A Wine that Isn't a Wine, Tavel, and mother f***in' Alan Moore

Episode 11 Extended Show Notes! With guest Frank Martin!

Watch the full show here:

Comics Experience (CEX)

A big detour in our conversation was Frank’s history with one of Dave’s favorite indie publishers of the moment, CEX. Frank took a course or two with CEX (most usefully a lettering course! We should all take that course and make American indie comics lettering better!) Part of CEX’s set-up is to only be open to submissions from creators who have taken part in the larger CEX community, something we briefly touched upon in a previous episode regarding Dave’s fave comic of 2022, STUD AND THE BLOODBLADE.

Frank published THE MACABRE MOTEL with CEX, the one Frank Martin book Dave *didn’t* get while it was on Kickstarter, but he has rectified this by purchasing it online, in digital. Sadly, the print edition is fully sold out.

But between Stud, Macabre Motel, Saga of a Doomed Universe, and Seven Years in Darkness, we are simply in love with their catalogue thus far. If you haven’t noticed CEX as a publisher/imprint yet, you need to do yourself a favor and get on this shit, asap.

Glühwein w/ Kombucha Recipe

Full recipe (including instructions for making a homemade “first fermentation" kombucha here. As the pic above states - this is not store bought kombucha! You need to make your own at home, so you can halt the process after the first fermentation (store bought goes through a second.) Bury your self-doubt insecurities deep and just give it a whirl; it’s actually easy to do.

Then you can make your own mulled glühwein using any cheap red wine (no using the expensive stuff as you’ll be flavoring and aromatizing the crap out of it via the mulling process). You can also purchase cheap pre-mulled glühwein in most stores that sell wine. It’s a readily available, popular celebration/holiday product.

Tavel

Dave mentions in the ep that this criminally unknown French style of rosé - it’s a region in France that by law can only make rosé! - was the ideal pairing with Sex Night, especially considering the final of the book’s three multiple endings. While Dave highly recommends the Avensole Brooke rosé as a close second, nothing beats a Tavel in terms of a complex, blow-your-mind, I-don’t-even-like-rosé-but-holy-fuckballs-what-is-THIS-shit-it’s-sooooo-good rosé.

Predominantly a blend of Grenache, Cinsault, Syrah, and Mourvedre (the primary red Rhone varietals), though a full 9 grape varietals are allowed and often all are used in small percentages, almost field-blend style, Tavel is typically one of the darkest, reddest, richest roses you’ll ever see or taste. The secondary grape varietals allowed are Carignan, Calitor (nearly exitinct ouside of its use in Tavel!), and then white grapes Picpoul, Bourboulenc, and Calirette (not to be confused with the British word for Bordeaux red blends, “Claret”).

Alan Moore

Mr. Moore here deserves his own mention: Frank brought Moore’s SWAMP THING run as his book of choice, and paired it with a Vermont-based, Zero Gravity “Green State” German-style Pilsner. If your only experience with Swamp Thing are the old Wes Craven films and the recent, aborted TV show, you need to check these graphic novels out. Moore’s run is quintessential, always what the filmic adaptation are (loosely) based on, but Moore is a writer who writes very specificaly for the medium the story is meant for. Which makes trying to “adapt” the story a herculean and nearly impossible task. What makes for an unquestionable classic in comics makes for a strange, odd duck of a stab at a movie or television series.

I (Dave) will say this: I’ve read nearly every single major Alan Moore story in comics history. I’ve even read the rare full collection of LOST GIRLS, ffs. But there is ONE Alan Moore run that’s considered an absolute comic book staple that I haven’t yet read. And no, it’s not Swamp Thing. But I will reveal what it is in the near future, on an episode where Dallas and myself read a comic book that we are ashamed to admit we’d never read until that present (future?) moment. Keep an eye out for that ;)

Also, for those interested in that gargantuan Alan Moore 1300+ page novel Dave showcased on the episode, here it is: