Megg Mogg & Owl in Quarantine

[13 schoolyards]

It seems to be collecting the WWJ & Sons mini comics (which weren't in Seeds & Stems), though hopefully there's some new material in there too.

Supposedly the latest storyline (titled "You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy") is also another "alternate timeline" one, so at a guess it'll be the original quartet together again. It's going to be serialised in mini-comic form, as is (I think) Megg's Coven, which is also meant to be on its way.

Guess Hanselmann's been busy over the last year or so in between being a new dad

[13 schoolyards]

Just got my copy of Hanselmann's latest self published comic, which is quite the fancy and professional looking unit, though slightly disappointingly the story itself is

Spoiler alert

a fairly traditional zombie thing, only with MM&O being their usual selves during the collapse of civilisation

[close]

It makes a little more sense after reading the long back page text material / rant, where Hanselmann explains that it was originally going to be the instagram follow-up to Crisis Zone (but that site became too censorious), then was going to be an all-action comic published by Image (before they became too censorious), then was going to be a traditional comic published by Fantagraphics (before he realised he'd be giving them 90% of the profits).

Still well worth getting (supposedly a reprint is coming, plus a collected edition down the track), and I'll be interested to see where it all goes.

[Pink Gregory]

Don't know if it's sold out yet (so it must be) but the WWJ and Sons book got some exclusive stickers with an order - of course he's drawn a WWJ Savile.  Made me laugh a lot.

[13 schoolyards]

Forgot to add that supposedly the reason for the multiple delays with Megg's Coven is that now he's in a very different head space from where he was when he first planned things out - happily married, got a kid, life going well, and the idea of spending months trapped in the grim headspace that story requires is now a lot less appealing.

It looks like for the time being at least, he's going to go between a more Crisis Zone style comedy drama and try to get going on Megg's Coven as a counter to that.

It did get me thinking about how... "trapped" isn't the word, but maybe constrained?.. he feels about still having to deal with a chronology for the characters he first laid out almost a decade ago. In some early interviews he said how planning things out - WWJ's death, the Megg's Coven storyline - was his way of making sure things kept moving forward and he didn't fall into the rut of telling the same stories the same way over and over again. I wonder if he might be viewing that rut a little differently now.

[PlanktonSideburns]

I'm glad he doesn't live in megg and mogg world these days! If that means he doesn't write in that world, then so be it - be quite happy with him doing something light and whimsical TBH

[Huxleys Babkins]

Don't know if it's sold out yet (so it must be) but the WWJ and Sons book got some exclusive stickers with an order - of course he's drawn a WWJ Savile.  Made me laugh a lot.

Amazing.

[Pink Gregory]

my mistake, that's an Alex Pettifer WWJ

[Mister Six]

Just got my copy of Hanselmann's latest self published comic, which is quite the fancy and professional looking unit, though slightly disappointingly the story itself is

Spoiler alert

a fairly traditional zombie thing, only with MM&O being their usual selves during the collapse of civilisation

[close]

It makes a little more sense after reading the long back page text material / rant, where Hanselmann explains that it was originally going to be the instagram follow-up to Crisis Zone (but that site became too censorious), then was going to be an all-action comic published by Image (before they became too censorious), then was going to be a traditional comic published by Fantagraphics (before he realised he'd be giving them 90% of the profits).

Still well worth getting (supposedly a reprint is coming, plus a collected edition down the track), and I'll be interested to see where it all goes.

Wish Hanselmann would just learn not to read the fucking comments. (I assume Instagram as a platform isn't itself being censorious, and he's just talking about sexually awkward/repressed zoomers getting up in arms about cartoon knobs.)

[13 schoolyards]

Well, he's talking about how he's had content strikes for text and image infractions (including having something struck for "hate speech"), so I guess it works out to the same thing - if the site is responding to complaints, then the result's the same.

His worry was that he'd be putting up a serial only to have random chunks of it vanish behind him if people made complaints, which seems fair enough considering the kinds of material he deals with. He says future installments of his zombie serial might get violent and start dealing with some iffy areas, so it doesn't sound like IG is the place to be for that.

[samadriel]

Shortly after Crisis Zone,  Instagram changed to a Facebook-style chaotic feed that doesn't follow any sane timeline; it would be impossible to do another Crisis Zone, because you can't just scroll backwards to whenever he last updated the comic, it'll instead be lost in the depths of your feed. You can go to his account and read it that way,  but that's a pretty inconvenient use of Instagram.

[Pink Gregory]

In which case I can't really fault his frustration.  Crisis Zone was just a moment in time I guess.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Shortly after Crisis Zone,  Instagram changed to a Facebook-style chaotic feed that doesn't follow any sane timeline; it would be impossible to do another Crisis Zone, because you can't just scroll backwards to whenever he last updated the comic, it'll instead be lost in the depths of your feed. You can go to his account and read it that way,  but that's a pretty inconvenient use of Instagram.

What a shit website by twats

[13 schoolyards]

On the plus side, Al Columbia has turned up on IG and is posting original art (as @orangesunshine I think), thus justifying the sites continued existence (until he vanishes again)

[Mister Six]

Columbia is @orangesunshinehouse, I think. I just found the account. Cheers!

[Custard]

My digital copy of the WWJ special popped up on Comixology this morning, and of course I devoured it in one sitting

Some of it is genuinely a bit shocking, but no spoilers bruv. It's amazing this comic can still surprise and shock

I thought I was getting a bit tired of WWJ, but this is fantastic

[Pink Gregory]

looking forward to being really bummed out by Jaxon and then laughing at some sort of horrible senseless filth on the same page

[Custard]

There's one of the funniest ever putdowns of poor old Owl too

[Huxleys Babkins]

You can read the first nine pages on Amazon. Just click the Read Sample button.

[Pink Gregory]

looking forward to being really bummed out by Jaxon and then laughing at some sort of horrible senseless filth on the same page

pretty much

some surprising turns from Diesel as well, and classic horrible senseless filth

Hanselmann's still got a stick up his ass about 'woke stuff' and it's jarring and unfunny but oh well, can't have everything

[13 schoolyards]

The WWJ material always seemed more in the tradition of the old Truth Zone series where he went more shocking / topical for the sake of cheap (but effective) gags.

I'm still disappointed he never did the third in his Landscape / Portrait series of zines, it seems the online backlash against them (which was almost entirely from one critic who argued that it was wrong to make comics referencing a "scene" because he was exploiting the other members of the scene, which... there goes about 60% of literature for starters) put him off. So I reckon his annoyance with "woke stuff" stems from it being used as a stick to beat him up online, which... I mean, I guess it's fair enough to be pissed off, it's not what I want to read about though.

But yeah, the annual, classic stuff. Really enjoyed the new material too, Ronald McDonald house looks like a great place (they actually do have them in Australia, but I think they're more for kids with long-term illnesses?)

[madhair60]

i think it's entirely reasonable to be annoyed with "woke stuff" because a lot of its cruft and purity test shit is fucking annoying and I never felt like Hanselmann's annoyance with it betrayed any kind of opposition to its core values; it has usually been about over-zealous virtue signalling and such hasn't it?

i realise i just said one of the bad things you're not supposed to say but i genuinely don't know a better term than "virtue signalling" to describe the stuff S.H seems to be against.

[Pink Gregory]

i think it's entirely reasonable to be annoyed with "woke stuff" because a lot of its cruft and purity test shit is fucking annoying and I never felt like Hanselmann's annoyance with it betrayed any kind of opposition to its core values; it has usually been about over-zealous virtue signalling and such hasn't it?

i realise i just said one of the bad things you're not supposed to say but i genuinely don't know a better term than "virtue signalling" to describe the stuff S.H seems to be against.

I don't disagree with the premise, and I think he picked a lot of the resentment up over Crisis Zone being serialised on Instagram in the way it was, and a lot of people who don't get it seeing it.  I'm in agreement, largely.

But also I'm not on social media (well, now I'm locked out of reading Twitter),  in the same way that Hanselmann has to be, so I don't see a lot of this stuff; so when it comes up in the comic it feels like yelling at someone you made up.

I mean, I bought the book, I generally like his stuff, but it just jars for me because we're not in the same world, if that makes sense.

[Pink Gregory]

And to balance it out it does show remarkable generosity to have Josh Pettinger doing so many comics with his characters, but with his own voice. 

[13 schoolyards]

WWJ has always been the character Hanselman's been most free with. HTML Flowers was a big contributor to the early zines - he even published his own solo zine with one of his WWJ stories.

And yeah, Hanselmann's disdain for a lot of online attitudes seems largely a response to the way they've been weaponised more than anything else. There's a certain crop of minor US comic critics (mostly on twitter, presumably they have their own online spaces, I'm not bothering to look) who've had a go at him a few times for failing various standards / saying something positive about R Crumb / trying to sell merch / that kind of shit, and it's clearly just a bunch of personal grudges and dislikes on their part playing out in semi-public.

From the other angle, Hanselmann seems to have always been the kind to deliberately piss people off a little (see: his music career), and there's probably some of that in his public opposition to the pushier forms of wokeness and whatever.

[Pink Gregory]

god forbid someone try to sell merch of their own work?

That does, I admit, sound frustrating.  It's just that I, as someone who's not that much of a comics head, can only guess at the context and it reads less as 'there are stultifying and arbitrary standards set in this creative space by people who don't contribute that much to it' and more as personal grievance (which, y'know, it's his comic).

But then who's the fool for making this fairly belaboured point about the comic in which the silly horrible wolf man does drugs and violence in front of his kids.  It's me, isn't it.

Also love how chaste it sounds when Jones uses the word 'Bumming'

[13 schoolyards]

I'm really interested to see where Megg's Coven goes in all this. Hanselmann has pretty much turned MMO&WWJ into static sitcom characters now, where each new book has them reset to the "classic" status quo and any progression is wiped away by the start of the next story.

To suddenly go oh wait, over here they're growing older and becoming more depressing and less fun is going to be tricky to pull off. I wonder if the main storyline will end up as just another version by the end of it, and whatever comes after Megg's Coven will once again go back to the original share house set up

[Pink Gregory]

Hasn't he pretty much said that he didn't want to continue with the more serious tone of Bad Gateway?

[13 schoolyards]

It was more that going down that path took a lot out of him and he wanted to get a bit of a run up before resuming - he's said that for now he'll be alternating between zines with Megg's Coven and You Will Own Nothing And You Will Be Happy.

Which has a pretty serious tone itself I guess. It seems like Crisis Zone inspired him a bit there

[Artie Fufkin]

Just started reading Seeds & Stems.
The lucid dreaming bit was amazing.

Not the most enlightening post, I realise.

[13 schoolyards]

I think a big part of what makes MM&O more than just a stoner sitcom is that Hanselmann has a side interest in horror (and science fiction, and post-apocalypse stories I guess). He's able to pull off these unsettling digressions in a way that makes them feel like they're expressing something essential about the characters and their world, not just some trippy weird shit