Comics

nothin’ but

by Joseph LusterLeave a Comment on nothin’ but

With the huge migration going on lately, I finally took another look and an earnest crack at using my Bluesky account. For those who haven’t used the app/site yet, Bluesky is basically just Twitter/X. It’s X without having to think about Elon Musk, which in itself is a victory of sorts. There are ostensibly nicer people there, I guess, and there aren’t as many bots (yet) or other unsavory aspects (yet). As I sat there and stared at my feed, though, I had the recurring thought that I just can’t do this all over again.

When I say Bluesky is just Twitter, I mean it. Everyone is comfortably slotting back into their respective niches, and that’s great. People clearly feel more comfortable there, and I don’t want to dog on Bluesky too hard as a service. If you want raw social media, it certainly seems to fit the bill. If you want a nicer place to follow weratedogs or whatever it is you use feeds for, I’m sure it’s there. Corporations and brands—many having already fled from X for a variety of reasons—are taking the hint, too. 

Which means it’s going to become more like Twitter every single day. 

All the flavors you either love or hate are present and accounted for. Everyone is still incredibly thirsty for engagement, and numbers do, indeed, go up. In a way it feels like an alternate timeline, in which Twitter kept being tolerable, even though everyone lovingly called it a Hellsite well before the Musk regime. The me of a few years ago would have loved this. The me of today is just tired of it all.

I’d much rather read what people have to say in other formats. Forums and Discords and blogs seem more attractive to me as far as being social online is concerned. I want to read what people are thinking; I just don’t want to read what everyone is thinking. That softly thudding anxiety of having to be subjected to everyone’s opinions in one place wore on me over the years, and probably changed the way I think in a number of ways, for better or worse. In many ways it was a burden, like being stuck in an eternal comments section from which there is no hope of escape.

That’s really what this is all over again. It’s another sprawling comments section, and it’s not going to be all neat and tidy for much longer. It would be nice to think you have a safe space online to enjoy yourself in good company, but that’s literally just what forums are for. Sure, you might not get the kind of dopamine hit you get from likes and shares and quotes and all the push notifications that go along with them. But at least it’s easier to put it all out of your mind.

I’m ready to dial it all back either way. The Internet is dead. Long live the Internet.

Currently Reading, Tutorials & Process

wielding powers and mainlining manga with author briana lawrence

by Joseph LusterLeave a Comment on wielding powers and mainlining manga with author briana lawrence

For those who haven’t met her already, I’d like to introduce you to Briana Lawrence. She’s an author, a cosplayer, a panelist and more, including, as her website states, a “professional puppy petter.” She’s also my co-worker, which makes her even cooler. Thankfully, this is my blog and I can do what I want, which involves reading Briana’s books and asking her questions about them! 

Back in January, Andrews McMeel Publishing released the first volume of Briana’s latest project, In Search of Superpowers: A Fantasy Pin World Adventure. Flash forward to today, though, and it’s already no longer her latest work! June 11, 2024 marks the launch of The Essential Manga Guide: 50 Series Every Manga Fan Should Know, written by, you guessed it, Briana Lawrence. It’d be weird if someone else wrote it and I was still talking about it, but I digress. 

HOW does she do it? WHY does she do it? WHEN does she find the time? All these questions and more were burning a hole in my brain, so I used my own magic power called “I can message Briana at literally any time” and got to the bottom of ’em.

***

Can you tell us about how In Search of Superpowers came to be? When did the first spark of the idea come about, and was it always going to be a novel?

So the publisher (Andrews McMeel Publishing) actually approached me about the idea! They had the idea about the kids with the superpowered enamel pins, but I had the chance to flesh out the kids and develop the overall plot, which is great because it meant I could make them as diverse (and nerdy) as I wanted. I also had the idea of their powers being a bit more subtle, like, things you might not notice right away (like Angela’s ability to copy what she sees, or Skylar keeping things more organized) and things that would probably come in handy in everyday life… but could also be easily mishandled. 

Also, since it’s enamel pins I thought, “Well… they could swap the pins back and forth, couldn’t they?” They could trade pins and play around with their abilities, like how Sophie doesn’t really like her power and trades with Skylar.

What is your process like? Give us a look at a day in Briana Lawrence’s writing life!

Hahaha, I wish I could say I was one of those “set schedule” writers. I TRY to be, but I feel like when I actually have a free day to write my brain gets distracted with other things, or I write for an hour or two then stop. I usually end up writing after work, or during lunch, or something like that. Early mornings before I clock in are GREAT for me. 

Sometimes, if the muses are nice to me, I do it over the weekend. It’s an interesting balance since my day job is also writing related, so I go between that and book writing.

Your characters are all richly defined but in a breezy, easy to digest way. How long have they been living in your head, and do you tend to flesh them out fully before diving into the story or is it the other way around? 

Thank you! I love that my characters feel like that to people. When the publisher told me about the idea they had a small amount of details about the characters, but I added a lot of my own ideas to them (which they were very happy about). One example is Angela and her stepmom, Latrice. I really, REALLY wanted to tell a story where the stepmom isn’t terrible and really is trying her best. That’s how my stepmom was, who I recently reconnected with when my dad passed away. They’d been divorced since I was, like, 14, but she was always there for me while they were together and she showed up to be there for me when he passed away, so I was like, “I have to have a good stepmom,” lol! 

I always flesh out the characters first before getting into the story. I make a Google Doc and just write out ideas and descriptions for them. With Fantasy Pin World I also figured out their powers and how they’d want to use them. I also figured out fun stuff they were into as well so the story wasn’t just about their powers, that’s why Travis is a gamer and Angela really loves Princess P, who is basically a magical girl. I feel like I have to have that nerdy touch somewhere as someone who loves anime and video games.

Congrats on getting this to the finish line and in hands physically! This obviously isn’t your first trip to the bookstores—you appear to be quite prolific!—but what was the path from page to publisher? (AKA how did you do this?)

This actually is my first book with a publisher! I’ve been self-publishing this entire time! I’ve had short stories or essays in things that are in bookstores, but this is the first book I’ve had that’s physically IN bookstores! This has always been the goal (I’ve had big writing dreams since I was nine, I know this because my mom still has all my old stories!) but it’s still hard to grasp onto the fact that it’s happening, you know? 

The path has been quite the adventure. I’ve always been writing somehow, whether it’s fanfiction or doing a bunch of freelance writing gigs. I’d travel to conventions with my wife and we’d sell our self-published books. The publisher connection came way later in life.

There’s been some major setbacks. I feel like we can all relate to that, especially after 2020. I had a lot of plans that completely fell through, but I really can’t imagine myself doing anything else but writing, so I just… kept trying. I’ve learned that you end up making connections in the most unexpected ways. Me writing a bunch of deep dives on my feelings with anime and manga got noticed, for example, and me constantly trying to get my self-published stuff out there. Now I’m working with a publisher for Fantasy Pin World, a different publisher for a manga essay book (The Essential Manga Guide), I partnered with another author for her Gamer Girl series, and one day I am going to have that magical girl animated series just so I can have an anime-style opening of them running through the grass or something. 

So I guess the path from page to publisher has been “rocky, but always trying to catch up to that dream I had as a kid.”

Do you have a preference in your writing style? As in your go-to genre or medium (comic, prose, etc.)? 

Go-to genre tends to be young adult fiction, I feel, especially if I get to have adult characters also learning and growing (like Latrice in Fantasy Pin World). I tend to write prose, but I’d love to do comics or graphic novels someday, I think that’d be fun.

You are busy. That’s just a fact. You also have a book on manga, for Pete’s sake! Can you tell us a little about that and how it came to be?

That’s where all those deep dives come in! It may have been my Kiki’s Burnout piece I wrote (I watched the movie way late in life) but I got an email asking if I’d be interested in writing essays for an anime guide. I was like “sure, I do that all the time anyway” since I was at The Mary Sue at the time. Later, the publisher (Running Press) asked if I’d like to write an entire book about manga. 

I love anime. That’s just the truth. But with manga I knew I’d have a LOT more options (especially with LGBTQIA+ content), especially since I got to pick the titles, which was a blessing AND a curse because as I was writing I’d find another manga I wanted to talk about, but alas, the book stops at 50!

I gave myself some limits, like I told myself I could only pick ONE work per creator, for example, and I really wanted to highlight a range of genres. I really wanted to show that manga is full of different genres and isn’t just one kind of story. Even if manga is more popular than ever, there are so many people who assume it’s just one thing (usually shonen) and not a medium that’s made up of a variety of stories. We got horror with Junji Ito, we got rom-coms with Kaguya-sama: Love is War, we got autobiographies like The Bride Was a Boy that simultaneously educates readers about the trans community; there’s something for everyone!

I also wanted to have some emotional beats, too, some deeper looks at why so many of us love manga so much, like writing about Bleach and knowing it’s held up as shonen royalty… but talking about how it’s what I needed because Orihime lost her older brother at a young age and I did, too. Or how I went off to college and discovered Naruto at the perfect time in my life. I also was honest about it, like I wrote about Berserk and was like “I didn’t get why so many people wanted something this dark, then my friend started reading it in 2020 and encouraged me to start, too, and I got it.”  

Manga just… does that. You can get a deep look at humanity in a story where a dude has a chainsaw for a head, but you can also get validation for being a nerdy woman in something like Wotakoi. You can get stories from gay activists like in Until I Meet My Husband while feeling really good about getting the house clean in Way of the Househusband. I wanted to capture that with this book. I really hope I did it justice!  

Finally, let’s pass on some recs. What inspires you, and what are you reading/watching right now? 

I’m not purposely making this all anime answers but…

  • Kaiju No. 8
  • Black Butler
  • WIND BREAKER
  • Tadaima, Okaeri
  • My Hero Academia
  • Killing Eve (hahaha plot twist)

Also trying really REALLY hard not to buy a Steam Deck for Hades 2.

As for inspiration, I think everyone around me inspires me. My wife and my mom are my biggest cheerleaders, and they’ve always inspired me to go for what I want. I went through a period for a while where I tried to not be a writer because I kept being told that it wasn’t a “real job.” But these two knew what was in my heart and supported it. I also have a really close group of friends who are artists, so they understand the creative drive and the desire to do this. It’s really nice, we cheer for each other and inspire each other all the time. 

Oh, and I work around a bunch of encouraging nerds 😉 

Comics, My Comics

pilot season: instruction manual

by Joseph LusterLeave a Comment on pilot season: instruction manual

In the process of accepting the fact that I’m getting more scatterbrained, I’m going to start sharing some comic “pilots” here on this very blog. Some may just be a page, while others will be a few pages long. We’ll see how this pans out! Let’s kick things off with Instruction Manual, a project I pitched to open submissions for mini-comics last year. Nothing came of that—at least not as of this very moment—so now the first five pages will exist right here!

If there’s interest from others and if it fits in with what I’m working on next, we’ll keep it going for the full story. It’s not a long one, at least!

Here’s the logline:

Three years ago Berill and his little sister Juniper started finding lost pages torn from a mystical video game instruction manual, each one granting access to weapons, items and other artifacts. Berill always knew the other shoe would eventually drop, and he’s about to find out what happens when he discovers the other side of the manual; the bestiary, the dungeons, and the suffocating demonic aura behind it all.

Stay tuned for more!

Subhorrorzoids

Great Madballs of Fire: An Ode to Gross-Out Cartoons

by Joseph LusterLeave a Comment on Great Madballs of Fire: An Ode to Gross-Out Cartoons

Where is my bony stranger,
Where is my hairy son?
Where has my slimy friend been,
Where have all the gross-outs gone? 
– Appalling Coal, “Where Have All the Gross-Outs Gone”
© Warner Brothers Blecch-ords

“Yuck”’s and “ew”’s abound as your average 9-year-old blasts through the Madballs: Escape from Orb VHS for the hundredth time, the bright red Hi-Tops Video logo barely discernible through busted tracking errors. Slime has long since dried up and caked over the roof access grate on their old Ghostbusters Firehouse, and that bug in the corner is either long dead or part of a discarded Creepy Crawlers kit. The kid in question hasn’t been formally diagnosed yet, but there’s no doubt about it—we’re dealing with a full blown gross-out maniac here. 

If you were ever anything like that kid, you’re one of the few and proud with nostalgic glasses that sport a tint closer to puke green than rose. You dealt in toys with distended eyeballs and exposed brains—heroes who were nasty by nature, sometimes even more so than the actual villains. In the years since Garbage Pail Kids stickers were slapped on every surface imaginable, the fever for gross-out media has died down considerably. Despite a few lukewarm comebacks over the years and some modern takes on everyone’s favorite nasties, we’re left to worship the disgusting deities of the past, an elite pantheon of the gross, the grimy, and the great.

Balls Gone Mad

As repulsive as the Garbage Pail Kids and the media they spawned may be—the 1984 feature film deserves its own place in the Nasties Hall of Fame—nothing quite hits the high note of gross-out nostalgia like Madballs. For those who weren’t around or chose to ignore these little stinkers, Madballs started out as simple rubber balls by AmToy, which cooked up a small assortment of weird quasi-heroes like Screamin’ Meemie, a baseball with a massive tongue, and the much more graphic Slobulus, who has one loose eye and a permanently vacant, drooling stare. They went on to mix the giant head motif with poseable figures in the Head-popping Madballs line, and they even had vehicles like the Mad Rollercycle, which, naturally, had a basketball net attached to it. 

The whole Madballs toy line was essentially the childhood retail equivalent of the Gremlins phenomenon. Joe Dante’s original flick really lit a fire under the asses of everyone who wanted to make a horror movie about small monsters running amok, from Critters to Ghoulies and beyond. For every Slobulus Madball toy there’s an equally nasty—but safely caged—Boglin. Toy manufacturers got really creative back then, riding the wave of Madballs to produce such inspired pieces of art as Blurp Balls, Weird Balls, and Spit Balls. 

After all, who could forget everyone’s favorite Blurp Ball heroes, such as “Skullsquert,” “Croaky Bugchuck,” and “Retch-A-Rat Tomcat.” At least these blurping bastards had the cred of Madballs artist James Groman behind them, or else we’d never, ever remember the likes of “Boney Tossteeth.”

The adventures of the Madballs came to a head in Escape from Orb, a 22-minute VHS that had the crew jammin’ together in a band called—you guessed it—Madballs. In an extraterrestrial Footloose-esque twist, it turns out the Madballs hail from a planet where music is illegal, all thanks to the wishes of the evil Wolf Breath, leader of the Badballs. This prompts a hasty escape from Orb as their rickety spaceship takes them straight to Earth, where rockin’ isn’t a hobby, it’s a way of life. Luckily, they happen to hook up with a 12-year-old boy who also manages rock acts or something, defend our planet against invading Badballs, and live to rock another day.

Outside of Orb, the only other piece of video media related to the franchise is Madballs: Gross Jokes, which is 22 minutes of “sketch comedy.” Marvel as Horn Head, Freakella, and the rest of the gang try out their best impression of rejected Monty Python material—or you could just pop Escape from Orb in again and pick up some old back issues of the short-lived Madballs comics, which were released for 10 whole issues under Marvel’s Star Comics label. 

Toxic ‘Toons 

Whether intentional or not, Madballs left a thick imprint on the spectrum of gross-out cartoons, which would also go on to dip regularly into the old Hollywood well for inspiration. One of the most bizarre examples is 1990’s Toxic Crusaders, which took Troma’s lewd The Toxic Avenger films and dumped them on children’s television like so much hazardous waste. 

When Dr. Killemoff decides to use Tromaville, New Jersey as his own personal toxic dumping grounds, his henchman Psycho chimes in with an amazingly prescient reply: “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, doc. What if some complete and hopeless nerd falls into the Grossolium and transforms into a hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength?” Don’t be ridiculous! There’s no way that’s exactly what would happen to the otherwise unassuming Melvin Junko, a nerd who likes to sniff his armpits from nine to ten o’clock each night. That’s an actual throwaway line from the first episode, but think about it. An HOUR of sniffing your armpits every night. The mind reels. 

The way Melvin’s serial harassers trick our hero into putting on a pink tutu and, after plenty of mean-spirited laughter, eventually force him to slip and fall into a vat of toxic waste, is familiar territory for Troma fans. Toxie’s origin story is watered down to overflowing and sanitized just enough to make it perfect fodder for 13 episodes, a toy line, and video games. It’s Captain Planet with a malformed gross-out twist, back when your average citizen at least pretended to give a shit about the environment. Somehow, pilot episode writer Chuck Lorre—also the creator of actual toxic sludge like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory—even managed to squeeze some of Toxie mastermind Lloyd Kaufman’s tongue in cheek take on golly-gee suburban idealism into the script.

But what about the kiddies who discovered that there were actual full-length films featuring their favorite superhero Toxie? Speaking from experience, the act of post-cartoon childhood Troma discovery is nothing short of confusing and, depending on how deep you were willing to dig before your face turned redder than a thousand suns, downright traumatic. 

Speaking of movies turned into cartoon properties, there was plenty of gross-out fun to be had with shows like The Real Ghostbusters, a series just as notable for its slime-filled 140-episode run as it is for all the bizarre toys it spawned. Granny Gross and Fearsome Flush are just a couple of these, the latter of which is a living toilet that inspired fears ten times worse than the old Ghoulie-up-the-butt nightmare. The improbable cartoon Beetlejuice adaptation ran for nearly as many episodes starting in 1989, and 1988’s short-lived Robocop: The Animated Series always begged the important gross-out questions, like “will an acid-drenched dude pop like an overstuffed water balloon on this, the most sacred of Saturday mornings?” Sadly, the planned Aliens series—which surely would have prominently featured slime and acidic drool—never made it to our screens.

Carrying the Splortch Torch

The rest of the ’90s weren’t without their own gross-out heroes. Ren & Stimpy made the gross-up close-up—a term for the nasty still-frames that turned the show’s vilest moments into modern art—prevalent enough to be featured on t-shirts that actual children wore in public. Aaaahh!!! Real Monsters was just as foul as its character designs would lead you to believe, and every commercial break was punctuated with the promise of Cree-ee-ee-py CRAWLERS, a “make your own gross rubber bugs” device marketed as an Easy Bake Oven for boys. Nickelodeon even managed to fill toy stores with seemingly endless kinds of slime including Gak, a plastic container of ooze that has got to boast one of the highest profit margins in toy history.

Where does that leave us today? Kids keep Elmer’s glue in business making their own homemade slime, but where is my bony stranger? What of my hairy son? For the most part, contemporary kids’ TV is squeaky clean without an errant eyeball in sight. Madballs had a revival of sorts in 2007—complete with new toys and some amazing art by James Groman—and Screamin’ Meemie and the gang got back together for online animated shorts and more toys in 2017. Is that enough? Are you not entertained and thoroughly grossed out? Probably not. 

Thankfully, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Check almost any toy shelf and you’ll see the occasional grody highlight, with a line of figures called The Grossery Gang seemingly leading the charge. With characters like Putrid Pizza, Dodgy Donut, and Fungus Fries, who could possibly hope to challenge their rotten reign? These are essentially the Barnyard Commandos or Food Fighters of the aughts, and you gotta give it up to them for that alone. The official website even has an animated short based on the line’s latest arc, Time Wars. Yes, The Grossery Gang has different series to follow, so you better keep up or you’ll end up chomped, chewed, and poo’d—their words, not mine—by the likes of the Trash-O-Saur. 

Maybe that’s where I belong. Chew me up, spit me out, and bury me in the very toxic sludge that raised me. 

This post originally appeared on the now-defunct VRV Blog in December 2018.