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Some of you may or may not have heard the news that TMNT co-creator Peter Laird sold the rights to Nickelodeon lock, stock and barrel. Laird retained the rights to publish up to eighteen TMNT comics per year, but as far as the rights to the property? Nick Nick Nick Nick, Nick Nick Nick Nick, Nickelodeon. This is kind of disheartening. TMNT was the great indie comic of my far flung youth. I had the original series. In a world where the cutting edge at Marvel was maybe Frank Miller's run on Elektra, and the only really heavy stuff you could find at DC was Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, Mirage Studios produced a comic that blew most others away. Sure, the art was black and white, not to mention rough and raw when put up against the Big Two (Image didn't exist yet, remember). But it was a new style, a creative style. The stories were engrossing, and for the first time since I'd started reading comics, the fucking book didn't talk down to me. The turtles killed motherfuckers. Raph was borderline psychotic. Leo had the weight of the world on him. Mikey was the group's kind heart, and Don was the level ground. (Also, the Jack Kirby tribute story "The King" featuring Donatello remains one of the best comcis stories ever told, TMNT or otherwise.) The Shredder was a sunuvabitch. Shit was real. People died. There were consequences. To my limited experience, it was genius. That was Volume 1; Volume 2 picked up the story, same as before. Image published Volume 3, but the results were so atrocious that they've been struck from canon. Volume 4 began a few years ago, publishing sporadically but still coming out, and kept the heart of the original story going. I was loving it. Peter Laird wasn't, though. That's why Volume 4 has been coming out at such a sputtering rate. He's pretty much felt trapped by the empire that sprung up from the property: the kiddie version, the cartoons, the live action films, the CGI film, the concert tour (don't ask) . . . he was at the head of all that. It kept his bank full, but it also kept him from doing what he wanted to, which was to make comic books. But he's all but burned out on the Turtles. At the age of 55, they've taken up 25 years of his life so far. I can see why he'd want to move on for a while. I hope he comes back and completed Volume 4, at least . . . but I'm gonna miss it when it goes. And yeah, Nickelodeon has the goofy, silly, nonsense versions of the TMNT. Well, more power to them; the pizza-eating catchphrase-spewing "ninjas who never kill anyone or actually hit people with their weapons" shit was never something to which I gave much heed. All I was is a fitting end to a saga that pretty much launched my love of the comic book medium ages and ages ago. Is that so much to ask? Current Mood:  contemplative
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Ah, back on the meds. I kick-started myself with an extra high dosage like I did when I first started them, way back in the day. Once again, it's like a switch got thrown. Intrusive thoughts? Gone. I'm able to focus on what I think of, dismiss the irrelevant, not dwell on things, not constantly remind myself of all the problems I have going on. Now, I'm still not happy, but it's a "natural unhappy." This is the unhappy that normal people feel, the kind that's due to actual circumstances and not ghost emotions brought on by bad chemistry in the brain. And it's the kind of unhappy you can be distracted from, or actually come out of when given a reason. Right now, I don't like my job, I don't like my lack of funds and I have a lot of responsibilities that I'm behind on, but that's all okay. That's normal and it's not the end of the world. For the moment, I'm just relieved to be feeling better and more in control of myself. It's been a while. Current Mood:  relaxed
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I'm gonna give you a preview of what's coming up on next week's RDA. It occured to me that I never do countdowns, and rarely if ever do theme nights anymore. Just something we sort of floated away from in the transition to being more of an out of character thing, and what with the new segments and the comedy and all that, the musical focus has drifted. After hearing two recent songs that got my attention ("Who Says" from John Mayer and "Can't Stop" from MoZella), I thought a bit more about the way songs used to turn my head and give me more than a few moment's pause. I considered other songs that had done the same, over the long course of my life and up until now. Everyone has these songs. Everyone. You hear a song, and not only does it fix a point in your memory it changes the way you hear and perceive music from that point on. It's always a part of your mental iPod; at any given moment, you find pieces of them drifting through your thoughts. You know them by heart. They're integrated into who you are, and they color the way you experience the world. I tried to do just ten songs, but that proved impossible. I broadened it to twenty, and even that was something of a challenge. Stop and think about all the songs you've heard over your entire life; now pick the twenty most important. And it's not just the songs, either. The artists themselves have an impact, so I had to make sure my list represented the singers and songwriters who make the biggest dent in my psyche. These will get played next Monday, probably with more commentary. For right now, here's the list. ( And with that . . . )Current Mood:  accomplished
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Chemical depression is an insidious little fucker. See, it's like trying to run software on damaged hardware . . . sure, it'll kinda work, but you'll end up with a blue screen of death more often than not. So you reboot, you try to run it again, lather, rinse, repeat. There's a phenomena associated with it called "intrusive thoughts." They're things you not only don't want to think, but you really don't have any reason to think, either. Things that should be over and done, stuff that's passed. You can embrace them as being finished on every intellectual level, but the screw-ups in your miswired head won't hear of it. Anything that brushes too closely to a way you used to feel, anything that resembles what you're feeling now (even though it's not real emotion, it's a chemical imbalance) . . . you cling to those thoughts. You hold on to them even when you don't want to, even when all they do is hurt you, or make you feel worse. Your brain is trying to make sense of why you feel so awful, and the only thing that makes sense are those old wounds. So they don't leave you alone. You're literally at war inside. One part of you knows exactly what's happening and why, and is reasoning and lucid. The other part is flailing and chasing phantom emotions and feelings, spewing things into your thought process that don't make any kind of actual sense and don't reflect how you should feel about what's actually going on in your life. You don't get a choice. You're going to feel awful, no matter what good things come your way. You're going to dredge up things from years and years ago, because they hold a resonance to these wretched feelings and this flailing part of you is using them to try to make sense of itself. At the same time, it's just making it worse. It's frustrating to be constantly clawing at yourself, stomping snatches of words out of your immediate thoughts, trying to keep focused at all times because otherwise you'll blink and end up wallowing for no sensible purpose. Feeling sad is a natural reaction to appropriate stimulus. It's what we do when bad things happen; we hurt. We suffer through it, we learn, we understand how to cope, we form a better picture of life and living from the whole experience. Most importantly, when all of that is done we move on. Some things never stop hurting entirely . . . break-ups, deaths, regrets, things and places and people we've lost. But those hurts are never meant to overshadow the here and now. They'll always be sore, but they shouldn't be constantly bleeding and never scarring over. That's how you know something's wrong. I've been unaware of the whole process until I managed to stop and take stock of it, but I'm suffering some pretty serious symptoms of depression. From all accounting of life and what's going on, I've got reasons to be disappointed, unhappy and displeased with some aspects. What I don't have reason to be doing is focusing my attention on things that happened years and years ago, or drifting into fantasies of how I could reverse those cold and hard facts. Chemical depression is an utter bitch because it represents a malfunction. You can't think your way through it, and you can't just work the problems out. Every time you think you have, every time you think you've come to terms with the things your mind is demanding are so utterly important . . . the cycle starts again. It's the very definition of the word "frustration." I've finally scraped enough cash together to order new meds. It'll take a while for them to arrive, and longer to kick in, but I'm sincerely at a point where all the normal methods of dealing with myself and my emotions are ineffective. Reasoning won't do it, talking won't do it . . . I know exactly what's wrong and I know I should feel differently, I certainly want to feel differently, but all the bad hardware keeps throwing up the old BSOD. Unless someone feels like sending me free Wellbutrin while I wait for my under-the-counter solution to arrive (Isn't our health care system ever so grand?), I'm just going to have to muddle through in the meanwhile. Let's see how I manage it. Current Mood:  aggravated
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