Lubchansky Home News, March 2025
A book announcement, More GENDER ORDEAL dates, and a weird rant about something that's been driving me insane!
Remember there was that stretch of a few months where nothing was happening and I was like I promise something is happening but I cannot tell you yet? Well, one was the cover reveal for SIMPLICITY (preorder now), one thing is yet to be revealed (sorry), and the third thing is: I’m making another book!!!
Imagine you got in a fight so bad that you stole your girlfriend’s car, but the car is a time machine. The working title in my head was 10,000 Year Dyke Drama but they don’t let you call a book that, do they!!!! Anywho, I started writing this week before last and it’s going great and I’m raring to get drawing on this sucker.
GENDER ORDEAL: MIDWEST
Our little show is coming to Chicago and Minneapolis!
Come see us on 4/24 at the Color Club in Chicago or 4/25 in Minneapolis at Hook & Ladder! A lot of people requested we hit the upper midwest so: see you there!
I mentioned that you can pre-order Simplicity right?
Frog and Peach Report
March Comics, from my Patreon
And don’t forget of course my damn PODCASTS!
No Gods No Mayors is chugging through The Order Mayoris.
Odds and Ends
hopped on Trashfuture to talk about “AI art” and also My Year of Rest and Relaxation 2: Back to Bed and screamed my head off!
Adaptation Corner
Putting this down here because it’s long!
Ok so I have a little rant for you this month in Corner Corner. SO: a couple of things happened recently: 1. In late January we went and saw the current Broadway production of Sunset Boulevard, a revival of the Andrew Lloyd Weber play that is adapting the 1950 Billy Wilder film for the stage. 2: I re-watched the 2019 HBO show Watchmen. 3. I then watched Zach Snyder’s 2009 film Watchmen. 4. I then watched the 2-part HBO animated film Watchmen (2023). 5. I read a bunch of my copy of Watchmen, the 1986 comic book series collected into a single volume, for (conservatively) my 30th time. 6. This past weekend, we saw the current Broadway production of A Portrait of Dorian Gray with Sarah Snook playing every role. I have a thought I’ve been trying to refine for a while, but it is basically: An adaptation of a work into a new medium should endeavor to do things that only the new medium can accomplish. Now this should be simple, I think! However this is almost never the case for some reason anymore. I think in the age of “IP” there’s just too much emphasis on delivering people’s Blorbos to them intact. And that’s a shame! Okay so let’s go with Sunset Boulevard here: Sure, Andrew Lloyd Weber is maybe my least favorite living artist* and everyone knows the show kind of sucks, but Nicole Scherzinger is great in it (she was) and that’s sort of the reason for seeing it. However, this production did something absolutely maddening, for me: everyone was just kind of standing around while cameras zipped around them on stage, and a big screen projected people’s faces. Now, screens have been infiltrating theater and broadway shows for a while now, but when used judiciously they can kind of work. Not here, however, they were SO overused, for the effect of “it’s just like a movie!” and it completely ruined it for me. I’m not at a movie! Why not think about what a musical can do, that a movie can’t? It’s so much! Do those things!
You can see where I’m going with this for all these Watchmen adaptations: most of them fail spectacularly because they’re trying to emulate a thing that was completely devised to showcase what the comics format can do. Sorry, all Watchmen movies! The show, whatever my other problems with it, at least had the tenacity to make it kind of “about” prestige television and do things that only that format are really suited for. The other positive version of this was that Dorian Gray adaptation we saw over the weekend – Snook is great in it, but it also featured The Dreaded Screens, and also Book Narration on Stage. Now you’d think this would fall into the little trap I’m complaining about but it actually really surprised me: the way Snook interacted with those elements and the literal staging of them resulted in a high-wire act that only live theater can really deliver and I was just really blown away by it. Hey, this ended in a much more positive place than it started! Isn’t that nice.
*Cats excluded. I will one day write my dissertation on my relationship to Cats and also Cats (2019) and also Cats: The Jellicle Ball (2023) and also Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats but not today.
Kinda wished you came to the Northeast, too! 🥺