One of the few downsides of leaving twitter was losing track of people that you don’t know, exactly, but whose posts and work you’ve come to appreciate as part of your ongoing diet of stuff.
One of those people was Chloe Maveal, who runs (ran?) The Gutter Review, which featured a lot of really good comics criticism, mainly around 2000AD. I didn’t see any updates in my RSS reader for a while and the site seems to have gone dark. You never know with online folk. Sometimes you don’t hear about them and it turns out they’re struggling and sometimes it turns out they’re doing really well.
Given that she’s now co-hosting an official 2000AD podcast, it seems that Chloe’s doing really well. I was very happy, though, when news came out of a new zine she had made.
Trash Humper ($5 on Gumroad) has two essays in it - one about the Trainspotting sequel, T2, which was serendipitous as I’ve found myself thinking about the film lately and the way it handles aging, memory and nostalgia. Although I’m finding sequels, prequels, franchises and “IP” to be horrendous concepts, there was something about T2 that seemed genuine and thoughtful. Perhaps sequels are only worthwhile when they’re shot decades later. I don’t think Richard Linklater’s Before films with Julie Delphy and Ethan Hawke are a franchise, but it has restored a bit of my faith in long-form episodic story telling. I think I just want the form to be longer and the gaps to be bigger than most producers would be willing to countenance. (I’m also thinking of Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, which took a seven year gap between series 2 and 3.) What I find so tiring about the desire for episodic content is its relentlessness - that there are always new episodes, that they must be released to a continual schedule, that you must consume or face being left behind.
The other essay in Trash Humper is about Peter Milligan, a comics writer I’ve somehow always managed to miss. I think I’ve got a week or two left on my DC Universe subscription, so I’ll see if I can look up some of his work, including Face, the somewhat grisly piece of body horror mentioned in the essay.
Anyway, the zine is good. I’ll admit that it’s scratching the very specific niches in my brain, but isn’t that what zines are for?
Buy Trash Humper: The One About Obsession, Heroin, and Choons on Gumroad