Off To Blue Skies, Amos on Gaiman, Best Of 2024 Lists, and more — The Comics Bookmarks December 15th, 2024

So it’s been a month or so since we did one of these. It felt like we were rolling along pretty good there since we started doing these link posts in the early summer but then we hit November and let’s just say, things happened in November. But one of the big ones that impacted what I was doing was the great Twitter/X exodus of 2024, of which I was part of. Sometime in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I decided to deactivate both my personal account and this site’s account on the Elon Musk hellsite and it was for the best.

Now I didn’t have the same experience that a lot of people did on TwXtter. And my secret was that honestly, I didn’t engage with my following list or the algorithm that much. Years ago, I discovered the joy of Tweetdeck and lists, the ability to curate Twitter accounts into different lists based on topics or just people I wanted to group together. Also, I didn’t necessarily follow individuals but news and entertainment sites to follow their headlines. In many ways, this replaced the long lost Google Reader (2005-2013 — it doesn’t seem like it’s been 11 years since we lost one of the best things that Google ever did.) Tweetdeck and lists took me out of all of the algorithms and advertising that seemed to sour everyone’s else experience on the site. But then, things changed.

When Musk bought Twitter, somewhere along the lines he put Tweetdeck behind a paywall— you had to pay Musk money to use it. So that was the first strike against Twitter/X. The second was easily Musk himself, inserting himself into everything that was happening. In far too many ways, he became Twitter or Twitter became him. Using the lists to curate the experience still helped to shelter my experience but it just wasn’t the same. And then the third strike was November 4th, 2024 and the days/weeks after, especially the ways that X now was posed to become even more of a propaganda machine for the incoming administration. (Let’s not even talk about the updated ToS and the AI training that X was being used for.) I held out hope far longer than I should have but a week or two before Thanksgiving, I started going through the steps to download and delete my accounts on X.

So to bring it back to these Comic Bookmark posts, getting away from X stalled any momentum I had because I had really figured out how to use that system to aggregate a lot of different comic/manga sites and feeds. To replace X (because I did really enjoy my sheltered experience there,) I’m like a lot of other people and moved to BlueSky. Now, it’s taken a bit but I’ve been working on setting up that place to mimic Twitter at it’s best— setting up lists, putting people where I want to follow them, getting it to see the world the way that I wanted to and not the way some algorithm wanted me to. Is BlueSky an echo chamber? Maybe but I don’t really care because I have other ways to engage with news (Google News is actually pretty good for that.).

https://deck.blue

So for now, you can find me, Mike, and From Cover To Cover over at BlueSky.

So I’m back with these link posts. With the holidays coming up, I’ll see what we can get done but I figure right now it will be January before things get back to regular service. But with that said, here are some articles for you to check out.

Previously on FC2C

Headlines

One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.”

Exactly who did Tony Soprano or Walter White represent? This article tries to explain it as a way to just show how media illiterate people are.

Adam Serwer invokes Judge Dredd, The Punisher, and The Boys (even if it is the TV version) in this article so it counts as a piece about comics.

I ask Amos how she felt when she first heard the allegations. “Shocked,” she says. A long pause. “And if the allegations are true, that’s not the Neil that I knew, that’s not the friend that I knew, nor a friend that I ever want to know. So in some ways it’s a heartbreaking grief. I never saw that side of Neil. Neither did my crew. And my crew has seen a lot.”

I’ve been chewing on this one a bit. “… that’s not the Neil that I knew…” seems like a canned answer to these kind of questions. I’m really glad to see Amos talking about this, knowing the friendship they seemed to have back in the 1990s and learning in this that Gaiman is the godfather to one of her children. I kind of admire her for at least talking about it when most of the comic industry seems to have forgotten Gaiman’s name. Neil who?

Business

"Yotsuba &!" by Azuma Kiyohiko will finally release new volume 16 on Feb 26, 2025 in Japan (four years after the last volume) Slice of Life about a cheerful, energetic young girl finding joy in the smallest daily adventures together with her dad & her neighborhood Image © Kadokawa, Azuma Kiyohiko

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— Manga Mogura (Anime & Manga News) (@mangamogura.bsky.social) December 13, 2024 at 1:35 AM

Quickly becomes on of the most anticipated books of 2025. I actually just read the 15th volume a week or two ago and forgot just how delightful this series is.

At the end of this column, De la Piedra has a link to his analysis for 2023. Reading the 2023 and 2024 pieces together offers a really fascinating glimpse into the Japanese manga business and how it breathes, expands, and contracts from year to year.

The Funny Pages

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Interviews

I’ve been sitting on Anzuelo for a few weeks now for a really weird reason— I was waiting for a new pair of glasses to show up so I could really enjoy this book and I just got this week. So guess what I’ll be reading tonight?