It's Not Spring, Stop Lying

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where it has been bright and beautiful all week. The birds are singing, the temperature has lifted, the bulbs are growing, and I’ve been pruning trees and bushes, amending the soil and generally clearing the garden. This is what I’ve come to think of as “false spring.” Every year around this time, it gets warmer and brighter and we believe spring is arriving. It’s a lie. In two weeks we’ll be plunged back into winter for another six weeks at least.

So I’m making the most of the light and the dryness while I can, because soon frost giants will shit on the flowerbeds once again.

Let’s have some fun while the sun is out.

In this letter:

• The Brutalist

• Operations and uncanny food

• 1941, the most lunatic film adaptation

• The News

• A digital lifeboat, maybe

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

THE BRUTALIST

Of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I have only seen DUNE PART TWO and THE BRUTALIST all the way through. ANORA and THE SUBSTANCE have been in my queue for ages, and I do want to see CONCLAVE because I enjoyed the book. DUNE PART TWO is fine, occasionally brilliant, and a clever adaptation/update of the original text. Its flaws are minor - Javier Barden spends the last half of the film saying nothing but “Lisan al-Gaib” in varying tones, and establishing the family atomics and then having Timothee Chalamet looking directly at them exploding seems like a slip. But it’s fine.

THE BRUTALIST, working with a total budget that might just have covered the cost of DUNE PART TWO’s costumes, is something else. It, too, has flaws. We see what we presume to be Adrien Brody’s left hand writing a letter, but Brody is right-handed for the rest of the film. Scenes are over-long. It loses sense of its own timeline here and there. But it is a work of great ambition. Yes, so is DUNE, but DUNE is starting from an established text. THE BRUTALIST starts from scratch, inspired by true stories but not bound by them. It goes for something else, something bigger.

(The score, by the way, is brilliant, and goes a long way towards arranging the scale of the film. When it comes in, it’s immense. That Oscar was deserved.)

It’s the story of Bauhaus-trained monumental architect Laszlo Toth escaping to America after the Holocaust and falling into the orbit of a shallow, rapacious industrialist who commissions Toth to build a community center to honour his dead mother. Everything goes wrong. But Toth sees the shape of the place. He sees its statement. Almost all in his life is sacrificed to making it real.

It’s art as a balance between cost and reward. What the world wants and what the mind wants.

It’s a tricky film. Sometimes it wants you to take it literally, sometimes it wants you to see through it and its people. Its Brutalist architecture is a put-on, because the Brutalist of the title isn’t the architect or the architecture. Full marks for using Bauhaus design for the main titles, though. It’s a long film, and, like the center Toth builds, it’s far vaster in its underneath than it looks.

The coda is odd. It radically complicates and re-contextualises most of the previous two hours. It’s about the power of art to take ownership of victimhood and transcend it: the power of a creative mind to pull a victory from the mud.

Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold pull off a huge magic trick in THE BRUTALIST, and it’s worthy of awards. I am faintly annoyed it didn’t get Best Picture, because that would have been a strong signal about art. I’m looking forward to watching it several more times.

"No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey."

OPERATIONS

UNCANNY FOOD

As I write this, the art on PROJECT LOST SIERRA should be coming in for a landing. There’ll be a couple of months for corrections and production, and then we’ll see if and when the publisher wants to announce and schedule it. Which, this week, will probably be fraught with questions like “where the fuck are we going to print it?” The US tariffs on Canada and China are going to make comics publishing… interesting. That said, by the time this gets sent, everybody might have changed their minds again.

Also I read ULTRA PROCESSED PEOPLE and I will write about that more on LTD at some point but my main takeaway is oh my god don’t read this if you ever want to eat with convenience or not have to scan an ingredients list into a search engine again. Absolutely terrifying.

I have decided to write some short stories this spring, as it’s a skill I’ve lost and would like back. Some will appear on LTD in pieces, some will go somewhere else. But I haven’t written a short story I’ve liked since DEAD PIG COLLECTOR.

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ORBITAL

1941, THE BEST WORST MOVIE ADAPTATION EVER

There was a time when big films got comics adaptations. Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson did an amazing adaptation of ALIEN, for instance, and Bill Sienkiewicz did a wonderful version of David Lynch’s DUNE.

1941, directed by Steven Spielberg, is not remembered fondly by anyone except me. It was the last film we took my Nan to see before she passed, and she laughed until she cried. It’s my last clear memory of her, and I’ll always be grateful for that. So, yeah, I have a fondness for 1941. Which got a comics adaptation, which I found in a remainder bin at the newsagent’s a few years later.

That’s Stephen Bissette who did SWAMP THING with Alan Moore and published the anthology book TABOO, and Rick Veitch who did SWAMP THING with Alan Moore and on his own and also did BRAT PACK and MAXIMORTAL and a ton of other great stuff.

Spielberg was not a fan. He wrote a letter, in fact, copied to his lawyer and studio heads, about its grotesquerie and its horrible racism. (1) He’s not wrong, but Bissette and Veitch (and all their friends who worked on bits of it with them) really just amplified what was already there. Give a racist movie to a couple of young ambitious underground cartoonists who know all about racist tropes in 1940’s American cartooning and you’re going to get what you deserve.

1941 was a big budget action comedy by the hottest director in the world.

The book is fuck off demented and could never ever happen today.

The first thing that jumps out is the amount of collage going on:

Then you realise it’s worked in everywhere:

Bissette and Veitch can just about be separated out in some panels, but there’s the strong sense they were both touching every page.

This transformation does not happen in the film and it’s just the artists playing around. By the end of the book, the bad guy is a drooling werewolf.

Collage and satire have gone together for centuries. I mean, you don’t get Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python work without Max Ernst, and Ernst was working in an established form. But it’s not often you see it used so extensively in the graphic novel form, and certainly not in a big movie adaptation graphic novel that was supposed to be a commercial enterprise. The people who made this book seem to have liked nothing at all about the film and decided to just murder it in print. And the book got published anyway. No licensor would allow that today.

1. https://paneltopanel.tumblr.com/post/81122130520/in-1979-heavy-metal-magazine-hired-stephen-r

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, the LIGHTS OUT Anthology.

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

Lordess is absolutely swamped in work right now, so I’ve told her to take a break from The News until her meat suit is functioning properly again.

OTHER

DIGITAL LIFEBOAT

So here’s a thing someone told me last week.

I’d been muttering here about the idea of selling digital products through Patreon, but had been concerned that - well, imagine you’re running your Patreon and offer a digital comic every month for that membership cost. If someone joins six months later, they get six of your comics for a one-month membership fee, right?

No. You can sell digital products inside your Patreon channel for a separate fee. And the terms don’t look bad. SO you charge whatever you charge for a monthly membership - or maybe even nothing at all - and you can add in digital products for additional fees separate from that monthly charge.

This sounds to me like a thing worth exploring. Especially if, say, the major distributor for indie comics goes under and it suddenly costs a lot more to ship comics into the US from Canada and China.

Did you know Matt Kindt already serialises a digital comic on his Patreon for free?

Very into the music of Angela Winter these days. She also does a monthly radio show called Anti-Authoritarian ASMR which is lovely. Newsletter too.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

• trying to morning computer every morning, more or less

• book cover designs I liked

• notes on that recent film LOVE HURTS

• recent notes on use of notebooks

• my favourite photo of the week

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If you get your comics from a comic book shop, tell them the comics you want to continue getting, have them put away for you, and pay your bill every week or month. If things get weirder, shops ordering copies for the shelf isn’t something you want to be relying on.

Things always get weirder. That said, sitting outside reading a book over coffee still works just fine. I blew off everything on Thursday and sat in a local place reading Ionesco with a glass of wine and an excellent coffee made with beans roasted in Naples. Do something that makes you happy and quietens your world. Live your own life. Take care.

W