GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #835: THE BEST COMIC BOOK OF THE WEEK IS . . .

 . . . all of my books. They were great, each and every one of them. And I am so happy to have something other than my misery to talk about, I'm going to do an old school cool-shit type GF tonight. If you weren't with me back in the day, every Thursday I would post a Cool Shit talking about my favorite comics of the week. There are spoilers, as this is not a review series. It's just me talking about cool shit. So let's start!

JAMES BOND 007 #4: Shockingly enough the least excited I was for a book this week was for a Garth Ennis book. That is very much unlike me. I like in this book that Bond mentions that M is not the M that's always been with us, but that people fill in the role. He's distrustful of the current M. He currently trusts only Moneypenny because he's known her the longest. He's just returned from space and will soon be working with Felix again in the very near future.

TRANSFORMERS #7: Starscream is one of my favorite Transformers. He's a weasel. He will do anything to be in charge of the Decepticons, and curiously he actually is their leader in this new series. Megatron has yet to show his face in this series, although he's depicted in another as out of working order. How did he get that way? Did Starscream have something to do with it? I'm sure we'll find out. But Soundwave just challenged Starscream's leadership. Starscream is at his best when he's using words as weapons, but Soundwave much prefers to use weapons as weapons, and he's not above cheating. It reminded me a little of how Roland the Gunslinger bested Cort in the Dark Tower series. While it seems Image is not afraid to kill some Transformers, I wouldn't count Starscream out yet. I'm sure he'll be back.

COBRA COMMANDER #4: Cobra Commander is a lot like Starscream, and not just because the two characters were voiced by the same actor back in the 'Eighties. I'm glad that Nemesis Enforcer is around and beating the mortal shit out of the Dreadnoks, but the best part of this issue was Cobra Commander's sudden realization that he wasn't the main character of his own book. Like Starscream, he's got tricks up his sleeve. In a fair fight there is no way he'd be able to defeat NE. Luckily he's very adept at cheating. I think the next issue is the last. Too bad. I'm very much enjoying this one.

QUICK STOPS VOL 2 #4: I never thought I'd need to hear an origin story for Mooby, but goddam! I'm very happy this exists. In the final part of the story Kevin Smith ratchets up the action to a ridiculous level. I never thought I'd see Jay beat the daylights out of an elderly naked Satanist lady wearing a Mooby golden calf mask, but that's the world I currently live in. (I didn't expect Silent Bob to snap a selfie with her after, either. He's a man of few words, and his actions speak volumes.) It's good to see that the Quick Stop has a plaque commemorating Dante Hicks, but in pure Randal fashion, it's at the coffee station with a sign declaring Dante *was* supposed to be here today. This is probably the last issue, but I'm hoping for a volume 3.

HELLBLAZER: DEAD IN AMERICA #4: I don't talk about it often, but I'm fully on board with this new incarnation of Hellblazer. It feels like the Vertigo Hellblazer of old. It's more in tune with Jamie Delano's version of Constantine rather than Ennis's. There's even a nod to the original series in this issue. John is still a walking dead man, but it seems he's finally got Swamp Thing on the same page with him. It was good to see ol' Con-job pulling a scam on people, and to have it not work out for him? It was kind of funny. What I very much liked was how the people he was scamming, who had covered up the rape and murder of a teenage girl by the high school football team, got their comeuppance when they all were cursed to relive her final moments for hours in one night. It's not often that John does something good. Usually it's an accident while doing something very self-centered, but this was good work.

I feel a lot better for having written this one. It reminded me what fun was like, and fun has been running very low around here. This will be the last GF for a while, now that I'm at 835, which was my goal. Hopefully my life will stop sucking so much soon, and I can get back to having fun. Living with overwhelming stress 24/7--and I mean 24/7, I can't even escape from it in my dreams--is not helpful and needs to stop ASAP.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #834: I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO CALL THIS ONE

 I'm fucking exhausted. It's not just the sickness thing, although that's a huge part of it. Imagine feeling at your absolute lowest, and a doctor tells you that you will never feel like this again if you remove one specific thing from your life. You remove that specific thing, and it doesn't work. You feel at your worst time and time again, and it doesn't seem to stop. You'd feel betrayed, wouldn't you?

I know medical science doesn't know everything, and that there are many mysteries that may never get solved. But I'm hurting. I feel betrayed. I trusted them with this thing, and they just take a look at me, go whoopsy, and let's move on.

I can't move on. There's so much more going on in my life right now, and I usually tell you everything. There are a few things I've been holding back on. Two, to be specific. One of them I will never tell you about. The other? I almost decided to write about that tonight. But it's unspeakable, even for me. I can't. Not yet, at least.

It took all my ability to not cry on my drive home from work. That's very unusual for me because up until maybe five years ago, I thought I'd lost the ability to cry. The last time I cried was when I was a child.

It was pretty easy to stop me back then. My stepfather gave me a sharp crack across the face and said, "Boys don't cry." And he stared at me, like he was imposing his will on me. And he was.

Much to my surprise I found myself crying when my mom died. I cried when my dad died. I cried when my grandparents died. And now it seems like it's in my soul again. I can watch something sad or harrowing, and I can feel my eyes tear up. But to suddenly need to cry while I was driving? That was out of the fucking blue for me. And then for me to force myself not to cry? It was like feeling that slap across the face again from across the decades. I felt chastised.

Men are told they have to be a certain way, or they're not men. For the record, I recognize that this is the same for women and nonbinary people, too, but I can only speak of my own personal experience. The indoctrination begins almost at birth when they give you a blue blanket and talk about how one day all the ladies will swoon at your feet. That's taking a lot for granted. Hell, these days it starts with the gender reveal. Gotta have your blue smoke or your pink balloons or what have you, or you think you're not going to be a caring parent.

We focus too much on details. Can't we just be happy that we have a healthy baby? We have to foist gender norms on them before they even know what the earth's air tastes like?

Be a man. Love sports. Fuck all the girls. It's OK if they're not on the same page with you. Bully them until they'll put your dick in their mouth. It's consensual that way. But even if you go beyond that, it's OK. It's just boys roughhousing. Besides, she shouldn't have dressed that way. Gives men all sorts of ideas . . .

But you'd better want your dick in that woman's mouth. If you like other men? You're not a man.

I did not like all the kinds of things men are supposed to like. I always found comfort in books and playing with my toys. Making up my own stories. Getting lost in my thoughts. But I also had my cousin, Erik, so I was able to pretend to like that other stuff by modeling myself after him. It kept my stepfather off my back, and he was the one who wanted me to be a man.

It was odd. My father accepted my ways as manly, or at least boyish, and he didn't seem concerned with beating the shit out of me so I'd fit some kind of mold. Dad was always easy-going, and he often found it was more important to be funny than anything else, sometimes to his own detriment. I'll bet that sounds pretty familiar to a lot of people who know what I value more than most things, sometimes to my own detriment.

Yet despite that, my stepfather was the stronger influence because he had boots on the ground at all times. And I don't like admitting this part much, but some of the blame does go to my grandfather. He wanted to make sure I was a man who liked manly things. He didn't want to beat me into it, but he shamed me often. He'd take me out to ballgames, which I found as an adult weren't that bad, especially if you had whiskey with you. He got me a subscription to Playboy when I turned 18, I think because he was afraid I was gay. Gramps, too, used to say, "Boys don't cry."

I think I would have been a lot better off if my stepfather had accidentally killed me during a beating. I wouldn't have grown up into this thing that feels like the world is slipping away constantly, and I'm losing all of my battles, and I'm not even having fun making up my own stories anymore, and that was the one thing that kept me alive and sane when I was a kid.

I've spent my life trying to just get by. I was advised as a very young boy that it was best to bottle your shit up. Keep bottling it up until it becomes unbearable, then take it out on some poor prick. His offense doesn't have to be that bad, just enough to break the camel's back. And when it's done, go back to bottling it up until next time. I do bottle a lot of things up. I completely get it when Bruce Banner says, "I'm always angry." Because I fucking am. The world is unfair. I've known that longer than most people I grew up with. But as an adult I've always fought for the world to be fair. For people to stop taking advantage of others. Every time you see me rant and rave about the dipshits and fuckfaces taking advantage of us all, that's me trying to bring some balance to the world. I can't make the changes. I can only make people aware. If enough of us are aware, maybe we can gang up on the bastards.

But I can't lash out. I can't take it out on some poor prick. Because I know what I'm like when the rage has taken me over. Instead I self-immolate. I take it out on myself, because if I took it out on someone else, I'm certain I would go to prison for a very long time, and rightfully so.

And that's a man's greatest achievement, isn't it? Destroy yourself before someone else has the chance to. As much as I tried to avoid the manly lessons, I adopted the most horrifying one of them all.

Doesn't it say something that the manliest man of my youth, Arnold Swarzenegger, is on a mission to help young men find real lessons instead of the toxic bullshit that's been handed down for centuries?

I listen to him. I try. I want to be a better person, but holy fuck, I got a raw deal nearly from the start. There's shit in the DNA of my mind that will never come out, no matter how much I twist and turn the knot. I don't think Alexander the Great could cut this fucking thing.

We do so much damage to our children in the name of wanting them to be good people that we will never understand our own destructive natures. Every time I see some asshole saying something stupid on TV or, more likely, in the House of Representatives, I remind myself that they were children once. That someone visited this horror on them, and they have no idea how bad their problem is. They think they're normal. They think it's OK to boobytrap the Rio Grande, and when some kid gets hurt or even killed, fuck 'em. Because they're not Americans, dammit. Only Americans are people.

I think I've worn myself out. I'm going to post one more GF before my hiatus. It will probably be on Thursday, and I'm going to try to not be my own subject. It seems like every time I write something these days it's about me and my problems. I did some good tonight. I no longer feel the despair I started with. I feel like I made a few good points to myself, things to work on. But something's got to give. I can't see myself continuing like this for another ten, twenty, thirty years. I hope I'll find a way to shed this thing (and the two others I won't mention). It would be nice to make it to 50 without burning out like a supernova.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #833: SPINAL INJECTIONS

 Today was my fourth and hopefully final spinal injection. The others were fairly easy because they knocked me out for the procedure. But not today. I got to enjoy the sensation of several needles penetrating my spine this morning.

They gave me some local on my back. That wasn't very pleasant, but it did numb me. That didn't stop me from feeling the needles, though. I could feel the pressure of them going in, but when they injected the steroids I felt a burn that was far from pleasant.

But it's over. The procedures and surgeries are finally over. I no longer have to worry about this shit. It was rough, but now I can move on with my life.

At least until the next fucking thing comes along. Remember, for my body it's a rule. When one thing gets resolved, another thing shows its ugly face. So who knows how long I'll get to enjoy the feeling of not worrying about that shit before the next thing arrives?

My heart rate was up today, so they gave me Valium to calm down. I've never taken that before. It made me feel like a ghost of myself. You know how when you've been drinking all night in a hotel room (for reasons, I tell you, reasons), and when you step out into the next day you're blinded by the sun? That's how I felt when I left the hospital today. It was weird not being hungover in that moment.

I've got too many personal battles to fight. I'm exhausted, and it's starting to look like I might as well give up, but the success of my spinal injections today has bolstered my will to fight. I would give anything to have ordinary fucking problems. I remember what that was like, what, fifteen years ago? I told a friend I would give both balls and three inches of my dick to never suffer from my stomach illness again, and I fucking mean it.

I am so goddam tired.

All right, I'll have to figure out how to get back to my numbering scheme. I might do another GF tomorrow. I don't know. Or I'll just do two next week. We'll see.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #832: BREAKING POINT

 This fucking sickness is back yet again. I spent yesterday and today puking my guts out, and when I ran out of guts, I continued to dry heave. I think it's over. For now. But I'm weak and exhausted.

And I'm reaching my breaking point.

The one and only reason I quit drinking was so I would never feel like this again. So far this year, it's almost all I've felt. If I'm going to feel like fucking garbage anyway, why not drink? Maybe if I did, it would give the doctors reason enough to admit me and at least fucking try to figure out what's wrong with me. When I was a boozer they admitted me constantly and said, hey, quit drinking and you'll never feel like this again. I want to see those same fucking doctors and demand to know why they lied to me. Why they used Occam's Razor too fucking freely. Hey, look at that. He's a drinker. If he stops, he won't feel like this anymore. BULLSHIT.

I've been fucking dancing on that particular razor's edge for more than a decade. What in the fucking fuck?

I'm pissed. I'm demoralized. I can feel myself breaking. I'm almost there. I think one more bad day will tip me over.

I'm so fucking angry that I don't think I can go to sleep after writing this. But I'm going to give it a try. Hopefully tomorrow won't bring a fresh batch of horrors, but knowing my life? Right.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #831: ECLIPSE

 I wasn't really planning on watching the eclipse. It was supposed to happen right after I returned from lunch. But then the boss of the call center came around handing out eclipse glasses. I still wasn't sold on it. I'd seen these things before. Where I am it wouldn't even be a total eclipse. There would still be a sliver of sun on one edge when the moon moved by.

But I looked out the window and saw how dark it had become. I'd just gotten back from lunch, and they were letting us go outside for a few minutes. I figured, anything to get away from the phones for a bit. We were super busy today.

I went outside, donned the glasses, and looked up. My field of vision was pitch black except for that golden sliver. It seems I'd come out at just the right time. I saw the sun as covered as it was going to get. I heard someone say that it wasn't going to happen again for another 20 years, and I realized that I might not be alive for the next one. Life is always precarious for me, it seems, and the likelihood of me making it to 65 is pretty low.

So I watched the eclipse for a few minutes, and it felt a little more important than it had earlier in the day. I wondered what it must have been like for people living in a pre-science era during an eclipse. Maybe they knew it happened from time to time. It's a weird world. Darkness at noon isn't too out of the ordinary. But what about the first humans to ever see an eclipse? That must have scared the ever-lovin' shit out of them.

But in this modern era we know exactly when an eclipse will happen. No soothsayers need apply. The universe is like clockwork. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Even me. As I looked up at the sliver I had an odd feeling that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I'm not one for destiny, but it felt like I was a part of a much bigger scheme of things. And I was. How long have humans gazed up in wonder at eclipses? Millennia? I leaned back against the outside wall of the building and tried to see the moon moving. Given enough time I'm sure I could have, but I had to get back to work.

I took the glasses off and went back inside. To the busy phones. To the workday that is, essentially, the same cycle day in and day out, as predictable as a, well, you know.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #830: TOUGH GUYS

 

This is not a question that would probably come up in 2024, but if you were to ask me what my favorite Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas movie is, I would not say Gunfight at the OK Corral, which would probably surprise you. Although I love that movie, my heart belongs to Tough Guys. Two elderly bank robbers get out of prison after decades and decide to pull one last heist: rob the train they got busted robbing their last time out. What good timing! Because that train is about to be retired. And an elderly hitman who took the contract on these two guys comes out of retirement himself to hunt them down. This guy, by the way, is played wonderfully by a myopic Eli Wallach.

I'm a big fan of stories about old people trying to do something they used to do a lot in their youth but can no longer reasonably expect to do. Closely related to this kind of story is the kind where young people underestimate old people who then do something horrible to surprise the fuck out of the youngsters.

But I'm bringing up Tough Guys because there's a real life "tough guy" in the news.

71-year-old Bruce Edward Bell

Bell was arrested for robbing a bank recently. It's pretty impressive, considering how he's 71 years old. He's a lifelong bank robber who has been inside four times previously and did a cumulative 40 years behind bars. He just got out of prison last year, and what does he do?

OK, yeah, he robbed a bank at gunpoint. Sure, that's no laughing matter, except as I read the news story I knew instinctively that this guy isn't a killer. Big surprise, the gun in question turned out to be fake. So it's not as tense a news story as one would think. No one got hurt. The money was recovered. Not that it should matter about that last one. It was a little more than sixty grand, which is easily covered by the FDIC, so not even the corporate scum running the bank would feel the hit if it came to it.

But Bell wasn't all that good at bank robbing. He got away with the money only to be chased down and arrested. Perhaps simply leaving the bank and getting into his car to drive away was a bad exit strategy. But you gotta give him one thing: he's consistent.

I don't imagine they'll be letting him out of prison again. Typically bank robbery is punished with up to 20 years, but I'm sure the fact that this is his fifth time doing this will ensure that he gets stuck with the full 20, no parole. But let's say he survives the sentence. It's not likely, but it's possible. He would be a free man at 91.

You know what I want to know. Maybe I'll be around for that day so I can find out. If I'm still writing GF columns at the age of 65, I'll let you know how it works out . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #829: AN OPEN LETTER TO MOONSTONE BOOKS

 

Dear Moonstone Books,

I've been reading your Kolchak comics for as long as you've been putting them out. Also, my eternal thanks for reprinting The Kolchak Papers by Jeff Rice, a book I'd tried to find for years before you brought it out again, and I found it at a comics convention. I've read your anthologies, and if you have Kolchak in a Double Shot, I get that, too.

I'm familiar with your other properties, but I'm a Kolchak superfan. I loved the two movies and the show. I did not like the remake of the show, which I skipped after watching that abortion of a first episode. I see you also publish Sherlock Holmes stories, and I've read all the originals by Doyle.

I say all of this to lighten the blow, because while I enjoy reading your books, I find the editing to be absolutely atrocious. It's to the point where I wonder if you even have an editor. For a professional publisher, you seem to be OK with letting typos run wild, and your authors don't seem to have much guidance when it comes to the content. The stories are great. The execution? Not so much.

The reason for this open letter is because I just finished reading Kolchak: The Night Stalker: Dead Reckoning by Eric Fein. An excellent story, but there are so many problems with the book that the story is almost lost in the mess. I'd review this on Amazon or Goodreads, but you don't seem to have much of an interest in having this book (or many others) listed there. I have to believe one of two things. Either you don't have an editor (or an editor worth their salt), or you think that fans of your properties will buy anything, that the content doesn't matter. I'd much rather believe the first, but the longer I live, the more I realize that certain fandoms will buy anything in that fandom even if it sucks. Evan Dorkin has a strip in which a Batman fanatic will buy any Batman book, even one that comes with anthrax, because "gotta have my Batman."

First of all, letting a title like "Dead Reckoning" out into the wild is extraordinarily lazy. Especially since it doesn't seem to mean anything. Like "Blood Moon." How many things are called Blood Moon? It transcends the idea of stereotypical horror.

Also, why are you having Vincenzo rabidly siding with the Dispatch's publisher? Vincenzo is a newsman first and foremost. He understands the business. He knows the publisher is the boss, and what they say goes, but he has the desire to get to the truth just like Kolchak does. It's one thing when Vincenzo is yelling at Kolchak over writing an article about, say, vampires, but it's another when a legitimate news story is getting a cover up by authorities to the point where he has to kill said story. He should be commiserating with Kolchak on that one, not yelling at him. I appreciate that you had Vincenzo send Kolchak off with one purpose and very subtly telling Kolchak to do something else. That was good.

I don't want to go off too much on the story because I thoroughly enjoyed it, but the way it's told is just so wrong. Do you want readers to be pulled out of the story by something stupid like a typo? Or a sentence that doesn't make sense until you realize a word or two are missing?

Which brings me to the point of this open letter. HIRE ME AS YOUR EDITOR. My passion is for Kolchak, but I'll edit all your properties. I'm an amazing editor, if I don't say so myself. A typo or two might still get through. I find that in my own work I usually have a couple that escape my attention. Compared to the countless legions I encountered in just this one book? If you don't believe me, perhaps the words of another editor will convince you. Just read the first paragraph here, and you'll see that I'm not just delusional. I've edited books for StrangeHouse and New Kink and Rooster Republic Press. That doesn't even count my own books. Editors I've worked with don't have to take me to task for spelling, grammar, etc. I can fix that for your books. And I'm more than just a line editor. I can actually help authors shape their books into stronger fiction. I don't want to shit talk Eric Fein. I'm sure he's a good guy, but he often overcomplicates his sentences, which is another thing I see often in your books.

Best of all, I'm local. I live in Elmhurst, 45 minutes away from Lockport. If you need me in the office, I can be there. All I ask is a decent wage. $70K per year would be ideal, but I'm open to negotiations. It's a lot of money, but I'm worth it.

Think about it. You can reach me at tabardinnedgewoodent@yahoo.com. Oh yeah, I used to be an editor and publisher of my own fiction magazine, Tabard Inn: Tales of Questionable Taste, published by Edgewood Entertainment. See? I can help. I want to read a Moonstone Kolchak adventure free of errors, and if that means I have to do it myself, I'm fully willing to do that.

Best wishes,

John Bruni