Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nose pimples. Cincinnati chili. Taking six guesses to figure out Wordle. There are any number of reasons to sink slowly, softly and sadly into blackness. These are some of my reasons to keep my head up.

Eight Million Ways to Die, graphic novel adaptation

Here’s a fun thought experiment: On balance, are we getting more digitally available comics or fewer? And, no, I’m not talking about new ones that are coming out every week. What I mean is are we getting more newly digitally converted back catalog titles than we’re losing to licensing issues and other weird corporate vagaries? I don’t have anything but vibes to back me up, but I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Case in point — I reviewed the IDW graphic novel adaptation of Lawrence Block’s Eight Million Ways to Die when it was published, had the good foresight to plop down American greenbacks to pay for a digital copy and now, it seems to be gone from the Comixology Amazon storefront. It’s fine (I guess) since it still appears in my library, but it makes it a bit harder to recommend, which I do (clearly).

I am a runner. And as a runner, the only thing more miserable than running is not running, which I have been doing (not doing?) for a few weeks as I try to get over a nerve issue/tendonitis/whatever the latest guess the doctor has for the reasons my legs ache and feel like they’re full of hot rank monster piss whenever I try to run more than five miles. To compensate for this feeling of impotent decrepitude, the distinct impression that I’m trapped in a decaying flesh prison as I’m 39 going on 78-and-a-half, I have been drinking more. Perhaps not to excess, but definitely more. And so as I thought about writing this here little column and as I fumble with the bottle-as-muse trope like I’m goddamned Hemmingway over here, I thought about Block’s private dick character Matthew Scudder, a man who takes his sobriety from moment to moment and case to case, often with disastrous consequences. 

The graphic novel (me? a prose reader? in this economy?) is as good as I remember. Yes, it might come with a few stock characters — the hooker trying to get out of the life, a pimp trying to rise above his station — but it’s a thoughtful read about a cruel life and a crueler city. And I also see too much of myself in Scudder.

Which is all the reason to not have a bourbon tonight.

‘Ram: Deluxe Edition’ by Wheeler Walker Jr.

OK, this is going to take some explaining. Comedian Ben Hoffman has done his tour of Hollywood — picking up some writing credits along the way with stops at The Late Late Show with James Corden and the magically perfect Sports Show with Norm Macdonald — and even had his own sketch show on Comedy Central, The Ben Show with Ben Hoffman. That show featured a country music number, “Eatin’ Pussy, Kickin’ Ass,” that … uh went a little sideways when it got to the punchline, poking fun at both bro country and masculine heteronormativity.

After The Ben Show was canceled, Hoffman — who comes from a musical family — decided to go all-in with the country gimmick, hooking up with legendary Nashville producer Dave Cobb to produce his new alter ego, Wheeler Walker Jr.

Wheeler’s songs are profane and often pathetic — he whines about losing his gal in “Fuck You Bitch,” thereby demonstrating what a shitty guy he is, “Pictures on My Phone” is all about how he prefers nudie pixels to real relationships — and always funny. But Cobb and a whole band of spectacular musicians support the weird, vulgar little enterprise, creating real, honestly good music.

In September of last year, Wheeler dropped “Ram,” a Southern rock album that got a deluxe re-release Nov. 15. The new edition includes demos, remixes (one with Killer Mike!) and live tracks, including one that proves Hoffman has a deep and everlasting love for the music he continues to lampoon.

Imagine you’re at the Ryman Auditorium — the mother church of country music — and Wheeler Walker Jr. is on stage. You’ve heard songs like “Drop ’Em Out,” “Pussy King,” “I Like Smoking Pot (A Lot)” and more. (You have to wait for “Fuck You Bitch” — that’s a closer.) But then the show shifts and becomes something altogether stranger as Wheeler gets into “Outlaw Shit,” a cover of a Waylon Jennings song about the country legend’s real-life drug arrest.

It’s a song about regret, being misunderstood, maybe living your own gimmick too hard for too long — “What started out to be a joke,” the chorus goes, “the law don’t understand.” And there’s Hoffman as Wheeler singing it in earnest tribute, equal parts obligation to tradition and undiluted gumption for being willing to put such a somber, straightforward song in an otherwise silly show.

I cried big, fat, dumb baby tears the first time I heard the song on the album — in part because the mix is so fucking good (one of the best live recordings I’ve ever heard), but also because this is just a beautiful thing that shouldn’t exist. Yet it does. 

And when the guitar solo drops, I’m right there back in the Ryman, in awe of a funny man doing a strange thing in his own way. 

Jason Aaron’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Years ago, when my body was not a husk filled with regret, I read the first few volumes of the IDW TMNT series and generally enjoyed it because it felt like the Turtles I grew up with as A Man of a Certain Age albeit a bit more serious. And while I stopped reading at some point (“City Fall,” maybe?), I figured the relaunch — with Jason fuckin’ Aaron of all people writing it — was a great place to start reading again, and I was not wrong. These are brothers dealing with loss, separation and (presumably) the complications of starting over again with so much trauma, and the idea of giving each one of the guys a spotlight to begin the run was a great one. And wouldn’t you know, it went Raphael-Michelangelo-Leonardo-Donatello, which is the precise and 100% correct order of Turtles from worst to best. Issue #4 featuring Donnie was also the best so far. Where he goes from here (a broken, delusional, uhhh … shell … of the tech-loving brainiac we generally know) is going to be a hell of a read.

Balatro War Diaries, pt. 63

From the Ohio State Archives

April 9, 1862

Dearest Catherine,

My dearest love. How I long to see your face, how I miss its contours and your long, curly locks of golden hair. I think of you often, trying to hold on to that face in my mind, as if it might pass from me at any moment, carried away on the ungodly wings of a Minie ball. The thought strikes me with an awful fear, my love, a fear as powerful as any I have faced on the battlefield.

I write to you some days after our most dreadful encounter to date. We met the rebs near where Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama all come together, at some little place they call Shiloh. Even though we arrived late, it was a horror, and while we were able to drive the Confederates from the field, I have never seen so many men dead or lamed or sickly from exhaustion. The meager ground we gained was purchased with the almighty blood of thousands, a cost we could scarcely bear.

We followed the rebs after they turned tail and gave chase until we ourselves tired out. I must tell you, though, of a strange thing that followed, Catherine. A handful of fellows and I came across one of the rebs, a scraggly boy from Georgia named Jim. He was lost, separated from his company, had no sense of the country and had little more than peanut shells and cornbread crumbs for rations. He gave himself up immediately, and we were inclined to offer quarter and thus took him as our prisoner. 

We made camp that night and fed him as best we could. It was as if he had never eaten before, Catherine, the vigor he had for anything we put in front of his face. We felt a touch sorry for him, so one of the fellows even scrounged up a pair of shoes and a new coat. The joy painted on Jim’s face was as beautiful a thing as I have ever seen in God’s creation.

He did not have anything to trade or knowledge of reb plans to give, so to thank us, he offered to teach us a game. It was the only thing he carried in his threadbare pack aside from his meager rations, Catherine, this peculiar game he called “Ba-La-Tro.” As he explained it, it starts like regular poker, but there are these jokers that change the rules and how you keep score, and so on and so on, enough to make my head rightly spin. Everyone was entertained and bemused until Captain Johnson got serious and said we should play a game of Ba-La-Tro for Jim’s life.

We hollered fearsomely, but the captain did not relent. He pointed to me and said that if I beat Jim, we would turn him loose with a map and enough provisions to get back home to Georgia. If the boy lost, he was to remain our prisoner until we could hand him off to those who would take him to Camp Chase in Columbus. If that were the case, he would likely never see home again.

I do not know what came over the captain. He is tired and as lonesome as any of us are. Yet it is a great evil to gamble with a man’s life. I know that, Catherine. But war makes monsters of us all.

I sensed that the captain was not treating this as a request, and we agreed to terms. Jim decided we would play with the Abandoned Deck, which negated my preferred Baron build, but my life heretofore has been filled with similar trifling inconveniences. I put together a more than respectable Scholar, Hanging Chad and Odd Todd, but, Catherine, I say unto you, it was as if Jim was playing with the devil’s hand on his very shoulder. That simple Georgia boy strung together Marble Joker, DNA, Hologram, Certificate and Blueprint into some kind of almighty terror the likes of which I hope to never see again on this mortal plane.

He beat me handily. The boys whooped and yelled and clapped Jim on the back, and the captain was true to his word as our pet Georgia boy was outfitted with a map, all the provisions we could spare and turned loose into the night.  

The next morning, we broke camp and set out for the day. We had gone less than a mile before we found Jim’s body, there by the side of the road, felled by a bullet in the back, likely from one of our sentries. 

My soul curdled into something awful.

I smiled.

Ba-La-Tro, Catherine.

It makes monsters of us all.

Yours in love,

Sergeant-Major Wm. Arnold

31st Company, Army of the Ohio   

I regret to inform you I am still on my anthology series bullshit

I can’t figure out Garth Ennis’ politics aside from that they’re disagreeable. Like in his series A Walk Through Hell (remember when Aftershock was a thing?), he makes some vague mention of how bad Hillary Clinton is/was, or at least that’s what the subtext made me believe or who the fuck remembers because that book was weird as shit. And then in his ongoing nuclear horror story in Hello Darkness, one of the characters talked about how the “2024 election changed everything.” What the shit is that supposed to mean? Kamala Harris’ policy on Russia and Ukraine would not have been substantively different from the status quo, and President Crimes might as well be a deputy minister in the Kremlin, so which one of those outcomes primes the world for nuclear apocalypse there, Garth? Please explain.

[Side note, we’ve got to stop serialized stories in anthology books. This goes for Hello Darkness and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Taking a 40-page story and chopping it up into five or six installments is not good reading. Also, Hello Darkness? I’m not here to read Something Is Killing the Children stories. I’ll read that book when I am good and ready, THANK YOU.]

And if that wasn’t confusing enough, Ennis has a story in the second volume of Creepshow about a pro-life dad who starts puking and shitting invisible fetuses … because he paid for his daughter’s back-alley abortion. And because that wasn’t Ennis enough, the pregnancy was due to dad’s sexual abuse. Lord. Do you think the man misses Avatar? (The grindhouse, gratuitous sex and violence publisher, not the movie franchise or anime. No one misses the franchise.)

And after reading this week’s Epitaphs from the Abyss, I’m calling for an indefinite pause on the use of incest as a plot point. Thanks!

Until next time, keep your head up.

Will Nevin

Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.