite editor Katie Kubert for a tale about The Riddler, Punchline, Jim Gordon, and of course The Joker. It’s a 10 page story as told by The Joker that really sets us off on our series and gives you hints of what’s to come. And if you read it on the DC UNIVERSE INFINITE App you get a bonus 6 page story that gives you even more clues. Or you can just read it on Comixology.
If you aren’t familiar with Josh’s stuff you should really pick up the brilliant pirate series SHANGHAI RED with one of my favorite writers and people Christopher Sebela. Or go back in time and come to HeroesCon and get the variant he did for 4 KIDS WALK INTO A BANK. Either way you should be reading more of Josh’s stuff because he’s great.
That’s it for me this week. I’m hoping to do a pretty different thing here starting next week, but we’ll see. I might just decide to get 8 hours of sleep instead.
Stay safe.
-Matthew Rosenberg
NYC 6/14/21
"Real heroes don’t wear capes. They hatch out of gross egg sacks and are sort of see-through at first."
thank you for this, I find this kind of representation of my experience very important in your work <3
That Chocolate Milk review was more well written then I expected.