"This always was a love story."

And everything I won't get done today.

Neon Pink Pop Rocks

It’s 11:54 am here on the west coast as I’m typing this line and I’m struggling to keep a thought in my head. My therapist and I shared a laugh about it this morning — she was late to Zoom because she let herself check for election news, even after having promised herself she wouldn’t. She is the perfect therapist for me.

I usually start the session with an idea of what I want to talk about — something from the past week to work through, something from the coming week to strategize for, or an idea that applies to one of our themes.

Not today. Today I read her some Bluesky posts and then we let the conversation wander. We eventually found our way to perfumes and my two favorite fragrance notes: geosmin and petrichor.

ASIDE: I was going to link to my Fragrantica profile here, but I was today years old when I learned that their forums are apparently QAnon hotbeds…? This, frankly, blows my fucking mind. I don’t use the forums but I’ve had an account there forever and I’m BUMMED. If anyone has an alternative site or app for looking up fragrance profiles and logging collections, I’d love to hear about it. Comment or hit reply.

Where was I?

Geosmin and petrichor — right! Yes. Anyway.

We talked about the difference between the two, and I wondered aloud if there’s a connection to the comfort I take from doing laundry…

No, no — they’re adjacent but not connected. Laundry is perfumed, it’s control, order, tidiness. Petrichor may be the smell of rain, but it’s the feeling after a good cry. Ah. Right. Now we’re getting somewhere.

I don’t cry often — that’s not a point of pride, I actually wonder why I’m so bad at it. Or… no, that’s not right. Try again.

Maybe I don’t wonder anymore, but having wondered and thinking I know the answer now, I still wonder why the problem persists. Something like that.

For someone who makes a living putting things into words, I’m notoriously bad at the FEELINGS to WORDS equation. Thoughts, ideas, persons, memories? We’re golden. I got you. But fuck if I can use language to tell you how I feel. One of the reasons I enjoy perfumes as much as I do is because I love reading about them. Perfume copy and perfume reviews are a genre unto themselves — just naming the notes is like describing your best friend in third grade by saying she had two arms, two legs and curly brown hair. The parts can’t begin to capture the whole of it. Better to talk about that time she tried to take the top off a container of orange tic tacs and pulled too hard, sending them flying everywhere around her room, tapping and bouncing on the base-housing linoleum like marbles or rain, and how you both started laughing and then laughing at how much you were laughing and then you laughed so hard you drooled and that was the funniest thing that had ever happened and her mom came in to see, “What’s so funny?” and that was somehow funnier — so much so, you could not catch your breath to speak and a part of you wondered if anyone had ever suffocated from laughter. That is your third grade friend. (We found errant orange tic tacs for a whole year, by the by.)

All of this to say that today is Election Day and I feel like neon pink Pop Rocks smell.

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Some stuff to check out:

• Nine days left on the Marvel Art of Mike Allred Kickstarter!

• 24 days to go on the Juni Ba folklore gn.

• Fraction bought me one of these. Want to guess which one?

• We’re both doing stories for Ice Cream Man #43.

• You want to buy Anzuelo. I’m serious.

• And while you’re celebrating election results grabbing your copy of FML tomorrow (*cough*please god please*cough*), you should also pick up Living Hell by Caitlin Yarsky and One For Sorrow by Jamie McKelvie.

• Imaginary Authors is a niche fragrance line out of Portland with scents based on made up books. I want to try Bull’s Blood.

• You can still late pledge for Unfinished Business.

• I’m going to bake these this week.

• Thanks to MF for pointing me toward #enteredthechat on Threads.

• If you need something to distract yourself with this evening, might I suggest streaming Yassir and Isaiah Lester’s THE GUTTER? Check out this trailer or see Fraction’s review below.

  

  How long do we have to wait to declare something a cult classic? Asking for a friend. (My friend is Yassir.)

In a week full of big name superhero books that will no doubt hog the comics media headlines (including ours!), this very personal, very charming book is the one I'll be thinking about the longest. - Will Salmon, Games Radar

My new book with David López, Cris Peter and Clayton Cowles, called FML, is out tomorrow and we hope, hope, hope you’ll pick it up. I think most of you have heard me talk about it ad nauseum at this point, but here’s a few links:

• FML site is here!

• Dark Horse’s FML page is here! (See all the covers here.)

• If you didn’t pre-order and you want a signed physical copy, you can fill out the form here. I’ll sign a bunch when I’m there on Saturday. (If you want it inscribed to someone in particular, fill out the form before Saturday!)

• If you’re in Portland—or near enough to make the drive—please join us for our release party on Saturday at Books with Pictures on Division. We’ll be celebrating FML as well as our Dark Horse sister book, Caitlin Yarsky’s Living Hell, and Teen Witch is going to play the event. Details here.

• David Harper interviewed David López and it’s as terrific as you’d expect.

• 5 New Comics to Read in November from The AV Club: https://www.avclub.com/november-2024-comic-books-new-releases-preview

• Books With Pictures Podcast episode 17

• The first reviews are in. YAY!

  • This reminds me — women are underrepresented on all the aggregator sites like Comic Book Roundup, Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic etc. We can think about why later (…::all the emojis::…) but for now I’d just like to ask that if you’re a woman who reviews things, please consider submitting yourself for inclusion. This might mean adding a rating element to your review, which… is a whole thing, I know.

  • Spoiler-free review from Games Radar is the source of the lovely pull quote above.

  • Terrific TikTok tour of FML from one of my very favorite comic book dads.

• As of right this minute, the FML Discord is open. Use this link to join.

• What am I forgetting? Anything? Everything?

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Why Don’t You…

…Why Don’t You will return next newsletter. I ain’t got it in me today. Oh, wait, I got one—!

• Why don’t you send me some suggestions for the next Why Don’t You? column.

Oh Shit You Did

• Do a Why Don’t You (“WDY”) and send it to us and each newsletter we pick one to share. This time it’s from Jason Beamish, who took us up on “Why Don’t You… Make a mixtape?”

  It took a long time, but I would like to present you with a mixtape. That link will take you to a Drive folder where you can download flac or mp3 files, the flac and mp3 are identical aside from the lossy compression. The tape is two files (sides) and the songs are mixed together. You will also find liner notes. The mix works better listening without previewing the track listing, but once I hit send you can do with it as you see fit. 

  Here is the URL if you would prefer the copy and paste rather than clicking a link.

  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lKuz5strOORB4DJJLzdcwzwXrkTuEvae?usp=sharing 

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You read to the end, so you get a treat. From Rebecca Solnit:

You can see that by how much people care about the outcome of this election, whether they’re sitting home refreshing polls as if the polls tell us what will happen or doing the work that decides what will happen. Someone said to me a week or so ago that people over 70 shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they had no self-interest in the future. I rebuked him, because across the political spectrum most of us vote our broad values, not our narrow self-interest, unless our values are that we’re just our self-interest (and that’s a core belief of the right).

Most of us are idealists. There’s been a lot of exclamation in recent years about right-wing working-class voters who vote against their self-interest, often portrayed as baffling, as a sign of ignorance or confusion. What’s really going on that they’re more committed to their values than their practical self-interest. So are we (though you could also argue that the recognition that we are inextricably connected to each other and to nature means that self-interest and the well-being of the whole are not separate).

I used the word care, but let me clarify: what we care about is what we love. And we love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes with secure human rights; we love places, love rivers and valleys and forests, love seasons and the pattern and order they imply, love wildlife from hummingbirds to great blue herons, butterflies to bears. This always was a love story.

Please go read the whole thing here.

xo

Kelly Sue