July/August 2023 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest

The Backstagers, Volume 1: Rebels Without Applause by James Tynion IV and Rian Sygh

Hello, everyone! I was not called for jury duty on the day of our meeting, so I was thankfully on time. On the one hand, I did want to be civically engaged, but on the other hand, I did not want to have to travel to the Chicago suburbs. Lol We had a smaller group this month, but our discussion was engaging and relevant to the book even when we weren't directly talking about it. More on that below!

One of our official Comics Book Club members recently wrote a musical, so he had a lot of direct experience with the subject matter. I didn’t realize until afterwards that I forgot to bring up one of my favorite details—the random lines from famous plays that echoed through space around a patchwork catwalk—because we were talking about so much else. Everyone was impressed with the breadth and depth of writer James Tynion IV’s output, especially since we’d read Something Is Killing the Children, Volume 1 back in October 2021. I was unaware of how young the intended audience for this book was when we chose it, and there was some confusion over the characters’ ages, but the variety of body types and relationships represented was all the more satisfying because of what that would mean for younger readers. Our next meeting will be Wednesday, August 16 to discuss The Good Asian, Volume 1.

What We're Reading

August 16 - The Good Asian, Volume 1 by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi

September 20 - Heartstopper, Volume 1 by Alice Oseman

October 18 - Harrow County, Volume 1: Countless Haints by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook

November 15 - Ironheart, Volume 1 (tentative)

December 20 - The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack by Nicholas Gurewitch

January 17 - Always Never by Jordi Lafebre

We held an informal poll of those gathered to select our second requisite Big Two book of the year for November and Ironheart was a clear winner, but we’ll see if that holds up with a larger population sample. It looks like that will still coincide with the release of another major Marvel movie, albeit one that might only be peripherally related to whatever comic we decide to read.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I’m pleased to announce that I have been accepted into another anthology! This one hasn't been officially announced yet, so I don’t know how much more I can say, but it has been unreal going from having no serious prospects to having two books to look forward to next year in a couple of months. I have to remind myself that this is actually happening!

I’m planning to submit to another anthology next month after I secure an artist for the two-page script I’m developing. I entered the Mad Cave Talent Search right before posting this newsletter, making it in right under the wire. The coloring on the one-page comic that I’ll be sharing in this space got delayed, but I still hope to have it finished by the end of the summer. As for my other major projects, I’ve got sample layouts for one issue and character designs for the main character of the other. I’m really impressed with what my artists have come up with for these, especially since the scripts aren't even entirely finished yet!

NEWS

Backstagers #1 won for Best Single Issue from a Mainstream Publisher at the first Prism Awards for queer-themed comics back in 2017. You can read more about the book in this interview the creative team gave to The Advocate back in 2016. Their love of manga will come as no surprise for anyone who’s read the book. For all things James Tynion IV, you can find him here on Substack at

The Empire of the Tiny Onion

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The Ringo Award nominations were announced this month, but the biggest awards news was the Eisners at San Diego Comic-Con last weekend. There were lots of deserving recipients, but the most noteworthy part of the whole ceremony (if not the whole weekend) for me was Hannah Templer’s acceptance speech calling out the awards themselves for Thomas Woodruff’s nominations. For more information on that, you can check out last month’s NEWS section.

SKETCHD magazine had a great piece checking in with comics retailers from all over the world about the state of their businesses for 2023 so far. Everything seems very uncertain and for a variety of reasons, many of which are listed in this piece for Popverse by Joseph Illidge. It’s the first in a series he’ll be writing that promises a frank examination of many of the problems with the current comic book industry. I’m excited to read future installments. Kickstarter also did a mid-year check-in on their comics market, but it was a much rosier picture!

One story from this past month that I found interesting was Robert Kirkman talking about the terrible time he had working at Marvel. In Marvel’s defense (and boy howdy you know it took a lot for me to type those three words), Kirkman’s experience was largely the result of then-president of Marvel Bill Jemas attempting to re-create Project Greenlight (remember that?) but for Marvel, despite that being a logistical nightmare for everyone involved. And that wasn’t even Jemas’ biggest fiasco!

On a positive note,

Mattie Lubchansky

wrote for Lit Hub about the creation of their latest work, Boys Weekend, why it’s unique to comics, and their influences from both literature and comics. I really enjoyed it.

A new tool has emerged in the ongoing struggle for artists against AI and those who want to devalue their work! Glaze is a program that adds pixelation (or something) to artwork that makes it harder for it to be scraped by algorithms gathering images for manipulation. It’s been endorsed by Sarah Andersen, who has had her own issues with AI, and was developed at the University of Chicago. (Yay, Chicago!)

Finally, I wanted to share this article from The New York Times that provided a brief history of manga translations and the struggles in adapting it for a Western audience. I found it very informative, though it may appear a bit superficial in its need to provide a brief overview for such a long period of time.

Some Thoughts on High School Theater

During our discussion, I briefly touched on my own high school theater experience. I didn’t go into much detail, though, because it was not very pleasant. I was a shy teenager, more interested in writing and reading than public speaking or performing. At the urging of my guidance counselor and parents, I decided not to take Creative Writing as my elective class for my freshman year of high school, but Theater Arts. Because if there’s one thing an introvert loves, it’s getting in front of a room full of strangers! (I’ve since gotten better at that, no thanks to high school.) I want to say I ended the class with a B/B-, but was invited to join the theater department and told to work with props.

The teacher for the Theater Arts class was also the faculty advisor for the theater department. There are some drama teachers who nurture and empower future generations of actors and creatives, and then there are those whose artistic careers didn’t work out and are bitter and angry as a result. She was very much of the second camp.

She was the first person I’d ever met who appeared to subsist entirely on fast food and cigarettes and she had a voice to match. Was it dangerous for her to have been smoking so much in the backstage area of a high school theater full of cloth, paint, and other flammable materials? Probably! But no one dared say anything. She was known for many things, and one of them was reducing teenagers to tears with her temper.

Everyone took those high school theater productions way too seriously and she encouraged that thinking. One year, the non-musical play was set in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and she insisted that anyone auditioning needed to have a shaved head. If you shaved your head and didn’t get a part? Too bad! She made every stage manager a blubbering mess. In my sophomore year, a famous actor died and one of my classmates was broken up about it; seeing his distress, she told him, “That’s what he got for doing drugs.” (The actor had died of a heart attack.) I told her I was interested in writing a play and she told me to stick to tech crew, but later called me a turd for not opening the curtain fast enough.

In my junior year, I quit the theater department after barely earning my way into the Theater Arts Honor Society, which entitled me to a multicolored cord for my graduation gown and a complimentary t-shirt with the theater department logo on the front. I had a distinction for my college applications and I was tired of trying to please someone who would never be pleased, so I considered my time as a theater kid over. I stopped showing up for the meetings, and no one bothered to ask me to return. I should have let that be the end of it, but I was dissatisfied. It wasn’t enough to quit the theater department; I needed people to know I had quit and why! I decided to air my grievances in a very strange, public fashion.

Using my mother’s sewing kit and an old red shirt, I cut out a red circle with a slash through it and sewed it over the theater department logo on my honors society t-shirt to wear to school the next day. I was ready to walk into school with a crude “no” symbol besmirching the shirt they had given me and tell everybody all about the mean, abusive faculty member who had prompted such action. I was going to repudiate the theater department and let everyone know what an awful teacher was in charge of it! Ha ha ha!

And that’s when I found out she’d died.

I had missed the principal mentioning that in the morning announcements, but a friend of mine informed me before I could take off my jacket and reveal what I’d done. I must have looked stunned, because he asked if I was okay, and I didn’t have the nerve to explain. Fortunately, my first class was gym so I had a spare set of clothes. I had to go through the rest of the day in a smelly, sweat-stained shirt that I’d worn while running laps, but it was better than whatever would’ve happened had I showed off what had started as a silly act of teenage defiance and was now an offense.

I spent the rest of that day in kind of a daze, which I’m sure my teachers chalked up to grief. I was in no way compelled to correct them. At the end of the year, the school’s newspaper and literary magazine each ran “in memoriam” pieces that quoted the same line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (you know the one).

Death has a way of sanding off the rough edges of a person’s legacy. This is perhaps perfectly illustrated by one of the theater kids who had joked about getting the teacher’s face tattooed on his penis as a prophylactic measure (“Nobody’s gonna want to have sex with you if they see that comin’ at ‘em!”). Years later, he had her name tattooed on his arm “to remember her.”

I probably could have had a fun time if I’d relaxed and been more self-aware. Wherever my classmates are now, I’m sure some are recounting their theater experiences like the characters in this CollegeHumor sketch:

If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve tried out for the track team.

I hope I don’t come off too terrible in this story. After all, I was a teenager. Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! Do you have any favorite plays? Were you in your high school theater club? Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you in a month for The Good Asian, Volume 1 by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi!