I have this headcanon that Husk's little golden hearts cand conduct energy/electricity, even if the only things he can actually affect are the dice and cards of his own summoning

On everyting else is little more than mild-barely-there static, but Angel loves its more... recrational uses. (They don't indulge often in that kind of play though, because static absolutely wrecks Angel's fur)

I'd be curious for more of your thoughts on that Hibbs piece. I've read him for years and often find him insightful, but this one seems very reactionary in a very typical retailer way ("blinkered" was a good word Kim O'Connor used). Particularly, he seems to pretend that Diamond is just fine as is and that DC had no reason to want to switch distribution. I recently swore off DC, but I've noticed since the switch that those comics have been on time at my lcs each week. Diamond, not so much.

Yeah, I don’t really agree with that (I missed whatever Kim said), though I really don’t know what’s going on at a retail level.  I haven’t gone regularly to a comic shop in years.   

(Setting aside the health stuff, which is the most striking thing in there:)  Hibbs is a retailer writing from a retailer perspective, so wishing that he was saying something else”... I mean, we know what we’re signing up for when we read it; we know how to slot it into our own personal worldviews. I’m not to going to complain that Hibbs isn’t going to tell me how long to cook a steak for, or that he’s not yelling that the Direct Market should be dismantled because if those were what I was looking to read, the egg should be on my face for pulling him up to begin with.

The question with Hibbs I think I always have is “how representative is he of retailers generally, as a store in San Francisco.”  (And I think people slightly overstate how non-representative he is because if you hear him talk about his operations, he makes clear he operates differently for different retail audiences, when he had that second store going-- I don’t know if that’s still a thing, but.  And also: I don’t fucking know what it means to be San Francisco anymore because what is that city even...). But generally, you know, you take that data point into consideration but still try to get at what you’ve signed up for, when you read what he says-- where are retailers’ heads at... You know, you go “well if Hibbs is at 8 then even adjusting -2 for factors x y and z, that mean Joe Median-Store might be at 6 and 6 is great / isn’t great, etc.”   

Hibbs has always erred slightly worried, on the spectrum of human reactions, so you know, (even though I personally tend to be drawn to that more than optimism), I’m not sitting here going “I bet DC’s going to license all their characters tomorrow because he says so” because it’s not like the first time I’ve heard that-- though it remains entirely possible, possibly a good idea for the suits (though probably not for anyone else), who even knows.  (Though if you’ve been listening to Rob Liefeld talk on Robservations about Heroes Reborn you’ll already know a significant challenge that would face-- that if they do a trial balloon, the people who already entrenched will do whatever they can to poison the trial balloon so as to make the case for not doing it and remaining entrenched...)(that becomes tougher after multiple waves of layoffs, though).

But what he’s talking about-- DC just did its own Heroes World...? As soon as I heard all that to begin with (and I didn’t pay close attention because the world was happening), my first reaction was “oh shit, Heroes World!”  So a comic retailers saying “this is looking the same after __ months in these specific ways” ... I’m going to pay attention to that.  I just remember how spectacularly unlikely it was that comics cleaned up the mess they’d made of themselves in the 90′s. It was a ridiculously unlikely set of events that turned things around, and I don’t think you can reasonably expect those events to happen again.  (Especially after the “we learned a lesson from the 90′s” part turned out to be a lie, which is something I know I was yelling and screaming about for years and I was getting called like “ungrateful” or something by the Serious Comic Voices of Seriousness for it, there were entire CBR blog posts about how I didn’t understand how great things were now, etc, etc, etc... I don’t think they pull that “we learned not to rip people off” lie again, not this batch of assholes.  Though who knows, maybe....)

I mean, sure there are criticisms of Diamond to be had, of trad retail to be had.  And there’s the giant black box of “how desperate are people right now” that hasn’t been reported on.  There was a time in ‘02-’04 or so  when a book distributor or somebody like that went down, and it almost took out Fantagraphics with it. And this seems worse than that! Where’s the money flowing here and whose debts are getting paid first?  I don’t have any idea.  There’s all these systems in play that have been knocked out by COVID, and who knows who’s owed how much money or how much product is sitting in a warehouse collecting warehouse fees, etc., like this is all a fucking disaster and there’s no reporting on it (comic reporters are too busy encouraging Damon Lindelof to make Watchmen TV shows) and there’s ... DC is a black box in a black box in a black box (he said, having waited for 3 years for DC to answer an easy question once). 

But even if DC had good reason to do whatever it did?  It doesn’t seem to matter much if the rest of the comic market’s built around Diamond and if no one has the health of the Direct Market on its radar.  And DC doesn’t if they fucking fired everyone who understands the health of the Direct Market as even being a fucking concept to begin with, which is extremely likely at this point.  Or ... I don’t know-- it’s the old comic problem of people wanting to argue that “the thing is bad an we need to replace the thing.”  Diamond’s bad and we need to replace it.  Okay.  With what?  And with comics, the answer is usually “moonbeams and hopes and hugs.”  There’s just a lot of wishful thinking out there that a Better Answer just shows up.  I don’t know about that... 

Comic retail’s built around selling Batman. For DC’s moves to be this impactful, that’s a problem at the core of the system.  The undoing was in the origin.  So i get that criticism,  and it’s well taken (except to the extent there’s an entirely speculative argument built around it that either (a) there would be some other system that’d exist but-for and (b) there’d be some flourishing of human creativity but-for). But that’s still a lot of people and a lot of human energy that’s at issue.  And the few life rafts that are out there, you’re not going to get a lot of people on them.  Digital is a joke (according to me, a digital comic publisher! hahaha)-- hibbs if anything overstates the possibilities there because as a retailer, he doesn’t want to bring up that we’re in the Golden Age of Comic Piracy.  (And ... I like being a digital comic publisher!  I’m having fun.  But). And bookstores-- bookstores are great, provided your readership expectation are 10-14 year old girls.  Which might be better for comics if that became the default comic as compared to 35-50 year old bachelors that’s the DM’s bread and butter, but... I think you probably have to be okay with a lot fewer people having gigs.  Bookstores can’t even remotely support the same level of human activity that comic shops can, by the look of things.  (You know at some point you have a larger cultural heat death going on, that’s the part I find interesting, but...)

I don’t know. Hibbs might be to an extreme.  I might be to an extreme.  But having seen people voting for Biden and then going “wait, he’s going to hire racist industry-controlled centrists??  we got nothing for our vote?  we’ve been betrayed!”... having seen people talk about what a great human being George Bush was (I saw a tweet fucking today that was like “George Bush was underrated because he was nice to a trans person once”)... I’ve become very cynical about the human memory or ability to learn lessons.  I don’t think people remember 1995-1999 in comics, and just... how ridiculous it was when that got turned around.  It was like watching them pull off a fucking heist to turn things around last time... Comics are selling-- people are buying comics.  So it’s not as bad as last time.  It’s nowhere close.  But... People overestimate how structured the industry is, and obviously the DC layoffs suggest that the people looking purely at the bottom line don’t understand and didn’t account for the unique levels of institutional knowledge required for the industry... Other media, you don’t hear about hand-selling as much.  When have you ever seen a movie because the guy who owns the theater told you it was good?? Or because you saw the director standing over a flea market table looking like they were about to cry...?  Like... I don’t know.  

I do know for me, I want to start thinking about a next project, and I’ve been looking again at what the Big Hit Books have been these last couple years (I kind of avoided new stuff when I was working on my things) and... You know, part of what changed things in the early 00′s was there were new voices with a new style ready to come in.  Now?  Jesus, I don’t know.  At first blush, everybody’s writing books nearly identically, and it’s just this massive level of bombast and confidence (good for them!) and huge splash pages and hyper-emotional narration and... it all just is this blockbuster schmear that’s very impressive but entirely skippable anyways.  None of it’s as a bezerk or strange or just weirdly interesting to me as 10 seconds of  a Metal Gear Solid video essay... it’s a lot of big splash pages of Thanos or Thanos-for-creator-owned-comics... But it all seems like halls of mirrors-- none of it seems very outward looking... You know, Kojima did halls of mirrors by the 4th game, too, but in Death Stranding, he had like Amazon deliverypeople, and you’d play the game and go “oh shit, this gig economy is making my formaldehyde-baby cry” and like... he had something besides the hall of mirrors to him.  (And I mean, the 4th game is a criticism of the hall of mirrors, according to a video essay I saw, but...).  Or you know, it’s like the thing that Rebuild of Evangelion 3 is criticizing, they’re doing unironically... I don’t know.  It’s weird; the books are weird; I keep wanting to ask like “what should I be reading here” because I’m mostly ignorant besides a Hulk or a Long Con or Sink or ... I never saw the end of Seeds but I thought Seeds had something...

Sorry to ramble.

Hi! I really love history and I want to learn more about a lot of different periods and how people lived and the politics of those times (also about important figures but that's secondary for me), but I don't know how and where to start, beside choosing a year/event in particular. And now that I've finished high schools and won't study history in college I won't even learn about history that way. How do you do it??

Hello there! For me, studying history has always gone hand in hand with studying the school subject of it: I do research something further if it piqued my interest or I don't quite understand it, and of course I have my great fascinations such as Federico II or the Phoenicians which I have bought quite a few monographs about, but as for the basic structure of it I've always followed my history textbooks, especially in the context of European civilizations (which are usually far more thoroughly developed than others, at least here in Italy and I assume the rest of Europe).

Historian Marc Bloch said to really understand history we need to detach ourselves from the old mindset of "history of events", a series of wars and kings and revolutions all seemingly unconnected to each other, but we need to focus on the society and whom it is composed of: you can't make history without the people that lived through it, and by this I don't mean so-and-so noble or so-and-so revolutionary, but the collective of people, especially those traditionally ignored such as peasants, women, poor people and the other marginalized communities on whose backs the most prominent figures we all know about rested. I deeply believe in this, and I don't think any historical period or event can be studied without knowing what lurks underneath it, contextually, politically and socially.

One great starting point, I think, would be narrowing down a time period and a place you want to study, and looking for what books you can find on that: I suggest, if not much pops up on a regular Google search, using Amazon to search books, not necessarily to buy them from there but because it will show you anything remotely related to that topic (of course, always check if the author is a valid authority on the matter and if the book itself is legit).

If, on the other hand, you're absolutely lost aside from vaguely knowing what continent and what era or couple of centuries you want to focus on, I would suggest looking for generic books meant to give you a base understanding of that era, and see what you're particularly drawn to in that broader context: of course you won't get perfect knowledge of anything through those books, but you will get what we in Italian call an "infarinatura", a basic recap of what's going on with everything.

I don't think buying actual history textbooks would be a good idea for you, especially as you are a college student and are probably already dealing with exorbitant prices for your assigned textbooks in the first place, but if you are in a position where you can and want to buy textbooks just for a passion, I would recommend it: mine, the Nuovo Millennium, comes with first-hand sources and historical criticism from experts on the period, and I think having access to those tools drastically changes your perception of history, so if you do decide to get a textbook make sure it offers multiple perspectives on historical criticism!

That is all the advice I have for you, unfortunately --- like I said, I've only ever studied history with a teacher in a classroom, so I myself probably wouldn't know where to start if left to my own devices! I hope I was of some help, and if anyone who's ever studied history on their own would like to offer their perspective they're welcome to do so. Best of luck studying history, anon! ❤️