Muddlers Beat

Hello everyone! Apologies this comic took so long to complete.

Tomorrow and Saturday, I’ll be at the Queers & Comics conference in San Francisco. I’ll be on the web comics panel first thing tomorrow, with Christine Smith, William O. Tyler, Tony Breed, and Maia Kobabe, lead by Nina Kester. It promises to be cool.

Also: on the subject of widowhood, today I finally listened to all of Mount Eerie’s newest album, A Crow Looked at Me. It is an amazing album, and it made me cry, but in a good way. Mount Eerie is the musical project of Phil Elverum, who last year lost his wife, the cartoonist Geneviève Castrée, to cancer. (I was lucky enough to see Geneviève read at Quimby’s a few years ago, and to get a signed copy of her book.) The album is all about losing her, and grieving, and the lyrics are true and piercing, and I wouldn’t have thought I’d be strong enough to listen to it, but I found it comforting to listen to someone else’s grieving.

I’m not sure I can sum it up better than he does in the closing lines of the opening track, “Real Death”:

“It’s dumb
And I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you”

Anyway, check it out.