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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It is 10 C and raining with fifty mph winds and the garden looks like a Bela Tarr film. All week I’ve been daydreaming that the forthcoming BLADE RUNNER show will feature a Blade Runner putting away the Voight-Kampff machine, holding up a tablet and asking the replicant interviewee to select all images with bicycles on the screen.

In this letter:

• Bits and pieces

• The PLANETARY Compendium

• The News, with Lordess Foudre

• COLLIDE 01.06

• zero search

• Deliberate Disconnection with Rain DeGrey

• Todd Blackwood’s Graveyard Gallery

• A care package from Zoharum

• LTD

THE WORLD SERVICE

BITS AND PIECES

In LA, seventy artists turned a vacant hospital into a gallery installation.

OPERATIONS

THE PLANETARY COMPENDIUM

A brand new softcover collection of the entirety of the PLANETARY works, featuring the main series by myself and my friend the late John Cassaday, and the crossover specials PLANETARY/BATMAN, PLANETARY/JLA and PLANETARY/THE AUTHORITY, illustrated by John, Jerry Ordway and Phil Jiminez.

It is a heavy brick of a thing retailing at sixty US dollars, which I believe is now the cheapest way to obtain the entire work. Looks to be out in July, but my copies showed up on Wednesday.

The cover is in for reprint book PROJECT WALLOPS and it is glorious, and another publisher got in touch this week to tell me they’re doing a special collection of a run I did on one of their books years ago, with a new foreword and a request for me to write a 1500-word introduction. We will call that PROJECT SPITALFIELDS for the hell of it. 

Given the number of big reprint projects happening this year, I am starting to wonder if I secretly died and nobody told me.

Further proof:

This immense hardback outsize slab that arrived on Friday from Marvel is named for and features NOT DEAD YET, a four-part Wolverine story I did with Leinil Francis Yu donkeys years ago. I remember Leinil did an astonishing job with it and that the first issue had one of my better action sequences, but I have spaced the rest, so I look forward to opening it up and flinching at my writing a lot. The odd thing is that I actually talked to Leinil recently (he’s doing great).

Find more Lordess Foudre work at her Instagram and Substack.

Jerome Eyquem is an artist and writer: here are his releases on GlobalComix.

ORBITAL

zero search

With Google prioritising their AI summaries over search results, it is now useless for search and discovery and traffic from Google searches is about to drop to near zero. And yet, people are making serious bank from Substacks that are literally just linkblogs. Because they’re curated. I remember suggesting years ago that things will fold back to curation by humans, as in the days before Google dominance and “the algorithms,” and it seems to be happening in a small way. Seems to me that the people making it work are deeply embedded within their communities, interest groups and physical locations - which makes sense, as it’s next to impossible to surface stuff on social media, too.

I’ve been watching people on Substack, particularly, build out that kind of newsletter, link-curating in specific areas of interest. And it goes slightly beyond the “I found this on the internet for you,” in some cases, into actual if small-scale news reporting in those niches, and into real space events. Things are changing out there. NYC-specific newsletter writer Emily Sundberg may use the tagline “I can do things with my phone you wouldn’t believe,” but it’s notable how much time she spends in places, meeting people, to do her work, and her newsletter FEED ME is now a studio and a party brand. An especial fascination for me right now is Laura Reilly’s newsletter HIGH TOUCH, about “longevity and aesthetics” but really mostly a non judgmental and extremely detailed look at all the frightening things people are doing to themselves - and the top of each newsletter is a linkdump.

The days of lonely old hermit farts collecting up things on the internet for you are passing, because most of the time we can’t find anything online worth passing on because social media buries the cries of artists and real conversation happens in private spaces now, and nobody tells us things. This is fine. It’s just change.

A new issue of the Black Flowers Arts Journal, a brief collection of wonderful images that is worth your time.

If you want to rediscover blogs, try ooh.directory.

A message from our supporters this week:

Markets move. Headlines catastrophize. Inside the noise is the story that matters — the opportunity, not the fear. The Daily Upside: global business and finance, reported without the alarm.

Read for Free Now

Artist, writer and educator Rain DeGrey moved to the wilderness after a lifetime in California and this is the record of her discovery of the land and the seasons. This is her newsletter.

Todd Blackwood is the creator of NOSFERATU: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL. See more of his art on his IG.

If you want to work together this year, or if you’re doing something creative you want more people to know about, or if you think there’s something Orbital Operations should be covering, hit reply to this newsletter to shoot a note to the office.

OPS

A CARE PACKAGE FROM ZOHARUM

Every month or two, the Polish label Zoharum sends me a package of their recent releases. You can stream them all for free at their bandcamp page.

I haven’t listened to these yet, as they only just arrived, but they always have some gems. This is a piece I absolutely fell for last year, by HVAST.

I used to keep a list of care packages from Zoharum, and here they all are.

It’s actually one of the great privileges of my life that record companies want to send me things. Sometimes people send me books via my management, too:

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder. Currently, I do one post a day, with maybe an additional note in the evening to log stuff. The daily note is like a more condensed yet more confused version of this newsletter. You might like it.

• retired

• wavy

• taste (rant)

• habit

• all over the place

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Keep Your Cool

In the glass: Halfpenny Green English Rose. My local place specialises in English wines.

And that’s me for this week. Hopefully the sun will come out next week. Take care of yourself. See you next Sunday.

W